How to Convince your Customers they need a CMS

Posted by Scott on 20. November 2008 19:21

Currently, I am dealing with one of my current clients.  They control a multi-national non-profit organization.  In the past they have used basic html to do the work for them in the web side of things.  They came to me through a person I knew and asked me to do very minor things for their web site. I agreed and started working with them.  There last request was to accept payment through the website and I told them to look at PayPal.  I thought it was the best bang for their buck.  Banks can charge an arm and a leg to manually enter things in while PayPal does it just fine. Most of the time, PayPal is much cheaper than what banks charge too. So I built them a PayPal system straight from Rick Strahls site. The next thing they started asking was a bunch of questions as in what can I do next, what can they do next and what can be done to improve apon this? Now they aren't very big, with a membership only in the thousands and much of the money is spent through the year.  So I decided to write them an email explaining what could be done with this organizations site. I decided to post it to show others why there is a need to have a Content Management System and hope it helps any other programmer trying to convince their customer to buy into a CMS.

I would like to title it "How to Convince you Customers they need a CMS"

Here is the deal.  I decided to go with the cheapest hosting possible when I purchased the space for $60.00 because of your budget.  It is another server hosted by GoDaddy.  Since its PayPal we are talking about. You are not required to have another server from another Service Provider to use PayPal, but for me to work using my programming languages ASP.NET, C# and SQL I needed another type of server other than what the company you were using had to offer.  Basically, since you wanted my work I needed to use GoDaddy (which is the cheapest hosting so far). PayPal doesn't have  restrictions as to what it uses as a server, but the application I build for you and the programming I do for you does have the restriction.  The $60.00 will be an annual expense once a year on or around the same date of this past week.

The way I look at it is that we are in the very early stages of development on what is formally known as a Content Management System(CMS). The best place to loosely define it would be Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system. If we look at your organization at the base level.  We can see the organization requires most if not all of the following:

Required:

• A membership database.
• An event calendar and scheduling feature for the calendar.
• A money management system.
• A payment system. 

Extra/Additional:

• A place to hold all your images and review them in a photo gallery.
• A place to hold all your official documents.
• A place to publicly display all your public information (Website).
• A place to download any and all forms or documents relating to events and organizations.
• A place to write and read all the news of your organization.
• A place to create newsletters that can be emailed out to all your members once completed.
• A blog for your organization.
• A place to email all your members on a regular basis.
• A place to host a forum which would allow all your members to communicate and chat amongst each other.
  

• Because your organization has several other organizations below it in a tiered approach, you could also host webpages for those different organizations.  It could have something like a main page for each and every member in your organization or team.  This can be seen for example in another online application such as facebook.com or linkedin.com.  This of course is above and beyond, but it is available.

ASP.NET and C# is not regular HTML that you might be used to.  It is an entirely new platform for developing web applications.  When I say new, I must say that’s it has been around for about nine years and is owned by Microsoft, so I do not see it going anywhere soon.

You will get all this with the $60.00 a year hosting through GoDaddy and along with my working costs.  You can achieve this with your other hosting company, but it would not be through me.  I am sorry to say, but I do believe the other languages that are used to develop applications like this could not compare with what could be built with ASP.NET and C#.

P.S. As an organization, I must imagine you do have a membership management system in place along with some sort of news letter system.  Both those systems could/would cease to exist once I built this for you.

Side note: All this information is completely dynamic. Once I build a “component” for your application, it will then pull data dynamically from the database.  This means that you can have an extensively large amount of information on a webpage without very many things to develop or need a programmer for.

Employee Retention: The challenges of recruiting and retaining Gen Y.

Posted by Scott on 21. October 2008 16:10

The grass is always greener on the other side, but the water bills are more expensive. For the passed few weeks I have noticed problems with companies.  The problems are large and small.  Things need to be upgraded, changed and reconfigured for Gen Y. Companies that are large are very broad and ideas come slow in a company of size. Companies have some major changes that it needs to change if they are to compete in the next 20 years. Most of the workers here today are baby boomers and after viewing a charts of the attrition, companies need to work hard in the next couple of years.

The problems with companies include, but are not limited to:

1. Career advancement - Publicize requirements for advancement. What is needed to move from Engineer I to II or II to III should not be a secret. What are salary bands for each job title?
2. Continuing Education - Reimbursement at the IRS cap of $5250 a year does not permit employees to complete the master’s degree program within a reasonable time limit forcing employees to assume additional debt.
   • To safeguard the investment, possibly require a year for year payback. I.E. for every year the company pays tuition, employee guarantees they will remain with the company for the same amount of time after the degree is awarded.
   • Instead of reimbursing employee, pay tuition directly to the school preserving the companies tax write off while protecting the employee from taxes over the $5250 cutoff.
3. Exposure to Career Path Opportunities - Create a formal new hires program including:
   • Job rotation - In a large company, a formal plan is needed to allow for greater visibility across the range of possible career paths. Give new hires the ability to explore the many different practice areas within the company. One possibility: four to six, three month assignments in different areas of the company.
   • Assign a mentor to assist in career development. The existing mentoring program is one of the best kept secrets at NG and it shouldn’t be. Lack of exposure is keeping the mentoring program from reaching the people it is meant to help.
   • Cross discipline information sharing. Something that combines aspects of Facebook and a blog would allow employees to share knowledge with each other.
     
4. Encourage innovation and creativity - Allow the employees to develop new and innovative technologies which would speed up or eliminate repetitive, costly tasks.
   • Create a review board to examine requests for funding to develop tools.
   • Have proposers create a BCA identifying risk / benefit / cost.
   • Create “sandboxes” to allow developers to explore emerging technologies without jeopardizing corporate computing infrastructure.
   • People searching for jobs at the company see the cutting edge technologies that we create, but walk in the door and see the antiquated machines that we build them on and then leave. There must be a way to allow us to use more cutting edge software platforms without adversely affecting the network.
   • Virtualization or private networks within the company would allow software engineers to work with newer tools and provide better solutions to the customer.
     

Companies often struggle with retaining Gen-Y. The above was a short summary of what should be done to help keep Gen Y at the company in which it invests so much time and money in.  The grass is always greener on the other side, but is it really?  Do other companies all have the same problems?