Monthly Archives: November 2008

SaaS User Satisfaction Skyrockets to a Whopping 97%

 Anne Mullaney | Nov 25, 2008  2 Responses
Nov 252008
 
SaaS User Satisfaction Skyrockets to a Whopping 97%

Analysis of the data we collected in our fourth annual software-as-a-service (SaaS) market survey has revealed that 97% of responders are satisfied with their SaaS deployments. Jeff Kaplan will continue to analyze the data over the next few weeks. He wrote in a recent Business Technology Trends & Impacts Executive Update: Given the tangible benefits survey respondents report gaining from their SaaS deployments, I’m not surprised by this finding, but still, it’s impressive! This is a satisfaction level that few established on-premise enterprise software vendors can match. The benefits enterprises are enjoying that have lead to such an unprecedented satisfaction level include reducing infrastructure costs as a result of SaaS solutions, greater functional capabilities from …

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 Benchmarking+Surveys, Business Technology Trends, News, Outsourcing  Tagged with: , , , ,

IT-Enabled Synchronous Psychosis?

 Vince Kellen | Nov 21, 2008  4 Responses
Nov 212008
 
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Is information technology accelerating the wild swings in the market? Oil barrel prices, thought to cross over $200 are now around $50. The stock market jitters 5% – 7% in a day looking like warmed-up jello. The talking heads on TV are talking with more emotion and I can see their veins popping on my high definition TV. Watching the stock market, I get the sense we are behaving like a large flock of birds. At the first sign of any perceived threat and the lead bird takes off and the whole flock blindly follows. The whole world is joined together in a synchronous flow of information, made possible via the information technology of the past …

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 Business Intelligence, Business-IT Strategies, General, Leadership, Web 2.0  Tagged with: , , , ,

Assessing Obama’s IT Promises

 Robert Charette | Nov 17, 2008  No Responses
Nov 172008
 
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For the IT community, the incoming US administration could be a very interesting one. President-elect Barack Obama is going to be the US’s first tech-savvy president who understands the power of the Internet. It is obviously overstated, but some political observers, such as Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, claimed that, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.” During the campaign, President-elect Obama made several wide-ranging promises in regard to technology. For instance, he promised to protect the openness of the Internet by strongly supporting the principle of Net neutrality; he promised to deploy a …

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 Leadership, News  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Software-as-a-Service Adoption Nearly Doubles Since 2007

 Anne Mullaney | Nov 17, 2008  1 Response
Nov 172008
 
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A recent Cutter Consortium survey revealed that 63% of responding organization are using a SaaS solution, up from 32% in 2007. Over the past four years, Cutter has been charting the growth of the SaaS market with a series of yearly customer surveys. This effort has been spearheaded by Cutter Senior Consultant Jeffrey M. Kaplan. In analyzing the data for a Business Technology Trends & Impacts Executive Update, Kaplan wrote: Last year, the survey gave us a hint that this jump in adoption might occur. Even before escalating fuel costs and the recent collapse of the credit markets, 80% of our SaaS survey respondents last year who reported they were considering SaaS solutions stated they …

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 Benchmarking+Surveys, Business Technology Trends, News, Outsourcing  Tagged with: , , , , ,

A Direct-To-Citizen Presidency?

 Vince Kellen | Nov 12, 2008  1 Response
Nov 122008
 
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For Abraham Lincoln, it was the telegraph. For John F. Kennedy it was the television. For Barak Obama, it is Web 2.0. Each of these politicians proved adept at adapting new technologies to communicate. Lincoln took to the telegraph and used it for rapid communication. No doubt the advantages of the telegraph were on Lincoln’s mind when we composed the short and compact Gettysburg address. Unlike keynote speaker, Edward Everett’s 13,600-word, two-hour oration, Lincoln’s ten sentence and 272-word address fit neatly on the front pages of newspapers across Europe. In the famous Richard Nixon-Kennedy television debates, the youthful Kennedy performed well on television. Nixon, ill at the time, looked ill on television. Kennedy knew television …

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 Business-IT Strategies, Collaboration+Teams, Leadership, Web 2.0  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Software estimation “a tough beast to control”

 Kim Leonard | Nov 4, 2008  2 Responses
Nov 042008
 
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One of the most costly results of poor estimation skills is often the complete cancellation of a project. Cutter Consortium recently examined the extent to which software organizations have abandoned or cancelled projects over the past three years due to significant budget or schedule overruns. This survey effort studied software project estimation at more than 100 software development organizations and was analyzed by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant E.M. Bennatan. The first area we examined was comparative performance; how are projects estimated today compared to six years ago? We defined success by the ±10% rule: success means hitting the mark within 10%. Organizations were asked: In the past three years, what would you say is the …

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 Agile Project Management, General  Tagged with: , ,

Ineffective, Inefficient Acquisition Processes

 Anne Mullaney | Nov 4, 2008  No Responses
Nov 042008
 
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Cutter’s Bob Charette has written the cover story, “What’s Wrong With Weapons Acquisitions?,” for this month’s IEEE Spectrum. The article highlights the problems in defense acquisition: spiraling costs, extremely lengthy project delays, politics trumping technology, a lack of skilled workers, and a dearth of institutional knowledge as a result of outsourcing. Sound familiar? The scope of the projects and of the failures Bob reports is immense, but the issues are surely ones you can identify with, regardless of which industry you’re in or where you’re based. Bob interviewed dozens of industry and government defense-acquisition experts over the course of a year and a half to support this piece. When we talked about it, Bob remarked, …

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 Agile Project Management, News, Outsourcing, Risk Management  Tagged with: , , , , ,

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