Recently I completed a project that was challenging in the best of ways. We were asked to study and understand the client’s current system to write their next system requirements. The client asked us to glean system requirements from reviewing the system, speaking with users, and combing through as much documentation as possible. The task felt monumental – we needed to understand the system as it was, but with an eye for improving the new system. Documentation was sparse. The […]
When you think about your organization’s cloud strategy, mindset may not be one of the first things you think about, but mindset is crucial. Adopting a cloud mindset has been called the “single most important” predictor of cloud success (Lewis, 2017, p. 44). Why? Because it is key to aligning people, processes, technology, and culture necessary for cloud transformation to take place on an enterprise-scale rather than as a one-off project with limited scope. What is a Cloud Mindset? Mindset […]
Data Lake has become a mainstay in data analytics architectures. By storing data in its native format, it allows organizations to defer the effort of structuring and organizing data upfront. This promotes data collection and serves as a rich platform for data analytics. Most data lakes are also backed by a distributed file system that enables massively parallel processing (MPP) and scales with even the largest of data sets. The increase of data privacy regulations and demands on governance requires […]
Whether you are just starting your journey to Office 365, or you are expanding your usage of the platform, it’s important that you stop and define what you hope to accomplish in your project. User research is the most productive activity your team can do to define and shape your project. Many underestimate the value of investing time and money into user research when a team believes they already understand what needs to be built. The Need to Define the […]
K.C. Jones-Evans, a User Experience Developer, Josh Lathery, a Full Stack Developer, and Sara Darrah, a User Experience Specialist, sat down recently to talk through our design and project development planning process that we implemented for part of a project. This exercise was to help improve our overall project development planning and create best practices moving forward. We coined the term the “Design Huddle” to describe the process of taking the feature from a high level (often one sentence request from our […]
I recently read Patrick Lencioni’s latest book, Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty. I found the book useful, well written, and insightful. Here is a quick summary of the key ideas: Always Consult instead of Sell Rather than harping on past accolades and what you can do if the organization hires you, transform every sales situation into an opportunity to demonstrate value. Start adding value from the very first meeting… without waiting […]
Make no mistake, most organizations and government agencies are—at least in part—software companies. The backbone of the services and products they sell, the internal business processes they use, and the customer feedback mechanisms they rely on are all built on software. Even in the age of software as a service (SaaS) – a modern organization’s portfolio of applications and the specifics of how these apps are used influence its most important decisions. So while it’s easy to understand that software is a […]
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily reporting data on crimes brought to their attention. The program’s primary objective is to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. Over the years, however, this data has become one of the country’s leading social indicators. The FBI is required by law to store national […]
In my previous post, I proposed an example application that leverages the resources available to us in Office 365 development platform and Azure Active Directory, as well as the in-application integration of Office 365 Add-ins. Now we’ll take a deeper look at the Graph API and some of the implementation points. Build Your Enterprise Graph The Graph API empowers developers and enterprises to build new relationships and interactions between resources in Azure Active Directory, Office 365, and other applications and […]
Enterprises have a trove of business resources and data that are often under-utilized – users, calendars, contacts, emails, tasks, documents and other files. Often there are redundancies between what users do with Office applications and other enterprise applications, and a painful lack of integration. In prior posts, I discussed the compelling new Office 365 development platform and introduced Matter Center to demonstrate how integrating web-based add-ins directly into Office applications like Outlook can lead to productivity gains and happy users. In […]