How to Introduce New Ideas and Technologies

Ideas vs. Technology

> Ideas can be driven by a new technology
> Ideas often come from a “community” within the company
> Ideas require a higher level of research and development
- What does it mean? Who does it affect us? How will it work?
> Ideas can create more change within a company than a technology
- Affects multiple levels within an organization
- Requires deeper participation with employee population

> A technology can be selected to fulfill an idea
> A technology recommendation can come from anyone within an organization
> A technology requires a lower level of research and implementation
> A technology can usually only affect a single group within the employee population
- Project Managers
- Developers
- etc.

Selecting the Right Idea

> Concept Screening
- Comparing options against a baseline benchmark.
- Compare against factors like cost, reliability, time etc.
> Delphi Method
- Explore ideas or gain consensus with remote group.
> Force-field Analysis
- Exploring forces for and against an idea (pros and cons).
> The Hundred Dollar Test
- How will you spend $100 on your ideas?
- Select the idea that best matches your budget.
> The Kipling method (5W1H)
- Ask simple questions for great answers.
> Negative Selection
- Sort out the ‘definitely nots’ first.
- Must Haves, Maybes, Can Live Without etc.
> NUF Test
- Score idea based on how New, Useful and Feasible it is.
> Pause
- Reflect for a minute before deciding.
> PINC Filter
- Evaluate Positives, Negatives, Intriguing and Concerning elements.
> Six Thinking Hats
- Look at ideas from different viewpoints.
- Information, Judgment, Creativity, Intuition, Optimism, Thinking.
> Swap sort
- Sorting a short list by priority swapping.
> Voting
- Democratic casting of votes for the best idea.

Selecting the Right Technology

> Assemble a selection group composed of people from every part of the organization who will use the software, including key decision makers.
> Come to an agreement about the business processes that will be automated before looking at software. What are you trying to solve and/or improve?
> Factor in your company’s culture.
- If people are used to the freedom of choosing their work and working conditions, be careful not to choose a system that will destroy what people value most about their current business processes.
> Decide if you want an end-to-end, all-in-one package or one that integrates with current systems.
- Usually the latter are simpler and more cost-effective to implement – adheres to the “organic nature” of a company.
> Match the technology to your company size and the industry you’re in.
- Some solutions are better for small companies, some are designed for health-care enterprises and others for government services.
> Decide on your platform of choice.
- Will it be a thin-client Web-based one?
- Will it be a more traditional client/server model?
- Will it be an open-source or licensed solution?
> Don’t underestimate how long it will take to implement the package!

Preparation for the Presentation

Before presenting an idea or technology to management, prepare answers to the following questions:

> Where is the value?
- How will this idea/technology affect change in the company, and how will that change deliver value to your company?
- What are the $, resource and time costs to implement and support?
- What are the $ and time benefits after implementation?
> What will this idea/technology solve and/or improve?
- This should be a definite list of areas that will have a positive impact from the start.
- Long-term benefits should be categorized separately so there is strong awareness on short and long-term gains.
> Is there a strong “buy-in” within your company?
- The greater our community supports the implementation of an idea/technology, the higher level of success can be attained.

> Your Official Proposal
- Executive Summary
- Management, Key Personnel and Business Partners Involved
- Description of Idea/Technology
- Implementation Plan
- Management Plan
- Financial Evidence and Projections
- Supporting Documents

Gathering Feedback

After your official proposal is submitted, gathering feedback is critical to help re-enforce and/or improve the idea/technology being recommended.

> Specific areas requiring feedback:
- Quality of proposal
- Overall score on the idea/technology
- Areas requiring improvement
- Recommendations on improving the budget, timeline and resources for the implementation and support of the idea/technology
- What alternatives can be recommended
- Has it been done before at your company, and if so why did it not succeed
- What external resources have done in the past (ask friends, relatives, prior coworkers etc.)

Single Sign On with AspDotNetStorefront and Community Server

The ongoing debate and question continues… However, as of late, some breakthroughs on my end in this area.

Basically, with a little bit of tweaking, hacking, cheating, and fooling, AspDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) and Community Server (CS) can live happily ever after in a single user session and “share” user account information.

