Optimizing IT or Engineering In Tough Economic Times Through SEER
When economic times get tough one of the most difficult things for management is to determine the impact of slowed or killed projects, the impacts on maintenance, and further methods of achieving time to market with fewer resources.
Sterling Commerce in a presentation called “What’s Real Answers For Tough Time” pointed out some of the challenges and issues in the new consolidated banking, finance and other industries. The legacy is difficult including:
- Fragmented, Incompatible, Fragmented, Siloed Systems For the Pre-Acquisition Assets, and cost prohibitive to replace systems
- Difficult To Process new customers due to disparate systems
- Incompatible / Incomplete Business Processes so no one knows the status of customers
The article also pointed out that some organizations will just not spend any money while others will make the decisions and spend the money to have them emerge stronger. That article’s subtitle was “A Crystal Ball Wont Provide the Answers Your Need” While I agree with the challenges listed by Sterling, I believe that a sort of Crystal Ball… SEER can identify the effects of decisions on business.
Real Time IT Budgets Versus Annual Budgets
Interesting article on Eweek. “That elusive IT budget is more elusive than ever. It looks to me like the idea of the yearly budget is totally trashed in favor of a real time budget, updated all the time and as fluid as the economic news of the day. That may not be the best way to get projects moving and completed on time, but it is the current reality.”
All the more reason to understand the realities of projects and the cost / benefits of starts and stops with SEER.
2009 IT Spending: Generally Flat
According to research published by Computer Economics, Inc. on 2009 IT spending:
about 34% of IT organizations have cut 2009 budget
About 11% have increased IT budgets
About 54% have no change in budget from 2008
Doing more with the same or less requires better project and operations planning. That is why SEER for Software and SEER for IT are used by organizations looking to optimize their productivity within scarce budgets.
How Galorath Quantified the Salesforce.com Platform With SEER For Software (SEER-SEM)
The following summarizes the report prepared by Galorath’s Dr. Tarbet on the process of building specific Knowledge Bases and validation of SEER for Software (SEER-SEM) for the Salesforce.com platform (Force.com). Force.com enables you to deliver enterprise-class Web applications on demand—without the cost of deploying infrastructure, supporting the software-as-a-service paradigm (SaaS). This was customer funded (by a potential user of salesforce.com).
Galorath established a technical interface with internal Salesforce experts, consultants with extensive experience developing software in the Salesforce.com Platform, and with current users of the on-demand SaaS capabilities provided by the platform. From the technical discussions, preliminary analyses of expected effort impacts on the software development effort for an IT project were derived. A Salesforce.com Platform Knowledge Base and a language definition for the APEX language has been developed for SEER-SEM from the technical inputs.
Bottom Line 30% to 40% Savings: The model indicates that effort can be expected to be reduced from 30% to 40% over developing the same project in JAVA for projects that are aligned to the Customer Relations Management model, which serves as the basis for the Salesforce.com Platform. Read more
New SEER Functionality, Like a Kid in a Candy Store
It is interesting as the company has grown over the years and as i have gotten further and further from day to day software requirements and design, to see some of the amazing functionality coming out of our development group. Sometimes it makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.
I was struck by the newest version of the metrics and benchmarking. A Histogram in addition to a scatter plot. This is so handy. And nearly a surprise to me. (I did know they were doing it but didn’t see it until beta time)
I see some of the global estimation abilities that have gone into SEER for Hardware Electronics and Systems. Very nice!!!. Makes trades even faster. And these I didnt know about until they were in the shipping product.
For SEER for IT, the newest scenario functionality is beautifully executed. Generate an entire IT system estimate by using a pattern and answering a few questions. I never saw this improved version until release.
And the Far out project… estimates unmanned spacecraft far out into the future. i just played with it a few weeks ago. It was released months ago. Very interesting.
Even some of our unreleased projects such as xippr (code name, ask and you can find out details) Amazing in its ability to ferret out project issues and potential problems.
And our top secret project… Amazing as I occasionally get glimpses into the builds.
