gokubi.com

Greg Olsen is starting up a sofware business called Coghead. He’s trying not to follow the path of the typical Silicon Valley startup, which if they succeed tend to end up in a huge, opulent headquarters.

For many rapidly growing technology companies, “new opulent headquarters” seem to mark the point where a once innovative and agile company has become big, slow, and distracted.

Could a company “make it” but resist the ossification that comes from growth, overhead, and all the administrative details that come with it? Coghead is going to try a new path he calls “going bedouin.”

Any reduction of distraction or complexity that is due to operational infrastructure is a good thing. The goal of “going Bedouin” is to create a low inertia business that takes less capital to get started and that can react with greater agility to changing conditions.

I was just talking with Gideon last week about how it sure would be great to get rid of a lot of our infrastructure. Why do we have a phone system in our server room? Couldn’t we use a virtual one? Or use VOIP? Or use cell phones? Why do we have 7 servers in a closet? Are they all necessary? We need Active Directory and Exchange, but do we really?

The thing about servers and phone systems is that they make a ton of sense. We need them. But Olsen makes the point that maybe we only are used to needing them. As times change, there will be a point where we no longer need these things to live in our office, requiring our care and feeding. Maybe that time is now.

Almost everything costs less than it did in ‘96 (except possibly the attorneys), and there is an ever expanding set of service-based alternatives to building operational infrastructure. Most companies seem to be employing these new capabilities incrementally.

I’m interested in something more radical. By focusing almost exclusively on service-based infrastructure options, a business could operate as a sort of neo-Bedouin clan - with workers as a roaming nomadic tribe carrying laptops & cell phones and able to set up shop wherever there is an Internet connection, chairs, tables, and sources of caffeine.

In my work I get to talk to a lot of people who are responsible for complex technology. They are the “database” person at their nonprofit. And they usually don’t like their job 100%. The main reason they don’t like their job is that they are in charge of a critical asset of the organization and they don’t have the tools, expertise, and time to do it well. They know that. And it stresses them out. If the database dies, the organization will suffer, and there’s not much they can do about it even though it’s their responsibility.

I feel that way about a couple systems I’m in charge of. We really aren’t doing good backups on one of them. And it’s getting to be a few revisions behind the lastest release. But I don’t have 20 hours to backup, upgrade, migrate code, etc. I likened that system to an airplane–at any one moment it’s hard to tell if it’s flying or falling.

So here’s to paring down. Here’s to using services. Here’s to removing stress and administration from all our lives. Let’s all go bedouin, if only just a little bit.

Jon’s got a nice wrap up of the Plone Conference over on his blog:

We sold out, with over 340 people from 35 states and 20 countries.  We held three two-day training classes with over 130 students.  We ran over 45 sessions.  We had three keynote speakers, including Dr. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center, who connected the dots between the free software movement and the long human struggle for democracy and freedom and literally moved many of us (including me!) to tears.  (Think about it: an intellctual property attorney who moved an audience to tears.) 

Congrats to Jon on pulling off what I’m hearing was the best Plone conference ever!

Bill lends his usual wit to America’s penchant for proclaiming itself “number one” in the face of statistical evidence to the contrary. Claiming greatness is not greatness. Maybe we can stop resting on our achievements from the 50’s and start creating a better 21st century.

We’re hosting the Plone Conference up here in Seattle this week. It turning out to be a great gathering of over 300 Plone aficionados from all over the world. A lot of the best Plone minds are in town, and the conference is going very well.

I dropped by last night and saw some quick presentations that were a bit mind blowing. There are some really cool things being built in Plone on the new Zope 3 framework. There are a lot of changes that will make the kind of work we do in Plone easier and less painful to maintain over time. Did I mention we’ve done close to 100 Plone sites?

Today I’m heading over to do a quick demo of the Salesforce Connector for Plone with my coworker Andrew. Should be fun to show it to folks who get Plone but don’t necessarily know much about Salesforce.com. Maybe we can even get Andy McKay to take a look at some ideas we’ve got on how to improve things. Got 15 minutes for some free consulting?

technorati tags: Salesforce.com, nptech, plone

I got to have a conversation with Pete Hickok today about how Oregon Natural Desert Association uses Salesforce.com. I had the pleasure of working with Pete, Kelly, Erin, and Bill early in 2006 on getting them up and running in Salesforce.com. Pete’s been cranking with it ever since and doing some cool stuff.

Pete talks about how Oregon Natural Desert Association is using Opportunities to model membership, and how Salesforce reports power his renewal mailing process. He also talks a little bit about giving board members access to data. Here’s our conversation:

You can also download the MP3.

Thanks again to Pete and ONDA who were true guinnea pigs for me–very patient folks down there in Bend!

technorati tags: Salesforce.com, nptech

At the Dreamforce conference they handed out copies of a newly published book called Creating On-Demand Applications with AppExchange. It’s a pretty nice capture of how you can do everything from customize the app via point-and-click, all teh way up through hard core programming. They even include a nice section explaining what APEX is and isn’t.

You can’t buy it on Amazon, but you can get a PDF for free from Salesforce with free registration.

My buddy Sam over at the Leage of Young Voters passed on their official launch of theballot.org, a really slick site for creating and sharing voter guides for your area. I created a very simple voter guide based on some good recommendations from the 36th District Democrats. I’m the first voter guide in Washington, but guides are popping up all over the map.

theballot.org allows you to easily create a guide and publish it. Users can view your recommendations, and also join your voter bloc. This puts you in touch with people who agreed with your guide–a nice way to connect to folks.

Check out theballot.org and get your voter guide out there. Nice work Sam and company!

Judi has a nice run down of how she has three technology systems supporting her organization: GetActive, Salesforce.com, and OpenAir. To integrate GetActive and Salesforce, she does a daily manual export of GetActive data, transforms it by hand in Excel, then shoves it into Salesforce.  Based on her estimates, she spends about 10 hours a month doing this. She wishes things were simpler:

My best hope is that at some point GetActive and Salesforce will talk
to each other and come up with a common language between their
applications so when a donation comes in and it hits the GetActive
database, an opportunity record is automatically created in Salesforce.
But I’m not holding my breath.

The connection between OpenAir and Salesforce.com is much smoother. Invisible, in fact.

There are a lot of applications out there that do time and expense
management. I picked OpenAir because I was able to implement it within
Salesforce and our folks can get to it and use it with a flick of a tab.

I got to hear the CEO of OpenAir talk in Seattle about 9 months ago. OpenAir is a stand-alone web app for project management, and expense and time tracking. He said they spent 8 developer weeks making it a 3 click install for Salesforce.com. That’s one developer working for 8 weeks solid–not a large investment compared to what it takes to build an app like OpenAir. And now any Salesforce.com customer can attach OpenAir to their Salesforce.com database.

And Judi gets the benefit of that work by OpenAir. She doesn’t have to do manual steps to connect the two systems–they’re already connected. How much is that worth to Judi? Enough to justify the monthly cost of OpenAir. Enough to make her choose it over other lower-cost options out there.

So, who’s going to be the first to invest 8 developer weeks and make their web action center a two click install into Salesforce.com? I have clients who would buy it. They don’t need donor trakcking–they’ve got that already in Salesforce.com. They don’t need email blasting–they’ve got that already integrated with Salesforce.com. Don’t sell them the whole package, just the piece they need–in this example a web action center.

More and more folks are going to be taking the stance that Judi is when talking to vendors:

Tell me how your product is going to fit in the world I’m already living in…then we’ll talk. If you have to have an API to do it. So be it.

Technorati Tags: NPTech, Open_API, Salesforce.com

So I listened in on the N-TEN discussion on open APIs today. In NTEN’s selling of the event, it was never really clear to me what they meant by “open APIs.” The vendors all said they do have open APIs, and some said they are worried about security, and that’s why they haven’t opened their APIs more.

Here’s what crystalized for me on the call today. Nonprofits need technology tools to help support their business processes. No one tool can meet all their needs. So they will have many tools. They need strategies for using more than one tool in their organization.

A common strategy we’ve all seen many times is do nothing. Have more than one system, and do double entry. The systems don’t know about eachother, and nothing is shared. Track your donors in your CRM, and double enter those gifts into Qickbooks, for example. A drag, no?

Another strategy is to build your systems on a platform to which you can add appropriate components. Add some CRM functionaltiy to you CMS by installing some modules. Works great if all you want to install is in the same language, on the same platform, and the same server. If not, you’re back to the first strategy.

A third strategy is to connect technology tools that are addressing related business processes via web services APIs. Send mass emails through an email blasting service, and pull the names from your CRM living with another vendor. Can really simplify things for the users, and give lots of flexibility. You can switch email providers fairly easily. But the APIs have to be built by the vendors, and they have to be connected by someone who knows what they are doing.

Will the vendors build good APIs that will make this third strategy possible? Some have. Others won’t. Some because they can’t pull it off technically, but more because they have business reasons not to. Vendor lock in is one reason. Not wanting to deal with developers and customer questions might be another. Prioritizing other feautures yet another.

Whateve vendors want to do, customers are starting to demand this stuff. It’s the future. Nonprofits are going to start looking at software differently: what are the features and what is the API like? Can I integrate with other systems? Can I power other web-based services with my data?

Thanks to N-TEN for convening the call and everyone who participated. I thought the back-channel chat worked very well. I look forward to future calls!

Technorati Tags: NPTech, NonprofitTechnology, Open_API

Who is Salah Al Bloushi? He’s a Bahranian who until October 15th had been held at Guantanamo Bay by us, the United States of America. He was held for nearly five years. He was never charged with anything.

We were all told Salah Al Bloushi was at Gitmo because he was a dangerous terrorist who needed to be kept locked up to keep the world safe. But we let him out after 5 years. Why? Was he actually not dangerous? Then why did we take 5 years of his life? If he’s a terrorist (which I doubt based on what Josh has told me) why would we let him out even after 5 years? There is no explanation for our behavior at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Just like Olberman said the other night, we were wrong locking up the pacifists in Wilson’s time, we were wrong interring the Japanese in Roosevelt’s time, and we’re wrong in how we’re dealing with terrorists today.

My firend Josh is a lawyer who helped Salah Al Bloushi get home, as well as 5 of his countrymen last year. Thanks, Josh, for doing great work standing up to our
misguided government–we really need folks like you right now.