Author: Julie Spicer, Director – Retail Industry Lead, Manufacturing/Distribution Industry Lead

This year mobile technologies ranked number one as the top CIO technology priority when asked if they were aligned to the CMO to enable top-line growth. Across industries and companies large and small, we have seen the countless and ever growing benefits mobility brings to businesses, however, with its many facets, there is a lag in developing comprehensive organization-wide plans to adopt and maximize its benefits. Smart organizations are developing strategies to capture and execute cross-functional initiatives to leverage this phenomenon.  

What is your company doing?

While most companies see mobility as a key enabler of their overall business plan, marketing, sales, learning and efficiency, few have yet to formulate long-term strategic plans in this area.

Without widespread planning, many companies have already implemented or are in the process of implementing custom mobile applications, mobile versions of critical business applications, and corporate app stores.

With this adoption, most firms feel that mobile computing is extremely challenging and identify mobile initiatives as one of their top IT risks. Gaining an understanding of those risks and what should be done about them is critical to the success and sustainability of a long-term plan. What most businesses need to do now is develop a long-term strategy for enabling mobility in the business across all departments, applications, devices and mobile platforms.

To date, most companies we meet or work with have mobile initiatives that tend to be tactical rather than strategic and departmental rather than enterprise-wide. Given the critical reach mobile applications provide for your business, we recommend an approach that is unified and consistent across the business that addresses mobile platforms, provisioning, usage, device ownership, etc.

Here are some questions and considerations you should ask yourself when building your mobile technology plan:

• Understand Your Goals. Who will own the mobile strategy? What do you plan to implement for consumers in commerce and mobile interactive marketing? What do you plan to implement for employees in mobile enterprise applications? What is the desired consumer and employee experience? Is the business case about driving revenue, improving process, providing information access or customer loyalty? What is your competition doing?  
• Understand the Technology. What is the impact on infrastructure? What mobile devices will be supported? What resources and knowledge do you need? Will you need consulting expertise? What processes, policies, and education will be required?
• Consideration Security Factors. How do you minimize risk while allowing access to email, business applications and data on tablets? How do you address the growing diversity of mobile platforms and applications? How will you support new customer facing applications?
• Address Mobile Policies. Have you considered the increased personal devices personal devices on the corporate network and address usage policies?

Building a mobile strategy can be a simple internal process or one where outside support is needed. Whether your business has 100 customers or 1,000,000 customers, thinking about how a user on the go is interacting with your company must be a consideration in todays mobile world.

Author: Kimberly Murgas, Director, Financial Services

 

Technology advances and global commerce have intensified the competition for profit and market share in the Financial Services Industry. As the demand for innovative products and services continues to increase, time-to-market and brand differentiation become key factors for success. Furthermore, responsiveness to the customers’ needs and agility in adapting to today’s challenges will determine tomorrow’s financial leaders.

Business activity is being conducted through online banking and transactions. E-business capability is quickly becoming a requirement to compete in the marketplace. For aggressive firms, it presents unrivaled opportunities for profit and growth. E-business capability provides companies with essential agility and holds the key to differentiation through internet-based customer services and sharing of information and resources.

How is QSI aligned to add Strategic Value to its clients facing these issues?

QSI responds with its Mobile Banking Service Offerings & Solutions…

Customer Relationship Management (CRM). An important trend in the new economy is the necessity to focus on the customer and emphasize self-service. To build customer loyalty, companies must strive to accommodate the customers’ expanding needs for personalized services and greater convenience.

QSI responds with its Application Development and BI Service Offerings & Solutions…

Time-to-Market. Business strategy and organization must be altered to suit the new dynamics of today’s market. Real-time access to critical business information and integration along product and geographical lines are paramount to the future success of any organization.

QSI responds with its Strategy Service Offerings & Solutions...

Strategies for Success
. Among the companies that have maintained a track record of success over time, certain characteristics are evident:

• Superior customer service and innovative products
• Ability to respond to shifts in the market
• Quicker time-to-market
• Staff and cost reduction
• Increase employee satisfaction
• Generate Return on Investment (ROI)
• Create ease and convenience of business transactions (e-business)

Companies must also focus on retaining and building lasting relationships by adapting a customer-centric culture. QSI responds by being Customer-Center Organization and approaches its service offerings and solutions with the client in mind.  95% of QSI's current clients are clients for life. Specifically, because QSI listens and responds to the ever-changing and challenging demands of the Financial Services Marketplace.

