Planning and Implementing Social Software for Your Enterprise

Recently, I got the latest book IBM Lotus Connections 2.5: Planning and Implementing Social Software for Your Enterprise. I am invovled in delivering the value of this software to three large corporations and having read the book, searching for answers I see it is very pragmatic, introducing the product but also every facet of planning, deploying and using social software to meet business needs. Extremely valuable book, that is your best friend in an implementation.

   

Chapter 1: Social Networking Concepts 

Chapter 2: Introducing Lotus Connections 2.5    

Chapter 3: Lotus Connections Architecture

Chapter 4: Deployment Planning

Chapter 5: Install Planning

Chapter 6: Using Lotus Connections

Chapter 7: Administering Lotus Connections    

Chapter 8: Extending Lotus Connections to Other Applications 

Chapter 9: Using the Lotus Connections API    

Chapter 10: Plug-Ins and Widgets

Gartner on CIO business and technology priorities

I am still waiting for the report 2010 CIO Agenda with survey results to be published soon.
Top 10 Technology Priorities Ranking for 2009 were rated as below. Interesting to note is priority of Collaboration technologies vs. Document management. I expect the ratio to hold in the next year as well. Of course it will be interesting to see what happens to vendors as Microsoft with Sharepoint 2010 trying to make the move from document management to collaboration and networking.

1. Business intelligence
2. Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM and others)
3. Servers and storage technologies (virtualization)
4. Legacy application modernization
5. Collaboration technologies
6. Networking, voice and data communications
7. Technical infrastructure
8. Security technologies
9. Service-oriented applications and architecture
10. Document management

Source: Gartner Executive Programs (January 2009)

The Apple iPad

The entire universe is talking about the new iPad. Here are my thoughts.

Just as with the iPhone, which is all about the apps, we will see the iPad become an AppPad for home. It won’t replace my laptop or my phone, but that isn’t its goal. I see the iPad on the living room table, in the kitchen, or any other room at home provding information and entertainment, driven by thousands of apps.

Unfortunately it doesn't have any phone features, clear sync strategy with other home devices, no multi-tasking, and no built in camera. I also noted that even Steve Jobs had a difficult time handling the touch sensitive display when showing it to the audience without the icons jumping around. I am trying to figure out if the iPad has hold switch on the side for turning screen touch sensitivity on / off.

That said, what I like the most with the iPad, apart from the fact that it runs any iPhone app, is its design, screen, speed, media features, web browsing capabilities, gaming potential, GPS and price.

Apple has once again set a standard that will have an entire industry reconsidering its strategies.

Mobile apps for 6 billion dollars

The market for mobile apps is growing. In 2009 there were 2.5 billion downloads generating 4.2 billion dolloars. According to a prognosis from Gartner there weill be about 8 billion downloads in 2010. These apps are estimate to generate a revenue of 6 billion dollars.

The growth in this market is fueled by the iPhone success which stands for more than half of the downloads. More and more businesses turn to this channel to reach out to their customer base. Exciting times ahead in 2010!

A test manager’s opportunity

More and more I hear that the Financial Crisis is over, but now we have to manage the impacts of the actions that were taken to save costs. In my opinion, costs don’t need to be saved just by cutting them, but instead by revealing the effects of making savings, especially in software testing. As Albert Einstein said: “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” Applying Einstein’s concept of opportunity to testing leads us to look at the most appropriate choices when trying to reduce costs at the lowest risk.

As a test manager, you will prepare and manage the execution of a test project based on the client’s wishes. You need to create a test strategy in which these wishes are addressed in terms of four different aspects namely: result, risks, (lead) time and costs. This is called Business Driven Test Management (BDTM).

BDTM advises a test manager to use a test assignment to state the test goals in collaboration with the client. From here, you should carry out a product risk analysis. The purpose of this is to create a consensus on which parts and aspects of the test object have more risks if they fail and which have less. Therefore this analysis forms the basis for the test strategy.

This basis is to define the best coverage for testing. BDTM lets you deliberate the best coverage of risks against the lowest costs. In preparing a test strategy, you should take into account the different product risks (the organisation’s risks if the product doesn’t have the expected quality) and test goals (why and what should be tested), together with the costs. From this, you can create a structured test approach.

