Business Needs and Presentation Requirements

Kello James at Canaxia is reviewing his presentation needs. Kello is well aware of the pitfalls of a poorly designed presentation tier. The metrics from Canaxia's projects indicate a surprisingly high cost in the overall spending related to the presentation tier. Some projects were actually spending nearly 30 to 40 percent of the overall development budget on addressing the needs related to the presentation tier. What has made this more painful is that a large portion of the spending has been due to cost overruns and spending in support and maintenance. Although a detailed cost analysis of the spending in the presentation tier area is beyond the scope of this book, several industry research groups are reporting a large increase in presentation tier spending. It is not uncommon to find companies today that have a larger presentation tier cross-functional team than other development teams.

The Standish Group reports that U.S. companies are wasting as much as $145 billion a year on failed IT projects. Only 9 percent of technology investments are completed on time and within budget.

The growing complexity in presentation needs is related to the transforming business paradigm. This is apparent to Kello as he looks at how Canaxia is continuing to transform the way it does business. A large part of the complexity was introduced some years ago when Canaxia decided not only to connect and consolidate its global IT systems but also to open them to channel partners and customers. Mattie Lee Mitchell, Canaxia's CIO, had outlined this in her company broadcast: "Our business needs to reach out to our partners and customers. We will reach out to them via channels that they are most comfortable using and with messages that they are most familiar with. Doing business with Canaxia should be exciting and mostly transparent to them. Although we need to work as one company, we need to adapt to the local ways in every country that we do business in. We need to prepare our IT systems for the future or we will be lost to the competition."

The complex IT needs become apparent immediately. With the core application and system needs remaining the same, the presentation tier architecture needs to support some of the following:

• Internationalization and localization

• Personalization and co-branding

• Support for multiple device and access points

• Support for local business processes and data presentation

• Support for multiple technologies

• Potential exposure of the applications to other systems as services