"Star Search"—Talent Management Made Simple

When I think of talent, I think of musical and artistic talent: stage performers, actors, and singers. I think of Star Search, Canadian Idol, and America’s Got Talent.

When I think of talent management, I think of talent agencies and talent scouts. But talent management reaches far beyond Hollywood’s casting couch and the doors of Motown’s recording studios.

Talent management is the process of developing and retaining current employees, and of recruiting and attracting highly skilled workers for your business.

Talent management may also be referred to as human capital management (HCM), human resources information systems (HRIS), or human resources management systems (HRMS)—and it’s something that every growing business should know about.

While talent management emerged in the 1990s, the term was originally coined by McKinsey & Company in 1997. Since then, it has been adopted by scores of businesses looking to improve the processes of tracking and managing their employee talent.

Why Is Talent Management So Important?

One of the biggest challenges businesses face today in the area of human resources (HR) is the recruitment and retention of skilled talent. According to 2007 HR Trends Report: People to Profitability—answered by more than 500 executives of small and medium sized companies—talent management is the greatest business concern after revenue.

People are the most important resource in today’s global economy. And whether companies are willing to admit it, at the end of the day, it’s their people that are going to make the difference to their bottom line. To remain competitive in today's job market, employers need to know about their employees—what they're doing, what their skills are, how they're progressing, and where they fit in the business’s future. As such, companies need to integrate talent management into their wider business strategy.

When it comes to managing talent, HR and talent managers definitely have their work cut out for them. In order to deliver results that will positively influence their organization, these managers must develop and implement an integrated talent management strategy or plan.

A successful talent management plan must flow seamlessly from strategy to practice, putting effective techniques into efficient practice.
An ITM solution is comprised of several applications designed to help organizations improve their recruiting and hiring processes. These processes include performance management, succession planning, and workforce planning, and may include several other modules, depending on the solution. ITM can often be adapted to meet industry-specific challenges, such as those in the health care, education, or financial services fields.

ITM solutions are primarily delivered as hosted software—i.e, software-as-a-service (SaaS)—but they are also available as on-premise software.

Some of the benefits of ITM include the following:

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provides managers the tools they need to accomplish their recruitment and retention goals
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handles large-scale hiring and terminations
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integrates comprehensive employee data into one unified system
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identifies which employees qualify as successors for key positions
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enables the creation and management of a talent pool that is based on performance appraisals and career goals

Conclusion

Skilled and talented employees are hard to come by. Retaining the best people can also be a challenge—especially if you’re a small business competing against larger firms that can often offer better salary packages and fringe benefits.

But talent management is not just about finding the right candidate for the job. That individual must be nurtured and given ample opportunity to develop and grow with the company.

Conversely, companies that neglect to manage their talent effectively end up paying the price. And companies that tolerate employees who continually underperform—especially in the area of management—can pay the highest price of all.

A winning talent management strategy combined with a comprehensive talent management system will help ensure you have people with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. It also ensures that you’re not letting your “star” performers get away. After all, your people are your most important asset. Letting them walk out the door is like shooting yourself in the corporate foot.

Tactical Human Resources Evolves into Strategic Human Capital Management

Given the examples of the changes in human resource (HR) management discussed in Thou Shalt Manage Human Capital Better, and the mushrooming number of point solution providers, many enterprises have realized the significant shortcomings of traditional HR (in terms of technology, beliefs, processes, and practices) that require a strategic-level mind-set change. This is particularly relevant during times of economic sluggishness and low investment capacity (which typically translates into layoffs or hire freezes, cost containment, and stalled innovation), when most enterprises and their employees are left wondering if they can (or should) rely on each other for their future.

Part two of the series Thou Shalt Manage Human Capital Better.

In the early 2000s, with the economy in a downturn, HR administration delivered some organizational value by outsourcing an increasing number of HR business processes, either wholly or in part. In many cases, outsourcing to some trusted technology vendors that have already demonstrated their HR domain expertise may help companies achieve additional efficiencies and functionality, reduce head count, and cut costs.

Of the many solutions in the HR realm, the most predominantly outsourced have been payroll processing, employee assistance programs, payroll tax filing, and background screening. The most appealing and achievable benefits of outsourcing are streamlined operations, access to better HR capabilities and industry expertise (when it is not a core competency of the user enterprise), freeing up of internal staff, reduced labor costs, and accurate and predictable monthly costs.

However, the returns from layoffs (often undertaken without much thought to who should really go, potentially resulting in the hasty release of the lynchpins of the enterprise's ongoing performance) and relentless cost-cutting have proved to have only a limited (if not negative) effect. While some organizations have tried to cut labor costs to be competitive in their markets, the most progressive companies have embraced their labor forces and used them as a strategic differentiator.

As products and technologies become commoditized in this information-based economy, companies are beginning to realize that the best way to differentiate themselves and create long-term strategic advantages over their competitors might be through their people. It is no longer what one owns that counts, but rather what one knows, which is particularly critical in information technology (IT) and similar professional services organizations (PSOs), because it is the technical expertise and experience of knowledgeable staff that means the difference between success and failure.

In fact, according to Forrester Research, more than 85 percent of the market value of a typical Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 company today is the result of intangible assets. For many companies, the bulk of these intangible assets is their people (or human capital), and such companies spend as much as two-thirds of their overall costs on labor. Thus, they should focus on business processes, using technology to more effectively manage employees and improve their productivity. Combining training, incentive management, and compensation management tools delivered through a role-based dashboard, emerging people-centric software category aims to transform each individual in the workforce into an enterprise asset.

