The NSR staff has a lot to be thankful for this holiday season.  We are blessed to work on interesting projects for even more interesting clients that we know and love.  We are lucky to have an extended family of unique, fascinating, and dedicated coworkers that we get to collaborate with.  We asked our team what specifically they may have been thankful for this holiday season, and here their responses.

Jim McVeigh

…is thankful for the empowering capabilities of today’s consumer tech.  He writes “The most amazing technology moment of the year has been watching Grandpa (75 years young) …

In my first semester of graduate school, I came across a rather unsettling statistic : less than half of all IT projects reported are considered “successful”. Billions of dollars are being poured every year into CRM, ERP, BI, upgrades, migrations, deployments, refreshes, business engineering, and more, only to have a less than 50% chance of coming out the way you expect.

My professor cited examples such as Hershey’s ERP migration resulting in late delivery of halloween candy (and a loss of $100m in sales and a 9% drop in stock).

In more recent news, respected ERP vendor recent Standish Group …

It’s no secret that the world is becoming flatter. Humans across the globe and in their local communities are MeetingUp, LinkingIn, and otherwise forming dynamic groups through social media and this phenomenon we have all grown to love called the internet. At NSR, we recognize that this is a wondrous thing and sometimes ponder how we did anything before cell phones and Google, but we also recognize that it is important to develop meaningful human relationships both in the cybersphere and IRL (In Real Life). A thumbs up on Facebook is great but it never beats a live high-five.

NSR …

“I want to work on that spreadsheet but I’m stuck at home taking care of a sick kid.”“I get so confused emailing drafts to myself all the time – which one is the latest version?”“I flew to Chicago for this presentation and my laptop is dead – with all my files on it.” We’ve all had similar experiences: Murphy’s Law has put us in the circumstance where we need a file and don’t have it. Nearly all knowledge workers are bound to a their Microsoft Word and Excel files, …

It’s tough being in a relationship. It’s even tougher when you work separate shifts, and both of you are taking full loads of classes (at separate institutions). Such circumstances do not facilitate seeing eye-to-eye (or seeing each other at all) and such challenges can only be compounded by one of you being highly technical and detail oriented and the other being highly social but removed from her friends and family. All that being said, ever since my wife got her iPhone, things couldn’t be better. Here are some of the ways that her new phone has brought us …