New to ITG? Read on!

A lot of people join ITG domain everyday. They have many questions they find difficult to find answers of. Here at this page I will touch upon some things a person new to this technology domain or a person planning to join this technology domain should know.

Every person coming to ITG Domain gets an opportunity to enjoy his/her share of fun learning it. That, this is an uncoventional technology domain is not a secret. In fact, I would fall short of calling it a technology domain. This is more like a modelling tool, to translate business processes into data collection forms to help enhance visibility into buisnesses thus making decision making at higher level easier.

A person joining this technology with no prior IT experince has a different set of problems learning this tool from the ones transitioning from another domain. The former has to learn entirely new concepts making the grasp difficult and the later has to potentially unlearn some concepts in order to learn new ways of doing things. Regardless of which category you fall under, I have some tips for you here at this page.

One thing that you should be clear about is -- IT Governance Center is NOT about software development. It is a form of concept selling. Don't expect ITG to turn a business into a billion dollar corporation overnight. It is but a mere tool that can enhance visibilty and control over operations in a business, thus, potentially increasing profits and making the organization benefit from the investment.

If you are learning ITG Center, from the perspective of facing the real life challenges, i.e. doing actual development (configuration in ITG terminology), you should know primarily about Workflows, Request types, Portlets and Reports. Most important skills to have are:

Very clear understanding of Workflow configuration:

• What is a decision step?
• What is an execution step?
• What is a transition?
• How to work with Timeouts?
• How to configure notifications?

Very clear understanding of Request Type configuration:

• Identify correctly the need to customize a Request Header Type.
• What are validations? How to make use of validations optimally?
• Laying out fields on a Request Type for optimal visual ergonomics
• Using Field attributes to control appearance and editability of user input
• Using Tokens to access runtime data

General Skills:

• Configuring Data sources
• Configuring Portlets
• Configuring Reports
• Understanding ITG base schema
• Understanding ITG RML schema

Among the above mentioned categories, the first two list basic skill. Everyone joining this domain must posses these skills. The 3rd category lists slightly higher level of skills that one may do without in his first couple of weeks/months of working with this tool. But ultimately everyone should target to have these skill in a longer-run. A category of even higher level skills to have would be:

• Integration of ITG with other tools
• Data export/import/migration
• Back-end operations/Open Interface

These are some of the skills one can do absolutely without in first six months. But as one moves along, in due course these skills would be required.

Here I will stop delving further deep into these topics individually. But yes, I will be talking about them all, in due course. Watch out this space.

Happy learning!

-- Ranjeet Rain