The Low-code Conundrum – Balancing Low-code Productivity with Engineering Best Practice

Companies undertaking digital transformation projects with new, low-code development tools face significant challenges. Especially true when the new applications need to integrate with critical databases associated with Line of Business (LOB) applications. Choosing the right tooling and planning ahead can smooth the digital transformation journey. Most of us who have worked in software engineering for … …

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5 Reasons You’ll Fall in Love with Application Development (Again)

With a seemingly endless list of programming tools, languages and platforms, some tech types consider today the golden age of software development. The freedom to choose from such an expansive menu of sophisticated languages and frameworks – Java, JavaScript, HTML5, Python, Rust, Ruby, Swift, Java, PHP, Node, Kotlin, MEAN, C#, Perl, .NET, Bootstrap and Pure.CSS, just … …

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Imagine the Power of One Language

I’ll ask the reader to at least temporarily suspend feelings and thoughts of politics, culture and religion. And, you should cue John Lennon’s “Imagine” to set the scene. Okay, thank you! Please sit down and take a deep breath. Let’s drift off to the land of imagination for a few moments. Imagine if the whole … …

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Quick! It’s High Time to Get GDPR Compliant

So, you’ve been swamped with massive application backlogs and haven’t been able to dig into understanding the requirements of GDPR.  After all, the legislation won’t go into effect until mid-2018, and you’ve been running against so many other mission-critical business deadlines that have been much tighter than GDPR. But wait! It’s only five months away … …

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IT Strikes Back

Our saga begins in a company, not so far away, where a federation of end-users from all corners of the organization is unhappy with its IT department. They want more apps, better representation during the design phase, and faster delivery. IT, which is currently handcuffed by constantly changing technologies, can’t seem to do anything right … …

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Faster and Cheaper by going IT alone

Paradigm Housing Group is one of the leading housing providers in the South East of England, managing over 14,000 homes across 33 UK local authorities. When we started over 20 years ago, we already knew that we would have to build a number of systems in-house because, as the first large-scale voluntary transfer (LSVT) in … …

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Why Don’t Users Ever Know What They Want?

Why Don’t Users Ever Know What They Want?

We’ve all been there. In the heat of an IT project – be it greenfield, modernization or just a little “tweak” – users provide you with their requirements. Everything seems to be so clear and obvious that you write up the specifications for the user, and they say it looks great. The project continues, and … …

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The Code Generation Dilemma

The Code Generation Dilemma

“That’s great, but what do you generate?” We hear this a lot at LANSA from prospects.  Companies are scared to death to move to something which doesn’t generate C#, or PHP, or even RPG.  Here’s the problem: they’re looking in the wrong direction.  I’ve seen advertisements for ‘low-code’ development environments. One vendor even espoused that … …

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IT Innovation

8 Principles of the Innovator’s Way

Evolving From the IT Cost Center to the IT Innovator (The original article appears in IBM System Magazine Power Systems) While attending a conference, I engaged with attendees of an IT management track session. The exchange quickly turned interesting when we discussed a few key questions that most of us responsible for IT systems should … …

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