Tom's blog

Last Tuesday Accretive Solutions gave me the opportunity to present a social media 101 to a room full of about 250 to 300 CPAs. I have been getting some questions about the presentation so I thought I would do a quick post to complement the deck uploaded to SlideShare.

I recently went through Mike Cohn’s Scrum Product Owner training. I was a little worried I wouldn’t learn too many new things since we have already read all three of Cohn’s books. Mike, however, did not disappoint.

I originally listed several take aways from the training in this post. Then realized it was too long and that many of the take aways were a post unto themselves. So my plan is to cover each one as a separately.

1. 21st century Product Owners are now pigs

The Web industry is broken. Web development and online marketing services are wrought with mediocrity and failure. A self perpetuating cycle of misaligned and missed expectations have become the norm. We can do better...we MUST do better. The very survival of the art of professional grade Web services depends on it.

One of the reasons Drupal is so powerful and will continue to grow is the vision. The vision manifests itself in two primary ways: the code and the community. While I have worked with many open source projects, I have never seen one where the community drives the code and the code drives the community as much as it does with Drupal.

I have been working on a new whitepaper about how to become an online leader. One of the cornerstones is to use a strategic, agile process. While agile is not for every project, often it is by far the optimal process for web development. While many large development organization such as Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo! use agile, very few companies that don’t do software development for a living are using it – particularly small and midsized businesses.

There are a series of paradigms that work together to redefine how leading companies are unleashing the power of the web:

1. Integrated Online Marketing - SEO, PPC, social media, viral marketing, online pr
2. Web 2.0/3.0 Websites – social media, blogs, wikis, semantic web
3. Enterprise 2.0 Intranets – collaboration, knowledge management, community building
4. Open Source – development by self-organizing communities with a wide breath of knowledge

I just finished watching James Walker's "Why I Hate Drupal" presentation on the flight back from DrupalCon DC. The presentation was a perfect exclamation point to the clarity I received about Drupal this week.

It’s official.

We are now entrenched in the worst recession since the great depression, and everyone’s talking about stimulus packages. Bailouts are everywhere: banks, real estate, auto manufacturers, municipalities, home owners and the unemployed. Just about everybody is receiving help - everyone but small businesses. Which we know is the hardest working sector of the economy. We know this because we are one – which is exactly why LevelTen has come up with our own Stimulus Package for small business owners.

I was doing some research on the adoption rate of agile development methodologies in corporations and came across this great quote in a CIO magazine article: