Business Technology Consulting

Building the Business Case for the Business Case

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

In a BATimes article John Moore visits the need and proper use of a Business Case document to increase the success of IT business solution projects. He demonstrates a failed project due to a competitor who released a competitive product in the market before our organization’s project completed. The business manager showing the project failed because it did not deliver the projected ROI. The IT project team noted that they delivered the project on-schedule, on-time and on-budget. Was that risk that a competitor could beat us to the marketplace identified at project initiation or during the life of the project? Were the proper stakeholders identified and included in the project communication plan?

John makes note how the Business Case document should be revisited several times during the project life cycle. Doing so may have caught the changing environment and allowed the organization to mitigate the risk from the competitor.

John makes very valid points that I believe show an improper IT solution Project Delivery System. Laura Brandenburg notes in her blog that the Business Case document is often created under another name, or as I have noticed in many organizations the Business Case document is created, then it is used to develop the Project Charter and Project Design documents. These documents should not only be created but needs to visited by an IT Governance body during multiple steps in the IT solution Project Life Cycle; not just at project initiation. At each point it makes a “go/no go” decision as to whether to continue the project. This is where many organizations fail to follow through.

Take the simplified high-level Project Life Cycle that includes 5 phases: Initiation, Analysis, Design, Development and Implementation/Closure. Most organizations will make the “go/no go” decision on an IT business solution project either prior to the Initiation phase that kicks off the project or at the end of the phase, depending on how the organization defines its Project Delivery System. In most organizations that is the only time that the IT Governance body will rule on the value of the project.

If the IT business solution project had to go before the IT Governance body at the end of the Analysis, Design and Development phases as well as the Initiation phase then the organization has greatly increased its ability to mitigate risk in the project, especially from external forces.

As the project goes through each phase of the Project Life Cycle, the benefits, costs, requirements and risks are further defined. In John’s example, if our competitor launched their product while we were still in Design then our IT solution project went before the IT Governance body for its next “go/no go” decision. The IT Governance Body, being aware of the competitor’s product launch, can now say that the project benefits are no longer valid. The risk mitigation plan can be executed, which may include dropping the project all together. This reduces the cost to the organization as those resources can now move on to a more valid IT solution project.

So not only is it important to make sure that you build a Business Case document, by whatever name you may call it, but be sure it is visited several times during the project life cycle, by others outside of the project team, to ensure that the assumptions (benefits, costs, risks) therein contained remain valid. This along with making sure the proper stakeholders are involved greatly increases ensuring that the IT solution project maintains its value to the organization.

Everything Old Is New Again

Monday, March 8, 2010 by Matt Warman

This post may shock you... the Java Rocker is going to talk about legacy iSeries and AS/400! Before you panic, and call it the end of the world, let me continue. This post is about running all of the cool new Web 2.0 things on your IBM hardware. Really! Even in Cincinnati! Many people, (myself included) thought the old IBM hardware was only for RPG and COBOL (shudders). It turns out that IBM has been adding functionality to run Linux on the box. That means Wikis, Ecommerce, blogs, and web applications are now there for iSeries-AS/400 people. The catch is that your iSeries needs to be up to date, which sadly for most organizations is not. My IT consulting colleagues at STAR BASE are good with taking your tired old hardware and doing the maintenance necessary for the modernization piece. They get your hardware and software cleaned up and ready, so I can help you with all of the cool new application development projects that I have been talking about.

Business Analysis: Building the Bridge

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

A common reference I hear in business today is that the Business Analyst (BA) is the bridge between the business and information technology staffs within the organization. This infers that the knowledge of getting from one to the other, or interacting with either is contained within the BA alone. The BA should not be the bridge, but the bridge builder. If the knowledge is contained only within the BA, if the BA should leave the organization, then the bridge is gone. If the BA is the bridge builder, then if he/she should leave, the knowledge remains within the Organization.

As an IT Strategy Consultant developing IT solutions here in Cincinnati and Southwest Ohio, I go from organization to organization and see that turnover within the BA ranks inevitably causes a great learning curve; either to recover the knowledge that has just walked out the door or bringing the new BA up to speed and making them an effective contributor to the organization.

