Team picture / Baden Place

Thank you Matt for taking the picture!

Debating the role of innovation

Providing innovative products and services is top priority for over 80% of marketing directors in the technology sector. Although a study from Forrester (Being Innovative Means Beyond The Hype) indicates that the way innovation is managed by these companies is usually not process driven, and do not support innovation efforts with proper management.

The definition of innovation according Chris andrew (author of the article) is:

Innovation is a combination of both invention and commercialisation.

This definition insists on the fact that to be innovative, an invention needs to have commercial value.


Companies such as Google or 3M take innovation very seriously. Members of engineering development teams at Google for instance are actively encouraged to allocate and spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them.

I think that this model can work for for SMEs as well (interesting discussion here), and is worth considering. For a web development/design company, this can include: working on improving production processes, developing plug-ins for open source software or work on open source projects, developing new services, setting up micro websites or online social communities, etc...

There are many challenges to address...

- ensure that staff don't become too "passionate" about this side projects, and end up spending more than 20% of their time on them
- try to fit in these projects into short term strategies, whereas they should on the contrary contribute and be in line with comapny's long term strategy
- running the scheme for a couple of weeks and then forget about it as soon as new product/services deliveries are due.
- etc..

... However I would find it difficult to encourage big corporations improving the way they manage innovation if I could not demonstrate that it can have a very positive impact on my own company's bottom line.

Buy to standardise, build to compete

There is an interesting article about the choice between building an IT application or buying one.

This can apply to websites, which are online IT applications. And I often comes across clients or prospects who ponder whether it is worth developing a website from ground up, or use existing software available on the market.

Here is a first pointer given by the article:

Everybody knows that the more standardised you are and the more you buy off-the-shelf, the more cost effective it will be for both implementation and ongoing maintenance

This is true, especially for trivial activities such as the ability to update your website. Updating a website should be as easy as giving a phone call. And it doesn't really make sense nowadays to build a content management system from ground up. The objective is to find the right product for your business.

And an other pointer:

On the other hand, executives such as Bob Laird, IT chief architect at MCI (now part of Verizon Business), sing the familiar refrain of in-house development: “Where we tend to invest is where we can get incremental revenue … or competitive advantage,” he says.

Well I tend to agree as well. It makes sense to choose a Content Management System already available in order to give the marketing team the ability to update the site without depending on the IT team (internal or external), at lowest cost possible. However it is also important to consider developing some features from ground up, specially the ones which can give you a competitive advantage.

We recently released a stock photos website. The website is a combination of:

1) open source content management system: allows administrators to update the actual content of the page (about page, disclaimers, etc...)

2) open source frameworks (Zend, Doctrine): allows programmers to use a familiar environment, and speed up the development process. It makes also any custom development more robust and reliable.

3) custom programming: makes the website unique, with features matching exactely the business model. As business model evolves to meet new challenges, the website can also evolve rapidly to meet new requirements.

In my view, custom development is only justified when the website is intended to provide a competitive edge to a business (especially for an online business for instance). In case a website act only as a support for an exisiting communication strategy, it is preferable to select existing products.

I believe this view is in line with the conclusion of the article:

When evaluating whether to buy or build, it’s critical to thoroughly understand total costs during the software lifecycle -- typically seven or eight years. This step is important, Lutchen says, because 70 percent of software costs occur after implementation. A rigorous lifecycle analysis that realistically estimates ongoing maintenance by in-house developers often tips the balance in favor of buying.

Bearing in mind that it can become very costly (if not sometimes impossible) to customise a commercial (or open source) software to match new business requirements in case these requirements are unique, and not covered by "common features".

The importance of testing your website backup

You have probably come across http://ma.gnolia.com/ in the past, a popular social bookmarking web site which has been around for years.

In early 2009, the site went down, and is now only accessible through invitation (back to beta version!)

What hapened behind the scene?

Their database backup failed... and they lost all their data.

Hang on , you would think that they run daily backup, test it and ensure that they can deploy a back-up version of the site quickly.

Well, it turns out that they overlooked this elementary side of the business, and they actually lost everything.

Check out the video here, where the owner talks honestly and in a very transparant way about the whole exprience..

The art of twitter

I have really tried Twitter as yet (except maybe a couple of lines written when the services launched a few years ago).

Recently came across an excellent article about how to "master" twitter from Tom Raftery (social media wonk), and will probably try to follow the recipe and give it a try very soon though.