Biomedical Engineering Reference
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feature bloat often seen in more traditional enterprise software packages.
As a consequence of this these tools provided a clean and simple user
interface and the competition for users on the web placed an emphasis on
quality of user experience. In our opinion these factors, user interface and
user experience, were critical to the success of these tools and in some
respects actually more important than their feature lists.
Finally at this time, the commercial market for these tools was quite
limited and very immature. In contrast though there were numerous free
and open source software (FLOSS) alternatives. Often the FLOSS
alternatives were in fact powering some of the most successful social
software on the web, or were clones of existing popular offerings. The
fact that these tools could be downloaded and installed freely meant that
they readily enabled the experimental approach we wanted to follow.
The natural way to introduce these capabilities was through an
evolutionary path akin to agile/scrum development methodology rather
than a more traditional 'big bang' launch. This meant that the introduction
of these capabilities would start with a phase of experimentation and
progress to proof of concept followed by production deployment and
fi nally transfer of support to a central shared service group. As a result
we developed the framework illustrated in Figure 13.1 to introduce,
evaluate, develop and deploy these new capabilities.
The FLOSS assessment framework. Describing
the different phases associated with an evolutionary
model for the introduction of new IT capabilities
to an enterprise
Figure 13.1
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