I read the Signal vs. Noise blog run by the 37 signals guys. It's a good read most of the time. Sometimes they come off a little too religious for my liking (Simple! Fast! No spec! Get Real!). leaving me with little hope that they could take on a real "enterprise" project. By "enterprise" I mean massive. integrated. stuck working with old data. "legacy" bad choices and nasty data formats.

All of the things they seem to work on are new code. Of course it's going to be fast and work well! you're not dealing with the cruft of decisions made long ago!

So when i read an article like Computer Project Awash in Red Ink. I naturally think of them first. What would they do?

My next thought is "geez...Oracle really screwed the pooch on that one." then I think "wow. Philly can't manage it's way out of a paper bag."

$18 million. I bet (and this isn't just hyperbole) that you could get two or three teams of 3 developers each to focus on a particular module of the system and have a functional effort done within a year. What's the max cost on that? 9 developers. let's consider the cost of them being there at $150.000 each. total cost to Philly under $1.5 million. Round up to 2 so it sounds like a real budget and let the hiring process begin.

Instead. Oracle goes and tries to rig one of their off the shelf products to match the requirements and fails miserably. Then. using the same folks who made that decision. they decide to write their own. That fails too. Big shock!

Attention people who make decisions about IT investments:

Just because the company you're hiring to do work for you has a big name doesn't mean they're smart -- it means you are going to overpay for substandard work!

There are plenty of talented companies in the greater Philadelphia area who would have willingly jumped in on this. People who do outstanding work for many. many other clients. The big firms charge exorbitant rates (>$200/hr and up to $400 in some cases!) for the work being done by employees fresh out of college. How is that working in the best interests of your client?

In the era of SOA and web services. having your technology chief say something like this:

"Neff. as well as then-City Finance Director Janice Davis. pushed for Oracle because the firm also was going to be revamping the computer systems of several other city departments. Neff and Davis thought it made sense that the systems all be compatible."

...should be a fireable offense.

Thousands of technology professionals in the region would have shouted you down for using that as your decision basis. Maybe there should be an external technology oversight board to make sure these kinds of decisions are never made again.

We're doing a lot of stuff right now. Not bad for a small company...

• Faculty Performance Activity Reporting System (launched. but being supported)
• IMI Portal (January)
• Athletics Recruitment System - Email (February)
• Event Management System - version 2.2 (February)
• Athletics Recruitment System - Recruit Mgmt. (April)
• Alumni Relations - Online Community (May)
• Alumni Relations - Portal (May)
• Event Management System - version 3 (June)

We're going to get our own Labs site up soon to showcase our work. The PAR system is awesome for its usability thanks to careful use of cfAjax. The Athletics systems are inheriting all of the intelligent design (ha) we put in to the PAR system and taking it up another notch with a beautiful twist that you'll see when we put it up for playtime.

As for alumni. well. they are our primary focus. We know Alumni Relations. Before the end of 2006. we'll have a complete suite of tools for running a great Alumni Relations operation patterned off of one of the best ones in the country.

As for conferences. we'll be at CFUNITED 06 where i'll be giving two presentations - one on Farcry 3.0 and cfAjax. I'm looking forward to seeing many of the other presentations there - last year I learned an awful lot and can't wait to do so again. Plus. the social time with my friends (Rob Brooks-Bilson. Adam Crump. Ray Camden. Todd Sanders) is priceless. CF-Objective is still kinda iffy...i'd like to get up to Minneapolis. but I have to balance that against our workload (and yes. budget too). And if there's a MAX-type-thing going on in the fall. I have to plan for that too.

It seems like every blogger goes through a phase where their posts slow down...then...unexplainedly........stop. Then about 2 months later. the "mea culpa" post - "been busy" "had a kid" "major project" "releasing soon" "index finger removed by rabid aardvark" - then everything gets back to normal.

Here's mine.

December 2005:

We're working towards releasing our second major Ajax-enabled application. The due date (immovable!) is December 13. Matt is working his tail off on this and in the process has become quite the god of DOM manipulation and character encoding. Eeks...never really meant for it to get that bad. but i'll make it up to him once the "open" season was over.

I'm working on a mass email application. Dime a dozen functionality. but additional features that are client-specific. Since we're trying to deploy to a fully Mach-ii powered intranet. I decide that we should roll our own. Coding goes well for the most part; not everything is done (and i'm still picking at it as of this post) but i'm nice and busy.

December 13 comes and things are cool for a few days. but then we start hearing from the end users that there are things they don't understand and a few minor bugs that needed to be killed off. Also. the reporting engine needs some attention - CFDOCUMENT is devouring parts of the PDF. We fix the minor stuff quickly. sometimes within a half hour. and figure things should calm down considerably before we hit our self-prescribed "R&D period".

