Developing Software for Entrepreneurs

What does a Best of the Web website cost?

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:42:00 +0000

The Rochester Business Journal holds a Best of the Web competition each year. OS-Cubed is proud to have developed sites that have qualified in the past as a finalist - though this year none of our clients submitted an entry. The RBJ's competition looks at websites in a variety of categories including Not for Profit cultural, Not for profit human services, Banking and Finance, Education, Business and professional services, Government and Community, Health care, Legal Services, Manufacturing, Real Estate, Retail and Tourism. In short, a vast cross section of the web services industry.

One of the more interesting questions they ask (and not everyone answers this) is the cost to build the site and the annual cost to maintain it. Note that the interpretation of these amounts is left up to the submitter of the site and (for instance) may not include internal development costs, volunteer costs (on the part of Not for Profit companies) and other non-accounted for expenses. Nonetheless, the study offers a nice cross section of the community and what it costs to build and maintain an award winning quality website.

If we look at the data gathered from the information provided, the initial cost of development of an award winning site is roughly $40,000 on average with a range of $325,000 to $2500. The cost of yearly improvements, upkeep and maintenance arrives at around $6700/year or around 17% of the total cost of the initial site and varies between a few hundred and tens of thousands.

Award winning sites are typically redesigned every 3 years or so, the cost of which isn't surveyed, but we can expect the cost to be somewhere around 1/4 to 1/2 the initial design cost for a content managed site, and as much as the total design cost for a "built from scratch" site.

So what does this mean for the average company looking to build a site? Budgets in the over $10,000 range should not be surprising to you. Depending on features and functions (retail, real estate and banking sites probably cost much more than not for profit or information only sites) you could be anywhere along a continuum of a few thousand dollars all the way to hundreds of thousands. You also should be expecting to expend somewhere in the 15-20% range to maintain, update and improve your site each year. As new browsers come out (is your site compatible with IE10 for instance?) sites may well need tweaks and updates to function properly. Security updates need to be applied, and content needs to be changed and updated frequently.

None of these budgets included demand generation activities including SEO, direct marketing, social media, pay for click or other marketing costs.

Of course you could also opt to build a site for much less than that and not go for a "best of the web" site. Why you would want to do that when there are competing sites that are better than yours is an exercise I'll leave up to your Marketing manager. Good luck with that discussion :)

With budgets in that range though, you will want to carefully pick a developer and designer for the long haul - one that has your best interests at heart, and will help save you from costly mistakes - as well as recognize when an investment is worth it.

2012-2013 - A banner year for OS-Cubed, Inc.

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:06:00 +0000

The last year has been an amazing one. OS-Cubed has:

Produced a dashboard for sales performance for a major national firm using MS-SQL, office applications, and automation scripts
Assisted with building web based administrative tools for an enterprise print management dashboard using C# and .Net
Implemented a major new ecommerce site using DotNetNuke
Created dozens of brochure sites using DotNetNuke
Created custom product choice wizards for 2 international companies for their DotNetNuke site - one of which has gotten national recognition and will be featured on their distributors and resellers websites.
Hosted over 100 websites for clients - without a single failure or downtime beyond normal maintenance.
Provided hosting services for a web based human resource career application co-developed by us that services tens of thousands of employees world wide for a major international firm
Installed hundreds of new machines at client sites
Implemented virtual servers
Supported users
Created an application to manage bar code inventory items and update their status in a proprietary ERP system
Assisted in implementing a HIPAA compliant EMR system
Protected thousands of users from viruses
Migrated hundreds of users to Office365 and Google Apps in the cloud
Implemented a complete redesign of a major medical information website
Implemented a successful prototype of a fashion website for an entrepreneur who has since leveraged that with major funding
Implemented sophisticated SSL and remote access for multiple clients
Managed technology transitions and expansions for dozens of local clients
Assisted multiple not-for-profit boards with their websites
Helped organize and handle technology for the Eyes on the Future Event
Helped an organization with limited funds continue to support their 60 workers with very old technology

What can we do for you? Let us know what kind of problem you have to solve and we'll help you solve it.

Microsoft Office 2013 OEM licensing - the other shoe drops

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:56:00 +0000

Microsoft releases Office 2013 to OEMs

So the other shoe has dropped on Office 2013 - and this one not only emphasizes the THUD from the last licensing reveal, but reiterates it with a thud of it's own. While a preinstall to hard disk kit is available to shorten download times, Microsoft is pushing (and vendors are hopping on this with abandon) installing Office 2013 OEM entirely from a log-on to Windows Live.

The process works like this - you get only a license key when purchasing an OEM copy of MS Office 2013. You can't just run the software and activate the license - you must go to www.office.com/setup to install, and you must establish a Live ID and your packaged license code to get to the download and install screen - there is no alternate installation method. Once there you can download and install your oem version on one machine. Although it says in the FAQ that you can come back to the site to re-download and install, it's not clear if you can reactivate after say a hard drive wipe and reinstall. We'll just have to see as Microsoft could not give a clear answer.

Also unclear is whether you can do this with more than one license on a single LiveID - IE must I have a unique live id for each OEM license, or can I use one live ID to download and install all my licenses? Enquiring minds want to know but even Microsoft Support and licensing couldn't answer this one definitively. Their recommendation - "try it and let us know how it works - we'll leave this case open". Helpful. Not.

This doesn't of course consider the case of whether the end user has a fast internet connection or not. Over some internet connections the multi hundreds of megabyte office download may well take hours. Additionally, what is the first thing I want to do with a machine - well.... use it. But I can't because I may be sitting around for quite a while before any useful software is loaded on it.
Finally there's the issue of the LiveIDs. How many people will create a one-time throwaway live id and then forget the username and password. With the old system all they needed was their install disks and their keycode. ~~They can't even ORDER install disks any more~~. Update - you can order backup install disks - once you activate using your live ID.

Fortunately you do not need to associate the live ID you used for install with Office for cloud storage etc. I can just imagine managing this for a 50 user install and having them all share the same 7gb skydrive. Fortunately once installed and authenticated you don't need to ever log into that account again from that computer.

All this points to a drive towards subscription based systems. Which begs the question of - are you ready for it? I predict that OEM and OEM pricing will go away. The new subscription based systems are cost effective on a 3 year new version renewal plan - I suspect rather than noodle with all the rest of this stuff this will drive more small to medium businesses and all individuals into subscriptions. And with Microsoft's cash grab on the low end subscriptions - resellers make ZERO dollars on these installs and ZERO recurring revenue. I suspect that Microsoft may have written the death knell for office within the next 5 years unless they fix some of these deficiencies.

What you probably don't know about Microsoft's new direction

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:04:00 +0000

and why it's important for every Microsoft Developer to understand it...

Microsoft has finally let the other shoe drop on how their new Office/Cloud/Windows 8 strategy is going to work by releasing the details of how Office 2013/365 will be licensed and sold - and it's not just a shoe it's a hiking boot - landing with a big THUD.

There are some important new ramifications about how the entire thing will work - and it's important for you as a developer to understand how that changes what is still the predominant IT ecosystem on the planet. Let me apologize now to the Linux, Apple and Android developers - this article is not for you - it's for those of us who have been working on Microsoft Apps for the last 30 years.

Let's start with a little history. Back in the late 70's and early 80's a revolution happened. Until that point computers were large, relatively complex beasts, controlled by a corporate entity (because they were too expensive for mere individuals to buy) and had one processor, one set of ram, and one set of hard drives shared by dozens of users through a terminal. This had advantages and disadvantages. It was easy to control software and access to that software, and easy to manage since everyone shared the same tools. Of course you couldn't easily take your work home with you (you might consider that a good or bad thing) and the applications were very expensive and monolithic since it required the developer to have equivalently expensive tools to create the software. In the late 70's personal computers peeked their way into the American home. Initially crude and difficult to use - but relatively inexpensive compared to their mainframe counterparts - they created a revolution. Suddenly you could purchase a system that would let you perform powerful calculations and perform difficult tasks in your home. More importantly, through the advent of the business PC you could have the same platform at work as you used at home and carry data back and forth on a portable storage device. Also importantly - you could purchase a system to develop for this new platform that didn't cost an arm and a leg - which meant that new software and software improvements increased at an exponential rate.

Since that time we added in the ability to access your computer over the internet - and for computers to have access to shared data on the internet. At the same time - through some serious investment in infrastruture, it became cheaper to get storage, processor time and bandwidth through major services like Windows Azure, Amazon AWS and other huge interconnected networks. So in a sense we're back where we started from. Our current devices are very complex and independent, but we're becoming more and more reliant on apps and storage that run in the cloud - simplifying the requirements for what our personal devices need to have. Suddenly a tablet running a run of the mill low power processor can leverage gigabytes of data, bandwidth and the processing power of thousands of processors. This means that - down the road - assuming we continue to live in a connected society our applications are going to become more and more like the original mainframe apps of the 70's and 80's. Instead of buying machines with gigabytes or terabytes of local storage we're going to be buying a simple inexpensive machine that leverages that cloud power. Our operating systems need to be less complex because the heavy lifting isn't handled at the desktop any more, or even at the local server level.

