Business Related Posts

By Bruce Taylor
For you engineers out there -

I can tell you your worst nightmare: you go to bed one night as a competent secure in your technical competence, and you wake up the next morning as a technological dinosaur. All your strong technologies are now quaint footnotes in the history books and you’re faced with re-learning a whole new repertoire of technologies. You open up the morning paper and you see a want ad like this: Continue Reading »
Keeping Up With Technical Change

By Tim Bryce
INTRODUCTION

We now live in a fast paced society where we expect products and services to be delivered rapidly (some say “yesterday”), cheaply, and with a high degree of quality. This is particularly true in the systems and software industry. If we lived in a perfect world, systems and software would be developed rapidly and inexpensively, they would effectively satisfy business needs, and would be easy to maintain and modify. There is only one problem with this scenario: it is a fantasy. In reality, we live in a “disposable” world where systems and software are slapped together in the hopes everything will hold together and will pacify the end-user for the moment. Some people believe striving for a Utopian world is an impossibility and, as such, resign themselves to rewriting systems and software time and again as opposed to designing them to be industrial strength. Continue Reading »
What Price Quality?

By Terri Roeslmeier
Examine, for a second, the thought process of the staffing software buyer. It’s amazing how many times buyers will say it has to be an ASP or web based before they ask any questions about what the software can do. The thinking is to pare down the systems before taking an in-depth look at any of them. The idea is to save time, as there are too many systems out there to be able to evaluate them all. So, they eliminate a number of systems and then take a close look at the survivors trying to pick the one that best fits their actual business need. The error in this process is subtle. It must be since so many good business people seem to fall into the same trap. By using a non-functionality based criteria to winnow out possible solutions they are left choosing from amongst systems that may not meet their actual business needs. If an integrated payroll and billing solution is needed, why look only at systems that don’t offer this capability? Yet this is exactly what would have happened. Continue Reading »
Choosing An Effective Software Solution

By Paul Deis
This paper first defines key terms, then discusses how to improve inputs to the process, the improvement process itself, and wraps up with some “lessons learned” advice. Continue Reading »
Process Improvement - A How To Guide