Maintenance
Getting technology lifecycles in sync
Different technologies age at different rates. Understanding the variations is the first step to managing them. One of the great challenges you face as an IT manager is selecting the right technology for a given project, for a specific department, or for your organization as a whole. That technology may be anything from an end-user […]
The Unhappy Valley: customized COTS between “buy” and “build”
In response to my post yesterday on buy vs. build, Geoff asked a very important question: I’d be interested to get your opinion on the degree of customisation that COTS packages can realistically handle. I’ve seen several systems that started out as customised COTS, but eventually departed so far from the vanilla functionality that we […]
Buying vs. building software applications: the eternal dilemma
Some years back, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he was working at the time. The corporation had a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The corporate employees who used this application largely used it and nothing else all day long at dedicated workstations. The application […]
Controlling IT Costs: Using a Maintenance Architect
Software rots over time. Of course, it doesn’t literally decompose, but it often becomes fragile, harder to support and more likely to break when something else in the enterprise’s IT environment changes—another application, the hosting platform and operating system, a third-party product with which it communicates, a database schema. When a defect is fixed, or […]
Technical bleg: curious iPad wifi problem
I bought my first iPad (original model) about six months after they came out, and replaced it with an iPad 2 about four months after they came out. So I’ve been using an iPad for about 2 1/2 years. For most of that period, my typical iPad usage has included checking e-mail and blogs first […]