Ara 23

Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model

If you deliver training for your team or your organization, then you probably know how important it is to measure its effectiveness.

After all, you don’t want to spend time or money on training that doesn’t provide a good return.

This is where Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model can help you objectively analyze the effectiveness and impact of your training, so that you can improve it in the future.

In this article, we’ll look at each of the Kirkpatrick four levels, and we’ll examine how you can apply the model to evaluate training. We’ll also look at some of the situations where the model may not be useful.

Eki 31

10 Tips for Closing a Sale

If you asked a hundred sales professionals for their best tips on closing a sale, you would get a hundred different responses. You would hear the old school crowd preaching the benefits of the assumptive and Colombo closes. The newer breed would claim that a sale is simply the result of the relationship and rapport that you have built with the customer. While closing techniques are as varied as the sales professionals employing them, there are some tried and true tips to effectively close a sale.

Eki 31

Essential Sales Skills

There are a lot of different ways to approach sales, but they all tend to rely on the same skill set. Note that these are skills, not talents: talents are inborn, but skills are learned. Anyone can learn to be an effective salesperson, and good salespeople can become great ones by honing the following sales skills.

Eki 02

SOA? ESB? What is all this?

Lots of nice articles have been published on the net on both Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Server Bus (ESB). This topic is being discussed quite heavily for last few years but started gaining weight as ESBs started getting more and more matured. To start this series, I am planning to put together information which I found to be very useful when I started working on this project. Some of this information has come from other blogs, company websites (JBOSS, IBM, Cape Clear, BEA, Microsoft etc.). I am planning to add my experiences when we carried out performance analysis of one of the ESB implementations.

Eyl 16

A Day in the life of an Enterprise Architect

Enterprise architecture has grown from being just a set of small pilots to being a fully sponsored and supported initiative within enterprises. With the growing demands to reduce costs, increase agility, and standardize IT environments, there has been a surge of enterprise architecture activity. According to Gartner and the MIT institute the growing complexities that span across process, information and software are among the three top CIO concerns. Additional pressures come from regulatory bodies that impose compliance guidelines on the industry (such as the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 or FFIEC Guidance). Compliance has been a catalyst for the formation of an enterprise architecture practice. This article will walk you through the daily challenges that an enterprise architect faces. By doing so, we hope to provide a unique perspective on this growing role in the IT industry.

Eyl 11

A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies

Twenty years ago, a new field was born that soon came to be known as enterprise architecture. The field initially began to address two problems:

  • System complexity—Organizations were spending more and more money building IT systems; and
  • Poor business alignment—Organizations were finding it more and more difficult to keep those increasingly expensive IT systems aligned with business need.

The bottom line: more cost, less value. These problems, first recognized 20 years ago, have today reached a crisis point. The cost and complexity of IT systems have exponentially increased, while the chances of deriving real value from those systems have dramatically decreased.

Today’s bottom line: even more cost, even less value. Large organizations can no longer afford to ignore these problems. The field of enterprise architecture that 20 years ago seemed quaintly quixotic today seems powerfully prophetic.

Many enterprise-architectural methodologies have come and gone in the last 20 years. At this point, perhaps 90 percent of the field use one of these four methodologies:

  • The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architectures—Although self-described as a framework, is actually more accurately defined as a taxonomy
  • The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF)—Although called a framework, is actually more accurately defined as a process
  • The Federal Enterprise Architecture—Can be viewed as either an implemented enterprise architecture or a proscriptive methodology for creating an enterprise architecture
  • The Gartner Methodology—Can be best described as an enterprise architectural practice

Tem 10

Why do we need model driven architecture (MDA)?

Many organizations have been developing IT software without modeling but there have been various problems in realizing the “requirements to implementation”.

Primary issue continues to be that of communication.

The two keys to solving this problem are

  1. Distinct viewpoints for each stakeholder.
  2. Automated information passing between them.

Business people need to communicate IT requirements in their own terms.

System designers and developers need technical specifications and unambiguous designs.

Tem 08

TEC’s Evaluation Centers

Şirketlerde yazılım satınalma süreçlerinde, teknik ve iş gereksinimlerini oluşturmak ve gereksinimlerin sektör standartlarına uygunluğunu sağlamak her zaman sorun olmuştur. Bu web sitesi (http://www.technologyevaluation.com/store), en basit ifadeyle onlarca farklı kategoride yazılım için RFP ve RFI şablonları satıyor. Yürüttüğümüz proje bütçelerinin, yüzbinlerce hatta milyonlarca dolar olduğu düşünüldüğünde, değerlendirme ve karar verme aşamalarında ciddi anlamda işe yarayacak bu şablonlara birkaç yüz dolar vermek çok da gereksiz olmayacaktır.

Aşağıdaki tipte şablonları sitede bulmak mümkün :

  • Yazılım değerlendirme raporları
  • RFI / RFP şablonları

Aşağıdaki şemada ise, hangi dokümanın hangi süreçte kullanılması gerektiğini açıklamışlar.

evaluation_chart

Tem 04

Difference Between RFP and RFI

Understanding the difference between RFP and RFI can help you make strong selections when you need to outsource. Whether you’ve been outsourcing for a long time and want to find a more distinctive method of choosing contractors for the position, or you’re just getting started, the difference between the request for proposal, and the request for information, can make your job easier.

Haz 24

Protect yourself from the coming cloud crack-up

Here’s how it will play out in many organizations: As the years wear on, line-of-business managers and CMOs will increasingly look outside the organization to find cloud solutions to business problems, either because IT can’t move quickly enough or because self-service Web apps make cloud services so easy to adopt.

Most of that spending will be on so-called systems of engagement, where applications built and hosted in the cloud become the front line of interaction with customers. Public-facing, cloud-based Web and mobile apps will gather gobs of information about customers — and when the quantity of data grows large enough, it will become fodder for big data analytics on the same cloud platform.