Here’s the funny thing about technology - I’ve mentioned before that technology should help current business processes, and that as far as possible, should not dictate the process. This article that was sent to me got me thinking about that. Short summary, it’s about how content management systems need to be customized to fit the processes, and not the other way round.

I do agree with the post, but as I’m working on a document-related project right now, experience teaches me that it’s not really as clear cut as this. In a lot of cases, the company actually needs technology to help them define the processes, because a process is either currently lacking, or needs to be improved.

Here’s my take - choosing an off-the-shelf (or an off-the-sourceforge) solution and deploying it as is into an enterprise is not very wise. The enterprise will definitely have current work-styles and processes in place that will not fit into the system, and forcing people into a box has always proven to be a failing endevour.

However, thinking about processes from a technology point of view (or rather a systems POV) will help identify gaps in the processes that needs to be fixed. And for that, some off-the-shelf features will help, because they fix a gap in the process that was ignored in the first place.

For example, if let’s say a Mandy wants to send something to her boss Joe Luddite to approve, but Joe does all his approvals through his PA… what is the system supposed to do? That’s a gap. Forcing Joe to do the approvals himself might not be the solution (lack of time, and practically speaking nothing will get approved if the volume of requests are too large). Giving the PA access to approve isn’t the solution either. So it’s a gap in the process but it has to be addressed.

There isn’t a clear cut solution to cases like this, and in most cases do depend on other factors (work-style, audit and governance concerns, company policy etc.).

Here, thinking of content management (and here I mean Enterprise Content Management in particular) as discrete products falls apart. However, thinking of ECM as a customized solution is also prohibitive - in terms of cost, configurability and variable quality - the customized solution in the wrong vendor’s hand is disaster for sure.

Instead, the system will have to be a bit of both off-the-shelf and still be flexible enough to customize to the way people work (people first and foremost before all else!). I’m hoping I’ve achieved a bit of that in what I’m working on right now.

Technology, Enterprise 2.0 | No Comments »

Geek out time! There are a lot of places on the web that keep telling you about the merits of purely CSS based design, and avoiding the use of tables (A List Apart is one example). But reasons cited have always seemed to theoratical to me; it’s always along the lines of “separate aesthetic form and programmatic function, keep pages semantically pure” and multiple other justifications that, while true and appropriate, require a 5,000 page dictionary to comprehend.

I’ll now try to explain it in really simple terms that web designers (by that I mean Imageready-junkies and Dreamweaver-dependents) can understand. And I’ll state it out in point form (a vestige from my army days I think):

1. Love your colleagues - Show your programmer colleague some love. You can’t imagine how torturous it is for a developer to work through 500 nested tables just to find out where the data goes. Imagine reading a book where the words “the” and “is” are repeated 500 times for no apparent reason. It’s like that - infuriating. So your colleagues may be like geeky and all, but doesn’t mean you should torture them for their lack of fashion sense and what not. Learn CSS!
2. Love your design - Do you love your own design? Enough to protect it no matter what? Then you might be better off expending the effort and learning how to do CSS-based designs. I think anyone who has worked with programmers on the team have witnesses how the lazier programmers have this tendency to shred through designs, leaving 1-pixel gaps between sliced images where there were none, and totally ruining a design so painstakingly sliced into HTML by your trusty Imageready program.Only you can stop this insanity. Not by threatening the programmer with death, but by adopting CSS-based design. You see, the programmer has absolutely no need to touch your CSS files in 99% of cases, so in essence he/she has no need to touch your designs at all, down to the last pixel in your layout. So your design is untouched.
3. Love your users - There are a multitude of reasons why CSS-based websites are better for users. CSS files are cached across pages, the code-base becomes neater and smaller in size, and it becomes easier for search engines like Google to read your sites. I’m not going to be the guru on this, but just Google for the reasons why XHTML is better than HTML and you can find a multitude of other reasons. And get this - designing in CSS makes it much easier to allow blind people to hear your site, or to let the older folks with poor eyesight like me in increase the font size (something called accessibility). Oh, and trust me on the poor eyesight thing… my monitor is set to 1600 x 1050 pixels on a 15.4 inch screen. Words are mighty small, and I know how it feels!
4. Love yourself - This is pretty important. If you know CSS-based designs, you are going to be pretty hot in demand job-wise. In fact I’m looking for one myself! (shameless plug: if you’re interested, please mail me at adrian.lee @ utopia-edge.com). On top of that, you learn something new, and you can start boasting about your mad skillz and start becoming an uber among your peers.

