cmurray.org

I am relatively new to Facebook and Twitter, but have been blogging on and off for several years. Very recently, however, I’ve seen how spending time to tweet and comment and read others communications has helped my business.

I follow Abbie Lundberg, a friend and former Editor-in-Chief of CIO magazine, who recently started her own business. By following Abbie’s tweets I became aware of and registered for a couple of online courses in Social Media, learned of some new sites about business and strategy, and kept up with the adventures and discoveries she’s had while getting her business off the ground (many of which I can relate to from the past couple years). I follow Abbie’s tweets and her comments on FaceBook.

I also follow Chris Koch, also from CIO, who now writes for ITSMA. Chris offers very thought-provoking and engaging marketing research and commentary and usually provides sources that are valuable reads. I like how he ends most of his posts with “What do you think”? I can find his announcements of newly published posts on FaceBook.

Yet another former CIO colleague, Meredith Levinson, recently contacted me to help her author-husband design and develop a new web site to highlight and build community around his work. I doubt that Meredith would have thought of me if it were not for my visibility (and hers) on FaceBook.

In my own case, I recently sent out a tweet mentioning that I am now putting up sites on cloud computing platforms. I need to write something more about this experience soon, but just sending that out brought followers to my Twitter stream and also a couple of inquiries for more information and my insights. That’s powerful stuff!

What I have found, of necessity, is that I need some simple and efficient way to manage this activity. And with the tools at hand (WordPress, FaceBook, and Twitter) I have found that. I have my “channel” set now so that if I Tweet something, it ends up not only on Twitter, but also (and most importantly, automatically) on FaceBook and the sidebar of my blog. Equally, if I write a new blog post, it shows up as a new status item on FaceBook and as a new Tweet. This is where the power lies: the ability to create items of interest and distribute them efficiently, and in the best case, cheaply.

Sure, once in a while I tweet about the dog getting loose or running through a FastLane, but for me these platforms are not just about keeping in touch; they are about keeping people connected and informed.

David Churbuck recently tweeted a quote from Mark Cahill to the affect that “Personal Branding is an artificial edifice that is antithetical to the …. authenticity expected in Social Media Marketing.” This generated a very passionate discussion, mostly because of the definition of Personal Branding. Mark was referring to the bad kind (people who hire others to blog and tweet for them); but several commentors were quick to point out that for many of us (especially those with our owns businesses) social media is a perfect place to inform and communicate with an audience of supporters and potential clients.

That’s why I’m here: to promote the work I do, to encourage people to engage my services, and to learn from my highly respected friends and colleagues. I also like to see where Al Sacco is drinking this weekend.

In the world of development and integration, you invariably come across projects that require some form of integration with or connection to an e-commerce solution. You may need to sell product on your site, or you may need to process batches of credit cards and checks for services. In any event, the first step is to find a reliable and reputable third-party vendor. There’s lots of them out there: Sage, USAPay, PaySimple, First Data, TeleCheck. All have names that make it sound like they know what they’re doing.

After some reading and phone interviewing, we (my client and I) decide on First Data. They have a stable platform, lots of sample code in different languages to get your connectivity started, and they just are beginning a joint service with TeleCheck to offer batch check processing (ACH).

We laid out our requirements to First Data in several meetings and conference calls: our in-house system manages tuition and billing charges, monthly it sends this batch to the vendor to process all the charges against parents’ cards and accounts, and then we receive back into our system the status of all charges for reconciliation (Approved, Denied, Declined, etc.). It seemed like the perfect solution; all automated and tight.

This was the service and functionality that was sold to us. Shortly after the implementation phase began, however, we discovered that they have no such capability for returning to our system the status of the processed charges. You can imagine our reaction. (This was the differentiator between them and their competition. Sage, for example, is very clear that they cannot support this.) We’d already put in place all the hooks for passing our data to them, so we were in deep at this point. A week of calls and emails followed with the result only that our sales person was new and didn’t understand what we planned on doing, even after all the meetings and descriptions and specs. The short of it is that they lack the capacity to fulfill the promise and have no intention of satisfying our expectations.

For the short-term I wrote a script that takes a downloaded report and pipes it into our system so that we can have monthly reconciliation tracked. It works, but it is not automated and not ideal. Strike one.

The second incident comes from the sample code they make available to customers to connect to their system. While the code is sound in that it does indeed provide hooks for connecting, it is flawed in structure so as to let test transactions through as real transactions. How did we find this out? By sending thousands of dollars worth of tests through only to find they actually got processed. A true nightmare. Fortunately, we were able to clear out the check transactions quickly because they take several days to process, but the credit cards went through instantly. Fun. Days spent on the phone with banks reversing charges and calling parents to clear the situation. Strike two.

