Blog of Chinh Tran

1. Be responsive.  "Use a responsive technology framework," . "There are several of these available (we use Bootstrap). "These frameworks are basically simple ways to lay out elements in a grid and then shift that grid based on different screen sizes, so that elements on a large monitor are spaced just as well as they would be on an iPad [or smartphone]," "Frameworks like Bootstrap are open source (free), well documented and very easy to implement." " Responsive is a more unified approach to Web development that allows you to create a similar experience for the user no matter how they are accessing the site (desktop, tablet or smartphone )," 2. Think with your thumb (or index finger). "This is one of the most important tips for any mobile site as you want users to be able to navigate your site with their 'phone hand' without the use of a second hand. Additionally if you have to pinch to zoom, your content is pro...

Gartner Identifies Eight Steps to Build a Compelling Business Case for Social Initiatives Analysts Will Discuss Social Collaboration at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2014, September 15-16, in London IT leaders planning to introduce or extend a collaboration and social software initiative may well need a more compelling business case to present to business leaders, according to Gartner Inc. Gartner has identified eight steps to help gain approval for investment in such initiatives. They involve via dialogue with business leaders and increasing the commitment of stakeholders. "As collaboration and social software initiatives are becoming more costly, complex and risky, IT leaders can't treat them as basic infrastructure rollouts, or simply assume they will benefit the business," said Nikos Drakos, research vice president at Gartner. "They must make a clear business case, setting out the expected costs and business benefits in an appropria...

In the past 20 years or so, manufacturers have been able to reduce waste and variability in their production processes and dramatically improve product quality and yield (the amount of output per unit of input) by implementing lean and Six Sigma programs. However, in certain processing environments—pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and mining, for instance—extreme swings in variability are a fact of life, sometimes even after lean techniques have been applied. Given the sheer number and complexity of production activities that influence yield in these and other industries, manufacturers need a more granular approach to diagnosing and correcting process flaws. Advanced analytics provides just such an approach. Advanced analytics refers to the application of statistics and other mathematical tools to business data in order to assess and improve practices (exhibit). In manufacturing, operations managers can use advanced analytics to take a deep dive into historical process data, identify patt...

Most large companies invest heavily in application development, and they do so for a compelling reason: their future might depend on it. Software spending in the United States jumped from 32 percent of total IT corporate investment in 1990 to almost 60 percent in 20111 as software gradually became critical for almost every company’s performance.2 Yet in our experience, few organizations have a viable means of measuring the output of their application-development projects. Instead, they rely on input-based metrics, such as the hourly cost of developers, variance to budget, or percent of delivery dates achieved. Although these metrics are useful because they indicate the level of effort that goes into application development, these metrics do not truly answer the question: how much software functionality did a team deliver in a given time period? Or, put another way, how productive was the application-development group? Flying blind With big money and possibly the company’s competiti...

Large technology-led transformation programs are important for creating business value and building strategic capabilities across industries. With many organizations spending around 50 percent of their IT budget on application development, the ability to execute software programs faster and at lower cost is essential to success for many transformation projects. However, the quality of execution leaves much to be desired. A joint study by McKinsey and Oxford Uni­versity found that large software projects on average run 66 percent over budget and 33 percent over schedule; as many as 17 percent of projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of the company. Some large-scale application-development projects are particularly challenging because of their complexity and high degree of interdependency among work streams. This category includes development of systems for telecommunications billing, insurance claims, tax payments, and core retail-banking platforms. These proj...

The adoption of IT in healthcare systems has, in general, followed the same pattern as other industries. In the 1950s, when institutions began using new technology to automate highly standardized and repetitive tasks such as accounting and payroll, healthcare payors and other industry stakeholders also began using IT to process vast amounts of statistical data. Twenty years later, the second wave of IT adoption arrived. It did two things: it helped integrate different parts of core processes (manufacturing and HR, for example) within individual organizations, and it supported B2B processes such as supply-chain management for different institutions within and outside individual industries. As for its effects on the healthcare sector, this second wave of IT adoption helped bring about, for example, the electronic health card in Germany. It was also a catalyst for the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in the United States—an effort to promote the adoptio...

July 2014 | by’Tunde Olanrewaju As European consumers move online, retail banks will have to follow. The problem is that most banks aren’t ready. Across Europe, retail banks have digitized only 20 to 40 percent of their processes; 90 percent of European banks invest less than 0.5 percent of their total spending on digital. As a result, most have relatively shallow digital offerings focused on enabling basic customer transactions. Neither customers nor digital upstarts are likely to wait for retail banks to catch up. Recent analysis shows that over the next five years, more than two-thirds of banking customers in Europe are likely to be “self-directed” and highly adapted to the online world. In fact, these same consumers already take great advantage of digital technologies in other industries—booking flights and holidays, buying books and music, and increasingly shopping for groceries and other goods via digital channels. Once a credible digital-banking proposition exists, cust...

IT Director A Director of IT focuses primarily on technology.  The Director may engage people, processes, and projects to move technology forward, but only to the extent that these elements support technology initiatives. For the Director, it is all about the technology first, and everything else is secondary. The Director may engage people, processes, and projects to move technology forward, but only to the extent that these elements support technology initiatives.  For the Director, it is all about the technology first, and everything else is secondary. This perspective leads the IT director to confuse the tool (technology) with the product of the tool. When the IT department values the tool more than the purpose of the tool, its values become misaligned with the values of the overall organization. CIO A Chief Information Officer focuses on people, processes, projects, and technology as a holistic system designed to achieve the mutual interests of the ent...

The Chinese is moving from physical world into digital space. The tradition of giving cash gifts of "lucky money" ("hong bao" in Madarin and "lai see" in Cantonese) goes back centuries and can be particularly lucrative for the young and the unmarried. The tradition is taking a back seat to convenience as more and more lucky money recipients prefer to receive their money via electronic means. The recent study showed that 58% of respondents preferred their hong bao directly deposited into their account. Chine is becoming increasingly connected, over 90% of 18 to 30 year olds own an internet - connected smartphone. As a result, China's internet giants have not been slow to capitalize on this trend. Tencent is launching "New Year Red Envelop" app, an add-on to its phenomenally popular WeChat messaging service. The users can search other lucky money through their profiles, provided both the sender and recipient have signed up to payment service....

What is knowledge management (KM)? Unfortunately, there's no universal definition of knowledge management (KM), just as there's no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it's best to think of KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices. It's important to note that the definition says nothing about technology; while KM is often facilitated by IT, technology by itself is not KM. Think of a golf caddie as a simplified example of a knowledge worker. Good caddies do more than carry clubs and track down wayward balls. When asked, a good caddie will give advice to golfers, such as, "T...

What is ERP? Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn’t live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn’t do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP’s true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs. That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other. That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if compan...