Should You Cater to Younger Workers?

If you cater to the younger group, you risk alienating your most senior people (talented, expensive, hard-to-replace experts; people you don't want to lose to the competition; people with great political capital in the organization, who can perhaps defeat an IT initiative by pushing back hard). On the other hand, if you cater to the older group, you risk alienating the younger workers; and you risk keeping obsolete systems in place far longer than you should, making future replacement that much more difficult while also impeding business objectives, etc.

assertTrue (2009). Articles>Content Management>User Centered Design>Workplace

Where Did All the Documentation Go?

Documentation is a huge cost factor in software development, and companies are looking for ways to trim costs. If you cut back on product doc and customers don't complain, there's a temptation to keep cutting. Eventually you end up with software engineers writing bits of doc because all the tech writers were laid off, but there'll be one guy who didn't get laid off who has to work like heck to wire it all up and make it continue to look like professionally written doc.

assertTrue (2009). Articles>Documentation>Programming>Technical Writing

What APIs Can Tell You About a Product

I always try to get a look at a vendor's APIs before (or in the process of) evaluating a product. And I recommend you do, too. If you are involved in a product-selection effort, get input from your developers -- have them evaluate APIs as part of the product-evaluation process. Don't wait until after the deal is inked to find out whether the product's APIs are so problematic that your rollout schedule might have to undergo serious changes.

assertTrue (2009). Articles>Content Management>Programming>Collaboration

Why Do We Still Have Vendor Lock-In?

There's a common myth that one of the main reasons enterprise customers get locked in to a particular vendor's technology is the huge investment (of time and money) that goes into specifying, procuring, rolling out, and maintaining a large system. I was talking to a financial analyst the other day about this very phenomenon. The name of a well-known CMS vendor came up. My financial-analyst friend -- somewhat new to the software biz -- asked whether the huge cost of rolling out, training for, and maintaining a large system didn't pose an enormous disincentive for customers considering moving to another system. I said no, that's a myth.

assertTrue (2009). Articles>Content Management>Faculty>Content Strategy