The third incident stems from the fact that for all check transactions Telecheck requires a valid driver’s license for the account holder. We have been billing our parents for several years (there is an established relationship), so Telecheck was able to waive this requirement for us. Until this weekend, that is. Some technical error at Telecheck caused the system to be unavailable for several hours. When service was restored, our transactions began to fail because no driver license information was sent along with our records. Again, after several calls and emails, it appears the service department is unaware of our waived requirement and now needs to take it “under review.” This “review” has been going on for four days now, and meanwhile our transactions continue to fail.

So I ask you, is this the support you expect from your vendors? Once the promises are made and the contracts signed, they wash their hands of you? If I could, I’d pull up stakes and move on in a minute, but it ain’t that easy. I’m restraining myself and trying hard to attract the bees with honey rather than my piss and vinegar, but it’s tough. This affects my relationship with my client (though he’s been very good to me about it). I put this service right up there with overstock.com and Sprint.

The take-away? I did everything in my power to mitigate the circumstances that affected my client’s system and his ability to run his business.  This is his expectation of me. I’m confounded that First Data does not share this philosophy.

Update 4/24/2008, 9:00AM: We’re on Day 7 now.  We get nothing from First Data but emails asking us to test again (although surely they must know it still does not work), and excuses and promises. We are 7 days down and they have done nothing. You decide.

Update 4/24/2008, 2:00PM: Their brilliant engineered solution is for us to put a dummy driver’s license number and state in the required fields. It works for now, but I imagine it will break when someone changes or removes it.

Update 4/24/2008, 5:45PM: First Data decides the dummy data hack isn’t such a good idea afterall. Now they want to port us over to another “product.” Not really sure what that means yet.

I am proud to introduce my new business venture: The Northborough Group.

The mission of The Northborough Group is to provide services that help businesses manage information better and to use that information in a way that supports defined business goals. The Northborough Group enables:

• business analysis and functional specifications;
• design and development of internet and intranet sites;
• data modeling, mining and migration;
• open-source systems integration;
• custom development that provides context for your data.

We also specialize in content management systems (CMS) and the information structures required to build them properly (for example, meta data and taxonomy). In addition, we partner with other experts in the field to better serve your needs.

Visit our web site at http://www.northboroughgroup.com. Check out our blog, which keeps you current with our projects but also provides insight into industry trends and provides technical how-tos. In addition, click through our portfolio to see the projects and systems we have created. And best of all, click on Contact Us and tell us what ideas you have and how we can help make them reality.

My email is cmurray@northboroughgroup.com. You can always reach me at 508.294.6732.

There, I said it.

Having read both the hype and the dismissals, curiosity got the best of me: I created an account and downloaded the Second Life software. Within minutes I was bumping into virtual poles and falling into virtual rivers.

It seems like a fun game though. And there is certainly some reality to it. I walked up to a woman in the same orientation site as myself, said hello (or rather typed hello into the chat window), and she walked away saying nothing. Just like real life (in Boston, anyway). Fabulous.

But then I read things in places like Forbes magazine that say Second Life is going to burst wide open, like the Internet did no less. It’s going to be the next big thing and there’s lots of investment behind it. IBM uses it for virtual meetings. In fact, I read that you can actually buy real estate in there, islands no less, and create private little worlds. Spending real dollars buying virtual islands, pixels on a file server.

I don’t know. I’m missing something in this discussion, I admit. It seems like forums with cartoons. People are hoping customers will buy things in there? Companies will provide support in there? Damn, I have a hard enough time getting good support from many companies out here. Am I to drop myself (my avatar, rather) into a virtual world and expect something different? Dream on.

I wonder if I’ll get taken to task like David Churbuck did when he said he didn’t like Second Life after admittedly using it for less than ten hours. I used it for about an hour and don’t care for more than that. Seems like a game to me, money or not.

Having spent years now working with content management systems like Documentum and open-source tools like Joomla, I’m finally getting around to some Microsoft applications. I’ve written here before about Ektron, which is a fabulous tool built on the .NET 2.0 framework, but now I’m moving on to some of Microsoft’s own offerings.

Lately I have been getting my head deep into MS SharePoint 2007. I have to admit that I am really struggling with this one. Modifying templates and master pages not only seems needlessly difficult, it seems often not to work. I have created sites based on wikis, and then built subsites within them for document management and forums. But these subsites appear not to recognize their parents’ attributes, requiring lots of manual tweaking to pull them together. Equally, the provided templates are inflexible and do not allow for adding the content I would like to add. For example, if I create a wiki site and want to add some ‘web parts’ (components of functionality) I cannot because the template design does not allow it. Equally, I am not allowed to drop the wiki onto some other templates. To make changes like this I need the MS SharePoint Designer, which only runs in WinOffice 2007, which I do not have. These are first impressions and I quickly acknowledge that I am sure I am missing some obvious things.

