I saw Stewart's article on customized software in ComputerWorld this week, and googled (Googled?) a bit more and found a pair of good posts from Scavo (Keller/AMR started it all), speaking of an apparent trend back to favoring custom-built software in business today. A few thoughts ... A classic blunder made by many corporate IT groups is to buy into the idea that custom software is easy. It's certainly fun - much easier to develop a brand new piece of…
When implementing centralized reporting systems, you need to make sure you are prepared to go "all the way" - after the implementation is done. We've recently finished the first phase of a project to centralize and consolidate financial reporting in a single tool / platform; pretty common stuff, and this story is relevant to any data warehouse / consolidated reporting platform. A week or so ago, we had an internal IT meeting to review report requests. One of the business…
Conversations this week with folks in multiple, different organizations I have connections to, about formal change controls. The general rule, especially for the non-public companies, seems to be reasonable levels of process, but not as well documented, automated, and not as rigidly enforced as the more rigorous among us would prefer. It was interesting talking with the groups that were most frustrated; the developers will talk the talk, but find ways to get around the process when crunch time comes…
A lot of talking with the team yesterday, and I have a sore throat because of it - but we covered some pretty key concepts, stuff that is hard to reconcile in many tech staffers' minds, but must be dealt with. One conversation covered this person's desire to be thought of / leveraged as "more than a programmer". "That's great!" was my response -"... then close the issues that are getting assigned to you - without programming!". Recently, I am…
(attrib) I was in a meeting yesterday - first time with this particular group of folks, all at same time, on this topic, although I had already established a working relationship with all. Anyway, subject matter was one that most of them had talked about at length over the past few weeks, but I was a new addition to the mix. Suffice it to say, I didn't have too much to add to the conversation, not until the very end…
We've faced this problem a few times, as we roll out a distributed application across a network of remote locations. A fairly typical challenge is to explain the impact of a technical architecture improvement in a relevant, meaningful way - without resorting to techno-jargon. A good approach includes: Keep it short - Too much detail and you will lose them. Find the balance between enough information to be valuable, but not so much as to be boring Focus on the…
Had a week full of vendor meetings and presentations this week, captured some random thoughts: Bad Buzzwords 1 - I definitely tune folks out when they use the word "cool" to describe some piece of technology - how 1990's. The weird one came this week from a older gent, representing a fairly large company that has mixed hardware and professional services areas. A true moment of cognitive dissonance to hear that one. Bad Buzzwords 2 - Another one - probably…
Interesting article in Thinking Faster, just getting around to capturing my comments ... On Requirements "The first reason that business folks don't get what they need from IT is because they aren't sure what they want" The fundamental challenge of capturing and managing knowledge - it's much easier to understand something than it is to describe, document, teach it. Why do so many organizations do knowledge transfer and training by saying "follow that person around for 3 months"? Of course,…
Business issues / problems are like fractals. You can drill into the details or see things at a high level. The trick is to be able to understand what level you are looking at, and what level other folks may be at, and the relative difference that can contribute to missed communications. Some conversations at work this week have been interesting, and in hindsight I realized that I was seeing priorities / objectives / issues at one level, and my…
Well, we're not exactly seeing agressive price drops, but we are looking for ways to either cut or control growth of software costs. Some specifics: Understand how the software is licensed. Concurrent Users? Actively monitor the number of users during peak times. Make sure you are paying maintenance only on the number of users that really attach - not the number of named users. Processor count or power? Watch out for server upgrades - you may get stuck with an…
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