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John McCoy

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Enterprise Solutions Architect, Assurant

2558 points

Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect with deep expertise leading the evaluation, design, deployment, and support of enterprise solutions. Over 16 years of staff and consulting experience in government, education, finance, insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. Specializing in IT and operations ...

Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect with deep expertise leading the evaluation, design, deployment, and support of enterprise solutions. Over 16 years of staff and consulting experience in government, education, finance, insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. Specializing in IT and operations process architectures with a business-oriented focus on agility, responsiveness, and efficiency.

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Feb. 10, 2012

John McCoy is speaking at this roundtable

ERP – Priming Your Business to Deliver Value From Strategy to Operations

Enterprise Software

Feb. 8, 2012

John McCoy recommends this answer by Charlie Judy

What is the best way to deal with sick employees when working in a small space?

send them home.

Human Resources

Employee Health

Feb. 6, 2012

John McCoy and 21 other people answered this question

Should corporate culture be set by general employees, or should it be defined by upper management?

Very well said Andrew!

Human Resources

Corporate Culture

Feb. 6, 2012

John McCoy recommends this answer by John Anderson

How do you groom young employees to take up highly responsible leadership roles, especially when they have limited experience?

Some of the most effective ways I have used is to do active career pathing with employees. Show a genuine interest in their development and partner with them to skill build and grow. You will do some things while they must do others.
Look for ... more

Human Resources

Career Development

Feb. 3, 2012

John McCoy answered this question

What are you doing to prepare for ICD-10?

On the insurance side, we're facing some interesting challenges in this area. As you might imagine, there are many legacy systems that perform mission-critical functions and cannot be reasonably replaced or upgraded in time for this transition.
To address some of these challenges, we're deploying ... more

Information Technology

Jan. 27, 2012

John McCoy and 3 other people answered this question

Upcoming Roundtable: "Driving ERP Success": what topics would you like us to cover?

How about the gathering and documenting of requirements and the structure of the all-importnat Statement of Work (SOW). more

Information Technology

Contract Management

ERP Implementation

Jan. 17, 2012

John McCoy and 1 other person answered this question

Will the Euro zone stabilize in 2012?

The more time goes by, the harder I think it is to remain optimistic, I recently read a report that explained how this crisis has been labeled and treated as a liquidity problem to date when in fact it is a solvency problem. In light ... more

Jan. 15, 2012

John McCoy recommends this answer by Bob Swedroe

Is it better for an SMB to select software on its own or hire an outside ERP Consultant?

I agree with John. The cost of a good consultant will pay for themselves many times over.
Having said that, I do want to provide a word of caution to John's statement that "A competent consultant can provide unbiased advice and guidance through the process.....". ... more

Information Technology

Enterprise Software

Jan. 15, 2012

John McCoy and 1 other person answered this question at this roundtable

Drive ERP Selection Success – Ask Our Experts How to Make Your Project a Winner [1/17 @ 1 pm]

Are ERP selection methods applicable to other enterprise software solutions such as BPM, BI, etc?

They most certainly are!
At this roundtable, we’re focusing on ERP, but the principles and strategies we discuss can and should certainly be applied to other types of enterprise software investments.
That said, problems with other software deployments (like BPM, CRM, ECM, and others) generally ... more

Information Technology

Enterprise Software

Jan. 13, 2012

John McCoy and 2 other people answered this question

How trustworthy are storage benchmarking stats?

From a systems architecture perspective, storage benchmarks provide a good deal of value. Without getting too technical, vendor tweaking should not skew test results to the point that they’re unreliable. That said, Like an x-ray to a doctor, the results of these tests have to ... more

Information Technology

Servers and Storage

Jan. 13, 2012

John McCoy and 3 other people answered this question at this roundtable

Drive ERP Selection Success – Ask Our Experts How to Make Your Project a Winner [1/17 @ 1 pm]

Do ERP vendors require the customer to buy an annual maintenance contract?

In my experience, it is typical for an annual maintenance fee to be part of the total purchase price of enterprise/business software. The annual service fee is typically between 15 and 20 percent of the base price of the software license(s).
That said, the maintenance ... more

Information Technology

Enterprise Software

Jan. 13, 2012

John McCoy recommends this answer by Jonathan Gross

What is ERP? How can it help us?

