Feb 07 2012
Eliciting Requirements: Three Simple Phrases That Help Gather Information
The CapTech slogan, prominently displayed at the top of our webpages and on our business cards, is “Others Talk, We Listen”. That motto quite accurately describes how we are successful, and we strive to produce solutions that work for our clients. What are the client’s pain points? What do clients actually need, and what are they really asking for?
What if a customer is having difficulty conveying information? Have you ever been at a loss for how to extract requirements or other information from a Business User? Have you ever felt that every question yielded a vague or “YES”/“NO” answer? Here are three easy phrases to prod your customers to supply more information in an easy to use, non-threatening way.
Feb 04 2012
The Missing Health Care Mobile App
When I think of the boom in Healthcare IT, I am reminded of the multitude of systems which allow providers to communicate to other providers, patients, and insurance companies to facilitate the care of the patient and management of health services. I know there are several websites available to communicate with the patient or member community, yet, the mobile applications are generally lacking. While there is an app for your health and fitness, there aren’t many apps for the patient which insurance companies or health care providers are supplying.
Jan 26 2012
A Portal By Any Other Name
Recent discussions on CapTech’s internal social media platform addressed a favorite challenge for technology professionals: how to describe what you do for a living to those without a lot of technical expertise. To achieve that goal without boring your audience to tears, oversimplification is nearly inevitable. Personally, I’ve found the threat of oversimplification even more daunting when I attempt to be a little bit specific about what I do by using not just an industry term, but a highly flexible industry term: portal.
Jan 22 2012
A QlikView QuickStart: first steps for learning QlikView desktop
QlikTech’s QlikView reporting and analysis tool is among a new class of Business Intelligence (BI) software tools. As Ben Harden reported in a recent blog post, BI vendors like SAP, Microsoft, and IBM have traditionally sold “to the IT enterprise, but companies like QlikTech and Tableau are targeting the business and bypassing IT. Their tools are quicker to stand up, more intuitive and don’t need the configuration, support, and hardware that the bigger players require.”
A Quick Overview
At first look QlikView is fairly accessible to those experienced with BI tools. A “.qvw” QlikView file contains three classes of user-facing components: a script-based data integration language that runs when the user requests a “reload”, a data modeling component that looks deceptively like a relational data modeling tool, and a familiar array of data visualizations: graphics, charts, lists, etc.
Jan 18 2012