Archive for the ‘Business Sense’ Category

I try to stray away from political discourse, as a rule, on this blog. After all, it is my company’s website and the discussion doesn’t really have a place here. However, after reading The Wall Street Journal Article, ‘Sick and Getting Sicker’, I feel it may be appropriate…or at least germane…to add my two cents to the discussion (for what it’s worth).

So much is made about the health care issue and the cost to businesses, but not much is added to the discussion that has a bearing on real life. It ends up being about tax dollars and spending and ‘BIG’ government and ’small’ government. It’s never about who’s affected by action or inaction. As a small business owner, insurance is a big deal. Health insurance is an even bigger deal.

It’s not all ponies and rainbows

I’m constantly worried about when the other shoe will drop, as I’m sure many business owners are. Will my new client pay? Will I get that new contract? What happens if we make a mistake? Insurance is supposed to help us all feel a little better about doing business. My business insurance helps. My Errors and Omissions policy makes me feel better too, but it’s not nearly as important, psychologically, as health insurance.

Thankfully, I’m insured by wife’s excellent policy, but I can’t offer insurance to my employees, so I’ve taken to hiring freelancers and contractors to fill the gap, but the talent pool is shallow and it’s not easy to ramp up for a big project when you staff a project this way. This ham strings my efforts to get and keep amazing people (no matter how amazing I may be…which my Mom tells me I am…so I must be), as it does for the people in the article. More importantly, it wears down the fiber of an organization. It’s yet another hurdle to creating and building a business. A hurdle that seems unnecessary when you look at the way European countries care for their population.

So much lip service is given to the culture of small business in this country. It’s apparently essential to making the economy rebound. It apparently employs the most people in the US. It apparently speaks about the culture of this country and our rugged individuality. If it is apparently all these things, then why are small business left hanging in the wind. Why is the discourse disproportionally skewed toward big business? I guess it’s hard to have a seat at the debate when small businesses are made up of so many disparate voices. I don’t think it’s an excuse.

The cost of any progressive action will be high, but the cost of inaction will be much, much higher. Insure us all and keep our country moving forward.

I’ve long been a fan of MySQL. We use it to power Event Clipboard, integratechange.com, and many of our other projects. I was concerned when MySQL was bought by Sun, but I thought, at least Sun has a history of embracing open source initiatives.

My one fear was that MySQL would lose direction and become a behemoth of epic proportions. In short, I thought it was going become Java (not to start a flame war, but I could never embrace Java). Now that Sun has been purchased by Oracle, I fear that my fears will be realized. I hope not, but this article in Infoworld, MySQL: Forked beyond repair? doesn’t help me feel better about the situation.

If the originators of MySQL are jumping ship and creating disparate derivatives, what will be the one source we can trust. I don’t necessarily trust Oracle to shepherd the open-source process, which would ultimately lend credibility to MySQL and engender a period of adoption by enterprises. From a purely bottom-line perspective, It doesn’t make sense for Oracle to promote something which naturally competes with it’s already profitable offerings.

If indeed, MySQL is being cast out into the wilderness of so many open source products, it may have to wander the desert for a little while as the most prolific contributors coalesce around an authoritative source of code. This may be an opening for a new company to come in and fill the gap that has been left by MySQL’s changing hands, or Oracle may do what we all hope and keep MySQL’s vibrant community going strong. I think it will end up in the wilderness for some time and a new source will come out on top.

For the time being, we may not see any real changes that affect us, but it may be time to start dusting of the PostgresSQL skills.

We live in a changing world, that much is true. What I’ve found recently is not only that the environment changes around us, but our perception of the environment changes around us just as quickly. I think this is an important and prescient idea. Almost everything I know, or think I know, is probably wrong. There may be some odd facts, like New Jersey Devils Left Winger, Zach Parise has scored 41 goals so far this season, that will hold true many years from now. On the whole, though, I’m probably going to be proven wrong about a number of things I think are iron clad ideas. It’s a humbling and energizing realization.

You may be asking yourself what triggered these thoughts (and if you’re not, I’m going to say it anyway). If you’ve read my blog before, you’ve probably seen references to Scientific American…mostly because I’m a subscriber…but also because I love almost all things scientific. The most recent issue has a leader article called Does Dark Energy Exist?. The basic premise: astrophysicists have been trying to explain what makes up most of the universe. To do so, they have created and are trying to prove a theory that a mysterious dark energy has contributed to the expansion of our homogenous universe. The article offers a different theory that explains the expansion of our universe. In short, (read the article for the entire treatise), our universe is inhomogeneous, that pockets of the universe are expanding at different speeds which accounts for our observational data.

Granted, this isn’t necessarily earth shattering news to most people, nor may you care very much about dark energy. The interesting point here is that for over a decade, cosmologists have considered the universe homogenous and filled with dark energy. Now the opposite may be true. In short, a lot of stuff they know about the universe may indeed be wrong (It’s not proven yet, just a theory).