What all these organizations lack is an Enterprise Architecture, a fundamental artifact of the Business Analysis profession. This and other artifacts are the foundation of creating a Business Analysis Center of Excellence. There is a maturity path that all organizations take from having a community of BAs that serve the organization with no continuity or conformity of service through a mature level in which that continuity and conformity of service is establish; into a BA Center of Excellence, where all BAs within the organization have a common standards of practice, tools and resources from which to draw knowledge.

Where is your Organization on the maturity path to a BA Center of Excellence?

What makes a good BA?

Friday, February 26, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

I have spent a lot of time talking about the duties of the Business Analyst (BA); now let’s talk about the characteristics that make up a good BA. I find it interesting that Kupe wrote on this very subject this week, I guess great minds do think alike. As Kupe notes, the IIBA call these underlying competencies and define these as “the skills, knowledge and personal characteristics that support the effective performance of business analysis”.

The BA performs an important role in the application development process and is tasked with the duty of ensuring that the IT business solution meets the needs of the business. The BA develops and maintains the business and functional requirements that the IT business solution must contain in order to be deemed successful.

So we know the role and duties of the BA during a business application development project, so what “skills, knowledge and personal characteristics” does a person need to have to perform these duties. As the duties of the BA entail eliciting requirements from stakeholders and working with an application development team, you can imagine that communication is at the heart of the competencies of a BA. Good written and oral communication is necessary in order to be able to perform these duties. Good communication is not only departing information, but taking in information, or listening. This is often the skill that is over looked when we talk about skills or create a competency model.

Notice that when discussing competencies, that we not only are talking about “skills”, like Decision Making, Creative Thinking, Learning and Problem Solving; but we are also considering “knowledge” and “personal characteristics”. As the BA has to work with both the business and information technology staff, they need knowledge of the organization, industry and technology. What kind of personal characteristics would you want in a person that serves such an important role? I am sure ethics and trustworthiness would make the top that list.

So if you’re a BA looking to advance your career, there are some competencies to work on. If you’re an organization or manager looking to hire a BA, look not only at their skills and past performance, but develop some probing questions that will give you a look into their “underlying competencies”.

Where Does the BA Fit into My Small Organization?

Monday, February 22, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

In my previous two-part posts I discussed where the BA fits into the organizational structure. Even Jeff Welsh notes how application software development has changed over the years and requires a team approach for successful implementation of IT business solutions.

But you are sitting there saying we are a small to medium size business (SMB), my entire IT staff is 10 or less, I do not have a Business Process Orgranization (BPO) or Project Management Office (PMO); where should the BA fit into my organization?

SMBs need to utilize the BA role within their project delivery methodology. If the role is not being fulfilled then there is higher risk of failure of the project in that it does not meet the needs of the business. I have worked on many small-to-medium IT staffs and can attest to the fact that when resources are few that people wear many hats. There were projects where I served as the project manager, business analyst, developer and trainer. On smaller staffs, where only one or two of the people will be doing the duties of the BA, it is even more important to make sure that those people are easily accessible by the business units that they support. Have them sit in the vicinity of those business units instead of in the IT Department. I still feel that the BA is an IT function and should report to IT management as opposed to business management, but making the BA readily available and accessible to the business adds value to their role and gains buy-in from the business people to assist the BA with their duties.

So when making the organizational chart keep the BA in the IT Department; but when divvying up office space, make room for the BA near the business unit(s) that they are to support.

Where Does the BA Fit into Your Organization? Part two

Friday, February 19, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

In my last post, I joined the discussion of “where does the BA fit into the organization?” I concentrated on the first line BA that should develop the enterprise architecture and help cultivate the business requirements for business process improvements. This BA would be part of a combined Business and IT staffed Business Process Organization (BPO). The purpose of the BPO is to analyze business issues and make the business case as to which IT business solutions projects should be undertaken.

Once a project is approved by the governance body it is turned over to the Project Management Office (PMO) to guide the project to completion. The PMO will be staffed with project managers (PMs) and business analysts (BAs) that will guide the project the rest of the way through the project life cycle. You may be asking why you would need BAs as part of the PMO, or project leadership team; after all the PM is responsible to see the project is completed on-time, on-budget and on-schedule. Yes, but the BA would be responsible to see that the project is completed and the IT business solution meets the business requirements. A business application development project will need functional and technical specifications that the BA should help develop.

