Program by Day

A recent IBM study makes the argument that the health, competitive power, and even survival of an enterprise largely depends on its ability to harness the power of knowledge workers by enabling them to take responsibility for providing their own solutions to their business needs. These solutions, which IBM calls “situational applications” (SA’s), solve immediate business challenges in a cost-effective way by addressing the situation at hand. SA’s are usually created for a small group of users with specific needs, rather than for a generic set of “users”. The applications may have a short life span, or may continue to evolve to accommodate changes in the user’s environment. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the situational application altogether – in some cases it is just easier to develop a new one than to evolve the one in use.

These types of applications have been generally inaccessible because software has been too difficult to write, too costly to implement, and too brittle to customize and maintain once deployed. Cloud computing has spawned a new wave of tools that effectively address these problems. These tools empower business users closest to the problems being solved to quickly build full-featured collaborative business applications online and immediately deploy those applications to the appropriate people both inside and outside their organization. They significantly reduce or even eliminate the need to hire professional software developers, requisition (and wait for) a new software purchase or development project from IT, or piece together a messy and incomplete solution using tools like Excel and email. Far removed from the traditional controlled environment of corporate applications, this will address areas that were previously unaffordable or of low priority to the IT department, and lead to new opportunities for improving efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

This presentation provides an introduction to understanding and leveraging this new technology, including a review of:

The situational mindset and methodology
Situational platforms and tools
The role of IT
New opportunities for businesses, consultants and entrepreneurs

The target audience includes:

Executive Management - How will SA’s reduce time to market for new solutions, improve the organizations overall productivity, and increase return on IT investment?
Departmental Managers - How will SA’s help me improve my departments productivity and effectiveness?
Business Professionals - How will SA’s provide me with better tools to do my job more effectively?
IT Management - How will SA’s reduce the amount of effort and risk required to build solutions, and how will it allow me to service my user base more effectively?
IT Professionals - How will SA’s make me a more productive and therefore more valuable member of the organization?
Business consultants - How can SA’s help me improve my client’s organizations, and allow me to expand my service offerings?
Systems Integrators - How can I take advantage of SA’s to help my clients and increase my revenue?
Entrepreneurs - How can SA’s help me build my new business, and what opportunities do they offer to create new business opportunities?