And now, for the approach… In broad strokes:

1. Setup ASPDNSF and CS in their own virtual Webs within the same domain (e.g. domain.com/community, domain.com/store/)
2. Set both ASPDNSF and CS Web.config machine keys and cookie names to be identical.
3. Modify ASPDNSF code where it reads/writes to the cookie to reference the new shared name.
4. Add a column in ASPDNSF customer table that stores the CS user name (so when a user account is created on CS it will create a user account in ASPDNSF with a matching user name)
5. Modify ASPDNSF code where it reads cookie to pickup the user name (since CS will write the user name to the cookie and not a ASPDNSF GUID as ASPDNSF normally does out of box), then using that user name lookup ASPDNSF’s customer GUID in the DB and reference that for the ASPDNSF session.
6. Locate all locations in stored procedures that create/update user accounts to handle the new CS user name column.

This will ultimately allow you to sign into CS, then go to domain.com/store/ and get automatically signed into ASPDNSF since the cookie already has your sign-in information and a matching session record is located in ASPDNSF’s database.

As for the rest of the details – specific code changes, stored procedures etc., more details to come later when time permits.

Finally, since CS and ASPDNSF have URL re-writing engines we can elegantly handle those elaborate URL’s so things look nice and clean when a user view’s a ASPDNSF page and a CS page.

Hope that helps with some people out there… Enjoy!

Solutions Customization and Integration – Part III

It has been a while since I posted an update on this project… So here it goes.

Since my last post, the project I am working on has evolved to a 3-piece solution tying in AspDotNetStorefront ML 7.0, Community Server 2007 SP1 and a fully custom e-Learning solution built on Flash and .NET controls.

Due to the complexity and unique features on this project, the architecture and design grew to be very specific and custom – beyond the normal skinning of the out-of-box products and turning features on/off. The final architecture came down to an intermediate Data Application Layer (DAL) and Business Logic (BL) layer that encapsulates and partly overrides the methods/classes provided by Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront. The thinking behind this implementation is to retain the core functionality of both systems, allowing us to implement software upgrades easily and support the application maintenance and enhancement lifecycle. The e-Learning system, being that it’s designed from scratch, will expose a custom BL and DAL.

Interfacing with Community Server’s and AspDotNetStorefront’s API allows us to work outside the framework of classes/methods provided by both products, as well as build our own custom layer of methods/classes to define and produce entities that consume/provide data apparent to the application as designed. The presentation layer, will be modeled around the common ASP.NET practices of .aspx files, custom controls and a selection of controls from ComponenetArt’s WebUI product.

The single sign-on architecture has changed slightly since my last post. The approach taken now, for the sake of simplicity and ease of management, is to have Community Server act as the central point for account management/creation using ASP.NET’s membership provider, and have back-end processes that replicate billing/transactional data to AspDotNetStorefront. This allows us to collect all the data we need about a user in a User entity from the Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront databases.

The project is currently undergoing the initial stages of development, with a target date for launch of mid-2008. Stay tuned for more updates…

250+ Tools for Web Developers

Found a great list of links to more than 250 online tools to help you refine your Web development skills and deliver some quality sites.

Click Here to view the Mashable.com post, and Click Here to download a bookmarks file containing all the links on that page that you can easily import into your Web browser.

Enjoy!

Making the Switch: Windows to Mac

Well, I finally caved in and picked up a MacBook Pro for my business, and I must say that it truly is a work of art!

Next to ThinkPad’s for quality laptop builds (all my previous laptops), MacBook Pro’s are by far the most impressive in build, design and elegance. Definitely kudos on the hardware and system features – and double kudos on the built-in camera, dashboard, bluetooth and juicy CPU and hard drive.

The experience of switching over has been rough – from keyboard shortcuts to applications, and mouse clicks to common tasks. Although I have not switched over completely, and highly recommend against a complete switchover, I am finding the Mac OS experience to be very impressive and powerful. Expose is great, window management is slick, everything looks nice and clean, and the human-to-computer interaction seems seamless and super user friendly most of the time (much like my iPhone).

To counter the complex experience of switching, I opted to install VMWare Fusion (reports show that it performs better than Parallels – lighter overhead on the OS, and faster performance). On that I am running Windows XP Pro SP2, and all my Web development applications (Visual Studio, IIS etc.). There is no way I would have been able to switch over completely, even with the open source Web development applications out there (e.g. eclipse, mono etc.). Additionally, I picked up ConceptDraw to support some of my Visio work, however I still have Visio installed on my VMWare image just in case.

Besides the extreme learning curve of having to learn to do things in a new way, I gotta give it up to Apple for creating such an amazing product with a very reliable and impressive OS.

Time to stop by the Genius Bar to bulk up on some knowledge so I can use this puppy to its maximum potential!