Agility is Everywhere
“Companies
require business agility to survive; software requires agile
development procedures to respond to change; development requires agile
business rules to allow change; and the enterprise requires agile
business planning protocols to cultivate internal collaboration.
“Agility
could perhaps be described as the ability never to be stuck in any
groove that you can’t get out of in response to new signals.”
Two views of Web 2.0 in business
“Fully 89% of the CIOs said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools – blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging – and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools.
“Perhaps
the most surprising finding coming out of the McKinsey survey was that
American companies are not poised to be the leaders in embracing Web
2.0 in coming years. If anything, they’re looking like laggards.
Leading the way are Indian firms, 80% of which plan to increase their
investments in Web 2.0 over the next three years, compared with 69% of
Asia-Pacific firms, 65% of European firms, 64% of Chinese firms, 64% of
North American firms, and 62% of Latin American firms.”
Using Closed-Ended Questions
“Closed-ended questions are preferable over open-ended questions because:
- their scoring is faster and more objective.
- they
are best for measuring complex behaviour. For example, instead of
asking the open-ended question ‘Describe the process of registering a
new client,’ break it into closed-ended questions such as:
- initial client contact occurs over the phone,
- initial client contact occurs in person,
- initial client contact occurs by Mail.”
The Future of Social Bookmarking & Clipping
“As
the amount of information on- and off-line continues to explode, we’ll
need new and better tools to discover, organize and process all the
content. Browser-based bookmarking has given way to social bookmarking
sites like del.icio.us.
“The CEO
of Clipmarks, Eric Goldstein, was kind enough to chat with me about the
idea, what has surprised him most about starting the company, the
biggest challenges the company faces, the web applications that inspire
him and more.”
Auction Site Builds CRM System From Scratch
“The
key to rapid development didn’t lie solely in technology, however,
Whitehead says. ‘It’s primarily a matter of mind-set,’ he explains.
‘You have to believe that you can actually do it.
“That
meant boosting the IT staffs confidence. It also meant building the
rest of the company’s appreciation for IT people – ‘who traditionally
had been fairly close to the bottom of the pile,’ Whitehead notes.
“A3
enabled Bonhams to significantly reduce the ratio of overhead staff to
revenue-producing staff, Whitehead says. ‘Our earnings staff were in
the minority,” he says, “but now they clearly are in the majority.’”
Are stacks making SOA a ‘complex, hard to use beast’?
“We’re seeing that SOA is being adopted on a gradual basis, not as a one-off architectural retrofit of the entire IT operations.
“Many software vendors have pounced on SOA as a way to sell more software, middleware in particular. But the fact of the matter is, SOA is something you do, not something you buy.”
