Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009 – What’s New?

It was interesting to visit the Web 2.0 conference last week and see the progress and trends compared to my last year impressions.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• SharePoint is the de-facto standard for Enterprise 2.0 While other vendors have compelling products and features, a CIO that is looking for an internal, comprehensive, secure and maintainable solution has almost only one choice (unless you are on an IBM stack..). Other tools focus on providing point solutions, hosted environments, plugging current SharePoint holes and extending functionality. Microsoft had the biggest and most impressive presence and were heavily promoting the next version SharePoint 2010 that will be launched in the SharePoint conference in October. (Some preliminary details here).
• The field has definitely matured over the last year. There are more case studies and research about usage, benefits and trends although most companies are not sharing explicit ROI numbers. Some vendors have disappeared while others are growing and establishing themselves at a level where they may be considered long term players and safe for the enterprise.
• The experts are still frustrated with the slow rate of adoption and the seeming growing gap between the prevalence of social tools and technologies used by marketing and sales to communicate externally Vs. they almost complete absence internally. The rapid adoption of tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer communication not just in retail but in Healthcare and other industries creates glaring discrepancies where the same companies have no tools internally and sometimes even block their own marketing teams from external use of these tools under some outdated IT policy.
• IT is still not part of the discussion. That is unfortunate because as Steve Wylie, the conference director expressed in a guest post at ZDNET last week, large scale adoptions will not happen without IT.

  “While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board.  Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers.  They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed.  They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT.  With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.”
  

• Tactical view. One of the most frequently asked questions was “what is the best way to get started?”. The pretty universal answer for vendors and corporate users was to approach it in a tactical manner and find a specific business problem you can solve using collaboration tools. Be it an HR portal to boost morale, tools to help virtual project teams work more efficiently, sales best practices portal or any of many other ideas. Define a narrow business case and implement. So far, trying to approach this in a strategic manner makes finding ROI a herculean task and as noted above, puts IT on the defensive. I hope that this trend will start to change as these tactical solutions rarely provide long term sustainable benefits.
• Rise of the Community Manager. The most active forum was the one where the newly created function – community managers shared their challenges and tricks for getting people to take part in the social activity. First, It is great to see that many leading organizations have realized the importance of such a task although many had it as a secondary responsibility they volunteered to do rather than a full time position. Creating and maintaining a vibrant and active internal community requires skill, passion and process and the focus should rightfully be as much on that as on the tools that enable the community.

Additional impressions:

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize

Do you see the recession as an opportunity or are you panicking?

The Dow was down about 200 points earlier this week – is that bad or good? The Dow has been picking up fairly consistently over the past 6 weeks or so and this is probably just an “adjustment” rather than another freefall. Is the glass half empty or is it half full? Many people see the down economy as a time to hunker down, sell off their assets and bury the money in Mason jars or hide it inside their mainframe. But for those with the stomach for it, this down economy brings a lot of opportunities; a lot of bargains.

Any insurance organization looking to improve IT services can find a lot of good deals on hardware, services, and especially back office systems. However, most insurance organizations, because they are intrinsically risk averse, don’t want to spend the money now, but instead wait and see what happens. When things do turn around, they could find themselves behind the curve, rather than leading the way. A lot of companies are looking for band-aids for their IT problems, quick fixes to get them through the storm. Rather than just repairing the mast and patching the hull on your ship, wouldn’t it be better to have a new, stronger, and more stable ship ready for sea when the storm subsides. Or, even better, fully prepared to weather the storm if it continues, and head out for the deadliest catch.

Another benefit to purchasing during a down economy is that as a mid-market carrier, you are likely to get a lot more attention from technology vendors and a better team now because you become a big fish in a little pond, and every customer is extremely important. Because you’re in more of a command position, you can negotiate better services and even more free upgrades because it also becomes an opportunity for the vendor to improve their product.

We’re all confident that the economy will turn around, it’s just a question of when. There are those “economic experts” that say September; those that say next Spring; and more that say Summer 2010. If any of them are right, its really not that long a period of time – about the same amount of time it takes to implement a system.

When it does, your agents, your customers, and most importantly, your prospects, will be there to move forward with you. So talk to technology vendors now, because just like the car companies, prices have come down and there are deals to be had.

The Magic of Mash-ups: Co-browsing

What is co-browsing?

Co-browsing lets multiple users work together in their respective browsers through what look like shared screens and communicate via telepresence including video and audio.  The impact of this technology is enormous as companies become more virtual and the need for serious collaboration increases to be competitive in tough times.  To be able to share, interact and see the body language of your collaborator in real-time without extraordinary downloads to your PC or expensive third party solutions could simply change the way we work.  This innovation comes from not Google, or Yahoo but from IBM in a proof of concept project called Blue Spruce, a Web browser application platform that IBM is working on to allow simultaneous multiuser interactions enabled by AJAX and other standard technologies through the Web browser.

The Blue Spruce project is IBM’s solution to the classic one-window, one-user limitation of current Web browsers.  The application is a mash-up that combines Web conferencing with voice and video and other data forms to let people share content including existing Web widgets – at the same time.  Two different users, possibly anywhere, are able to move their respective mouse pointers around the screen in the browser to click and make changes on the shared application, with the platform enabling concurrent interactions through the browser without disruptions.  Despite the appearance, the co-browsers aren’t actually sharing content. Both collaborators obtained a Web page through the Blue Spruce client, but the “events” enabled by the mouse are what is being sent to the Blue Spruce Co-Web Server.  The idea is that no matter where the two users are in the Internet world, they pick up the general data caches on both personal computers and react to the events.

The applications for co-browsing collaboration are numerous, especially for knowledge workers. In healthcare, IBM has used Blue Spruce to create an online “radiology theatre” product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to “simultaneously discuss and review patients’ medical test data using a Web browser.” The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Boston.  According to IBM, it has created a secure Web site that allows select medical experts at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to access and collaborate on data such as CT scans, MRIs, EKGs and other medical tests. Each medical expert can “talk and be seen through live streaming audio/video through their standard web connection, and have the ability to whiteboard over the Web page as well as input information to the patient’s record.” Basically it is a secure multimedia experience running inside a single browser window, using Blue Spruce as the platform.

It is important to note that Blue Spruce is not your typical “fat client” or downloaded application, but it is a fully browser-based application development platform, currently in development, which is being built on open Web standards. The main feature of Blue Spruce is that it allows for a combination of different Web components – data mashups, high-definition video, audio and graphics – to run simultaneously on the same browser page. It’s important to note that the Radiology Theatre app only requires a standard Web browser – so there’s nothing to download for the end user, in this case, doctors.

This is how IBM described how the new online radiology theatre will work:

 ”A group of doctors can log into a secure Web site at the same time to review and analyze a patient’s recent battery of tests. For instance, a radiologist could use her mouse to circle an area on the CT scan of a lung that needs a closer look. Then using the mouse she could zoom into that scan to enlarge the view for all to see. An expert on lung cancer could use his mouse to show how the spot had changed from the last scan. And then, a pathologist could talk about patient treatments based on spots of that size depending on age and prior health history, paging through clinical data accessible on the site.”

“The theatre allows all these experts to discuss, tag and share information simultaneously, rather than paging through stacks of papers, calling physicians to discuss scan results and then charting the results. This collaborative consultation brings together the personal data, the experts and the clinical data in one physical, visual theatre.” 

The impact on rural medicine and the need for telemedicine for key healthcare experts is significantly advanced with this technology.
Perhaps the biggest potential benefit of the online radiology theatre is that it will enable experts from all over the world to consult on cases. The ability for multiple users to “co-browse” means they can interact in the browser in real-time and see each other’s changes.  Of course, since this is medical data, there are significant privacy implications involved in using the Internet to collaborate.  The time and cost savings from collaboration is important, but better and faster decision making is the key.

The need for inexpensive and minimally invasive techniques for real collaboration over the Internet is real and the backlog of potential applications is fun to consider.  Imagine reviewing your health care or insurance claims with a live person (and their reactions) at the insurance company to reduce cycle time, or collaborating on new product engineering drawings from the U.S. with your Chinese manufacturer.  Imagine the potential for teaching or training with key experts and a worldwide audience using a live whiteboard. Finally, imagine not paying big monthly fees for basic meeting collaboration needs on a daily basis.  Blue Spruce is really a technology to keep an eye on.

