The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”  Attributed to Bill Gates (long long ago)

One thing that we should always try to do when building, buying or choosing a solution for e-commerce, data process, integration or any system, is that there will be a time when we have to move, to expand or extend it. We don’t have to solve all of the problems of the future, but we should be aware that we will have problems. And we will need to solve them.

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One of the keys to keeping customers, potential customers, trading partners or any other type of person engaged in your process, product or service is to keep giving them information.  Using social media and networks is a great way to extend the reach of your information communication channel.  That’s why we do it.

No matter the technology that you choose to use, or the medium of the communication there are some good rules of thumb, and some things to consider when planning your campaign.  First some terms:

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In the series of posts that have social media tips and advice, I mention that using YouTube as an effective way to communicate.  So I have recorded the first post in the series as a video and here it is.

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Remember that webcast we talked about?  Well I hope you recorded it.  Because web casts, or parts of them, can make great YouTube content.  But it doesn’t just have to be from a webcast, one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get customers and others to start telling each other about your company, is with a clever YouTube video.

Setting up a YouTube channel can help people who watch one of your videos find the others and watch them in a coherent order so that they can do the best for your business.  And combining YouTube videos with your blog, newsletter, website or other on-line communication can expand and naturally interlink your content so that people that find one, are directedto others.  This make them more engaged, and fosters more interest in your program or product.

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It is easy to recognize that creating an environment where your cusotmers, and potential customers can interact with you and get updates and information is highly desirable.  Today with many forms of communication going on-line, it may begin to feel that you are talking, but you don’t know if there is anyone listening.

A webcast is another way to provide engaging content and information to your customers and potential customers.  But it is in real time, where they can ask questions, get real time responses and both hear and see the information/demo/etc.

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No matter how good you are, some transactions will fail.

Plan on it.

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The Newsletters that I am talking about today are electronic newsletters sent out primarily via email.  These email communications are sometimes attractive to customers or clients that haven’t completely made the jump to social media.  Or people that have a separation between professional and private lives so that they don’t want to have business information/communication communicated to them on their social channels of Facebook/Twitter/etc.

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Does your business have a blog? It should.

And it really doesn’t require that you turn your whole business into something online, or even choose between spending hours writing posts or hiring someone to do it for you.

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Sometimes you just don’t have time to check up on your Facebook or Twitter feed.  Life happens, you get busy, and you can’t stop and focus on reading a webpage.  Sometimes you want to keep up with the current information, but you have to prioritize.  But what if there were a way to communicate with people that couldn’t stop and read what you are writing on the newsletter, or blog, or even twitter?  Well there is, and it is called a Podcast.

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The reason to use Facebook as a way to communicate with customers and trading partners is slightly different than the reason to use Twitter.  For the most part this difference is in the size scope and way that information is shared and its lifespan.  But the core reason is very similar.  We are sharing information, building a relationship and keeping customers and users engaged so that our products and services can take root.

The real power is in the how.

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I sometimes hear people tell me they don’t use twitter.  Well this may be suprprising to some people that use twitter all the time, there are others that are nodding their heads in agreement.  I know that when I first looked at it I was not quite sure what I would do with it.  If you look at what is being “tweeted” you may think this is not the place for your business.  But you would be wrong.  Very Wrong. Probably.

The key reason that you probably are wrong, is that the customers or users that are new to your products and services are on twitter.  They may not say much, but they are there.  And if you are not there, you are engaging with them and providing them the information that will keep them around long term.

There are four things that are important to consider when planning your twitter campaign:  Why use twitter.  What to put on twitter.  What not to put on twitter.  And what does this do or accomplish.

Why use Twitter

As I said in the intro, people are on twitter.  Some of them are your customers.  Others are interested enough in you or what you do, to follow you.  This is not a place to do direct marketing.  Some people do this but it generally doesn’t work very well.  What people are looking for on twitter is bits of information.  News, events and updates.  If they are not getting it from you, they will get it from someone else. (more…)

There are times and places where the effectiveness and quality of your technology or products is good enough to get people to buy or use them once, but not enough on its own to keep people coming back or sticking with the program.

This happens a lot.

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Some times we get excited by solving problems that we forget that having a system that is problem free is our real goal.  Businesses and teams that focus on increasing the number of problems they resolve each day/week/month but don’t focus on the root cause will never produce the long term rewards they need to realize.

This comes from a bit of personal experience.

I once had a job, (I’ve been told I start many stories this way).   Where we were given a new set of goals that would determine the performance bonuses of our team.  Here was the way the goal was stated. (more…)

One of the challenges that infects every project is the problem of “scope creep.”  For clarity, scope creep” is when a new “feature” or “solution” is included into an on-going project.  Thus a project that started out as a way to streamline shipping begins to acquire features that will help accounting.

Most of the time scope creep has benevolent intentions.  We want to help accounting, and since we are in the code anyway, lets just add their feature on to the project so they don’t have to wait.  Other times scope creep can come from project manager or developer pet projects.  We may not be able to get approval for building that feature for accounting, but we could just start adding it into the shipping project and get them done together.

This may not sound like a bad thing, but for anyone that has worked on a project plagued by it, scope creep can kill a project and a team.  Scope creep is, by its nature, antithetical to the principle of breaking a project into small, discrete tasks.

To limit this problem, I recommend doing two things: (more…)

I was at a business seminar where the instructor said, “Every task can be broken into three pieces; Inputs, Outputs, and Processes.”  I have thought about this and would like to echo that with more emphasis on integration projects and tasks.

Integrations can be broken into these three pieces as well.

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When we talk about getting the well defined target as the first step in the data mapping process it is not because starting with source data is harder.  And we don’t talk about sequence of project tasks because we are like little children who want to eat desert first.  There are two major benefits that doing an integration project (and other projects) in the right order bring; Cost, and Quality.

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To be quite honest, 80% of the work to pull off an integration is easy. It still has to be done right, but after you have done more that one supplier boarding there are many things that just make sense.

But then there is that 20% that is not so easy. 20% that you end up spending way too much time on. And its this 20% that produces the most exceptions, the most errors and the most cost.

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A friend of mine once said in a meeting, “Let make sure we’re not trying to save the world when all we need to do is get lunch.”  This stuck with me and I often see teams of developers getting excited about what can be done to the point where they loose site of what needs to be done.

When this happens there is a tendency to try and “save the world” or at least far exceed the scope of the project or problem.  To avoid this tendency, it is good to have someone in the meeting and involved in the planning and scheduling of resources that will constantly ask, “How does doing this help us solve the problem?”  And this also means that we should have a well defined goal for our project.

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It has been said that “the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results“. While this may or may not be true, programs that can easily get caught in repetitive or infinite loops can certainly be the cause of crazy data and logs.  And so we need to recognize this potential and make sure we don’t write integrations susceptible to this ailment.

But there is another type of  “doing the same thing,” that can be just as maddening.  These are errors that continue to happen and no one bothers to fix them because the resolution is simple even if it is manual.  Like hitting the side of an old TV to clear up the picture.  It may work, but eventually all that time spent with the fuzzy picture, or making that quick manual change add up.  And that time is worth money.

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and simple tools have simple problems.

In one of the early scenes in “The Patriot”, Mel Gibson’s character gives his young 11 and 12 year old sons some last minute instruction before ambushing a British patrol to rescue the older son.  He says, “Remember, aim small, miss small.”  The meaning behind this is simple.  If you are aiming small, say, at the button on your target’s shirt, and then you miss, you still actually hit the target.  This is “missing small”.

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