Reliable Systems - Software Development Blog

It’s predominant in the general business that IT consultants are these geeks you invite when you have a virus, or your printer doesn’t work - or when you need to move your offices and need to configure your network.

This is of course most of us are capable of doing anyway, but this doesn’t define our speciality, it’s merely a support role.

What I believe is - it really pays to put more trust in IT consultants.

Most of us are geeks who like gadgets and new technologies.

We like everything that is cool.

But surprise, surprise! These cool things are not cool because they give weird sounds or change colours - they allow people to do some stuff quicker or more efficiently.

We all know about Mail Merge feature in Word, but I don’t know many clerks who actually use that feature on a daily basis, and most of them would hugely benefit from it, since a large chunk of their jobs is sending the same (or similar) letters/documents to different people.

You can always send these people to trainings and tell them to “get on” with their duties. And they will - eventually, after spending days in trainings and only learning one or two things, they will gain new skills, but if they lack the motivation to keep brushing their skills, this gain will eventually deteroriate.

Everyone of us knows the feeling, that there’s simply too much to do, the Inbox is always full and the day is too short.

But, when we pause to organise our work little better - we free up more time!

This is where IT consultants come to the rescue - they don’t know anything about your daily duties, so you need to explain everything to them as you go. When doing that you will both start to see repetition and common sources of problems you encounter every day.

And in most cases the consultant will offer you a solution to your headaches.

It is really easy to get bogged down in the Todo list for Today and not think about your efficiency, but trust me, optimising your work not only makes you less stressed, it also improves the quality of your work and saves you money!

Of course, with IT consultants you need to be vigilant, they will sometimes try to sell you what they specialise in, not what you need, so always do a Return On Investment forecast before you actually commision any work to them.

Business Software has been around for few years now, but I feel it still has many misconceptions and myths about it.

I’d like to devode this article-to-be to characterise this kind of software and offer my perspective on it.

What is Business Software, anyway?
I think it’s easiest to use an example - it’s a computer program, which business users use to accomplish a business goal.

You could try calling Microsoft Outlook a business program, but in my opinion - it’s a generic purpose Organiser, you can use it for organising your schedule both in and outside of work.
And e-mail - every teenager now uses e-mail, this isn’t enough to call this program a “Business application”. It’s nothing more than a Personal Information Manager.

What I call Business Software - is a software which communicated with you using business names people at your company use.

For instance, whenever you can ask your software to provide you with a list of recent orders, unresolved customer enquiries, or sales forecast for the next months - this indicated you are using a proper Business Software.

You have to say, these things sound smart, don’t they?

Normally what happens when you want to know these information is - you ask a Person (let’s call him Steve) which is responsible for managing this exact area of your company’s activity, and ask them to provide you with the information you need.

Steve then uses his tools, usually Microsoft Office (Excel in particular) to come up with the figures you need.

This spreadsheet is then e-mailed to you, you print it out and have a hardcopy on your desk.

But imagine, wouldn’t you like to have such a report every week? Or every day? Or maybe every hour, to be able to trace how your recent advertising campaign increased the sales growth dynamic?

I bet Steve wouldn’t be too happy if you’d ask him to provide you with hourly reports, would he?

This is where Business Software, and Management Information Systems in particular come into play.

The problem with paper documentation is - it becomes outdated the moment it is printed!
This way of thinking is a bit different than we are used to. We like to send e-mails, call people up, and meet with them face to face to exchange information and chat. But this isn’t always the best way to get access to information you, or your people need.

Switching from the culture of “reporting to the line manager on request” to “logging daily activity in the System” - you gain a whole new level of understanding of your business - you can review past periods, and seek patterns in them, for example - did you know, that most of your orders come in at Monday, and the peak hour is 2pm? Maybe it would be good to have twice as many sales rep in the office on Mondays, than on Fridays?

Of course, this isn’t a complete magic - people knowing their businesses very well can observe these patterns every day, but they need to be vigiland, it’s hard to miss some important pieces of management puzzle in a typically hectic day.

