Dovetail Software Blogs: Business Planning Precedes IT Development – Ideally
“The
business needs should be the principal drivers of any significant IT
resource allocation. But discovering these true needs can often present
tremendous difficulties, from the nature of the business organization
itself. Non-technical users have objectives that they cannot translate
accurately into technical terms. By the time the requirements get to IT
from management, the requested “Solution” can be widely different from
the original problem. Furthermore, the organization structure of the
enterprise may simply not allow for the correct input or feedback into
the decision-making process.”
Slicing Through Bureaucracy the Wiki Way
”’If
you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies, you would
probably find some sort of wiki in all of them,’ says Andrew McAfee, a
Harvard Business School professor specializing in technology and
management operations. Sony’s PlayStation team uses a wiki to help keep
executives informed about products in various stages of development for
the video game”
Earning Customer Trust Is the Name of the Game
“As
customers have unprecedented choice, what are the new criteria that
companies need to consider in order to retain them? The answer may be
deceptively simple: Companies in Asia, as in the rest of the world,
will constantly have to ask themselves: ‘Why do our customers choose to
buy from us rather than from our competition?’
“Across
industries, companies agreed that customers buy from them not only on
the strength of what the product is, but also because they value how it
is sold. In other words, more than ever, earning customers’ trust is
the name of the game.”
How to Scale IT Infrastructure Without Leaving Stretch Marks
“Development
resources are almost always scarce, and deciding how much to expend on
the features that the users see, versus how much to expend on the
architecture that the users do not see (but which would make the
application scalable) is always difficult. There is no one answer, but
the question needs to be the subject of some deliberation. Weigh the
importance of every new feature against the scalability and performance
impact it will have on your application.”
Strategy Before Tactics
“Getting
the right strategic framework around what you want to solve, and then
developing a suitable tactical solution to the strategic goals will
help make the project more successful. Rather than many systems in a
company that do like or similar things, going back and evaluating the
technology you have, in comparison to the technology that you already
have, in comparison to the strategic goals for the company, and then
how it will be implemented on a tactical level.”
Consolidating vs. Federating Data in the Warehouse
“The
assumption is no longer true that data should always be stored in a
central warehouse database. We have technologies that open up access to
whole new realms of data: spreadsheets, files, web pages, messages, XML,
images, standard industry formats. Centralizing this content isn’t
required to manage the schema and relationships for these things –
often it can’t.”
