Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by LongJump

At its 2008 SIMposium conference this week in Orlando, SIM (the Society for Information management) published the results of their survey highlighting the top 10 IT management concerns (listed below):

1. IT and Business Alignment
2. Build Business Skills in IT
3. IT Strategic Planning
4. Attracting IT Professionals
5. Making Better Use of Information
6. Manage Change
7. Reduce the Cost of Doing Business

Tied for number 8 were: Improve IT Quality, Retaining IT Professionals, and Security and Privacy.

This list offers a nice dovetail as to how LongJump can positively make an impact within IT organizations and their senior management.

IT and Business Alignment

By building applications on the LongJump platform, IT can have greater awareness of the information their constituents are dealing with under a centralized platform. And because of how adaptable LongJump is to business needs, IT can also provide greater responsiveness to new business challenges.

Build Business Skills in IT

Too often, IT teams are relegated to keeping the lights on. Using LongJump as the platform for their applications, IT can become a solution service center rather than just an infrastructure provider. In addition, they can develop greater understanding of the needs of their customers and make better decisions.

IT Strategic Planning

The most pressing IT strategy issue today is how IT can optimize their application data so that it serves those who need it. Rather than reinventing the wheel for every application, taking a more leveraged platform approach is key to maximizing developer resources as well as keeping the infrastructure lean.

Attracting IT Professionals

There’s not much LongJump can do to address this issue directly, but imagine being able to provide a greater range of services to the organization without more headcount or external consultant costs? Would that cost advantage be enough to hire more solution-oriented IT professionals?

Making Better Use of Information

It’s not only that IT needs to make better use of information, but business units themselves need greater access and flexibility of reporting to information. LongJump provides a greater self-service culture among business units to quickly analyze and process data as they need it using the reporting engine and data policies.

Manage Change

By keeping data in LongJump, IT can track when changes to data occurs and who made the change. For more sophisticated processes, the workflow engine can help organizations define the proper process in which changes occur and understand who made the change. 

Reduce the Cost of Doing Business

With a single application platform strategy, LongJump enables organizations to reduce the cost of applications as well as complexity. Rather than paying for multiple applications and licenses, LongJump offers simplified licensing that charges for the platform, not the application, so costs are reduces for every application you add.

Improve IT Quality

The only way to improve IT quality is to consistently measure and monitor performance. LongJump keeps a complete log of activities so management can consistently audit team activities and associate them with key metrics and results.

Retaining IT Professionals

Not unlike attracting IT professionals, the cost savings that come with LongJump could conceivably be used to sweeten the salaries of existing IT employees. Or at the very least, reward solution-oriented IT members with interesting work and projects, rather than canned implementations.

Security and Privacy

LongJump’s robust security features ensure that data is only seen by those who need it. In addition, because it is a true multitenant platform, data is securely segmented from other companies and can even provide permission segmentation across groups, roles, or individual users.