Business benefits derived from COMPAS Commander's technology

In a word: agility.
 
 A list of technologies (benefits of each appear below)
  • Industry-standard, leading-edge desktop and small business server platform=no obsolescence.
  • Full-strength scalable relational database enables flexibility and data mining.
  • Data, more importantly information, can be exchanged very easily with anybody.
  • Standardized and unified development framework makes development faster/cheaper.
 Introduction


The point to talk about in the context of "what’s in it for me, the businessman" is .NET, not VB or even VB.NET. Microsoft de-emphasizes the languages and emphasizes the "frameworks." The current generation of .NET is one milestone (or plateau) on a path Microsoft has been walking for several years.

The rest of the industry also walks much of the same path. Microsoft didn’t invent many of the concepts, but it has been in the forefront of making them real and valuable instead of remaining concepts. They’ve done this by delivering tools and techniques that let AIMS use the concepts in real-world business applications, rather than in academic computer-science exercises or multi-vendor consortia or committees that never agree on anything until it’s already obsolete. Microsoft takes a lot of flak from academics and "purists" of various sorts because they often rush things to market before the philosophical framework is all resolved and before the problems have all been thought through and resolved.

The key concept for any business today is "unpredictable change." There’s a saying: "Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans." We all know that things are going to change, and will change, in ways that we very seldom see coming. To survive, the business manager must know that this unpredictable change WILL happen, and he must accept change and keep operating. To be successful, the business manager must plan on change: anticipate it, prepare for it even without knowing what it will be, and adapt to it faster than his competitors. To become wealthy, the business manager must use change. Not solely adapt to it or even embrace it, but make it a key factor in business plans - still without knowing what the change will be. One facet of this is recognizing when one’s competition does NOT see a change coming that you have already begun to anticipate.  
 
 How "unpredictable change" applies to COMPAS Commander


On the technology front, this means that you can’t afford to be limited by your technology. Long gone are the days when you bought hardware, software and service all from IBM, when every computing device in your place of business came from the same manufacturer and worked the same way. Gone too are the days of being tied to one operating system and ONLY being able to exchange data with the same operating system. More recently eliminated is the need to commit to one programming language and do everything in that language. And MOST recently, the need to have data delivered/consumed through one channel or one kind of architecture has been done away with. "Fat client", "thin client", "web client", "terminal server" - they ALL have appropriate roles to play. This has at times been billed as "Open Systems." But when Microsoft started getting proficient at this open architecture, the Open Systems academics objected to this use of "their" term. That is when it became referred to as a "best of breed" approach. This last term was mostly marketed by systems integration vendors who picked the best of breed, in their experience, and stapled it all together for customers.

And NOW on the chopping block is the dependence on any particular "framework" or "platform" technology. All proprietary, open, or home-grown tools and techniques have had their place at varying times, in addressing the need to embrace change and make The Next Thing part of our business plan.

AIMS’ business decision in favor of using the Microsoft .NET platform was made for only two reasons of importance:
a)  AIMS needed to make a decision and get started, and not expend undue effort in making a perfect decision.
b)  It is the industry leader. It is stable, enduring, and clearly full-featured and robust enough for the purpose.
 
 Technology Benefits in COMPAS Commander

First – the Windows platform, including the operating system and the tools, features, and support that come with it. It is the industry standard for desktop and small-office computing. If you need a Windows expert for something, you can find him or her. If you need Windows-specific training for your people, you can get it. If you need a program to do XYZ, where XYZ involves a brand-new type of device that just started becoming available from serious vendors for serious business use, there’s a Windows interface for it. Microsoft is going to be there and is going to support their customers. Yes, you’ll have to buy upgrades. Did you think that support and improvements came with no cost? Sorry, not on this planet. Reliability? Talk to people who’ve been using Windows NT for years. Not the toy stuff: 3.0, 95, 98, ME. Not people playing games and hooking up antique frobnitz drivers. From 1993 it’s been clear: NT and Windows 2000 (and now XP Pro) are true business-grade platforms, and they’ve been VERY reliable.

Second – AIMS built Commander around a full relational database – SQL Server. SQL Server is a good one. It provides open and direct access through any of several tools — not all provided by Microsoft. Microsoft is seriously determined to make it a full-scale competitor for Oracle in the data center for both performance and reliability/manageability, which will only bring benefit to smaller installations. Frankly, the design would work on any SQL relational database (though the implementation details make it difficult to change from one to another). AIMS uses the SQL Server database itself to document the database. The database is incredibly central to the concept of flexibility- the data isn’t just in the form that Commander happened to need it, it’s just THERE. The database tools allow knowledgeable people to look at things in ways and in combinations nobody ever thought of when the system was being designed. We have barely touched on the topic yet - the industry has been moving to data mining tools for several years, and relatively inexpensive stuff comes with SQL Server (Enterprise version). These tools are getting closer all the time to being something a sophisticated business manager could use for himself: to look at his business data in ways that are meaningful only because of HIS insight on HIS business data, to learn things, to predict change and grow.

Third – communication of the data from anything to anything, in any way that it’s useful, really enables sharing of information (not just data) with various stakeholders. XML is an underlying technology for exchanging data. AIMS has already seen and made use of XML with COMPAS version 8.0. The .NET framework makes it almost trivially easy (in a relative sense) to import data from suppliers, customers, etc. - and vice-versa using XML. Technical improvements in the schema aspect should make the experiences AIMS has had in interpreting the data format less troublesome and less subject to human error. PDAs and bar-code scanning for warehouse inventory, meter scanning on transport trailers, grocery inventory at C-stores, all the devices and interconnections are already supported via XML and .NET and Windows. Hooking it all up is JAMOS - "Just A Matter Of Software".

Fourth - more consistent and easier programming. There is a good reason so much of Microsoft’s hype about .NET focuses on developers. Making tasks simpler for programmers means the business owner can get new things done a) faster and therefore either b) cheaper or c) get more done for the same money. Desktop, laptop, handheld, cell phone, wrist TV? LAN, WAN, dialup, VPN, wireless? They all "look" pretty much the same to the programmer leveraging the .NET framework. The .NET programmers learn a few concepts and they can use all of them. There is a shorter learning curve with Microsoft than any other programming environment yet. Some tasks are still hard and technical and take a long time. Many of those are the tasks that used to come under the heading of "impossible" or "never in a million years" on other platforms, or with other tools, or in other decades.

And this trickles up to end-users. You’ve seen what some people do with Excel to massage and present data. With a few keystrokes, Excel has access to all the business data in the SQL Server database. And so does Pocket Excel on a palmtop using a wireless cellular connection from out in the Ozarks somewhere, where your salesperson needs to make a deal.

 Data Security

All of this great data access is pretty frightening when you think about just anybody getting access. This is a complex topic with many important sub-parts that really deserves a paper of its own, but a few words here: There have been well-discussed issues with Microsoft security systems. Why do you suppose that is? Microsoft systems are the most-explored, most-attacked in the world. Nobody has a perfect bug-free security record, and Microsoft has established a track record of finding problems and fixing them fast. And Microsoft has the world’s leading system for distributing fixes and updates painlessly. What Microsoft NT and .NET does provide is a whole suite of well-documented, consistent tools for applying and maintaining security, without needing a bunch of add-ons. AIMS uses the simpler of the two VPN solutions provided in-the-box with Windows2000 to secure Commander. No add-ons or other vendors are needed. Commander ties in with and utilizes the inherent Windows user identification/authorization system, with specific details for our application (e.g. who is authorized to approve credit limit override, and by how much).
 

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