Facebook, Wikipedia, the photo sharing site Flickr and others are household names, crucial resources in people’s daily lives. These web applications have vibrant development communities extending their core functionalities, building greater value and encouraging even wider adoption. Application development in much of higher education has been slow to adopt the successful technologies and strategies used by these leading web companies. But with the maturing of key technologies, rise in user expectations, and cost sensitivity brought on by the current economic crisis the time is now. Corporate, or in the higher-ed world central IT units need to start learning from, and adopting these practices.
Today’s innovative web-based applications share a common design approach including:
Consider these examples:
In all cases these technologies have proven themselves to be secure, robust and flexible enough to support rapid innovation to meet the needs of their communities. As we look to the future, accessible technologies such as MySQL and PHP need to become a significant part of the application development landscape. One big centrally hosted commercial ’solution’ isn’t going to cut it. Many smaller applications, locally hosted, loosley joined, sharing a common technology base (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and a common design approach (open-source, pluggable architectures, incremental development) is not just the wave of the future — it is the road to success now. I’m not quite sure how we get there, but I’m convinced we need to start walking…
Grass-Roots IT – Business Center – PC World
…from the start, Obama’s big advantage was his grass-roots army of millions of local volunteers who were actively engaged, not watching from the sidelines. Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of advantage for your IT projects? Especially now, when business conditions are lousy, money is hard to come by, and there’s no margin for error? You can, sort of. You can’t get millions of volunteers — but you can recruit a small army of users in the business units you serve. They won’t knock on doors for you. But from the start, they can help define projects, promote them and keep them on track to success.
Techworld – Corporate IT Can Learn a Lot From Web 2.0 Coders
Quick, incremental updates, along with heavy user involvement, are key characteristics of an emerging software development paradigm championed by a new generation of Web 2.0 start-ups.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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