With Windows 8 and Office 365 subscription services Microsoft has moved from the "software as a license you buy model" (which hasn't been eliminated yet - just deemphasized) to the "software you subscribe to and get as needed" model. An individual can now - for $100/year - buy any kind of device they want - phone, tablet, pc, laptop or something not even invented yet, install office software on up to 5 devices they own, use a simpler version of that software on the web, get 27gb of cloud document storage to use or share with whomever they want (plus each of the other 4 users gets 7 gb of storage for a total of 55GB of available shareable storage for $100/year). They get an hour of free Skype talking and sharing a month. They get the latest version of office, allowing frequent updates to add functionality without the expense of giant new releases. They get streaming of the software to a PC that isn't even licensed for Office to edit a document assuming the target is running Windows 7 or 8. On the corporate side the same thing can be acquired (with slight variations in capability) for $240/year/user for enterprise users or $150/year/user for small businesses - and on the corporate side they add in sophisticated sharepoint capabilities and active directory management (doing away with the need for an active directory server, or minimizing it's need to being just a local extension of the cloud). For $72/month they can have the same thing, without the locally installed office licenses. In addition, with either a corporate or Live account your settings, files, and preferences follow you from machine to machine - even across platforms. By the end of this year Gartner Group estimates that the PREDOMINANT way that websites will be accessed is via a phone or tablet. It will outstrip desktop and laptop access - in 2013. That's this year folks.

So what does that mean for you as a developer? It means that Microsoft means to make cloud storage and apps it's end game - not just an add-on, and the day of the local server - and even the super powerful end user system are slowly - but surely - ending. And if you think - well we'll just move to another platform - think again. The largest competing platforms for end-user computing are moving in the same direction. Apple (of course) saw this coming years ago and has quietly started phasing out desktop and laptop machines in favor of tablets and other simpler less expensive devices. Google's play in the Android market focuses strictly on low powered machines that leverage the cloud. Linux for the desktop? Nice OS but used only by technogeeks so far. In the next 2-4 years you're going to see a huge shift away from expensive powerful, complex to manage servers and systems in your office or home and towards low priced, low powered systems that leverage the cloud. And once they go cloud they won't be going back. Don't believe me? The only way to deploy a standalone Access application in Access 2013 is to deploy it to Azure and Sharepoint.

So what can you do as a developer? For one - learn a cloud based system and leverage it's power - now. I don't care if it's AWS, Azure, SharePoint or some other platform - but you should start to figure out how they work, how to make your apps operate efficiently and actively over a not-always-reliable internet connection, and how to make them scale so that you don't have to sell additional licenses to get additional power out of them. It also means designing systems - whether they be apps, websites, or whatever - to adapt to a huge variety of interfaces and screen sizes - everything from hand-held phones to 50" 3d High Definition living room monstrosities. They need to adapt to all sorts of interaction interfaces - the old fashioned keyboard, the mouse, the touchpad, the touchscreen, and the "gesture based" interfaces like the Kinect. It means that data becomes a mix of BYOD storage (Bring Your Own Data) and corporate cloud storage - and how will you manage that and protect the privacy and security of data when it's easy to copy things from corporate sources into a user's private data store in the cloud.

It also means you should start to explore web and cloud based development tools. That quad core dev machine on your desk may well go away someday - and you need to be ready to use some of the new and sophisticated web based tools for software development in project management, compilation, version control, etc. The distributed nature of today's collaborations will make that a must.

What happens if you don't? Well how long did terminal based apps last once the PC was out? How long did non-graphical DOS based apps after Windows came out? How long did non-web based apps last after the internet took over? You have some time - this isn't happening overnight. But it IS happening and if you don't adapt there will be a day when you wake up and find your app or skills irrelevant. And that day is approaching.

PS - if you're interested in migrating to the cloud and leveraging Office 365 OS-Cubed is a cloud expert - we can help you with migration, support and leveraging your existing infrastructure while using the cloud efficiently.

Mobile platforms slowing the production of new PCs

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 18:41:00 +0000

In a recent post from the NY Times they featured an article about how portable devices such as phones and pads have cut deeply into the market for processors for PCs and Laptops - except in the area of processors for large server type systems. While I'm excited about the opportunities that mobile and lightweight platforms offer I fear that in the long run this trend could significantly damage the development of bigger and better and more powerful personal computer systems.

For the last 30 years we've enjoyed rapid growth of the power and efficiency of processor systems. This is due in part to the fact that software has consistently outstripped the ability of hardware to deliver the very best experience. Especially in platforms such as gaming, but even in platforms such as office applications, getting a big, new computer every 3-4 years became de riguer. As a result we had a constant sales cycle of new hardware, and the processor companies had a constant incentive to invent and deploy faster and more efficient hardware that could perform more powerful tasks, address more memory, and create richer user experiences. But somewhere in the mid 2000's that growth slowed. Suddenly people realized that the stuff they did every day (access a document, check something on the web, watch a video) didn't actually require these powerful new processors, and - due to the popularity of laptops and smart cell phones in the last decade - the processor manufacturers brought out new chips that - for the first time really - weren't more powerful than the ones they were producing for PCs but were smaller, less powerful, but perhaps more power efficient. Thus was born the transition to portable hand held systems.

Now don't get me wrong - I love my Android tablet and my smart cell phone. But I wouldn't want to do any serious work on them. They're OK for posting on Facebook (which by the way they barely seem able to do with Facebook's complexity) and for watching video on a small screen. But they're not so great for big spreadsheets, or number crunching, or gaming or any of a number of other things I do with my PC. Well that's OK you say - we can do those things in the cloud now and leverage that (which of course drives the sales of processors intended for the server market) and that is true but - it means that the processor manufacturers like Intel and AMD are starting to back away from their commitment to employ and produce more powerful processors on standard desktop and laptop platforms. It seems to me that new processors in this category (And even the processors in the server category) have gotten evolutionarily more powerful, but at a much slower pace and without the revolution that would herald in the next generation of super powerful processors that we can own and control and program ourselves. And in the long run that worries me. Without volume sales there is less incentive to constantly innovate and produce new products.

Part of the personal computer revolution was that we were no longer beholden to the mainframe, or the company's big iron machines. If we wanted to we could contain a 30gb database right on our own system, query it, massage it, do cool things with it, etc. We didn't need to be hooked to a network to do this, we didn't have to ask for the powers that be to install new servers or spin up new instances - it was completely under our control. I see those days retreating with this new trend to lighter weight, low memory, low processor power front ends and heavy duty back ends. I see a future where we as software developers and users are saddled with fighting (again) the limitations of our front ends, and relying on the good nature and knowledge of those building the back end systems to provide us with the performance we need. I don't think this is a good thing.

I love being able to be chatting in a conversation and have someone say "hey do you know if" and be able to whip out my Thunderbolt from HTC and answer it by just running a quick query on the web. I just wonder what the world will be like if all our systems are as stupid as my Thunderbolt (or iPhone or any other mobile platform) - because I really really like my PC and it's capabilities. speed and performance. I don't WANT it to be at thin client. What do you think - how do you think that the portable platforms and cloud computing will effect the next generation of personal computers.

Techstars expanding rapidly....

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:51:00 +0000

Wouldn't it be great if Rochester could join the Techstars fold? We can make it happen but here's what we need to do for that to be a reality:

Education Cooperation - Rochester has several powerful and innovative schools in the area. Unless they cooperate though - most of them don't have the resources to pull off making TechStars a reality all by themselves. Realistically if the major area universities got together they could easily make it happen. A key plank of the techstarts platforms is cooperative university support nurturing entrepreneurs and the employees they will eventually hire. RIT, U of R, Nazareth, Brockport, St John Fisher, even Buffalo, Cornell and SU- all have something to offer TechStars but they have to get over themselves and realize that it's going to take regional educationaal cooperation to make this happn. Then they can ALL take credit.
Governmental Cooperation - the constant battle between State, City and County governments needs to end. To make this happen the proper tax incentives, employment opportunities, community redevelopment, facilities planning and regulatory control issues needs to be smoothed over. All three entities need to chip in, and put their marbles behind a single goal - attracting venture and new startups to the Rochester Metropolitan area and beyond. We've seen the glimmer of this in GRE - but they're focused more on attracting businesses both new and old to Rochester. We need a singular effort with a charismatic and forceful leader to make this happen.
Established Startup Mentoring - One of the other key planks in the establishment of a TechStars program is a strong portfolio of established entrepreneur mentors to help the startups along. Rochester is a giving community and has a strong and tight entrepreneurial community, unfortunately those community members are split up among 1/2 dozen groups and there is no one place for them to gather to assist, and no set of venture capitalists to "get behind". Groups like DR, RPCN, GRE, Pariemus, Independent Entrepreneur Council, Rochester Open Coffee Club should merge their efforts and their meetings to create a single organization that pushes the entrepreneurial message in a concerted and coordinated way.
Coordinated Venture effort - The venture community in Rochester HAS grown and you hear more and more about Rochester funded startups being either moved to a new level or selling out to larger companies. In the end though - the local Venture community still invests mostly in traditional business models, not high tech or software startups. We need to attract new venture blood to our region - and not from outside it either - because bringing a venture capitalist in from Boston or California generally only results in an early exit to that community. Syracuse has had some success in this arena and UVNY has also been doing outreach. Let's coordinat them with the above groups.
Recruiting of outside people to move to Rochester - One of the key things that TechStars does is create opportunities for Boulder (which in the end has similar weather and isolation issues to Rochester) to attract young and talented people. While Rochester already has an awesome, hardworking and dedicted workforce - we need to turn into a destination city where a talented rockstar can see that he or she has not one but several cool startups to potentially work for.
More coopetition and less competition - some of the best startups end up being the blend of several great ideas - the more startups collaborate, the lower their costs, the better their ideas, and the more likely they will get implemented and funded. Let's encourage startups to find ways to work together - instead of putting them in the arena to battle it out and see who can come up with the scrap of gold at the end.
A strong emphasis on improving the downtown environment - one thing that Boulder has going for it is a strong, well established zone of downtown development. Rochester has a hole in the ground.
A strong emphasis on K-12 education and STEM subjects - In a city with as many engineers as Rochester there is no excuse for not having FIRST Robotics in every elementary, middle and high school - especially downtown where it matters most.

