Technology As Innovator

Janet Penley discussed ten examples of how wiki(MBTI) research can be utilized for better Marketing Strategy development and implementation:

1. More in-depth consumer psychographics for defining target audience
2. More refined framework for understanding the purchase decision
3. Additional depth and reliability in small-scale, low-budget qualitative research
4. Better refinement of a product/service’s positioning
5. Additional direction on product/service development and modification
6. More effective promotional communications, copy writing and testing
7. Improved agency-client relationships
8. More productive brainstorming activities
9. Better business plan
10. Additional perspective on team creation

Full article: Janet Penley, Using Type to Develop and Implement Marketing Strategy

RUP the Star

Rational Unified Process has been one of the most successful iterative processes. It is also one of the firsts to encourage UML as the universal language. With problems of traditional software development methods identified and diagnosed, RUP arises to solve them. From one perspective, RUP is an effort to manage projects by effectively dealing with failure symptoms.

The world is not enough

Looking from the business perspective, one project in a software development company is one business unit. Though bearing specific characteristics, it follows common principles of every business department. It receives from resource management and provides feedback, it employs its own budget and maintains production plan. Something seems missing. RUP serves as a development process; it is contained within the boundary of software development. Organizational aspects, enterprise management and strategy are not looked into.

Moreover, post-deployment system maintenance and support is critical and it has not been described in RUP. Additionally, systems don’t last forever; they need to be replaced. How to decompose and let a system retire also requires a clear process.

Enterprise Unified Process covers these concerns.

EUP extends RUP

Enterprise Unified Process is an extension of RUP. It is created by Scott W. Ambler from IBM Agile Development. From RUP, EUP adds 2 phases and 7 disciplines

Two phases

1. Production phase offers assistance to end users by clarifying queries, resolving production issues by root-cause analysis and applying fixes for dealing with change requests

2. Retirement phase provides guideline on decommission the product

Seven disciplines

1. Enterprise Business Modeling The artifact - enterprise models - distinguishes the relationship between business process, domain process, enterprise activities, functional entities and functional operations. The difference between EUP Enterprise Business Modeling and RUP Business Modeling is that EBM targets goals and vision of the enterprise.

2. Portfolio Management Portfolio and Program management maintain systems inventory snapshots. They build up data for overall efficiency and effectiveness of diversified software projects management, and help scheduling software implementation in a more strategic fashion. Duplication in functionality is eliminated.

3. Enterprise Architecture Enterprise-level Architecture promoted consistency across the entire organization. The impact is on multiple systems for both the present and the future. Enterprise Architects cast their efforts into building a foundation for future enterprise efforts. It is easily seen that the difference between enterprise architecture and application architecture is on scope.

4. Strategic Reuse Reusing software assets ranges from source code, frameworks to strategic approach to similar accounts. The scope being firm-wide makes it very different from reuse within one application.

5. People Management Due to its particular characteristics, HR management and recruitment in the IT industry faces a lot of difficulties. EUP promotes more focus on HR strategies, where organizing, monitoring, coaching and motivating are all standardized to ensure and improve collaboration.

6. Enterprise Administration Network administration, Facilities administration, Information administration and Security administration are universal across all enterprise. In order to generate consistently effective supports and environment to development, all are to be standardized in the enterprise management process.

7. Software Process Improvement Processes need improvement, and even the activities to improve the process are themselves process.

Benefits of EUP

1. Reducing IT costs. Implementing a strategic approach to reuse for the enterprise can significantly reducing your cost of developing software. Just having an enterprise view of architecture will lead to fewer ‘stovepipe’ applications, which are costly to develop and maintain.
2. Improved IT/business alignment. By improving your enterprise business modeling efforts you improve your understanding of the overall business and thereby increase the chances that you will build systems that reflect their true needs. With a portfolio/program management approach to choosing projects you prioritize and then execute projects based on business needs, thereby improving alignment with the business.
3. Improved business planning. Improved enterprise business modeling has the advantage that it provides insight into your overall business needs and vision, insight that can be used by your executives to manage and guide your organization.
4. Higher quality. Reusing software can lead to higher quality, as reusing an already tested component can lead to fewer defects. Leveraging enterprise architectural solutions that have been tested and proved to work ensure that applications built upon those architectures will improve in quality.
5. Improved IT planning and governance. By implementing the portfolio management discipline, you can obtain a better understanding of and control of your software portfolio by recognizing programs, or families of related products. This can lead to better strategic planning and elimination of overlapping requirements in different systems.
6. Improved levels of service. By understanding the ‘big picture’ through enterprise business modeling and enterprise architecture you are able to identify opportunities to take a systems approach to development which looks at the entire picture, not just the IT aspects of a project. For example, a project team should strive to improve the business process as well as (re)build an application for their end users.
7. Greater adaptability. By having an effective approach to enterprise IT issues you will be able to react to changes within your marketplace, such as new legislation or new competition, more effectively because you will have a better understanding of the potential impact of those changes and a consistent way of addressing them.
8. Reducing time to deliver systems. An improved enterprise-level software process will reduce your overall time to deliver systems for several reasons. First, an improved portfolio management approach enables you to identify projects which are more likely to succeed, reducing the change of late and/or cancelled projects. Second, an effective enterprise architecture strategy enables you to work to a common platform, reducing the learning curve of project teams. Third, improved reuse increases your development velocity by enabling you to take advantage of existing assents instead of creating systems from scratch each time.
9. Increased end user productivity. By integrating operations and support into your software lifecycle, you are better able to enhance your end users usage of your system and to respond to their feedback. End user requests for fixes and enhancements are automatically included in the requirements for new releases of systems and ensure that their needs don’t slip through the cracks.
10. Increased developer activity. With an effective approach to enterprise administration, developers can gain the technical resources that they need, such as workstations and network logon IDs easily. This enables them to focus on their jobs, developing working software, and not on trying to get access to resources.
11. Higher return on investment. By leveraging enterprise efforts such as an enterprise approach to architecture and a strategic reuse program, you can reduce costs and speed up development time, realizing a significant increase on ROI.

