The Savvy CIO

There are two major methods of developing software: waterfall and agile. If you’re considering a development project, you should consider how your software should be made.

Waterfall development goes through distinct stages, with requirements gathering in the first stage. In the waterfall method, a group of decision makers think, imagine, script and whiteboard how the system might be used. These working sessions create a set of requirements for the application. After the requirements are set, the waterfall method flows down to future stages of development, testing and deployment.

In contrast, agile development breaks a project down into small stages. Each stage tackles a small area of the application, gathering requirements, building, testing and then putting the growing application into the hands of users. This process allows requirements to emerge over time, as users and developers learn together exactly what the application needs to accomplish.

Waterfall development assumes the requirements of a system can be fully predicted and codified before any development begins. Agile development assumes requirements only fully emerge during the process.

Waterfall development aims at a stationary target. Agile development aims at a moving one.

So which method is best?

read more »

Running a business well takes specialized knowledge. Not only in the core service and marketplace of your business but increasingly in law, human resources, technology and more.

Most businesses don’t have the need to maintain a full-time lawyer, HR administrator or CIO. Typically these roles have either been outsourced or simply neglected.

In the last few years, this approach has changed, moving from “outsourcing” law or technology advice to retaining “virtual” advisors.

The change in wording is more than mere semantics; it reflects a change in focus. Outsourcing work focuses on the vendor. Your legal questions, HR needs or technology plans go into the queue of a company that performs the exact same actions for a hundred other businesses just like yours. Virtual assistance focuses on you and provides unique, on-demand assistance. A virtual advisor gets to know you and your business, providing expertise as an informed, long-term trusted advisor.

At Highland, we believe in the virtual model. While most small to medium size companies invest in IT-either full time staff or an outsourced firm-very few have the need or resources for high level technology planning in a full time CIO. As specialists in business technology, we provide the benefits of strategic technical thinking in a virtual role.

The benefits of long-term planning, disaster preparedness, and aligning technology with your business goals are immense. A virtual CIO gives business leaders confidence that IT is driven by business thinking and frees them to focus on other core tasks.

I don’t praise the value of a virtual CIO because it’s one of our services. Virtual arrangements are the smartest way I know for businesses to fill out their expertise. Highland retains a virtual HR department and a virtual lawyer. We practice what we preach.

Are there other specialized roles you’ve seen work well as virtual advisors? Have you experienced key benefits or drawbacks from this model? Share your comments below.

Every now and then I like to browse the websites of other technology companies. Recently, as we’ve been putting the finishing touches on a brand new website launch (coming in June!), I’ve been doing it a lot more.

While I’ve come across sites both great and terrible, I have noticed a discouragingly common trend. Many technology companies are overly specialized in a particular type of technology.

The most common example is Microsoft, of course. Legion are the IT companies who display their “Microsoft Gold Partner” badge and the long list of Microsoft certifications their staff holds. Such specialization is a good thing if you need assistance with a piece of Microsoft technology. However, if you were to approach such a company with a business problem to be solved or goal to be achieved, you would undoubtedly receive a Microsoft-shaped solution.

But what if Microsoft’s offering is actually inferior or overly costly for your business issue? read more »

Some months ago we did a breakdown of the costs of Zimbra versus Microsoft Exchange. I’ve long been negative about the costs of Exchange. The price doesn’t scale down at all for small companies, and scales up far too quickly for larger ones. But the previous breakdown was a hypothetical scenario. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what we all do when making a purchasing decision. But now there’s some real life data to turn to.

The University of Pennsylvania runs both Exchange and Zimbra. They have nearly 1,000 users on Exchange and over 6,200 users on Zimbra, and the same technical support team takes care of both systems and their respective user bases.

My primary complaint with Exchange is how time-intensive and difficult it is to support and maintain. Support and maintenance are entirely hidden costs at the point of purchase, and many unsuspecting buyers have been lured in with steep license discounts only to discover the ongoing costs were far more than they bargained for.

The data from Penn agrees. For Penn, supporting an Exchange user is over 9 times more time consuming than supporting a Zimbra user.

For 1,000 users, Exchange requires 3.2 full-time equivalent staff members to support. With over 6,200 users, Zimbra requires 2.2 full-time staff members to report. That’s right, 33% less time spent on support for six times the users.

When Penn analyzed the total cost of ownership for Exchange and Zimbra (licensing, hardware, maintenance, support, etc.), Exchange came out at $7.50 per user. Zimbra was under half the cost at $3.00 per user.

Adam Preset, an IT technical director at Penn, discusses their deployment: read more »

To balance out my previous post (perhaps rant is a bit more accurate) about Facebook and Twitter, here’s a fairly well-balanced overview of 30 Valuable Lessons Learned Using Social Media for Small Business.

My only beef? The author, while providing many good points, is in the hospitality industry. That’s business-to-consumer and somewhat of a lifestyle brand, exactly the two areas that have seen some social media success.

I still hold reservations for the near-term prospects of most social media for business-to-business industries. (Though we obviously blog and use some other targeted social media, so we’re in the pool, even if not wholeheartedly!)

Regardless, good tips for any type of business using or considering social media.

If you lend half an ear to “marketing experts”, “industry analysts” or “social media gurus”, you’ve probably heard your company should be using the social web for marketing, sales, customer support, brand awareness and about anything else you can think of. Now the “social web” can mean a lot of things of varying use, but the two tools that really get a lot of publicity are Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s my advice: Don’t believe the hype.

At least, most businesses shouldn’t.

I’m a technical consultant, so I’m sure I’m missing the marketing brilliance happening here. But the truth is, very few businesses are doing anything with tangible impact with Twitter and Facebook right now.

After watching social media and business with interest for a few years now, here’s my take: read more »

Every morning I walk about a mile from the train station to the office. This morning around 6:30am I was traversing the gray streets of Chicago when a guy I’d never met sidled up beside me.

He greeted me and I returned his greeting.

“Why’s everybody so wrapped up in themselves?” he asked.

I stopped. We talked for a little while. This fellow lived on the street. He had his own reasons for trying to get me to stop, of course. But his sense of isolation was palpable.

I’ve heard it said that one of the worst parts of poverty is being cut off from relationships. Everyone is “so wrapped up in themselves” because we don’t want to be taken advantage of, because we fear what a conversation might bring, because we believe our time is better spent at the place we’re headed to, whether work or home. It’s easier not to stop, not to listen, not to look others in the eye.

It’s hard to tend to and care for people.

At the risk of diminishing the importance of this man and the problems of poverty, can I suggest that this lesson applies in business too? read more »

Working at a tech firm, I’m surrounded by a lot of very technically savvy people.

I find, in general, very technically savvy people tend to be paranoid about privacy and security on the Internet.

This worries me.

What do they know that I don’t know?

So in a toast to technically savvy Internet paranoia, here’s a trio of Firefox browser add-ons designed with the security paranoid in mind. read more »

Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump. read more »

Darren Rowse over a ProBlogger has some good thoughts about website and blog content for click-happy browsers. It’s a short and funny read.

Darren experimented with a video chat site called ChatRoulette. The site randomly paired him with another person, and either person can click away to a new partner whenever they want. Darren couldn’t even get others to acknowledge him before donning a clown wig.

Applying his experience to the people browsing his blog (and your website), he offers this summary of visitor behavior:

• They don’t stay till long - they’re always clicking
• They are always looking for the next best thing
• They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
• They are ruthless
• They are impulsive
• They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
• They rely upon instinct and first impressions

He has some take home lessons for interacting with this type of person on a blog or site, but it’s important to note that not every site or blog (especially business ones) should plan their web strategy around this type of visitor. read more »