Claims Outsourcing Strategy – Managing a Smooth and Seamless Transition

Part 3

The focus of this three part series is to provide insight into managing a smooth and seamless transition for outsourcing claims business processes.  Part 1 concentrates on the upfront gathering of current and future requirements, the Request For Information (“RFI”) and Request For Proposal (“RFP”) process, the selection of the “right” vendor, and a brief on contract negotiation.  Part 2  focuses on  the development, testing, and conversion that takes place between both organizations, and some of the pitfalls to avoid.  Part 3 will focus on maintaining a productive,  long term partnership with your vendor.

One of the biggest pitfalls seen in an outsourcing arrangement is the absence of a true partnership between the client and the vendor.  In the absence of a partnership, the replacement is a customer-vendor relationship.  In this type of relationship the customer is looking for one deal while the vendor is looking for another.  This arrangement creates a lack of trust between both parties involved, that will eventually make the relationship sour because it becomes disconnected from the true business needs and requirements.

Secondary to the partnership but equally as important is the communication between parties.  Communication ensures business interests are aligned and understood. Lack of communication throughout the life of the relationship creates tensions that will definitely hinder future value creation.  Effective and continuous communication ensures both companies are responsive, deal with the facts and not assumptions, keep all stakeholders in the loop, and make decisions in the spirit of a partnership.  Successful outsourcing arrangements, those that last for years, put in place a joint planning process between the client and vendor.  Regularly scheduled joint planning meetings every six (6) to nine (9) months assure that both the client and vendor monitor the health of their relationship.  By continuously reviewing the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of the relationship, agreeing upon recommendations and placing those recommendations into action continually improves the relationship.  

Most often seen in healthy outsourcing relationships is an effective governance methodology or framework.  Both parties must agree early on to operate in a collaborative environment, as noted above.  In the absence of a governance structure, the resulting implications could be devastating.  This could lead to unclear roles and responsibilities between the client and vendor, challenges encountered that are not overcome and linger, problems not resolved in a timely fashion, and unmet expectations . 

Conclusion

The worth of an outsourcing agreement is generated when both companies strike a mutual agreement that forms the foundation for a long term partnership.  When both parties buy into these steps as well as avoid the pitfalls noted, the framework and foundation has been set for a long term successful partnership.  By doing so, both parties have put in place the tools, design, contracts, and methodologies that will ensure success. Failure comes when anyone of the steps are short-changed, missed or are misunderstood by either or both parties involved.  When your company makes that strategic decision to outsource, make sure you make the same decision to be successful by employing these  best practices.

The Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH)

In a recent article released by IBM, an argument is made for a transition in the U.S. healthcare system to a team-based approach based on the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model. A strong case is made from a description of the model, its’ players, technology, and benefits. The critical change that must be established first, though, is the healthcare systems’ evolution to a data-driven system. The access to, higher quality and integration of data, across disparate silos of information, will provide the foundation for this change. Only then can the position of Dr. Douglas Henley, EVP and CEO of the American Academy of Family Physicians, “ A smarter health system is one based in comprehensive patient centered primary care which improves patient/physician communication, the coordination and integration of care, and the quality and cost efficiency of care” be achieved.

The quality and cost of care is what we hear the most about in news headlines. However, the success of each piece of Dr. Henley’s statement is based on the ability of a team of providers to access accurate and updated patient data across care settings and over time in order to proactively suggest lifestyle improvements and reactively diagnose and recommend appropriate treatments.  Fundamentally, each decision maker and operating entity needs a data strategy for how it will achieve the ambitious and often ambiguous goals it likes to claim.

I’ll recite a popular management mantra I’ve heard numerous times, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The healthcare system is a data rich environment. Cleaning, manipulating, and leveraging  the huge volume of data available will become the critical success factors that will enable the linkage between education, research, the delivery of care and its outcomes, to benchmark and monitor the performance of the continuous improvements necessary to bring costs down and quality up.  

Players in the healthcare world will soon find out (if they haven’t already) a principle all those in the data world already know:

• Good data, appropriately aggregated and manipulated, drives accurate information;
• Accurate information is not a luxury that most decision makers have;
• The executives, managers, physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, educators, pharmacists, researchers, and other stakeholders that do have access to accurate information are in a position to leverage and evolve this data and information from satisfying compliance and regulatory requirements to enabling an organizational knowledge-based asset.

Actionable data will drive the improvements that you see scattered across headlines and mentioned in political speeches in the past and no doubt, in the future.

