Tag Archives: Dave Jacob

Apr 6 2011

Davalen Business Track Presentation “Experiences and Best Practices from Integrating and Implementing a Intranet Portal at Unitrin/Kemper Insurance” (BUS-S07) to be at IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2011 Conference

More details to come: Davalen to present session with client at IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2011

BUS-S07 Experiences and Best Practices from Integrating and Implementing a Intranet Portal at Unitrin/Kemper Insurance

Presenters:

Daniel Jaffa, Application Architect, UNITRIN Services Group

Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, Davalen

Kemper Insurance, a Unitrin company, is a nationally recognized Property & Casualty Insurance firm selling a variety of Comprehensive Insurance products through independent agents. Customer interaction for independent insurance agents is an imperative aspect of the Kemper business model as they represent the sales and customer relation arm of the business. Historically, the independent agents had close relationships with Kemper personnel to check on the status of policies, renewals, and servicing additional insurance requirements in order to satisfy the needs and requests of clients. Attend this session to understand the business drivers and implementation details as Kemper developed a new portal based agency system using IBM WebSphere Portal version 6.1.5. The solution services include Rating Application, Billing Application, Claim Inquiry, Enterprise Content Management (IBM Filenet, IBM Content Manager, IBM Content Manager OnDemand). The team will share experiences designing a solution that provided increased reusability of application services across not only Kemper’s infrastructure but by all of Unitrin Personal lines of Business.

See how the results provide Kemper’s agents improved access to key information and data, resulting in improved customer service and client retention. Understand the details, lessons learned and plans for future expansion to support their business goals.

Mar 16 2011

We Speak Business. We Understand Technology. ®

Dave Jacob

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

A fascinating book was recommended to me by the CIO of Global Partners, Ken Piddington entitled, “World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs” by Peter High. The book reinforces a concept that is central to the mission of Davalen – it’s that information technology vendors must understand the businesses they support for both you and the enterprise to succeed. When Davalen began in 1993, we were so sure of this idea that we trademarked this concept as: “We speak business. We understand technology.”

The IT department should not be a cost center reacting to a myriad of requests but a strategic partner in the business that offers solutions using the toolkit they have available, i.e. their software. As Davalen has grown, we found IBM to have the most comprehensive toolkit, which allowed us to recommend the best business value to our clients.

Getting the most out of your IBM software starts with understanding the business need and how it will increase revenue or reduce cost. These metrics are not always apparent but starting with this mindset helps IT become part of the solution and not a bottleneck. Priorities are set as an organization with clear measurements of the software impact on the business.

Early in my career, I was on a design team that automated claims processing for the Medicare B program. In every case, we doubled the IT budget of the organization – try that in your company. However, the business case was compelling because we automated much of the claims process and reduced the overall business cost by 50 percent.

Much of my time currently is spent managing the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portlet Factory practice at Davalen. We have found that once we go through the business analysis and define the appropriate processes to automate, that Portlet Factory cuts our development time by 60 percent or more so we can get to the solution more quickly.

Using the IBM tools available and with our deep understanding that IT supports the business processes, Davalen is in a unique position to help your business get the most from your IBM investment.

Jan 25 2011

Our Fabulous Lotusphere 2011 Team

With only days until the main event, here are the team members who are lucky enough to represent Davalen at Lotusphere 2011. Between sessions, events, booth space and meetings, make sure you meet these talented folks! You can schedule a formal meeting by emailing Ruth Jarvis at rjarvis@davalen.com or just stop by Booth #221.

 

 

Len Barker

Len Barker, Managing Partner, Lotus Practice

About Len: Len spent 15 years in the nuclear industry managing complex, multiple system projects before founding Davalen’s predecessor, Barker Consulting in 1998. His understanding of business comes from 10 years of running his own business and in plant manager, project manager and business development positions in the corporate world. He is a certified IBM instructor and is well versed in web technologies, system administration, and collaborative technologies.