Yep. we were supposed to not be doing any deployments or actual client work for the last 2 weeks of the year. Ha! I'll know better in 2006 to not even attempt this one unless we deploy at Thanksgiving so the hubbub dies down sooner.

Due to certain users who shall remain nameless (though they all have nicknames now) not reading the very nicely illustrated and critically acclaimed user guide. we find ourselves answering the same email over and over again.

Christmas week comes. No meetings (horray!). Productivity on the other app skyrockets. Matt gets a little bit of time to start messing with Flex 2. as we have plans to start developing some stuff in the 2nd quarter of 2006. But not the full 2 weeks. and hardly without interruption.

I'm more than a little upset that my planning didn't allow for us to really dig in to Flex more. But we've got a lot of stuff on our plates right now. Blogging is important. so i'll be working towards getting back to my "every other day" pace starting now.

So i'm back. just like Jack Bauer. Enjoy!

Most of our colleagues and families know we were working like animals to finish up some of our projects for a July 6 launch. We did great!

The Young Alumni Reunion website. powered by Farcry. went live right on schedule. Featuring a completely fresh look and feel. it's better aligned with the type of event Lehigh is trying to host this year.

A one-two punch of version 2.0 of our Intranet and Event Management systems went live for the Lehigh Alumni Association on Wednesday as well. These are core services that will drive content on their new public website (more on this in a moment) and help their continued backoffice automation push.

We weren't able to deploy their new public website as planned. Months ago we decided to keep the content in the University's CMS. This has had great results - the folks who run it have been OUTSTANDING to work with and rounded out the project in ways unexpected. But. between scheduling issues and finding good artwork for the site we were in the position of having to slip two weeks. At that time you'll see the "all new" web view of Lehigh. The new design theme is quite stunning (sneak!). Also. the Event calendar on the new site is really a Flash component written by us and driven by a web service feed from the EMS. Finally. integration from back to front across disparate systems!

As for the others that didn't make it on time. i'll just sit on them and do an announcement when we do go live. We've got some awesome stuff in the pipeline!

I'm an avid Basecamp user. which means by proxy so are my clients.

Basecamp is a SIMPLE tool for project management that i've blogged about before. Now the guys behind that have launched a new product called "Backpack".

Backpack is aimed more at "get your life together" activities than Basecamp (which is much more business oriented). Post notes. to-do lists. photos. and files in a place you can get to them from anywhere. Even better. you can put this content up on the site either through a web browser or by emailing them to the site - it's pretty sweet.

This being the age of Internet 2.0. sharing information is just as key as storing it in the first place. RSS feeds from your personal Backpack site are readily available just as they are in Basecamp. I love this feature - I monitor any activity happening on my Basecamp site through Thunderbird (rox!) so I only have to log in to respond. Even better. you can get iCal feeds for integration with your (reasonably competent) calendar of choice. Now if i could close the loop and get this info in my Treo too....

I'll post more on Backpack as i get into it. My life needs a bit more organization anyway ;-)

This morning I had the opportunity to roll out the results of an ill-timed brilliant idea. Said idea came to me around dinner time last night. causing much work straight through 2AM.

Lehigh's alumni association is working on redeveloping their website. The old one has been in production since 98ish. The "new" look will be something more like this.

Of course. any site redesign involves reorganizing and rewriting content. re-assessing the goals of the site. and herding about a hundred cats in the same direction to get it done in a timely manner.

Last night's idea was to use Contribute to get the content editors to start populating pages with images and text while we're working on some of the more technical issues (clean code. final image design. template composition and server changes). I wanted them to write in the context of the page - considering layout. whitespace. images...all in relation to the standard page look and feel.

We're not quite final with the design yet. but I have a "close enough" sample template that i've used for a few meetings. Yanked it into Dreamweaver. added the template markup to it. and pushed it out to a development area on our server. Showed it off today and explained what we were doing.

It was a huge hit. The editors had *just* finished Contribute training on Friday and were eager to test their knowledge. This is a safe project with no production impact (other than writing. which can be done anywhere) and it looks like it'll work really well.

When the new production site is ready. i'll run a bit of script to strip out all the chrome from the pages. leaving me with the raw content so I can just jack it in to the University's CMS.

Contribute is removing the hassle of collecting content in any number of non-helpful formats. attempting to describe layout in text. and engaging the users in the creation of their new website. I love it!

(this message was in no way. shape or form paid for or endorsed by Macrodobe ;-)

Yesterday after lunch we started work on a new project. It's a big one...probably a 6 month job that is fairly complex.