As our processes continue to tighten (ISO 9001:2000 review coming up next month) I will be invited to attend more reviews… some of the fun surprises will disappear for me. I love seeing SEER evolve. Hats off to the development group.
COTS Components in Software Development Are Not Without Effort or Risk
I have lost count of how many project that used COTS (commercial off the shelf software) components thinking they were saving huge development expense where the COTS itself was the cause of project failure.
I recall, some time ago when a super object oriented database was going to save the day, cutting development cost dramatically and exceeding requirements. Only problem is that software didn’t work. And the developer didn’t have source to fix it. And the design was wrong. And On and on.
In a less dramatic sense I look at the seemingly risk free use of COTS components of a small magnitude. For example we used a package that was an excel like plug-in one time for our custom calcs. The vendor went out of business and we lost support. We had to redevelop (this time we used real Excel) but it cost months of development work, and changes to user configurations, and technical support challenges.
And people often forget about testing of the COTS components. They will impact test effort (if you assume they just work you are likely in for a sifnificant project surprise)
Then there is the IT support of a deployed system. Your users dont care if the software is COTS, not developed by you. They want support for the system with its whole mission.
And just the cost of choosing the right (hopefully) COTS software. SEER for Software captures all these costs and risks.
Northrop published a case study showing of SEER-SEM and its COTS abilities: ”the results were remarkable”
SEER for Software’s COTS functionality provides estimates of the effort to choose, use, and deploy COTS software.
SEER Estimate By Comparison Professional Released To All Users
The SEER Estimate By Comparison (formerly SEER-AccuScope) comes in two flavors, the core and the professional. The professional version allows estimation of anything, such as
- total system cost
- software size
- hardware weight
- system value
- server capacity
- best choice from a set of alternatives
This new feature incorporates sophisticated mathematics for uncertainty and estimation.
For the first year Galorath is providing the professional version to all SEER users. Beginning the second year the professional functionality will be available as an upgrade.
Galorath recommends using an industrial strength database for an enterprise but will allow Microsoft Access for simple desktop installations.
This feature began shipping with the release of SEER for Software 7.3, in October, 2008.
Estimating IT Personnel and Issues of A Down Economy
Historically IT has been more stable in a down economy than the job market at large. We still need to keep the business running and there are usually value to the business considerations that keep software development going. IT employment is a near record high levels. Still, with the issues in banking and Wall Street, the offshore outsourcers are going to be hurting. Some reports say Wall Street employed a third of outsourced IT. And organizations such as the now defunct Lehman were in the forefront of IT innovation. .
So.. expect some bargains from offshore.
This chart from CIO Insight shows the strength of IT employment in the US:
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Draft Estimating IT Infrastructure and IT Services
Original draft sent out for review for the GAO cost handbook section on estimating IT infrastructure and IT services. There is a newer version that has some adjustments to the WBS that should be public, distributed from the GAO web site soon. The WBS adjustments were done primarily by the Air Force Cost Agency to make the WBS more consistent with some of the services.
IT Infrastructure & Services Must Be Considered In Total Ownership Costs
Studies have shown that IT services outside the software development and maintenance (e.g. hardware cost, help desk, upgrade installation, training, etc.) can account for over 60% of the total ownership costs, Figure 1.
Figure 1: Relative Cost of IT Vs. Software Development Vs. Software Maintenance
Even systems such as ships, aircraft and mission control centers have a major IT infrastructure and IT services components to them. In fact, some IT systems encounter over 90% of their costs in the infrastructure and services required to support and run the system. Read more
More IT Effectiveness Metrics
Mean Time to Repair:How long it takes ro resolve an outage.
First Fix Rate: The percentage of incidents that are correctly repaired the first time.
Change Success Rate: Percent (and number for scope) of changes that are successfully deployed without creating an incident.
Server to System Administration Ratio: Number of servers that can be handled by an administrator (high performers can handle about 125 servers.. while medium and low performers can handle about 25)
