PreferenceSet

Each year, organizations spend millions of dollars on technology.  Between the upgrades, the maintenance, the training, the ERP implementations, the servers… there is a constant drive to provide better, faster, safer technology to the business.  Not just as a cost savings gimic, but there is a real desire to do things better.   Of course, even the most pristine, glorious application is meaningless without users.  And therein lies the problem with many implementations – most employees do not understand, or embrace, change.

Why not? Is it because employees are really lumbering oafs, resistant to using a computer?  Many organizations portray their users to be this way; particularly in government, the employees are pegged as obstinate elderly, practically incapable of sending an email.   But in my experience, this portrayal is false – I have had devoted users upwards of 70 years old, burning with zeal to get something new and innovative.  There is one common theme, however, that occurs in implementations and may have something to do with employee reluctance, and that is lack of communication.

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I’m a huge fan of Komodo Media’s Social Media Network Icon set. The icons are simple and elegant and they’ve become quite popular on the internet. Recently we were building an application here an needed an icon for Google Buzz and decided to build one to fit the Komodo Media icons, as the set has not been updated with one yet.

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Responding to the growing popularity of link shorteners (services which compress long links into short, coded links), Facebook, Google and Bit.ly. all announced new products yesterday. Google and Facebook are launching their own link shorteners, while Bit.ly is enhancing their market leading service. Beyond the excitement of these new developments, none of the new services forge new ground, nor do they help uses gain actionable insight into the way their content is being used.

Cross-site engagement is a particular interest of ours here at PreferenceSet. More traffic is moving off of traditional websites and onto social networks where it cannot be tracked or measured using traditional tools. Yet understanding the relationship between different entities and content is increasingly necessary to gather meaningful insight into the way an organization or company makes use of its own online presence. Despite this trend, the current crop of tools leave users mostly in the dark.

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There’s been a lot of recent press on government technology contracts. In response, the Office of Personnel Management has published recommendations on how best to implement large enterprise systems.  Most of these recommendations draw from previous failures: efficiency and cost savings that failed to materialize, or stalled projects that have no determined end date.  I think that OPM’s recommendations are incorrect, based on flawed assumptions, specifically in the realm of Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) solutions.

The original mindset behind the development of Enterprise HRIS was to develop a “Custom Off the Shelf” product that could be purchased and implemented, then changed minimally in order to accomodate customer requirements.  They were touted as ways to cut both costs and timeline – a massive replacement of an entire HR system could be done, hypothetically, in as little as 6 months.  There have been great successes in the private sector in implementing these systems – efficiency gains, cost savings, standardized business processes leading to improved productivity and the like.

The federal government, always eager to follow the private sector, began to examine the idea of standardization in the realm of technology and along with that, the COTS products.  But, unlike the private sector, the feds implementations have not gone so well. 
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Recently we launched an internal project called Giv.to.  Giv.to is a URL shortener with a few additional tricks.  To support all the features we wanted to provide our uses, we decided to go with a full Ruby on Rails application.  We were worried about expensive scaling with Rails, if the service ever really caught on.

But there was really no need to scale most of the application.  The admin interface would not be used heavily, and usage would likely grow predictably.  The only element on the application that might grow quickly and demanded high scalability was the actual URL redirection – that is, turning our shortened URLs into long URLs.

So we decided to separate our this piece of the application and build a separate web service.  URLs are created and served from a very lightweight Sinta application which is under 100 lines of code.  This application is hosted on a cloud based web service that can be instantly scaled depending on usage.  The Rails application queries the Sinatra application to create URLs and to read URL statistics.  This is done via RESTful web service.

An additional benefit of this method is we get a working API for integration with other services as well.  We’ve already implemented this on Contribune, a social news site.  Posting a story automatically creates a Giv.to URL for each posting.