Real-World Information Systems Management

Technology Visions for Knowledge Based Sites

January 21, 2010 in Strategic Technology Adoptions, Web Technology Solutions | 4 comments

New Technology

A knowledge based site would be any site that provided knowledge rather than primarily selling products or providing entertainment. This is a wide classification and encompasses media, content, reference, research or any site that communicates knowledge on specific subjects or topics.

The Internet has become the great knowledge provider given the plethora of sites providing any type of knowledge imaginable from baking cakes to building space craft. Sophisticated search and indexing engines expose that knowledge and the game has become how to craft sites to be found and used by the largest audience possible.

Out of the virtual sea of possible knowledge sources, the more relevant, useful and valuable that knowledge is perceived to be, will determine a site’s success. Sites which do not provide relevant, useful and valuable knowledge are never very successful.

Once a site has conquered the design, usability and SEO challenges, the next mountain to climb will be how to make it an invaluable resource for the widest possible user base.

Here are some technology visions for increasing the usage, relevancy, usability and value of any knowledge based site:

Tailored Visitor Content
Content Syndication
Content Affiliate Programs
Content APIs
Smart Phone & Handheld Apps

Tailored Visitor Content

The Holy Grail for any online marketer would be to push tailored content to each visitor based on their online digital profile. Now, such a profile would be built up over time as the user interacted with your web properties and email marketing campaigns. Thus we are talking about dynamic digital profiles. Such visitor profiles would enable marketers and sales teams to dramatically increase visitor interaction, participation and, ultimately, the sales close percentage. These profiles could also be shared with partners to provide qualified leads and generate a significant source of revenue.

Minority Report - Holographic Ad

Sounds very grand and brings to mind the techno thriller film Minority Report with Tom Cruise, where consumers are presented with holographic ads based on their past spending habits.

Generating online digital profiles of your public is quite possible using Eloqua – a marketing automation and lead generation service. Eloqua has developed the technology for creating Digital Body Language profiles for powering tailored marketing campaigns, empowering sales teams and providing tailored content. See Eloqua CTO Steve Woods post What Exactly IS Digital Body Language? for more info.

At eRepublic, we now have a synergistic and powerful combination of using Eloqua, SalesForce, Clickability and our own proprietary object relational database, The Node Mesh, for powering our marketing, sales, content and knowledge delivery programs and systems:

Eloqua

Powers all of our email marketing campaigns and online forms with full synchronization with lead, contact and custom objects within SalesForce.

SalesForce

Is utilized in four core business areas:

Straight CRM for all sales teams.
Magazine circulation custom application for managing the subscribers of all company magazines.
Event custom application for managing the 70+ events the company puts on each year.
Account, user and case management for the two Navigator SaaS products.

Clickability

Is our new Web Content Publishing system and currently powers the following:

Convergemag.com
Emergencymgmt.com
Centerdigitaled.com
Erepublic.com
News, blogs and CIO Interviews content that is presented within the Navigators.

The Node Mesh

Provides a very flexible database and web services platform for connecting cloud based services. Examples of how it is currently used:

CMS and delivery platform for:
- Govtech.com
- Centerdigitalgov.com
- Navigator SaaS portals
Consumes Clickability content for publishing to the Navigators.
eCommerce forms with data pushed to Eloqua.
SalesForce API interface for managing the Navigator products.

Plum Benefits Presentation at EE09

The next technology advance will be to use these systems to present tailored visitor content on our web properties.

At the Eloqua Experience 09 conference there was a great presentation on how this was achieved for Plum Benefits using Eloqua and SalesForce (click image on right to download).

The synergistic aspects of these cloud based services are enhanced dramatically by using a directly controlled platform, like the Node Mesh, for providing data translation and integration services.

Content Syndication

Going beyond providing RSS feeds and utilizing Feedburner, content widgets with various themes and controls could be provided for embedding on other sites. A good example are the new Facebook Widgets.

