Objective Action on E-Business

Credit Crunch

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:53:00+0100

So what is really going on? Its clear the financial institutions are in much deeper brown stuff than either they or their governments care to admit. Its a case of releasing the bad news when and only when they can't conceal it any more. How is this going to affect that sector on industry that we are most interested in. Well the pain is going to continue to be felt in the retail sector. The large stores and those with established clicks and mortar are going to survive, but in a different format. The property companies that own the sites are predicting a 20% rate on empty property, even the charity shops are no longer looking for space. Retail apparently makes its real money on a 10% of its sales that occur late in the year preceding and just after christmas. A large section of this business in 2008 and early 2009 went online. This percentage will mean the end of may retailers. So, more online purchases seems to be the way, from the Amazon range to Tesco Delivery, holidays and travel. The typical high street has a few anchor stores, Boots, M&S, & W Smith, followed by Opticians, Banks, Phone Shops and Fast Food. We no longer have the Butcher, Baker, Fishmonger, Hardware, Proper Bookshop and Coffee. When the high street cull starts to happen the income from Business Rates will fall, this decline along with the fall in other government income will be felt in town hall. Their income will fall and have to be made up from other sources. Look out for more charges levied by local authorities, these will require IT solutions

Budget Statement

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:25:00+0100

Well its all smoke and mirrors, there was no call to take the culprits and find a convienient wall to stand them against. It seems the decision is made to pump some money into the economy in the hope we will go out and spend it.

Seems a bit strange, the Banks want to rebuild their balance sheets (again Remember Argentina), Hopefully this time the Bank of England will give the FSA back its teeth and allow them to get on with the job. Perhaps someone will remember IOS and the Real Estate Fund of America, also cases where the lesson learnt would make it the last time.

It will never be the last time but with the financial markets in turmoil the last thing we need is another fund forcing the state to play in the casino.

Community Groups

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:37:00+0100

We have a system for community groups called ActivityForum this system is used by lots of membership organisations that want an affordable membership system. The emphasis being on affordable, for those of you to young to remember it was the Man Freddie Laker who refused to use the word CHEAP and insisted the right word is always affordable.

So how do you make a product affordable? well simply put it has to be within the purchasers budget. Of course then you have to consider what you get when you travel on an affordable airline, Laker is long gone, pushed out of business by the competition, however others have survived and here we see a different tactic developing, this is carry on your bags or pay, food at high cost, in otherwords the add on extras. Air travel, Would you be wanting Wings with that, spring to mind.

Back to ActivityForum, we built the system to provide all the basics and more, no frustration at having all the membership data and not being able to use it. We have made it both affordable and budget.....

In the last month we have added new features for sailing clubs, these new features make it affordable, with the added benefit of easier management of Winter storage.

This feature uses the concept of an asset which has properties of a calendar and a price. Once you accept this you can then rent it out, for the Winter just like a parking space. Except it would sink!

Will the housing crisis change the nature of Estate Agents

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:18:00+0100
No They will change but its their local knowledge that counts, its probably the only bit of little old England that is still a deal in the making. Its the IT bits that will change, search engines have made all the difference to the high street shops and the insurance market. Now its the time for the bigger packages such as houses. The sellers know its better to go through an agent, the buyer spends their time visiting agents to get on the inside track, except at the moment there is no inside track. Anyone thinking of taking a £250,000 morgage on a property that next year will be 10% cheaper will be paying £25,000 interest over a 25 year term.It will cost an extra £37K Go and rent. For the IT providers the message is for a slick and fast deal, this means streamlining the papers associated with the sales and purchases of houses. Automated HIPS, a waste of time and money. What about the rest? How do we handle the paperwork. Well it seems Adobe forms are the answer to a maidens prayer.

Developer Productivity

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:50:00+0100
Not so very long ago there was the debate around developer productivity, in the dim and distant past this was a really hot topic. Largely brought about by the development of High Level languages. Some of which are still with us and some have simply faded away. The argument rested on the fact that High Level languages gave the developer a hand with the heavy lifting, great sequences of commands are condensed into a single line of code. The awfull relisation came about when researchers in Univac/Unisys examined the details and discovered a good programmer could produce a set number of tested lines of code in any language but it nearly always was the same number of lines. This fact applied to Fortran, Cobol, Assembler, Basic, C, etc it was always the same. If you then switch your attention to the most productive languages to write programs in you begin to see another story emerge. Easy to understand structrues and clear development rules around the language make a difference, but still its the number of lines. This is where the PHP, ASP and ColdFusion debate really takes off, the origins of these three are similar, but the departure is around the vision PHP wants to be FREE, in both senses, ASP wants to lead on all fronts, ColdFusion wants to be Fast, again in both senses. ColdFusion has retained this position over the last 6 years, both fast to develop and fast in runtime environments. Adobe have continued where Macromedia left off, Macromedia gave us some great editing tools and FLASH now with Adobe we have a merger of the technologies. Does Adobe promote these benefits? not obviously. The key issues are the TIME TO MARKET, miss XMAS and wait a year for your next chance, miss the sales season for holidays and miss a year. Speed of development is key where you have a time to market issue. Where the moment may be gone forever or certainly for a period. Remember T5 well most of us will, and the trouble BA got themselves into, well this frequently happens with projects, they will come good in the end but not without taking a big bite out of your bottom line. If you want to build in some contingency have a thought for the development team, if you get them the tools which give them productivity you can achieve with ColdFusion then you will have enough time to have a proper and complete test of your system. If you adopt an agile development methodology its even more likely you will keep ahead of the customers request for changes and still maintain a strong development schedule.

What is wrong with the property market

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:16:00+0100
Seems the UK Government has added more pain to the housing market with the stamp duty story. We know the market has been out of kilter for the last 5 years, once the starter home price was 4.5 time the average salary we were heading for trouble. Now we have it, there is the most obvious conflict between what the Government would like to see and what will happen. The Government to get re-elected would like to see house prices stay much where they are. What will happen is the starter homes will