MagmaTec and Comprehend-IT have officially merged and rebranded to Alacrity with immediate effect; this final step marks the end of a year long process to combine the services and competencies of these two organisations into a single entity offering MS.Net and Java software development services to an expanding range of blue chip clients.

Since announcing the deal in August 2009 both companies continued to operate as separate entities, although combining efforts where required. "As technologies have converged it was no longer in our best interest to maintain our niche focuses," comments Stuart Phillips, MD, "the technology environments of our clients are far more dynamic and require us to be as conversant in cutting edge application development technologies and platforms, as well as being able to support legacy systems that need to be maintained to support their existing operations".

Services

Alacrity is a software development company that offers consulting, development and support services to a broad range of clients. Clients may need assistance in developing an IT strategy, competency based resourcing covering the full SDLC either on- or off-site; or software developed for products or projects, or systems and software applications support. The product division is geared to support technology entrepreneurs that need support services in addition to software development expertise to build and sustain the product or business. The company has an impressive array of clients including Momentum, Discovery, Gallo Images, Paarl Media, Old Mutual, Metropolitan, Firstrand, Webber Wentzel and Media24 to name a few.

Leadership Team

The Alacrity group will be lead by a combined management team: Stuart Phillips – Managing Director, Robert Marshall – Strategy & Business Development Director, Brian Ford – Sales & Marketing Director, Gerhard Pretorius – Technology Director, and Teresia Arendse – HR Director.

New Brand

"Alacrity as a word is synonymous with agility, quick responding, efficient, flexible and engaging; important words when you consider the work that we do and the benefit offered to our clients," adds Brian Ford, "similarly the corporate identity is more dynamic, using four colours interchangeable as the IT in the word, it's both simplistic and unsuspecting for a software development company." The brand was launched internally to staff prior to the official market launch today.

ComprehendIT, Equitrac and Tracer have further expanded their global influence with the launch of a BlackBerry application designed specifically for lawyers on the go.

The easy to use application, called Mobitrac, makes it possible for lawyers to manage the client contact to billing process automatically, in real-time and without delay as the meeting, call or consultation takes place.

The Mobitrac application gets loaded on the users' BlackBerry phone, making it possible to integrate data, keep client records up to date and enable accurate and automated billing, not to mention accurate daily, weekly and monthly reconciliations.

This application is an extension to the already successful hardware and software document management and accounting solutions provided by Equitrac to the legal industry.

Equitrac Sub-Saharan Africa is the sole distributor of software and hardware solutions provided by Equitrac Corporation, a global company recognised as the world's leading provider of automated Document Accounting Solutions. "Equitrac's solutions are backed by service and support that integrate easily into current digital work environments. We offer centrally administered cost accounting for any size organisation, especially those with multiple offices," comments Russel Roth, Equitrac MD.

Mobitrac is a joint venture between Tracer CQM, Equitrac and Comprehend IT, the technology enabler and development partner. The application is also available for Windows Mobile environments and provides an innovative and efficient cost recovery solution to attorneys via their mobile PDA devices.

Mobitrac comprises two simultaneous functions. Firstly, the background service that runs continuously, monitoring the various data inputs to ensure that what is required to be billed is captured. Each time data is captured the service then automatically synchronises with the back-office where it is processed by the billing engine. Secondly, it is an easy to operate user interface that assists the person to organise and efficiently manage the captured information.

Download Mobitrac

Mobitrac was designed for BlackBerry OS version 4.7, but is compatible with v4.6 and v4.5. You can download the application here as a J2ME application, which uses the extended BlackBerry API to access the required data.

Once the application is installed, you simply create a profile on the back-office Web application and the user and client contact information is imported to the handset. Mobitrac is ready for use immediately after the installation and first synchronisation has taken place.

How does it work?

When the user has made or received a call, the application will automatically pop up a request for a specific task to be assigned to a client profile. If the contact number is recognised by the system to be that of an existing client, the intelligence in the application enables this task to be automatically assigned to the existing profile, decreasing the number of manual actions that the user will be required to input.

The application automatically records all information related to the task, including how long the call was and what type of billing it should be assigned to, based on the context of the call. However, as not all calls will be related to a legal case, the user will have a choice on what he assigns to be recorded and billed by allocating specific filters to numbers, indicating some as private numbers.

Arguably one of the most popular mobile handset devices used by professionals and increasingly consumers alike, there are more than 50 million BlackBerry handsets and 20 million users worldwide, estimated to comprise 21% of the PDA market. "What makes this so exciting is that BlackBerry already has a significant market share in North America and is growing exponentially in more developing countries like South Africa," comments Robert Marshall, CEO of Comprehend IT. "The launch of Mobitrac for BlackBerry enables us to add another country to our existing global footprint, namely North America."

