Trying to Hit the Nail on the Head

In IT it looks as if it’s “innovate, or be doomed”.

Here’s some reasons why a company could need innovation:

• Because the vendors are going to stop supporting the old stuff. (See BS2000 )
• Because you’re people are getting too old and the young folks don’t now the old stuff any more. (See COBOL.)
• Because the new thing will be so much better/easier/faster/…  (but sometimes it isn’t) (See C# )
• Because you’re people want to learn something new (See Java )
• Because your clients are asking for innovation (because of one of the above)

Why do you need innovation?

In an attempt to clean up my laptop, I found these two programs which I created more than 7 years ago.

• RESIST helps you in decoding the color codes on resistors.
• SAMR, which stands for Simple Automatic MP3 Renamer, does exactly that: it can (batch) rename MP3. Should still work, but better to use the “COPY” option, so that you don’t loose your MP3s in case something goes wrong.

I’ve attached them, as they were originally packaged, but the URL and my email address are no longer valid.

By the way, no use asking for updates, fixes, … as I haven’t found the source code back yet… no surprises there… :icon_wink:

“We support Business Agility” is one of sentences that a lot of marketing boys in the software world use.
To give you a feeling of how often: the query “business agility” OR “agile business” gives you about 992.000 hits on Google. That’s roughly 50.000 more hits than one of our Belgian symbols:  the Atomium. And more than twice the amount of hits for that other Belgian symbol Manneken Pis. (Luckily we still have beer and French Fries, which should have been called Belgian Fries, but that’s an entirely different story.)

If you listen to the marketing boys, promoting Business Agility, they’re usually trying to convince you that the processes of your business, their business, anyones business, … changes a lot.
It’s as if almost every week or so, two steps in your business process change places.
And the software of your business, … should be able to adapt to those changes as quickly and cheep as possible.
And before you know it, they’re talking about SOA… because that’s the way to support Business Agility.

Now, I agree that if you’re business processes change a lot, SO(A) might come in handy. Because, if you implement you’re Service Oriented software correctly, you’re business processes should be very easy to find in your software. And ideally, the steps in your business processes, should be (operations on) software services. So, when two business process steps change order, with an SOA, it’s should be easy/easier to implement these changes in the software as well.

But, to me, being agile is more than just being able to change the order in which you do things. It should also be very easy to change what you are doing; to change what is done in a specific step of your business process.
Again, SO(A), can help you a lot: SOA makes it easy to locate the step that changed in your software… But, this kind of agility doesn’t stop there. If the (operations of) your software services are not well designed, it might still be very diffictult to find out what needs to change. And a good design in this case means, means a design that supports business agility.

Still following?

I guess what I’m trying to say, is that there’s more to Business Agility than reshuffling business process steps. And that your entire code should reflect your business… true Business IT Alignment (208.000 hits)