Star Base Inc.

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?

 

“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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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?!)

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.

Seems like it has been a while since I have had a chance to do a post.  For the last 3 weeks things have been absolutely crazy in our IT consulting world, but in a good way.  We had a chance to go to the Techserve Alliance national conference in Las Vegas.  I have heard all the jokes, including the one about it staying in Vegas.   We did learn that just because you are pre-checked with the airline, does not mean that your bags are.   We got our bags checked with literally a minute to spare and fortunately all made it back to Cincinnati.

Upon return, we signed a support contract for a new customer.  They trust us enough to outsource their entire IT applications support to us.  We have a real life example of an IT Strategy that was discussed at the conference (See #3).  Not only was IT strategy discussed but business strategy as well.  Here are some highlights:

1. Market Differentiation - customers have lots of choices, how will you stand out?

2. Improve Systems and methodology for delivering service- excellence, efficiency, depth of service.

3. Outsource what you can-eliminate the busy work that does not add strategic value.

4. Deal with the economy being slow to recover till 2012, spend your money wisely, hire wisely, fire quickly, and refine what is working, stop what is not.           

5. Build Alliances with like minded providers in different industries and sell collaboratively to serve the customers' need.

My favorite of these five is number four.  Said another way, its takin’ the basset hound to the farm.  I’ll expand more on that in my next post.

You have a 50% chance of getting this one right; do you want to ponder a guess? The goal of requirements gathering is to achieve stakeholder sign-off of the business requirements of the project. So let’s say you do everything right, you go through a few phases of requirements elicitation using several different elicitation techniques. You put together a well crafted Requirements Document and get the project primary stakeholders to sign-off on it. All this happens before development begins. You are on the right track. This is going to be successful, right? Your business solution developed by your IT staff is going to fulfill all the project requirements and be a huge success.
 

Kupe explains how the Dallas Cowboys went through all those steps. They went above and beyond the NFL requirement. Received sign-off from the NFL. They built their new stadium with a very impressive jumbo-tron above the field. Sixty feet long, 90 feet above the field. Anybody see a problem here yet. Well evidently neither did the Cowboys nor the NFL; until the third quarter of the first preseason game of the season when the opposing team’s punter hit the jumbo sized screen with his kick. This caused a do-over in the game, and I now understand that they have an extra official at the field whose job is to ensure that any kick does not hit the video screen.

So the IT business solution didn’t work for the stakeholders, namely the Dallas Cowboys and the NFL. So where did they go wrong? Kupe goes on to describe the flaw in the height requirement that made the end result unsuccessful.

This is a prime example of going through all the right steps, get the stakeholders sign-off, and the business solution does not deliver the expected result. So the Business Analyst job in the requirements gathering phase of a project is not only to gather the requirements that the stakeholders are telling you, but go beyond that and capture the requirements that the stakeholders either haven’t thought of, or just don’t know. Kupe’s article gives good point that simulation of punting in the stadium might have drawn out the flaw before the one million ton video screen was installed. Now how much will it cost to move that? Simulation is not one of the requirements gathering techniques that the IIBA^® emphasizes, but most certainly can be used as such when the circumstance dictates.

The moral of this story is to be sure to use the correct requirements gathering techniques to draw out all the business requirements so that your end business solution will meet the needs of the stakeholders. That is what will ensure success of your IT business solutions.
 

Its good to see Cincinnati and Dayton area companies starting to embrace open source as an alternative to custom application development.  As an IT Strategy consultant, I can say there is a place for both.

STAR BASE, Inc. just landed another Magento project.  I have written about Magento before and this post has links to several others.   These are not your father’s shareware packages. The packages we are working with are what I’m calling Commercial Open Source. 

I’m curious, why have you or your company not implemented an open source option?  Is it because the light at the end of the tunnel looks more like a train?  Maybe we’re just ahead of the curve again and I need a little bit of Patience.

 

I attended the first meeting of the season for the Cincinnati IIBA^® Chapter. They are doing a series entitled CIO Speaker Series, where they have the CIO from prominent companies in the Cincinnati area who have demonstrated a solid commitment to promoting the effective practice of Business Analysis in their organizations come and speak on how that commitment is put into practice within their organization.

Now I really thought this was going to be boring but the speaker; Jeff Wolverton, Senior VP and CIO of Great American Financial Resources, Inc. (GAFRI), captured my attention when he spoke about how he used the area of Business Analysis to turn his IT organization around and assist them in providing better IT business solutions.

Jeff has been with GAFRI for 11 years and has held the position of CIO for the past 8 years, but they have really put an emphasis on the area of Business Analysis and have begun to reap the benefits thereof here in the last year and a half.

He demonstrated how putting Business Analysis first changed the reputation of his IT staff within the organization from an IT production support group that is slow in delivering business applications that are often bug ridden, to an IT staff that develops great business application solutions that work for the business. GAFRI IT staff went from delivering solutions and telling the business to report any bugs found and they will fix them to delivering business solutions where they had found 85% of all bugs prior to user acceptance testing.

Jeff also spoke about how in last year’s economy where IT budgets in most organizations were being slashed, he received a double-digit increase; the largest increase in his 8 years as CIO. So how do you get that kind of budget increase and turn around the reputation of your IT staff and the business application solutions that they deliver? GAFRI did it by getting to the business requirements behind the business requests and implementing a systematic, repeatable project delivery process.

