project

All About Information Taxonomies – Yet Another Blog

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Further to the Ark Group presentation on information taxonomies on Wednesday, Ark Group have put forward a moderated forum for the further discussion and comment on Information Taxonomies.

You can click here for further information.

The welcome message is reproduced below:

“Welcome to the Ark Group Taxonomy Forum. Following on from Designing a Business Focused Taxonomy, we felt that it would be useful to start a discussion forum. The way that the discussion and topics progress is entirely up to you – the members.

Ideally, all discussions should be targeted towards particular business issues that you face with your taxonomy project. Please feel free to introduce yourself and organisation and your particular area of interest.”

Special Edition of the Australian Accounting Review: Information Systems Research

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One of the exciting things on the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence’s work plans for this year is a special edition of the Australian Accounting Review. If you don’t know of the AAR (and if you studied an Honours degree in business over the past twenty-five years, you probably should know about it), it is the pre-eminent Australian research journal for accounting and business.

Speaking for myself, I do occasionally get a little twitch in my eye when I think back to all those research papers I had to critique out of the AAR, but I’m getting over that. Honest.

At any rate, a call for papers has been issued, and the response has been very enthusiastic – much better perhaps than we had anticipated, and the editorial committee (Dr John Campbell, Shauna Kelly, and myself) are now finalising the papers that will be included in the special edition.

I will probably will document (OK, definitely will) the launch of the special edition. This is a project I am particularly proud that the COE has been able to bring to fruition, and the quality of the papers that have been submitted – from some of Australia’s foremost researchers – indicates a future need for such a journal. However, at this time, it is a one-off and the COE will review the project to see whether we do this more often – at the moment, I am thinking biannually, but perhaps it’s an annual thing (or if it’s a complete bomb, we’ll call it a success and not repeat the experience).

I suspect the whole “complete bomb” thing is not an option, just on the basis of my reading of the papers I have seen so far. Australian research is a strong thing, and information systems is no less strong than any other area of Australian inventiveness, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. I am looking forward to the final fruition of something we first talked about at least three years ago (when Tony Hayes was the Chair), and if this was the only thing we could achieve, I would have been a happy man. The fact that we’re almost done with our current work program is testament to the dedication and assistance of the people on the COE, on our policy and research advisor Jan Barned, and more particularly on the ability of CPA Australia to attract and foster the abilities of very talented people.

Who do I mean? Well, perhaps you’ll have to beg, borrow or steal a copy of the Special Edition of the Australian Accounting Review: Information Systems Research. I’m sure it’ll be a best-seller.

SAP: Just Look at me Now…

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I have had the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to take a look at what SAP calls its “MySAP All-in-One” solution. All-in-One is essentially the MySAP software combined with the skills, expertise and intellectual property of the business partner/software vendor (disclaimer: my firm, BDO Kendalls, sells, supports and implements the MySAP software, although I don’t personally benefit from the thing).

A few years ago I would have told my clients to run screaming in the other direction (or at least think very, very carefully before proceeding with any ERP, including SAP – particularly after the experience of the Queensland government with SAP). In fact, I once had a good hearty laugh when SAP tendered for a software solution I was advising on – the client’s budget didn’t cover Stage 1.

However, it would seem that the lesson has been learnt, and MySAP’s focus is on delivering business solutions in the context of the customisation required. Time was, a salesperson would glibly state, “yes, that’s possible, just do the customisation” – and somehow completely omitting the phrase “but I don’t know that that’s a particularly smart thing to do because it’s really expensive and adds bugs and makes upgrades difficult and…”.

Of course the difficulties were not always, I think, due to “good” salespeople. Some of my best friends are salespeople. Businesses at one time felt that it was worth the effort to change software to meet their business processes – but neglected to adjust the projected cost by the requisite risk factor.

At any rate, if you are an SME thinking about the possible benefits an ERP can bring, you could do far worse than check out MySAP All-in-One. It’s a rapidly shrinking market since Peoplesoft bought JD Edwards and Oracle bought Peoplesoft – but that’s the way of the world.

SourceForge By The Numbers

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At the presentation on Tuesday night (on the commercial issues of Open Source software) I was asked if it was possible to manipulate the Sourceforge rankings. Unfortunately the website was mostly down at the time, so it wasn’t possible to answer immediately.

However, I have taken a quick look tonight and note that the Sourceforge.net rankings are able to be manipulated if one wanted to do so, as the formula is quite clear. However, as Sourceforge.net notes, those statistics are not the only way by which a project should be assessed. The ranking statistics are a good indicator of the project’s activity level rather than the quality of that activity.

The point should be made that the incentive of an project author to manipulate the rankings process is fairly low given that, in general, the potential monetary gain would be fairly minimal.

Bespoke software? Take two tablets and call me in the morning.

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So far this year I have been to see several clients to review their approach to information systems. Almost all have struggled with the in-house development of software – in many cases a lot of effort has been put into developing in-house software, and although it must have sounded like a good idea at the time, they have come to regret it eventually.

In my humble opinion (and I haven’t really researched this one too much yet) there are usually several factors that end up ensuring that it all turns to tears:

  • It’s far too hard for internal software development staff to say “no” to any request for assistance from other areas within the business (and IT people are usually there to help, so they don’t like disappointing people).
  • Our natural optimism operates to say that to do the development work required will be much easier than it ever actually is. Eventually, we learn.
  • Developing software is really, really interesting. Documenting it and writing down what you did isn’t so easy – and besides, there’s always a new project to get to.
  • My final factor as to why an in-house development approach ends up giving corporate heartburn is that few organisations can afford to provide the real tools that are needed, and support the large development staff necessary to allow people to bounce ideas off each other. The natural evolutionary progression of this is that few good tools are available to the development staff – ergo, staff leave to go to more prosperous waters (and since it was never documented, it’s time to cue the violin music for all that investment that sails into the sunset).

For my clients, I often say to have a Bex and a good lie down before you embark on an internal software development project. And if it still sounds like a good idea tomorrow morning, then you should see your GP (because those symptoms are still persisting).

It’s not that all in-house software development goes to hell in a handbasket, but it is awfully difficult to do internal software development well on any large scale, and to have the discipline and the methodologies available is often beyond the capacity of a lot of my clients here. If you ever do think about writing substantial amounts of bespoke software, be sure to recognise the risks that come with that approach.

I am beginning to wonder if you aren’t better off adapting sometimes an open-source solution that does 80% of what you need for a small commitment of work (and my presentation on Tuesday night, again, talked about some of the issues you might come across there).

Hmm. I suggest I’ll need to write an article on this topic one of these days. Although, maybe I just did that.