Views from the Lab

What makes for a good API?

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:59:31 GMT

Web APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are quickly becoming the de facto integration model for IT systems. Key promises of web APIs (e.g., reducing development cycles within an organisation, fostering collaboration within the partner ecosystem, or monetising APIs from external use...

Driving innovation and agility through an API strategy

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:16:35 GMT

Today’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play the role of business-level artefacts, which provide the means to enable new business models and modes of efficiency. This could be interacting with customers over new mobility and social channels, reaching new customers through...

Testing for cloud - Unleashing a barrel of monkeys

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:28:00 GMT

Indeed cloud providers strive to offer high reliability for their services, but part of this promise supposes that tenants use the services correctly. Large scale cloud failures do happen and services can be interrupted. Tenants that do not properly architect...

Data consistency problems in RDBMS applications

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:24:00 GMT

The 2007 New York Times Bestseller, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Naseem Nicholas Taleb covers events characterised as 1) being outliers beyond normal expectation, 2) having extreme impact, and 3) being able to be rationalised...

Multi-tenancy models from the view of data architecture: Horses for courses

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:50:00 GMT

For many cloud-enabled applications, multi-tenancy is a key design decision. There is a spectrum of choices from which to pick. Gartner includes seven different models ranging from “Isolated Tenancy” (aka sharing nothing) to “Shared Everything.” And really, it’s not one-size-fits-all....

Don't confuse standard with commodity - added insight tunes cloud to meet customer needs

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:07:00 GMT

Many of today’s cloud services are one-size-fits-all, offering little or no customisation. In fact, this standardisation is part of the secret sauce: offer a few services and do them really well. But “standard” does not mean that customers need to...

Social BPM: engaging people in value-driven BPM

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:37:28 GMT

Given the growth of social media, increasing interest and opportunity exists for using digital channels to support business process management (BPM). This emerging concept marries the flexibility and pervasiveness of social media with the management discipline of BPM to significantly...

Using enterprise social technology to promote peripheral awareness between adjacent teams

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:23:37 GMT

Collaboration has become a first-tier concern for enterprises looking to transform their organisations. There are now several powerful social collaboration suites on the market, but to take collaboration to the next level, organisations need to reassess their specific needs.Most collaboration...

Whose PaaS is it anyway?

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:14:57 GMT

Cloudy days are here, but in the most positive sense. After the hype we are gradually witnessing a healthy adoption of cloud computing. However, as cloud can refer to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS platforms, the degree of adoption among these...

What if life was more like a game?

Accenture Technology Labs Staff — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:31:58 GMT

What if work could be more like our favourite games? This question has been inspiring growing interest in bringing "gamification" to the workplace, which means using games and game mechanics to help shape workplace behaviour. The idea that businesses might...

Data economics

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:23:03 GMT

A number of commentators, including Accenture, rightly point out that the advent of so-called "Big Data" technologies doesn’t change the need for our trusty relational databases and our well-curated data warehouses. Quite the contrary - the increasing availability and usability...

Advice on IT strategy from a one-year old

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:46:08 GMT

As a non-parent, I find it fascinating to watch the development of my nieces and nephews. My brother and his wife have been teaching my young nephew simple signs from American Sign Language to help him communicate. As I’m told,...

A privacy-centered economy

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:57:02 GMT

From a cover story in Time magazine, to high profile reporting in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, to several landmark privacy bills in US Congress, the concerns around online privacy are on the rise. Battle lines...

Surge to meet demand

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:23:51 GMT

According to a recent study published by Symantec, 52% of security organisations are "doing well" in responding to routine security events. But these same organisations struggle when under a complex cyber attack. Like a skilled surgeon, incident responders are best...

Thriving in the predictably unpredictable

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:46:07 GMT

Cloud’s on-demand value proposition is attractive, but there remain concerns around its reliability. Indeed service levels offered by most providers are basic—prominent providers promise 99.95% availability. Also service response varies. Our recent measurements of a widely known Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider...

Operating Big Data without a net

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:23:18 GMT

There seems to be a common misconception around the reliability of emerging big data platforms: "NoSQL—no worries, the backup is built-in". The built-in redundancy of distributed NoSQL architectures leaves many with a false sense of security. But alone the out-of-the-box...

To SQL or NoSQL - that's not the question

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:13:42 GMT

We receive a lot of requests from our clients about the applicability of NoSQL technologies on their enterprise systems. If you haven’t heard about NoSQL by now, we contend that you’ve been in hiding for the past three years. The...

Getting to the real value of data through Agile BI

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 10:57:59 GMT

The term “agile” is making a run for the adjective-of-the-year in IT conversations. In discussions with clients, we hear an increasing drum beat calling for more agility in infrastructure, applications and IT systems. But what do we mean when we...

Analytics and the next frontier

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:59:56 GMT

Earlier this summer, I attended GigaOm's Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco. It was a well-attended two-day event that focused on cloud computing. Most of the big players were all there -- from VMWare's CEO Paul Maritz, Amazon's CTO Werner...