The Business Agility Blog

In a recent conversation with a friend of mine, the topic of cloud computing arose in regards to his family business. His father owns an art handling business that is becoming one of the more technology advanced entities in a world of otherwise mechanical, labor intensive processes. The players in this industry are responsible for shipping priceless art around the country.

Historically, this industry has been geographically skewed towards metropolitan areas with strong museum and art communities. Private art collections were growing rapidly during the economic recession, making management at the company increase its priority on these more geographically spread out customers.

So, in a beautiful demonstration of agility, the company adopted cloud computing technology to make opening new offices a piece of cake. The company orders ‘thin client’ computers, configures them to spec at the corporate office, and ships them to a new office overnight – (they are a shipping company after all).

Here at Mendix, we love to see collaboration between business people and IT people. In this case, the IT Manager and the CEO of the company were well advised to open new offices – and the ‘office-in-a-box’ system seems to work wonders for technologically slow industries such as the art handling industry.

The IT guy doesn’t have to travel to the new office; he just maintains the entire system from the corporate office. As you can imagine, the cost savings are significant enough for even a technologically slow industry to implement this process. A central source of data within the company provides valuable information to upper management. Tracking CO₂ emissions, order frequency, and a host of other industry specific measures also increases the value of cloud-based business agility.

Not to be forgotten is the increase in revenue by being agile, even geographically agile in some cases, is the primary reason for this blog. Small and medium businesses will become more agile with similar strategies, and likely prove that serious business agility management always wins the race.

The Apple iPad has finally hit shelves and we’ve started to see these two dimensional planes of touch screen bliss in unsurprisingly tech enthused hands. The early adopter is an interesting species, a collector of obsolete technology sometimes – they still get their hands on the industry changing gadgets first. As the iPad matures, whether product or phenomenon, its presence seems to have already shaped the landscape for tablet computing.

The iPad will make sense for business owners when developers learn the needs of users and find new synergies that make products like these feasible. Regardless of whether numbers (ROI) or words (client satisfaction) prove this feasibility, tablets will make business sense once the moderate sized populaces get their hands on them and work together. In the meantime, the all knowing customer relationship management system serves a perfectly agile, cloud enabled candidate for the iPad.

Smartphones made having information at your fingertips a competitive factor in even some of the most unlikely industries. How will a huge increase in size and functionality effect this professional-to-handheld relationship? In terms of staying up to date with client relationships, the average smartphone user will be first entertained, then amazed, and finally functional and used to the technological transformation. As we said in February, Mendix applications have proven more than happy in the new venue.

Those agile business people out there will see the ever present early adopter and wonder about these possibilities. Web clients and customer relationship management may just be the first steps in yet another Mac backed revolution. We’ll keep you posted with more Mendix applications that end up on tablet devices. Keep us posted on all the unlikely, yet expected, industrious places this little game changer pops up in.

One of the first universities to join the Mendix University Program in the US is Curry College. Since this is a milestone in the worldwide expansion of our program, we would like you to know how students reacted to working with Mendix software. So for a change – no corporate blog post about the University Program, this time we gave a student of Curry College, Marc Lehane, the opportunity to blog about his experiences with Mendix. Enjoy his Post!

The MBA cohort from Curry College (Milton, MA) was introduced to Mendix during our Management of Information and Technology course. During this class our cohort had been broken up into teams combining 4-5 varying backgrounds. After a brief introduction to the Mendix model driven application Professor Akram Ahmed challenged our groups to develop a business model and create a Mendix solution to support it.

from L to R: Han Pieter Duyverman (Mendix), Professor Ahmed Akram, Joe Mearn, Marc Lehane, Pat Casey, Jon Bulman, Vincent de la Mar (Mendix)

Our group, the Step Dads consisted of Marc Lehane (Curry College- Business Management), Joseph Mearn (Hamilton College -Economics), Jon Bulman (Westfield State College -Business Management), and Patrick Casey (Colby-Sawyer College-Business Administration). Most of this team had very little experience in database creation or any sort of IT implementation. Through the basic logic we learned during our program and software operational overview we had one day in class, we were able to design and implement a basic operational customer management system.

Together we proposed and offshore gaming facility who hosted our customers pro football betting action. In this imaginary business we would ask that our customer supplied up front a payment of $5000.00 to create an account. Through the use of the “Micro flow” feature we were able to create logic that most companies would need an experience programmer to create. Based the weekly game results, the Mendix program would determine the winner of every betting option. From there the customer’s betting table would update and determine the transfer value for the customer’s account. At the customer screen, the built in microflow would look to the betting table and summarize the individual’s activity (total transfer amount) and reflect it on the customer.

Though this is a basic business model, we were able to develop it in under two weeks and under 16 working hours without any formal training. The Mendix website helped us teach ourselves through use of their forum and tutorials. We feel as if we were given more time we would have been able to develop a program at par with one that companies would have to invest large amount of money into and spend months and months to implement.