Technical debt is a metaphor that refers to the consequences of allowing low quality software coding to go unchanged. Ward Cunningham, one of the pioneers of extreme programming, coined the phrase to convey the potential risks of taking short-cuts when developing and testing code for an application. Ward’s first law states that lowering code quality lengthens development time. Whatever the form, the negative impact of technical debt on your development team decreases their throughput. get out of this spiral, strong executive sponsorship is needed.

As Business Management noted recently, we live in an information economy, and “smart use of information and information technology can be one of the most effective ways to gain a competitive advantage and thrive in times of change”. Business (BI) intelligence and data warehousing (DWH) are two important terms as regarding using information for decision [...]

Increasingly, large and small organisations, are talking about using social media, typically in the context of a specific service/application they have heard of such as Facebook, Twitter etc. As with any software system or service, in order to get the most benefit from it, it is important to have a strategy in mind beforehand. When [...]

Increasingly, organisations from different business sectors are using customer relationship management (CRM) systems to help boost sales and revenues. Depending on the approach that they adopt in selecting and implementing such a solution, they may have mixed results in terms of their sales and customer interactions. In this post, I discuss various aspects of an [...]

In a previous post, I explained the principles of a balanced business card and how it helps to focus an organisation on the expected benefits from an application rollout. The first step in building a balanced scorecard is to develop an overall business strategy for the application rollout that provides a focus on the end [...]

When your company is considering changing it’s website or rolling out a web application, one of the challenges that the management team will face is to ensure that the appropriate business benefits are achieved with such an investment of time and money (i.e. that the rollout of a new system/website will be the right thing [...]