Dovetail Software Blogs

"Experience shows me (again and again) that agility is not about working fast but about finding elegantly simple solutions to business problems. You'll know you've found an elegantly simple solution when the business people agree it solves their most important and immediate problems and when the developers know the solution can be built and tested in 30 days or less."

"...a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found that while more than 50 percent of IT executives are aware of the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), only 16 percent of companies had adopted the best practices framework. Like 'green' data centers, the biggest challenge involved with IT governance is asking folks to change deeply ingrained behavior patterns."

"Every company has got legacy systems stashed away somewhere in their businesses. Perhaps it's an archaic financial application that the accounting department just can't seem to part with. Maybe it's the sales force’s slow-performing customer database that belongs in a nursing home and not in your data center. Or maybe it's networking equipment that's been around since the late 1990s."

"AMR Research just released snippets of its latest survey on SOA spending trends, and finds big money is flowing — but many of the companies spending the money may not exactly know what they’re investing in. The typical company adopting SOA spent $1.4 million on software and services in 2007, AMR estimates. AMR also said it found tnat SOA adoption is broad based and growing rapidly—China, Germany, and the United States all showed adoption growth rates of over 100%."

"Now the bad news: 'Hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested pursuing these markets in 2008, much of it wasted,' said AMR analyst Ian Finley. The AMR survey found that most companies don’t really know why they are investing in SOA, which Finley said makes long-term commitment iffy. Often, there are multiple reasons cited within any organization, letting SOA appear as a buzzword justification for unrelated individual priorities. 'People more easily rally around a thing rather than five things,' Finley said. That lack of a rallying purpose for SOA calls its momentum into question, he added."

"This paper clarifies the underlying goals and objectives of Business Intelligence to help identify its value, then builds on this definition and outlines a methodology for uncovering the value it creates. This methodology relies on gap analysis and decision support principles for evaluating the value potential for an organization. This methodology thus should (finally) provide managers with the justifications necessary for procuring the right business intelligence solution for creating and delivering the value expected by the business."