The third role of the BA, I alluded to in my first post on this subject, is that of the Test or Quality Assurance Analyst. One role of the BA is to support the system, quality assurance and/or user acceptance testing phase of the project life cycle.

So the answer to the question ‘where does the BA fit …?” is in many positions within the organization. It depends on which BA role you wish to discuss, and whether the organization is large enough to have a BPO and/or PMO.

Any thoughts on the subject?

Testquerade Part One.

Thursday, February 18, 2010 by Jeff Welsh

I had lunch today with one of our Cincinnati customers and he made the comment that his company had eliminated a lot of costs via their IT applications. He also said there was no more low hanging fruit in their IT applications. Everything is integrated and there are no easy changes. I laughed and said there is nothing easy any more; even my easy button quit talking!

In today’s world some IT applications have grown quite complex. It was not that long ago an application developer that knew business could do the business analysis, the technical design, program the application, test and implement it.
Enterprise IT applications today require a team of dedicated professional working together and a good process methodology. Many members of the team are specialized in a particular skill or a part in the development process.

One of the things that is sometimes overlooked or gets glossed over is testing and quality assurance. I have even heard developers say “why should I test, that’s what we have users for”. Because systems have become so integrated and complex, quality assurance is not something to be taken lightly. As a matter of fact, it is quickly becoming a specialty in and of its self. There are many aspects to quality assurance, but one that I think we will be seeing a lot more of in the coming months and years is the notion of Test Data Management. To be continued……….

Where Does the BA Fit into Your Organization?

Monday, February 15, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

I attended the CIO Speaker series sponsored by the Cincinnati Chapter of the IIBA^®. The January meeting showcased the CIO and Deputy CIO of FirstGroup America. It was not part of their presentation, but a question was asked of them “should the BA report to IT or to the Business?” This alludes to the bigger question “where does the BA fit into the organization?”

This is the question that many organizations are still trying to answer today. Many organizations are just realizing the benefits of the BA role. One thing to realize, is those of us in the BA arena today are in the forefront of an infantile and growing profession. The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)^®, the professions governing body, was formed in 2004; incorporated in 2006. There are 827 certified professionals (CBAP)^® in the world. Compared to the Project Management Institute (PMI)^®, which was incorporated in 1969, offer five certification programs and has nearly 300,000 certified professionals. You may say that your company has had BAs for the last 5 or 10 years. Then I say your company is one of the forward-thinking organizations that has recognized the benefits that the BA role provides in developing IT business solutions.

Now I believe this discussion will go on for years; but as this is my blog, here I get to put my two cents in. First, let’s define the role of the BA in which we discuss. Many organizations have a quality assurance team, department or processes within the IT application development team. As these people support system or user acceptance testing procedures, these people are Business Analyst. For this discussion, I refer to the Business Analyst that works on the front end of the project life cycle. Who develops the Enterprise Architecture, gathers business requirements for business process improvements and makes the business case for IT business solutions projects to make those improvements.

As the role of the BA is to develop requirements and make the business case for IT application development projects, this is an IT function; therefore the BA is an IT position and should report to the IT management as opposed to the Business management. Although the duties that the BA performs may put him/her in front of external customers of the company, their goal is not to perform the business of the company but to recommend IT business solution projects to improve business processes within organization; this is an IT function.

If your organization is large enough to use terms such as Business Process Organization (BPO) and Project Management Office (PMO); then you should find the BA at the heart of the BPO. The purpose of the BPO is to analyze and recommend improvements to business processes. So now you say that in most organizations the BPO is a business team; I would reply that it should be a combination business and IT team. The improvement to business processes may require a business solution, such as upgrade or replace business machinery or training; or an IT solution, such as application enhancement, system training or system upgrade. Therefore, the BPO should be made up of business positions and IT positions working together to determine the best solution to business issues.