Not only would these drive more traffic to your site(s), they would provide more back links and raise your overall page ranking. If you have a significant user community then simple marketing campaigns could easily start a viral adoption of them.

Content Affiliate Programs

Looking beyond straight content syndication, if your content is relevant enough then creating affiliate programs much like Google’s Adsense, would drive even more traffic to your site as well as provide a financial incentive for other web publishers to sign-up. Here is a post that gives a comprehensive list of Adsense alternatives for providing a well-spring of ideas: Good List of Adsense Alternatives.

An example for a reference site could be an answers type widget that examines the page title, H1 tags and other elements looking for keywords that could be phrased as questions and linked to reference articles. For example, given an affiliate article entitled The Future of Internet Technology in Britain, the answers widget could generate the following questions:

When was the Internet created?
What is the Internet?
Who is the current Prime Minister in Britain?
Etc.

Content APIs

There may be a business case in providing content APIs for third party applications and platforms that wish to leverage the knowledge within your systems.

We are currently flushing out a content API for our Navigator products to seamlessly publish content to a client’s SalesForce organization or other CRM systems.

Smart Phone & Handheld Apps

The bank, Credit Suisse, projects global smartphone sales in calendar 2009 at 176 million units and 223 million in 2010. Thus the technology gold rush of third party created applications for smart phones and handhelds is in full swing and this ensures a deep and positive market for your applications on the leading platforms.

If your knowledge content has a wide enough audience then exposing and presenting your content on these mobile platforms is a fantastic way to dramatically extend the reach of your sites.

Here are the application stores for the top smart phones:

Summary

A knowledge delivery platform will be as successful as it is relevant, useful and valuable to its users. Adopting Eloqua or a similar technology will increase the relevancy and value of the knowledge provided because it will be tailored to the user. Extending the platform to as many communication channels and third party platforms as possible has become a very successful model for dramatically increasing usefulness, value and the user base.

The Right Stuff – Why Some IT Teams Succeed?

December 31, 2009 in IT Management, IT Project Management & Oversight | Leave a comment

The last day of the year has dawned and I was struck by a fundamental question as an IT executive: “What makes some IT teams really excel and succeed where others fail?”

This thought came to me as I reflected on the huge successes this year with my own team of 12 staff -

Convergemag.com – site completely redesigned from the ground up and launched on the Clickability.com platform. The new site was recognized as one of the top 10 great media sites in 2009 by BtoB Media Business.
Emergencymgmt.com – a new site split out from Govtech.com and launched as a standalone website on the Clickability.com platform. The site was awarded a Bronze Digital Azbee Award for Best New Website in 2009!
Centerdigitaled.com – the site was completely redesigned from the ground up and launched on the Clickability.com platform.
Erepublic.com – the site was updated with a fresh look and launched on the Clickability.com platform.
Navigatorgov.com – SaaS product completely re-designed and re-built from the ground up on the in-house developed proprietary CMS and API (the Node Mesh). See Navigator Product Launch post for more details.
Navigatored.com – SaaS product completely re-designed and re-built from the ground up on the in-house developed proprietary CMS and API (the Node Mesh). See Navigator Product Launch post for more details.

Yes, it was a banner year for the IT department! But, back to my original question, why this success? Was it because I am a great executive? No. Was it because of strategic and tactical planning? No, not really. Was I blessed with perfect project management? Again, no.

There is a very fundamental reason why some teams succeed and others fail. Yes, there are many, many factors which make an IT project successful but if this one factor is missing then everything will be for naught. The reason can be summed up in a single concept:

TEAMS SUCCEED WHERE THERE IS EXCELLENT TEAMWORK

This may seem too obvious and of course one needs teamwork in a team. But, let’s take a closer look. Every successful organization or team you have ever witnessed has had fantastic organization and teamwork. Have you ever seen a football team win the Super Bowl and not be just an amazingly coordinated team? That teamwork did not just spring from the ground and appear – it was created by each of the team members working in coordination with one another.

