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The Skills of the Game

By Michael H. Hugos

March 28, 2003 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - There are six core techniques for building information systems. Just as the game of basketball has basic techniques such as dribbling, passing and shooting, so does the game of developing information systems. The skill levels of IT project teams can be measured by their capabilities in these techniques:
1. Joint application design for pooling the collective knowledge and ideas of a group of people working on a project.
2. Process decomposition for mapping out existing work flows and defining new work flows.
3. Data modeling for defining the kinds of data and volumes of data that a system will handle.
4. System prototyping for building a model of a system's user interface and its technical architecture to verify that it will work as expected.
5. Object-oriented design and programming for creating systems from combinations of predefined and reusable software components.
6. System testing and rollout for testing and debugging a system and training the people who will work with it.
These techniques have been known for years, and people are continually improving them. An IT professional needs to understand all six techniques and be a master of a few of them. Each IT project will call for the application of a different mix of these techniques, so teams should be composed of people skilled in the techniques that will be needed.

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