A glance over the high stance

Initial observation gives the impression that what EUP has to offer are nothing new. Tasks described in Enterprise Business Modeling are named differently and are usually done by Sales, Portfolio Management is crucial to achieve wiki(CMM) level 4, any company has their HR, Properties, IT departments. The problem is that the collaboration is loose and they are standardized very differently from one another. EUP does very well the synthesis job to focus on the omni-picture. It requires very high level management to involve, lead, share the business vision and have it made practical. EUP does have good foundation and reputation of RUP. One good thing is that it is an extension, not a replacement of the still evolving, state-of-the-art RUP.

One important thing to notice, EUP is no magic wand. There has been warning about applying RUP as-a-whole may lead to cumbersome project failure. New EUP disciplines promote even more sophisticated collaboration between desultory departments. Sophistication leads to impediments. The total cost of utilizing EUP may well exceed the sum of costs from single business units.

Reference & Acknowledgement

• Scott W. Ambler, Introduction to the Enterprise Unified Process
• Frans Faase, The answers by Rational Unified Process
• Craig Larman, Philippe Kruchten, Kurt Bittner, How to Fail with Rational Unified Process: Seven Steps to Pain and Suffering
• Sterling Hoffman, Extending the Rational Unified Process: From RUP to EUP
• Gideon Schipper

Intro

When I first heard of “Web 2.0″, my expectation was a new standard of World Wide Web. The usage of the term failed me, as Web 2.0 points me to what happen on the surface - user interaction and collaboration.

Web 2.0 roughly defined

Web 2.0 is not a new version of WWW. It refers to a phenomenal shift from centralized information authoring to a platform that enables end-users to interactively create, maintain and share contents.

Components

Mistakably Web 2.0 is used to describe relatively new forms of communication via the web:

• Weblog
• Social network
• Wiki
• wiki(RSS)
• Social bookmark

However, it coverage is much larger. Comparing to the definition, the following are also part of Web 2.0

• Instant Messaging
• Text chat
• Forum
• Real-time editors
• Search engines

This is not an exhaustive list though, as new trends continuously emerge at the time this entry is written.

Characteristics

• Open communication
• Information sharing and reuse
• Many-to-many authoring
• Publishing methods that requires less technical expertise
• User-centered
• Endless evolving. This is what “Beta” is for

Technology

Ajax was coined in February 2005, and has been widely equated to the technology that enables Web 2.0. In fact, features that Ajax has to offer had been initiated earlier. Microsoft Remote Scripting, which exploits Java Applet was a good start, then XMLhttpRequest flourished in Microsoft Exchange Server.

M$ did it at the first time, how did Ajax gain the fame? The answer might lie in its open nature. The Web community collaborated to develop, apply and reuse the technique. ‘Open’ and ‘community’ are the key traits of Web 2.0, it is no wonder why Ajax has become that popular.

Technically, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a group of related technologies:

• XHTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• XMLhttpRequest
• XML

My experience

My first experience with Ajax was July 2005 in a vbb forum. Although having been working with Microsoft Exchange Server for a long time, I couldn’t help a Wow. The wiki(usability) of the technology means very much to me as a web user. The sad reason is justified in the next section.

My first experience with Web 2.0-in-definition traced back to 2002, when I first used Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Photos. Y!M opened up new horizons for me.

Pleasure

More than sharing and collaborating, Web 2.0 satisfies one dramatic desire of its users: ego affirmation. The virtual freedom of speech and the power of customization bring in the magic for laymen to lay their hands on creating and embracing their ‘I’ over the net by creating auxiliary identities.

Accept it or not, even ones who claim to pronounce what they want, or that they are wearing no mask are consumed by their own idealism, if not subconscious deluding.

Digital Divide

Vietnam International Internet connection bandwidth is so narrow it hurts.

Conclusion

Being abused, misunderstood, misused, Web 2.0 stands as an innovative evolution of Internet usage. While criticized to not being a deliberate advancement of technology, it completely revolutes the way users interact with the Web in the way it should have been, and proves the rationale of the rigid-free online business models. Web 2.0 enables collaboration, preserves and shares information and knowledge, brings business opportunities, enhances productivity, and encourages online practice of democracy.

Examples

Instant Messaging

Yahoo! Messenger
Gtalk
ICQ
MSN Messenger

Blogs

Blogspot
Wordpress
live.com
360.yahoo.com

Social networks

MySpace
Xanga
hi5

Forums

…

Photo sharing sites

flickr.com
imageshack.us
photobucket.com
picasaweb.google.com
slide.com

File sharing sites

rapidshare.de
rapidshare.com
megaupload.com
streamload.com

Wikis

wikipedia.org
citizendium.org

Search Engines

google.com

Real-time editors

Google notebook
Google Doc
Google Spreadsheet

Social Bookmarks

digg.com
reddit.com
del.icio.us

Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2