preserving the integrity of your investment

mind the gap

Your business systems may be world-class, robust and powerful. But their usefulness will be diminished if staff are unable to exploit the systems effectively. That’s when mistakes happen, sometimes very costly too. New projects may well make adequate provision for training staff: users, managers and technicians. But a few months down the line, people [...]

Proprietary platforms are increasing fragmentation

paying the price of multiplication

The software developers’ dream of “write once, run anywhere” is getting ever harder to achieve, instead of simpler. Because key hardware and software manufacturers are increasingly reverting to the prehistoric, proprietary platform mentality of a bygone age that blatantly disregards the interests of their partners in the iT value chain. Leaving everyone with a [...]

preserving data and systems integrity

danger of sitting too long on the wall

The temptation to avoid a discretionary iT upgrade can be overwhelming, because we are conditioned to believe: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Of course, skipping the odd hardware or software generation, or two, is not a bad strategy if you need to save precious time and money, by not upgrading systems that [...]

smashing business

The landscape of information service development is changing quickly, as more and more business services are created out of a mish-mash of components from sometimes unlikely providers. These combinations are somewhat charmingly known as mashups. Some rudimentary precautions are required, though, if you want to prevent your business being mashed-up in the process A [...]

Even the strongest systems have weaknesses

points of weakness

We invest a great deal of time, money and effort into making our iT systems as resilient as possible. And yet, no matter how strong we make our fortresses, our business systems are still at risk from the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune because even the strongest systems have points of