One thing that I would change in many organizations is that I believe the BA should sit more in the vicinity of the business unit(s) that they support as opposed to sit in the IT Department. BAs will be much more effective when they fully understand the business processes in place, issues that business workers face and the daily going-ons within the business unit(s). Also, easy approachability to the BA for the business gains buy-in to the duties and recommendations of the BA.

So there is my opinion on the subject, what is yours?

How to Get the Financing You Need

Monday, February 8, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

Any good Business Analyst will tell you that IT and business speak in different languages. Good CIOs and IT Infrastructure Management know that CFOs have a language all their own. “That being said, it is the money people who generally stand in the way of engineers and technologists and the spending required to accomplish great things with IT.”, according to an CTOEdge article. CIOs generally don’t speak in the language of the CFO when making spending requests, so we walk away feeling that they “just don’t get it”. Here are 10 areas where we, as the promoters of IT, can begin to communicate better with the CFO.

1. Think TCO, not ROI

To the CFO, return on investment is how much money you’re going to give back to the company. Let’s face it. Most IT projects — no matter how compelling — don’t bring “return” to the organization like an additional sales person, a new marketing campaign, or a new product launch. Preach total cost of ownership (TCO); repeat it until you are blue in the face. Whether business application development, web application development, IT infrastructure investment; you can demonstrate “fiscal stewardship” through cost reduction or increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Cloud Computing

CFOs like what they hear about cloud computing as a cost saver. Don’t fight them on it.

3. Green IT

Are you surprised when the CFO is not willing to pay a premium to keep the environment cleaner? The reality is that no green projects exist unless they have a better TCO. So whether to upgrade your IT infrastructure, better IT infrastructure cooling, or saving space for your IT infrastructure you can build a strong business case of the decreased TCO and community relations intangibles of being an “environmentally conscious” firm.

4, 5 and 6. Virtualize, Virtualize and VIRTUALIZE

“This subject takes up three spots because there are three key virtualization targets -- servers, desktop and storage. But again, the key here is how to justify and how now NOT to justify.” Again build your TCO case for virtualization, but be realistic in your cost savings estimates. Many times virtualization projects are viewed as unsuccessful because they did not meet the upfront cost estimates. Be sure to include high traffic times such as end-of-month close periods.

7. Adopt IT-Centric Business Continuity

Over the years responsibility for business continuity have been put on IT management. This needs to change. Organizations need to understand that there are three phases to a business continuity plan; event response, disaster recovery and business continuity. With the financial impact on the organization of disaster recovery and business continuity, business management must be involved and responsible for these areas. It should not be IT management’s responsibility to determine which business units are most important.

8. Align with the Big Picture

Along with TCO, build your requests showing how the request aligns with the business objectives and goals of the organization.

9. Proactive Cost Reduction

Boy does that sound like another way to say TCO to you? Take a proactive stance on reducing cost. The article showed how to reduce cost of document retention.

10. Reduce Data Center Costs

The organization’s data center is usually the center of the IT infrastructure, both in physical space and cost. Just as in application software development, modular building of a data center can cut cost of the IT infrastructure through avoiding construction cost, reduced cooling cost and reduced capital expenditures.

“While the relationship between CFO and CIO can sometimes have more debits than credits, it is definitely worth the investment in time and effort to highlight IT projects in terms the CFO will understand.”

JavaFX + JPA = Awesome

Friday, January 29, 2010 by Matt Warman

Yes, this is another of my continuing series of JavaFX posts. I hope you are enjoying the posts, and hopefully you will take a look at JavaFX, because it's really going to be a great platform. One of the key complaints from some application development folks is “yea it does cool animations, but where's the non-trivial uses?”. True there has been a lot of “toy” applications, some touted as “Enterprise”, but I want to give you a key usage for your business application development.
First off a brief primer on JPA, or Java Persistent API. The technology grew out of the complexity and (loathing) of the EJB 2.0 spec. Hibernate came up with way to use POJOs to persist data. The brains behind JPA were the driving force behind JPA. Now is the time to learn JPA, because it's a big part of the EE 6 spec.
Some notices here first; I am using NetBeans as my IDE. You should be able to use the general theme with Eclipse though. JavaFX can use Java classes in the script. The key part for me was how to integrate them. The easiest thing to is create a new Desktop application project (New Project → Java → Desktop Application). Pick the database application, so the JPA wizard displays. Select your table, and the wizard creates the JPA controller, and all of the Entity classes for you. Run the Build project, and now you have a JAR file. If you don't have NetBeans, or want to do this by hand, create the Controller and Entity classes and put them in a JAR file. Add the JAR file to your JavaFX project path, and your ready to go! The following Code can be put in your script to access:

 var db =  new YourTableJPAController(); //Creates a new instance of your controller 
 var list = db.findYouTableEntities();  // find all of the entities of your table.

