| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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The Ultimate Business Machine - ArchivesList of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel * Mon 14 Jun 2010 Twiddling AwayCategory : Technology/TwiddlingAway.txt As of now, Liya for the iPhone is still "Waiting for Review". I'd just wanted to feel how easy or difficult this App Store-submission process is before we commit to doing a few other Luca-related iPhone stuff we had planned, e.g., allowing invoices to be entered into Luca via the iPhone, which will open up a lot of other potentialities, like time-billing or making possible other revenue-collection or cost-control activities. Having the ability to update a database remotely via the iPhone or iPad is the key enabler for a business - or any business. The database represents the state of the business. Every piece of data collected updates this picture. Yet the more layers you have between the data collection point and the database, the more your cost of doing business. Opportunities exist to cut away at these layers whenever technology changes, because that will always make some forms of work obsolete. As sure as the sun rises tomorrow, the cost of doing business is going to rise - inexorably. Yet it's not quite so sure we can raise prices just as fast - probably not. So we've got to figure out which parts of every business process we can cut, to do more with less of the ever-expensive resources. And I hope I'm not talking like any sleep-walking IT/business analyst. I mean, that's the way we need to train our minds to think. Like in Melbourne, it costs about $12 in Singapore Dollars to eat at a food court. Singapore is about two-thirds that at an equivalent food court. So you can see, the prices have room to head up. Whether the quality and the consumer's experience go up with it is another matter - the problem is in the aspiration. But systems and processes don't have aspirations, so there'll be resource substitution by the smarter businesses. The dumber businesses, which could include government-linked ones, plus the people with the aspirations - these are the ones who'll get hurt, bad. So, one step at a time. I need to get Liya out there on the App Store first. In the mean time, I'm adding a feature to set up database users and groups and their access rights in Maven, which I'll probably rename Liya for Snow Leopard when I'm done. That'll plug one remaining gap and give us a true "end-to-end" database capability - from creating and designing the database, to collecting data and serving information from any end-point, anywhere in the world. |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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