Hi Eugene,
If you're looking for marketing management, full-blown ERP might be overkill. ERP typically integrates a business' core operations. For an architectural firm, that might include: finance, billing, program and project management, resource planning, estimating, and some form of document management (among other things). ... more

Information Technology

Enterprise Software

Jan. 9, 2012

John McCoy is speaking at this roundtable

Drive ERP Selection Success – Ask Our Experts How to Make Your Project a Winner

Information Technology

Enterprise Software

Jan. 4, 2012

John McCoy and 17 other people answered this question

How can you work with your employees to embrace change?

Lots of great answers here. One strategy that I’ve found very successful includes getting people to identify and discuss their frustrations with their current state of operations.
When consulting, I find that “negative stakeholders”, the people most resistant to change, are easier to engage by ... more

General Management

Human Resources

Change Management

Company Culture

Jan. 4, 2012

John McCoy and 5 other people answered this question

Should virtualization vendors offer disaster recovery options?

At least one virtualization vendor (VMware) does. Site Recovery Manager (or SRM) is a product that keeps a "warm" copy of production VMs. The sync rate is configurable and swinging over configurations to the Disaster Recovery/Standby site is *mostly* scriptable and automated.
That said, we ... more

Information Technology

Disaster Recovery

Jan. 2, 2012

John McCoy and 9 other people answered this question

Enterprise software users prefer Excel... what can vendors do about that?

The short answer is to simply pay closer attention to their customers.
Enterprise software purchases are an interesting conundrum. Incentives run in the wrong direction on both sides of the table so solutions don’t ultimately meet customer needs.
On the customer side of the table, ... more

Information Technology

Enterprise Software

Jan. 2, 2012

John McCoy and 19 other people answered this question

What makes content go viral?

In my humble opinion, it's simply about good humor. If it's funny in a way that will make the 18-35 age group laugh out loud and/or catchy enough to recite or sing along to after one listen, it will spread like butter on a hot ... more

Dec. 29, 2011

Lauren Buchsbaum selected a best answer for

What were some of the biggest site/service outages in 2011?

Information Technology

Dec. 23, 2011

John McCoy and 1 other person answered this question

Is there room (and time) for innovation in enterprise IT departments?

In direct response to your question, the short answer is no. There simply is not room for innovation in enterprise IT environments today.
In my experience, enterprise IT environments are generally “engineering” facilities as opposed to “innovating” facilities. What I mean by this is that ... more

Information Technology

Dec. 22, 2011

John McCoy and 2 other people answered this question

How should IT leaders address line of business users that develop business applications themselves?

These kinds of ad-hoc solutions are all too common, particularly in enterprise environments.
I think these cases are above all, an important learning opportunity. It’s been said that necessity is the mother of all invention. When we step back and look at these situations, someone ... more

Information Technology

Information Technology Management

IT Security Audit

Dec. 21, 2011

John McCoy recommends this answer by Charlie Judy

What is the best way to become an expert in a given field?

Hang out with other experts in that field - like network with them, share knowledge with them, dialog with them, offer to collaborate with them. Maybe even talk with them on Focus?!?!?!?! more

Customer Service

Human Resources

Dec. 15, 2011

John McCoy and 7 other people answered this question

Why isn't virtualization cloud computing?

As far as I'm concerned, virtualization is in fact a type of cloud computing. A VMware ESX cluster deployed in an enterprise environment easily meets all of the criteria currently proposed to define cloud computing.
Until we can agree on a definition of cloud computing ... more

Information Technology

Cloud Computing

Dec. 15, 2011

John McCoy and 2 other people answered this question

Why should Dell buy Citrix?

While I think Andrew makes some valid points, I also see the strategic advantage in Dell owning Citrix.
While all of this pandemonium about cloud computing is going on, I see a quiet paradigm shift happening in the PC and server world. Computing “appliances” are ... more

Information Technology

Following 62 Topics

Alternative Energy

Business Alignment

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Business Process Management

Cloud Computing

...

Competitive Analysis

Customer Experience

Customer Service

Employee Engagement

Employee Relations

Enterprise Resource Planning

Entrepreneurship

General Management

Human Resources

Information Management

Information Technology

IT Infrastructure

Marketing Automation

Network Infrastructure

Project Management

Project Portfolio Management

Talent Management

Web Development Outsourcing

Following 18 People

Followed by 306 People

Knowledgeable in 153 Topics

Information Technology

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