Sure, now we hear president Obama take on his rival Mitt Romney for Mitt’s alleged outsourcing US jobs to overseas companies.
With that in mind, it’s also important to note that the Federal government and State Governments are currently not obligated to keep US jobs at home! Our company, AMK Web lost at least 2 California state contracts to firms that ship their software development jobs overseas!
Now wouldn’t you think that if we are to stop outsourcing jobs, we should start with government jobs?
Mr. President, my company has been hiring local developers for the past eleven years. What incentive has the US government offered small firms like ours? We still have to pay a great amount in payroll taxes. If we outsourced our jobs, our payroll taxes would have been much less or next to none! In this economy, this is a matter of survival.
Outsourcing and hence saving money may be just good business. After all this is a free enterprise system and you should maximize profits in any possible legit way you can.
Since I am a software specialist and run a software company, I will keep my focus on just my field. In a previous blog on this same website, we analyzed a bit what happens when a company sends their software projects overseas. The result is almost always more money spent, a lot more headache and then a project taking several times longer than what it would take in the states. When Outsourcing in other fields, the outcome might not be so grim.
Now here are a few other items to consider, when you send your jobs overseas, you are in effect helping another economy instead of US’s economy. Money leaves the US and is poured into another economy.
There are a lot of valid arguments such as lack of financial incentives to keep jobs here. US government and our great legislators do not dish out a lot of good incentives to businesses to keep their jobs here. How about higher taxes on companies that ship work overseas? How about cutting payroll taxes for those who hire within the US? The benefits are obvious but are the politicians listening?

Database design or database application development is an art.

You have identified the data items that you want to save and you know what data you want displayed on each page.  Which do you do first, User Interface design or Database Design?

That might be a matter of preference.  What I normally do is create my database tables first.  It’s easier to make changes to your database table structure than it is to change how data looks on the screen.  Screen changes do take longer usually.

MS-SQL has made designing tables so much easier.  You can even use the SQL script builder to insert into and update your tables.  Writing Stored Procedures is always the preferred way to save and retrieve date.  A convenient way to call the stored procedures would be from data access classes.  You generally encapsulate your data access routines into these classes.  Then from your front-end application, you would call the class methods.   This way you would organize your application.

IT managers often wonder how they should go about starting a project.   No matter how small or large your company is, principals are the same.  Even though with smaller organizations, you have fewer people to talk to, still the same path needs to be taken

Identifying the need

1. Conducting meetings with requesting organizations to define in clear terms what needs to be accomplished.
2. Creating a blue print of the final product.
3. Refining the final product by reviewing the blue print with the requesting organization.

Keep in mind that these facts about the blue print:

• While bullet points show the major idea, details may not cover 100% of what is needed.  This is just a fact of life.  Project definitions that try to define every minute detail, often times will take more time than necessary and will result in unwanted delays.  With that said, major points do need to be identified.
• When a project is being defined, requesting managers should always talk about the big picture, what is in the horizon and how the product of this application development project fits within the future of the organization.
• It’s important to conduct meetings with different people within the requesting organization to learn about other viewpoints and expectations about what need to be accomplished.

Next I will talk about:

User interface design

Database design and development.

Platform to use

Finding an application development team.