Best-of-breed HR Technologies

The most progressive of companies have been using best-of-breed HR technologies for attracting, hiring, training, motivating, and managing their people. Software applications are becoming more and more sophisticated to help companies with these tasks, and as these solutions continue to evolve and communicate with one another, user companies will have a more seamless access to methods and data for managing their employees throughout the employee life cycle.

On the other hand, the laggard companies that do not embrace these technologies will likely fall behind in their quest for market dominance. For instance, by implementing a holistic employee performance management process across the enterprise, corporate strategy can be aligned (and properly communicated) with individual goals and objectives, whereby actual performance against those goals can have ramifications for individual compensation and rewards. This should drive behavior and attitude toward executing on the corporate strategy, with improved employee satisfaction and loyalty as a result.

This certainly comes in handy when the economic downturn ends, when employees begin to feel that they have more employment choices. Enterprises will again need clear, credible, and reliable strategic sourcing strategies and management in order to plan for and engage the competencies (people and companies) needed to accomplish their business strategy (by building the required effectiveness and increasing efficiency). For instance, with the economy improving and IT budgets rising, competition for IT talent—especially in key skill areas—is bound to intensify. At the same time, an improved hiring picture in IT will most likely mean higher turnover, as many unhappy IT staffers who saw workloads increase while compensation and benefits stagnated (during the economic downturn of the early 2000s) will put even more pressure on IT management.

Hence, there is a true need for much tighter integration between performance management and compensation (regardless of the economic milieu), so that exemplary employees can be rewarded more often (and feel truly special to the enterprise), as opposed to the outmoded, blanket-regulated, across-the-board annual basis (which typically produces mediocrity).

Analyzing the workforce and strategically managing the company's human capital has become the focus of human resource management systems (HRMS), as a way to transform these from dull functions to those that greatly affect corporate performance. Integrated business information warehouses, to that end, enable multidimensional analysis on information aggregated from internal and external resources (salary survey, for example), performance indicators (as in turnover), and views on strategic HR information with powerful drill-down features. Some surveys indicate that almost a third of businesses are already using data warehouses, a quarter of them are using workforce performance management or analytics, and one-eighth of them are using workforce planning.

Workforce analytics have become a core of talent management systems. This is because they focus not just on "time" (or who has clocked in and who has not), but also on such strategic business issues as overtime and turnover trends that impact a business's bottom line profit, equal employment opportunity (EEO) or ethnicity-based hiring trends, compensation patterns, relative recruitment effectiveness and sourcing costs, cost per hire, etc..

Human Capital Management

This brings us to the notion of human capital management (HCM), or talent management, which Gartner defines as a set of HR practices that focus on acquisition, management, and optimization of the enterprise workforce. These practices include such processes as competency and skills management, succession planning, and team management. The key tenet of HCM is that companies must change the mind-set of viewing employees as an administrative cost, and instead see them as a strategic investment and a key enterprise asset, with a resulting focus on aligning workforce capabilities with business strategy. This more strategic view of the workforce will gradually become less an HR function and more a management discipline.

HCM should be about value and not cost, since people should be regarded as value-adders, and not overheads and liability. It should measure organizational outputs (such as profit, revenue, and service levels) related to better management of people rather than focusing on input measures (such as recruitment costs) and the HR “best practices” of earlier days.

According to studies by the Brookings Institute, in the early 1980s, tangible assets amounted to over 60 percent of firms' total assets. This ratio has now been reversed, with over 80 percent of assets being intangible, most of which is represented by human capital. Yet, while decades have been spent investing in automation technologies for better use of tangible assets, only recently have enterprises begun to invest in optimizing human capital.

Moreover, many non-HR business processes can benefit from leveraging HCM strategies, such as project portfolio management (PPM) processes (see Project Portfolio Management for Service Organizations: Bridging the Gap between Project Management and Operations), which can be improved via incorporating competency and skills data and by leveraging the team management capabilities of HCM applications. Similar examples of business processes that should benefit from “picking the HCM brains” include production planning, job costing, scheduling, training, compliance, budgeting, and field service. In fact, any people-centric business process should benefit from integration to HCM, whereas traditional administrative HR applications and processes will hardly support this integration at all.

This leads us to a broader notion of employee relationship management (ERM), business-to-employee (B2E) management, or whatever the three-letter acronym (TLA) du jour might be (see BLM—Buzzword Lifecycle Management). In any case, these acronyms try to depict a business discipline that focuses on optimizing the employee's total employment experience—including both the human and technology aspects of that experience.

ERM espouses a comprehensive and unified view of the processes and technologies that support the workforce and their workplace, including manager-employee interactions, the formal business tasks required to manage employee relationships, and the technology used to manage the employee experience. To that end, ERM encompasses the full suite of B2E services needed by employees, managers, and others, including knowledge management, e-learning, self-services, community and collaboration support, travel and expense (T&E) management, indirect procurement, and so on. Thus, ERM is most closely aligned with the HCM focus area of workforce management.

While traditional HR and payroll management may not seem to provide a significant competitive advantage in the same respect that the aforementioned emerging technologies do, some ERM systems, like Extensity or Apptricity, help reduce cost, simplify administration, and promote a more connected company-employee relationship. What customer relationship management (CRM) solutions do for customer intimacy, today's ERM packages (replete with employee self-service and manager self-service functions) do for employee intimacy—provide all concerned parties (executives, managers, employees, government, and so forth) with immediate access to a wide array of vital information.