I didn't get our "big ass whiteboard" yet. so i plastered the wall with those 2'x2.5' post-it sheets . Looks kinda ghetto. but it was functional. We started scribbling out how the process flow should work. Amazing how frustrating that is when you can't erase.

We did have a good time with it and I could tell that my "partner in crime" was churning furiously over how to make the complex stuff very simple for the end user. Modeling the database is the next step; we figure we'll rev that at least 4 or 5 times before we begin implementation.

Really these details don't mean much. It's just nice to start with a clean sheet and build an application from scratch. All of our creative energy was thrown at the wall yesterday afternoon. collaboratively trying to solve a business problem for a client. It was great fun. Now the hard work begins!

We'll probably Basecamp this one too just because it makes client communication easier and much more frequent. The app architecture is going to be Mach-ii for ColdFusion running against either MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server. I'd like to use MySQL just so we can claim recent experience with it (I haven't touched it since 2000!). but finding a host for that DB with ColdFusion still has to be resolved. Plus. we'll be running Farcry for their public site as well which has some implications for the DB selection.

This is Matt's first Mach-ii application. I'll be training him and our summer intern while we get things started; hopefully they'll be as productive with it as I have been!

Users know interfaces.

That's usually the depth of their knowledge about applications.

They don't care about an elegant OOP framework. beautifully clean CSS. or a really hacky-kludgy middleware tier to your ERP system. If it looks pretty and works as expected. they're happy.

I'm sure we're all pretty much in agreement that this is how things work. Of course. in the ideal world we could describe an application in text. everybody signs off on it. then we start implementing.

And then the first demo rolls around. Users get hung up on something like "but i wanted that button over *there*" instead of "when i put a lot of text in this textarea. it's truncated when saved". Useless feedback to the programmer. but apparently it means the world to John Q. User.

They never see the big picture. because their "big picture" only extends as far as the pixels on the screen.

So that being said. we should probably spend more time wireframing the layout and process flow in a "clickable" format than we usually do.

I'm trying this approach now with a project. So far. it's great. I'm using Mach-ii for the app implementation so to do the wireframe. all i'm doing is creating events and views. No data. no model. not a single bit of "real" work is being done.

My client gets a demo that they can click through and think about. I can change stuff REALLY fast. and in the end the app implementation phase is just creating the CFCs to do all the data handling throughout the application. We can talk about clickpaths and process flow together while actually doing it instead of negotiating a flowchart.

It feels almost too easy to be right. But at the same time. i've never had a framework that allowed me to do a clickable model that would require so few changes to use in the real implementation.

They're thrilled to have something they can touch so quickly. I'm happy because my time hasn't been wasted. Sounds like a good project to me!

Things I love about Basecamp. continued:

The ability to pipe an RSS feed into Thunderbird from by Basecamp account that informs me of every activity taken on every project.

I know when my clients add a milestone or to-do list. I also know when someone checks off an activity or posts a comment to the site. All without logging in.

Simple. Effective. Worth every penny!

On the plane back from Phoenix last night I spoke with the guy sitting next to me. He was working on Powerpoint - I was playing with Flash. Turns out he runs a healthcare consulting company and is doing quite well. His company is highly specialized and is very service oriented as opposed to other companies in his niche who are more technology based with a service edge. The workflow system they use supports their service provisioning...and it's built in Filemaker Pro. developed in house.

He mentioned they were working on implementing a new workflow system. Being a consultant. my ears perk up and the scent of money filled the cabin. But my interest quickly faded when he told me that they were working with an offshore company to get the system built.

He made the claim that "you people are expensive" and that he could have three foreign workers doing the same work for $45/hr. combined. Sure. we're expensive. But I bet this guy bills out in the $200/hr range (no question) and has a decent size staff doing the same.

So tell me...

If the system is absolutely key to the success of your company. why would you accept a "lowest bid" from a company thousands of miles away? Why would you not want to use a company who could really get to know your business inside and out? Your niche is highly specialized and your workflow (as you told me) was adjusted for every client.

How do you plan on educating them in your business process? It's more than just a very tight. well-written spec. I bet I could have learned more about his business in a 4 hour flight than they could in a 50 page system spec.

If he's as sharp as I think he is. he should have been able to draw the parallel between his service-oriented approach and using local technology help. For many things. "you just have to be there" to understand it.

Consulting is all about that human element. Treating software implementation as a commodity is dramatically undervaluing the art and science of building workable systems.

I didn't offer him a card. I'll never win a price war - i'm an American with an expectation of a decent standard of living. Bangalore doesn't interest me at all!