Author: Douglas Drescher, Director Public Sector Industry Lead

Last month Computer Aid Incorporated (CAI) from Harrisburg, PA was hired to provide Vendor Management Operations for the State of Ohio government.  CAI now manages the IT supplemental staffing needs for all state agencies.  Last year IT supplemental staffing spend in Ohio amounted to $50mm to $60mm.  This is a new approach for the State of Ohio to utilize VMO services to manage their IT supplemental staffing.  

By implementing a VMO process the State of Ohio is seeking to benefit from controlled costs, improved quality of service, and timely responsiveness.  It will also open the door for any IT consulting company or independent consultant to do business in Ohio.        

While reliance on consultants may be a sensible next step following the recession, don't be surprised if the trend toward a flexible workforce continues beyond the recovery. The recent explosion of business technology means you now need access to a range of independent contractors, consulting firms, managed services and other experts for a variety of unpredictable demands that will stretch even the most skilled full-time staff. Many state agencies are now finding that it makes economical sense to supplement their team with a pool of experts with specific skills that can be called upon as needed.

Early in the recession, during deep IT layoffs, there was an increase in demand for independent IT consultants. On the surface it appeared to be a natural response to reduced budgets -- hire the temps for now, and when the economy rebounds, ramp up the full-time staff. What people failed to see at the time, but is apparent now, is that we were also at the cusp of a major upheaval in business technology characterized by terms like “do more with less”, “shared services” and “globalization”.  These changes inside state government are driven by factors such as the introduction of new flexible technology, communication in real time, and knowing that 1 out of every 3 State of Ohio IT employees are heading for retirement over the next 3 years.

The national unemployment rate for IT is under 2%, and we are in a tech boom.  It is even more challenging finding skilled talent.  Now more than ever we need our colleges and universities to step up and close the IT gap to meet the demands of a flexible workforce.

Author: Tom Lynch

I recently attended a lunch-and-learn session that focused on Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and automation techniques being employed by one of our project teams. Although I have some background in this, I had yet to see a truly successful implementation of this methodology first hand. I have to say I was impressed. The team is achieving great things and creating significant value for their client through a rigorous approach to ATDD and automation.

As the team has hit their stride over the last few months, they have attained a virtually unheard of standard – Zero Defects. They are catching problems during the iteration and before promotion of new code. This is a tremendous cost savings, as it avoids or minimizes that bug list that never seems to stop growing on most projects.

Along with Zero Defects, the team is delighting the client. They are thrilled with the team’s productivity, in large part, because of the absence of a growing backlog of distractions defects. Additionally, during demos, the automation runs in the background, demonstrating the functionality as the team displays their accomplishments. The client is able to watch this and see the fruits of the team’s approach. All that, and the code works – the first time, every time!

As I listened to the presenters tell the lunch and learn participants about their success, I was forced to wonder “why aren’t we doing this on all of our projects?” The answer is “because it’s hard!” – there are a variety of challenges confronting adoption of this approach to quality assurance.

First, our developers (both programmers and quality analysts) are still very uneven in their exposure to these concepts. Many business analysts have heard little about this topic. Until we are able to generate a critical mass of developers that are able to implement these techniques, we are going to face significant difficulties in applying them across the board. The example project has the good fortune of being lead by a thought leader in the QA space and a technical lead who is an automation hobbyist in addition to his day job. Clearly we need to, as an industry, make evangelizing these methods a priority and bring our development experts to a more consistent level of expertise.

Second, until we reach a point where all members of a project team are comfortable with and enthusiastic about these methods, projects will continue to under-deliver and take longer. ATDD simultaneously increases productivity and client satisfaction with the end product. However, implementation of these techniques currently depends upon having highly skilled project team members with the initiative to drive their adoption on the project. These resources are potentially more costly to the client and could be better utilized on other project tasks. Additionally, bringing the other members of the team up to speed and ingraining the methods hurt productivity initially and lengthen the overall project timeline.