And besides - who always has the time to de-brief staff when they go to holiday? I bet you called someone - or someone called you while on holiday, to ask few questions about your project’s progress.

Using an Information System anyone (with the necessary level of privileges) could access progress reports on-line, instantaneously.

But how much does it cost?

There’s a common misconception, actually two of them.

• First one is - “a Management Information System has to cost you millions”,
• Another one is - “software is cheap, you can buy a Microsoft Office for 300 pounds, why some simpler systems should cost more?”

As always, truth is in the middle.

Bespoke Business Software doesn’t have to cost millions anymore - the skill of Enterprise Applications Development is now much more common than it used to be - and frankly, most small and medium businesses don’t need the level of scalability and availability as huge organisations do.

Obviously I don’t mean systems for smaller businesses can be of second quality - but the availability of 99,9% should be enough for most organisations, there’s no point to pay lots of money to gain another “9″ in this figure. Also, if your software doesn’t automatically send statements to 40,000 clients, a potential bug in it won’t cost you as much as in a bigger organisation.

In recent years, the Enterprise Applications had to be written in Java by a high-class consultant, which wasn’t necessarily the brightest programmer available - but happened to have a good training and certificate given to him by a big organisation.

Gradually these magic certificates became less meaningful, and what started to count was the pure talent and expertise.

Also, the technology became more popular, descibed in multiple books on the subject, so anyone keen enough to learn it could possess new, system-building skills.

Open Source platforms offer a basic set of free tools to make low cost (and high quality!) software development possible, and software written in PHP/Ruby isn’t necessarily any worse than one written in Java/C#.

All these trends caused the significant fall of systems’ prices, since the knowledge became more common, and more effective tools gained popularity.

Why isn’t Business Software dirt cheap, then?

This is an important question.

In the scenario of Microsoft, or any other Software Vendor - the software is being developed once, and resold through various channels to multiple clients in one form - the Program.

You cannot call Microsoft and ask them to make you a golder paper clip, or disable this feature by default. You cannot ask them to enable Outlook to do something it doesn’t do already.

Yes, you can submit your feature requests to Microsoft (or any other company operating in that model) and wait (usually years) for the next version of the software to find out whether or not your desired feature has been implemented.

This model, called shrink-wrap software basically means “Software Vendor creates an application, many clients buy the rights to use it”.

There’s nothing wrong with this model, it works successfully for many years and will work for many years to come.

But - what, if you really want to have a software solution to make your life easier?

Let’s say - your company produces Widgets. You can go to Google and ask it for “Widget producer software”, but chances are - there isn’t any.

And besides, your Widget company might be based in UK, and only American versions of the software are available for your niche. And Americans, like with most things - have their own laws governing your business sector.

What happens is - the software you’re after cannot be used by enough other clients to make the shrink-wrap model feasible.

You need to hire an IT Consulting company to assess your needs and advise on the best strategy to ease your organisational pain.

The software they create is created especially for your company, based on your requirements, and used exclusively by your organisation.

That’s what makes the fees go significantly up.

This is where you need to assess if the gains from implementing the system will be bigger than the costs, and in most of the cases - they are.

The thing with software is - it doesn’t only give you financial profits. People work more efficiently, are less stressed, your workflow is better organised, you have less delays in daily operation, your clients are being served better - you really cannot put a pound figure on it.

Business Software is usually used by companies employing between at least 5 and 10 people, and the bigger the company - the more it needs a good Information System, and the costs are becoming less significant, but profits - bigger, scaled up by the number of users of the new system.

But what can it actually do?

The Business Software has its principles and limitations.

First of all - the system needs to be fed all the necessary information in order to be able to analyse it afterwards. So - it might seem like an additional work.

But - when people put the necessary information into the system - everyone who works with them knows about it immediately. This is the first benefit. For example - a new order has been placed on the website. It’s much better if a whole sales team received an e-mail message about that. What is different when using an Information System - any member of the Sales Team can log into it, and browse orders’ history and make various reports of the data already in the system. Appointing a “best salesman of the month” becomes as simple as clicking an appropriate button.