To read more about TechStars and it's successes - check out Brad Feld's blog article

Are you a terraformer?

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:43:00 +0000

Occasionally something from a local college crosses my desk and I can't help but crow about it to everyone. We are blessed to have a number of great schools in Rochester, and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) leads the pack in terms of software development. All of my technical employees are RIT graduates. RIT - recently selected as being one of the top ten schools for Online Game Development - has a fantastic professor of marketing and interactive media - Dr. Neil Hair. His blog www.neilhair.com features some of the cutting edge courses that today's kids in online marketing are taking, as well as excellent advice on marketing in today's world. I always pay close attention to what Dr. Hair is teaching - because that's typically where marketing is headed, not where it's been.

Dr. Hair's recent article on Commercializing Virtual Worlds Online is a first of it's kind course anywhere. Taught entirely online, and featuring online commercial opportunities, it's a way for kids to learn about how to analyze business models, create markets, engage customers, and create a new business - all online.

When building your software, concludes the article, you shouldn't ignore the vast marketing potential raised by incorporating virtual online worlds into it's every day existence. You can read more on Neil's blog, and look at some of the other great articles to see what tomorrow's kids are learning today. Are you considering virtual markets in your business plan? Should you?

What are your 3 magic numbers?

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:14:00 +0000

Today's entrepreneurs need to be more focused than ever. Brad Feld has coached and mentored hundreds of technical startups, and is firmly convinced that to run a successful startup he can take their business model and summarize success using 3 magic numbers - and the metric must have EXACTLY that number of measurements. Why? Because more than that and you're submitting to what he calls "data porn" - an overload of stimulus that doesn't let you concentrate on what's important to business success. The three numbers won't be the same for every business, but every business can be distilled down into 3 measurements.

I strongly suggest you read Brad Feld's article, then come back here and tell us - what are YOUR 3 magic numbers? Or do you need help finding them? How do you work on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis to improve your metrics with each of those measurements?

Time for the Rochester media to step up

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Thousands of high school kids from throughout upstate NY show up for an event featuring science, technology, engineering and math. It's an event as exciting as the first NASCAR race of the year, or the first baseball thrown out at the beginning of the season for these kids, and their mentors. In fact, it's filled with even more suspense because unlike those events in this event they'll discover the challenge they're going to try to tackle for the next 6 weeks as they build a FIRST Robotics Challenge robot to compete for glory.
Over the next 6 weeks kids from these teams will be working on their robots as much as 3 evenings a week, plus all day on each weekend day, putting hundreds of hours in - all while maintaining excellent grades in school. At the end of the 6 weeks they'll be delivering the robots to compete at a regional event, and hopefully an international one. These regionals are every bit as exciting and engrossing as a great basketball game or football game, featuring both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

In the meantime they'll have learned programming, design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, math, science, embedded systems, how to run a lathe and a drill press, how to work as a team and collaborate, as well as leadership, public relations, marketing, and team spirit. After a 4 year experience in FIRST 85% and more of graduates go on to college, and 70% of them go into much needed engineering fields. FIRST Robotics offers millions in scholarships to FIRST Robotics Alumni at major technical colleges all over the US.

Doesn't this sound like something that our community and culture should be promoting at every opportunity? Doesn't it sound important enough to warrant television, newspaper and online media coverage? Pictures? Video? Profiles of the teams and individual superstars on those teams? It does to me. Apparently not to those who actually run and prioritize media stories however. They seem to think that it's much more important to post stories about who is the best baseball, football, basketball, - heck even water polo is covered in more detail than FIRST Robotics. In fact recently the Democrat and Chronicle posted a 36 page special on the best individual athletes in traditional sports - on the same day that they completely failed to cover the event mentioned above. Apparently "Driver ticketed for 2 car crash" and "Local swimsuit model competes" is more important than "Thousands of High School kids get an opportunity to be professional engineers".

Our culture today promotes sports and our high schools spend millions on sporting equipment, fields, and infrastructure. Think what a change we could make in our society if we instead spent those dollars and that effort on promoting academic challenges. Think what a difference it could make for urban kids if all of them had the opportunity to participate in one-on-one mentoring and building a possible career, instead of sports where maybe one or two out of thousands of participants might someday go professional.

I hereby challenge the Rochester Media to step up this year. Go select a couple of FIRST Robotics teams - Email me if you need some leads - and give them the same coverage you would give a high school sports teams. Don't just cover the FIRST Regional event in March from the point of view of a "bunch of geeks getting together" - post the scores the next day. Post the winners. Tell us who won what awards. Highlight where they're going and follow them if they move on to Championships or compete in other regionals. Follow a couple FIRST high school seniors and see where they end up in terms of colleges. Let's make academic challenge just as important as athletic challenges. We need to in order to survive and compete as a community. And you don't have to stop with FIRST teams - other great challenges like Science Olympiad and Odyssey of the Mind are also deserving of your coverage, recognition etc. Those kids deserve to have their success documented like every athlete in your 36 page athletic section do. This means YOU Rochester Democrat and Chronical, and ALL of you in the news media (WHEC, WHAM, WROC, etc).

Some say that the media should just follow culture - I say that you can have a positive effect on the Rochester region by highlighting not just our athletic successes but our academic ones as well. Do something good for your community. And don't just stick us in the back of a local section - do feature stories. For the good of Rochester.

Microsoft and Kodak - same company, different timeline?

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:39:00 +0000

As Rochester, NY residents we wax perhaps a bit more philosophically about our local "founding" company Kodak. I've been alive long enough to know Kodak in the heyday of photography when nothing seemed to be able to bring the "Big Yellow Box" down, to today's more sobering announcement in the Wall Street Journal that they are relying on a sale of some of their most important digital photography patents (not licensing or enforcing mind you - selling) to prevent bankruptcy. I predicted their demise into a tiny office selling patents downtown filled with lawyers and brokers from one of the largest and most diverse photographic giants 10 years ago when they started selling off profitable divisions to fund quarterly stock price expectations and a long tradition of paying out unsustainable "profit sharing bonuses" to employees.

If you look back over the timeline for Kodak, one of the key things that jumps out at you are their lost opportunities. One of the reasons that digital photography patents exist in Kodak's portfolio at all is that for a large part - they invented it. And yet once invented it was quietly killed by an internal team stuck in the past - looking at chemical sales and the blade/razor effect and refusing to think that someday that might not work for them and digital would make them obsolete. Love those cool OLED displays? Also invented at Kodak, but they never made any instead selling the patent to LG Electronics to make some quick cash. They similarly bet wrong in the videotape arena, refusing to believe it would replace handheld film - getting into it too late to matter and choosing and betting on the wrong platform (Beta not VHS). Another misstep was the inability to identify the importance of instant photography from competitor Polaroid. Recently they've entered the consumer printing market, well after it had become commoditized.

So let's look now at Microsoft's recent timeline. Beholden to inertia they've now missed the boat on at least 3 of the most recent 4 innovation thresholds. Their windows phone 7 for all it's evolutionary but not revolutionary technological superiority is too little too late in a mobile marketplace now dominated by Android and Apple. They bet that something better than Windows Mobile (which never held more than 7 or 8% of the market) was all they had to make and that they could roll it out after everyone else - hubris of the worst kind. Sales of windows 7 phones lag behind usage of their now no longer sold windows 6.5 phones - hardly a promising beginning a year after release.

Similarly their tablet effort has been derailed by tying it directly to the windows OS - with usable tablets from Microsoft now not due until 2013, they might as well just throw in the towel. The market will be saturated with cheap Android and high end iPad tablets by that point, and they'll be stepping into a well established commodity market yet again. If they get 5% of it I'll be surprised. Similarly the trend away from big hardware and iron and towards the cloud is being only 1/2 well managed by Microsoft. Though they have a powerful and well managed cloud offering in Office365, competition with the server and desktop divisions within their company has rendered them ineffective at competing with Google, Amazon and other providers, with their offerings significantly more expensive and complex to manage than those of their competitors. Even partners are getting confused messages about what to sell to whom, and their sales and marketing have been woeful in trying to clarify why Office365 vs other platforms like Gmail, probably due to fear of cannibalizing their currently fat server and office divisions that run the rest of the company financially.

Microsoft could learn a thing or two from Kodak's fate: if you let the line of business guys decide what to market and be innovative with you are doomed to fail. Disruptive technologies like the iPad are DESIGNED from scratch to be disruptive. Did you see Apple's laptop division try to kill the iPad - no you did not. The reason is that they would rather create an innovative and competitive new product than retain the tail end of a laptop sales era they could see disappearing in the future. They looked at more than next quarter. Similarly Zune, though they have a superior service to Apple came in too little, too late to compete with the iPod juggernaut. Even the Android crowd hasn't yet figured out how to break that barrier. The only real success Microsoft has had is with the Xbox360 and Kinect. One gaming platform a company doesn't make. Kinect like devices could completely change the way we interact with all sorts of devices - laptops, tablets, kiosk displays. But if we leave it to the LOB folks at Microsoft, Apple and Android will have competing camera based products out there eating their lunch by the time they actually get anything in the hands of consumers.