Image courtesy of Texas Family Physician

Claims Outsourcing Strategy – Managing a Smooth and Seamless Transition

Part 2

In Part 1, we focused on creating the core structural foundation of a Claims Outsourcing Strategy:

• gathering the business and technical requirements
• creating a detailed Request For Proposal (“RFP”)
• selecting the correct claims outsourcing vendor
• contract negotiations

In Part 2, we will concentrate on the development, testing and conversion that take place between both companies, identifying some of the pitfalls that can be avoided during this stage.  In Part 3, we will wrap up with a focus on maintaining a strong, healthy partnership.

Development Phase

 Prior to the development phase you should ask yourself as well as your staff the following question:

“What is the best strategic approach that both companies should utilize to obtain optimal success during the development phase?”

Without a key strategy agreed upon by you and your vendor, many unforeseen obstacles will soon be on your door step, obstacles that you’ll need to juggle and resolve. 

One pitfall many organizations fail to identify prior to the start of the development phase is the common “siloed development approach”. Your company works against a set of functional and process requirements specific to your own system to support the outsourcing project.  Your vendor works against another set of functional and process requirements specific to their system.  There is no known intersection of the functional or process requirements between the two companies. By no means is this ever considered the correct strategic approach to take.

 

By strategically working together prior to the development phase, both organizations will find the intersection or “Joint Functional and Process Requirements”, so all three pieces of the puzzle can come together and be managed accordingly.  If you skip these requirements, the puzzle is not complete and managing this process will become a nightmare.

Testing Phase

As with the development phase, a joint strategic approach for testing should be developed and agreed upon prior to testing beginning.  Many organizations fall into one of the biggest known pitfalls – unclear definition of the different phases of testing.  Ask your IT and Business staff as well as your vendor this question:

“What is considered unit testing, system testing, User Acceptance Testing (“UAT”) and Integration testing?”

I promise you this, you will not receive a unified answer from your staff or vendor as to what each phase represents.  Clearly identify in a Testing Strategy Plan what each phase’s primary purpose is, who is responsible for executing the phase within and between both companies, and what is the measurement of success for each phase.

Without a doubt you can utilize the integration concept from the development phase in the testing phase.  Developing test plans to support this process should include resources from both organizations.  Agreement on what is to be tested and who should test will lead to the optimal testing results.  This joint planning should take place early on so that both companies know what is expected of them during this joint testing effort, and have their resources allocated when it come time to start.

Conversion Planning/Execution

Conversion is one area we consistently see that both companies have not spent the quality of time or effort needed to succeed in their conversion efforts.  Conversion of data and files to and from both companies is equally as important as the development and testing efforts.  Yet most companies will spend less time understanding the data and files needed in order to make the transition and outsourcing arrangement successful.

Time and effort must be allocated to analyze and enhance the data to support the outsourcing initiative.  This includes putting a team in place to focus on:

1. Identifying and measuring the data in your systems(s) today — determine the quality of the data or the lack thereof.
2. Identifying a set of data quality rules and targets that must be met prior to the conversion of the data.
3. Designing and implementing data quality improvements processes where needed, that make the data ready for the conversion.

If the correct analysis and time is not spent upfront to understand the data, files, and conversion planning, the project will come to a screeching halt. Prevent this by investing in a detailed Data and Data Quality Assessment.  Figure 1 below depicts at a high level the data process life cycle that companies must take in order to understand, scrub and enhance their data in preparation for a successful conversion to the vendor system(s).

Figure 1

Knowledge-based computing: next generation of business intelligence?

Pablo Picasso once said “Computers are useless.  They only give you answers.”  The truth is that computers have to work very hard to provide answers to what appear to be simple questions.  While we are buried in terabytes, petabytes and exobytes of data – answers and information can be very hard to come by, especially information necessary for serious business decisions.   Data must be viewed in context of a subject area to become information, and analytic techniques must be applied to information in order to create knowledge worthy of taking action.  The challenge is getting data into context within a subject area and applying the right analytic techniques to get “real” answers.

Enter Wolfram Alpha, as an “answer” engine.  Once touted as the next generation of search engine, this web application combines free form natural language input, i.e. simple questions, and dynamically computed results.  Behind the scenes, a series of supercomputers provide linguistic analysis (context for both the question and the answer), ten terabytes of curated data that is constantly being updated, dynamic computation using 50,000 types of algorithms and equations, and computed presentation with 5,000+ types of visual and tabular output.  Sound impressive?  It could easily be a glimpse of the next generation of business intelligence and decision-support systems.

