Dovetail Software Blogs: Retail Self Service
“Beyond simple queue-dispersion, however, the potential for stellar personal service is compelling: a handheld CRM
device in a clothing store, for example, enabling the sales assistant
to walk the customer through the purchase, swipe the card, and help
carry the bag to the car – all without touching the sales counter –
will create one very pampered customer.”
There’s no I in team?
“This
group thought they knew the business needs better than the end users.
They also thought the BI team was ‘fluff’ and shouldn’t be allowed to
execute a query before it had passed a 20 point code review. One person
was responsible for those 20 check points, for each and every report
request…. Can we say bottleneck? Btw – that bottleneck approvals
process was created by someone who had never implemented a reporting
system. We’ll talk about interview techniques and staffing in another
post.”
Architecting the Real World – Lessons from Second Life
“Isn’t
this what we should be delivering in the real world? Do you think they
spend a lot of time arguing over process? Do you think they spend a lot
of time gathering user requirements? Or do they have a vision and know
how to anticipate user needs? Have they tried to handle every possible
exception in the world or did they create a robust set of standards
that do not restrict usability and functionality?”
Are you ready for amoebic computing?
“So
is the concept of ‘amoebic computing’ the future of parallel
processing? A University of Illinois computer scientist thinks so and
wants to harness the strength of amoeba into computer cores. He thinks
that an ‘amoebic computing’ system could, ‘like the amoeba, replicate
tasks waiting to be processed and run them on other cores as needed.’
In other words, it would ‘break sequential programs into component
parts, or services, and send them to available cores instead of having
them wait in line.’”
How to build SOA when executives don’t care
“Over the past few weeks, Nick Malik and I have been discussing the pros and cons of bottom-up SOA,
starting small, and top-down approaches, and we both agree that
starting small (not to be confused with bottom-up) is the best way to
go, because the number of organizations with C-level executives ready
and willing to promote SOA-style transformation are few and far between.”
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise
“It
seems a fundamental new widespread focus on leveraging that two-way
aspect of the network deeply in our online products, as well as
increasingly playing to the fundamental strengths of the network that
is the Web, is teaching us invaluable lesson after invaluable new
lesson for our businesses. The result is that the living laboratory of
the Web is now the source of the greater part of our innovation in
business these days. Today’s World Wide Web is a larger ecosystem and
with far more brainpower and activity that any single organization
could ever hope to match.”
Analysis and creativity in decision-making
“Even
with adaptive control you run the risk that you are perfecting today’s
business rather than thinking creatively about tomorrow’s
possibilities. However, when you are dealing with massive scale
(millions of accounts, hundreds of thousands of customers etc), you
really have to be able to model the impact of your creativity before
you put it into production.”