Teams are not just a group of people – they are individuals working together to achieve a common purpose.

Thus, as an executive or manager, one must work with and grant beingness to individuals vs the whole group as just one big mass, and ensure that everyone on the team has the same purpose. If this is not done then there are a lot of wasted actions, staff feeling left out or not noticed, staff having their own agendas, work being re-done, etc., etc.

Since teams are built from individuals, you must ensure that you have GREAT staff on your team. Do not compromise when looking for new talent and just accept whatever the market has to offer! Keep looking and find those really great staff and hire them. Building your team with excellent staff is half the battle.

If you have staff which are a liability to the team then that is a real problem and you should work with HR on how to handle it, fast!

Given a team with great staff then you need to really drive home a common purpose for the group. This is done in various ways but it will always consist of clear communication on the goals and purposes for the group and reinforced regularly. Here are some ideas on this:

Strategic plans adopted by management and communicated to all members on the team (see my post Building Bridges with IT Governance).
Tactical plans hashed out on how and when the items in the strategic plan(s) will be carried out.
Regular team and project meetings to review the plans.
Excellent processes in place to ensure a smooth working environment for the team (see my post How to Make an IT Department Efficient).

In summary, if one really treats a group as individuals with a common purpose and just reinforces this over and over with good organization then you will have a top-flight team that really has the Right Stuff!

Navigator Alchemy

December 28, 2009 in Announcements, Web Technology Solutions | Tags: Navigator | Leave a comment

In my previous post, Navigator Product Launch, I detailed the project scope and features of the new Navigators from a high level. This post will detail the technical alchemy used to pull the whole system together.

The new Navigators were completely re-designed and re-built from the ground up on the in-house developed proprietary CMS and API – the Node Mesh – which is an object relational database running on MS SQL Server. The middle-wear was written in PHP5 to take advantage of the Node Mesh and our deep repository of PHP5 objects. The presentation layer and CMS were both built from scratch using advanced CSS, Ajax, Ext JS library, JSON, Flash and XML.

Node Mesh Implementation

The Node Mesh provides a very flexible database structure which can be accessed using lazy reads from PHP5 without writing a single line of SQL code.

Given the overall complexity of the database schema for the Navigator project, having the Node Mesh greatly assisted moving the project along as the schema expanded and became more complex. Here is a diagram of the Node Mesh in use for the Navigators:

Navigator Node Mesh - Click for Larger Image

The mesh structure of the database provides an extremely flexible system without the necessity of re-writing large areas of the code base to accommodate new changes in the future.

System Overview

The Navigator system is actually comprised of a number of different components:

Navigator System - Click for Larger Image

Clickability is the company’s Web Content Management (WCM) platform which was adopted earlier this year to power all of the company’s websites except the Navigators. The Marketing and IT teams have successfully rolled out four websites on Clickability this year (see image above). Clickability is used as the content platform for News, Blogs and CIO Interviews which are consumed by the Navigator system using the Clickablity API. This allows those content items to be shared with any other web property powered by Clickability.

Web Services is used to connect to a 3rd party Grants database for exposing grant information within the Navigators. Simple HTML fetches are used to consume 100s of eRate bids daily (a type of education id) and display them as well.

SalesForce was rolled out as the company’s CRM standard this year across all sales units and is used in the Navigator system as follows:

Account Management – all Navigator accounts are just SalesForce Accounts with custom fields for contract information. Custom workflows were created to move Navigator Accounts into “renewal” and “expired” phases and to alert the appropriate sales staff.
User Management – all Navigator users are simply SalesForce Users with custom fields for Navigator user information. New user emails can be generated and sent, as well as the management of trial users with automatic workflows.
Support Cases – when Navigator users submit support requests they are pushed up to SalesForce and automatic cases are created and then dealt with by the Member Services team. Automatic emails are generated and sent to the end-user and support staff.
Custom Research Cases – when Navigator users submit custom research requests they are pushed up to SalesForce and automatic cases are created and then dealt with by the Research team. Automatic emails are generated and sent to the end-user and support staff.