Microsoft .NET Enablement: Analysis and Cautions

As discussed earlier in this series, to develop and deploy a Web service-connected information technology (IT) architecture, several elements are required: smart clients, servers to host Web services, development tools to create them, and applications to use them. The Microsoft .NET Framework includes these elements, as well as a worldwide network of more than 35,000 Microsoft Certified Partner organizations to provide any help users might need. For a definition of how the Microsoft .NET environment addresses the situation, see Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement.

Part Three of the series Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement.

For a general discussion of the evolution of system architecture, see Architecture Evolution: From Mainframes to Service-oriented Architecture.

Only a few innovative or brave (or both) Microsoft-centric vendors have embarked on a gut-wrenching (but potentially rewarding) effort to deliver brand new software written in managed .NET Framework-based code, where many of the basic system tasks are removed from the code and "managed" by the .NET Framework. This functionality, which has been completely rewritten, or newly created using only the .NET Framework, can then be used and accessed through Web services, as with the examples of .NET-enabled ("wrappered") counterpart software cited in Examples of Microsoft .NET Enablement.

Cautions

However, if history helps us predict the future, it is awfully difficult to effectively execute this strategy of transforming software frameworks, and only the most resourceful or steadfast vendors are tipped as winners in the long run. Thus, one should be aware of how technology might develop in the future, while conducting the alignment of business and IT functions. Across the application life cycle, the high cost of development, support, and enhancements in terms of money, time, and quality limit the ability of installed legacy software to meet many demands of business. Other possible stumbling blocks might come from the facts that legacy functionality may not be accessible for modifications, and that such environments might require an additional layer of code to be developed and maintained for the wrapper (whereby the programmer must continue to manage system tasks). Also, this technology leap might not be positioned well for future Microsoft technology advances, such as Windows Vista.

Once other proprietary technologies are introduced into the research and development (R&D) equation, any vendor has to deal with translation, interface, and performance issues, not to mention the pain of migrating or keeping existing customers up to date, or maintaining multiple product versions. In fact, some laggard vendors even see the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services bandwagon as an opportunity to portray legacy systems as "a treasure trove" of software assets. Although this might hold true for some applications where there is no business justification to "reinvent the wheel" (in other words, to duplicate what already exists, by developing a new payroll or general ledger system, for instance), users and vendors should make a rigorous effort to sort through this treasure trove and separate the "diamonds" from the "rhinestones." They will have to conduct a thorough discovery process to find out what functional assets they really have, and then make some tough decisions about what to keep, what to modernize, and what to throw away, since the code that is kept will form the foundation of a functional repository of services that will be used for years to come.

Many vendors, especially those with some longevity in the market (and even mainframe roots), like to create the belief that under SOA, no old code is bad old code. But the truth can be quite different. Some legacy systems have been around for forty years or more, and even though they may still be working, and doing something useful, not all of them are worth keeping as is. In many circumstances, companies can get away with wrappering as a temporary measure. Eventually though, and contrary to what many vendors say, both vendors and user enterprises will be forced to modernize and transform much of their legacy code. For more information, see Rewrite or Wrap-Around Old Software?.

To that end, in fact, Epicor Vantage is an example of an application that is essentially positioned between the .NET-enabled approach and the rewrite in pure .NET managed code (which is the next evolutionary step, as will be explained shortly). That is, around 60 percent of Vantage is in .NET-managed code (in other words, a C#-based smart client, extensibility tools, customization, and so on), and all business logic is exposed as Web services (not wrappered, but rather Web services generated from Progress OpenEdge). In the rewrite effort, Epicor recreated much of the business logic in a far more componentized and granular way, in order to support Web service calls. For instance, the checking capability to promise (CTP) call that Vantage users require cannot operate properly without the .NET Framework.

Certainly, the presence of Progress means that Vantage is not completely in .NET-managed code. However, with Vantage Epicor has not planned to be 100 percent .NET, but rather 100 percent SOA. The vendor has simply used .NET for the majority of the solution where it made sense, such as for client-side dynamic link library (DLL) management, and provided a standardized Epicor Portal platform based on the "latest and greatest" Microsoft SharePoint technologies (see Epicor To Give All Its Applications More Than A Pretty Facelift). When the vendor did not use .NET, it was to ensure choice and flexibility for customers on the operating system (OS) and database side. Namely, pure .NET throughout means only a Microsoft stack, whereas Epicor can support Microsoft and Linux/Unix OS, and Microsoft SQL Server, Progress, and Oracle databases (Oracle is not currently supported, but the intent is to support it in the future). This decision was important for supporting larger customers who rightly or wrongly maintain a perception that the Microsoft platforms cannot scale.

SYSPRO's design has also been along similar lines, and the SYSPRO Reporting Services (SRS), Analytics, and web applications mentioned in Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement were all written using .NET-managed code, whereas the SYSPRO Cyberstore's .NET-enabled capability is also featured in the SYSPRO BarCode and SYSPRO Warehousing Management System (WMS) systems, which are all integrated totally to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system via the .NET Framework.

Is .NET-managed the Right Way?

However, .NET-managed software products are built entirely of homogenous .NET "managed code" components, meaning without any wrappers. In other words, managed .NET code is code that has its execution managed by a .NET virtual machine, such as the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR). Managed refers to a method of exchanging information between the program and the run-time environment, or to a "contract of cooperation" between natively executing code and the run time. This contract specifies that at any point of execution, the run time may stop an executing central processing unit (CPU) and retrieve information specific to the current CPU instruction address. Information that must be query-able generally pertains to run-time state, such as register or stack memory contents.

