Business. Agile. Nice report on the value of end-user developers » JT on EDM. Syndicated from ebizQ Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research recently wrote a nice piece called Deputize End-User Developers To Deliver Business Agility And Reduce Costs.
The report is available from Forrester (for subscribers and for those who purchase it) but the summary is on their website: The ranks of businesspeople who are capable of developing applications are swelling due to a combination of the technology-savvy Millennial generation entering the workforce, the proliferation of easy-to-use development tools, and burgeoning demand for applications. These businesspeople don’t want developers’ jobs; they just want to get things done. Their enthusiasm, however, may lead to poorly designed, insecure, and unscalable applications that application development professionals inherit. This is a really nice report, as Mike’s generally are, and addresses what I think is going to be a key trend – more end-user (business user) involvement in development.
Trends: Software vendors need to understand how the web really w. It's amazing to me that so many of the vendors we cover at CMS Watch (even some that claim to have deep expertise in marketing and social-web sorts of things) still haven't figured out that the Web is about conversations, openness, and making it easy for people to find what they need.
Making it hard for customers to find out about your company or your products is just plain dumb. People will route around you. And yet, there are still WCM and ECM vendors who want to make you (the potential customer) consume their product information they way they want you to consume it, rather than letting you decide how to consume it. Example: Say you want a copy of a white paper (touted as a free download on the vendor's home page). But when you click the link, you get a webform asking for your name, e-mail address, company, job title, phone number, and sometimes a lot more. Heaven help you if you want to know the price of a product (or read the actual terms and conditions of a license). Wrong. 1. 2. Inside Architecture : Software Reflects The Process That Creates. Of all the ‘laws of software’ that I subscribe to, this one is one of the most fundamental, and unwavering.
I cannot find an exception to it, and years of experience reinforce it for me. I can look at a chunk of source code, or an operations manual, or even a build script, and see the effects of the software development process used to create the artifact. Process affects architecture. If you use agile techniques, you will not only get your results in a different amount of time and features will appear in a different sequence than if you used iterative spiral techniques, but the software itself will have a different structure, different patterns, and different interfaces. Just making an observation. Software reflects the process that creates it.
Inside Architecture : IT to Business: "I won't read yo. Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Off. The announcement this week that Google released a beta version of a robust cloud computing platform called Google App Engine that lets anyone build apps on Google's renowned and highly scalable infrastructure underscored a key trend in the software industry today.
Namely that software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the "cloud" of the Internet. Google's entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud -- as well as a few smaller players like Bungee and Heroku -- has turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight. Figure 1: Amazon and Google both offer comprehensive PaaS solutions This takes us to the capabilities of these platforms, which are just now being fully fleshed out and offered to the marketplace in a form that's relatively complete (though we'll see which pieces are still missing in a minute.) Small Is Essential. At 37signals, a company with just eight employees whose Web-based collaboration software is used by thousands of small businesses, there isn't time to sit around a conference room sipping latte and deconstructing memos.
Come to think of it, there isn't even a company conference room. There are just a couple of cubicles, loads of brainpower and three simple goals: make useful business software, make it easy to run, make money selling it. Repeat. Founder and president Jason Fried, 33, decided early on that he didn't need to be in the shiny valley of Silicon to make cool software. Half his team... Subscribe Now Get TIME the way you want it One Week Digital Pass — $4.99 Monthly Pay-As-You-Go DIGITAL ACCESS — $2.99 One Year ALL ACCESS — Just $30!