The communication with SalesForce utilizes triggers within SalesForce to initiate requests within the Navigators which in turn use the SalesForce API for effecting changes within SalesForce.

The Navigators use a custom C# application running in-house to manage the hourly, daily or weekly e-mail pushes to Navigator users who wish to receive news, blogs and bid information, based on their exact preferences, by email. The email gateway used is the PowerMTA system from Port25.

A custom Cron synchronizing system was built using PHP5 to manage the syncing of data between the Navigators and Grants, eRates and Clickability.

Summary

The Navigators are very sophisticated, data centric web applications which provide a vital service to the clients of the Center for Digital Government and Education. I am very excited about the new platforms as they were designed to allow the rapid extension of new features without the headache of “complexity creep”.

Navigator Product Launch

December 26, 2009 in Announcements, Web Technology Solutions | Tags: Navigator | Leave a comment

eRepublic’s Navigator products have now been completely re-designed and re-developed from the ground-up on cutting edge technology and successfully launched to a user base of 6,300+ users. Both Navigators are SaaS products – Software-as-a-Service and require a paid subscription for access.

Here is a short video giving a quick peek at the Navigators and the exciting new CMS contextual editing feature:

Digital Government Navigator

DGN Homepage

Navigatorgov.com serves clients of the Center for Digital Government – sales organizations who are targeting the state and local government IT markets.

Some of the product features include:

Custom delivered pre-RFPs, bids and awards to each user by email.
Current contact data for decision makers.
DealWatch to keep a close eye on your most important opportunities.
Detailed budget data.
Huge grant database.
CIO Interviews.

Digital Education Navigator

DEN Homepage

Navigatored.com serves clients of the Center for Digital Education – sales organizations who are targeting the state departments of education, school districts and higher education IT markets.

Some of the product features include:

Pre-RFPs, RFPs and awarded bids.
Access to thousands of grant opportunities.
Education IT budgets/spending.
Contact information for thousands of decision makers.
Daily automated news alerts.
Executive teleconferences with education IT leaders.

Project Scope

The development of these new Navigators was the single largest IT project in the history of the company -

Over 4,000 man hours of effort over 10 months.
80,000+ bids migrated to the new system.
2,900+ jurisdictions created for Navigatorgov.com
15,000 institutions created for Navigatored.com
4,600+ agencies created.
8,000 contacts created.
4,000 news and blog posts migrated to the new system.
45,000 user settings migrated to the new system.
6,500 users setup in the new system and in SalesForce.
200+ accounts setup in the new system and in SalesForce.
183,000+ user login records migrated for usage reporting.
Integration with SalesForce for the management of Navigator accounts and users.
Integration with SalesForce for handling all Navigator user support requests and custom research requests.
Integration with our Clickability.com platform for displaying Navigator relevant news, blogs and CIO Interviews.
Integration with a remote database for the display of grants.

All design and development was done in-house with a technical team that grew to:

2 project managers
6 web developers
1 web designer
1 quality assurance specialist

If the project had been out-sourced, the cost of the project would have topped $500,000.

New Product Features

These new Navigators have been built using cutting edge technology which provides a stable and flexible platform for extending the feature set as needed.

Here are highlights of the new features in this release:

Brand new design that allows easy access and discovery of all data.
More powerful and advanced search to zero in on relevant data.
Interactive U.S. Flash maps that instantly provide high-level data for each state and to drill-down for more detailed information.
Ability to manage all Navigator accounts and users from SalesForce which allows a seamless connection with all sales activities.
Ability to manage all Navigator support and custom research requests from SalesForce which keeps customer service information connected up all other customer data.
A new collaboration area such that vendors can connect with other vendors to provide complete solutions on specific bids.
Ability to selectively publish news, blog and CIO Interview items from the company’s web content management platform – Clickability.com.
Ability for end-user account managers to view profile, login and usage data for all users in the account (e.g. IBM).
Ability for an editor to edit any Navigator content item directly on the website (also known as contextual editing).

