ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Hello to the brave developers,

So, did you wait long? I hope the anticipation was not too hard.

Following my last post I would like to fulfill my promise.

Last time I stopped the flow of writing with the idea of looking for somebody in the organization that is not the application user.

Also, try to find what in the application, would interest this somebody or even better, assist them to do their work.

I will jump directly to a real life example.

Imagine yourself as a truck driver. You work in an independent logistics firm and sometimes you deliver goods for some company's warehouse.
Let's call it SCW. Now, imagine a hot day and you arrive with your truck to SCW. At the gate, the gatekeeper checks your papers and tells you that this delivery is totally unexpected and you cannot unload or even get in because of new security regulations.

Now what? You could park your truck, try to walk into SCW and raise hell until they found out what went wrong.
Another alternative for the less aggressive would be to call your office and they will try to get hold of the purchasing guy or the SCW manager and sort it out.
Both alternative will take a lot of time and the day is hot.

Now back to your reality as a developer. What would the truck driver need out of your application? It is simple, the person that can help and solve the problem.
How would he get it? simple, he got a paper with a Delivery number, this paper was issued from the application. Someone created it, probably it has a reference to a Purchase order or Sales order. There must be some contacts there.

If you, the developer, could expose this information to the driver via extranet, that would be great and by doing one phone call the problem is solved.

Now the only task is, how to expose this data. I think you already know how. After all, you developed the application.

One last request from my side: You are welcome to add your comments and ideas in the comments section.

See you next time,

Noam