To display all of the values, you can run a for loop like this:

 Vbox {  for(y in new YourTableJpaController().findWineEntities()) 
     Text {  	    content: y.getField() }	
 }

The code above iterates through the List object created by findYourTableEntites, and puts it in a Vertical Box (Vbox). Each item in the Box is a Text object whose display value is one of your fields from your table.

You can now dynamically populate your fields from a database, but more importantly, you are using JPA to handle all of the heavy lifting. Notice I didn't mention anything JDBC. I let JPA do all of the communicating with the database. This is a layer abstraction that let's be an application development guy, not a DBA or Network Admin (not that there's anything wrong with that). If you are using an application server that handles JPA like Glassfish, then you can make your JavaFX application available on the browser and desktop. Now you can have that awesome looking application that actually does something. You are happy to start doing something cool, and your boss is happy because it does something he wants.

Deploying JavaFX on Glassfish and Facebook

Thursday, January 21, 2010 by Matt Warman

First, sorry for the tardiness of my posts. Between the holidays, coming back from the holidays, a cold, and a secret project (for now), I haven't had time to blog.. until now. My current focus has been a Facebook game application. Well it's still in the alpha phase, but I wanted to get the architecture up and running. There's nothing worse for an application development person than to finish your application, then find out you need to rewrite it (or worse) because of the architecture doesn't support it. Even without Zembly, setting up a Facebook application is pretty easy. Since I had most of the defaults already in, the only thing I need to do is to tell Facebook where my application resides. Since I don't have Zembly anymore, I have to put on my application development and network administrator hats on set up an application server.
My first test was to deploy the application into my local Tomcat. NetBeans does a great job of having the files available to you, but the thing you learn quickly is that there isn't a simple deployment piece. Tomcat needs a WAR file, so I tried to use the JAR command to WAR up the files in the dist folder. No dice. The war file needs a proper web.xml file to work properly. Rather than use workarounds on workarounds, I created a web application project in NetBeans, linked the jar file from my JavaFX project, and copied the JNLP and HTML files to my new project. I now have a WAR to deploy. Tomcat loves this file. I run and... “FILE NOT FOUND?” was heard all throughout Cincinnati. Your JNLP file that was created points to a servlet called internally by NetBeans. Make sure change the following lines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jnlp spec="1.0+" codebase="http://your server.com/app path/" href="SBWarsTest_browser.jnlp">
<information>
<title>SBWarsTest</title>
<vendor>STAR BASE </vendor>
<homepage href="http://your server.com/app path/"/>

Once I made the change to localhost, everything was fine. Now I wanted a real application server, so I downloaded and installed Glassfish V.2.1 on one of our servers, changed the JNLP file and we are in business. I tried to hit it from my machine, and no dice. After some extensive research, I found out the the Java 7 EA JRE does not play well with JavaFX. I uninstalled it (which reverted to JRE 1.6.18), and it works. In Facebook, you need to set the canvas callback URL to your host application path. The result is the pretty picture you see at the top of my post.

ROI, Do we have to?

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Jeff Welsh

Happy New Year!!! Welcome to a new year, new decade and a new beginning.

As the recession recedes and recovery takes hold, IT executives are looking at their project lists and trying to decide what their priorities are. Should we do application development in house or bring in an IT consulting company? Should we consider an open source application? What is the ROI? What’s a company to do? It doesn’t matter if your company is in Cincinnati, Dayton or Katmandu, the questions are the same.

Last month we did a pulse survey to see how IT leaders are managing ROI measurement. The results were surprising and sparked a lot of conversation here at STAR BASE, Inc. The thing that surprised us the most was the number of companies that did NOT look at ROI before doing a project. Most of our respondents (58%) do not.