Wolfram Alpha lets you input a query that requires data analysis or computation, and it delivers the results for you. It’s “curated” data is specially prepared for computation— data that’s been hand-selected by experts working with Wolfram, who go through steps to make sure the raw data is tagged semantically and is presented unambiguously and precisely enough that it can be used for accurate computation.  Alpha demonstrates the real power of metadata – data about data, and the importance of semantic tags for categorizing data into a context necessary for providing knowledge and, thus, answers.

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine according to Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Grey.  It is not a replacement for Google.  He says that Alpha is very, very different from a search engine. “Search engines are like reference librarians,” Grey explained. “Reference librarians are good at finding the book you might need, but they’re useless at interpreting the information for you.”  Alpha takes reams of raw information and performs computations using those data.  It produces pages of new information that have never existed on the Internet. “Search engines can’t find an answer for you that a Web page doesn’t have,” Grey explained.

“It’s been a dream of many people for a long time to have a computer that can answer questions,” said Grey. “A lot of people may think of a search engine as that, but if you think about it, what search engines do is an extreme limited subset of that sort of thing.”  Examples of how Alpha can be used today range from solving difficult math equations to doing genetic analysis, examining the historic earnings of public companies, comparing the gross domestic products of different countries, even measuring the caloric content of a meal you plan to make. You can find out what day of the week it was on your birthday, or show the average temperature in your area going back days, months or years.

Wolfram Alpha would make an “ultimate” business intelligence application by computing over an enterprise data warehouse once the data was properly “curated.”  The ability to create knowledge from data, particularly to create actionable answers is what business executives really expect – not prettier presentations.  The only questions left for Alpha are:

1. who can curate your data for you, and
2. how quick can you see Alpha running over your data?

Bust For Big Three Auto Could Be Boom For Warranty Insurance Companies

With the big three US automakers impacted by the recent recession and becoming very unsteady – closing dealerships, factories, laying off workers, discontinuing lines, and possibly even filing chapter 11 – consumers are faced with a conundrum; To buy or not to buy, that is the question.  The only way for automakers and dealers to get out of this mess is to move cars.  However, will consumers want to purchase a car from a company that may not be around long enough to back their warranty, let alone provide service after the warranty has expired?

For those risk averse consumers that still want to take advantage of these “fire sales”, a great way to get that warranty back is to purchase an extended warranty agreement on their vehicle.  These warranty agreements are backed by warranty insurers like Mercury Insurance, a.k.a. Certified Car Care, Great American Insurance, or Federal Insurance, a Chubb company.  An extended warranty essentially replaces or broadens the manufacturers warranty coverage so that consumers do not have to bear the full burden of repair costs to their vehicles.  Just as with any other insurance, each company’s coverages and benefits are different.  Edmunds’ offers a great description of warranty coverage and how to shop for it.  Here’s an excerpt:

Do you have to pay the bill up front and get reimbursed?  Does the company whose plan it is offer any payment to the repair facility via a credit card over the phone so you don’t have to pay any out of pocket expenses?  How easy is the plan to use at the repair facility that will be dealing with it?  Being on the phone, on hold, waiting to get authorization could cause a major delay in getting your vehicle repaired in a timely manner.  Will a representative from the auto warranty company have to come out and inspect the vehicle?  That will also add delays to the repair process.

The automakers misfortune could become an opportunity for warranty insurers.  Assuming premiums remain reasonable, and there’s no reason not to, warranty insurers could see their business quadruple.  For those insurers that have automated their systems for application and claim processing, they will be in good shape to keep up with the large increases in demand and processing requirements.  The departments that cover these types of policies are no where near the size of the bread-and-butter departments like General Liability.  Those insurers that can keep up with the demand with automated functionality for application entry, quote, and issuance, as well as claim submission and adjudication, should become very profitable.  For those companies whose systems are not ready for the bubble, it could become a nightmare threatening the viability of the company due to reputation and service damage.  Once they cannot keep up with the demand, those requests will dramatically decrease and potentially go away completely.

