Author: Joe Gillespie

What will Happen to a Giant

Joe Gillespie, Monday, July 6, 2009 @ 4:08 pm

Although I’ve seen so many players rise and fall over the years, what has inspired this post is the irony of what is happening to Microsoft. In the early years of my technology career it was Microsoft’s ownership of the PC O/S market that primarily allowed other compatible hardware manufacturers to create innovation and eventually marginalize IBM’s dominance of that market.

In the early years of PCs, the applications on top of the O/S weren’t even Microsoft applications. It was only later that Microsoft started developing their own applications and with them the predatory practice of squeezing out other application providers to rule the desktop.

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You’re at the Software Development Finish Line! …. or are you?

Joe Gillespie, Monday, March 23, 2009 @ 9:25 am

There is so much focus and investment put into developing a new software application that many people fail to see that completing the development isn’t the end of the road; it’s really just the beginning.

For one thing most people don’t realize that over the life cycle of a good software application, more development time is expended after the initial application is developed than within the initial development effort. While it’s a cliché, it is so true that “change is the only constant over the long run”. Therefore your application, no matter how well suited for your requirements now, will have to change over the years and evolve over time.

While ongoing life cycle software development can be the subject of future blog posts, my intention was to be more myopic today. I want to focus on what you’ll need to have in place when you are ready to launch as these requirements are often not well understood. This post will also not address any data conversion, integration issues, or related steps that may be required to implement your system. These are all valid issues but not today’s subject.

In the last 25 years, having resided in both the corporate world as CFO and a couple of times as the CIO and now on the other side of the table with organizations in the consulting world, I almost always see a gap in expectations. The root cause is that most people just don’t appreciate or take for granted what all goes into supporting an application. Even in the IT field, I’ve found that network people generally don’t fully appreciate what programmers have to do and vice-versa.

Let’s break it down. You’ll need to have services that we’ll organize into the following categories: hosting services, production support services, and software maintenance.

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Software Development

Big Changes Underway at LinkedIn for Groups

Joe Gillespie, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 5:42 pm

LinkedIn has made several significant changes along the way. The changes that are underway now are in regard to Groups. In the past, members have been able to join as many groups as they want. I’ve found it’s a great way to reach out to people and explore areas of common interest, since the group logos generally appear on your profile. If you are logged in, when you view someone else’s profile it shows you the groups you have in common with that person.

The changes underway with groups have some positive and negative attributes. First, as a negative, LinkedIn is imposing a cap of 50 groups that any member can belong to. Changes have already started but effective 9/12/2008 if you haven’t already reduced the number of groups down to 50 LinkedIn will do it for you based on the sequence of when you originally joined various groups. While 50 may sound like a lot to some people, I was in 1,351 groups and deciding which groups to keep has been difficult, especially since I initiated and sponsored over 10 groups myself.

On the positive side groups will now have the ability within LinkedIn to support discussion groups, blogs. That means for a lot of groups you won’t need a Yahoo Group or something akin to that as a base and although the feature set may be more limited you’ll have tighter integration. Another negative is that LinkedIn could ultimately control your group since they control membership in LinkedIn. Stay tuned for updates as to how this is progressing.

If you haven't experienced what's available in terms of groups from LinkedIn, here's a way to check it out. Groups are free to join and when you perform a LinkedIn search, you can specifically search within specific groups. Support Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid by clicking the link below and Joining the Chicago 2016 LinkedIn Supporters Group:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/54811

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