Some of conversations we have had revolved around the idea of doing a project or installing an application just to stay in the game. Could you imagine a company of any size today functioning without email? I could argue that there is negative ROI with amount of time managing my email in box takes!

For those that measure ROI, only about half see the actual ROI align with the projected ROI most of the time. The other half report that they see the actual ROI align with the projected ROI less than half the time and most said seldom or never. I have often said that if management knew how much it was really going to cost to install that new ERP system before they started, they probably wouldn’t.

Since most of our respondents don’t look at ROI and of those that did, half said the ROI did not align, my question is this: How do you decide what projects to do? Are most companies spending money on IT because they need to “keep up with the Jones’ “? Is it because installing that new ERP will look good on everyone’s resume?

Get your copy of our ROI Survey results by going here.

Open-source Security A Major Concern for 2010

Friday, January 15, 2010 by Aaron Whittenberger

According to ComputerWorld, web application development remains top dog by far in the top IT skills to have in 2010. Specifically, companies will look for developers with knowledge of .Net, Java, Web development, open source and portal technologies. The article goes on to suggest that combining web application development skills with business analysis or project management skills is a big plus. ComputerWorld lists the remaining skills to have for 2010 in its top six as: Help Desk/Technical Support, Networking, Project Management, Security and Business Intelligence.

I feel ComputerWorld did not put enough emphasis on Security; this without doubt will be the biggest challenge for IT executives in the coming years. Open-source software may be an innovative money saver, but IT professionals still have concerns that networks could be vulnerable to viruses, cyberattacks and other intrusions.

According to InfoWorld, a new survey from Forrester Research found that 58 percent of large companies have security concerns about open source. In addition, 57 percent of small and mid-sized businesses expressed concern that open-source software would be "complex and hard to adopt".

With the advent and increasing usage of open-source in the business world, expect to see demand for IT security related skills to grow. According to the FLOSS 2020 roadmap presented at the Open World Forum in Paris, 40 percent of jobs will be related in some way to open source by 2020. You can expect application development and security to comprise a great majority of these jobs.

Run with the Pack

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Jeff Welsh

I was reading this article and as a Cincinnati based IT consulting firm owner, found it interesting. Social networks are influencing our everyday lives more and more each day. This research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro According to them, there were six key findings:

1. Professional decision-making is becoming more social - enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG).
Professionals want to be collaborative in the decision-cycle but not be marketed or sold to online; however online marketing is a preferred activity by companies.
2. The big three have emerged as leading professional networks: LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.
The convergence of Internet, mobile, and social media has taken significant shape as professionals rely on anywhere access to information, relationships and networks.
3. Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools.
Decision-makers are broadening reach to gather information especially among active users.
4. Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person.
Information obtained from offline networks still have highest levels of trust with slight advantage over online (offline: 92% - combined strongly/somewhat trust; online: 83% combined strongly/somewhat trust).
5. Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years.
Three quarters of respondents rely on professional networks to support business decisions
6. Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation.
Younger (20-35) and older professionals (55+) are more active users of social tools than middle aged professionals.
There are more people collaborating outside their company wall than within their organizational intranet.

After reading this, a Bad Company tune came to mind, “Run with the Pack”. There is certainly safety in numbers. My question is this: If everyone is doing the same thing, are they giving up any competitive advantages?

Is IT Qualified To Satisfy The Business?

Monday, November 9, 2009 by Aaron Whittenberger

“IT executives increasingly implement marketing initiatives to improve the communications with their business customers. But these efforts often focus solely on the brand aspects of the services under the IT’s control without understanding the business’ perception of IT. To maximize the success, IT must add business satisfaction assessments to its tool kit. Understanding business satisfaction requires qualitative and quantitative data that capture customer expectations and perceptions through different types of interactions such as interviews, panels, focus groups, complaint systems, and surveys. This report provides best-practice recommendations, survey templates, and questions to guide IT executives through the deployment of a business satisfaction assessment. It applies Forrester’s deep expertise in external customer satisfaction to the interface between business customers and their internal IT suppliers.” says a new Forrester report.