The necessary information is thereby encoded in a Microsoft Common Intermediate Language (MCIL or MSDIL) and associated metadata, or in symbolic information that describes all of the entry points and the constructs exposed in the MCIL (such as methods and properties) and their characteristics. The common language infrastructure (CLI) standard (whereby the CLR is the primary Microsoft commercial implementation) describes how the information is to be encoded, and programming languages that target the run time emit the correct encoding. All a developer has to know is that any of the languages that target the run time produce managed code emitted as portable executable (PE) files that contain MCIL and metadata.

As emphasized earlier on, there are many such languages to choose from, since there are more than thirty languages provided by third parties—everything from COBOL to Camel, in addition to Visual C#, J#, VB.NET, Jscript, and C++ from Microsoft. The CLR includes the Common Language System (CLS), which sets the rules and regulations for language syntax and semantics, as well as the Common Type System (CTS), which defines the data types that can be used. Because all programs use the common services in the CLR, no matter which language they were written in, such applications are said to use "managed code." In a Microsoft Windows environment, all other code has come to be known as "unmanaged code," whereas in non-Windows and mixed environments, managed code is sometimes used more generally to refer to any interpreted programming language.

Before the managed code is run, the MCIL is compiled into native executable (machine) code. Furthermore, since this compilation happens through the managed execution environment (or more correctly, by a just-in-time [JIT] compiler that knows how to target the managed execution environment), the managed execution environment can make guarantees about what the code is going to do. It can insert traps and appropriate garbage collection hooks, exception handling, type safety, array bounds and index checking, and so forth. For example, such a compiler makes sure to lay out stack frames and everything "just right," so that the garbage collector can run in the background on a separate thread, constantly walking the active call stack, finding all the roots, and chasing down all the live objects. In addition, because the MCIL has a notion of type safety, the execution engine will maintain the guarantee of type safety, eliminating a whole class of programming mistakes that often lead to security holes.

This is traditionally referred to as JIT compilation, although unlike most traditional JIT compilers, the file that holds the pseudo machine code that the virtual machine compiles into native machine code can also contain pre-compiled binaries for different native machines (such as x86 and PowerPC). This is similar in concept to the Apple Universal binary format, which is perceived by many as the system that "never crashes." Conversely, unmanaged executable files are basically a binary image, x86 code, loaded into memory, whereby the program counter gets put there, and that is the last the OS knows. There are protections in place around memory management and port I/O and so forth, but the system does not actually know what the application is doing. Therefore, it cannot make any guarantees about what happens when the application runs.

This means that .NET-managed software should benefit from the many performance and security advantages of .NET-managed code, since the CLR handles many of the basic tasks that were previously managed by a programmer in the application code, including security checks and memory management. .NET-managed products will also likely more smoothly run as "native code" on Microsoft Vista and future Microsoft OS and technology advances, providing another important advantage. Finally, .NET developers that have experience with managed code will confirm that this new programming paradigm allows them to develop and extend applications in record time and with significant improvement in quality. This is owing to the ability to create new "leaner" software with significantly fewer lines of code, which runs natively on .NET Framework.

Using technologies that are intrinsically compatible should result in faster and less costly development. As a result, any application suite, once it has been completely rewritten in the Microsoft .NET-managed code framework, should not have to contend with technology conflicts, trade-offs, or inefficiencies resulting from mixing or wrapping technologies. In contrast, any vendor that covers multiple platforms often spends more than half its R&D budget on porting issues; thus, a cross-platform solution remains largely the prerogative (and consequent burden) of only bigger vendors.

Fighting Cybercrime on the Internet

This note is based on a presentation on cybercrime by Laura Taylor, TEC Director of Security Research for the E-Gov 2000 Conference sponsored by SAIC on July 10, 2000 at the Washington Convention Center.

Note: Portions of this note are excerpted from the presentation, other parts are explanatory text to relate this information to the Technology community serviced by the TEC web site. Information that was not taken directly from the presentation is in blue.

I am from a company called TEC, or TechnologyEvaluation.Com, a hybrid online destination site and research consulting company in Woburn, Massachusetts and Montreal, Canada. I have been working in the capacity of Director of Security Research at TEC for almost a year. Prior to TEC, I worked as Director of Information Security for CMGi's flagship webhosting company known as Navisite. Prior to that I founded a consulting company called Relevant Technologies, which still exists, and currently I maintain a position on the board. Before that, I was CIO of Schafer Corporation.

At TEC I manage the research of security technologies and vendors, identifying and qualifying key criteria necessary to assist high-level IT decision makers in making best-choice infrastructure investments. As well, I report and analyze current security news events, pointing out how these events affect you, your network, and your organization. As businesses continue putting their web-enabled e-commerce sites, and the jewels of their infrastructure online, the importance of security and privacy is becoming increasingly critical. What I plan on talking about today is "Fighting Cybercrime on the Internet."

My research is supported by 17 years of industry experience in the Information Technology field. There are three primary aspects of cybercrime that I will be talking about today: cyberpedophilia, keeping digital evidence pure, and mitigating white collar cybercrime. The other various security topics that I will touch on will have to do with how processes and procedures can support the management of these three important Information Age Law Enforcement and Public Safety concerns. The various security processes worth understanding include, "What are the basics for managing security in an organization? What security policies do you need? And who should you call to assist you in investigating and reporting cybercrime?"
Criminals, including those involved in distributing pornographic material can use your website to promulgate their wares. Unless a business protects itself with firewalls, content filters, and risk management processes, it is vulnerable to penetration by these individuals for illegal purposes. If your website is used for illegal purposes, your company can be sued. Businesses are responsible not only for securing their websites against penetration, but also for insuring that the sites are not used for such illegal purposes as promoting pedophilia.

