New Website, New Frontier for Business Technology
A lot has changed in the last few months at Solentive, the place that keeps me busy in the day time. In addition to the software development side of things we knew we had so much to offer and our website didn’t reflect that.
So today we launched a brand new website that tells you all about what we do. We opted for a plain English approach so you don’t have to be a tech head to understand it. In fact good IT is a reflection of a good business process so if your in business (any business) you need to see what we have to offer and what we can offer.
We have also launched our revolutionary Business Process Management Suite, MAMBA. This ‘product’ is a next generation enterprise transformation which allows managers to model, deploy and test business processes without heavy reliance on the IT department. I will be doing a webinar in the next few weeks to give you an exclusive preview on the platform. If you are new to BPM, you will get an idea of what its all about here too.
So take a look at www.solentive.com over your lunch to see what the future looks like.
Dave Birchall
www.sydneynetworkers.net
www.davebirchall.com
Clouds, Filters and the New MS OS
Microsoft unveiled its new software plus service offering to room full of developers in LA last week. MS Chief Architect Ray Ozzie introduced Azure as the platform that will support Microsoft Software plus service strategy. The plan will enable Microsoft to compete with the likes of Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com who each have their own SaaS / Cloud offering. The cloud computing concept allows clients to hire storage space and processing cycles on the server side. MS aims to offer service such as exchange, sharepoint and other well established technologies through the cloud. It seems that the future of software technology and therefore our businesses
This news made the front page of the well known technology journal (yes I am being sarcastic) Mx in the same week as news broke about the proposed internet filter being pushed by the Australian Government. Under the plan, content will be restricted by ISP’s to filter ‘harmful content’ such as extremist messages, pornography and other such ‘morally damaging’ content. Critics of the scheme claim that our internet access will be restricted in the same way as the great firewall place by the Chinese government. There are fears that a filter is a step in the wrong direction away from freedom of the internet and towards politically motivated filtering of content.
Of most concern to me is the claim that a filtered internet could only run at 20% capacity of unfiltered speeds. This has obvious implications for your business if you want to take advantage of next generation technologies such as cloud computing. To add to the fray experts predict that the filter will be next to useless at filtering out such content.
A New Age of Business Agility
‘Agility’ is such an over used word I feel so I am often reluctant to use it. However, given recent events in the markets and the air of uncertainly, there has never been more of a need for a business to be agile.
Market conditions are constantly changing so your business needs to be able to react and change direction as fast as practically possible. Do do this, its important to break down some of the bureacracy and layers in decision making whilst also striving to maintain a unified direction. Tough call.
Managing through change is never easy and its often painful to a lot of businesses. Sadly not all make it through. Agility and the abilty to adapt and change is a vital ingredient for any businesses - credit crunch or not. Think for a second or two about some of the major corporations and institutions and consider, where they started, how they have reinvented themselves. Did they merge or aquire businesses along the way? I can’t think of many businesses that haven’t.
The pace of modern business is constantly gathering pace and the now the pace of change has also been knocked into turbo.
So how will your businesses adapt and survive? How will your inject more agility into your business, yet keep a unified view of the business?
How do you do it now? I know I have my ideas and they are coming soon. But I would love to hear yours.
Why Should I Care about Workflow?
Well before we jump into why you should care about it, let’s and cover off what it is.
A workflow, for the sake of simplicity is a business process or series of actions. In a typical working day, you may encounter a whole raft of workflows as you go about your daily business. If you ever find yourself working out what actions gave to be done in what order in order to achieve something, then you just unintentionally made a workflow.
In workflow, individual tasks can be allocated to other staff members or suppliers. I like to think that workflow is the act of allocating the right task to the right person at the right time. By playing close attention to workflows, a manager (or business process owner) can streamline a process, remove unnecessary actions and ‘fine tune’ the engine of the business
Simple Workflow
A workflow system can be a powerful way to not only allocate tasks and manage your business but to also add a layer of accountability in your organisation. Tasks can now be tracked and the work rate monitored in a granular form. If you are a strong believer in business process then you can understand that a solid well thought out workflow system can hold people to that procedure and ensure that things are done properly. A custom application can be used to ensure that the right information is collected verified and put to work in a centralised repository. If roles are set up in the system, the system can allocate work to employees that it has calculated can handle more.
A more advanced system will allow you to make changes to your business process (workflows) on the fly. This simple function can have a significant impact on the business in times of change. No longer does the Business Process Owner need to consult or engage in IT, they can now design a new workflow, publish it and reap the rewards today rather than weeks or months down the track. This kind of agility has an enormous benefit in times of significant change.
Simple Everyday workflows
- Annual leave request
- Booking a meeting room.
- Computer helpdesk support
- Sales Process
- Create marketing collateral
- Get invoice payed (automatically)
- Raise Purchase order
-
Appoint new supplier
Workflows are everywhere and you may be able to see how they can be approved already. Alternatively, I am happy to discuss with you how we can streamline and add agility to your business.
