Tom O'Connell, Author at Applied Information Sciences

@tomoconnellais

I thought Per Werngren made some important observations in his recent article for Redmond Channel Partner Magazine. His main point: System Integrators (SIs) need to evolve their business models or risk disintermediation. As workloads are migrated to AWS and Azure, automation replaces the need for people to perform those tasks. This automation enables governance and compliance to standards, while also setting the stage for better downstream, fully-automated management, monitoring and operations. This, of course, further reduces the need for people performing in those roles,

Meanwhile, the new generation of intelligent PaaS services for predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. are also replacing jobs once done by hand. These new tools allow us to build better and more intelligent applications.

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Despite all this potential for automation, we still regularly see organizations allowing contractors to move workloads manually. It’s simply in a staffing contractor’s best interest to have people do this, despite it being a time-consuming and error-prone process. But why would an SI recommend automation and reduce their long-term revenue? Read More…

Tom O'Connell

@tomoconnellais

I’ve been reading a lot about the sweeping organizational changes at Microsoft. It’s always interesting to analyze and attempt to interpret their strategy and internal politics. (For example, why is the Dynamics business still separate? Is it being positioned to be sold? Probably not, but fun to consider.)

However, I am more drawn to the larger changes the re-org is enabling. The external press always seems to be negative about the actions of Microsoft’s executive leadership ever since Bill Gates left. While I may not agree with every choice Steve Ballmer has made, when you really stop and think about how they have transformed themselves over the past six years, it’s pretty amazing — especially when set in juxtaposition to the lack of change at other lumbering IT giants. Microsoft is well on their way to transforming from a worldwide monopoly of “Windows and Office” to a “devices and services” business. Read More…

Tom O'Connell

@tomoconnellais

It was more than 10 years ago when AIS first began to explore and envision the idea of using SharePoint as an application development platform. Although Office was a great product to author content, it did not provide a means to manage that content. From the moment we heard that Microsoft was going to provide a centralized, managed repository for Office and other forms, documents and records we immediately started to envision solutions for our clients, along with a laundry list of new features.

Automated workflow and integration of development tools were immediate needs. It wasn’t until 2007 that we felt we had enough features to address our client’s needs to automate paper-based workflows. You can view the whitepaper we published on January 30, 2007 (the very day SharePoint 2007 was released) on our YouTube channel. We published an updated version on the day of the 2010 release, which was a major release in terms of features and performance that also marked the expansion of Search features.

Over the years we have built countless large-scale, human-to-human (and human-to-system) workflow solutions. Some support tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of workflows, and hundreds of millions of documents and records. We’ve built task, event, investigation, legal matter, and assessment management systems (just to name a few) across DoD and the military, many Intel agencies and some civilian agencies in the public sector. In the commercial sector our clients range from the largest law firms, international NGOs with far-flung offices, health plans, wealth and financial management, among many others.

Today, SharePoint 2013 has fully matured. It finally contains all the features we need for a fully-featured application development platform. We now have enumerable building blocks which allow us to write less code and deliver solutions for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Read More…

Tom O'Connell

@tomoconnellais

Several months ago, we set out to improve our online presence and build an information hub that would engage communities and individuals who share our passion for system and software engineering, and attract companies searching for a proven software solutions provider.

Today, I’m both proud and excited to launch AIS’s first corporate blog, with contributions from our terrific team of experts. We can’t wait to share our insights and innovations related to the services we deliver. Read More…

BlogPosts by Tom O'Connell