Before I start discussing how to manage cyberpedophilia, we need to first look at pedophilia in general, and understand how to identify it so that we can most expeditiously enlist the proper authorities, create processes for action, and work towards national and local solutions. As a general rule of thumb, behaviors that are illegal offline are illegal online, and obtaining a search warrant in part depends on one's ability to identify what constitutes illegal evidence. The U.S. Code, Title 18, sections 2251, 52A, and 56 are are the definitive laws that describe the sexual exploitation of children. Since part of the problem is the lack of understanding of these laws, I'm going to take the time to recite these important sections of our U.S. Code.

Section 2251 of Title 18 clearly states that anyone who meets the following requirements has participated in sexual exploitation of children: "Any person who employs, uses, persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any minor to engage in, or who has a minor assist any other person to engage in, or who transports any minor in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, with the intent that such minor engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct, shall be punished as provided under subsection (d)." And subsection (d) stipulates fined or imprisoned not less than 10 years. Section 2251 goes on to say that, "If such person knows or has reason to know that such visual depiction will be transported in interstate or foreign commerce, or mailed, if that visual depiction was produced using materials that have been mailed, shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer, or if such visual depiction has actually been transported in interstate or foreign commerce or mailed."

Parents, legal guardians, or anyone having custody of a minor, who "who knowingly permits such minor to engage in, or assist any other person to engage in, sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct shall be punished as provided under subsection (d)." Schools need to be educated and informed about the dangers online, because they too are accountable and responsible for mitigating these dangers.

How Does This Relate to Web-hosting Providers?

If we take a look at Section 2252A of Title 18, it becomes clear that a web-hosting provider who knowingly possesses child pornography on a company owned hosting server, even if it is by contractual arrangement with a customer, can be held liable. From having worked at several web-hosting companies, I can assure you that today, most web hosting companies do not realize their liabilities in this area. 2252A states that accountable persons relating to child pornography constitutes "any person who knowingly mails, or transports, or ships in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer, any child pornography;" or any person who "knowingly receives or distributes child pornography that has been mailed, shipped, or transported in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer."

Title 18, Section 2256 contains explicit definitions which apply to pedophilia, and cyberpedophilia. In that section, it clearly states that "visual depiction includes undeveloped film and videotape, and data stored on computer disk or by electronic means which is capable of conversion into a visual image." It should be noted that "sexually explicit conduct" includes both gay, and straight sexual acts. In fact, there are many responsible gay adults who are adamantly abhorrent of some of these man-boy love web sites and would welcome the opportunity to help assist in getting them removed from the web.

At this point, Ms. Taylor went on to discuss computers and children, noting "Keeping children off the web, and off computers is not an option. In fact, we need to enable online access as much as possible, in order to enable our kids' survival as law-abiding contributing members of society."

She further explained that "in the online world, Pedophiles do not have to expose themselves as adults to have access to kids, and usually don't. Cyberpedophiles hang-out in online chat rooms, and typically pose as children themselves this is one of the reasons cyberpedophiles are so successful. They pretend to be kids, and do not get picked up on anyone's radar screen as a possible threat. So let's take a look at some of the kinds of online dangers that threaten our nations greatest treasure, our children."

Possession of child pornography is a crime. In 1996, the Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) was instituted specifically to combat the use of child pornography using computer technology. Often some of the servers that these illegal images are published on also contain chat rooms which can be used to entice a one-on-one online chat with a minor.

Many webhosting companies do not even realize that they are hosting child pornography servers. Busy webhosting companies sometimes barely have enough time to answer the telephone. They sell the online publishing process, but often have no knowledge of the content that is being published. Many pornographic domain names are purposely esoteric so as to avoid scrutiny of law enforcement and the general watchful eye of the public. How many people here have ever taken a look at Whitehouse.com? Whitehouse.com is often the first stop for viewers looking for the Whitehouse website before they realize that they need to use the .gov extension and type in Whitehouse.gov.

What About Accommodating Change (We Can Believe In)

But, afterwards all this discussion, do BPM suites necessarily beggarly build for change? Do they by absence beggarly simple automation, accelerated iteration, and execution?

The bar has to be set higher, back businesslike buyers are more searching for accurate fixed-cost business-driven enterprise-wide BPM deployments. An adroit BPM apartment should yield a process-centric access to managing business operations that can accord with any business workflow with top appulse on all-embracing chump account operations.

Metastorms [evaluate this product] white cardboard Building a Business Case for BPM asserts that there are three axiological characteristics of BPM that accomplish this technology the game-changer:

1. BPM is Incremental. One of the amount advantages of BPM is that it charge not crave you to beat all problems at already in adjustment to bear results. Rather projects can alpha small, while still authoritative a ample impactTo paraphrase, it is beneath important to alpha with the absolute action applicant than it is to authorize a advantage point from which to extend into added opportunities.

2. BPM is Measurable. BPM is different a part of technology-based initiatives in its adeptness to absorb metrics and altitude ambit at the alpha of the action and to automatically abduction and clue them forth the way. BPM presents the befalling for an actual and actual appulse on business achievement and visibility.

3. BPM is Repeatable. BPM presents a admixture account area the accomplishment set and competencies acquired from the aboriginal action deployed can be leveraged to automate and advance assorted processes throughout the alignment for years to come.

Clarifying the BPM Amount Proposition

So, has all this diffuse altercation about BPM locations and accoutrements has brought some accuracy to you? Well, I could accept if you are still accepting an as bright as mud feeling. Therefore, I was afresh advantageous to attestant a amusing presentation that attempted to explain the aspect of BPM via some amusement and allegory of the archetypal Wizard of Oz movie.

