Yet another IT project demanding a bigger budget !

Online, September 3, 2009 (Newswire.com) - You let out a sigh and remember with a certain nostalgia your company's first information system. With a reasonable investment, you computerized some of your business processes, and gained in productivity.

But your company has now evolved, and although a good portion of the system still meets your needs, you wish to modify or replace some part of it. Nothing major.

You are not an IT specialist, but you think that in 2009, it should not cost a lot to connect your e-commerce website with your inventory system.

But no! You are told that it will be a complex job.

A little discouraged you call upon the supplier who sold you the system. He has also evolved, but not necessarily in the same direction as you! Perhaps he modified his service offering, discontinued his product, was acquired by a competitor or quite simply disappeared from the market. Bottom line : he cannot modify his product, or demands a fortune to do so.

Does this story sound familiar? It can be told (with some variation) by almost any company after a few years.

Do you really control your information system ?

For better or worse, most information systems are designed as tightly integrated wholes, using technologies that are often cumbersome and exclusive to a particular supplier.

You are now locked into the technological choices of the system where interconnection is concerned. If you want to modify it, perhaps you do not even have the right (legally) to do so without calling upon the supplier or a small set of authorized companies. If you choose to replace the entire system, it is unsure that you can recover all of your data without losing information.

By putting all your eggs in the same basket, on the technological level as well as in terms of supplier choice, it becomes difficult to adapt to unforeseeable changes at a reasonable price.

Can you avoid this trap ?

One can largely minimize the obstacles related to changes of supplier, technological migrations and the integration of new functionalities by heeding the following advice :

Avoid building monolithic systems

Apply the loose coupling philosophy. By designing your information system as a series of independent systems communicating with each other through clearly-defined and easy-to-test interfaces, you can change a component of the system at a lower cost and minimize the risk of weakening another.

Demand the use of open standards

In France, they are defined by law as :

« ... any communication, interconnection or exchange protocol and any interoperable data format with technical specifications publicly available and with no access and usage restriction. ».

Using open standards for communications between your internal systems ensures that, in future, you can connect your systems to those made by different suppliers. They also give you the option of accessing your data with the tools of your choice.

Use free software wherever possible

Free software is software licensed such that it respects 4 fundamental freedoms (excerpt from Wikipedia):
* The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. Access to the source code is a precondition.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition.

This way, the original supplier cannot prevent you from working with another company to modify a component of your system.

These are proven approaches; the Internet as we know it would not exist without them. It is up to you to use them to your full advantage.