Jeff and his team put into place a new IT business solutions delivery process from the requirements gathering phase to project delivery (implementation). This new process was going to take much longer than the old process. What use to take a week will now take two to four weeks.  How do you get business buy-in to wait for their business applications? When you deliver a business application solution in which the business usually reports several bugs during testing to delivering a solution in which the business reports almost no bugs, they see value in the new process.

GAFRI’s new IT business solution delivery process put emphasis on two areas: requirements gathering and application testing. They created new roles within their IT staff and put people in place with very specific duties to gain measurable increased value in these areas. They not only put IT staff through training, but they put the business through training on the new delivery process and the business role on working with the IT staff to drive better IT business solutions.

The first new IT role is the Requirements Analyst. This person works with the business in the beginning of the project to elicit and form clear and concise business requirements for the IT business solution. So many times when IT delivers a project they get the punch line to that Dr. Seuss rhyme about the Super Programmer, where the requester says ‘You gave me just what I asked for but not what I need!’. The Requirements Analyst works throughout the project, in a diminishing role, to ensure that the IT solution will meet the needs of the business.

The second new IT role created is the Test Analyst. Typically, testing is thought of after development is complete or nearing completion. In GAFRI’s model test plans are created before or as development starts and are based on the business requirements of the project. The Test Analyst either performs or supports IT Quality Assurance testing and supports User Acceptance Testing.

GAFRI is a shining example of how commitment to the area of Business Analysis can reap many benefits for the organization, both for IT and the business. The end result is better IT business solutions.

I read an interesting article in Agile Journal today titled "What is Best, Scrum or Kanban?" To a business application development specialist working with many application development teams, this is an interesting question. If you are in the same boat as I, maybe you already have a preference. Perhaps the article may sway your opinion.

If you are not familiar with one or both of these application development methodologies then the article will be very good reading for you. In a nutshell, both of these methodologies are used in the Agile application development style, as opposed to the SDLC or waterfall application development style.

In Scrum the project team decides on what deliverables it can deliver within one iteration of time. The team decides how long this time iteration is, usually two to three weeks. So Scrum focuses on splitting large tasks into its smallest pieces and delivering pieces of the project very quickly. This style tends to put the project team in sprint mode all the time.

Whereas, Kanban focuses more on steady workflow. The project team decides on the limit on the amount of work it is capable of accomplishing and sets up the workflow of tasks to ensure that the end result is accomplished. The article gives example of a Kanban chart and describes the similarities and differences of the two methodologies.

After reading the article and through my own experience, I would ask do these two application development methodologies have to be mutually exclusive. Can these two methods work in conjunction with each other within a project? Perhaps at the same time, or that you start with Scrum and move to something more along the lines of Kanban. Take this to the broader picture, do Agile and SDLC project methodologies have to be mutually exclusive? Can’t Scrum and time iterations be used within the SDLC project life cycle? What do you think?

Come on, come on, come on, come on now Touch me, babe!  Can't you see that I am not afraid? ....... Yea, I have been listening to The Doors again.  See the complete lyrics here.  Actually we are trying to decide how, when and what to do marketing wise or as we say internally, how many times to “touch” the client.  Even a Cincinnati based Information Technology Firm is not immune to the FUD Factor.  What’s an IT Consulting Service firm to do?

One of the things that has stuck with me from my marketing class at MIT  is when the professor said that the quickest way to burn through a million dollars and have nothing to show for it, was to start marketing and advertising. We certainly need to be marketing, but if companies’ are not in a position to buy, are the marketing dollars wasted? 

Having been around for 19 years, this is the 3rd economic downturn we have experienced.  We have come out of each one a little wiser and a little stronger.  We have been positioning to leap frog our competitors during this one.  We have seen an up tick in activity, just like everyone else.  This is the 64 dollar question:  Is now the time to spend the marketing dollars?

Since today I have more questions than answers, I invite you to leave comments on How?, When?, How often?  What means?  You would like to be marketed to.  Comments will be posted following this blog, so contribute and check back to see what others think.  

 

• Network security specialist: A person familiar with intrusion detection systems.
• Penetration testers: Someone who can assess a system's potential vulnerabilities.
• Incident handlers: People who understand attack methodology and can apply critical thinking skills to respond to incidents.
• Forensics Analyst: The person who looks for evidence after an attack.
• Research Analyst: The person to keep abreast technological advances in incident response activities.
• Team Leader: Leads the team through crises and communicates to the business incident activities and cost to the business.

• Preparation and Training: for both prevention and incident response.
• Identification: fast identification of an occurring attack and its impact on the IT infrastructure can help in minimizing the duration and cost of clean-up.
• Containment: Once an attack has been identified, steps must be taken to minimize the effects of the attack.
• Recovery and Analysis: The recovery period allows analysis and lessons learned of What happened? Why did it happened? Was the response effective?

This is my last week at my Cincinnati client. My previous posts have been about reviewing the present. This post deals with my future. I am been in the development stages of a new application framework called History Slider. Basically, it allows you to move through time on a fixed map, and show information about that time period. For example, you could have a map of Cincinnati and Dayton, and graphically display the urban sprawl of these two cities. Stop anywhere on the slider and select either UI element, and you can find out the population of the city, it’s suburbs, and any other information you would like to use. I call it a framework because the maps and data can change, but the displaying of data through the UI will not. I even have plans for integration with Google Earth. If you are interested (especially if you are an application Development person), go here. This is an open source framework that is being written in JavaFX. A proof of concept test class is out there now.