Dovetail Software Blogs

"I have been developing code for the Dovetail Agent for a few years now and I thought it would be nice to post some tips for modifying it.  These are some of the things I do when creating new screens or modifying existing screens.  They are by no means a definitive list and are strictly based on my coding practices.  Feel free to post your own..."

"In our client work, we’ve found that the companies that take customer-centricity seriously have de facto high-level customer champions for each key customer segment. These executives ensure that the end-to-end customer experience is well thought out and that it connects their brand to the customer’s self-image."

"But one market in particular -- EDI between suppliers and buyers -- has already seen some very large players converting to SaaS, as Bell Brands, Welch's, Arena Brands, and Target are tapping its ability to establish a hub for business-to-business data integration. To be sure, SaaS enables smaller suppliers to meet the integration demands of big customers such as Bell and Target without having to commit the IT and budget resources necessary to perform EDI in-house or via a managed solution. But SaaS-based b-to-b data integration goes beyond that."

"Indeed, this reinforces the key premise of enterprise decision management or EDM - that little decisions add up and that a focus on the automation and improvement of these operational decisions is critical to the effective execution of a business. This is particularly true in the case of customer treatment decisions where an approach often called 'best next action' is used to assess what will best develop the customer next time there is an interaction and then deliver the selected interaction across whatever channel makes sense."

"ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer observes that there is widespread belief (which he mainly disagrees with) that 'enterprise architecture as a practice is more widely respected and practiced in Europe than it is in the US. Some believe that the IT community in the US is perceived as developer-centric, coding cowboys that care not a whit about architecture.'"

"Enterprise content management (ECM), business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) all developed well over the last decade. Many employees in a diverse set of industries know what those solutions do and are using them on a daily basis. However, the systems leaned toward the static rather than the dynamic. ECM systems, for example, provided reliable repositories in which to store official documents. But they were expensive, time-consuming to deploy and sometimes difficult to use. In the long run, only a small percentage of a company’s intellectual assets ended up in a formal ECM system. Although those documents represented critical information needed for compliance, technical documentation or other purpose, much information that could also have been useful was not shared throughout the enterprise."