Office 365 is a leading enterprise cloud solution for companies looking to make the jump to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). While the functionality is now mostly on-par with the On-Premises solutions (e.g. Exchange), there are a number of caveats during the implementation phase that add complexity and limitations if not properly addressed.…
Read MoreWhen it comes to the IT challenges of the new Healthcare.gov Healthcare Exchange, the hits keep on coming. Over the weekend, the healthcare.gov hosting vendor, Terremark (a subsidiary of Verizon), “experienced a failure in a networking component” and the attempted fix crashed the system. The failure is in the “Data Services Hub,” which connects the exchange to other...
Read MoreAuthor’s Note: For the sake of this blog post, I have left the politics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare, out of the discussion. As the White House, Congress, and most of the news media made sure we knew – today is the first day of open enrollment for individual health care plans sold on one of the insurance exchanges. …
Read MoreIn the last two to three years, technological advances coupled with customer demand for new ways to bank have empowered financial institutions to take on many new technology projects. The lack of investment during the recession coupled with the beginnings of an economic recovery have permitted banks’ technology budgets to grow and have even allowed many banks to take on major transformational...
Read MoreThe last mobile app my team wrote for a current client was an internal app with an audience of several hundred to maybe a couple thousand. That allowed the client to easily dictate what OS versions we were willing to support. It didn’t make sense to spend a few thousand dollars trying to fix an issue specific to an old version of Android when they could potentially buy those users new...
Read MoreAs your organization’s project manager in a software selection, you’ve been working hard for the last month or two gathering requirements, reviewing RFPs, and managing the team’s expectations. The time for the software demonstrations has arrived at last and you walk into the presentation room and think you finally have an opportunity to sit back with a donut, cup of coffee, and watch the...
Read MoreThe last phase of the software selection process, negotiations, is often the most overlooked, especially from the perspective of the IT organization. But once you have analyzed a vendor’s initial total cost of ownership (TCO) and evaluated the options via a balanced scorecard framework, you need to have a plan for software negotiations; it cannot be an afterthought of your selection...
Read MoreFor many years now, IT executives have struggled with the business’ assertions that “IT does not understand them,” “IT is focused on the wrong activities,” “IT is taking too long to provide solutions,” and/or “IT is always saying no.” Conversely, IT executives often find themselves in a situation where they cannot say “no,” and say “yes” without understanding the implications of doing so, or...
Read MoreA colleague of mine, Kyle Tobin, and I attended TechEd 2013 down in New Orleans earlier this month. We are writing a series of blogs about what most impressed us about Microsoft’s message around their newly released or updated software TechEd 2013 brought with it a number of new feature releases for many of the traditional Microsoft products, but what Microsoft delivered (in my mind...
Read More
The past week will likely go down in history as one where we saw the massive impact of social media in today’s world. Most notably, following the horrible events in Boston, social media, especially Twitter, became a leading distributor of news information. While a combination of bad reporting by the traditional news networks and tweets by ill-informed Twitter users often...
Read MoreAs evidenced by the proliferation of business intelligence tools and vendors, the pursuit of metrics and data is essentially ubiquitous to businesses of every size and industry. Gartner predicts business intelligence software revenue will reach $13.8 Billion in 2013, climbing to over $17 Billion in 2016 (Source: CMS article citing Gartner). Given the macro-level uncertainty...
Read MoreIn 2005, Congress approved funding for a bridge to Gravina Island (later known as “nowhere”), Alaska. At that time, the island had a population of 50 people and was served by a regular ferry service. There is little doubt that this bridge could have been successfully completed. Similar bridges had been constructed before, and there was never any concern about the difficulty of engineering the...
Read More