For a more detailed technical overview, see my post Navigator Alchemy.

New Center for Digital Education Website Goes Live

December 17, 2009 in Announcements, Web Technology Solutions | Leave a comment

The newly designed and updated Center for Digital Education website was launched today by the eRepublic technology team – www.centerdigitaled.com:

Center for Digital Education Homepage

Centerdigitaled.com provides a sales and marketing web presence for the Center for Digital Education – a premier resource on K-12 and Higher Education technologies, providing market intelligence programs, advisory services, events, custom publishing and research.

This is the fourth site to launch on the new web content management (WCM) platform the company adopted earlier this year – Clickability.com. This new site was fully designed and developed in-house – graphic design, full presentation layer and template coding.

Website Highlights

Awards and Surveys:

CDE Awards & Surveys

CDE Custom Publications:

CDE Custom Publications

CDE Custom Reports

Web Tour de Force at eRepublic

November 14, 2009 in IT Project Management & Oversight, Web Development & Operations, Web Technology Solutions | Leave a comment

During my tenure at eRepublic, my tech team and I have dramatically upgraded the company’s web presence across all 8 corporate websites including two SaaS products. Web revenue and lead generation are helping to drive the company’s expansion.

As the senior product and technical executive responsible for all company web products, I oversee and drive all phases of web product development – project requirements and specifications, front-end design and usability, technology evaluation and adoptions, vendor and consultant relations, development oversight, quality assurance and product launches.

Below you will find a summary of each web product:

Govtech.com

Govtech.com’s mission is to facilitate technology for better, less expensive, more democratic government. Governments avoid risk in spending public money — so they use Govtech.com to learn from those agencies trying new ideas and technologies successfully.

The Events section of the site manages 70+ custom events that the company produces each year. The full events system includes: online and onsite user registration, badge printing and exhibitor barcode scanning.

The Video section of the site, GTtv, is powered by The Feedroom with all video production being done in-house. GTtv was awarded a Media Business Online Video Award for best overall use of video in 2008.

The site was completely re-designed and re-built from the ground up in just 6 months and launched at the Government Technology Conference in Sacramento in May 2007. The re-design encompassed all aspects of the site:

Full front-end redesign;
New proprietary CMS and API developed completely in-house (the Node Mesh);
Full data migration;
New enterprise search using the Google Search Appliance;
New web ad management system using Atlas Solutions;
New Flash streaming video service;
New user login system with web 2.0 components for site bookmarking.

Govtech.com is served from the company’s data center. Lead capture is managed by a seamless integration with Eloqua and SalesForce. Companion eNewsletters are created on the Clickability.com platform and served using Eloqua.

Emergencymgmt.com

Emergencymgmt.com

Emergencymgmt.com is the award-winning, all-hazards website of record for emergency management, public safety and homeland security topics.

The site was awarded a Bronze Digital Azbee Award for Best New Website in 2009!

The site was split out from Govtech.com and launched as a standalone website in July 2009. The site is running on the Clickability.com platform. All web ads are served by Atlas Solutions. Lead capture is managed by a seamless integration with Eloqua and SalesForce. Companion eNewsletters are created on the Clickability.com platform and served using Eloqua.

Convergemag.com

Convergemag.com reports on education technology advancements through interviews and events with government and education officials.

The new site was recognized as one of the top 10 great media sites in 2009 by BtoB Media Business.

The site was completely redesigned from the ground up and launched on the Clickability.com platform in May 2009. All web ads are served by Atlas Solutions. Lead capture is managed by a seamless integration with Eloqua and SalesForce. Companion eNewsletters are on the Clickability.com platform and served using Eloqua.

Centerdigitalgov.com

Centerdigitalgov.com provides a sales and marketing web presence for the Center for Digital Government – a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government.

The site was completely redesigned from the ground up in 2008 and is served from the company’s data center, running on an in-house developed proprietary CMS and API (the Node Mesh).