This is really a hard post for me to put up there. I've been a staunch Microsoft advocate for years, and I despise Apple's rigid control over their platform hardware and sales process - don't even get me started on the whole iTunes thing. But I gotta say Microsoft - if you stay on this path - in 10-15 years you could find your stock under a $1 and be the host of a bunch of patent lawyers squabbling over who gets your most valuable stuff before you go the way of the Dodo. Microsoft needs to take a hard look at itself and make some significant changes to the way they think about innovation and being first to market. Because second to market with a 2-3 year lead time is no longer an option. If they don't think it can happen to them - look at Kodak 15 years ago. Then tell me it can't.

A shameless plug - OS-Cubed, and what we do

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:06:00 +0000

Just in case there are any questions: OS-Cubed, Inc. develops software, every kind and flavor of application as long as it's based on Microsoft technologies. We prefer to adapt existing software to building it from scratch but we have the ability to build almost anything you can imagine. We build content managed websites - large and small for big businesses and small businesses, everything from simple brochure sites, to ecommerce, to multinational b2b marketing systems.
We also provide technical support for Microsoft (and increasingly Apple and Android) based office and industrial systems, including servers, sharepoint, exchange, etc.

We provide consulting services to software development departments within large companies, helping them focus on strategic initiatives and building a well rounded team with an awesome culture - like we have.

We provide cloud based email and services - both self hosted and Microsoft/Gmail. We host Microsoft/MS-SQL based websites, host our own email and DNS, on our own servers using our own software. We make the coolest stuff you can imagine, but aren't so proud that we won't work on your mundane Access database or web based report. We are a great bunch of guys and gals that will work hard. When the phone rings at the office a human being answers it. We give you our cell numbers. We have an online service system so that you can track every single ticket and project right down to the 15 minute increment - nothing hidden.

We need business. We need projects. We need referrals. Please consider hiring us, or referring us to someone who will.

Are you a pig? Or a Chicken? One VCs view....

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:05:00 +0000

In this excellent article by Jeff at the "Seeing Both Sides" blog, he talks about what kinds of red flags will make a VC pass. If you're developing software and looking for funding - here's an excellent list of things to watch out for. I highly encourage you to read the entire article.

You should already have "started up" before you look for money. VCs want to know you have skin in the game and are passionate about your product - so passionate you won't wait for them.
You should be entirely dedicated to your project before you approach a VC. They see you having a separate job while working on your wonderful idea as not enough dedication and passion - you must believe in what you're asking them to invest in.
Your team should be geophysically located together. Working as a team is an important part of forming a good startup. Even with todays awesome technology - nothing beats face to face.
They are looking for a hands-on CEO. If that's not you then you better be sure you already have one. Saying you're going to hire a CEO or COO to run the business for you is a red flag for them.
You must be willing to exercise your own network to drive revenue, bring in sales etc. If you won't even try to convince your friends you'll never convince them.

So to flip that over the "pig" entrepreneurs as Jeff calls them must truley dedicate their life to their vision, they must put themselves out there as being behind their idea, so that failure is a public event. You must be poor. Seriously. VCs are looking for hungry enterepreneurs with family obligations and commitments who will work to make their company a success. If you can just sit back and live high on the hog regardless of how your company does you won't have the proper motivation in their mind 0 the only exception is the "happy and scrappy" lot who just can't settle down - and prove it by being very hands on in venture number 2. You must be obsessed with your company to the exclusion of all other outside interests other than your family and your health.

Jeff goes on to state that VCs want not just a Pig in the drivers seat, but an entire team of pigs. How's your pigsty? Full of pigs or are there some chickens in there. Are you one of them?

Why development isn't cheap....

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:57:00 +0000

As professional software developers with years of experience, our guys have become pretty good at estimating things. You can't always be right, but if you have done a good job of choosing and limiting scope, and are developing in an agile environment estimating becomes more of an art and less of a science. If you're in a business like ours, providing accurate estimates of how long something will take is key to success. We want to build long term clients who will keep coming back for us for job after job - not one-shot projects where everyone leaves dissatisified.

The conundrum for a company like ours is though - we're too honest. During the sales process we tell people how much it will really cost to do exactly what they want and the next thing you know they've moved on to others who promise to do it for less. Do those "others" typically deliver it for less? No. We've followed up with some of these potential clients only to discover that they paid as much or more than we originally estimated, or ended up with a product that was less than what they wanted. That's a sales process though that's doomed to failure - they've already spent more than they wanted to, exhausted their budget, and have soured on the whole "external development" concept. "I told you so" may feel nice but it doesn't deliver successful products.

Now, with our ongoing clients we typically have an entirely different discussion. Our clients tend to tell us up front - here is my budget, what can we do for that. It's a different mindset - we KNOW we have more work than they can afford to do, but we want to get the best bang for the buck we have.

Now I promised in the title to talk about why development isn't cheap so let me give you a few anecdotes:

For one client we're working with who has an existing codebase that's been worked on with 3 different programmers in the past, we've spent over 20 hours just getting a replica of their production environment working for doing testing. This cost has to be built into the project even though it doesn't directly result in a product improvement
For another client they want us to give them an estimate on changing a shopping cart. But they don't have the source code for the compiled shopping cart module they're now using and can't understand why we can't just tell them how much a simple change will be. We don't know because we can't see the code, or even tell exactly how the current shopping cart works. Even if we had the code it would take at least 1/2 day just to digest the workflow and get the source code understandable - if the original programmer did a good job.
Each of my programmers needs ongoing training, certification updates and time to research new solutions, fix old problems. None of that is typically directly billable to a client.
We need to pay for software and infrastructure for each programmer - test servers, source control systems, development licenses, backups, licenses, professional memberships - all paid for out of our pockets.
Our programmers are salaried workers with benefits - so every hour they are here - and all the hours on vacation, regardless of whether they bill that hour, is a cost to the company.
Our offices need power, lights, phone, mobile phone, fast internet service, etc. Again - a cost that is built into the cost of our labor.
The company pays their unemployment, disability, federal taxes, a portion of their medical coverage, etc. All these add to the burdened rate
Tech toys - you might think, why does that programmer need the latest iPhone? Why do we have to have android, wp7, iphones and blackberries in our mobile phone stable? Well the answer is - we have to test apps and mobile websites in these platforms to be sure they work. All costly.

So the moral of the story is - if you're purchasing software development, consider all that you're buying. Look at the level of experience and the satisfaction of the employees doing the work for you, and when you get several bids, remember - the lowest bid is frequently NOT the best deal when it comes to software development.

The entrepreneur's secret - reuse, recycle and repurpose

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 19:29:00 +0000

One of the key attributes of successful entrepreneurial software development is not reinventing the wheel. If you have tools that let you do something close to your goals, adapt or reuse those tools before you build new ones. If you want or need to later in the development cycle you can scrap the pre-made stuff and substitute in your own code or custom version. One of the advantages of this is that you have already established a nice interface to the particular re-used software you used in the first place - with well defined entry points and an interface that makes sense. This can be invaluable in helping you shortcut costs during that critical start-up phase where every development decision is a choice between having the best functionality and least cost.

For example, I had a client that wanted a Facebook application developed that would allow their users and public to leverage social media and get them signed up for a free public event they were running. App development on another social platform can be a daunting and expensive task - but in this case the client already had a functional content managed brochure site, that had the sign up form for the event on a page. All they wanted was for users to be able to fill it in without having to leave Facebook.

We looked at alternatives and realized that we could simply use a specially designed skin on their existing site and they could frame a subset of the site on Facebook - exposing Facebook designed pages for users to register on. In the future we may even enhance this to allow users to fill in their contact info directly out of the Facebook profile when they log in - but for the moment we just needed a quick solution to the specific problem.

We implemented the skin change and developed the pages in 6 hours - on a platform we'd never developed for before. The resulting pages look professional and well integrated into the Facebook platform, carry the branding from the original site forward, and even give the sponsors some exposure within the Facebook App. So, as an entrepreneur - especially in software development - you need to ask yourself every day: Am I reinventing the wheel? Can I leverage something I've already built to achieve my goal cheaper, faster or better? Can I leverage the work of others to create a better user experience and a more rich interface to my application?

To see the full site: http://www.eyesonthefuture.biz
To see the app page: http://apps.facebook.com/eyesonthefuture/
To see the EOTF event page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eyes-on-the-Future-Event/131647666907289#!/pages/Eyes-on-the-Future-Event/131647666907289?sk=app_5614204682

For more information about DotNetNuke: http://www.dotnetnuke.com
For more information about OS-Cubed, Inc.: http://www.os-cubed.com

Do you have a service buinsess...

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:48:00 +0000

If so I'd highly suggest reading this article on whether your business is all about making money or all about helping your client. At OS-Cubed we're all about helping the client. Of course we need to make money to keep the lights on, pay our bills and make a reasonable profit - but our main focus is on building great software and providing excellent support. If your focus drifts more towards the money side and away from the client side - you may want to rethink your mission.

How Microsoft lost me to the Android

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:00:00 +0000

As a Verizon Wireless customer I've been waiting (not so patiently) for the Windows Phone 7 to come out for the Verizon network. Various release dates have been bandied about since they announced WP7 almost a year and a half ago. I've been suffering along the last couple of years with one of the old Windows Mobile phones with the 6.x release of Windows CE/Windows Mobile on it. It crashed several times a day, and despite a "lipstick on a pig" makeover of the UI by HTC the phone sucked. I told it so every day I owned it.

Well last weekend the phone must have had enough because it jumped ship. I lost it somewhere in Washington DC on the Mall, and frankly didn't look very hard to find it. Sent it a remote wipe signal and promptly abandoned it. So now it was time for a new phone - I can't live without one. And it has to be a smartphone. And I use data ALL the time so it needs to be able to be used as a hotspot/tethered. And it would be GREAT if it was 4g for speed. This left one phone - the Thunderbolt - a sweet piece of hardware from HTC again, but this time the lipstick is on a sexy babe instead of on a pig.