Peripateia and Anagnorisis

That brings me to programming. In general, programming is ephemeral and guided by the best ideas of the day. If you’ve worked as a programmer for longer than a couple of years, you’ve probably migrated from one general design pattern or language to another. And in every migration, you’ve thought to yourself, “this is the one I’ve been waiting for.” Case in point: Ruby on Rails.

I was looking at the source code from one of our old .NET applications. We built that system using the Table Data Gateway pattern. More or less, the TDG pattern utilizes a gateway class that contains all necessary SQL code for a specific entity. All of your other code then interacts with the gateway class to perform the CRUD operations that you’ve outlined in the class. On top of the gateway, we constructed additional classes which wrapped each entity and provided any necessary business logic. Then using the .NET (version 1.2) code behind classes we created all the sweet, sweet presentation code.

Lately, we’ve moved to the MVC architecture for all applications. The separation of concerns has improved the speed and cleanliness of our code. In short, our code smells a lot less. The MVC architecture makes a lot of sense (especially because we’re doing a lot of ROR work), but it also fully encapsulates the entire architectural idea for a system. Previously, we relied on the governing structures of the .NET framework, but the move to a more language agnostic framework makes it easier for us to transition from one language to another very quickly. To be fair, TDG is only one part of a larger architectural pattern, but it fueled the overall architectural ideas that governed our .NET architecture.

All this hullabaloo and exposition is to make one point, MVC will probably give way to some other architecture in the ensuing years. We may all move to the PAC pattern (doubtful I know) or the Reflection pattern. This is the thing I like the most about programming. It seems like no matter how hard I try, I’ll always be wrong about something and I’ll have to rethink everything I’m doing sooner or later. The nice thing, even when I change my approach to programming, the stuff I wrote 6 years ago will keep chugging along with it’s old patterns. The poor astrophysicists will have to rethink almost everything if dark energy doesn’t exist.

Another inspiration: Mike Rowe on being wrong

Custom software development and consulting is Integrate’s core business. We do have a product out in the wild that people are paying us to use, but custom development is, and always will be what makes Integrate, Integrate.

I’ve been thinking about the software industry as a whole recently. For as long as there have been entrepreneurs, there has been money to fuel businesses that make and sell products. In software, that’s all people are interested in. To become a big name or make an impact, you have to develop the next big product. Because of this, programmers and entrepreneurs always seem to search for ways to make the huge impact. It’s considered the Holy Grail of software development: make a great product, sit back and rake in the dough. You are now successful enough to talk at events and give everyone else advice.

When Integrate set out to create Event Clipboard, I approached it from a slightly different perspective: It doesn’t have to be the next big thing, it just has to be our next big thing. 6 or 7 months later, we have paying customers and we’re happy about it. Recently, Integrate was in talks for a strategic partnership to market Event Clipboard. Ultimately we passed on the opportunity. It just wasn’t conducive to the way we approach software and manage our business (on saying no).

All of the water-cooler hubbub about this deal at Integrate got me to thinking about who we are and why I started this business 4 years ago. I had one goal in mind: provide great service and develop great custom software to help people improve the way they do business. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some great clients (Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson), but what I’m most proud of is how happy those clients are even after a year or more has passed since we installed their software.

Most recently, I received a call from one of the division heads at Merrill Lynch about the software we developed for them, Account and Account::Coaching. If you have ever gone through a merger at a big company, you know that one of the hardest things to merge (other than the personnel) are the different software systems that run the businesses. So when this director called me to talk about Account, I thought they were going to ask what the best way to decommission it is. To my surprise, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch were so happy with the system that Bank of America’s representatives have made the decision to continue to use it into the foreseeable future.

The reason I tell that story is not for accolades. I tell that story because I’m extremely proud of what we accomplished, not just in the software arena (It’s been running for 2 1/2 years without being touched by us), but because of how proud I am that Integrate got it right for this client. Low-maintenance and ease of use are certainly worth praise, but the service we had to provide to get it right is more important to me.

For Integrate, the Holy Grail is our service, which ultimately is what makes our software successful for our clients. I lament that investors and the press don’t line up to help or promote software consultancies like they do for product developers, but I’m also exceedingly happy to be in the service driven business and to have the chance to make great software for great clients.

-Chris

So it’s apparently been 54 days since I bought my new Mac. Here are my thoughts on the transition. Why oh why did I wait so long.

That is all. Transition done. Happy developer.

This is definitely an odd combination of links, but both are worth a look.

Check out Samuel Colbert’s article in the Wall Street Journal, Get Rid of the Performance Review!. I tend to agree with most of his sentiments about the performance review being arbitrary and less than helpful. His suggestions for replacing it however are, I think, less than stellar…but a good start.

Once your done with that, take a refresher just like the Hubble Telescope. Everyone loves a come back.

Enjoy.
-Chris

Cap Gemini’s CTO blog post by Rob Tolindo,¬†Insight to the People¬†takes an interesting (and agreed on) tack regarding Business Intelligence.

