Replacing rogue apps at Yellow Pages Canada
- Summary:
- Replacing rogue applications is often positioned as a tough proposition. Yellow Pages Canada found it surprisingly straightforward. Here's how.
While I was at TUCON last week I met with André Boisvert, chief architect Yellow Pages Canada. What started out as a fairly routine customer story quickly turned into a long conversation about the company's business model and its transformation to a digital enterprise in the face of intense and disruptive competition. To that end I have split the conversation across several video segments.
In the above piece we talked about how a company can wean its users off rogue applications. One example was an instance of Basecamp where the person acting as administrator went on maternity leave...ooops!! In another case, there were governance issues over ex-employees still having access to a service.
Over and above, Boisvert talks about how he needed to login to multiple applications in order to know what was going on among the various groups that had 'acquired' services outside of IT's control. This is something I know only too well.
The interesting learning here is obvious when placed into context. Rogue applications might well have sprouted up out of necessity, but there have to be question marks over their real productive value in the enterprise. Although we do not touch on this directly, the ongoing question of services integration looms large. It is a battle we face at diginomica every day.
In the Yellow Pages example, Boisvert assembled a variety of services including Taleo, Box and tibbr as a way of developing an intranet across which everyone can gain access (subject to permissions) while safeguarding corporate assets. tibbr is the glue for that project.
In another video, we explore the challenges of disruptive business models entering Yellow Pages space. More of that later.
Disclosure: TIBCO funded part of my trip to TUCON