So I bought the Thunderbolt, and burned an upgrade. I promptly went out and bought all the accessories that we know we'll need (extended battery, second battery, protective case, holster, extra charger, etc). None of these presumably will fit any future Windows Phone 7 phones so they are an additional sunk cost. I now have 2 years to consider whether I even want the WP7 phone or not.
So how does this apply to entprepreneurs? Well this is an entrepreneur blog so there had to be a point. :)

Microsoft has repeatedly bungled the marketing and sales of mobile devices. They clung to the aging and impotent Windows Mobile/CE platform long after someone should have stuck a cross in it's grave. They marketed a crippled version of the WP7 phone (the Kin) and then promptly proceeded to create the creepiest ad campaign ever that basically featured one teenager stalking another teenager. They release WP7 on the same network that Apple already dominated in (as if they were expecting people to flock to a v1.0 Microsoft anything over a version 4.0 Apple piece of artwork). And when they do release it the best testimonial they can come up with was "I edited a powerpoint in bed".... I hope it was a porn powerpoint because that's all that particular user will be "getting" tonight. They fumblingly semi-announce they're no longer making new Zune hardware effectively killing the non-phone version of the product that has been so successful for Apple. They announce that the OS/Development platform that WP7 is based on will be going away, disincentivizing developers to build the critical applications required for platform success in Silverlight.

As a company Apple has regained the entrepreneurial spirit - and Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated that they've lost it. As an entrepreneur we want to be first to market, best to market and have a serious reputation for providing quality products quickly and within the proper marketing timeframe. In the past couple of years Microsoft has repeatedly lost to Apple in this contest. They need to start winning and so do you if you're not beating your competition to market with these capabilities. What are you doing to be first to market, and to build products that are unique and powerful?

Knowledge Athletes begins to promote Kajour

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:54:00 +0000

OS-Cubed has been the principal developer for the product kajour by Knowledge Athletes. Kajour is a real-time collaborative education platform, extensible and designed entirely with Microsoft products, including IIS, ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, fCK, DotNetNuke, Microsoft SQL Server, and other technologies. Based on a unique and custom REST engine, designed entirely in .NET using modern AJAX, JQuery and XML/XSLT, the system is completely real time, including logged chat, auto save functionality, full embeddable editing, real time scoring and grading, and full student accountability.

Knowledge Athletes is the brainchild of Dave Miller, a successful educator and entrepreneur.

The beta for the product was developed over the course of the last couple of years using our entrepreneurial development techniques, including agile, scrum and a fully collaborative process. Funding for the project was provided through private investment and several SBIR grants which assisted in the base research for product features and capabilities, and provided proof of educational effectiveness.
From a "non-technical" point of view the system allows teachers to create homework assignment for kids to work on in an environment that is "Facebook-like" either individually or in teacher-defined collaborative groups. Kids love this, and seem to prefer to do homework in kajour over other platforms. Since all content is logged, and private only to the class, students are able to be held accountable for their input. This allows teachers to guide students in the use of social media in a controlled environment, as well as opening new avenues for collaborative learning. Kids call it "Facebook for homework" and teachers call it a revelation - a view into how kids think about and process their homework assignments like no other tool that they have found so far.

The product is still in beta release, with a limited set of participants. If you are an educator interested in actively participating in the Kajour Trial, check out their website at: http://demo.kajour.com/, or click the button below.

Here is a video, developed by Mac Village Productions and Skeeter Harris, after the fold :)

The Power of SUNY

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:18:00 +0000

Apparently I'm not the only one....

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 22:08:00 +0000

Here's another great post with a similar bent to a couple of my past posts:
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-01T15_45_40.htm
Entrepreneurial programmers are not a commodity. Their skills require both programming experience and understanding of the entrepreneurial process. While these capabilities (Whether you hire them and use them in-house or hire out to another company for service) are not inexpensive, they are well worth the investment. And be aware that to get GOOD programmers that can understand and manage the process you WILL have to pay for those skills.
Note http://twitter.com/tordf pointed out the post to me - thx for the lead :)_

I've got an awesome idea....

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:28:00 +0000

(http://xkcd.com/827/)

I hear the words in the above title all the time. We love awesome ideas at OS-Cubed - it drives our (and our client's) passion. But what about all those ideas that you have that never end up getting made, what happens to those? Today the process of getting a patent on something, especially a "business process patent" is fraught with difficulty. You have the burden of proving there is no prior art that shows that your idea hasn't already been thought of by someone else, and of actually prosecuting any perceived infringement on your own nickle.

Truly your best defense against someone else taking your idea and running with it is doing it yourself - sooner rather than later, and better rather than poorer. This is why most venture capital companies won't sign a non-disclosure or a non-compete. They know that there is an unlimited supply of ideas, but a very limited supply of entrepreneurs with both the passion and ability to turn those ideas into cash.

That means really letting your great idea take hold and putting your full passion and energy behind making it happen is the best way to be sure no one steals it. This is not to say you shouldn't pursue a patent if you really believe it's revolutionary enough to get one. Being first to market AND better to market though will make up for a lot of lost revenue fighting over lawsuits. And no - you can't just get someone to send you money if they later "take" one of your ideas and make it happen.

Oh, and as an added aside - be sure to actually CHECK the market to see if there's a competing product already there. I can't tell you the number of times we've been approached to create a reinvented EBay (with no significant difference from the real EBay), a new PowerPoint (with the same features), or a new version of an existing site. These aren't revolutions and they won't capture the hearts and minds of users unless there is truly a pain being serviced, a product being sold or a methodology being used that is new and different from the rest of the marketplace.

The four partners in entrepeneurial success

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:16:00 +0000

When engaging an outside vendor to do development for you - how do you balance the needs of the four partners in development - and who are they?

Each development project requires key ingredients. Combining the right ingredients, in the right proportion can create value and further your project towards profitability. Combining the wrong ingredients, or choosing the wrong proportions can spell disaster. So what is the recipe?

First let's list our ingredients:

A passionate committed entrepreneur with a strong sense of mission and a specific goal for success
An entrepreneur savvy development team that concentrates on closely managing cost and delivering best value for the dollar
A technology platform that can implement, support and handle expansion of the proposed solution
A source of money to fund development, with a target goal for the next funding step

The first question to ask is are all these ingredients required and have we missed any ingredients? Let's examine each one.

The passionate entrepreneur - the entrepreneur comes to the table with the business idea, and the passion and commitment to make that work. Don't underestimate an entrepreneur's passion in the importance here. An entrepreneur with no skin in the game, and without the passion to work through tough problems and make tough choices can kill the project. Some of the negative qualities we've seen in entrepreneurs is the idea that they expect the world to develop their software for them for free or for a "piece of the pie later". In 90% of entrepreneurial endeavors - later never comes. Other entrepreneurs show the "everything must be done by me" syndrome. They are generally very smart people who refuse to accept help and assistance from those around them because no one can do it but them. They must also have a CLEAR VISION for exactly what they want in a development effort. They need to be able to articulate and/or document this vision for the developer in terms they understand and can commit to delivering. The entrepreneur must also trust and accept the evaluation of the development partner. When the partner says "this can't be done for that amount of money" they must realize that the only alternative is to pare down scope to fit the project within the budget.

The Development partner - A development partner needs to look at this as not only an investment in the future, but also a source of immediate income. If not - they aren't a business they're a speculation company, and worse yet one that has no control over their own destiny. To succeed in the entrepreneurial world, and succeed at business as a developer, they must create rigid standards for their development process that includes scope control, agile development with incremental improvement, the ability to help the customer understand and make tough technical capability choices, the ability to not only see the individual tasks on the table but the big picture goal of what each next step must be, and the ability to add value to the project where it is appropriate - without treading on the entrepreneur's vision. The developer must also be forceful when a client proposes doing too much for too little dollars. Every entrepreneur is going to ask for this. Every developer must learn to be straight up and let someone know what the investment will be and what the limitations of the delivered product will be.

The Technology Platform - let's face it, while the other three items are important selecting the right platform is equally important. We must pick a platform that satisfies the immediate needs of the development effort, and can potentially expand to service the needs of the next level of development. The platform must be scalable - at least enough to satisfy next stage growth needs. This means that in the long run, you may select different platforms as you move up the food chain in complexity, capacity, security and capability. A well designed solution allows you to adapt individual parts of your platform to new, better platforms as they are either developed and made available or better suit the needs of the market, end user, developer and entrepreneur. You might well select a different platform for your initial demo than you do for your final production. In some cases as some famous companies have done you may even wholesale replace the back end while leaving the front end intact or vice versa.

Money Management - Money is the great limiter, the great motivator and one of the best ways to keep track of your goals. Having a specific development budget allows you to control scope in your final outcome, allows you to deliver the best product for the money you have, and gives you a specific focus for each round of development. You must understand not only the cash flow and dollars of the original development effort, but also where the next "lump of development money" is coming from. The entrepreneur and the developer must always keep in mind what they have right now to spend on new features and what they need to deliver to secure the next level of spending. When requesting dollars, whether it be through the grant process, angel money, customer funded, etc.the developer and entrepreneur must work together to form a reasonable request that can be accomplished within the limited budget. If that doesn't happen they may well get that next level of funding, but never be funded again.

So giving that, what is our formula? Here's my proposal for it:

Success = (Entrepreneur x 3) + (developer x 3) + (platform x 1) + (money management x 2)

This weights the Entrepreneur/developer relationship highest, followed by money management, and finished off by platform choice.