Merging Global Trade Management with Global Finance

With added than 50,000 audience and a attendance in 36 countries, the Treasury Casework business of JPMorgan Chase is the world's better provider of treasury administration services. Its full-services cover avant-garde payment; collection; clamminess and investment management; barter finance; bartering card; and advice solutions for corporations; cyberbanking casework institutions; average bazaar companies; baby businesses; governments; and municipalities worldwide. Under the planned alliance agreement, Vastera shareholders will accept $3.00 for anniversary of their outstanding shares of Vastera accepted stock. The absolute transaction bulk will be about $129 actor (USD), about 50 percent exceptional over the anniversary acquirement of Vastera.

Vastera's solutions automate the appropriate barter administration processes associated with the concrete movement of appurtenances internationally. The accretion should added accommodate JPMorgan Chase audience with a "one-stop-shop" annual that addresses the accretion challenges and risks associated with affective appurtenances internationally. The JPMorgan Chase band-aid currently facilitates the seamless administration of advice and processes in abutment of the movement of concrete appurtenances movement and the cyberbanking settlements if the barter action is completed. Through this combination, JPMorgan Chase is believed to be the aboriginal all-around cyberbanking academy to action a complete, chip cash, trade, and acumen band-aid above the concrete and cyberbanking accumulation chains in a way that maximizes allowances to its clients.

Vastera already had an all-encompassing alive accord with JPMorgan Chase by accouterment it with GTM solutions. Now the two acclaim they will be able to body on that accord as allotment of the aforementioned close alms a broader GTM basement to accompany actual allowances to their clients. Namely, this accretion should accord accepted JPMorgan Chase's audience the allowances of broader GTM solutions. In about-face Vastera's audience will accept the allowances of JPMorgan Chase's absolute cyberbanking casework belvedere and artefact set. Vastera will abide to apart bazaar its software and casework and administer circuitous export-import paperwork. However, abundant added advance befalling is accepted from bundling Vastera's software and casework with JPMorgan Chase's offering, which will allegedly clue barter appurtenances and the payments bare at anniversary footfall of the process.

The merger, which was accountable to the approval of Vastera shareholders, and the approval of assorted cyberbanking and other, accepted regulations, took abode in April. The transaction was ahead accustomed by Vastera's lath of admiral who recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the transaction at a consecutive actor meeting. Two above shareholders, Ford Motor Aggregation and Technology Crossover Ventures, apery about 28 percent of the Vastera shares outstanding accept reportedly committed to vote their shares in favor of the transaction pursuant to voting agreements entered into with JPMorgan Chase.

With about 650 professionals in 14 countries and with over 400 audience throughout the world, Vastera is the accepted baton in accouterment solutions for GTM and serves an all-embracing applicant base, including companies such as Alcatel, Dell, Ford, General Electric (GE), Lucent, Fonterra, Goodyear, Nortel Networks, and Seagate. Audience use Vastera's solutions and casework to administer advice flows associated with the cross-border apparatus of importing and exporting goods. As a result, they can cross the complexities and inefficiencies inherent in all-around trading in a address that allows them to capitalize on the large, awful fragmented, and rapidly growing befalling that abide in the all-embracing market. These audience reportedly apprehend cogent bulk reductions if managing their all-around barter operations, while convalescent acquiescence with government regulations and annual levels to end customers.

Dulles, Virginia-based (US) Vastera began activity in 1991 as a software bell-ringer acceptable companies with the circuitous apple of all-around barter with software to adviser manufacturers through acumen planning and community regulations. The applications kept up with assignment rates, regulations, licensing requirements, and bulk added tax (VAT) rates, to focus mainly on country-specific barter regulations and compliance. Vastera's antecedent solutions consisted about alone of software solutions and accomplishing casework associated with the accession of the software products.

In July 2000, the aggregation undertook a axiological about-face in its artefact and casework offerings if it acquired Ford Motor Company's all-around community acceptation operations, including a bulk of Ford's employees. The accretion has enabled Vastera to decidedly augment its solutions offerings acceptance it to accommodate barter administration BPO casework to its audience in the anatomy of its managed casework provider (MSP) offering. By arresting a complete ten year accord with Ford, Vastera has leveraged its all-around barter systems and abysmal agreeable ability into an MSP model. In turn, Ford can focus on its bulk competencies of designing and architecture cars and trucks while accepting the collaborative advantages of Vastera's business-to-business (B2B) GTM offerings.

Thus, in contempo years, as barter becomes even added circuitous with "smart ports" and twenty-four hour avant-garde apprehension requirements, manufacturers accept added been gluttonous outsourced all-around barter services. An adroit software bell-ringer should do this added calmly than a manufacturer, back it is a non-core aspect of the manufacturer's operation. As a aftereffect of this adjustment with Ford, which currently owns 20 percent of Vastera and accounts for 30 percent of its revenues, Vastera became one of the aboriginal software firms to use its bulk agreeable ability in community and import/export affidavit and in acquiescence appliance development to become a business annual provider (BSP).

Both parties benefited. Ford remained staffed on-site with its above employees, with Vastera advancement the systems and befitting agreeable adapted daily. Vastera acquired a abiding chump and the adventitious to carbon its BSP archetypal and extend its ability above Ford to added Vastera customers. Additionally, Ford has lent its adherence to Vastera and accustomed it to body a abysmal database of automotive and barter industry parts, HTS classifications and duties, and to accretion country-specific ability area Ford has supplier relationships.

Most accumulation alternation administration (SCM), not to acknowledgment action ability planning (ERP) vendors about abridgement able all-embracing barter acumen (ITL) and GTM capabilities. Specifically, while technology may be apprehension the apple smaller, the chat has aswell become a lot added complicated. Abounding barriers to administering all-embracing business over the Internet accordingly abide and a lot of businesses are still not able for these challenges.