This can also be another opening for frontline agents.  When consumers come in to request auto insurance, agents could seize the opportunity for the up sell and offer warranty insurance to cover that newly purchased US auto, or any auto for that matter.  Most consumers will expect to hold on to vehicles longer, making the warranty insurance coverage a very attractive option.  Agents are probably already representing carriers that offer this coverage and could easily add this arrow to their quiver.

Some interesting M&A Stats

I just took a look at a news item that arrived in my daily  PEHub Wire news roundup: Gotham Consulting Partners’ private equity survey on value creation.  While I’ve only had time for a quick read, three things jumped out at me immediately.

• 6% of the time spent on due diligence is spent on IT systems. This seems low, especially in light of what the rest of the survey says about value creation. A figure of at least 10% would make much more sense for PE firms that are serious about driving operational value creation initiatives.
• Post-merger integration does yield greater than expected results, according to survey respondents. A logical extension of this thought would be to begin integration planning early, to achieve those results as quickly as possible after the close.
• Most firms are relying on standard financial and operational reporting as tools for managing their portfolios.  However, among the more active methods of portfolio management cited, shared purchasing /shared services is the least used among the respondents.  However, a followup question listed shared purchasing/shared services as one of the two active management techniques that yielded better than expected results.

There is a lot of great information in this survey, but at a high level, it points to the need for further changes in approach both before and after deals close. More time spent vetting out risks at a deep level within operations and IT, rapid integration, and new approaches to active portfolio company management could drive these results in a different direction when the 2010 survey rolls around.

Know Your Customer: How Web Analytics can save your IT applications team money

We’ve all dealt with requirements that were written by well-meaning, but technology-confused procurement departments, or business users who believe that people still use the Mosaic Browser (my first graphical browser!). Few authors of quasi-technical requirements put much thought to the actual cost of implementing a modern, rich, dynamic web application on decade-old technology.

A purposely over-the-top hypothetical quote :

The application must support Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+, Netscape 4+ at a minimum graphical resolution of 800×600 pixels.

While you may at first chuckle at this obvious bit of anachronism, think back to the last system requirements you spec’ed out for a web application.

What browsers did you ask to support? Were you shocked when the development team told you you couldn’t have that cool AJAX drop-down because your browsers didn’t support it? Were you suprised when compromises had to be made to the look and feel, or flow of the application? How many users really use those old browsers, anyway? How many of your users do?

“They shoot browsers, don’t they?” — Jeremy Keith

Don’t know the answer? Don’t worry, it’s pretty common. A lot of businesses make requests for web-based applications without first doing internal due diligence to understand their target market. Sure, you can build a web application that settles for the lowest common denominator — but why sacrifice when you might not have to?

Understanding your users’ browsing platform should be one of the first steps to building requirements for projects that involve a significant IT spend on web application development, whether it be enhancements to existing applications, or greenfield development.

Here’s 4 reasons why skipping this important step of due diligence will cost you more money, or users, or attention:

1. You’ll Be Too Conservative. Fearing that you’ll lose the 0.5% of users who may be on Internet Explorer 5.0, you’ll insist (against your CTO’s recommendation) that all users are important, and if it means sacrificing a few bells and whistles, so be it.
2. You’ll Be Too Boring. You’ve heard about rich internet applications, Web 2.0, AJAX? If you’re trying to support these new technologies on browsers that are 5+ years old, forget it.
3. You’ll Spend Too Much. The 80/20 rule will be in full effect when you realize late in the development cycle that no one tested with Netscape 7.2. “But it’s in the requirements document!” cries the project sponsor. Frantic testing will unveil the fact that half the functionality is broken or visually skewed. You fire the designer, and the project goes into a death march to the lowest common denominator.
4. You’ll Be Unhappy with the Final Product. You’re building the web application to replace your mainframe claims processing system. Or your billing system. Or your financial forecasting package. And the final, boring mess will look exactly like what you had on your old green-screen system, except it’s different. Users are complaining that it’s not easy to use, and your CFO is now revisiting your ROI projections. Projects aren’t supposed to end like this… are they?

Fortunately, judicious use of web analytics and good old fashioned business analysis can provide you with concrete data to build a solid foundation of business cases and technical requirements. The chart below illustrates browser market share over the past 9 months:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats, April 2009

You can see that the bulk of market share goes to a very small percentage of very modern and powerful browsers. How can this information help you? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore how up-front legwork in web application development can lead to a happy outcome for all.