The democratization of software continues at a rapid pace. Solutions that once were only available to the largest corporations are now easily within the reach of small to midsized businesses. This time it's project portfolio management (PPM) software.

PPM software enables your company to analyze, recommend, authorize, activate, expedite, and monitor projects. And that kind of control turns into dollars, whether your organization uses an engagement profitability or budget alignment model, or a hybrid of the two. A properly exploited PPM system can cut up to 30 percent off product development time, significantly improve on-time and on-budget rates, and boost R&D productivity.

Finally, on a different note, today's feature blog post offers a look at Japanese decision-making, and how it uses a bottom-up flow rather than the familiar top-down North American model. You'll also discover how this is spawning Japanese-style enterprise content management (ECM) software that helps manage this seemingly upside down (from a North American perspective) process.