It's the platform right?

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:42:00 +0000

One of the challenges of working with entrepreneurs as clients is that their methodology, purpose and culture for building software are different from your average everyday business or web client. OS-Cubed has built their methodology, culture and tools around being able to service the entrepreneurial client. In our case, since we are a small group - we chose ONE platform to support (DotNetNuke on IIS with a MS SQL Back End). We didn't choose that casually. We wanted to remain in the well supported (from a developer and a client's point of view) paid .NET development arena. We wanted to build on software for the back-end that was scalable and reliable. We wanted to build on software (on the front end) that was open source and optionally free. And we wanted something that wasn't so proprietary that we couldn't hand it off to another team when the time came. We also wanted a platform we were experts in hosting - as well as configuring. We've done things with DNN not even Facebook or Twitter have done - and we did it all on a shoestring budget compared to those sites.
A lot of times our clients end up in our shop because they've gone through one, two - even three or four - developers who have let them down. They tried the cheap route with programmers from India. They tried the expensive route with high end business consultants. They tried hiring "the guy down the street" or the guy from Belarus to build software for them. Frequently these forays are wretched failures - the entrepreneur-developer bond is a very specific one and if either side doesn't understand how the other thinks and works - you can end up with a real disaster.

Recently a customer came to my office (through a local referral) who was a perfect match for us - they had a site that was created by at least 4 different programmers doing different tasks (in this case all badly or with the wrong tools). They were ALREADY ON DNN! Their product was in the educational marketplace - awesome I already have an educational entrepreneurial client so I know the culture and subject matter. We didn't even need to convert them to the platform, just fix what had been done wrong and adapt it.
They had some simple, easy to repair (if you know what you're doing) systemic problems that were bringing their site down and making it unreliable, and they were on GoDaddy for hosting - possibly one of the worst hosts in the world. Amazingly though we were able to take them from a wretchedly unstable DNN install to a stable one in a matter of a couple of days - identifying and either fixing or documenting what needed to be done to get them running and meeting their goals. We unraveled the hosting issues, and the stability issues, got them up and running and all prepared for future growth. Perfect right?

A quote from the customer: "WOW! We love your process. You keep us informed, and almost seem to have a second sense for exactly what we need. You let us know before accruing hours that something might go over an estimate, and you work with us - and our other vendor partners - in a kind and courteous way as you have done this - paying attention to our priorities. You've done more in the last 48 hours for our site than has been done in 2 years of development."

Awesome. Our customers say the best things about us and we love them for it - and when we get a compliment like that it lets us shine up our white armor and say - see we CAN ride that horse! But the customer didn't stop there.

"I'm sorry to inform you however that the board has decided to move from the DNN and MS SQL to a php and mysql platform, because of all the frustrations we've had with DNN. We just want to stabilize the current install while we develop a replacement in another languague."

WHAT!? Hold the horses. The problem isn't the platform - it's the programming teams. It's not whether the platform can do what you want - it's whether the team you had used the platform to it's best advantage, using pre-programmed tools when appropriate and developing custom modules where they are needed. It's whether the team understands your requirements, budgets and goals, and works with you to make all 3 fit into the same project iteration. It's whether the team building your software knows the ins and outs of the platform to really take full advantage of it. And it's whether you trust the people building stuff. It won't matter if you move to a new development platform if your developers don't know, understand and live these precepts.

I haven't closed the loop on this yet - I'm still hoping to convince this client (through references from other clients) that it's the team not the technology. Wish me luck!

So for all of you out there right now cursing your platform (whatever it is) just be sure that the problem is really technical not cultural.

Day 3 CFO Rising West 2010 notes

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:33:00 +0000

Day 3 started with Michael Mankins, author of the book "Decide and Deliver" - 5 steps to breakthrough performance in your organization. He is co-Author with Marcia Blenko and Paul Rogers and they talked to organizations to determine what allowed breakthrough performance in successful organizations.

Ford went from losing $13B are making $6B this year - the one difference is that the CEO is different. the new CEO knows how to MAKE decision and EXECUTE on them - he knew the how of decision making. The growing complexity of companies have moved companies into poorer decision making ability. An organization is defined as the ability to make and execute decisions.

4 aspects of decision making:

Quality of decision
Speed of decision - faster than competitors
Yield - how often are decisions executed as intended
Effort - the amount of energy devoted to executing the decision

Quality * speed * yield - effort

To gauge quality they asked - what percentage of the time do you choose the right action
To gauge speed they asked - do you make decisions faster or slower than your competitors
To gauge time they asked how often are decisions executed as intended
To gauge effort Do you put the right amount of effort into making and executing decisions

In various objective success measures those with high QSY-E scores were 13-15% better than those with low scores. There was a 96% correlation in the score vs the objective measures. Making small changes in Quality, Speed or Yield = large changes in performance.

10 elements of organizational health:

Clarity
Alignment
Roles
Structure
Processes
Information
People
Performance
Leadership
Culture

A great performer must have better than average capability at all of the above. There is no huge difference between the bad and the best in any one area - they need to build an integrated system that improves things across the board.

You must know the following to make a decision:

What is the decision you are trying to make - is it the root cause decision or something peripheral to the problem.
Who are the roles in the decision using RAPID

R - Recommend a decision or action
A - Agree on what decision is made
P - perform the decision
I - who provides input on the decision
D - who is the decision maker

determine the decision approach:

Criteria (what are the criteria that dictate a successful decision)
Facts (always look at facts not opinions and agree on what facts are needed)
Alternatives (explicitly look at alternatives)

Design

Interaction
Critical meetings/committees
Closure and commitment
Feedback loops

When

Determine for each decision a specific deadline to decide, and another to deliver
Create a calendar for each decision and track progress
Evaluate the calendar of each decision at each decision making event

You must then embed this in your organization by building the capability and sustain success, anticipate and adapt to change, and increase the capacity to deliver results. Rewards matter more than penalties and what you do AFTER a decision is implemented is more important than the planning you do before. Rewards are 4x more important than penalties

For more information check out http://www.decide-deliver.com/

Next up was Bill Molloy on "Strategic Speed, mobilizing people, and accelerate execution". Objective was to answer 3 questions:

Why is speed important?
How do leaders achieve speed?
How do we use speed to attract and retain talent?

Some facts:

H&M stores can take a design to hanger of a fashion design in 20 days - industry average is 200
Southwest Airlines planes spend an average of 20 minutes on the ground
ICICI bank in India has the 3rd most active online trading product in the world. They built it in 90 days

2nd generation speed is about mobilizing people to execute nimbly and successfully.

Three people factors:

Clarity

At Fender Guitars - every person's name badge has the vision statement on the back
People have a shared understanding of our strategy at a detailed level
People focus their efforts on a few critical priorities
Our strategy has been translated into concrete and achievable goals

Unity

At Wells Fargo when they merged w/Wachovia - they spent over a year planning, integrating and choosing the best of both systems to transition to a new system - cross functional collaboration
We have commitment at all levels to the success of our strategy
We staff strategic initiatives with team members who are capable and dedicate sufficient time
A spirit of teamwork and cross boundary collaboration is evident throughout the organization

Agility

People stay open and flexible in the way goals are met
People maintain a bias for action while correcting course as needed
People capture and communicate what they learn from initiatives and projects

Optimize this scorecard to create speed within your organization.

Our final panel was to discuss the future of finance skills.with Ken Sanginario - manager of corporate finance for Northstar, Arun Dhingra, search consultant for Egon Zehnder International, David Greene Professor of accounting for Indiana University, and Kristi Matus - EVP and CFO for USAA.

The panel started out with a statement that the CFO skills of 10 years ago have become commoditized. CFOs are no longer just bookkeepers, but are now key partners in a companies financial success. CFOs of the future will need to be a generalist and understand more different company roles will be the more flexible and hireable capabilities. David recommended the following books for career advancement: David: In career success skills, he recommends "How to be a star at work" by Robert Kelly & "The Platinum Rule" by Tony Allesandra. Kristi stated that you need to be a lifelong learner to succeed in business. All the panelists agreed that strategic thinking rather than just thinking numbers is the important key to success.

And that wraps up Day 3 of the conference - I will post a summary of learnings and how it all applies to you as an entrepreneur as a separate post.

Day 2 CFO Rising notes

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:59:00 +0000

Day 2 notes - CFO Rising West
Breakfast roundtable sessions

My first roundtable session was how to control IT costs. The flavor that I got from my first session is that CFOs repeatedly said they didn't really understand IT guys requests, and didn't feel that IT did a good job of deciding on ROI and considering multiple options when deciding. I got the feeling that those CFOs that didn't "get" the CIO had hired up their CIO from inside, rather than hiring a business person who also understood IT. The presenters assumption was that outsourcing everything will result in the least cost, but in my opinion a blended approach is still justified. Moving to outsource means you can't capitalize the investments, and you don't have control over the back-end data to the extent that you do if you move to an outsourced solution. This was later confirmed by Susan Kamm who said that the very best Smart IT companies insourced everything but commodity products like email.

In our next roundtable we talked about mobile workers - both traveling and from home. The gist of the discussion with the CFOs resolved around the idea that allowing mobile workforces increased flexibility but changed the culture and protecting internal culture and treatment of mobile workers vs in-house workers could represent some risk. There were even stories about workers suing for the "right" to work from home.