I have served on countless business application development teams within several organizations in the Southwest Ohio and Cincinnati Information Technology community, one thing I can say is that most IT organizations do not gauge business satisfaction with IT business solutions. I have served in only a couple of organizations where the business serves on the IT governance committee. An organization does not have to be “big” to have an IT governance committee. No matter what the size of the organization decisions are made as to priorities in IT work. IT governance does not have to be a long drawn out process or take great time commitment from the business or IT executives, but business involvement in IT governance goes a long way in gaining business buy-in as you roll out the IT business solutions to the business.

Involvement in IT governance is just one way that many organizations in the Greater Cincinnati area can improve the IT-business relationship. The Forrester report goes into ways to solicit and gauge business satisfaction with IT business solutions. Doing so should affect decisions concerning not only IT business solution delivery but also IT Infrastructure and IT outsourcing initiatives.

Too Little, Too Late.

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Jeff Welsh

I am part of the LinkedIn community and a member of several groups in LinkedIn. One of the groups I am a member of is the IBM i Professionals group. I get a weekly summary of activity and sometimes there are comments on the posts that people have made. Usually there are no more than 3-5 comments. What caught my attention is a LinkedIn post that had 23 comments. The original post referenced this blog post: http://blog.angustheitchap.com/?p=159 In this post, the author talks about the iSeries application development community needing to pull together to DO something about the lack of support for the platform. He asks the question: What have YOU done for the IBM i platform this week?

As a former iSeries application developer, I thought it was a good question, perhaps about 10 years too late, but a good question none the less. Let me state for the record that the iSeries is a great platform and it is without a doubt the best box for business that IBM has.

The problem is that it is a victim of its own success. There is no other platform where an application written in the 1980’s could still run un-touched even though the underlying hardware has changed numerous times. To me the core issue is this: IBM is no longer in the hardware business; meaning they don’t derive that much revenue from hardware anymore. The majority of IBM’s revenue comes from services. The iSeries does not need or generate the services revenue that other platforms do. So in my opinion, it’s an economic issue and no amount of doing or community is going to change that.

IBM, Java, and the Community

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Matt Warman

I recently read an article about the state of the IBM “i” and the amount of complaining by IBM application development and business partner folk. I know several RPG application development folk, and it sounds familiar. That made me think about my Java Application development and career. Are there things to complain about, and uncertainty about the future? Yes, but there are 2 reasons why the Java community is in a better place; the business model and the community. Before the IBMers call for a holy war, I said COMMUNITY! I am not talking about the strengths or weaknesses of the hardware or software. The business model for IBM is that they make the hardware and software, and partner for the sales and service. I think that is a viable model until IBM competes in the sales and services with their partners. If a lead is brought in by a small partner, they are awarded by giving the business to someone bigger. This sets up a confrontational relationship between IBM, the big partners, and the little partners. IBM can also decide whether or not you are worthy to be a partner. Why does this affect the software application development team? Because most consulting firm are selling SERVICES not HARDWARE. If they are not seeing business because of political fighting, they don't have to sell it. There are viable options on other platforms, where interference does not happen. IBM never fostered a community, they created a hierarchy with themselves as the head.

Certainly Sun has done some things that made myself and others unhappy. Besides, complaining, we actively pushed to remove barriers in our path. We do have an open source Java. Is there a IBM community that can work with RPG to make it work for them? I also think its about scale and timing. It's not like IBM software developers have their own AS/400 at their home. It's easy for me to create and use nearly any kind of application at my home in Cincinnati, and pretty cheaply. It makes it fun to tell non-technical people about my application development. Nobody but accountants want to hear about accounting programs. Java, and newer languages have grown up with the Internet. I have friends from all over the globe that have similar interests. If I have a problem, I can go online to a forum, friend, or web page to find what I need. I can read and write blogs to voice my opinion (like now). These things are not ingrained in the Legacy community, and in fact, have been actively campaigned against. It is my belief that any software, hardware, or service will die when there is no vocal community to support it.

