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I'll follow up in a couple weeks with the results.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Chirping Up With Mark Bradford
In preparation for an article I'm writing for Public CIO magazine on eGovernment on a Shoestring, I had the chance to sit down with Mark Bradford, the co-founder of ChirpUp, a startup focused on helping businesses and municipalities engage and care for customers using new-era media and technologies. Mark brings up some great points of how to use social media to promote your company, an organization your involved with, or even yourself. Highlights from my interview are below.
JS - Everyone is feeling the pressure to do more with less. How can municipalities leverage Web 2.0 technologies on a shoestring budget to further their objectives?
MB - I think municipalities have an opportunity to apply many of the same open source technologies and methods being used by new entrepreneurs to connect with customers. In an era when communities need help, governmental transparency expectations are high and budgets are scarce, municipalities have a chance to get creative and find new efficient ways to humanize interactions with constituents. Mayors, councilmen, aldermen have tools for authoring, publishing and promoting their message using free or low-cost tools. Public officials can also use social media and free monitoring tools to track, by a targeted municipal geography, conversations, reactions and concerns. Take instance http://monittor.com, which is just one of many Twitter monitoring tools. You can track topics by keyword using their UI or feed the results into a blog or RSS reader. Conversations about municipal issues are already happening. These tools help you join the conversation, inform the record, reach out, and help constituents.
JS - Do you have some examples of low hanging fruit in the public sector?
MB - Obviously blogging methods have evolved to a point where it's pretty easy and affordable to establish a two-way communication channel for public relations, outreach, advocacy, and intervention - all kinds of grass roots community activities. Municipalities actually have an advantage relative to the private sector because the "community" already exists. Municipalities who establish blogs just need to leverage their existing websites and traditional constituent touch points to establish awareness. Businesses blogs on the other hand usually have to spend money, time and energy developing the community.
Look at Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley's new YouTube Channel. He's taking his message directly to Chicago citizens and perhaps national leaders. There is no mediation or dilution by mainstream media journalists - no color commentary, no editorial by the broadcasters. He's speaking directly to us. That said, I'm a little curious why Mayor Daley didn't embed the YouTube feeds in his own existing site http://egov.cityofchicago.org? Maybe too much bureaucracy involved in changing his own site? Regardless, we know that speaking directly to the citizens advances public interest because it's cheap, fast and effective.
JS - What are some specific tools and costs that might apply to a municipal scenario?
MB - Almost every tool we use at ChirpUp is free. WordPress is the de-facto standard backbone for a rich SEO friendly blog because it is open source, powerful, flexible and relatively easy to use. With some expertise, WordPress functionality and user interface can be customized and configured to satisfy all kinds of requirements. Plus there is a big community of folks developing free or low-cost themes and plugs into social media sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter. So municipalities can "plug into" existing citizen networks.
JS – Doesn’t blogging take a lot of time?
MB - Yes and no. Communication takes time. But blogging and social media communication is more efficient. You get what you put into it. The public sector is interesting because citizens generally have similar questions. A blog is not a novel. Frequency and consistency are the keys. Constituents just crave a reliable place where they can pose questions and get feedback from officials. Blogging and social media isn't a replacement for the old-fashioned handshake and face-to-face meeting. But, it does accelerate or amplify the message.
JS - What about security and infrastructure dependencies?
MB - Infrastructure and maintenance costs are low for Web 2.0 products like WordPress. However, we recommend getting help from a trusted advisor for initial configuration, integration, hosting and launch.
As for security, you must think about what it is that you want to secure. WordPress is widely adopted and hardened for security. That said, all public website have some small level of security risk. Consider hosting your blog / website at a separate facility from the municipality host where sensitive information may exist.
JS - Everyone is feeling the pressure to do more with less. How can municipalities leverage Web 2.0 technologies on a shoestring budget to further their objectives?
MB - I think municipalities have an opportunity to apply many of the same open source technologies and methods being used by new entrepreneurs to connect with customers. In an era when communities need help, governmental transparency expectations are high and budgets are scarce, municipalities have a chance to get creative and find new efficient ways to humanize interactions with constituents. Mayors, councilmen, aldermen have tools for authoring, publishing and promoting their message using free or low-cost tools. Public officials can also use social media and free monitoring tools to track, by a targeted municipal geography, conversations, reactions and concerns. Take instance http://monittor.com, which is just one of many Twitter monitoring tools. You can track topics by keyword using their UI or feed the results into a blog or RSS reader. Conversations about municipal issues are already happening. These tools help you join the conversation, inform the record, reach out, and help constituents.
JS - Do you have some examples of low hanging fruit in the public sector?
MB - Obviously blogging methods have evolved to a point where it's pretty easy and affordable to establish a two-way communication channel for public relations, outreach, advocacy, and intervention - all kinds of grass roots community activities. Municipalities actually have an advantage relative to the private sector because the "community" already exists. Municipalities who establish blogs just need to leverage their existing websites and traditional constituent touch points to establish awareness. Businesses blogs on the other hand usually have to spend money, time and energy developing the community.