The funny thing about SharePoint is that it is remarkably like Joomla. They both are module-based, allowing you to build pages by adding components to them. They both also provide similar functionality in that with either you can easily deploy blogs, forums, wikis, image and document libraries, and a whole slew of other popular features. Joomla, to be frank, also can be difficult to configure and redesign.

SharePoint indeed has some great features and offers a lot of promise. But unlike Ektron, which offers much of the same functionality and more, SharePoint seems frustratingly hard to modify and develop. My money is still on Ektron to build the best of breed.

My worst fear is that Microsoft buys Ektron and spoils the whole party. More to come as I proceed.

One of the things that makes the Ektron CMS400 .NET so attractive as a CMS is that it is both a publishing platform and a document management system. Content contributors (writers, editors, or departments leads for intranets) use web-based forms (either builtin or custom) to add information and literally build their sites and portals. (Those fields also can be set as flagged for indexing.) Metadata is stored and managed within the system and is remarkably comprehensive and flexible. Included in the environment is the eWebEditPro editing module (the original Ektron product) which provides a very rich editing environment for content authors.

The system also provides for uploading and tagging documents in almost any format (.doc, .pdf, .swf, you name it). And because it is built on the .NET 2.0 framework, developers can quickly design and build sites using templates and master pages. Right out of the box, you can use Ektron controls to include on your site modules for blogging, forums, content collections, DHTML menus, a variety of search metaphors, RSS feeds, all in combination with the other Microsoft controls available in tools like Visual Web Developer 2005.

The power of Ektron, however, lies in its obvious attention to its customers. Everything about this system speaks to ease of use, functionality, and performance, without a lot of unnecessary gadgets and noise on the interface. The newer version, due out as a release candidate in the next few weeks and to be released in January, boasts some very sweet Google API integration and support for managing taxonomies (this was the eyebrow raiser at training last week).

I am truly geeking out over this system. I have it loaded on both my home and work laptops and I fire it up every opportunity I get. My initial reaction on first using the Ektron system was that for the money it is a great alternative to both open source offerings and enterprise Goliaths like Documentum and Interwoven; now I simply say it is a great system.

I’m not prone to blog rants … But I have been reading for months how Churbuck and Cahill and Borsch analyze and even define reaching out to customers, proactive support, customer engagement and participation. All great stuff and long overdue. Which makes my recent experiences with Sprint so glaringly awful.

I wanted to become a late ‘early adopter’ by getting aboard the Treo train. But I found that my current provider, Nextel, only supported the Blackberry. After several conversations with reps from both companies (they still are somewhat separate even though they have merged), I decided it was worth switching to Sprint.

So, I went to the web site and began ordering my phones and services for my wife and I. While doing so, a chat window popped up with a sales rep helping me through the process. It was a real rep, too; I asked several pointed questions to see if it was just a bot. She was very helpful, and in fact, even gave me a $50 promotion code. Well, that was very easy and a very good experience. I was told I should have my phones in two business days.

Four business days later I became concerned at the absence of my phones. I got a call from Sprint’s fraud department the same day questioning my order, because several orders had been mistakenly sent to the wrong addresses. I was given a number to call to check my order.

When I called the customer service number I waited on hold for almost an hour before the lady there confirmed that my phones had shipped and that they would be here tomorrow. I asked for her name and waited another day.

The next day I called the support number again (which is even more difficult when you don’t have a Sprint phone number yet; they seem troubled by helping you when you’re not a real customer yet). After another hour on hold, the guy I spoke to confirmed that my order shipped and should be here today, which was now Friday.

No phones on Friday. (I wondered if the reps were just making things up, typing on their computers to make it sound like they were accessing actual information on my order.) Late Friday night I get call from a guy at UPS. I can barely hear him for all the factory noise in the background. He seems to be saying he has a package he thinks is mine. It was shipped to Kansas City, MA. Since there is no such place, he opened the package and checked the bill. He confirms my true address, though I can barely make out what he is asking me. Very strange and disconcerting.

Sprint on Monday (after another hour on hold) tells me of the error with the shipping when I call them again. But this time they tell me that there is nothing they can do; they say I have to wait up to 10 days for UPS to consider the package lost before they can put a trace on it. I say that is fine, they can just send me some new phones while they wait for their lost phones to be returned. They cannot do that; they have to get the phones back first. I ask to speak to a manager, who is surprisingly surly and unhelpful. After another call, another hour on hold, and another rejection for satisfaction I am fit to be tied and wished I had never switched services.

