On behalf of the Segue Technologies Business Intelligence unit, I attended Kaleidoscope 2009, a conference organized by the Oracle Development Users Group (ODTUG, www.odtug.com), of which I happen to be a member. It was held during the third week of June at Monterey Bay California. This was the second consecutive ODTUG conference I’ve attended in addition to Kaleidoscope 2008, held in New-Orleans. Last year, a whole conference track dedicated to the Oracle Hyperion suite of products (with Essbase at the center focus of the track) was introduced, which saw a pretty good response. Also, the amount of knowledge transfer from industry experts last year was so valuable for real-world implementations, that this year’s overall conference attendees grew in number (much to my surprise given the current state of the economy). This is a true testimony of the word having spread far and wide that Kaleidoscope is a conference unmatched in its class by any other related technical conference in the Oracle Business Intelligence domain. Read the rest of this entry »

Good websites make it easy for users to find what they want, by implementing proper usability techniques. This is often a challenge for application-based websites with features like user logins, searching, shopping carts, and document archives. However, usability is also important for brochure websites, meaning those with limited functionality and a focus on showcasing an organization and its products or services. All websites with a customer focus benefit greatly from combining good usability with good marketing to achieve fantastic results. Read the rest of this entry »

Nineteenth Century writer and critic John Ruskin said, “Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.” In a modern corporate environment, this intelligent effort is a natural result of establishing repeatable activities and tasks that are supported by skilled and knowledgeable people. The goal of this article is to show how Process, Quality, and Innovation are strongly related to each other and cannot live independently.

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Segue Technologies recently sponsored the Armed Forces Communication and Electronic Association (AFCEA) Northern Virginia NOVA chapter’s annual Naval IT Day. This event provided an opportunity for members of industry to meet with civilian and military leaders of the Department of the Navy, including NAVSEA, NAVAIR, SPAWAR, and the Marine Corps, and learn about their vision and plans in regard to employing technologies in their service branches. This allows members of industry to gain a better understanding of the direction that the DoN is headed in the IT realm and where they need support to achieve their goals. Some of the topics covered this year include operational trends and war fighter experiences and maritime strategies that underpin needed capabilities, such as:

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They are not big bad wolves!

Quality Assurance and Quality Control are often seen as loathsome corporate entities, assigning blame, slowing down the production process with excessive control measures, and creating tons of “useless” documentation. This perception is unfortunately the result of years of bad corporate QA and QC implementation, where upper management groups impose policy (without process user input) to define adequate “Controls”, untrained or unqualified personnel leading QA and QC activities, and  poor communication about vision and goals. It is far too common for companies to approach QA and QC the wrong way, thereby spoiling their staff on the concept and limiting the benefits that can be gained not only for customers, but for internal quality of work environment.

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I had been recently building a cfgrid with html format in my company’s ColdFusion application when I encountered a problem. For those not familiar, the cfgrid html format uses the ExtJS API. The intent of this blog entry is to describe a bug fix, but look here for more information on how to use cfgrid or for ExtJS. My problem occurred while using my Internet Explorer browser to do an inline edit in the cfgrid. The edited field had the red marker in the corner, but the whole cell turned white, making it appear blank.

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