Dear CIO/IT managers,

This CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here.

Topics in this issue:

• How to specify software quality in an outsource project
• UK government cloud to save 300 million pounds annually
  
• Advance your ITIL knowledge to the manager level
  
• Upcoming courses for CIO/IT managers

How to specify software quality in an outsource project

Recently I came across a request for bid document from a government agency for a software development project. To my surprise, it mentioned almost nothing about quality; it only talked about the functional requirements. Do they care about the quality? I bet they do. It's just that it is difficult to describe quality requirements. If I were them, I would request the potential bidders to specify how they would ensure the following:

1. Security. A bidder could perform a risk analysis and list the primary risks concerned with that particular application domain (e.g., an online transaction platform must fight against all kinds of frauds or errors involving money) and how it will build countermeasures and extra defences (e.g., access control, authentication, audit trail).
2. Maintainability. If my company were going to maintain the system itself, I would request that automated tests be provided to ensure future changes wouldn't break the system. In addition, testability is itself an indication that the code is loose-coupled and thus is easy to understand.
3. Suitability. I would request to see demos of the running system, say, every week, to ensure that the system would fit my needs. I would also organize the stakeholders in my company to join.
4. Correctness & robustness. I would request that automated system tests for all of the use cases (or a high percent of them) be provided.
5. Performance. I would specify the acceptable upper bound (e.g., 2 seconds) for conducting some common transactions (e.g., borrowing a book in a library system), with a certain volume of data in the database (e.g., 30,000 books and 10,000 borrowers) and a certain concurrency (e.g., 10 users).
6. Availability. A bidder could propose a high available architecture (e.g., cluster, off-line clients).

UK government cloud to save 300 million pounds annually

The UK government will start piloting a computing cloud (G-Cloud) for all its departments in early this year. It aims to reduce its over 100 datacenters down to 10-12 and achieve an annual saving of 300 million pounds. For more information, see here and here.

Advance your ITIL knowledge to the manager level

If you have studied ITIL foundation and would like to go to the next level (manager/intermediate), please join our upcoming ITIL v3 Operational Support and Analysis Capability Course. It costs as much as HKD22,000 in Hong Kong, but we offer it at only MOP9,800. By taking that single exam at the end of the course, you'll get an ITIL intermediate level certification. The following processes are covered in the course:

• Event Management Process
• Incident Management Process
• Request Fulfillment Process
• Problem Management Process
• Access Management Process
• Service Desk, Technical Management
• IT Operations Management
• Application Management
  

Upcoming courses for CIO/IT managers

Feedbacks

Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also have two other newsletters: Network administrator newsletter and Software developer newsletter, your staff may like to subscribe.

Until next time, 

Kent Tong