Colin Boothe
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia Build vs buy software decisions hinge on whether a process is the reason customers choose you over a competitor. If it is, customize it or build it. If it isn’t, adopt the software’s standard process and change how your team works. Most mid-market build requests fail that test. The … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia A custom AI assistant for business is a chat tool that answers questions from your own documents and records, by searching them first and handing the relevant passages to a language model along with the question. Training a model is rarely any part of the job. What these things … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia AI data cleaning uses machine learning and language models to find duplicate records, standardize formats, and flag missing or wrong values, then proposes fixes for a person to approve. It matches fast and decides badly. So write the rules first, and clean only what your next AI project reads. … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia AI in accounting speeds up the close by handling pattern work: matching invoices, flagging outliers, drafting a first-pass flux narrative. It does not make judgment calls like materiality or revenue recognition. Those still need a controller, and most vendor pitches blur that line on purpose. A controller I worked … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia AI governance for a mid-market company is a short written standard that says which tools people may use, on which data, and who checks the output before it reaches anyone outside the room. It fits on one page. Companies get this wrong by building a committee first and writing … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia Use SuiteFlow when the process is states, conditions, and field updates on one record, and SuiteScript when you need loops, sublists, real math, or an outbound call. Oracle publishes that boundary in its own help documentation, so it isn’t a matter of taste. The expensive part of the decision … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia AI in ERP is real today in three narrow places, which are document capture, drafted text, and natural-language reporting. Everything wearing the word autonomous is a roadmap slide with a delivery window on it. The sorting rule is whether you can switch a thing on this afternoon without starting … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia ERP user adoption is won in the ninety days after go-live, by putting a named owner on every process, training people on the transactions their job actually needs, and measuring how much work gets fixed after it is entered. The software is finished on day one. The habits are … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia Build your first agentic AI workflow by picking one boring, high-volume task, writing its rules down like onboarding notes, giving it two or three narrow tools, and making it stop for a human wherever mistakes are expensive. Start with a workflow, not an agent. The stopping rules are the … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia NetSuite OneWorld consolidates subsidiaries by rolling child-entity balances up a subsidiary hierarchy at period-specific consolidated exchange rates, then posting intercompany eliminations to elimination subsidiaries during period close. The software does that part well. The hierarchy underneath it is the decision you cannot cheaply take back. A private-equity-backed manufacturer I … Read more