 


Dave Jacob

Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

About Dave: Dave is listed in “Who’s Who In America”, and is a frequent contributor to technical publications on technology initiatives. He held a number of key management positions with EDS and Data General and founded Jacob Solutions, Inc. (JSI) in 1993 and merged JSI with Barker Consulting to form Davalen, LLC in 2006. Dave is certified by IBM as a architect/consultant/trainer in most development technologies in IBM including RAD, Domino and Portlet Factory and has worked with various languages including FORTRAN, IBM assembler, COBOL, Lotus Notes, LotuScript and Java.

 


Deborah Corcoran

Deborah Corcoran, Staffing Services

About Deborah: Deborah brings with her significant experience in sales, marketing and consulting services for enterprise accounts across the U.S. and internationally. Prior to joining Davalen, she supported the IBM Software Services teams across all the IBM Software portfolios, in addition to working on numerous IBM dedicated vendor teams building and managing strong, long-term relationships. Using a consultative sales approach to articulate IT consulting services and solutions product offerings to Fortune 500 -1000 companies, she successfully grew her sales territory in yearly revenue specific to IBM Software Services for the Lotus and WebSphere brands.


Ruth Jarvis

Ruth Jarvis, Marketing, Social Media & Events

About Ruth: Ruth  joined Davalen in 2002 and took charge of the Marketing Department in 2007. She is responsible for Davalen’s presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube and is the face behind Davalen’s monthly email newsletter: The Tech Connection, website, blog, webinars, and conferences. She also handles our public, press and analyst relations as well as case study development, white paper creation, press releases writing, and outreach to clients for joint media related initiatives. If you need information about Davalen, she’s the woman to see!

Jan 18 2011

Portal & Portlet Factory at Work in the Insurance Industry

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

Dave Jacob
Dave Jacob

We were recently presented with an interesting problem in the insurance industry to solve.

A major insurance company wanted to make their Independent Agency system more accessible by their agents directly. The information they needed was stored in many legacy systems that were not designed to communicate with one another. The solution that was selected involved IBM Portal as the glue to share the disparate information and IBM Portlet Factory as the development environment.

The solution began with the Davalen WebSphere Portlet Factory Application Development curriculum to quickly get the data processing employees up to speed on Portal development, followed by a joint Davalen/Insurance Company architecture and design phase.

Responsibilities were assigned for various design phases including theme and skin development, client jars to interact with the legacy services, Portlet Factory service consumers and ljos to translate the services, and finally a GUI layer to display the results.

In addition, portlets had to be defined to work in a coordinated fashion to display all relevant information to the agent, regardless of which legacy system contained the information.

Finally, all information needed to be displayed in the portlets via one authentication sign-on.

Contact us to learn more and see a demonstration of our capability in your industry.

Dec 22 2010

Snow and Lotusphere

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

The first snow of the season in Boston reminds me that its time to get out of town and head for Florida. Luckily, Lotusphere is waiting for me and I’m ready to go!

With the maturity of the Portlet Factory environment, I am looking forward to seeing how the product is being used with Portal, Dashboards, Expeditor and more. It’s also good to see what my Domino friends have been up to since last year. Hard to believe that this product has been around for 20 years and continues to reinvent itself to stay current in the marketplace. Remember when Lotus 4.5 came out and shortly thereafter Lotus 4.6 with html and web support, not to mention LotuScript? Seems like a long time ago.

I wonder what’s new on the horizon…

Nov 16 2010

The Future of Virtual Business Intelligence: Dashboards

Dave Jacob

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

As a web-based, virtual employee world, Davalen is always evaluating our procedure and protocol. Obviously, the old excel spreadsheets and status reports systems just can’t keep up as sales and assignments expand globally and all times of the day and night. So, how do we measure our performance?

We use business intelligence (BI) tied to our real-time systems. Since clients often do most of the fulfillment work on-line, it’s critical to know when items are not lining up. Davalen has made major investments in tackling this information problem through web-based charting solutions attached to critical performance data.