Centerdigitaled.com

Centerdigitaled.com provides a sales and marketing web presence for the Center for Digital Education – a premier resource on K-12 and Higher Education technologies, providing market intelligence programs, advisory services, events, custom publishing and research.

The site is currently being migrated from a legacy PHP in-house system to the Clickability.com platform.

Navigatorgov.com

Navigatorgov.com is a SaaS product serving clients of the Center for Digital Government – sales organizations who are targeting the state and local government IT markets.

Some of the product features include:

Custom delivered pre-RFPs, bids and awards to each user by email.
Current contact data for decision makers.
DealWatch to keep a close eye on your most important opportunities.
Detailed budget data.
Huge grant database.
Industry Insider blog.
Economic Stimulus Central blog.
CIO Interviews.

The product has been completely re-designed and re-built from the ground up on the in-house developed proprietary CMS and API (the Node Mesh). Some editorial content is consumed from the Clickability.com platform. User and account management is done seamlessly via a custom application in SalesForce. The site averages 5,500 unique visitors per month.

It is currently in Beta and is slated for general availability in Nov 2009.

Navigatored.com

Navigatored.com is a SaaS product serving clients of the Center for Digital Education – sales organizations who are targeting the state departments of education, school districts and higher education IT markets.

Some of the product features include:

Pre-RFPs, RFPs and awarded bids.
Access to thousands of grant opportunities.
Education IT budgets/spending.
Contact information for thousands of decision makers.
Daily automated news alerts.
Executive teleconferences with education IT leaders.
Direct access to CDE’s research and advisory services.

It is currently in Beta and is slated for general availability in Nov 2009.

Erepublic.com

eRepublic.com

Erepublic.com is the corporate website for disseminating the various company brands and providing a central point for company news, announcements and awards.

The site was migrated to the Clickability.com platform in June 2009 and is currently undergoing an upgrade to become the central site for all business unit media kits and advertising information.

Building Bridges with IT Governance

October 8, 2009 in IT Management | Tags: IT Governance | Leave a comment

IT Governance

In my previous post, I emphasized the importance keeping the senior executives well-informed on the status of IT projects and issues. If this is not done or done poorly then the woes of the IT department expand exponentially due to the upset engendered by management’s dissatisfaction. Why? IT staff generally work hard, are very creative and do their best given clear direction and oversight. When those efforts are invalidated then the general purpose to create is blunted resulting in less production, more errors and unhappy staff. A sort of dwindling spiral comes into play – less production and more errors = more dissatisfaction = less production and even more errors, etc.

Factually, nothing lowers the morale of an IT dept faster than dissatisfaction by management. Now, certainly if the IT dept is messing up then it deserves such treatment. This, however, sets the stage for an “us vs. them” conflict or the trench warfare analogy mentioned in my previous post.

So, what is an IT executive to do then? He or she must stay causative and not blame upper management either. At the end of the day, it is the responsibility of the IT executive to build his/her organization to deliver excellent IT services and become a full partner with upper management in helping the company achieve its goals.

Given that the internal processes and procedures have been ironed out in the dept then the remaining puzzle piece is:

KEEPING UPPER MANAGEMENT WELL INFORMED AND FURNISHING THE VITAL INFORMATION OF WHAT IS GOING ON.

At first glance this may seem too simple and not workable. But, I can guarantee that if you do not do this then upper management will never be happy with the IT dept because it really does not know what is going on. The gap between what the IT dept is actually doing and what upper management know may be so vast that the Grand Canyon would look small in comparison!

We are now embarking on the road towards true IT Governance – “IT Governance is about IT decision-making: The preparation for, making of and implementation of decisions regarding goals, processes, people and technology on a tactical and strategic level.” (Simonsson & Johnson, 2005) Good communication between IT and the business executive strata is the foundation for sound IT Governance.