Lastly, the central idea of ATDD in an Agile environment is to bring testing to the front of the process. One of the benefits of this is to draw the business analyst (and product owners, for that matter) into the development process and get them more engaged in design considerations. This is heavily dependent upon making the techniques, especially automation, more user friendly and easier to manage and maintain. With the current tool sets (cucumber, Selenium, Watir, SVNs, etc.) this is a huge challenge. As a BA myself, the last thing I am interested in doing while refining the team’s understanding of the client’s desires for the application is to wade into an SVN and check-in/check-out test scenarios so that we can all stay in sync. Additionally, every project I have seen dabbling in this uses a whole slew of different open source gadgets and "doo-dads" to make it all work.

Despite these challenges, we are on the cusp of great things in the ATDD and automation space. The potential to improve project success is massive. We simply need to focus on broadening our acceptance of the methods, demonstrating their value, and refining the tools. Sounds easy, right?

Author: Kevin Feeman

 

With the U.S. economy still slumping and unemployment numbers barely moving forward, it is imperative to keep professional skills up to date. Whether you need to update the computer programs you already know or train for a completely new industry, your ability to adapt to change will help keep you employed, both now and in the future.

Staying current with required knowledge and skills enables you to make the most out of your years of experience. One of the best and most inexpensive ways to keep your skills up to date is using online training resources. There are many available options on the Internet to enhance your skill set ranging from going to an online university to taking free tutorials. However, one of the best, inexpensive, valuable training resources on the Internet today is Lynda.com.

Lynda.com has an amazing library of more than 1,000 learning courses for people at all experience levels. Instructional videos are added almost on a daily basis. There is in-depth training for advanced software, particularly Adobe products. There are also courses to sharpen business skills, such as Achieving Your Goals and Creating an Effective Resume. Courses are well structured, and the excellent video and audio quality make learning easy, fun and best of all, quick. The instructors are top notch and have extensive experience in the subjects they teach.

In today's economy keeping up with current skills and knowledge is essential. With the right training and education, updating your skills will not only be easier to achieve but will also enable you to re-enter your field in step with current conditions and requirements.

Author: Terry Wiegmann, Director

Author: Joe Astolfi, Director

 

Process is important in that it creates a shared understanding of how we accomplish things.  In our work life, process is all around us - how we get access to an IT system; how we receive feedback on our job performance; what we need to do to get an idea approved to develop.  We like things nice, neat and orderly.  We want to know how to get something done quickly and efficiently.  Process provides a repeatable, systematic way to get things done without constantly "reinventing the wheel."

With that said, process shouldn't be created for process' sake or to keep someone employed.  How often have you looked at a situation and felt that the processes were created merely to keep someone busy?  I fell into this trap in the earlier days of my career, when I was designing and implementing IT PMO processes.  I found myself creating process without truly asking "why?"  Why do we need this process? What purpose does it serve?  Where is the value in having this process?  I then started creating processes based on the PMBOK guidelines and what I had learned in PM courses because of these simple questions.

Interestingly enough, the more experienced I became at Project Management, the more process got in my way of getting work done.  Sometimes that work was responding to “late” changes that my customer needed in the software we were building.  Occasionally, it meant having the end users test functionality before all the development was completed, with the intent of getting some early feedback.  I had to put these requests or changes through a process created to control the chaos, or obtain some type of approval from someone of authority.  Often these requests were simply dismissed with the statement "that's not our process" or the dreaded “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.  

I'm not advocating that anyone modify or abandon processes without regard to the impacts.  The message I want to convey is that process sometimes gets in the way of getting the actual work completed.  The process may not provide tangible value.  When this happens, there needs to be an ability question and change the process, for the good of our professions and the good of our organizations.

This is exactly why I gravitated to Agile values and principles.  One of the core Agile principles is to continuously inspect and adapt, not just the product you are building, but your processes as well.  Every member on the team has the ability to change a process that is not working or modify the process to make it better.  It's refreshing and empowering to have a voice in how you do your work.  It leads to greater engagement, more innovation, and higher personal satisfaction.   And when you have those factors in play, you ultimately experience higher efficiencies and improved quality.

Regardless of your organizational processes, think about how they contribute to your organization’s success.  Process should exist to enable us to get the right work done efficiently and effectively, not prevent us from doing what’s right.