Look at Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley's new YouTube Channel. He's taking his message directly to Chicago citizens and perhaps national leaders. There is no mediation or dilution by mainstream media journalists - no color commentary, no editorial by the broadcasters. He's speaking directly to us. That said, I'm a little curious why Mayor Daley didn't embed the YouTube feeds in his own existing site http://egov.cityofchicago.org? Maybe too much bureaucracy involved in changing his own site? Regardless, we know that speaking directly to the citizens advances public interest because it's cheap, fast and effective.
JS - What are some specific tools and costs that might apply to a municipal scenario?
MB - Almost every tool we use at ChirpUp is free. WordPress is the de-facto standard backbone for a rich SEO friendly blog because it is open source, powerful, flexible and relatively easy to use. With some expertise, WordPress functionality and user interface can be customized and configured to satisfy all kinds of requirements. Plus there is a big community of folks developing free or low-cost themes and plugs into social media sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter. So municipalities can "plug into" existing citizen networks.
JS – Doesn’t blogging take a lot of time?
MB - Yes and no. Communication takes time. But blogging and social media communication is more efficient. You get what you put into it. The public sector is interesting because citizens generally have similar questions. A blog is not a novel. Frequency and consistency are the keys. Constituents just crave a reliable place where they can pose questions and get feedback from officials. Blogging and social media isn't a replacement for the old-fashioned handshake and face-to-face meeting. But, it does accelerate or amplify the message.
JS - What about security and infrastructure dependencies?
MB - Infrastructure and maintenance costs are low for Web 2.0 products like WordPress. However, we recommend getting help from a trusted advisor for initial configuration, integration, hosting and launch.
As for security, you must think about what it is that you want to secure. WordPress is widely adopted and hardened for security. That said, all public website have some small level of security risk. Consider hosting your blog / website at a separate facility from the municipality host where sensitive information may exist.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
IT on a Shoestring: Stop Paying for Commoditized Technology
TOUGH TIMES MAKE YOU THINK HARD ABOUT WHAT YOU STILL CAN ACCOMPLISH WITH FEWER RESOURCES. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE RESOURCES YOU HAVE YET TO TAP INTO?
When it comes to IT, there are a multitude of low-cost and free resources available. The question is, which ones are worth considering? What low-cost resources will not only save you money in the short-term, but also are reliable, proven and secure enough to not introduce long-term pain in the process? This article dives into practical examples that you can start using today, to save dollars and look like a hero in the process.
For the past 10 years, many technologies that we have been using reached wide scale adoption and thus essentially have become commoditized. It’s baffling how many companies continue to invest large amounts of dollars to pay for technologies that have reached mainstream status. These technologies aren’t necessarily giving companies a competitive advantage anymore. They are simply there to help run the business. In these cases, consider a few options to cut costs by using proven low-cost or free solutions.
Open Source Software – Community Driven Solutions
Commoditized software often comes in the form of open source technology projects. Now, I’m not saying all open source projects are commoditized technologies, but many OSS projects spring up because a group of talented developers are tired of paying for a set of services that would be relatively easy to recreate.
Good open source projects have strong communities behind them, and in some cases, build better features and offer better support than the commoditized technologies they originally set out to reproduce. The key to picking an open source project, is not by the product’s current features, but by the strength and viability of the community behind it. The community can be measured by the speed of innovation (i.e. how quickly product releases reach shippable status), the support forums (i.e. how mature and active the discussion forums are) and the number of active installations currently in production environments. If support, service and commercial product businesses have been built around open source solutions, you can feel that much more comfortable that the project’s got some legs and is going to be around for the foreseeable future.
Software as a Service Gaining Momentum
Other commoditized software has morphed into a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. New and existing vendors are packaging solutions that don’t come with a sticker-price, but instead, a subscription fee reserved for the individuals that need to use them. Many of these solutions have free programs available for a limited number of users (great for SMBs) or with limited feature-sets, which in some cases, are all that a company needs.
It’s even more important to analyze the viability of SaaS vendors, since the technologies are relatively closed in comparison to open source solutions. While evaluating SaaS solutions, it’s important to understand a vendor’s funding/cash position, subscription base and the openness of their platform, in case you want to migrate to a different solution at a later date.
The table below compares and ranks some attributes of the three different models:
In today’s market, where the cost and time to build software has been greatly reduced, almost every common aspect of a business has an open source or SaaS option to support it; from office productivity, to collaboration platforms to customer relationship management. To illustrate some examples, the table below outlines some very viable open source and SaaS products (and their proprietary product equivalents). All of these solutions fit the litmus test outlined above for both OSS and SaaS platforms.
These are by no means the only options, but they are all definitely worth considering as low cost alternatives, often providing 80% (or more) of the proprietary solution’s functionality, that you use 99% of the time.
Cloud Computing - Pay as You Go
Commoditized hardware solutions now are offered in the form of Cloud Computing Infrastructure Services. Many vendors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are starting to build massively scalable data centers (think power plants), and are offering up their computing resources in a “pay by the drink” model. This means that instead of companies having to pay for an entire server and all of the business continuity, disaster recovery and administration fees that come with it, they can choose to pay by the GB of storage used per month or pay by the CPU power they consume. In other words, you can pay for infrastructure services the same way you pay for water or electricity, with all of the BC, DR and support costs baked in.