¬†…you can‚Äôt really speak of separate ‚Äòapplications‚Äô any more. Intelligence is seamlessly embedded in other systems. You could be working with email, a spreadsheet, or the client contact system without even realizing that small particles of Business Intelligence keep raining down. It‚Äôs what you could call pervasive intelligence.

I’ve never completely understood the need for separate reporting tools.¬† For me, the only purpose for any system is to present actionable information.¬† Once you separate data and action, the power of analysis is weakened.¬† I, too, believe that any system that¬†doesn’t provide analysis tools next to¬†transactional tools doesn’t go far enough in meeting the user’s needs.¬† If there are additional analysis needs that would directly impact the use of a system, they should be placed within the system within one or two clicks.¬† If they exist only in ReportNet or some esoteric and completely unusable¬†OLAP cube, they might as well not exist.

We just completed a production roll-out of a budget management system.¬† Not only does this system manage budgets, but it also tracks (in real time) line item transactions.¬† The idea is that the spending that actually reduces the budget is right next to where the budget is allocated.¬† If there is an analysis to be made about how money was spent, it’s click away.¬† If a user needs to know how the cost they just entered affected a budget it’s a click away.¬†

As developers, it’s important that we enable users to answer¬†questions¬†easily without forcing them to think whether or not they are using the ‘Business Intelligence’ tool or if the answer to their question is in ReportNet.¬†

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve last written, and for that I apologize.¬† It’s been busy around here at Integrate, and it’s been difficult to break away to write¬†for the Blog.¬† I can’t complain.¬† Owning a company that’s busy¬†is a great feeling.

From time to time, a project, a change initiative, a team or an individual will fail. It’s inevitable.¬† The power of failure comes in many different forms.¬† Often construed as a negative event, failure is rewarded with punishment, poor reviews and a negative reputation.¬† Unfortunately, the¬†typical lesson learned¬†during a failure is that you can not recover.

Failure, however, has immense benefits.¬†¬†Failure doesn’t normally occur because of one individual’s actions.¬† It happens because of a systemic break down.¬† For a change management initiative, a whole cadre of people work together to reach a common goal.¬† When¬†the team doesn’t gel or the member’s of the team don’t communicate effectively, the initiative will either be incredibly difficult or impossible to acheive.¬† If the project doesn’t succeed, it’s important, I think, to do two things:

1. Evaluate the team and the politics or abilities of each individual to see what new strategies you can put in place to stem the tide of failure again.
2. Reconstruct or re-train the team to avoid the identified problems.

This doesn’t mean the same individuals can’t work on the same project again, but it does mean that the team must come together to identify how things broke down and correct the issues. Failure is a positive thing (as long as it’s not life threatening). Reinvention is necessary to keep the business and the people in it firing on all cylinders. Additionally, if you have gone through a failure before, and you’ve done your analysis, you’ll be better able to¬†repair issues¬†in your current projects before they become problems and result in failure.

On a similar note: I think it’s important to have a culture of failure.¬† Push your people to try new things and reward their efforts.¬† It’s the the only way new ideas truly come to fruition.

I just read the Pricing a Project post on Blue Flavor’s blog.

The most prescient thing in Brian’s post is his discussion of honesty:

Having been the client on many occasions, I usually have a price in mind. The problem is if I say I’m willing to pay $15,000 for something, proposals magically come back with proposals priced at about $14,999. On the other side of that coin, every book on consulting says never ballpark a project, even though the client always asks for it.

I find it funny… in a sad sort of way, that we often start out our partnership with bluffing, no one saying what they are really thinking… how much they are willing to pay and how much it should cost (again using scraps of paper in the car dealership).

The billing and pricing strategy is almost exactly the same as Integrate’s.¬† We charge what it costs on an hourly basis.¬† If a new client asks for an estimate, we provide it as best we can. However, in every one of our agreements, we specify that this is an estimate and should this estimate ever begin to slip in any direction, we imediately discuss the impact on the overall budget (we work very hard to avoid these issues).

However, When I first started this business, I found it incredibly difficult to discuss money. It’s the one thing everyone wants to avoid discussing.¬† Consultants hate to be hamstrung into a final price because things always go out of wack.¬† Clients never want to reveal just how much money they want to spend (understandibly so).

What I’ve found is that once I dropped my insecurities about money, budget, project management, etc. were a lot easier to talk about.¬† It also has an additional, brilliant side effect.

It creates a relationship of honesty.¬† There’s no limit to what a partnership can acheive when both parties are being honest.¬† When you’re honest with each other about budgetary constraints, design issues, project management issues, resource issues, etc., you can more quickly fix problems, and most importantly creatively design a solution.

In negotiation, the ultimate goal is not to win or lose, but to get each party a larger slice of the pie.  Honesty, I believe, is the first step to enlarging the pie, and it starts from the first phone call and lasts the length of the relationship.