Overview

Commercial off the shelf (COTS) or line of business (LOB) applications can provide a 60%-80% solution for your business. In many cases, such as accounting, salesforce automation or CRM software, this is sufficient. However, your business is unique and therefore there are certain times when the expense is justified to go the extra mile and develop a custom software package. This is a decision that must be carefully planned and executed. Like other IT services, programming is a process. It must be fully committed to because as your business grows and adapts, so too must your software.

Methodology

The primary tenet of IT management is that there are no IT initiatives, there are only business initiatives which require IT support. Nowhere is this more clear that with software development. Software projects frequently involve radical change within an organization. It is essential to the initiative to not only clearly define the project objective, scope and requirements, but to also have user involvement and stakeholder (business process owner) buy-in. By accomplishing this, the project has a significantly better chance of success.

Business Intelligence

A business intelligence (BI) system runs on a data warehouse. These systems collectively represent the top-level of information within your organization. The data warehouse catalogs the key data from your other production systems and provides for trend analysis, pivot-table analysis, data mining and "what-if" scenarios. The BI system repackages this information into a visual decision support system. This enables senior executives to see the business and how it is performing extreemely clearly. A balanced scorecard, for example, can provide a complete high-level view of your business on a single screen.

Development Tools

We have found that Microsoft has been able to consistently provide software development tools and server software which enables the SMB segment to design and leverage the same type of systems that enterprise organizations use. We augment their tools and platforms, as needed, with additional controls which provide advanced automation features or enhanced user interaction. Our primary toolset includes:

• Microsoft Access
• .Net Framework 2.0/3.5/4.0
• ASP.Net
• AJAX
• Crystal Reports
• Dundas Charts
• Infragistics Controls
• TX Text Control
• SQL Server 2005/2008
• SharePoint
• PerformancePoint