Here is an analogy to put everything in perspective: your family has outgrown the existing house and have hired an architect firm to build an addition. You meet briefly with the firm giving basic direction and let them carry on. The firm gets very busy dreaming up fantastic designs and solutions for the extension and puts them into production. Meanwhile you are busy handling your life and paying little attention to all of the noise and construction. When the dust settles and your proud architect tours you through the new addition, you have this sinking realization that the firm has not fully understood what you wanted and has just wasted a huge amount of time and money! You promptly get upset, berating the lead architect and consider firing him on the spot!

Now, if the firm had been applying the above maxim then this situation would never have come to pass because the owner would have taken a much more active role in the decision-making and project management process.

HP CEO Mark Hurd echos this sentiment during a televised broadcast at the 2009 Conference on California’s Future (his speech begins 5:25 into the video). Mr Hurd emphasizes the need for upper management, especially the CEO, to take a very active role over IT projects and initiatives. In fact, without this commitment, many IT projects fail.

Moving on to practicality, how will you implement the above maxim in your dept? Here are some guidelines from my experience:

Have one-on-one meetings with all the key executives that you report to or deliver service to. Find out what they really need and want from you and your dept. What information do they need on a regular basis?
Work out how to deliver that information on a regular basis (e.g. e-mail, reports, meetings, etc.).
Form Steering and Operations Committees that meet on a regular basis. A steering committee would address high-level strategy and approve new IT projects. An operations committee would deal with smaller projects, issues, bugs, etc.
Adjust the above as needed.

Applying these concepts will pave the way for the IT dept becoming a business partner rather than just a service arm of the company.

How to Make an IT Department Efficient

August 14, 2009 in IT Management | Leave a comment

In the Trenches

Like many IT executives, I have heard and experienced the derision from end-users and executives regarding the inefficiencies and delays in the IT department. This can degenerate into the IT dept vs the rest-of-the-company and brings to mind the trench warfare of World War I. This is definitely an unhappy state of affairs with IT staffers digging deeper into their bulwarks and end-users dreaming up ever more destructive ways to get attention and service.

What is the answer to this dilemma? Certainly not more complexity and barriers of technical jargon that no one outside the dept understands. No, the primary answer is:

PROVIDING CLEAR COMMUNICATION CHANNELS FOR THE RECEIPT AND HANDLING OF REQUESTS PLUS FURNISHING THE VITAL INFORMATION OF WHAT IS GOING ON.

Do you know every type of request coming into the dept with a clear procedure of how to handle it? Without this analysis, the flow of requests is just one BIG flow with everything jumbled resulting in confusion and inefficiency. Given a good analysis, clear procedures for handling and specific staff identified for such, then an orderly directing and channeling of requests can occur.

This is more than just having a ticketing system in place: it is the overall plan of handling each type of request the dept receives on a regular basis. I would begin with flushing out a map of all IT dept requests (MindManager or XMind are good products for this). Then, I would work with my staff to work out the exact handling of each request and document the procedures on a dept wiki (Mindtouch Deki is a good one). Finally, I would flush out which staff would handle each type of request and create an org chart or org board map showing staff positions and the associated responsibilities of each.

Here is an example org board for the web production section showing basic responsibilities at the unit level:

IS Dept Org Board

Working through these organizing steps will allow the dept to inflow requests and channel them efficiently through the dept. I have found this to be immensely effective.

Now, to furnish the vital information of what is going on requires a good ticketing system that provides excellent email communications to and from the end-users (Jira is a good solution). Such a system can channel the requests, move them through the processes and keep everyone informed on what is really going on.

An established Service Level Agreement (SLA) is also vital as it sets the playing field rules. The SLA needs upper management buy-in and be clearly documented on the wiki or other easily accessible platform by end-users.

The final component is keeping the senior executives well informed on the status of projects and issues. This is covered in part 2 of this post and is, perhaps, the most vital component, at least for one’s career.

