Agility in everything we do

I’m glad we decided to opt for agility in absolutely everything we do. This means choosing vendors, systems, solutions and hiring people with one question front and center: “will this decision help us go faster?”

No? Keep shopping.

We can move only as fast as our slowest component. In these times it’s important to be a winning IT team. Too many companies have settled for old school, slow, bureaucratic and risk-averse IT culture. They pay the price: disgruntled managers, defensive IT people, excuses and recriminations.

I’m so tired of dealing with defensive IT people who hide behind SAS70 or HIPAA or some other irrefutable piece of legislation, to tell us we can’t have what we want, quickly, and without a big fuss. It’s my mission these days to deliver technology solutions as fast as the business can absorb them. If the lawyers and the marketing people can move fast, then my team can too.

Here’s a sketch of our ecosystem, and a deck we presented at Dreamforce 2010 describing our approach to integration – frequently the slow boat in any SaaS architecture -and why we chose SnapLogic. So far, we have been very successful, though a rapid pace of delivery can also bring its own problems. Regardless, this is always better than regressing to old school IT with its bureaucrats and go-slow excuses. We’re having a great to at work.

SnapLogic-Pandora-in-Dreamforce.final

Dreamforce: becoming a must attend event

It’s no longer for the early adopters, the pioneers, the founders. Dreamforce has pretty much arrived as the event you can’t miss if you’re serious about enterprise technology beyond 2010.
It’s amusing to watch a few stay-away stalwarts over the past few years, finally showing up, gold sponsor status and all.
Companies I love and recommend you talk to at DF10:
SnapLogic.
OK, integration is hard, always will be. Get it wrong and you’re stuck, heaps of code, developers everywhere and nobody’s moving very fast. At all. SnapLogic gets it. You need FAST, first. Then, you need to BUY where you used to build.

Okta.
Soon your company has 40+ cloud services in production. People are spinning – they forget URLs, passwords, they start sharing userIDs (yes, they do) and they tell each other their passwords. Nooo! stop this. There’s a better way.

Box.net
Fabulous, simple, intuitive way to securely share files with colleagues, outside partners, customers. You can take off your policeman hat – hand to your business and get out of the way – they will love you for it.

GoodData
BI is hard too. It used to take a special team many months to design the perfect BI strategy. When they were done, you realize you’re still better off with Excel. Committees can’t give you good analytics – your need to power at your fingertips and you need IT out of your face while you’re trying to see what these millions of records are trying to tell you. GoodData gets it.

There are more – we’ll be talking about our multi-cloud environment at Pandora, and are happy to share our successes and lessons.