Uprooting the entrenched

Last week we spent time sitting down with several of the major stakeholders of the CMS project and discussed content. Some groups went better than others, but overall we made leaps and bounds of progress. As I blog, our amazing content writers and editors are busy reworking content scattered across the web and print to create copy worthy of a print publication. Perhaps not so strangely I find this very exciting.

This idea of creating highly polished copy and wrapping it in a well designed template is exactly the vision for the last 18 months has lead us towards. Currently the templates available to use for this content is limited but our design group is hard at work creating more and hopefully with continue to feed our writer's desire to create more content. My microcontrol of the CMS I once had is quickly disapearing and I can't help but want to scream "It's alive! It's alive!!! Muahahaha!" It is exciting to watch a project you were so closely involved with take a life of its own and have its ownership move to the institution.

Most economists favor the elimination of corporate income tax, and I too find double taxation of investors troubling. Being an election year, policy is always on mind and today I was pondering the likelihood of eliminating corporate income tax. Given the popularity of certain extremely liberal filmmakers in the country (Roger I'm thinking of you) I don't really see complete elimination of the corporate incoming tax happening anytime soon. So what could possibly be a good alternative?

Recently a few friends and I were discussing an article someone had read about how several oil companies, even thought they are making money hands over fists, are investing well above and beyond their net income in research and development (R&D). I have to admit I love R&D and feel that it is one of the most important parts of capitalism benefiting humanity. What if we could capture this idea and use it to effectively eliminate corporate income tax?

My morning shower brought to mind an idea. What if we were to give tax credits to companies for R&D? If were to allow companies to invest their corporate taxes into themselves rather than waste it on the inefficiencies of government spending, how much further would we become technologically? If companies were not able to invest their corporate taxes in R&D (I doubt few would) then let the government take over and invest it for them. This simple idea would effectively eliminate corporate taxes and double taxation while increasing R&D for the entire country by 35% of the market's collective net income.

Chris Cooney, our Web Communications Director, made a comment about how our CMS project isn't so much about implementing a new technology, but more about managing institutional change. The comment has been echoing in my head for a few days now and I just can't help but feel part of something so much bigger than a CMS.

As I have been chewing on that comment I can't help but try to define precisely what we are doing. My best description so far is developing a "marketing engine" to enable individual institutional groups to fortify and extend marketing of their key business strengths within their organizational units and at a institutional level without expending extraneous resources.

If you venture into the University of Idaho's website you will quickly see as you leaving the core website, branding quickly falls apart and the quality of content varies greatly between subsites. The new CMS will enable these groups to create quality content (with the assistance of professional writers) in a consistent brand across the entire site. Not only this, but since we are standardizing content it makes it trivial to develop marketing campaigns that reuse this professionally written content. The technology we have chosen to create the CMS makes developing this system almost seem trivial. The most difficult part of this system is shifting peoples paradigms away from being web developers to content managers.

I am been very lucky to work with Chris and his group on this project. It is very rewarding seeing institutional change take place before you and with out Chris's ability to catalyze change this wouldn't have happened. I can only hope that I can have an experience close to what I am getting now with my alma mater when I move to Seattle.

It is always important to keep the magical term "ROI" in the back of your mind when working on projects. The web is a fantastic place that allows for standardization of work flows, 24x7 presence, and it is just damn cool.

However it isn't always the "right" solution for every business problem. One of the first steps of developing a business plan for a web app (or any business plan for that matter) is coming up with a list of all possible solutions you can think of and determining the "right" solution. The "right" solution is going to be the one that has a high ROI and minimizes risk. The formulas for determining these are all different depending on your core competencies, but let me give you a big clue... technology is not always the answer.

There will be many times when offline processes will be quicker, cheaper, and meet your requirements better. You would be surprised how often it would just be cheaper to pay some temporary help to follow some precise instructions and just brute force the problem. The best clue to when this will be the case is when you are dealing with a very specialized problem and will only need a solution for a very short period.

Now don't get me wrong, most your decent coders could whip up a hack to get the job done efficiently, but they will probably be leaving out 90% of the software development life cycle. Often these hacks are not easily maintainable, not reusable, and not well tested. So while the solution may work, the resources spent creating a software solution (your developers time supporting their hack) would cause ROI actually be lower than just hiring some cheap labor and using them as a good training tool for some up and coming employees you are eying for management (again more ROI work to be done).

The difference between a good manager and a well seasoned great manager is being able to recognize these opportunities to maximize ROI and minimize risk.

As April continues to march on, I focus on the summer. When it really come down to it I am pretty sure I won't really have much of one. At work Sitecore will be my main focus until at least July, but likely well in to October. This weekend I just found that my parents decided not to hire a contractor to build the shell of the cabin they are building this summer. Which means as soon as the ground dries out and they can get a foundation poured, I'll be spending almost all of my free time with a hammer in hand. Given the snow levels this year I'll get to put this project off until mid-June at the earliest.

On top of all of this I keep rolling around an idea for a web application I've been pondering for some time. It keeps developing further in my mind and it is getting far enough I should probably start developing a functional specification. If I do get that started it'll be a fun project requiring the consumption of many bottles of wine.

Friday I could be found at the quarterly Seattle AGORA meeting. The had three great speakers who spoke on Office document exploits (like what Pro-Tibetan NGOs are seeing), disk imaging software reliability, and SCADA attacks. I guess once I'm in Seattle I might be able to go do this type of thing more often.

After the meeting we got to sit down with a few experts in the security world. Included in the group was a University of Idaho alumni, Defcon Goon, an executive officer of White Hat Security group, plus a couple other local Seattle folks. Pretty great opportunity for Katie and I to network with people.

It is frustrating at times knowing how slow change can take sometimes. Today we spent over three hours just defining the different person business objects that exist throughout the university. To my pleasure and relief we were able to boil it down to a core set of data objects with a few special extended attributes (woohoo!), but it did take three hours to complete... and it is more than likely still not complete.

With that in mind and pondering all the business objects that would exist within a university, one would quickly see that building a well thought out CMS would take some time. Even more considering we aren't even developing the actual HTML to render this data. It is great the progress continues, but there is still much work to be done.

I can understand how much frustration other groups on campus are feeling at this time to move to the new look and feel. Just today I had to spend a little bit of time trying to convince a group that moving their site from out current CMS to a Frontpage site using the new templates is a poor use of resources. I'm not sure if my reasoning quiet set in, but I do have a meeting next week to express my concerns again in person. I just hate to see resources wasted on moving to the current set of templates, which happen to be very developer centric (not for the faint of heart), and have a poor looking website(for lack of proper resources). The most frustrating part to me is we have new versions of the templates in the pipeline so any work that is done by then is just a moot point.

The joys of having no authority :) Oh well... just keep fighting the good fight and hopefully our end product is so easy and fantastic that no one will ever want to develop pages using HTML again! Here's to wishful thinking