gokubi.com

Constraints

Our work as a software integrator is determined very much by the customers we work with. Their problems and opportunities become ours when we do a consulting project with them. We also inherit any constraints that our customer has. Over the years, we’ve seen three general constraints in our community of customers:

• Our customers work with limited funds. It is often difficult for them to secure money for technology projects.
• In general, our customers have very limited in-house technical resources. They focus their energies on fulfilling the mission, and don’t bring technical skills on staff.
• Each customer has a distinct set of problems it needs to solve in support of its mission.

These constraints fundamentally affect the way our customers go about their mission, and set the stage for how we can successfully work with them. But we bring our own constraints to the table as well:

• We have very limited time with which to address a seemingly infinite need.
• Our mission focus as a software integrator in the environmental community dictates that we leverage our work to benefit the movement
• We are not software developers who build tools “from scratch”, so must rely on the current universe of platforms as tools for solving customer problems.

It is within these two sets of constraints that a software integration project lives, and it is with these constraints in mind that we select application platforms as tools for creating solutions for our customers.

Guiding Principles come from those Constraints

When put into practice, the constraints outlined above lead to a handful of Guiding Principles that we follow when selecting application platforms. They aren’t hard and fast rules–unfortunately there’s no checklist to be ticked off where garnering 5 checkmarks makes a bad platform and 6 checkmarks a good one. It’s more a list of broad things to consider and weigh during the process. As you’ll see, many could be seen to be in direct conflict with each other. In the end, it’s a judgment call that is grounded in our mission, but is as much an art as a science. Even though it’s not a clear-cut process, our Guiding Principles fall into two broadly defined categories: concerns that directly affect our current customers, and broader concerns we have regarding our consulting practice and the movement in general.

I’ll cover those in Part 2 and Part 3.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 2:04 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.