MMS' greatest technical challenge: "Creating and testing the code to convert the legacy data. The old system didn't have many data integrity checks so the data was a real mess."
Toughest moment during development: "When one of the lead developers, a consultant, quit a month and a half before the go-live date. It turned out that he hadn't done any of the coding he claimed to have done."
The next big challenge for MMS: "Enterprise application integration using Web services with all of our other back-end systems."
Why Web services isn't what most people think: "The concept of universally compatible software services has been around for years, in the guise of CORBA, COM and so on but never has fully materialized. This time, it has a much better chance because of the reach of XML, but the goals of UDDI are so unrealistic that the hype will most likely never become total reality."
MMS is important to Life Time Fitness because: "It gives us the ability to manage and monitor the members to a degree we never dreamed possible."
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