The beauty of Information Systems is - they do all the heavy lifting. Your staff only needs to provide the accurate information once, everything else happens automatically.

Very frequently used functionality, but rarely spoken about - is a document generation.

Let’s say you are a recruitmeng agency and wish you send information about unsuccessful application to your applicants.

Normally what you’d do is to prepare one template letter, and then copy and paste each applicant’s name and address on it and print it out from Microsoft Word. This works. You could also try to automate this using Mail Merge, but it requires you to do some confusing things with some data source, so you quickly ignore this option.
Frankly - I have only used the Mail Merge once in my life, and had a simple problem with it - I emailed the document, but I lost the “Data source”, which rendered my whole action worthless…

Anyway - having an Information System you could select a “Position” (click), then click the desired position “Account Manager” (click), then “Candidates List” (click), mark one of the candidates as “successful” (click), and a select “Notify of unsuccessful application” button.

What happens then is - the System analyses your database for you, gets information about all the candidates who applied for the selected position - and merges for you one document containing 50 letters, correctly named and addresses. What more can you want?

This is a significant time saving, but also a money saver - you can do more things in one day!

What your system could also do for you - is to store a “Log” of all actions that occured in it, so you could easily go to “Last week” and see which positions have been open/closed/filled and who from your office called which candidate. This can increase your effectiveness at the tactical level, and make your life simpler.

After all - why repeat yourself, if computers can do the work for you?

Also published on ReliableSystems.co.uk

I’ve just created a Whitepapers section on our website. The first PDF document was published a few moments ago. I’ve got to say, blogging is a great way to prepare written materials, allow readers comment on them and correct them.

Not to say that I got many comments, I hope I’ll have at least few times more next time ;-)

Have a good read!

Just a quick note, Today I’ve launched the “properly designed”, www.yourclients.co.uk, the Web Based Help Desk Software I develop - right now we’re in the phase of templating the backend (administration panel) and we’ll focus on the user experience and cool features afterwards.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester - do let me know by filling out this contact form.

Thanks!

We’ve now got the MVC framework, basic classes + few pagecontrollers up and running, you can add new clients, support tickets, and followups.

Looks good on the functionality front.

Next week we’ll start working on the layups and templates for the system, and in the meantime I have to add user authentication and some security protection, since the system will store data which are sensitive, at least to some extent.

I discovered recently, that one of the biggest factors making consumer software projects unsuccessful is the lack of publicity in the early days.

What’s your software worth, if noone knows about it?

I also think, that “ideas are cheap, execution is expensive”, so I won’t keep my idea in secret.

It isn’t very original, the market is existent for a long time, but still the amount of companies that use such software is very limited.

The potential problem is educating these companies that they NEED my solution, and that it helps, not hinders their organisation, but that can also be achieved through hard work.

So there we go - the idea is - Web-based Help Desk software, integrated with your website.

At this stage all I have is the domain name (yourclients.co.uk, what do you think?)and a PHP5 application framework, so there isn’t any specific domain logic embedded into it yet - and as I start from scratch I have a decent chance of making this solution “different”, and hopefully “remarkable”, so people would feel inclined to actually make a remark about it.

I’ll have to mock up a placeholder page on that domain name now so it’s indexed in Google and other search engines, so when launched it will actually have “linkpower”.

The other thing is payment processing, I think I’ll have to go with PayPal at this stage until things are more established in terms of cashflow.

Yeah, wish me luck

For your next revolution, try not to follow the pattern of Microsoft’s DataGrid/GridView control.

It’s a wonderful thing, once you know how to use it.

I saw an 12-page article on that, and even a dedicated website!

Considering, that this control was supposed to “make displaying tabular data easier” it definitively didn’t flatten the learning curve, the API is impossible to use without first reading a comprehensive guide about it.

Yes, I agree, this is a powerful tool, and useful - I use it every other day - but most of the features seems simply obsolete, and the abstraction level offered seems… to abstract

I’m not a huge fan of writing everything from scratch, but sometimes it really IS quicker to hack few bits together than reuse component which is intimidating in first approach.