Gmail and Google apps on the move
I am great fan of google apps especially google. I pointed my mail server records to Google for all of my websites and so I can truely access email from anywhere.
I have been using Gmail on my PDA for a couple of years now and its fantastic, but could be better.
So my curiousity was peaked when news of the android platform came out. Would they embrase the opportunity to do something good here.
Well it turns out they will.
If your curious too, then follow the jump to the developers blog page
Two great gadgets to use on Twitter
Apologies for the lack of updates. I’ve been head down working on a ’secret announcement’ that we think will rock the IT world. In the meantime, here are some interesting web technologies that I have been trialling out.
For those of you that twitter you will be glad to know that both of these sites / tools work with Twitter. (Follow me on ‘davebirchall’)
Remember the Milk
This is so simple but yet so effective. It’s basically just a to do list but you can break it down into list of your choice, prioritize them by time, add them to your Google calendar and more. I can access it from my PDA, or laptop. If I don’t have an internet connection, Google gears allows me to work offline. You can assign tasks to your colleagues ,wife or dog if he can use a computer. I can reach everything from within Google apps also.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/
Tweet what you spend
Again, such a simple idea. I am furious I didn’t think of it myself. Would you like to keep track of your spending without having to carry lists around? Now you can simply tweat the amount using some special syntax and have it land in your tweat what you spend account. From there you can categorise and sort to your hearts content and even export to excel.
http://www.tweetwhatyouspend.com/
Because we are using twitter, I can also text both of these account to enter into them. Very mobile
The World Wide Web Foundation
Tim Berners Lee (often heralded as one of the founders of the internet) today announced the establishment of the World Wide Web foundation. In a speech to members of the Knight Foundation, TBL outlined the objectives of the new organisation
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
TBL is already a director of the W3 consortium who efforts have concentrated on unified technology standards (such as XML and HTML) to promote the freedom of the web. The new foundation will aim to address the social impact of the web along with finding ways that to distinguish between reliable and non reliable sources of information.
More information is available at www.webfoundation.org.
What it means to be ‘thinking in rules’
The quickest way to get an appreciation for why Inrule is such a revolutionary bit of kit to think about business logic as a set of rules or conditions that are held in a centralised repository, (for the sake of argument) similar to the way that content is stored in a content management system. Rules are managed by non-technical business users in a collaborative, organisational fashion. Software engineers no longer need to be engaged in the management of business logic and so the business benefits both from cost saving as well as the reduced time to market to deploy the rules. The software engineer is freed to work on more challenging tasks.
In short the BRMS does for business logic what CMS does for web content (ie puts the business in control) .The company is now enabled to ‘think in rules’. This is a unified collaborative approach to the way that rules are controlled and managed within an organisation.
Such technology calls for an entirely different approach to software development, one that InRule call ‘dynamic decisioning’. In essence, Software can now be designed in such a way that business technology could be changed ahead of a change in the business environment.
For example, if a change in legislation is thought to occur which had a knock on effect on the business processes within the organisation, those changes could be written in advance, tested then activated on the passing of the legislation so that that the business transitions seamlessly.
How would your business benefit from ‘thinking in rules’?
How to launch an entire business in a weekend, then throw it away
Starting on Friday a mixed group of professionals from the start up scene will be attending Australia’s first ’start up camp.’
The ideas is to come up with a concept, and research it, plan it, implement it then pitch it and market it all in one weekend.
Obviously, we will be atking some serious shortcuts so the product will be discarded at the end of the weekend but the process that we will follow is important.
You can follow our progress at
http://www.startup-australia.org/startupweekendschedule
http://www.startup-australia.org/startupweekendcoverage
‘Unboxing’ Chrome the new web browser from Google
Yesterday Google launched its latest venture in its bid to (take over the world) cement its brand into the internet users brains for ever.
Chrome the new web browser was launched and made available for download. Suprisingly, there was little fuss or fanfair around what may people consider to be a bold move and a move with high significance for the billions of people that use the internet.
Internet Explorer currently holds around 90% market share over its competitors. The second most popular is my browser of choice; firefox. Google has been instrumental in the rise in popularity of the firefox browser by entering into a partnership whereby advertisng was offered to firefox from google pages.
So what can Chrome offer that the other don’t? Well on first impressions, its a simpler and cleaner interface than firefox and IE. If you think about the amount of time many people spend in their web browsers these days, that may be a welcome relaief for many. It also works with the apple webkit so if you site renders in Safari, chances are it will in Chrome too.
Word is that each tab is running on a seperate thread so if one tab crashes it doesnt bring down all of the other pages. (Why has no one done that one before).
Lastly, it could just be my imagination but tabs and pages appear to load significantly faster. I would love to hear from security experts before I login to my internet banking however.
A download is available from http://www.google.com/chrome/ and more info can be found at SMH