Information Architecture » Software

Data centralization

martin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:27:56 +0000

I read an interesting article about how the pendulum is swinging back to centralization of IT resources. Two of the most important results are an increased effectiveness in decision rights – the way technology investment decisions are made – and in information flows from IT to the rest of the business. This is related to, but not identical to some of the observations I’ve been making in this blog. With centralized data, everyone can see the same information as it

User data and web service constraints

martin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:57:30 +0000

Cloud computing is so big these days that I’m even getting emails from more or less reputable organizations imploring me to jump on the bandwagon and get rich off this latest fad. Clearly we’re well on our way if not already in the trough of disillusionment. As we pull out of the trough, we will have to deal with some very challenging issues – both technical and economic. On the technical side, I’ve been dealing with an interesting aspect of

Two paths to reducing complexity in your data model

martin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:56:28 +0000

The decision of whether to add data to the database - in effect, denormalizing it to some extent - is partly informed by the need to reduce the overall complexity. As with the internet and the Charles proxy, the ability to see the raw data is always

Selecting open source software

martin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:32:18 +0000

Open source software is not free. It costs time and money to evaluate the available packages and evaluate licenses, and when you use open-source software you take on greater risk than if you developed the code in-house or purchased it from a