Most organizations leave their mission critical systems vulnerable to security threats and performance degradation. Recent studies show that organizational constraints are at the core of this issue. These constraints range from organizational policies, budgets and staff availability and even competency.

26 percent of organizations apply critical security and performance patches as they are released, 20 percent will eventually apply 6 to 9 months later while another 20 percent have no requirement at all to apply them. That leaves many companies data unprotected.

There are several ways to combat these constraints. One way is gain support from your organization. This can come in the form of support from executives, security / audit team and other critical policy makers. By establishing new and or updating existing security policies, and as a critical component, patching, these guidelines and timeliness of patching removes some of these constraints. A second way to protect and improve data integrity is to use technology. By keeping current on latest software, technology can help you reduce time and budget constraints of getting current applications and databases tested and allow your team to proactively assess the impact to your enterprise.

Centroid believes in 2 degrees of continuous change instead of wide arcs of re-activeness. These small degrees of change allows for continuous improvement across the organization. Whether it be through technology or process slight proactive adjustments make the enterprise perform at a higher degree then you can ever accomplish by large scale reactive measures.

Centroid is in the business of Future Proofing Oracle environments. In fact, Centroid is the leader in Future Proofing your Business and Technology and no one does it better. No one.

Change Management, the mere mention of these two words make people cringe.

To paraphrase Gordon Gekko,

Change is Good…Change Works.

In this bloggers’ opinion, Change Management is a grossly misused, and misunderstood phrase.

At it’s core, Change Management should around change for the positive:

• Does change Increase Revenue?
• Does change Reduce Cost?
• Does change Improve Efficiency?
• Does it provide an environment for growth?
• Etc.

Often during Oracle EBS implementations, we see change is touted along with best practice, as a mantra for the project. People get nervous, raise their defenses, and the project suffers. Change is not something to enforce upon a business, most businesses have gotten to where they are working the way they’ve worked – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Change Management needs to be viewed not as an enforcer of change, but rather an enabler of change. Change allows businesses to move away from inefficient processes, to streamline practices, explore new avenues of growth. Change does not mean that everything you’ve been doing until now is wrong, just means there may be a better way.

Therein lies the art that is Change Management, helping business adopt change as a philosophy, a state of mind.