One of things that I’m passionate about is discerning appropriate technology solutions for all shapes and sizes of problems. Over the years I have often been known as the “office geek”, or the “guru”, or the go-to-gal anytime a question arose of how could this thing/project/idea be accomplished more effectively.
Many folks out there believe that the solution to any problem is the biggest, brightest, newest, shiniest cutting edge thing that is out there. I guess my years working in non-profit America has taught me that the right solution is more important than the biggest and newest option. I approach problems looking both at the scope of things as they are today and the plan for the future and try to find the most elegant, appropriate, and affordable solution that is available.
The projects and their solutions that I have been involved with have really ranged in size. But here are some examples to help you understand how I work, and how I might be of assistance to you.
A small business that does most of their sales online expressed frustration at how challenging and time consuming maintaining their online presence was. I watched them go about their business for a few days and quickly realized that there were three main problems at play. One, the user interface for the software they were using was designed for a larger monitor than what they were using. This caused all kinds of viewing and navigation problems costing time and frustration. All pages should have been a few short clicks away. The second problem was the computer itself was old enough that it was having trouble managing the images they needed to showcase their product and utilize their software. The third problem came down to a matter of training.
So, I helped them to locate a newer, used computer that met their needs and included a very large monitor that made it easy for them to manage the photos of their product and the software user interface without any scrolling. Then I spent some time with them and went through ways of using existing software on their computer to simplify some of the processes. These three things together significantly decreased the time spent from receiving the product in the door, to having it up on the website complete with photos and ready to be purchased. Less time managing the website means more time working on their business and their products.
A national non-profit I was working for began to realize that the same or similar projects were being done by teams in each of the different cities they were located in, and yet none of the information was shared between the teams. So each new city was starting an almost identical program and yet did so from scratch. Ultimately the organization was not sharing its internal resources and knowledge beyond the individual city office. It was obvious we needed a way for employees to submit the work and ideas and programs they were creating to some general repository that could be searched and browsed by everyone else in the company. This was back in 2001 when wikis and intranets were just getting started and not really seen in the nonprofit world yet. This needed to be completed with no budget and only whatever time I could put into the project. The organization already had Cold Fusion installed on their webservers. So I got to work and created for them a custom Cold Fusion application that acted as an intranet of sorts. Employees from various departments and cities were able to submit their curriculum plans, project ideas, reports and statistics, forms, and all sorts of other content. It allowed for collaboration between different locations that had not been possible before. I also created a Best Practices manual for what kinds of things would be good content to include in the intranet, and how to best format it for sharing with the whole company. I developed a two hour training class, and trained at least one person from each department and each city to help them all get up to speed with the new application.
So, as you can probably tell, I have been in projects as small as cleaning unnecessary applications off of business or home computers so that they run faster and can continue to meet the client’s needs, to advising on purchases of new hardware, to writing full web-based database applications for intranets and event management, to working on a team of hundreds of engineers developing on demand cable television.
Here are a few of the folks that I’ve worked for:
So, if you have a need for advice, or a solution…
or if you would just like to talk with me about what kind of experiences I’ve had…
please contact me, I’ll be happy to talk to you.
Here is a list of my recent posts about Technology
