Has Microsoft lost its technical leadership position to Google and other web-centric companies? Don't count on it. Microsoft has a solid history of remaking itself, and this time they've turned to Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes and Groove collaboration tools, to turn the software behemoth around.

"Ozzie's assignment is to webify everything: to intertwine Microsoft's entire product line—software for consumers, software for businesses, Xboxes, all of it—with the vast and ever-growing power of the Net."

1:19:21 PM    

The latest vendor assessment from Forrester Research evaluates "process-centric SCM solutions," which automate software development management processes, enabling development teams to store, track, and manage project assets across the application development lifecycle. Process-centric tools can assist organizations in driving quality improvements through their organizations, an especially important factor in the success in geographically distributed workforces.

Borland Software StarTeam Enterprise Advantage is the market leader for geographically distributed development. Advantages for large, dispersed teams include advanced cross-project search capabilities, file caching to solve the problem of responsiveness when using a centralized data repository, XML-based workflow customization and publish/subscribe functionality to help streamline communications, and secure web-based access to enable working from any Internet-connected computer - especially useful for mobile team members. Borland's press release quotes Marc Brown, senior director of product marketing at Borland: "We believe that distributed development is the single biggest challenge and opportunity software organizations will face over the next two years," - indicating a high-level commitment to serving the distributed workforce market.

Among its competitors, IBM's Rational ClearCase Change Management Solution ranks as the most popular and the strongest offering available today, but gets a thumbs down on customization. Microsoft's brand new offering, Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, fares well for smaller .NET shops. MKS Integrity Suite, Serena Software ChangeMan Directions,  and SYNERGY/CM and SYNERGY/Change - paired applications from Telelogic - are also included in Forrester's evaluation.

2:02:32 PM    

CollabNet has a new release, with features intended to help "corporations create a sustainable advantage in a new era in which applications are developed by decentralized teams collaborating over the Internet." hmm. a bit of marketese, anyone?

Translation: CollabNet, whose business model is built around tools for developing software over the internet, has added process improvement to its bag of tricks. A brilliant move if done correctly.

From their press release:

"Increasingly, software development practices are becoming distributed. Case in point is the fact that a number of today’s leading computing initiatives like SOA, compliance, outsourcing, convergence, open source, and other strategic community development programs all share the need to assemble distributed software development teams," said Bill Portelli, President and CEO of CollabNet.

Portelli cites good indicators that distributed development is increasing in importance. And the more you do it, the more important it is to get it right:

"In this distributed environment it has become essential for CIOs to set, measure, and improve their development processes and for project teams to understand and complete their specific development tasks in view of the overall lifecycle."

The new feature in CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 that offers this is the "Application Lifecycle Manager", which lets project managers select and customize a set of pre-configured process templates. The templates define consistent processes for their particular projects, from requirements definition through design and deployment. Management views into the development effort allow teams to measure and improve their processes - a critical requirement for higher-level maturity organizations.

This is the kind of robust infrastructure many corporations are learning to employ as part of a radical shift in the way we develop, deliver, and maintain software.

7:14:24 PM    

Are you doing fine with incremental innovations, but can't seem to satisfy the CEO's demand for radical innovation? That's the situation many companies face, according to Jeneanne Rae in the The Keys to High-Impact Innovation (Business Week Online, Sept. 27, 2005).

Mining data compiled from two years of work in 30 global companies, spanning 60 innovations within the services industry, Rae and her coworkers at Peer Insight developed a list of principles for companies seeking high-impact innovations. Does your organization support all four of these enablers?

1. A clear challenge statement that expresses aspirations to a worthy goal without prescribing the means. This should be expressed in terms of a customer need, not a business need.
2. A well-designed, well-facilitated process that includes multidisciplinary participation and sources of cutting-edge ideas.
3. Emphasis on developing concepts that combine multiple elements of innovation (e.g., business model, IT platform,and channel) to increase impact and distinctiveness.
4. Techniques and structures that counterbalance the forces of risk aversion.

Rae says overcoming the last hurdle is particularly important, and particularly difficult for large, successful companies. Effective techniques and structures included holding high-stakes competitions, funding exploration projects, removing "naysayers" from the innovation governing group, changing the risk analysis approach, and finally, creating a separate incubation area.

What other "techniques and structures" can help organizations overcome risk aversion?

6:18:32 PM    

Gartner Group's May 17th press release "Gartner Says a High-Performance Workplace Will Be Essential to Business Success During Next Decade" explains why innovative firms will view IT as a strategic enabler for productivity and innovation, rather than as a cost of doing business. Wondering if your company has the right perspective? One indicator: to whom does your head of IT report? Give yourself 50 points if you said "the CEO"; subtract 50 points if you said "the CFO".

The press release identifies five technologies as key to enabling the high-performance workplace: content and knowledge base management, expertise location, search and classification, collaboration support, and business and competitive intelligence.

Quotes from Tom Austin, group vice president and Gartner Fellow:

"To increase competitive advantage, organizations need to look for opportunities to increase market impact, including value and agility, by investing in a high-performance workplace."

"[Traditionally] IT has been a roadblock to agility, innovation and creativity; it has been anti-creative and anti-collaborative. The high-performance workplace is focused on the unstructured, on transformational agility, innovation and creativity without losing sight of structured obligations."

5:17:37 PM    

Prime Time for Real Time by Peter Fingar (May 1, 2005, Intelligent Enterprise) explains that a strategy for creating a real-time enterprise has impications beyond the technology architecture...

'A real-time enterprise is agile; it executes new business strategies when they can deliver the greatest benefit. Analysts and enterprise architects must start with this sort of business-oriented vision of real time and consider how best to make it happen. Business process management (BPM) systems and methods hold promise as the means of reaching the next threshold — but only if BPM is viewed as something more than just an extension of current software development strategies. Living closer to the development of business strategy, BPM can offer a global perspective on how to integrate cross-functional processes for dynamic execution.'

7:37:41 AM    

Three points:
(1) I'm back, after a much too long break from blogging, (2) the blog is different, and my views have expanded quite a bit - from telework to distributed work and beyond, and (3) I hope to hear from you - email me at dolan@software.org.

P.S. If you've subscribed to the "Telework Times" news feed in the past and want to stick to just telework-related posts, you might prefer to switch to my news feed from the "telework" category.

5:18:29 AM