Monthly Archive for September, 2008

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Great ideas are obviously great, to more than just you.

Published on September 11, 2008 in Business. Closed Tags: , , .

I’m working on a great idea to turn into a website. I created some mock screens to explain the concept to some of the others working with me to see what they thought. Apart from some questions regarding honesty (not of myself, but of the end users), the potential of the idea to turn into a great service for businesses is:

  1. Obvious. This idea can be explained to anyone from CEO to Janitor in about 5 minutes. No PhD necessary. Once pointed out the idea makes sense, and like Velcro, is something you wondered why no one else has thought of before (though actually someone has).
  2. Fiscally evident. This service clearly improves the bottom line. No extraordinary thinking or suspension of common Laws of Business are required. How does your great idea improve the bottom line for business? If it’s too abstract, that may not fly well (see the realm of intangible).
  3. Simple. Some ideas are abstract, complex, and like the Large Hadron Collider, aren’t exactly easy to communicate and point out to managers. And while some things are justifiably complex (like CRM software), others are in the realm of intangible.

Good luck for your idea, but remember, a great product is 10% idea, 90% execution.

Why it’s better to be a Programmer than a Business Analyst

Published on September 10, 2008 in Career Development. Closed Tags: .

I’m a Business Analyst so I don’t say this lightly, but I believe it’s better to be a Programmer than to be a Business Analyst.

A Programmer creates code that has direct value to the end user. A Business Analyst gathers requirements, creates process flow diagrams, does testing, but all this is a supporting act.

No matter how great an Architect is in the building world, without Builders, an Architect’s vision would be … just a vision. But a Builder could create a physical presence regardless of whether an Architect was there or not. Sure, it may not be as good, or safe, or well thought out, but it would be something without a plan, rather than a plan that leads to nothing.

One of my great regrets is that I am not a better Programmer. I may be a better Communicator, Entrepreneur, Manager, and Leader than a Programmer, but without code, it all for nought.

National Bank www.nationalbank.co.nz website down, oh dear.

Published on September 9, 2008 in Observations from the Web. 1 Comment Tags: .

So say I was a bank, ya’know, the fourth largest bank in Australia. And lets assume I had a sub-brand, called National Bank. You’d think that my website would be a hi-availability one, or at least one that had better error pages.

Facebook is blocking bugmenot.com, OMG, WTF!

Published on September 6, 2008 in Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , , , .

It’s a slow day in the capital city, so I was browsing Slashdot. Low and behold, someone tries to send a message on facebook about the website bugmenot.com, and it appears to be blocked.

Someone call the Mayor! I fireup the Facebook machine, change my status to talk about bugmenot.com, and it works. It just appears. There’s not trickery, there’s no elaborate warnings or opressive dismissals, it just appears and makes for a pretty uninteresting status update.

So the lesson learned? Either Facebook are blocking a website because of some background politics, and just happen to be really crap about it – or there is no big deal, and this is just Slashdot fanboys getting upset at things in the same way as the Foxconn Linux BIOS scandle of ’08.

Make $1500 in three hours GUARANTEED! My secret tip…

Published on September 6, 2008 in Business. Closed Tags: , , , , .

So I was sitting around at home, and I was thinking how can I make money easily?

Then I discovered … The Secret™.

Learn. Study. Become great at what you do in a specialised field that’s in high demand, and then you will make $500 an hour, not once, not twice, but every hour you work of every day.

Oh, just so this wasn’t a post baiting you without any substance, you can download Trial/Development versions of Siebel CRM, JD Edwards ERP, and other Oracle products from the Oracle E-Delivery Website.

Or download most of Sun’s products from the Sun website.

Learn these products, understand the business drivers behind their adoption in business, and specialise in that, rather than multi-level marketing. Trust me, you’ll easily make $1500 in three hours.

JD Edwards vs. Siebel vs. Sun Access Manager vs. Oracle Identity Manager

Published on September 5, 2008 in Career Development. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

What to specialise in. Young IT professionals are spoiled for choice. There are a hundred and one different IT applications out there from Identity Management, to Enterprise Resource Planning, to Customer Relationship Management, and a thousand and one other categories in between.

However, I doubt there’s enough time in the day to specialise in *all* these applications, let alone get experience to implement them successfully. And so, what to pick?

I think over-specialising in a particular application makes you like a peak athlete – great at what you do, not so great at anything else. If you’ve spent five years becoming the master in JD Edwards ERP, you’re probably not going to know too much about Siebel CRM, let alone Sun’s Identity Management Suite.

Perhaps it’s better to focus on specialising in a particular area of interest, whether that’s horizontally by knowing all about all the different Customer Relationship Management products, whether from Oracle, or Microsoft, or SugarCRM – or specialising vertically by knowing the chain of software used in a particular industry say a Telecommunications-specific version of Siebel, and Telecommunications-specific versions of Integration software, of Radio Frequency software etc.

One great thing is, most of this software is freely available for you to download and learn from. Sun’s Identity Management Suite is free (as in beer), Oracle’s Identity Management Suite is free (as in development license), and this is an increasing trend which is positive for students. So now there’s no excuse (apart from hardware) to go out, learn these products, and become paid one of these highly paid consultants!

Are Managers Web 1.0?

Published on September 4, 2008 in Business. Closed Tags: , , , .

I’ve been having a debate with a friend of mine about whether Managers are Web 1.0, holding on to their top down approach of planning, controlling, leading, and organising, but become less important over time.

His argument is yes, people only need leading and planning when they cannot do this for themselves, and control of people is dead. I mentioned the idea of people in the future coming together into temporary virtual tribes that temporarily work on a peice of temporary work, and then disband and recombinate into new tribes for a new peice of work. He thought that this was a good predictor of the future.

I’m sorry, I don’t fully agree with this. There seems to be this myth that people will get together in any way shape or form to achieve a certain body of work. This is clearly demonstrated with the success of linux, where multiple disparate groups of people come together to make software.

Unfortunately, without this management function, you generally get poor results. People have a tendency to focus on the itch that’s important to themselves, which may be coding a particular feature they need. But when it comes to doing things like write documentation, or add features that they personally don’t require, they really can’t be bothered. And hence, those people leave the group, and new people join the group. And new people are dissatisfied because the lack of documentation doesn’t show how descisions were made, and why certain features are the way they are, and how the program interacts with other programs, and eventually you get the falicy of choice, combined with poor software.

A manager is vitally important to look at the bigger picture. Do we really need 9 sub systems for Audio within Linux? Could we instead ditch the notion that we could make a better audio sub system than anyone else, and instead build off the work of others in a collaborative method? Are we looking at the bigger picture and thinking about why we’re doing all of this and for who? Do we really care about the customers, or do we just really care about our own desires and needs.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the open source model, but I still see the need for managers in a web 2.0 world.