Using a Business Driven Test Management approach, consult with the client and other stakeholders in order to establish a good representation of the product risks. By building on a structured test strategy that looks at risks and costs among other aspects, you can provide an insight in the test process for the client, so he/she can take the correct measures for where to save costs without adding more risks. And therefore creating an opportunity for test managers to add value and decrease costs.

Happy New Decade towards People, Planet, Profit Triple-A

 
 
Jaap Bloem

Sogeti High Tech and Dassault Systèmes author Digital Manufacturing and Simulation Book

On the eve of Dassault Systèmes' European Customer Forum 2009, "Virtual Concept > Real Profit with Digital Manufacturing and Simulation" was launched in Disneyland Paris. More information on this new book you can find here.

Below is a short video impression, featuring the authors, industry experts who appear in the book and other key people who made this publication possible.

Click to enlarge the cover. Order your copy or download the pdf version of the book at
www.virtual-real.com.

IT Strategy, the right way

Over the past couple of days I read Fruition, a novel by Chris Potts.

Fruition describes eight working days of Ian Taylor, CIO of a big enterprise, who has to change his IT Strategy drastically in order to keep his job. Bottom line of the book: IT Strategy is not the strategy of the IT-function, but the corporate strategy of making use of IT. IT Strategy should be integrated in an overall investment decision making process. It is not enough to create a list of IT investments and determine the ROI or NPV of these investments. Instead a list of value propositions should be made and it should be determined which kind of investments (both IT and not IT) to what extent contribute to these value propositions. The message is clear: not the IT-projects belong to the rows in the spreadsheet, but the companies value propositions! IT investments are part of the corporate investments.

Another important lesson from the book is that IT has no value in itself. IT as only value in applying it to contribute to the companies value propositions. If a company manages its investments properly, technology decisions will follow as a consequence. The message is that we have to stop threaten IT as something different from other investments.

The book also decribes what strategy is and what it is not. Strategy is not an 80 pager. It is a process that ends with a belief and a promise (a result), starting points and with tactical choices. Strategy is incorporated in a person: it is what you do and who you are! Try it!

Martin van den Berg

The 4th Paradigm - Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

Cf. the interesting post below by Robert LeRoy, I would like to draw your attention to this book, published last month in its "Second printing, version 1.1" by Microsoft Research.

Especially Chapter 3 is relevant to cloud computing.

Programming for the Cloud

I’ve blogged about how programming models change when developing for multi-core environments.  While we can achieve a high level of performance with multi-core systems, the cloud lets us take performance to a whole new level.  If we take this model forward, an entirely new set of considerations exists. 

Most technical people know the three cloud computing models Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service.  I find Platform as a Service most applicable to Sogeti's  business model.  I see three areas of concern when programming for the cloud:

·         Dynamic Provisioning – Image an infinite number of process servers available on-demand for your application. We will need new models of load balancing the application to dynamically allocate these servers.  In addition, we’ll have new patterns to support:

o   Handling exceptions in this world and how they appear to a user is going to be a big challenge.

o   We will have no way of knowing where servers are physically located and this will introduce latency and the programs must be prepared for this condition.

o   The traditional commit process will need to be modified to support a widely distributed application functions that support parallel execution.

·         New persistence models already exist including very fast, very flat, object oriented systems are being adopted in favor of traditional relational databases (Netflix.com and Smugmug.com already use these models).  Developers will need to be trained to maximize performance with these new data models.

·         New development environments

o   Entire new tool sets are already appearing that didn’t exist before (e.g. rbuilder) are re-defining how servers are provisioned for development and testing.  It will take time for standards across vendors to appear.  As solution architects and developers, we need to be aware of and competent in use of support tools.

o   Google and Amazon have both developed a rich set of API’s and Services to support cloud development.  Just as it takes time to learn the Java Framework, these new models will take time to master.  Get started now!

IBM is working hard to make development in the cloud feel like a traditional environment but it will take some time to work this out.  I strongly suggest we all start learning this new model because Chrome OS is coming and it’s going make this approach mandatory for all future applications.