Making the Leap to SaaS

August 7, 2009 in IT Management, Strategic Technology Adoptions | Tags: Clickability, SaaS | Leave a comment

Any IT director is constantly challenged with building castles in the sky while keeping all existing systems operational. At the chief executive level, those castles may seem little more than sand castles on the beach but more likely than not they are as formidable as a Scottish castle manned by the ladies from hell!

A recent chief executive request illustrates this point: “Every subscriber to our subscription research portal should have their own custom RSS feed which is based on their preferences; that should be easy.” The castle looks small but dig into the sand and you encounter some rather significant infrastructure and resource barriers to overcome – thousands of custom feeds with their own unique SQL queries that are dynamically created. Not impossible but you get the point.

Most IT departments pride themselves in being able to create or put together just about anything. There is a joy of creating and developing that is intrinsic with software and hardware developers. There comes a point, though, where developing and maintaining in-house does not make business sense. Bluntly, it is just too expensive and costly in some situations. Does the company wish to become a true software development house or concentrate on its core business strengths?

Making the leap to SaaS must solve business related IT problems and reduce costs over the long-term. Therefore, when evaluating SaaS one needs to be somewhat detached from the “we can build anything” IT mentality and really focus on empowering the business with technology from any source. The IT department is not there to build its own empire but to empower the business to achieve its objectives and be more profitable.

Evaluation points when considering a SaaS provider:

What business problem will the service solve?
Will it empower the business to achieve its objectives?
Will the service reduce costs over the long-term?
Is the service cheaper than building and maintaining in-house?
Will end-users actually use it?
Verify and confirm reliability and customer service (key point).
Will your senior IT staff get behind the project?
Technically, will it really do everything they say it can do?
What is the turn around time for bug fixes and enhancements?
What happens if the provider goes bankrupt?
Is their software kept in escrow?
Can you easily get your data out?

It is not crucial to get everyone in the IT department to agree and sign-off but you will need your most senior staff to sign-on. Remember, the decision is primarily a business one.

Making the leap to SaaS may be the best move the company ever makes. It all depends on the reasons for leaping and what you land on!

Emergency Management Website Goes Live

July 31, 2009 in Announcements, Web Development & Operations, Web Technology Solutions | Leave a comment

A new website dedicated to Emergency Management was launched today by eRepublic – www.emergencymgmt.com:

Emergency Management Homepage

The entire project completed from start to finish in less than four months with all design and development done in-house. This is the third site to launch on the new web content management (WCM) platform the company adopted earlier this year – Clickability.com.

My development team has found the Clickability platform to be an excellent WCM environment as it takes care of the back-end and infrastructure needs of any fast-paced editorial and web content business model. However, all unique aspects of the site had to be developed – graphic design, full presentation layer and template coding.

External Blog Syncing

Since the Clickability pricing model is based, in part, on the number of CMS user licenses, we decided to have any external bloggers use a third party blogging platform which we could then consume and mirror on the Clickability site. We picked Blogger.com as it has a very simple UI and the Google API makes it very simple to consume content.

Content Migration

Most of the news and article content was migrated from the existing Govtech.com site where EM was a sub-site. This was done by creating a custom XML feed from our legacy database to feed into Clickability via their Content Connector service. The service allows articles to be published into multiple categories along with any referenced media files (e.g. photos) automatically.

Website Highlights

News Topics with RSS and Related Items

Dedicated EM Bloggers

Dedicated Events Area

Real-World Information Systems Management

Tailored Visitor Content

Eloqua

SalesForce

Clickability

The Node Mesh

Content Syndication

Content Affiliate Programs

Content APIs

Smart Phone & Handheld Apps

Summary

Node Mesh Implementation

System Overview

Summary

Digital Government Navigator

Digital Education Navigator

Project Scope

New Product Features

Website Highlights

Govtech.com

Emergencymgmt.com

Convergemag.com

Centerdigitalgov.com

Centerdigitaled.com

Navigatorgov.com

Navigatored.com

Erepublic.com

External Blog Syncing

Content Migration

Website Highlights

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