For several years now STAR BASE, Inc. has been delivering open source IT Services in Cincinnati and Dayton.  I don’t know, but maybe we are IT consulting trend setters for Cincinnati.  Seems I have seen quite a bit in the last week about open source.

This is not the first time I have written about open source. In a previous post, I talked about Magento e-commerce.  I just saw this article about Magento.  As my fellow STAR BASE, Inc. IT strategy consultant, Matt Warman says, "come on in, we’re open."

Open source can substantially lower your cost of application development services.  You know what?  “It don’t get better than this”.

Organizations that build strong value-driven cultures frequently achieve high performance.  The values that are developed must touch every department in the organization or the overall operation will fall short of its targeted goals.

As an IT consulting firm in Cincinnati, we see many different approaches from many different companies and it is the “out-of-the-box thinkers that seem to continually apply lateral thought process on a continual basis and always stay a few steps ahead of their competition.

One would think that IT departments would observe and learn from this but way too often they do not pay attention to the business drivers of the organization and continue to stay with the same IT infrastructure year in and year out and resist change on any level.

There are those that would argue that “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” and I agree to a point but I believe that if IT professionals are going to contribute to building a strong value-driven culture that works to achieve the business goals of the organization they are going to have to look at new approaches that may enhance the very work they are held accountable for.

Being responsible for business development for our Cincinnati IT consulting firm, over the past couple of weeks I have approached several clients and potential clients with some new value propositions.  Many do not want to talk about them, nor are some even curious on what they are.  Everyone has a full plate and little capacity for a new application development services, IT training or IT consulting project.

However, here is a question that I have for these individuals.  If it is true that information technology changes every fifteen to eighteen months, how can the IT systems and enterprise IT applications that you have had in place for the last three to five years continue to be relevant or simply as efficient as they could be?  Do you not owe it to yourself to at least listen to what an IT consulting firm here in Cincinnati has to offer?  Perhaps that IT consultant has significant experience with a solution that can make a difference but you are unaware of it because you are resistant to change and everything is running 'smoothly'.  I can understand your hesitation but what if the new solution could greatly improve your IT infrastructure, decrease costs, fuel improved productivity or more effectively balance your IT staffing needs?   Wouldn’t it behoove you to at least listen?
 

In weak economic conditions, your company’s decision makers need the ability to understand how the company is performing against its targets. They simply do not have the time to sift through stacks of reports to find out what’s right – or wrong.  By linking applications, processes and information technology support together any organization will be able to measure exactly how they are performing against their targets.

The management team of any organization uses dashboards, gauges, charts and other graphical elements to translate complex information into a dynamic view of business conditions.  Is it possible to take this same approach when it comes to mapping IT’s relevance to the business targets of the organization?  The short answer is absolutely, but one must start with a plan and that plan should begin with an IT Wellness Check™.

In the IT consulting industry we find too many organizations that try to piecemeal their information technology systems together.  The problem with this is the mere fact that everyone everywhere is dependent on technology, and in this environment, every CIO and IT manager must know that their IT departments are in line with the business goals of the organization.  In these times of economic downturn downturn IT departments are one of the first departments to be cut.  In many cases, this results in the slowdown of production and contributes to missing the business targets of the organization.

An IT Wellness Check™ protects against economic challenges by shoring up internal operations to ensure the entire organization is running at peak efficiency.  IT is a vital part of any organization's internal operations, and a proper IT strategy is critical for IT departments to gain insight and to connect operational details to business drivers.  The IT Wellness Check™ is your business plan to make sure there are no inefficiencies, that you are operationally sound and that there is less chance that your budgets and your department will get cut.  That application development services project that you are trying to get approved will have a better chance of acceptance if you can show exactly how it relates to the business goals of the organization.

Remember, non-technical people often do not realize the consequences of the actions they take when they cut budgets and staff.  It is our job as responsible information technology professionals to make sure we are always operating at peak efficiency and paint the picture for upper management that shows why specific people, applications or IT infrastructure are necessary to assist them in meeting the business targets of the organization.
 

Like everything else, the economic downturn is affecting IT Departments everywhere.  Projects that were ‘earmarked” for completion are being put on hold and IT budgets are being cut as well.  However, IT Departments can help their organizations by selling them on the idea that IT can be used as a competitive advantage.

The key to running a successful IT department is knowing how your organization makes money and not proposing or running projects that are counter productive.  Until an IT department re-examines their current process and methodologies and puts together a plan that can transform IT into a competitive advantage for their organization - they run the risk of having budgets slashed and staff reduced.  Application development services must be developed with these facts in mind. 

