Why employees hate their computers

I just read this article in slashdot about why doctors hate their computers:

https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/11/06/162201/why-doctors-hate-their-computers

The article really shows JUST how much it can cost do implement software incorrectly. Specifically, the process we follow includes the following questions/components to ensure that our customers have useful software once it's in production:

- Identification of ALL users of the system and their frequency of use. Once we know all of the users and how often they interact with the system, we can define priorities for each use case. For example, we would have identified doctors as high priority frequent users and ensured that their interactions with the system were the smoothest possible. There are several ways to ensure this, but one that we always require is an actual run-through of the screens with the user. This is normally difficult to schedule with the busiest users, but it MUST be done or you'll simply be burning money.

- Identification of all data to be migrated. In the case of moving to a new system (whether it's medical records, insurance claims, or anything else), ALL of the existing data must be found and must be made available in the new system in some way or another. This normally takes time, but that time is a lot less expensive BEFORE a new system goes live. Issues in a software implementation get more and more expensive to fix the farther along in the implementation, so they need to be caught early.

- For enterprise applications, "good enough" isn't. Some of the current thinking in application development and deployment says that you should get something in front of users and fix problems as they arise. This attitude is fine for a new game or small application, but it can cost money and lives in enterprise software. The people leading the implementation need to have experience in business critical applications to truly understand the cost of even a minor failure. When the cost of one minute of downtime can be measured in tens of thousands of dollars (or more!), every possible scenario has to be addressed before a production rollout.

At Gulfsoft, all of our consultants have over 15 years of experience in mission critical situations. We've worked with 911 emergency systems, satellite communications companies, large financial companies and everything in between. We know how to successfully implement large scale enterprise solutions to ensure that your employees and customers are delighted, and we can help you.

You can now use Vega to create custom graphs in Kibana

Prior to Kibana 6.2, you had to create a custom plugin to create custom visualization types. Now, however, support for Vega is included. Vega is a JSON (HJSON, actually) language that you can think of as a wrapper around the D3 visualization toolkit to allow it to display in Kibana. Here's a video with the highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQGCipY3th8

IBM Announces Multicloud Manager

https://www.ibm.com/cloud/multicloud-manager

It allows you to manage containers across all the biggest cloud providers.

You can now see your LinkedIn saved articles on the desktop!

I just ran across this today, and am very happy that I can finally view the items that I save on my phone on the web version. The link to see your saved articles is:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/saved-articles/

To save an article, you should see a little bookmark icon under all articles. Click that, and you'll get a DIC popup that tells you it's saved and give you a link to view all of your saved articles.

ITMSuper is in a new location

IBM moved the ITMSuper tool to:

https://www-01.ibm.com/marketing/iwm/iwm/web/pickUrxNew.do?source=tivopal

If you're an ITM 6.x user and you haven't used this tool, you really should download it to help with the management of your environment.

Learning neat new things at the Splunk Conference

Splunk is introducing tons of great new features at their conference this year. Many customers complain about the cost of Splunk, but you can lower that cost by leveraging the data to cover more usecases. If you feel like you're not getting the most out of Splunk, give us a call to get some help.

IBM just released the TBSM 6.2 Install Guide

Their blog post about it can be found here:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/7d5ebce8-2dd8-449c-a58e-4676134e3eb8/entry/TBSM_6_2_Installation_Step_by_step_example_with_all_the_prerequisites_installation_and_configuration_steps?lang=en_th

Maximo 7.6.1 includes entitlement for Cognos Analytics 11

Cognos Analytics 11 is the all-new Cognos product built for self-service business analytics, competing with the likes of Tableau and Microsoft BI. Pam Denny at IBM created a 13-part video series about this new entitlement here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOBy7UFdPupclhOayxt8jrebiSZqZiv3R

Some of our current projects

We work with a pretty wide array of products, so I wanted to highlight some of the projects we're working on right now

ServiceNow Architecture and Implementation

We're working with a communications company to implement their procurement, installation and change processes within ServiceNow, with asset feeds from multiple external systems.

ServiceNow Incident Response integration with QRadar

We're helping our client customize both products and the integration between them to best leverage their existing investment and people.

IBM Control Desk for Field Service Management

We're helping a different communications customer with their field service management through workflows and custom user interfaces defined in IBM Control Desk.

Netcool Operations Insight Implementation

We're actually working on several of these at the moment. The most work on these goes into identifying the different event sources, what (if any) automated actions need to be performed and who needs to be notified.

BigFix Steady State

A medical client of ours has been leveraging our BigFix Managed Services for several years to ensure that all IT equipment is both known and is running software at the appropriate patch level.

ICD and BigFix Implementation with Airgap

We're working with a defense contractor to ensure that their Asset Management and Change Management processes continue to work smoothly leveraging ICD and BigFix

The latest version of OpenStack (Rocky) can leverage bare metal servers directly

The source link from ZDNet:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-openstack-cloud-release-embraces-bare-metal/

Now you can provision bare metal servers through OpenStack. The linked article describes some of the use cases, and provides additional links to more information.