consumer IT

Enterprise COBOL Applications Meet Web 2.0 - Social Software

jim wilde — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:37:35 +0000

Some 75% of the world's businesses data is still processed in Cobol.

JP Rangaswami, on his blog, confused of calcutta, has an insightful discussion, "Musing about enterprise information and flow. ...doesn't everyone in the blogosphere know about ping servers, search engines, aggregators, ad servers, data miners, ad servers and text scrapers? What's so instructive about spam blogs? And surely everybody knows about social bookmarking, about linking, and about making comments?

The instructiveness for me comes in the word I left out. Corporations. Enterprises.

In the 21st Century, the web is two-way; as Doc Searls often says, it's writeable. So, if we take these ideas into the enterprise, build enterprise applications around the web, what are the analogies? Should there be any analogies? Should enterprises be using exactly the same tools as their customers? Why not?"

Here's one idea.

COBOL Meets Web 2.0?

From CW (Computer World), "Confessions of a Cobol programmer".

Some 75% of the world's businesses data is still processed in Cobol, and about 90% of all financial transactions are in Cobol, according to Arunn Ramadoss, head of the academic connections program at Micro Focus International PLC, which provides software to help modernize Cobol applications.

Because of the massive installed base, it would be too expensive to try to replace all that code, he says. Instead, many companies are looking for ways to integrate Cobol with newer applications."

Don't laugh. I cut my teeth on COBOL at a time when IT was DP. I designed and wrote cics/cobol/IMS/DB2 code for dozens of mainframe applications. I even used Micro Focus with both, Telon and APS/PC - code generators. I'd love to have an opportunity to mashup a web 2.0 - social application with a COBOL one.

Any takers? What would the app do? Any ideas on consumer IT mixing it up with corporate IT? I have a couple of ideas around to-do lists with task, calendar, and event management.

Tags:

social informatin management

COBOL

Social Media:

Social Bookmarking

Web 2.0 website development

web design website development

Open Source CMS

Business Development Ideas

Is Your Corporate IT Age Showing?

jim wilde — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:35:51 +0000

How innovations like social networks, RSS, microblogs, wikis and mashups will translate into enterprise profits.

From CW, "Are You Obsolete? How to stay relevant in the world of Web 2.0, Wii and other wonders. According to a growing chorus of IT leaders, consultants and bloggers, IT needs to shift into a new role. It should continue its traditional responsibilities, such as governance, security and control of costs and return on investment. But it should loosen control over parts of the business intent on improving productivity through the use of downloadable rich Internet applications, social networking, collaboration tools and other Web 2.0 technologies.

There's still a question of how innovations like social networks, RSS, microblogs, wikis and mashups will translate into enterprise profits, but few doubt that they need to be explored, and not just by IT."

Even though we've implemented many web 2.0 - social technologies in business organizations, we still haven't hit on any one metric that can be tied to profits. How do you place value on collaboration, innovation, finding or retaining an employee? These tools are one piece of the puzzle. In most organizations, they will develop their own metrics for measuring ROI.

Tags:

Social Media:

Web 2.0 website development

Open Source CMS

Business Development Ideas

Consumer IT Delivering Corporate Productivity

jim wilde — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:25:49 +0000

Why is it that businesses, especially business development managers, have been slow to adopt many of the new social networking applications (consumer IT). We use Drupal, an open-source web application framework to make web 2.0 apps.

Better Customer Relationships,
Improves Knowledge Management,
Facilitates Recruiting and Retention,
Increases Business Opportunities,
Builds Community.

I finally get it - this stuff is too simple. What do you think?

"IT'S Recovering Complexaholics " from Computerworld

"If you're recovering from this addiction, you bring together a small skunk-works team of business and IT people and tell them to cast off all preconceptions. You give them time frames to deliver usable systems to business people within 30 to 90 days. You tell them everything is on the table, including things that have more in common with consumer IT than corporate IT. Under your guidance, they develop a strategy that relies on a collection of readily available IT components such as Web portals, dashboards and alerts, instant messaging and e-mail, data warehouses, spreadsheets, software-as-a-service offerings, and small programs that can be quickly coded, tested and put into production."

Tags:

orchestrating resources

Social Media:

Web 2.0 website development

web design website development

Open Source CMS

Business Development Ideas