Most people in IT use the MS Office applications the same way year in and out.  For the most part, they only scratch the surface on what they can actually do with these tools.  Additionally, every organization has developed specialty applications within their organizations to meet the needs of the organization.  However, far too many organizations have not optimized their applications to enhance the overall value of the IT department.  Projects and IT staffing cuts are made many times because organizations do not understand the impact and the value.

Making sure your organization fully understands the value proposition is more important than ever in these economically trying time.  The Information technology department can be the outstanding spot for any organization because it can do those things that save money rather than those that make money.  It’s not that you do not want to make money.  It’s that cost-saving projects tend to be easier to measure and are more predictable than products or services that are dependent on how a customer is going to react to what your organization is offering during these tough economic times.  I believe these cost-saving projects will assist any IT department in minimizing costs while maximizing value in these difficult economic times.

Application developers, for the most part, chose their career field because they have a passion for technology and they enjoy creating, developing and finding solutions for problems involving software.

In the technology consulting industry, application development services has been known to occupy people that like to work alone and can flat-out get the job done when traditional development cannot.  However, the new world of the global enterprise has changed and to survive and prosper the new application developer of today needs to have an appreciation for the idea that just building the application is not enough.  Enterprise application now development requires much more.

Application developers for the most part do not want any part of the business world. They simply want to develop and build.  They are faced with multiple challenges that perhaps they were not faced with in the past.  Organizations are requiring any employee or consultant to be able to multi-task.  This includes application developers.  They must have the capability to do several jobs and to understand how their developed application affects the “big picture.”

In his recent article, “8 Reasons CIOs Think Their Application Developers are Clueless”, Tom Wailgum, discusses exactly what CIOs think and what they are faced with on a daily basis.  CIOs need to be technical but they must also be business savvy. In-fact awareness of how to run a department or a business is becoming they key characteristic that organizations look for.  CIOs are tasked with the challenge of ensuring that the IT department is in strategic alignment with the business goals and objectives of the organization.
article: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/2559269/105281624/28054/0/

In the same sense application developers need to develop with the “big picture” in mind.  What does this mean?  It means that the sky is not the limit and that application bus be developed with efficiency and ease of use in mind.  Applications need to be developed within a given time-frame and not grow to the point where they cannot easily be changed.  Any application must understand what the goals and objectives of the organization are and how the applications they develop contribute to the overall mission.

No man is and an island and the sum total of the whole will assist any teams in better meeting the mission of the organization.

There is a major transformation of the workforce going on in the area of information technology.  Major global organizations have embraced it and small to medium business need to follow suite.

Organizations need to diversify not only in the workers they hire but in the way that businesses are organized.  Diversification of their employees has helped large firms such as Procter & Gamble and General Electric to penetrate countries around the world that would have taken years to accomplished if they insisted on going it the same way as it has been done in the past.

Information technology is no different in this respect because it continually changes at least every eighteen months.  Application development services, buiness technology development and information technology as a whole is constantly changing.  Those organizations that insist on keeping the same technology and processes will find it difficult to stay competitive on an on-going basis. 

Yesterday a client called letting us know that their system crashed over the week-end and they were down and temporarily could not conduct business. This is a client that we had spoken to in the past about the value of upgrading their system but they have continually put us off because they wanted to “squeeze a little more” out of the system that they have been using the past eight years. In short they wanted to continue using the technology the same way they have for the past ten years.

Well, my organization moved quickly and got the client up and running in less than a day.  However, the situation reminded me of an old television commercial that ran a few years ago for Fram Oil Filters, www.fram.com “you can pay me now or you can pay me later.”  Had they embraced our proposals in the past for an IT Wellness Check™ they woud more than likely been able to avoid the downed system situation.  

Ironically I visited a client yesterday and made a proposal for system and process improvements based upon our findings of a recently conducted IT Wellness Check™.  This organization is a rapidly growing company that is very dependent on technology to keep them moving forward.  This organization is very vulnerable in several areas but they choose to stick with the “status quo” for right now even though they really need the solutions we proposed.  As we drove away after our meeting all I could think of was “you can pay me now or you can pay me later.”  What say you?       

• Define your virtualization goals
• Select virtualization candidates
• Capacity planning and determining requirements
• Compare virtualization approaches
• Manage virtualization security
• Automate virtualization management

• Cost savings
• Simplified administration and management
• Portability and hardware independence
• Ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements

• Presentation level allows applications to run on a single central server.
• Application level allows the applications to execute on the client, but within the client independent partitions are created to make it possible to run many different types of applications.
• Server level provides the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single server.
• Hardware level runs through a hypervisor on a physical server.