Wednesday, April 30, 2008

7 ways to keep IT workers happy

What does it cost to keep an IT worker happy? Perhaps the question should be asked, what does it cost if you don't? Some estimates place the cost of losing a valued IT worker at 150% of that employee's salary when all is said and done.

This is even more dramatic in IT when factoring in the time and costs of technical training, education, and certifications that can easily stretch into the tens of thousands. So, keeping your IT workers happy can be a definite advantage. Here are 7 easy ways to keep IT workers happy.

One way to keep workers happy that is not mentioned in the article is to make their work fun. Many of my customers tell me that m-Power makes programming fun again.

Of course, if you're interested in improving productivity, then try m-Power. Here's an example of a company that reduced development time by 98% using m-Power.

Monday, April 28, 2008

The next hot IT niche?

Application security has become an increasingly hot topic. It seems like I see new articles on the subject every day. Recently, Microsoft was in the news for putting a feature in Vista designed to annoy users and put pressure on software vendors to make their code more secure.

It seems like they may be on to something. According to an eWeek.com article, “75 percent of attacks are now targeting applications”. The article also speculates that developers who know how to incorporate security into application development will be in high demand, and easily command a higher salary.

You can read the entire eWeek.com article here.>>

If you're interested in developing secure java applications quickly, m-Power makes it easy. Here's a demo site that gives a good example of role based security, one the many security features that can be created with m-Power.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Managing IT Costs in a Weakened Economy--Improving ROI

In good times, 7 out of 10 companies look to keep IT costs down. If the economy weakens, the pressure to make deep cuts will soar. Will your CIO slash jobs or adopt other cost-reduction strategies? What are the best options for making a major difference to the bottom line in such cases.

Here's a quick presentation on improving your ROI through Web initiatives that can provide new areas to make money as well as save money.

If you'd like to learn more about improving your bottom line through Web initiatives, fill out this form.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Easily create "forward filtered" drop-down lists

When building a Web application, you may often find it useful to provide users with selection criteria using drop down lists that are "forward filtered" or dependent on each other.

For example, if you had drop-down menus for state and city, you could make them dependent so that choosing a particular state would repopulate the city drop-down menu to only include the cities in that state.

m-Power makes it incredibly easy to accomplish this. Here's how»

Monday, April 21, 2008

A sophisticated Web-based reporting system built in less than 3 weeks? IT Jungle shows how Boise Cascade pulled it off.

When Boise Cascade's management told them to develop a complex and comprehensive Web-based reporting system that could interface with multiple host systems...and then to do it in just three weeks time...they just about fell over. That deadline would be impossible to meet.

However, despite being short a developer, they not only got it done, but did it well! How? Here's what IT Jungle's reporter uncovered»

Friday, April 18, 2008

7 Top Tech Skills Employers Need

There is always a constant buzz around the hottest new areas of IT, but the savviest IT professionals understand that it's the core specialties that can provide solid career prospects.

Here are 7 Top Tech Skills That Employers Need»

And note #2. Many of our customers began teaching themselves Java application development using m-Power. Here's how one IT manager got started»

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Corporate Darwinism: Using IT to create a competitive advantage

In his latest book, author Jim Champy studied 1,000 companies with double- to triple-digit growth, and then he produced a collection of case studies on the most innovative, growth-charged business models he found.

The common thread? These companies all drew on IT to produce substantial competitive advantages. Here's what else he found»

Saturday, April 12, 2008

What Happened to Easy?

I can remember a while back when “free” meant something. It simply meant you were getting something and paying nothing. No longer. Now there are asterisks and fine print. To say an item is free these days invokes justifiable skepticism and spam filters.

Nothing is free.

A similarly disturbing trend is arising in the web application development world. “Easy” is going the way of “free”. When nearly every product claims to be easy, but nearly all aren’t, “easy” has been relegated to an overused marketing term.

So, what can I say? Is m-Power easy? Read our customer testimonials. Look through all the m-Power demos. Try our online lab.

You be the judge.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Modernization in 5 Practical Steps

This white paper lays out five key practical steps that legacy-based businesses should apply to modernize their systems, and how to do so using Java (much faster than PHP.)

The article demonstrates a practical application of these steps through a carefully detailed case study on how we modernized mrc's character-based mrc-Productivity Series legacy software into the fully Java-based m-Power solution, including all metrics, technologies, and timelines involved.

"Getting to Java in 5 Practical Steps" can be found in our white paper library.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Create a 'splash' for your Web applications

Splash pages are the pages that pop up in Web applications, most often to let the user know that the program is in the process of loading or processing their last request. But there are other areas where incorporating a splash page into your Web application can enhance your business. For example, you can:

  • occupy a customer with useful information about your company's products or services that might interest them while they are waiting
  • alert the user that he/she has submitted a form
  • prevent your user from making the same request twice
  • brand your products (or services) with an advertisement
  • and more! If you know another way that a splash page can enhance your business, please share it in a comment to this post. I would love to hear your feedback.
This tip will help you see how easy it is to implement a splash page with our Web 2.0 reports.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Transfer data between databases in one step.

If your business has applications and business data housed on multiple databases, you know that transferring data between disparate databases can be a frustrating, problem-filled process.

Arduous steps are involved for IT and these steps often lead to transfer errors, impartial or incorrect data, and delays. And, when there are errors, you may not know it. That can spell big trouble for BI, reporting, order fulfillment and inventory management.

This new method gets rid of all of those troubles in just one easy step.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Ad-hoc reports aren't the answer to software package shortfalls. This is.

General Binding Company was in a bind. Their Movex software package didn't have the operational reporting capabilities they required and their IT department was being forced to create ad-hoc reports, taking time away from their more critical IT projects.

GBC knew it needed a better operational reporting system that could tie directly to Movex, but didn't want to make changes to the underlying core software package.

Here's how they did it»

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

20 things you can do in 20 minutes to be more successful

In just 20 minutes there are things you can do that can have a meaningful long-term effect on your IT organization, your career, your technology knowledge, your management skills and your relationship with the business.

I like #4 and #16, but then again, I've always thought asking the right questions is the key to those successes you never knew were possible.

Here's the list»

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