2009 has been a challenging year for CIOs all over the world. And for a while, South Africans were revelling in the prospects that we'd avoided the full impact of the recession tsunami. Unfortunately, the impact of globalisation meant a different reality awaited us.

This year has taught us many lessons, but these two challenges are unanimous among CIOs as those that contributed most to the success or failure of their operations:

1. This year has seen unprecedented cost pressures placed on IT departments.
2. The rate of change required by companies to remain competitive and successful increasingly places pressure on the role that technology needs to play to ensure this happens.

CIO agenda for 2010, beyond

The combination of recessionary and competitive pressures will continue to drive the CIO agenda for the next few years. In the financial services industry specifically, the level of automation required across the entire value chain means that the CIO's role in enabling business agility is significant, and it's therefore no surprise that financial analysts track the movements of CIOs and CTOs in listed companies. All these pressures have meant that "agile" has fast become the most touted buzzword of 2009.

The CIO has a dual challenge: to keep the business changing and adapting using systems and technology platforms and processes to get ahead and deliver shareholder value and wealth; and secondly, to do this under severe pressure to reduce costs. As you would guess, there is no quick fix, however, we believe there are two main areas that CIOs need to focus on if they're to shift their organisations to ease the burden and achieve greater results. The answers lie in the development processes and systems architecture, both of which are enablers of rapid ongoing change.

Development processes as enabler of change

This is not about the latest agile methodology, but rather the new paradigms and philosophies underpinning the move to agile methodologies. If these are not understood and embraced by a critical mass of senior people in both IT and business, any move towards an agile methodology will fail.

Key elements of these philosophies include:

* The need for a high trust relationship to develop between all parties involved in the development process. The estimation and expectation-management difficulties in coping with rapid ongoing change need to be acknowledged, and the agile development teams need to move beyond the "blame game" that gets played in traditional waterfall approaches. Ongoing changes to requirements are embraced by the process as normal, and in fact, desirable, not seen as "scope creep" and "project plan deviations".

* Technical debt and quality debt are terms referring to the longer term impacts of short-term sacrifices or poor decision-making; for example, when functionality requirements are prioritised over system architecture quality in the delivery debates, creating a situation where longer term delivery capability (or "longer term capability to change") is compromised. The process needs to recognise that in many cases, scope reduction needs to be sacrificed for quality improvement, even considering the rate of change, a typical system is going to be around for many years. Many companies have managed to implement continuous integration solutions, yet compromise on the implementation of automated unit tests, and as a result, negate many years worth of quality guarantees for the benefit of short-term functionality.

* The previous point needs to be supported by a firm understanding from the business of system ROI, and at a much more granular level than previously evaluated. In theory, each new function or service should be evaluated for the return it's generating for the business, and while this is sometimes difficult in practice, a more granular approach enables better trade-off possibilities when it comes to functionality and quality - whereas with waterfall approaches, an all-or-nothing mindset often prevails.

The key take-out from the above for the CIO is that it is her role to ensure that the required process changes are evangelised, especially to senior business sponsors. Getting the buy-in from these key stakeholders is a large part of the journey to success.

Systems architecture as change enabler

The second leverage point in the face of rapid ongoing change is that of architecting systems for change. While many argue that this aspect should stay within the realm of a CTO rather than a CIO, it is critical that both agree on the key aspects. The CIO's role is to evangelise the key architectural principles to the senior business sponsors in an accessible language, and to tie in the relationship between business solutions architecture and systems architecture (and the need for agility in both).

As an example, it is of limited benefit for IT to introduce a services-oriented architecture (SOA) if the business is not thinking of designing its offerings or final products as services. Business services should tie into the technical architecture from design, implementation, measurement and management perspectives.

A properly implemented services architecture from the business level down provides the potential for real business agility, whereas an IT driven SOA implementation rarely delivers significant business value.

CIOs will be forced to pay close attention to the move towards development processes and systems architecture that support rapid change. Many have already started on the journey, but as with any change requiring a paradigm shift, the journey towards agility is fraught with challenges and setbacks, and requires both courage and skill to implement in concert with a solid understanding of where the business is going and how IT can facilitate this success. CIOs have a significant role in bringing about the required changes to organisations, especially the changes required in the way business and IT work together. It is also clear that while certain themes and best practices are emerging, each organisation needs to map out its own path. The organisations that succeed will be significantly better placed for sustainable competitiveness, than those who decline to take the journey.

MagmaTec will host a CIO's breakfast in Cape Town, on 24 November 2009, on the topic: Agile: Promises & Lies. For more information, e-mail Stuart Phillips at stuartp@magmatec.co.za.