The birth of these services is relatively recent, and there still are a lot of questions around security, SLAs and privacy, all of which are being handled in slightly different ways by the different vendors. There’s bound to be some standardization in these areas as the technologies mature, but there are ways to take advantage of these services in the short term -- if not as alternative production environments for non-mission critical apps, then certainly as test environments for new and existing applications. The associated hardware and networking costs for test environments often mirror the cost of production environments. Cloud computing is a great way to mitigate those costs.
The table below outlines some of the major players in this space and their relative service offerings. Amazon is definitely the most mature, but IBM, Google and Microsoft are hot on its heels with more advanced solutions coming available.
Your Competitive Advantage
There is a time and a place to build and host technologies that will position your company for competitive advantage. But now is a time when we’re being asked to tighten our belts. To be successful in this economic environment, we should find creative ways to stop paying license and support fees for commoditized services and save those dollars for what really is going to give us an edge -- our people.
When it comes to IT, there are a multitude of low-cost and free resources available. The question is, which ones are worth considering? What low-cost resources will not only save you money in the short-term, but also are reliable, proven and secure enough to not introduce long-term pain in the process? This article dives into practical examples that you can start using today, to save dollars and look like a hero in the process.
For the past 10 years, many technologies that we have been using reached wide scale adoption and thus essentially have become commoditized. It’s baffling how many companies continue to invest large amounts of dollars to pay for technologies that have reached mainstream status. These technologies aren’t necessarily giving companies a competitive advantage anymore. They are simply there to help run the business. In these cases, consider a few options to cut costs by using proven low-cost or free solutions.
Open Source Software – Community Driven Solutions
Commoditized software often comes in the form of open source technology projects. Now, I’m not saying all open source projects are commoditized technologies, but many OSS projects spring up because a group of talented developers are tired of paying for a set of services that would be relatively easy to recreate.
Good open source projects have strong communities behind them, and in some cases, build better features and offer better support than the commoditized technologies they originally set out to reproduce. The key to picking an open source project, is not by the product’s current features, but by the strength and viability of the community behind it. The community can be measured by the speed of innovation (i.e. how quickly product releases reach shippable status), the support forums (i.e. how mature and active the discussion forums are) and the number of active installations currently in production environments. If support, service and commercial product businesses have been built around open source solutions, you can feel that much more comfortable that the project’s got some legs and is going to be around for the foreseeable future.
Software as a Service Gaining Momentum
Other commoditized software has morphed into a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. New and existing vendors are packaging solutions that don’t come with a sticker-price, but instead, a subscription fee reserved for the individuals that need to use them. Many of these solutions have free programs available for a limited number of users (great for SMBs) or with limited feature-sets, which in some cases, are all that a company needs.
It’s even more important to analyze the viability of SaaS vendors, since the technologies are relatively closed in comparison to open source solutions. While evaluating SaaS solutions, it’s important to understand a vendor’s funding/cash position, subscription base and the openness of their platform, in case you want to migrate to a different solution at a later date.
The table below compares and ranks some attributes of the three different models:
In today’s market, where the cost and time to build software has been greatly reduced, almost every common aspect of a business has an open source or SaaS option to support it; from office productivity, to collaboration platforms to customer relationship management. To illustrate some examples, the table below outlines some very viable open source and SaaS products (and their proprietary product equivalents). All of these solutions fit the litmus test outlined above for both OSS and SaaS platforms.
These are by no means the only options, but they are all definitely worth considering as low cost alternatives, often providing 80% (or more) of the proprietary solution’s functionality, that you use 99% of the time.
Cloud Computing - Pay as You Go
Commoditized hardware solutions now are offered in the form of Cloud Computing Infrastructure Services. Many vendors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are starting to build massively scalable data centers (think power plants), and are offering up their computing resources in a “pay by the drink” model. This means that instead of companies having to pay for an entire server and all of the business continuity, disaster recovery and administration fees that come with it, they can choose to pay by the GB of storage used per month or pay by the CPU power they consume. In other words, you can pay for infrastructure services the same way you pay for water or electricity, with all of the BC, DR and support costs baked in.
The birth of these services is relatively recent, and there still are a lot of questions around security, SLAs and privacy, all of which are being handled in slightly different ways by the different vendors. There’s bound to be some standardization in these areas as the technologies mature, but there are ways to take advantage of these services in the short term -- if not as alternative production environments for non-mission critical apps, then certainly as test environments for new and existing applications. The associated hardware and networking costs for test environments often mirror the cost of production environments. Cloud computing is a great way to mitigate those costs.
The table below outlines some of the major players in this space and their relative service offerings. Amazon is definitely the most mature, but IBM, Google and Microsoft are hot on its heels with more advanced solutions coming available.
Your Competitive Advantage
There is a time and a place to build and host technologies that will position your company for competitive advantage. But now is a time when we’re being asked to tighten our belts. To be successful in this economic environment, we should find creative ways to stop paying license and support fees for commoditized services and save those dollars for what really is going to give us an edge -- our people.
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