Survival Guide

So Google is following Amazon and providing a scalable platform for web apps and web services development and hosting http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07/google-jumps-head-first-into-web-services-with-google-app-engine/. In my role I am often caught between the need to follow the latest trends/support where advertising technology takes us, and the ever present challenge to make sure that security, loss of data and service reliability are taken care of.

I often find that many IT departments are in conflict with marketing because they are bound by the requirement to maintain systems and services. And to the IT group that often means keeping everything inhouse. The trend towards hosted apps, mashup sites, open source hosted sites, web service offerings, etc. continues relentlessly. These systems can be integrated and co-exsit with our mainstream online marketing activities. In fact by using the plethora of services available, we can not only reduce our workload, but significantly improve our product offerings, reach more people and drive sales — all while looking like technology hero’s.

I’m not saying that we should follow every trend but we must recognise that there are other solutions that we may not have full control over but do present serious opportunities to lower costs, improve time to market and meet the business goals that we all strive to achieve.

While seated at dinner the other night, I heard my Blackberry alert for an incoming text message. I should have left it alone but wondered over to pick it up and see who the sender was. Of course it was from my 20 year old daughter who texts constantly to the entire world. The most interesting thing was that she was actually just across the table from me but chose to communicate through text messaging rather than talk. So like a good dad I asked her why she didn’t just tell me and her reply was “Oh sorry I always text when I can’t be bothered to talk to someone, I forgot it was you” one brief apology later and all was well. Its no wonder that last year in one month alone Verizon reportedly handled 10 Billion text messages http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSWEN958520070724

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OK so this is long — but I’m the tech guy so what do you expect?

There’s always that big struggle between what you want to do, what you have and what your budget will stand. Regardless of that it’s important to define what you want to do without limiting yourself by existing infrastructure and policies. You can’t worry about what you can’t do; you have to allow the ideas to set the need and the strategy to define the project. After all you can always lower the scope and still retain much of the original thinking.

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