I get home that night to find that the UPS guy on the phone that night indeed did have my package and had forwarded it on to me. I was thrilled, but also amazed to find that it took another hour on hold to get the thing activated at Sprint. (They still considered my my phones lost, incidentally, though that is not why it took so long to activate).

About 10 days later I got a second box from Sprint with two new phones in it. And yes, it took me an hour on hold before I could find out how to return the phones to them.

There’s more. My wife recently wanted to make sure that when she unblocks her call blocking, that her name appears to the receiver and not mine. You guessed it, another hour on the phone … and it still does not work properly.

If it were not for the hefty cancellation fees and the cost of new hardware, I would switch to anyone … anyone … else right now. Each time I call Sprint for support each rep offers a different answer to the same question. It’s appalling really. You walk away feeling lied to every time.

This experience is second only to the misery suffered at the hands of the Big O, Overstock.com. After a botched shipment similar to the one mentioned above (and the requisite multiple calls and hours on the phone), I waited weeks for a 19-inch Dell monitor. When the thing finally arrived, the case not only was covered in dents and scratches, but the left third of the viewable portion was brown and distorted. Completely useless. I did get a $50 gift certificate as recompense, but refuse to use it.

I’ve been meaning to blog about these experiences for some time now. Ah, feels good to get that off my chest.

Two New Tools That CIOs Want

While I have written recently about VMWare from an implementation perspective, this is an interesting article from one of this summer’s McKinsey Quarterly newsletters that nicely sums up why CIOs are looking to server virtualization and software services in particular to get more bang for their ever-decreasing bucks.

I sat for another interview today. Very interesting people (four of them at once this time) and very intense and engaging conversations. Throughout the two-hour discussion they referenced things I have written on my blog (the Director, in fact, commented that she had recognized me in the hall because of the photo on my blog). I do, of course, provide a link to my blog on my resume, but I never interviewed with people who had read it much less asked about things I had written. It was truly eye-opening and made clear to me that blogs are, if not the new resume, a powerful addition to one. Imagine that in addition to the hard facts found within one’s CV (dates, responsibilities, accomplishments), potential employers also can learn more about you and your thoughts by reading them over a long period of time. Even the things you link to can be revealing. Granted my blog also includes a lot of personal and perhaps silly things, but these posts also provide a view into my personality, which is equally important when judging a potential employee.

Here again is a link to Steve Borsch’s blog entry about why he blogs and why blogging is important for personal and professional reasons.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

This is the stuff David Churbuck has been talking about on his blog and is also the driver behind some of his efforts at Lenovo. David’s focus is to reach out to their customers in new ways that foster a closer and more participatory relationship. Many claim they do this, but I think Lenovo is going well beyond the lip-service (David even posts his cell phone number as an example of personal comittment). I cannot comment further on a lot of this because I am new to this space and just now understanding web marketing and some of the new models for building community; I write about it here mostly to make others aware.

With this Lenovo experiment, I am mostly interested to see if the blogging and interfacing catches on. For example, I love my Toshiba laptop. I love the design, the power, everything about it. If I need support, I’ll go to their site or make a call (I haven’t had to yet, fortunately). But I don’t think I’m that interested in reading news from their corporate team. That’s the interesting part to wait and see, how Lenovo will build that audience and participation.

Within the Manifesto, however, the emphasis and understanding of the importance of the intranet is something that resonates with me. I have long been a huge proponent of the intranet as hub of corporate culture and community (and the extranet as its external partner). That this document gives voice to that in human terms is relatively new to me (and apparently others as well) and very exciting as I seek to define myself and my potential roles in this space.

I also find it interesting that all these years after the invention of the Internet that still so much conversation is based on the power of hyperlinks. Such a simple part of the overall structure and capability of the web has such force. Hyperlinks radicalize common hierarchical structures. Hyperlinks extend beyond what we might otherwise group in logical fashion.

I’ve heard his name before but Doc Searls’ (co-author of the Manifesto, writer, speaker, and many other things) and his weblog are also fascinating sources. Try working your way through some of the great bloggers he lists in his extensive blogroll.

Here also is a nice quote from J.P. Rangaswami on Building Society for the 21st Century which helps to clarify some of this philosophy:

Use what you stand for to attract the customer. Use what you do to retain the customer¹s trust. Ensure that the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen.

In a world of empowered individuals, everyone’s a customer.