My Learning Recipe

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Matt Warman

As a consultant and application development person, I have to learn new things all the time. Take for example, my work with JavaFX. The language does have some familiar aspects, but there is a lot new there too. How do you go about learning something new? I have come up with some guidelines that I use in learning new things (in this case a language):

Read as much about it as you can first. No one wants to wade through tomes of technical information, but that is where you learn. I try to get a feel for what problem the new thing is trying to solve first.
Understand the core elements. Whether it's a programming language, a car, or a philosophical construct, knowing how it works is the first step. I know it's time to go to the next step when I have some ideas on how to use the item, and I start formulating a project.
Examine and breakdown examples, if you can. You would be surprised at how many application development people think they're “smart enough” to figure out how things work just by following a few examples. I don't know about you, but I don't figure out a complex things just from a few simple “Hello World” examples. That being said, seeing how things works is the quickest to way get a basic understanding. Couple that with knowledge you acquired by reading the manual, and you get the “why” of how it's put together.
Create your own knowledge base. I like to Google more than most people, but things do need to get done. I will create a separate folder to contain links to examples, other application development team members' blogs, white papers and other documentation. If you can, create a “how-to” WIKI. Having a centrally located repository makes it simple to answer questions.
Create a test project. I do this especially for languages. I create a test project where I can test specific “how do I?” questions. It keeps you from removing code, adding unnecessary functions, and commenting and uncommenting code in your main project. Figure it out in its own project first, then transfer the code and knowledge to your main project. It is always good to revisit it after a period inactivity.
Write or teach what you learned. As application development people, we tend to get blinders on when doing something. Having a different set eyes, or different questions being asked makes you examine what you actually know.

So there's my “Secret Sauce” for learning. You still have to come up with ideas on how to utilize you knowledge though.

Takin’ the Basset Hound to the Farm (Part Two)

Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Jeff Welsh

In part one; I talked about some of the IT Strategies and business strategies that were discussed at the Techserve Alliance conference we recently attended. I’ll admit I’m a sucker for quaint sayings and one of the speakers had a good one: It’s time to take the Basset hound to the farm. So what does that have to do with IT Strategy or business?

Plenty, takin’ the basset hound to the farm means it’s time to re-think what you are doing, why you are doing it, and who is doing it. It’s time to eliminate products, services, processes or people that are not delivering value to the business. This is not just an IT strategy, but an important business strategy as well. It is critically important to make sure both business and IT are aligned.

The trick is to figure out what your basset hound(s) are. Every business that has been around for any length of time has one or more of these. It may be a line of products that are kept in stock because it “rounds out the product line”, when the reality is the items are not that important. It could be a service that our “customers really want”, but in reality the service does not deliver value or it could be that “special process” that you do “because we have always done it that way”. Then there is Bob. Everybody likes Bob. Bob has been around forever and knows everything. The problem is Bob doesn’t really do anything.

It’s always better to take the basset hound to the farm on your own terms rather than be forced into it by circumstances. Take for example the company in New England that manufactured parts for submarines. When the ship yard closed a few years ago, they were forced to change. They redeployed their manufacturing expertise and now make parts for the medical industry. What could they have accomplished if they had manufactured both parts for submarines and medical devices? Could the business have been double the size?

That’s where an outside consultant can help. They can be objective and bring an outside perspective to your current business and IT strategy. STAR BASE is in a good position to teach old dogs new tricks”. (Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?!)

Working with Magento

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Matt Warman

People outside of Cincinnati may be shocked to know that I work with languages OUTSIDE of Java! I don't know any application development person, especially one who does web application development who doesn't use several languages. I have recently been working on Magento. What is that you say? Magento is an Open Source PHP ECommerce application based on the Zend Framework. You don't need to download Zend, just the Magento PHP files. We actually have Magento internally setup with a LAMP package, but I already have MySQL and Apache on my local machine, so I thought I'd tackle and individual install. The verdict? Well after a couple of small hiccups (don't use the Windows install for PHP, just unzip, and localhost needs to be a virtual host), setup was a breeze! Fortunately, STAR BASE, Inc. has enough experience to over come these issues. Magento is easy to customize products and catalogs, and would be a good choice for organizations to create their own ECommerce site. Magento is easy enough to implement without an IT Consultant, but an experienced consultant can save you time and frustration.