Driving home from a client last week, I was intrigued to hear on the radio that the BBC here in the UK are running a short series of programmes on computer languages.
Here’s a link to the first one, on Fortran:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pmpf5
Next up are COBOL, BASIC, then Java…
I’ve just been building a volumetric model for a large volume consumer-market website. We wanted to make sure that we sized the initial launch infrstructure correctly, and had an understanding of the cost of growth (of both transactions and data volume).
It’s been a doubly useful exercise – as well as giving us the figures we needed, it has also highlighted an unexpected consequence of (an otherwise very sensible) archiving policy decision. This has allowed us to tweak a policy and create a new approach to one aspect of marketing, saving thousands of pounds per year.
Certainly good anecdotal evidence to support the old programmers adage that “it’s cheaper to fix it on paper…”!
In my last blog post, I outlined three key stages we use to help businesses improve, and I covered the first area (Commercial Imperative – the “why do it?”):
This time around, we’ll look at “Planning Improvements” – how to change the way your people do what they do, and how to give them better tools. These are the old classics of “people, process and technology”.
Hold on. You’ve only just started – how can you improve!?
Well, we believe you can, and should, make improvements every day. Continue reading
Business Continuity is a broad church, meaning different things to different businesses. It’s also very much a people thing; after all, it exists to keep people in jobs, delivering to customers, whatever happens.
That said, we have recently been involved in designing and deploying a fair few technology implementation projects within our process and systems work.
What is clear is that over the past year, and probably in the forthcoming year, there are a number of technologies which have come of age, or are due to have some significant upgrades that should transform them. Continue reading
A few people recently have remarked upon a handy little tool (all of 811KB) we use when we are helping businesses deliver IT migration projects. High time to trot out a quick blog entry then!
The tool is called Disk2VHD.exe, and can be downloaded free from Microsoft (link opens in new window). Continue reading