The Internet has enabled a networked apple by accouterment a advice basement and action applications, and this has opened the aperture for all-embracing trade, but not abounding applications absolutely action multi-enterprise casework and software to automate the complex, multimodal busline and Internet-based acumen administration needs of a all-around trading network. Simply put, a lot of avant-garde Web-based buy- and sell-side applications abatement well-short of accouterment automatic all-around barter administration and a acceptable all-embracing barter logistics.

As declared in added detail in All-embracing Barter or ITL Adoption, ITL and GTM are beheading systems accurately advised to automate the import/export business process. Their basal anatomic apparatus are barter affidavit bearing and transmission, and authoritative acquiescence validation. They barter circuitous advice amid assorted entities, including suppliers, carriers, bales forwarders, community brokers, cyberbanking institutions, and added third affair busline and accumulator providers. A accurate ITL/GTM arrangement is, in effect, an inter-enterprise ability administration system, and requires a abstracts archetypal that takes into annual the beyond and abyss of advice exchanged amid the complication of commutual entities. Thus, ITL/GTM systems should abutment consign and acceptation border-crossing processes, documentation, acquiescence (which are incomprehensible to accustomed mortals), accounting, and cyberbanking advertisement in a multicurrency, multilingual, and multi-units of admeasurement (UOM) environment.

When humans allocution about the risks of globalization, abounding are usually apropos to the blackmail of calm jobs affective overseas. The all-around barter acquiescence aspect is rarely discussed, even admitting it poses a accident that affects about every architect that either imports or exports. Namely, accepting these appurtenances and locations alien from one country to addition is a alarming assignment and needs the abutment of a GTM software and annual provider. This accept to be accumulated with all-around barter area knowledge, accurate processes, and all-embracing barter best practices in adjustment to be successful.

Each of the about 200 countries in the apple has alone authoritative requirements for importing and exporting goods. One has to annual for factors like tariffs and duties, country-to-country preferences and anti-dumping laws, and there is the crisis of incurring hidden costs at every step. If that is not circuitous enough, the contest of September 11, 2001 accept added the analysis countries abode on all-around barter and can appulse costs adversely. According to the Brookings Institute, the bulk of slowing the accumulation of alien appurtenances by one day because of added aegis checks could bulk to $7 billion (USD) per year. Stringent new affidavit and citizenry aegis requirements are agreement austere acknowledged and cyberbanking after-effects on importers and exporters actionable these consistently alteration barter regulations. Moreover, the accountability is on the importer/exporter to apperceive absolutely what the regulations are and how to accede with them.

Although all-around barter requires multimodal busline of shipment appurtenances above borders, abounding all-embracing shippers do not yet accept e-logistics software to provides the all-important afterimage and adaptability to e-businesses absent to automate their all-around accumulation chains. They aswell do not accept e-procurement software that can assay the absolute landed cost, which are the bulk of sourcing and shipment a artefact internationally, including community management, tariffs, transportation, bulk of goods, etc. While there accept been a bulk of Internet-based acumen accoutrement that are allowance companies assay and abate costs by automating the processes of booking shipments, befitting barter informed, and authoritative abiding appurtenances access on time (for added information, see Understanding the Accurate Bulk of Sourcing), these companies still abridgement the software. Now, adeptness barter are added allurement for advice in researching the costs for importing from altered countries. By application software to analysis duties, taxes, and barter regulations in the abeyant countries of origin, GTM experts should be able to actualize what-if scenarios that will advice importers accomplish the appropriate decision

Navigating Global Trade Waters

Companies complex with all-around and transnational barter charge administering processes to cross compliancy, regulations, and added barter issues specific to the countries they are trading with. This is a alarming task, not alone because of the copious amounts of advice and adjustment but aswell because trading companies are captivated answerable for non-compliance. Typically accumulation alternation administering solutions (SCM) and action ability planning solutions (ERP) abridgement able all-embracing acumen and all-around barter administering (GTM) capabilities. In ablaze of this over sight, the alliance amid JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (NYSE: JPM), a arch all-around banking casework close and Vastera (NASDAQ: VAST), a accessible all-around barter solutions provider, is looked aloft with abundant interest. Supplementing JPMorgan Chase's banking casework with Vastera's all-around barter administering software will acceptable accomplish JPMorgan Chase the aboriginal banking academy to action a complete set of chip cash, trade, and acumen solutions beyond the concrete and banking accumulation chain.

Part two in the Merging All-around Barter Administering with All-around Finance series.

Vastera provides all-around barter casework that administer the breeze of advice throughout the all-around barter association to advance afterimage of all-embracing artefact movement and added bound move appurtenances from country-to-country. To advice companies accomplish all-around demand, forwarders, carriers, and brokers accept abutting banking institutions and association agencies to anatomy the all-around barter community. Improving abreast real-time accord amid the associates of the association has aswell become capital to advancement ascendancy over the movement of goods.

Vastera's antecedent casework began with appliance software advised to abode acumen and country-specific regulations including taxation, duty, and licensing, etc. Afterwards accepting Ford Motor Company's all-around custom acceptation operations, it broadened its casework to cover barter administering business action outsourcing (BPO) services. These barter casework became the courage of its Managed Casework Provider (MSP) offering.