Tom Jones of Citibank
First general session speaker is the former CFO of Citibank Tom Jones talking about the new accounting standards and why they are needed. He holds that US GAP accounting standards are the cause of a tremendous amount of additional work, education, and problems because they are not compatible with international standards board accounting practices used by the rest of the world, created by the IASB. Equity markets are now global and international standards are required. GAP accounting is too complex to understand globally (at over 17,000 pages). IASB is only 3000 pages. Another advantage is that the IASB standards have a "smaller" version for privately owned companies - the Small medium Enterprise standard weighs in at only 275 pages.

IASB Rules myths debunked:

The standards must be worse because they are shorter - actually no - several studies have shown that they are both equally accurate
The international standards are shorter because they're new - actually in 10 years it hasn't changed at all, and is adopted in over 60 countries
Many countries don't implement the whole standard, they're picking and choosing the standards they like - not true this rumor came from a set of French banks that didn't like the hedging rules (11 paragraphs out of several thousand pages).
There is more fraud under IASB than under GAP - untrue, there is actually more fraud in GAP accounting than in IASB
There are rules for everything (rather than principles as in IASB) so it must be better - actually the more rules there are the more opportunities for loopholes and complexity being limited helps companies comply. Most judges in a principles based lawsuits look at whether the company really did due diligence - even if they were wrong in their final conclusion. Principles based means you have to put information in that you have done due diligence on including outside consultants - not that you can put anything you want in there.

Kim Wallin - Controller, State of Nevada

Up next was Kim Wallin, Chief Controller for the state of Nevada to talk about using business process improvements in government. In Nevada they are increasing the state's savings and revenues by applying aggressive accounting practices including putting a property tax cap in place, doing operational audits to identify "supervisor heavy" organizations for cost reduction, Use of data mining to identify overbilling in Medicaid BEFORE paying out claims, moving to better debt collection (they currently have debt that is between 400 and 3000 days old) and they only collect about 20% of the debt owed to them. They've increased that to 28% by checking debtors vs vendors, and hiring competing debt collection agencies to collect the owed debt. Their final goal is over 60%.

Nevada has implemented XBRL to eliminate spreadsheets and to decrease or eliminate data entry errors, eliminate thousands of spreadsheets, and allow them to use data cross-database. The second phase of their project will allow them to import data from their systems directly rather than manual entry into the XBRL database. They are spending only $500,000 for the system, and estimate savings will return quickly based on better debt collection alone. The XBRL system will also allow them to process grant reporting in a day rather than 2 weeks, and be more accurate in the process.

Panel Discussion - Mastering the new fundamentals

The next discussion was a panel discussion with Julia Homer (EVP of CFO magazine), Don Jordan, CFO of Pelican Products and Robert Lloyd (who has the best job in the world) as CFO of Gamestop. The panel discussed Mastering the New Fundamentals to measure and encourage growth. Gamestop challenges recently have included the move to online distribution, entry of other players in the used game market, and competition from non-retail channels. They've responded by moving to more unique content tied to the product distributed through their channel, move into online distribution and a new customer loyalty program.

Pelican products makes ruggedized cases, specialty flashlights, and remote lighting products. They make everything from iPOD cases to cases to carry missiles. Their sales have grown 20% YOY with growing EBITDA over the last few years. But last year in October the bottom dropped out of sales, and they were in the middle of an acquisition that would have doubled them - the banks were pulling out left and right. But they pulled it through with Mezzanine financing - they got debt at 14.5% fixed with pre-payment penalties as the only money the banks would give him - but they did it anyway and it's now economically feasible to spend the debt down. Meanwhile their company has doubled in sales and market share due to the strategic buyout. They hired a consultant to review both companies, and then created a synergistic cost saving of $25,000,000 in cost savings. Pelican is down in revenues 7% but EBITDA is up 15%. They are back to their 2008 levels in sales.

Lloyd says that to convert from a retail only business to a retail plus technology business, they have had a culture clash, and the same with doubling their size when they bought their biggest competitor. Pelican says the labor component of their product is 10-15% and the freight is more than the difference in labor rates so they've retained manufacturing in California. Gamestop has invested a 30% increase in CAPex to their technology initiatives, but cut CAPex on retail stores.

Managing Risk
The next panel is Gordon Bodnar, Professor of international finance at John Hopkins, Phung Ngo-Burns VP of Finance and CFO for Expressjet, Rob Schimek CFO of Chartis, and is managed by Scott Leibs editor in chief of CFO Magazine. Since 9/11 companies have created a more rigorous risk planning environment. Rob says that the it's the risks you don't plan for that are most likely to create a "killer" event.

Each company should create a risk appetite profile documenting their willingness to take risk in the following categories:

Impact on income
Impact on capital assets
Impact on need to go to the capital market for funding
Insolvency risk

Bodnar says that large companies are using derivative instruments as a hedge on risk rather than a trading investment. Rob says that they use the rating agencies as a way to measure risk, as will the investor community.

Mid-term election update from MSNBC
The next speaker was Joe Scarborough, commentator for MSNBC presented about the effect of mid-term elections on the business climate. Joe predicts that moderation will come to Washington because people are unhappy but the political process will gridlock. Joe predicts that the Republican victory will be so strong that some of the policies passed in the last 2 years will be changed, including increased taxes by at least 5%. Scarborough believes that if we don't find a way for Republicans and Democrats to work together to solve our problems we may be doomed. We have to figure out a plan to go back to a balanced budget, and reform the entitlement programs of social security and medicaid, as they are unsustainable.

Scarborough went on to say that when social security started the average age of death was 62 and you couldn't collect until 65. Right now instead of 10 people per one person on social security, we have 3 people - it's unsustainable. We need to reexamine the idea of resuming capital gains taxes in this environment. If we don't move to the center on business issues we'll be facing 15% unemployment through the next 2 years. He says that the biggest fight over the next 2 years will be the fight over taxes on individuals and corporations. He hopes that Republicans will actually ACT conservatively (rather than what they did during the Bush years). The POTUS doesn't have any close advisers that have ever run a business - and that is a requirement for a president as an advisor. Romney will be against Barack Obama in 2012, Bloomberg may try to get into the race which could change the dynamics if he runs under a 3rd party. If the economy turns around - the money is on Barack Obama. Crazy people get elected in off-year elections because people want change and don't care how they get there. 90% of Americans want the government to back off of our private lives, and the economy and let them be decided at the state level. The 2 party system will blow apart soon because there is no party that is liberal socially and conservative fiscally.

How Microsoft Technology enables Finance reporting

Next up is Chris Suh GM of Finance for small and mid-market solutions and partners discussing how technology empowers finance at Microsoft. Microsoft wants to both be smart and invest in innovation at the same time. The approach Microsoft has is to hire talented employees, balance investments, innovate in the right areas, product flow and their future bet on the cloud. Microsoft Finance strategic performance plan:

Nov/Dec is strategic planning month
Jan/Feb is the midyear review
Mar is target setting
Apr/Jun is budgeting

In 2008 implemented CORE finance - Integrated reporting, data quality measurements, and policy/governance which is published on Sharepoint using a MS BI Portal. The portal delivers reporting, scorecards, has an insight portal that can be accessed by all business users to generate all kinds of reports for internal use, and supports budgets and P&L performance measurements. Microsoft has created a sharepoint environment that uses Microsoft PowerPivot to create a graphical environment to "play" with and sort/compare the data in a tremendous number of ways and formats. This gives them the ability to easily look at the data in a digestible format for comparison of data. Powerpivot is part of Excel 2010 in the full Office 2010 professional as a product. Pivotviewer is a sharepoint add-in that allows you to view the Powerpivot sheets.

Panel - Audits unveiled

Next up is a panel on "Audits Unveiled" talking about audit fees and how to control them, as well as manage your auditor relationship. Due in part to information developed by CFO Magazine to allow businesses to compare audit fees many companies have reduced their audit fees. IDT was paying $4.3M for audit fees in 2008, by shopping their business they moved to a company that charged them a little more than 1/2 that the next year. Turner is concerned that as fees go down, independent audits may become less accurate. Turner says that the CFO should NOT control which audit company to use - the audit committee should be the primary controller of the audit process. Peer review process is not a substitute for a good audit in the first place by an audit company that understands your business. The peer review/PCAOB process only looks at about 3% of audits.

8 reasons we hate IT and how to make IT your partner

Susan Kramm, author of ValueDance spoke about how to make IT a full partner instead of a hated cost center. She insists that IT Smart companies incorporate the specific business impact of a project into all phases of a project form specification to implementation.

IT Smart vs IT Dumb companies:

In IT dumb companies don't require their business cases to be valued vs the project results
In IT smart companies companies iterate projects over 3-6 month iterations using a process of Inception -> Elaboration -> Construction -> Transition

Money and time are the death of projects. The longer they go and the more expensive they are the less successful they will be. The solution to this is to move to an iterative project that can be cancelled or changed early.

Most successful projects come in at $750,000 or less, 3-6 months, and no more than 12 people. The probability of a $5M-$10M project will be completed on time and in budget is zero. However, Plan/Build/Run mentality dies hard. It's more difficult to plan and architect projects in chunks, the process of development projects feels longer when chunked up but with an increased chance of success it's worth it, consultants/vendors like the "big bang" so you may be fighting vendors, technologists are optimists and business users don't believe future phases will be funded. All these need to be combated to change the culture. In addition, IT should concentrate on driving Keep the Lights On savings down by as much as 50%. Finally they should look at the fact that 20-25% of the work IT people do are tasks that the rest of the organization can and should do. The best companies who are IT Smart don't outsource on a wholesale manner, however outsourcing is a wonderful resource and allows you to scale easily for specific projects. Should be sure that if you outsource development that you are working with a partner that allows innovation, and keep that innovative outsource process managed internally.

