David on IT Outsourcing in China: [urls] Web Services Differentiation with Service Level Agreements

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my top ten "urls" for the past couple/few weeks. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of ALL my urls (about 100-250 per week) -- AND limit by subject (e.g., ITO) and/or rating (e.g., articles rated "Very Good" or "Excellent"). It's also possible to receive new urls as an RSS feed. However, if you'd like to receive a daily feed of my urls but do NOT want to sign up with Furl, I can manually add your name to my daily Furl distribution list. (And if you want off, I'll promptly remove your e-mail address.)

Top Honors:

* Web Services Differentiation with Service Level Agreements, courtesy of IBM T.J. Watson; as the title suggests, this paper tackles SLAs. See also Web Services QoS: External SLAs and Internal Policies, by the same author. The latter paper was the invited keynote at the 1st Web Services Quality Workshop (this site provides links to abstracts for all the workshop papers as well as links to each author's personal site).

Other best new selections (in no particular order):

* Product Focused Software Process Improvement: PROFES 2004 (if you're going to read only one tech book this year, let it be this!!)

* Legacy systems strike back!! We all know that there is a good market in servicing legacy systems. See the following: Arriba: Architectural Resources for the Restructuring and Integration of Business Application (an introduction), Identifying Problems in Legacy Software, and Evolution of Legacy Systems.

* Online Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions, Five Keys To Building Business Relationships Online and Advantages of Using Social Software for Building Your Network. (I can say with a fairly high level of confidence that these tools can be used to expand your business network. Been there, done that. Give it a try. Do I already know you and would you like an invitation to join LinkedIn? If the answer to both questions is "yes," let me know ...)

* Carnegie Mellon Project Aura Video (gets a bit silly at times, but the language translation component was interesting to see; the R-T example is still years away, but the idea is intriguing and this is where collaboration tools need to go)

* Innovation: Strategy for Small Fish (from the Harvard Business School; however, NVIDIA would not have been my choice for a case study)

* Stata Labs: Managing at a Distance, for Less (a pretty good case study; I firmly believe that China's systems integrators/contract developers need world-class collaboration tools and this describes one of the formats I support)

* An Authoring Technology for Multidevice Web Applications (one of my favorite topics -- and an area where I believe SIs in China can take the lead)

* Cheapware (or, "Changsha Gone Wild!!"; hey Qilu clan, are you listening? Go, Ding, go!!)

* How To Team With A Vendor (a "must read" -- and evidently a lot of my readers already did, even though I only made a passing reference in a previous posting)

Examples of urls that didn't make my "Top Ten List":

> ITU Internet Reports 2004: The Portable Internet (looks like this might be a great series; less biased than the typical IT advisory services report -- and a much better value, too)

> Software Cost Reduction (courtesy of the <U.S.> Naval Research Lab, this paper is a bit dated, but still worth reading; addresses problems with large-scale systems, albeit a bit light on practical examples)

> Japan IT Outsourcing 2004-2008 Forecast: IDC (might be a worthwhile purchase, especially for the Dalian-based systems integrators)

> The Power of No (Linux as a bargaining tool <see my Furl comments, too>; make Microsoft shake in their boots!!)

> Web Design Practices (a good reference site)

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

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http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)