Kevin O’Marah is vice president of research at AMR Research in Boston, where he directs the analyst firm’s coverage of supply chain technology. In this interview with ADT, he looks at the potential of radio frequency identification (RFID) and how IT should respond to demand-driven supply networks.
Efforts to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley will drive growth in application portfolio management software, according to Forrester Research, which notes that APM solutions are paying off already for some companies.
Time Warner's employeeConnection portal enables more than 80,000 employees to keep up with everything work-related, from their benefits, to the availability of free tickets for newly released movies. It's a "massive" portal with a tight security model, says Robert Caruso, senior business analyst for the media giant.
When Microsoft distributed a press release announcing the debut of the beta version of its MSN Search service, it apparently provided a screenshot of the service displayed on the Mozilla Foundation's highly touted open source browser and competitor to Micrcosoft’s dominant Internet Explorer—Firefox 1.0.
The staff of Application Development Trends magazine look at new products of note.
According to Neil MacDonald, a Gartner vice president, who pieced together the research, the IT organization will shrink about 85 percent over the next decade. Combine that with analysts’ predictions that IT spending is growing at only a fraction of Gartner’s 25-year running average, and it’s easy to conclude that IT is disappearing, and that you should visit a career counselor.
Terry Schurter, an expert on business process management, is lead analyst for the Business Process Management Group (www.bpmg.org), a global BPM community. He believes IT will make great strides this year helping implement BPM in the enterprise.
Borland’s JBuilder 2005 Enterprise is an all-Java IDE written by Java developers, for Java developers. This version targets enterprise developers with support for EJBs, Web services, XML, mobile, and database application development.
Everyone in IT recognizes the value of integrating applications. As Alan Radding writes in “Integration’s dividends,” the trick is proving it pays off. Why is building the ROI case for enterprise application integration such a challenge? The main reason is that the payoff is difficult to quantify in a way an accountant might understand. What’s it worth to improve customer service or streamline a critical business process? It’s hard to stick numbers on things like that.
Information systems have earned an unfortunate reputation as a retardant of business innovation. Structured programming and modern database design methodologies have established a mandate to closely control business analysis.
For many companies, outsourcing IT work is
seen as mandatory to stay competitive,
and even software product companies
are offshoring product development
and maintenance work to reduce costs.
But many experts will tell you that outsourcing
software development carries increased
risks, most notably, quality.
I thought of Charlie Chaplin’s classic film, Modern Times, after reading Stephen Swoyer’s piece on software factories, a concept
for automating software development that Microsoft has beenchampioning lately.
Modern Times was Chaplin’s protest against industrial society and the dehumanizing effect of the factory assembly line.
In many cases, IT and the business side continue to battle each other for control. But technology, and changes in attitude on both ends, can help improve business-IT alignment.There is a lot of talk about the need to align business objectives and the IT department, but enterprises are making little progress.
News from vendors on new products for application development.
Building Java applications
that generate customized
graphs and charts for plotting
business metrics or
that dynamically produce printable PDF
and RTF documents presents a unique
challenge to any software development
team. Creating the kinds of complex, interactive
charts and reports that Quest
Software’s JClass products are capable of
—out of the box—would require a downright
Herculean effort.
Despite signs of progress, the data warehousing and business intelligence industry still has a way to go before it masters meta data.
Some software developers work their entire careers without acquiring the skills needed to produce quality production code. Are you one?
The elders always said that XML 1.0 was but one part of a foundational trio comprising XML Core (syntax), XML Stylesheets and XML Linking, but it didn't take long for things to spiral out of control ... It may be moving beyond 1.0, but -- for now -- don't rush toward the next generation of XML.
As Patricia Keefe writes in Oops! Ford and Oracles Mega-Software Project Crumbles, the bigger the project, the more likely it will fall apart before it’s done.
A review of Portfolio 7 and TierDeveloper 4.0 Enterprise Edition