Social Media for the CFO

The final speaker of the day was Steve Sorbello, the CFO of LinkedIn. He pointed out the difference between the 3 social products. He said that Twitter is a soapbox, LinkedIn is the office and Facebook is the bar. Their primary risk considerations are privacy concerns and scalability concerns. Steve was formerly a CFO at Tivo and AskJeeves, and said that LinkedIn was unique from those in terms of their revenue model. They have an all-company meeting every other week with 900 employees. Steve said he doesn't eat his own dogfood - he drinks his own champagne. He indicated that LinkedIn is about owning your own web identity - and having only a partial profile damages your ability to do that.

And that concludes day 2 - watch for day 3 tomorrow morning.

CFO Rising west 2010 day 1 notes

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Drake) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 05:42:00 +0000

Introduction:

CFOs are becoming overwhelmed by CFO Fatigue - constantly fighting to survive instead of planning to grow. Many CFOs are sitting on large cash reserves in their company, but they don't know how best to spend them or whether to spend them at all and reserve them for future emergencies. More than 2/3 of the CFOs surveyed this quarter said that if there was not a major economic recovery in the next year their companies would be at risk of failure. More than 1/2 said they needed a recovery in the next 3 months.

Rajan Raghuram on the global economy
Rajan Raghuram author of "Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
" spoke on global economic markets, and why we're in the situation we are in today. Our problem comes down to inequality based on education in income. The less educated population is drifting further and further away from the educated segment in income. The government has tried to overcome this by decreasing the cost of money so that those with less money can spend as if they had more money by borrowing. Other parts of the world are exporting their way to growth instead. The recovery is being held back because of the debt that households and banks have in the US. As a result sovereign debt to GDP in G7 is at almost 1950's level, in 1975 it was 1/3 of that. Serious financial sector problem for small to medium business prevents lending in that area, larger companies can get financing, but smaller companies that fuel growth are probably going to be tight for 3-5 years. The gap in education in a long-term threat because if we cannot bring up our educational level the value added products that we currently create here and provide overseas (making money in emerging markets) will also go overseas and we will lose. We must concentrate on building what consumers in emerging markets need - not having them buy the things we think WE need. For instance in rural India "Frugal" refrigerators that just cool, without making ice, are what they demand because the electricity is unreliable. If you can get rid of the compressor - the refrigerator can run on a fan and a battery. In the end - the medium term outlook is good with emerging markets, but the threat is still there from our economic and educational gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Edgar Ancona on banking issues

HSBC VP and CFO of HSBC, Edgar Ancona, talked about the new regulatory environment for companies both locally and worldwide. He sees that regulators are not only making new requirements, they are also requiring banks to document their compliance as well as comply. HSBC is positioning itself as a bridge between capital and trade-flow between companies in multiple worldwide markets. The new regulations have given banks the message that they need to acquire and retain more capital and liquidity, but instant 24 hour access to bank accounts by both corporations and individuals makes liquidity harder since customers can cash out at any time for any reason. Defined benefits plans are dead or dying in today's economy. On the positive side there are stronger controls, and faster reporting cycles, an increased quality of insight to business needs, better cost efficiency and retention and growth of their global talent pools are all improving. Edgar believes that to remain competitive we must continue to improve educationally our ability to understand and address overseas markets - not just our own.

Aon Hewitt on Cloud computing

Next I attended a session on SaaS finance applications and requirements by Aon Hewitt (the leading HR professional services firm in the world) and Host Analytics. Historically SaaS financial apps have had problems with version control, broken links, reporting deficiencies, variance analysis, ad-hoc reporting, and creating a scenario models. Solving these increase the efficiency of the financial modeling apps. In addition problems with implementing measurements for those plans and making functional decisions based on them have limited their ability to see real improvement due to those models. Aon uses Host Analytics, plus 2 other SaaS products in concert to provide a full life cycle for financial reporting. The basic presentation boiled down to using SaaS tools to create consolidated financial reporting. They key factors include achieving compliance certainty, forecasting and managing the costs of the risk, and then forecasting to allow us to reduce the risk De-Risking happens when you identify and quantify the risk at local and global levels, and then take the information you gathered and globally based investment services. The specific tools that Aon Hewitt uses is Host Analytics for accounting consolidation because it is fast, secure, customizable, and cost efficient. Host Analytics matches the client's accounting cycle, accommodates complex corporate structures, is secure, and uses an excel-like interface for data entry. It has a built in approval process and very sophisticated reporting. De-risking is accomplished using PRisM an internally developed tool that lets them model risks and view both deterministic and stochastic outputs. Greater Insight, another SaaS tool, is used to look at broader view and create a global view of their pension and benefits plans in a true-cost and ROI of pension and benefits plans in a global world-wide viewpoint. The key product - Host Analytics allows the 3 programs to share information so that re-entry isn't necessary, though some data import/export is necessary between tools. Enabling that integration is one of the things that Aon-Hewitt provides.

Negotiating software licensing and development contracts for profitability

Next I heard a presentation from Randy Roth, Partner at Corporate Contracts, a company that specializes in negotiating and managing corporate IT contracts and software procurement for large clients. The #2 concern of CIOs in 2009 was controlling IT costs, and 62% of CIOs have put off important infrastructure or development projects this year due to economic conditions. Not including experienced software negotiators can cost your company big money, since in many cases products are rolled out on an emergency basis because they are so urgent. License models include:

SaaS - (annual term) Licensing in the cloud, also called hosted, or ASP
Subscription - (annual term) licensing locally but for a specific time frame
Term and perpetual are the 2 types of licensing
With Perpetual licensing you only pay for maintenance if you chose to - and can continue to use the product even if you stop paying

In negotiations - information = power. Both participants should walk away with the attitude that the negotiation was tough but fair. RFP development is key to project delivery. Vendors train their salespeople monthly, quarterly and annually on collecting information and developing a specific strategy to get the sale. Team members of IT teams are typically programmers or tech people who don't have the knowledge of how to combat these sales techniques. Good negotiators should not reveal the time frame (since this allows them to dictate sales timing), the budget (with budget you've told them what you'll pay), team members (they can pump each member of the team for info separately), and management structure of the negotiation team (allows the vendor to determine who specifically to sell to and how to get to them). Maintaining a single point of contact allows you to more specifically control the acquisition process. When negotiating the contract, use and include in your own RFP the contract so you can use the number of changes and type of changes to weed out some vendors.

Edward Hess on the DNA of Growth

Next presenter is Edward Hess author of Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth (Columbia Business School Publishing) and The Road to Organic Growth: How Great Companies Consistently Grow Marketshare from Within, growing an entrepreneur business, the road to organic growth, leading with values, and the search for organic growth, So, You Want to Start a Business?: 8 Steps to Take Before Making the Leap, The Search for Organic Growth, and Leading with Values: Positivity, Virtue and High Performance. He started out by stating that no position other than the CFO is more influential on growth within an organization. Growth is NOT always desired. Edward identified that High Organic Growth (HOG) companies were THOUGHT to have:

Cost superiority through outsourcing/offshoring
Innovative
Sophisticated diversified strategies
Unique products/services
Best talent
Visionary leadership

But the reality is that HOGs have:

Simple focused strategies (an inch wide and a mile deep)
Humble passionate operators (not necessarily visionary)
Were execution champions - need to get things done
Had high employee engagement - employees wanted to improve the company
Constant improvement was in their DNA
They were master learners and copiers rather than innovators and leaders

Successful HOG CFOs are Measurement Maniacs they measure everything. To achieve growth they measure 4 major attributes of growth: improvements (better, faster, cheaper - low risk and high probability), innovation (doing new things that no one else has ever done - this is risky and low probability), Scaling (doing more of what you already do well - also low risk and high probability), and strategic acquisitions. 2x2x4 - top line growth/bottom line growth, short term/long term, 4 factors: improvements, innovation, scaling and strategic acquisitions.

HOGs love their customers more than their products than services. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs love their products or services more than their customers. Growth killers include ROItis, group think, arrogance, legacy models, penalizing mistakes, short-termism, and product centricity. Good HOGs change their strategy daily and have a process for collecting new ideas changing their strategy constantly to add incrementally to the strategy. Try small controlled experiments constantly to see if they work. Good growth companies defer ROI until they've experimented and seen if the idea works using experiments.

Many great growth companies took 2-5 hires PER "C-level" POSITION in each growth company until they got the right team to accomplish constant growth. In many cases outside help would have assisted them in creating the right team from the start, and creating it's culture at the same time.

One precondition for growth in most private growth companies is you need a strong CFO and a strong CEO working together to make the whole thing work since they balance each other.

Final notes:

As before - at the end of the conference. I will publish any books through an Amazon store for the CFO conference so you can buy them directly if you wish to. In the book "Smart Growth" there is a growth audit that will help you measure whether you are growing well or not.

As a venue for a conference I can't really recommend the JW Marriott in Las Vegas despite relatively opulent hotel rooms. I'd rate them a 3 out of 10. The service in the restaurants is pathetic, the food is mediocre both in the buffet and at the sushi restaurant. A collection of attendees waited up to 2 hours to be served even their first portion of sushi at the sushi bar and rather than offer comps or a discount on the ticket the personnel argued over which items had and had not been delivered. The location of the conference center requires a trip through a very smoky casino to arrive. Unlike many casinos on the strip the ventilation doesn't cope with even the minor smoke created during the week by the very small gambling crowd there. Cigarette and cigar smoke creeps into the conference center - causing this attendee at least to sneeze and have a stuffy head and headache throughout the conference.

Day 2 is coming up!