And I’m not the only one. Here’s an interesting site with 55 reasons! Also, this is in response to several posts I read about designers and programmers, but mostly from a programmer point of view. I’m a little bit of both so I do think I kinda know where the two camps are coming from. But I do admit that these four points only begin to scratch the surface. Still, while I’m not like really hardcore, it’s in my belief that EVERYONE should start doing this.

Resources: CSS Layout Techniques, YUI Library, Layout Gala, CSS Zen Garden

Technology, web 2.0, browsers, Code, Geek, web design, css | No Comments »

Wow… I’ve been following this for a little while, and they’ve finally gotten acquired by Google. For an obscene amount of money I might add. Here’s a few thoughts on this:

1. I think this will jolt quite a lot of people into starting up companies, just by the sheer amount money the acquisition involves. This could very well be a tipping point for another boom (and hopefully, not a bubble).
2. This is proof positive that anyone with a good enough web service (not site) can make it if they play their cards right, and are extremely lucky to boot with the right product at the right time in the right place.
3. As for the above, the right place right now is not in Singapore. Specifically, not a service that only targets Singaporeans. I’ve always said that Singapore is way too small, and that hasn’t changed. And will never change. Add to that the fact that YouTube isn’t even profitable… what hopes does a Singapore company have of profiting on an Internet population of 1.5 million (give or take)? Or selling out on 1.5 million users?
4. Media is where all the money is right now. But Google has monopoly on the media long tail so it makes sense for them. YouTube and Google are a perfect marriage because YouTube has the long tail of the video community, and Google has a stranglehold on the long tail of advertisers. For the rest of us, if we want to strike it big, we’ll either have to look for a long tail in a new market, or hope to get acquired by a big guy.

I’ve got a feeling that things will start to get interesting…

Media, Internet, Singapore, Technology, web 2.0 | No Comments »

The latest book that I’m in the middle of right now is “The Theory of Almost Everything”, for those of you who are curious about what’s catching my fancy now. It’s a science textbook essentially, except quite a whole lot more interesting. It kinda describes how a physics theory called “The Standard Model” essentially explains the most fundamental aspects of nature - sub-atomic particles. It’s got equations in it though… so might be a bit heavy for most maths adverse non-scientific types. (Image ripped off from Amazon… quite obviously. My paperback looks slightly different though).

Just before that, this is what I plowed through in 3 days… a funny book by the dude from the Top Gear TV show Jeremy Clarkson - I Know You Got Soul. Dry British humor absolutely permeates this book as the dude from Top Gear rattles on about how machines have souls and character, and proceeds to describe the machines that do exhibit that. And he picks both the likeliest (Rolls Royce Phantom for instance), and unlikeliest candidates (an aircraft carrier) for a veritable beauty pageant of machines and boys’ toys. Well… I guess you couldn’t really expect more from the dude from Top Gear. A very entertaining read, and actually very informative when he delves into the history of the machines. Just imagine the Discovery channel in the written word, except much funnier.

Ramblings, Books | No Comments »

In the past few months when I’ve been quiet, the Web 2.0 buzz has been creeping into the Singapore psyche apparently. The signs are everywhere now.

A little bird told me that the Media Development Authority (MDA) wants to take advantage of this Web 2.0 thing to kick the media industry up a notch, I personally know of several local Web 2.0 startup projects that are getting off the ground, everyone wants a blog or a podcast now, and all the marketing big wigs and the media industry are going ape over social networks (think My Space… and nothing more).

This is both healthy and a little worrying personally. “Web 2.0″ was useful to describe a way of thinking about the Internet. But, having seen the dot com burst, any buzz term that takes precedence over substance has always worried me somewhat.

Social networks, AJAX, network effects, folksonomies, blogs, wikis… yes these are new adoptions that are gaining ground, but technology is so much more than the sum of these parts.

Technology is about people.

Choon Keat sent me this article about how content management systems have been on the wrong track (Thanks Choon Keat!), and it kinda mirrored exactly what I’ve been thinking. Technology is fundamentally about helping people. It’s not about the plumbing (AJAX). And it’s certainly not about the money (although it’s an essential bi-product in almost all cases).

It’s about solving problems. Solving people’s problems. Real people, mind you. It’s about fulfilling a need. Most of all, it’s about helping people… be it to find long lost friends, or to share photos, or to bookmark sites, or to manage process document that are in a mess.

I hope people don’t lose sight of this in the gold rush.

Ramblings, Family, Technology, web 2.0 | 3 Comments »