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Thoroughly Modern: The Smart Approach to Modernization – Know Before You Go!
September 14, 2020 Daniel Crépeau
In today’s rapidly changing digital economy, the ability to keep up, compete and quickly adapt is critical. Every industry, from transportation and logistics to banking, retail, insurance and even manufacturing, is facing business challenges that are forcing them to think about how they can manage change and be ready when disruption occurs.
Like many others, your organization probably had to evaluate how your systems could adapt to the changes that occurred over the past several months. Here’s an example that you might have seen in your own neighborhood: Restaurant #1 has been developing the ability for customers to place orders …
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Thoroughly Modern: Strategic Things to Consider With APIs and IBM i
August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The great thing about application programming interfaces is that many of the ways that programmers need to interact with system and application software are predefined and allow for consistent access to features and functions as well as data. To a certain extent, the APIs are what make such software useful. The API describes how the interface works, and libraries (in the sense of the software market at large, not the OS/400 and IBM i definition of that word) are developed to implement the functionality of the interface.
The fun bit is that not only system software makers like IBM get …
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Thoroughly Modern: Why You Need An IT Strategy And Roadmap
July 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What makes a modernization project successful? Is it the right software and tools? Having the right people on the job? Completing the project on time and on budget? Some might argue that all of the above contribute to the overall success of these initiatives. But the experts at Fresche will tell you that building a comprehensive strategy and roadmap is the most important part. It’s the secret sauce that ensures that the project provides business value and that requirements are mapped out before you start. After all, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Businesses today are facing increasing pressure …
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Thoroughly Modern: Top Five Reasons To Go Paperless With IBM i Forms
June 8, 2020 Stephen Flaherty
As offices closed and employees began working from home earlier this year, a significant challenge arose for companies that rely on printed spool files and IBM i documents. If employees were not in the office with access to a printer, how would they get checks, invoices and other documents to the people who need them? IT departments were already scrambling to enable employees to work remotely, and suddenly they were faced with the urgent need to electronically distribute documents.
A lot of organizations weren’t prepared to change the way they do business overnight and much of this burden fell on …
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Thoroughly Modern: Quick Digital Transformation Wins With Web And Mobile IBM i Apps
May 27, 2020 Kevin Cronin
The future of IT no longer involves hiding in the basement and pushing buttons. In today’s digital economy, the role of IT – and IBM i – is critical. Internal users and customers are demanding modern, intuitive applications that are easy to access. If you’re an IT leader, you’re likely meeting with business stakeholders, discussing how you can grow and improve your business, and looking at what’s available to satisfy those needs.
As my colleagues have discussed in previous installments of this column, failing to innovate in your market could put your business at risk. Digital disruption is happening …
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Thoroughly Modern: Digital Modernization, But Not At Any Cost
May 11, 2020 Daniel Crépeau
There is a lot of discussion around digital transformation, and for good reason: Digital companies are typically 26 percent more profitable than those that don’t have digitized and transformation management capability. However, according to a recent study conducted by Harvard Business Review, even though businesses spent $1.3 trillion on digital transformation last year, 70 percent of those investments went to waste.
Organizations don’t have the resources or budget to take on large-scale transformation projects that are doomed to fail. In most cases, resources are limited even though the very future of these companies depends on the success of these …
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Thoroughly Modern: Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever
April 15, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are very few things in life that don’t have some kind of distribution across behavior patterns. Some phenomena are driven by bell curves or inverted bell curves or some other kind of distribution – including random. And as such, we all know that the companies that comprise the IBM i base fall on different parts of the spectrum of behavior with regard to how up to date their systems and their applications are.
In normal markets, where some of the pressures are not so intense, it might not matter as much to have a modern system, software, and application …
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Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand
March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.
In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten incredibly more powerful. But …
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Thoroughly Modern: Resizing Application Fields Presents Big Challenges
February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It sounds so simple. You need to change the size of one or more fields in one or more applications. How hard can that be? Quite time consuming and labor intensive, as it turns out, if you don’t do it right. To get a sense of the issues that companies face as they tweak the fields in their applications, we sat down with Ray Everhart, a product manager at Fresche Solutions, who knows a thing or two about this issue after many decades in the field.
Timothy Prickett Morgan: Can you tell us a little bit about your experience in …
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Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers
January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing today.
Timothy Prickett Morgan: …
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