Dashboards are a visual way to set metrics, alerts and exception reporting in a visual format so you know how the business is performing at any time, not after nightly reports are generated, reconciled and emailed.

Davalen is using IBM WebSphere Portal , IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and the Davalen Chart framework to provide just this type of solution. This solution is being implementing in the energy industry to capture carbon credits for power plant generation and evaluate comparative plant performance. In the healthcare industry this solution is able to monitor and alert the necessary individuals based on pacemaker data. In the insurance industry these dashboards can be used to measure independent agent performance.

An important goal of web-based virtual business intelligence is to provide immediate feedback to the management team with a clear graphical measure of the situation, notify employees tasked with responding to the alert and monitor the alert until it is resolved. This can all be accomplished quickly and effectively with dashboarding.

Contact us to learn more and see a demonstration of our capability in your industry.

Oct 12 2010

Pain Point: Reducing the Cost of Application Development

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice.


WPF Productivity 400px


One of the latest IBM announcements allows Web Application development with IBM® WebSphere Portlet Factory. While not much discussion has been generated so far, there are some important reasons why this approach to web application is compelling:

     

  1. Portlet Factory is simpler to use than RAD,
  2. Portlet Factory is much cheaper to buy than RAD,
  3. Application development is accelerated by 50 – 70 % over standard Java development using RAD,
  4. Most Portlet Factory developers will not have to become Java experts although you’ll need one Java go-to-person on the staff for those unique instances that require some Java coding,
  5. Portlet Factory is a great career move for those Domino developers looking to move toward a Java world.

    6.  

While we do both Java (RAD) developments here at Davalen, we prefer IBM® WebSphere Portlet Factory when clients give us a choice. With the new release of version 7 of Portlet Factory, robust support is available for AJAX and DOJO to further increase the value in the marketplace.

If you haven’t investigated Portlet Factory as a primary development tool for your web applications, I think you are missing an important value proposition from IBM.

Contact me if you need more information or want to see a more detailed analysis of RAD and Portlet Factory.

Jul 28 2010

Congratulations to the Winners!

All week people spotted our remote control racecar zooming through the showcase at the “Exceptional Web Experiences – IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2010 – Americas” and exclaimed “I want that!”

Well here are the lucky three winners from our random raffle as announced from the showcase floor on Wednesday July 21, 2010!

Congratulations to Winners: Steve Heil (IBM), Nilesh Patel (Allstate) and Josh Varga (Sargent & Lundy)!!

Winners: Steve Heil (IBM), Nilesh Patel (Allstate) and Josh Varga (Sargent & Lundy)

Jul 21 2010

North Star is Coming

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere

As the conference wraps up, business partners spent the day learning about the execution of the cleaner planet IBM vision utilizing the North Star framework. This will include many of the tools in the IBM toolkit – Portal, Social Collaboration, Search and remains a very open framework for plugging in best of breed components from other vendors.

It is clear to me that an open framework is much more important than a focus on open source solutions for ongoing maintenance, upgrade and enhancement reasons. Open source will continue to be an important component of the strategy, Linux comes to mind.

Jul 20 2010

Nothing like Kick-Off Day at PEC2010.

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere

The kick-off meeting this morning was very exciting with the discussion of integrating more components to the IBM WebSphere Portal family of products including socialization and analytic.

A more subtle message was the adoption of IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory as the development platform for Portlet development and the September 1, 2010 release of IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory version 7.

Spoon’s presentation on best practices for Portlet development, html templates and Rich Data Definition files was well received by close to 40 people and the discussion continued into the evening at the Davalen booth in the expo center.

Fusion Charts and Davalen’s new builder got lots of notice as we described more robust ways to make dashboard charting more dynamic.

The highlight of the evening was meeting the new very nice “cupcake” at the cocktail reception, a traveling smorgasbord of desserts. I was fortunate enough to have my picture taken with the true celebrity of the night, which was not easy to do as she was placed in the middle of a portable table surrounded by desserts.