Role of technology in business

Welcome! In this blog, I am going to discuss my own experience about how to use technology effectively as business differentiators. It is obvious that good use of technology can create new business opportunities, improve operation efficiencies, contribute to the bottom line and increase competitive advantage.

I am very fortunate to have the chance to work on many business critical initiatives with talented colleagues and managers. I would like to say thank you to everyone that I have worked with. I have picked up tremendous amount of business domain knowledge and have learned about various project and team management styles also.

So, what are the areas I will touch on?

• Significance of different technologies. Without good understanding, we cannot effectively evaluate how and when to use them as tools to create business values.
  
• Project and team management. How to get things done is obviously critical.
• Business domain knowledge. Ultimately, the reward of the hard work of a successful software project is to deliver something important and of good value with respect to the time we spend.
• Something fun about consumer technologies (once in a while!). Recently I am impressed with the iPhone and the Netbook that I purchased. This also shows how quickly technology landscape can change.
  

Everything I am going to write will be based on my own principles and values. I welcome any comments.

Significance of different technologies
This list will change over time. Every couple of years, new buzzwords come up and old ones fade. I will discuss my views on some of these technologies in the future blogs. Java/J2EE, ASP.NET/C#, CGI, Servlets, Struts, Spring, Ruby on Rails, inversion of control, dependency injection, Web 2.0, AJAX, XHTML, multi-processor architecture, concurrency and thread safety, UNIX family (Solaris/Linux/Mac OS X), POSIX, XML, Sybase performance, database normalization, Object Oriented Programming, modeling tools (UML, ER diagrams), SOA, SaaS, Web Services (SOAP, REST), cloud computing, grid computing, ETL, OLAP, OLTP, data warehouse, NAS, SAN, NFS, ext3, 32-bit versus 64-bit computing. Going on and on, you name them.

Project and team management
How do we fairly and objectively size a software project? How do we motivate the whole team and maximize the moral and productivity? When should we use agile, scrum, extreme programming, and traditional waterfall model? What team structure works best to satisfy different functions of business analysis, project management, application development, quality assurance and code migration, support and customer feedback? What about the concept of technical debt? How to help individual team member grow? Company culture and geographic composition of team are also interesting to understand.

Business domain knowledge
Are we using a technology because it is cool? Remember when everyone wants to use EJB? We need to be able to explain why a particular technology is the best tool to a business problem. Without a deep understanding on what we want to achieve and why we are doing it, we may focus our energy and precious time ineffectively. We can get the best technical expert in tuning the performance of a complex database and queries, but do we need all the data, and can we optimized the amount of data? What is the impact and fallback plan if we do not get the latest pricing for some exotic products versus pricing for some very common stocks? How will portfolio margining help the business? I might also write on industry specific news and their technology implications.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read my first blog. Please let me know if you have any feedback.

Sincerely,

Timur King