Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Soul of an Agile Startup
The start of a journey from idea to reality
The soft grey light of a cloudy winter afternoon pours in through the plate glass windows of the Sky Deck Lobby on the 45th floor of an office tower in downtown Chicago overlooking Lake Michigan. A patented idea for an auction trading algorithm has become the intellectual capital for a promising new financial services company and a small startup team has assembled to build the first version of the system needed to get this company off the ground.
Sitting around a table strewn with notes and paper coffee cups is Peter Alsberg - COO, Eric Newhuis - CTO, and Gene Glaudell - Enterprise Architect. Gene is answering Pete’s questions about different cloud computing platforms that could be used to host the first version of the company’s financial service offering. “…now they’re not quite there yet but they are the best I’ve found and for a couple of extra dollars a month they’re also willing to do the sys ops and admin stuff; we don’t want to be distracted with that.”
[ I do lively presentations on agile startups and related topics - mhugos@yahoo.com ]
Pete is wearing a black blazer, white dress shirt and blue jeans. His longish hair tinged with grey is parted and neatly combed back. Wire frame glasses, a single black pen in his shirt pocket and an iPhone clipped to his belt complete the uniform of a modern day senior exec for a high tech startup that could take off like a rocket if it delivers positive results to the big early adopter customer Pete has lined up.
Eric is recounting his thoughts regarding another pressing issue. He’s dressed in blue jeans, a dark blue sweat shirt and black and silver Nikes, “The issue of authorization… I’ve got the kernel installed and I’m gonna move it into production with the client, but I still don’t know how we’re gonna do the authorization outside of the kernel.”
Behind Pete, through the plate glass windows, the view is of the Chicago Board of Trade building topped with the big art deco statue of Ceres (Goddess of Grain) and the CNA Insurance building, a tall rust red steel and glass skyscraper. Beyond that is Lake Michigan, fading off into the fog in the distance, its waters reflecting the diffused winter light of the low hanging clouds.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and softly, over the lobby sound system, come the lyrics of a song by the Moody Blues, “Tu-u-e-e-s-sday a-a-fter-noon, I'm just beginning to see; now I'm on my way. It doesn't matter to me, chasing the clouds away…”
“We have management of sufficient grey hair to know when enough is enough,” says Pete, “to know when to prune, when to cut, when to focus on the really important things we need to do.” Eric leans back in his black leather arm chair and listens.
“What we don’t like is somebody dictating what is the API to get outside of the cloud,” says Gene. The conversation continues for another five minutes or so. A consensus emerges.
Pete rises and walks over to the plate glass windows and stands for a moment looking out over downtown and
Previous Post: Virtual Immortality – Social Media, Data Mining and GamingNext Post: Five Traits of an Agile Enterprise – Part 1
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
