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IT: Still the Shoemaker's Children The story of the shoemaker's children having no shoes of their own continues to be analogous to IT organizations that do not leverage software tools to accelerate and enhance the quality of their work. Automating IT is the next step in the evolutionary growth of a field that has automated virtually every other field. IT organizations that leverage automated software tools to improve time to market and overall quality of mission-critical software projects will enable their enterprises to pull ahead of the competition. Businesses will see improvements in productivity while controlling or even reducing related costs. Here are some ways IT can meet these goals. * Leverage software tools you already own. Most companies already own a variety of tools that can accelerate and improve the quality of application design, development, enhancement, and project management tasks. Architecture teams with cross-functional responsibility should inventory and communicate the availability of these tools. Leveraging existing investments in software tools is the quickest path to achieving tool-related benefits. * Determine where tools can be best used in your enterprise. If you are doing an extensive amount of development work targeting component-based architectures, consider deploying an integrated development environment (IDE) to streamline development tasks. An IDE ensures that team members can create and share designs, test plans, test results, and source code in accordance with your development methodology. * Expand the use of tools to business analysts and designers. Transforming requirements into viable, robust application systems requires maintaining the integrity of these requirements throughout the process. For example, certain tools allow analysts to specify Unified Modeling Language (UML) models that help clarify the intent of their requirements to developers. A number of IDE products can transform UML into functioning systems, and this in turn ensures that systems do what business analysts require. * Invest in tools that address legacy systems. Much of the work being done by application teams is on legacy environments. Using software tools that help analyze, enhance, and transform legacy applications increases the productivity and quality of the work being done on these systems. Many companies are unaware of the value of legacy software tools and would benefit greatly by deploying them on legacy integration and enhancement projects. * Consider tool integration as an inherent part of the training and deployment process. If tools are integrated under a common framework, the potential users of those tools can more readily assimilate them. Ongoing training and mentoring also streamlines tool deployment and encourages tool usage. Applying a comprehensive set of integrated software tools to accelerate the delivery of quality application systems should be a goal for every IT organization. In doing so, IT can shed the image of being the shoemaker�s children by focusing on delivering better solutions more quickly through the use of software tools. |
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