articles

by John Kneiling August 2004 For many reasons, the Web has become the framework of choice for enterprise and departmental applications. Many organizations, however, are wondering whether they will be reliable enough to support important business processes. What can we do to make these applications highly available? There are three High Availability (HA) factors: availability, […]

by James Hobart June 2004 Probably not. However, I have a strong sense that this will be the year for a major shift in technology deployment for enterprise Internet applications away from HTML/JavaScript and toward the adoption of rich client solutions. Actually, the term “rich client” has been somewhat abused, so let’s start off with

by Colin White May 2004 Data warehousing has frequently been the subject of heated debate. Some controversies appear and quickly fade, while others continue to dominate press articles and industry conferences. Examples in this latter category of course include the topics of data marts and multidimensional design. Recently, a new controversy has erupted over the

by Ken Rau April 2004 Today’s uncertain business environment has made traditional formulas for success obsolete. To be competitive, organizations, and functions within organizations, must improve process per-formance, emphasize efficiency and demon-strate value to stakeholders. Today’s uncertain business environment has made traditional formulas for success obsolete. To be competitive, organizations, and functions within organizations, must

by Suzanne Robertson March 2004 When we published the first version of the Volere requirements template (http://www.volere.co.uk) we identified stakeholders (sections 2 and 3), goals (section 1), and scope (sections 7 and 8) as the foundation stones for discovering the relevant requirements. Since then we have applied Volere on many projects in many different industries.

By Mike Ferguson January 2004 Building on from my last article on this subject which looks at why corporate performance CPM and BI need to be integrated, this second article looks at how to make the kind of integration possible and why metadata interchange on metrics is key to making it happen. Over the last

by Koni Thompson December 2003 Function Point Analysis (FPA) allows you to size the requirements of software independent of technology. Therefore, the newer development methods such as OO and new environments, such as Client/Server and Web Based applications can easily be sized through FPA. First, one must understand the concepts of these newer methods environments.

by Colin White October 2003 The Portal is Dead. Long Live the Portal’ states a recent research report from Gartner. What this somewhat misleading statement really means is that portals are undergoing a metamorphosis into something else.In Gartner’s opinion they are evolving into integrated software suites that contain portal functionality. We can see an analogy

by Shaku Atre July 2003 Business intelligence (BI) decision-support initiatives are costly and difficult. A staggering 60% of all BI projects ultimately fail by curtailing the initial goals. But it needn’t be that way. BI projects are costly because disparate business data must be extracted and merged from a variety of data sources, including online

By Mike Ferguson June 2003 Over the last three years the uptake of portal technology has grown dramatically as companies look to integrate information, applications and collaborative tools into a single web based user interface to provide a more personalised workplace inside the browser. During that time we have seen a surge in new start-up