#it processes

Small businesses will often look to build their own websites in order to reduce costs. There are a myriad of solutions available to choose from and business owners are struggling to select a platform they are comfortable with.

Nearly 25 percent of DIY website builder users – those that use platforms like Squarespace and Wix – say their biggest challenge is getting started and knowing which web builder provider to use. Making these initial selections is more difficult than any functional aspects of the web building tools themselves. Once DIYers do navigate through the many web building options and select one, most strive to continuously improve their website through investing time and money. This data comes from a new survey from Clutch, a research and reviews platform for business services.

“Finding the most ideal web builder and technology platform can be difficult, so the best thing to do is work backwards,” says Michael Gaizutis, Founder of RNO1, a web design company. “Map out what solutions you need out of your web builder, and from there match that to the functionality and needs that align with what you’d like to bring to life.”

Recent events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have thrown the spotlight on issues concerning the protection of personal information online.

With the GDPR now in force, consumers and internet users originating from or based in the European Union (EU) now have a greater measure of privacy protection and control over how commercial organizations and data collectors/processors access their personal information – online, and through a range of other methods on the ground.

Privacy and data-handling laws in many other parts of the world have been amended to keep pace, and to give companies in those areas that do business with the EU a better chance of remaining competitive.

Why an Agile Mindset Beats Agile Methodologies Hands Down - IT Chronicles

IT Requires Committed Business Leadership - ITChronicles

One of the Open Space sessions at the DevOpsDays event in Riga in September 2017 was “Business-IT relationships”. Seeing as this is one of my enduring interests, I couldn’t resist attending. The guy who proposed the topic explained that it was born out of frustration with his dealings with business people. In order to get a better grip on the situation, I suggested that we identified the kind of behaviour that IT people would like to see from their business partners. The group came up with the following required improvements:

Give IT people a first-hand understanding of what actually happens in business operations

Share the overarching strategy

Share the stakeholders and their interests

Share the business case so that IT understand the desired outcomes

Specify the requirements clearly

Set the priorities

Provide enough budget

Contribute actively during the process, e.g. testing

Provide fast, frequent and good feedback

Business involvement

Do Laws of Motion Apply to Organizational Behavior? - ITChronicles

A recent discussion with a few names you might recognize if you are in the ITSM space started with whether DevOps was sustainable after the consultants went home. Some time ago it occurred to me that Newton’s Laws of Motion seem to apply pretty well to human behavior, so I ventured the following:

“Actually, I think you could state ‘Is anything sustainable without something powering/guiding it in the chosen direction?’ Behavior is a bit like the ‘object in motion’, which tends to stay in motion (a constant velocity) unless acted on by some force. Once acted on, the behavior will accelerate or decelerate in response to the force; so as long as the ‘force’ (or consultant, or management, etc.) is acting, you get a chance. Of course, there are many ‘forces’ at work that influence behavior, and which (forces) dominate tend to be fluid and dependent on individuals themselves as well. And of course, have to mention that 3rd law, in which every action produces an equal and opposite reaction — and even if they are stealthy about it, you can be sure there are people finding ways around your chosen direction, no matter how good the business believes it is…”

When that got a thumbs up from a certain IT Skeptic, I knew it must be worth exploring further…

For those of you not familiar with Newtonian mechanics, the ‘laws’ are (from Encyclopædia Britannica, one of many translations of the original 1687 publication, in Latin, of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica):

First Law — if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force.

Second Law — the time rate of change of the momentum of a body is equal in both magnitude and direction to the force imposed on it.

Third Law — when two bodies interact, they apply forces to one another that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Cognizant Launches New Digital Business "Collaboratory" - ITChronicles