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Weekly Recap: Build vs. buy, the enterprise IT infrastructure agenda for 2014, and more…

EducationEvery week, I share the most interesting and useful tech articles that I’ve found over the past week. This week’s top articles focus on the “Build vs. Buy” myth, BYOD, and more. I hope you find them useful:

It’s Not Whether To BYOD or Not to BYOD, It’s How To
With the workforce becoming increasingly mobile, businesses must find a way to balance productivity, affordability and security to meet current and future workforce demands. To read more about one secure way to handle BYOD, check out this article.

Build vs. Buy: A dangerous lie
Given the complexities of fluid business conditions and the peculiarities of the internal processes that support them, the term “off the shelf” is a marketing gimmick. “Buy” is never just “buy.” It’s actually “integrate.” So is “build,” which means they both require similarly skilled engineering talent. The truth is, building a new solution isn’t that much more difficult than buying and integrating a new solution, especially if you use the right tools (like this company did).

Why a Huge Department Store Chain Turned IT Development On Its Head
John Lewis Partnership, the owner of the U.K.’s largest department store chain, has turned traditional IT development on its head in a test project directly aimed at drawing on staff expertise. It’s a radical concept that other business should explore. Rather than bringing in outside help to drive innovation, why not give your current staff the ability to innovate on their own?

The Enterprise IT Infrastructure Agenda for 2014
In an attempt to capitalize on new technology, businesses are pushing to update their aging architecture. The technology of the future calls for agile, scalable architecture that adapts to changes and grows with the business. To read more on the benefits of application architecture, here’s an article I wrote last year that covers the advantages nicely.