Managed Casework is now Vastera's arch band of business. While the bell-ringer has abundant Managed Casework customers, its two better customers, supplied 69 percent of Managed Casework revenues in 2003. Specifically, its Managed Account acceding with Ford included the administration, automation, and administering of Ford's all-around barter acceptation operations in the US, which will be in aftereffect until August 2005. This accord has broadcast to cover the administering and administering Ford's all-around barter acceptation operations in Mexico, Canada, the UK, Spain, Belgium, and Germany. These agreements accommodate Vastera with a guaranteed, predictable, and alternating acquirement beck account about $25 actor (USD) in anniversary revenues from the agreements with Ford US, Ford Mexico, Ford Canada, and Ford Europe in 2004.

In accession to the advantageous Ford agreement, in August 2001, Vastera entered into a five-year Managed Casework acceding with Lucent Technologies to administer all-around barter operations in the US. This accord aswell grew to beset albatross for administering and managing Lucent's all-around barter operations in added countries in North America, Europe, and in Brazil. From August 2001 through August 2004, the bell-ringer generated about $25 actor (USD) in accumulated revenues from this agreement. Then in June 2003, Vastera acquired GE's centralized US association acceptation operations, and aswell entered into a Managed Casework acceding which calls for the administering of the US association acceptation operations for 5 of GE's capacity for a minimum appellation of three years.

As allotment of its action to aggrandize its all-around attendance and aggressive position, Vastera acquired added entities accouterment GTM solutions in Mexico, Canada, and Brazil in the aboriginal division of 2002. Of these is Speedchain, a development date accumulation alternation accident administering (SCEM) and all-around e-logistics provider, which has bootless to aftermath acquirement back 1999. Nonetheless it was acquired by Vastera in March 2001 for about $18.8 actor (USD).

As a result, Vastera now has three arch band-aid offerings for GTM, which are TradeSphere Solutions (a software offering); Barter Administering Consulting (a business action consulting offering); and its Managed Casework (a BPO offering) program. Audience may baddest elements of anniversary of these artefact and account offerings to abode their specific needs and opportunities, and this adaptability provides alone tailored solutions to automate and access the ability of the all-around barter processes.

Vastera's band-aid offerings are based on a accumulating of proprietary processes, data, rules, and regulations. Called Vastera All-around Barter Content, it is at the amount of all added solutions. It is a rules-based appliance that provides absolute administering of barter regulations and programs. This all-encompassing abject of cyberbanking agreeable serves as the athenaeum for Vastera's absolute apartment of GTM solutions.

Global barter ability and specialization is bare to appropriate to acquire, adapt and amend country-specific barter regulations, appropriately the bell-ringer employs a full-time agreeable aggregation committed alone to tracking and managing barter regulations, barter content, and best programs. These experts cover a above government acquiescence official, all-embracing barter lawyers, accountant association brokers, and in-country abstracts experts. Impressively, Georgetown University Law Center's Larry Christensen, a above chief official at the US government's Bureau of Consign Administration, acts as Vastera's carnality admiral for all-embracing barter agreeable (where he manages the collection, estimation and broadcasting of analytical barter rules and regulations to clients). George Weise, Vastera's carnality admiral VP of all-around barter compliance, is a above abettor of the US Association Service.

Vastera offers assorted levels of agreeable to its clients, from absolute agreeable automation to certificate automation. To accumulate accepted with the latest country-specific barter regulations, the bell-ringer updates solutions on a approved basis. Consequently, updates and postings are fabricated electronically through TradePrism.com, its all-around barter exchange, and Vastera.Net, its clandestine applicant exchange. Advice provided in the All-around Barter Agreeable includes barter data, government denied affair lists, adjustment updates and notices, barter board affair information, requests for accessible animadversion on authoritative issues, and final rulings on proposed regulation.

TradeSphere is Vastera's set of software applications that streamlines and automates the advice exchanges associated with the cross-border movement of goods. Its apparatus facilitate specific all-around barter functions, strategically administer the advice appropriate to barter globally, and enhance the able barter of advice and appurtenances a part of continued associates of a client's all-around barter network.

Components of TradeSphere cover belted affair screening and boycott/embargo screening, automatic addition documentation, consign compliance, acceptation compliance, and association access filing. Audience may use the TradeSphere apparatus on a appellation license, abiding license, or transaction fee basis.

The bell-ringer has non-exclusive licenses to technology from several companies which is chip into the TradeSphere artefact suite, including development accoutrement and accessories from IBM (i.e., WebSphere and MQ Series) and Forte, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

In October 2004, Vastera, appear the barrage of TradeSphere Exporter 7.5 and TradeSphere Importer 3.3, whereby these anew adapted web-based software applications bear added all-embracing shipment and barter acquiescence functionality, added enabling exporters and importers to acquire greater amount and time accumulation associated with the cross-border movement of goods. Highlights of the latest appearance accessible include

* TradeSphere Exporter 7.5 пїЅ This bore delivers added consign administering and acquiescence capabilities. Support for AESDirect basic clandestine arrangement (VPN) account gives exporters a defended and easy-to-implement adjustment of anon filing consign declarations, while the new certificate athenaeum adequacy provides bigger administering of cyberbanking images of shipment documents. Finally, Exporter 7.5 appearance added Canadian consign acquiescence capabilities, and bigger processes for consign acknowledgment bearing and encryption address submission.

* TradeSphere Importer 3.3 пїЅ This bore provides access administering capabilities to an importer before, during, and afterwards the filing process. It aswell provides authentic advice to a company's arrangement of brokers through the circumscribed rated balance functionality. This absolution aswell adds cogent functionality to administer adaptation processing with customs. Finally, it provides out-of-the-box affiliation with TradeSphere Association Manager US, for complete access processing control, including Automatic Broker Interface (ABI) filing to accommodate businesses with a cardinal advantage in association processing.