Dovetail Software Blogs: Customer Centric Data
“Most
companies have to rely less on individual vision and more on group
consensus. How do they manage to exhibit the kind of bravery that Dell
is showing by attempting to engage its customers in true conversation?
“There
are two forces at work. At the “bottom end” is analytics and the
software offered by vendors and developed by IT departments that
emulate the Best Buy approach of data mining the entire customer base
by individual.
“At the “top end” there is the
demonstration effect of major corporations beginning to change. Xerox
has taken a plunge into learning from its customers, taking the radical
step of asking customers what they want, and then changing its
development path accordingly.”
Retailers on Track to Spend Over $120 Billion on IT and Communications Technologies in 2007
”’Retailers
individually spend well below other industries, about 1/3rd of the
amount per revenue dollar compared to financial services and
insurance,’ said Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting
Group, a global research and advisory firm that serves retailers and
retail technology vendors. ‘However, what retailers lack in spending
percentage of revenue they clearly make up in sheer volume, due to
their high revenues. Retail is a huge market for IT that is growing
just over 9 percent a year.’”
All roads lead to RM
“Beyond
the issue of compliance lies the more mundane yet continuous need to
manage information to minimize storage requirements and make
operational data readily available to users. For companies that
recognize a need for formal, automated records management
functionality, many points of entry are available.”
Bridging the collaboration age gap with unified communications and Web 2.0
“Unified communications (UC) is the name that IDC (idc.com)
and the vendor community are using to refer to those rich toolboxes
that will be available from within existing e-mail and IM clients as
well as new clients and application platforms. The latest UC solutions
from one or multiple sources bring together unified messaging (single
inbox for e-mail, fax and voice messages), advanced IP telephony
calling and management, Web, audio and video conferencing, instant
messaging, and pervasive presence management and awareness—all
accessible through speech-enabled, unified user interfaces for desktop
and mobile devices”
REST Battles SOAP for the Future of Information Services
“REST is an architectural style and set of architectural principles and technically speaking, REST is a web service architecture, even though most people think of SOAP as web services. Unlike SOAP, REST is about resources, such as documents in a repository, a universal syntax for addressing the resource, such as a URL, a set of well-defined operations, such as Get and Set, and content types for transfer of information, such as HTML.
It was an exercise originally to describe the architecture of the web,
but has become a way of describing how you can develop any web
application.”
Agility Is First and Foremost a Frame of Mind
“Information
technology is a large part of what makes a company agile, and it can
also be a big part of what makes it a clumsy, slow-moving bureaucracy.
One of the major determinants of this is the way your IT group answers
the question, ‘Should we build our systems fast, or should we build
them good?’ The agile answer is to build them fast and good enough for
now.”
Has the long-expected wave of cyber crime/warfare finally appeared?
“Reports in CNET, The Economist, New York Times, and PC World
point to a stunning lurch in the sophistication and reach of recent
nefarious online attacks. And the initial sniff test pulls up a whiff
of state or large-scale organization sponsorship and support of these
events.
“They may well be a bellwether of what to expect.
These are likely not loosely aligned hackers, but outright strategic
aggression designed to influence politics and the behaviors of nations
and large corporations.”