I find myself an advocate of HumaneInterfaces, what means - writing your components to be usable by people, not machines

For instance I love Ruby’s construct:

5.times do
//something
end

This is far less intimidating than PHP’s:

for ($a=0; $asimple!

The times of coding for the Implementation are long gone, now you can focus on coding for the People.

I discovered recently one of the biggest problems all revolutionaries face - the lack of understanding of their brilliance.

This is a very simple thing in one way - others simply “don’t get it”, being used to doing things the “old way”.

The “old way” usually means a way they know every aspect of, like, know what to expect from it and more importantly - feel comfortable with.

I can imagine nay-sayers deprecating every major breakthrough we had, starting with the telephone (”you have to lay wires to every town, state and country - a monstrous job!”), or a train (”the vacuum from outside the carriage will suffocate the passengers”) to more modern ones - like the internet (”it’s only for watching porn and downloading device drivers, what else do you need it for?”).

But as always, the adoption curve comes kicks in and more and more people start using such a service/idea/methodology.

What seems to be needed for advocating “new ways” is to cross the chasm, but it still happens on a “user by user” basis, very rarely it comes as a sudden revolution (revolutions like AJAX/web2.0 being the good exceptions of that rule).

But if you don’t have the huge marketing machine (buzz generator) behind you, how do you get your point across?

The best thing to do, at least in IT-related fields seems to be creating a comprehensive comparison of the “old” and “new” ways, in a strongly graphical way, accompanies by easy-to-grasp charts, code snippets, and most importantly - pros and cons of each solution.

Don’t think your revolutionary idea is “needed” by anyone - they got without it until Today, so they can live perfectly well without it - so try to communicate the “real, hard advantages” instead of “paradigm-shifting, first-mover advantage generating solution”.

But sometimes it doesn’t help, the technology has to wait until its time comes, until people start to realize that they HAVE a problem and they want to do something about it and seek solutions to it.

This is where it seems easiest to help them by offering your “new approach”.

But by the time it comes - is it still a “revolution”, or merely an “evolution”? This is argueable.

But the rule seems to be - try to help people which are looking for and open to New Ways (in other words - acknowledge that they have a PROBLEM), you’ll get a very big barrier out of the way.

Don’t be a solution waiting for the right problem.

You might think that buying a computer might guarantee you “the experience”, after all - you have all the nuts and bolts under the bonnet, the IT-horsepower that everyone claims to be so powerful.

But a computer itself is indeed just like a car - you have to buy a World for him to drive in. The world itself determines what you can do in your car, where you can get, how fast, its parameters define your speed, range and comfort of your ride.

And sometimes, these worlds simply don’t have everything you dream about - like a Loop of Death or 5-lane motorway with no speed limit.

What’s the point of having a modern car if you can’t use it in the ways you like?

That’s exactly the role of software in Today’s world - to enable us to do things quicker, smarter and provide us with a level of automation of mundane everyday’s tasks.

But do you really need a custom built software?

Not always.

Sometimes it’s enough to have your typical Windows XP machine with Office XP installed and you don’t need much more to do what you have to do - all of these machines have the web browser included which allows them to use the biggest network in the world.

But that biggest network is also a separate world in a sense - and web software gives him a shape. This world seems to gradually take over other worlds, abstracting physical operations and giving them abstract, digital form.

Do you remember your last visit to your bank? I bet you know your last 3 operations on your account though.

Developing software then - is a good opportunity to unleash the creativity in order to make people’s lifes easier and more enjoyable.

It is an art.

Without which we wouldn’t be able to live anymore, being used to our standard of living.

I’m currently in the phase of looking for interesting problems to solve, or new products to develop, so if you have any problems that need tackling - just give me a shout

It’s now official - ReliableSystems.co.uk Limited is now registered since 23/06/06!

Now the top of the TODO list seems to be finding clients interested in making their businesses smarter