ExpressionEngine: Walkthrough of CMS for DoEverything.ca

I threw this idea out on Twitter a few days ago and got a lot of requests, both personal and publicly, to go forward with it, so I am!

As the Senior Developer of Impact Communications Group, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some excellent clients.  One is the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation — Atlantic Division.

We’ve launched a campaign called ‘Do Everything’ — it’s essentially a campaign that shows what everyone can do to help with Breast Cancer research.  The campaign consists of print ads and TV commercials linking users back to the website, doeverything.ca.  Ryan Quigley, our Interactive Director, designed this site.  I had the pleasure of implementing it in HTML/JS/EE.

This review will be from a clients’ perspective — in other words, the control panel that the client sees, not that I see.

Business Ethics, Corporate Responsibility and Personal Integrity

Do The Words ‘Ethical’ and ‘Business’ Belong on the Same Line?

unethical – not conforming to approved standards of social or professional behavior

I just participated in a frustrating debate with a close comrade in arms about the ethics of his sales tactics.  His original intentions was to start a hiring campaign with the purpose of selling a small electronic device to the people that are applying for a job, with the expectation they’ll take the product because they want the job.

Once I started challenging the ethics of the campaign, he started justifying the decision as ‘helping them by providing an invaluable service’ and that the company ‘really cares about the welfare of their employees.’  He wanted to sneak this in as an ‘opt-in’ check-box saying that we would provide them a device for free (with a 5 year, $40 a month contract to go with it – discounted because they were “interested in selling the product”), after leading the candidate on by making them send in a resumé and fill out an application – and then sending them to an e-learning site, which he had originally anticipated up to 8 hours of eLearning (remember, this is still part of the RECRUITING PROCESS) in hopes that most candidates would drop off.  ’Keep adding hoops,’ he said.

He then said that for the ones that did make it through the rigorous recruiting process, he would hire the best of the best to sell, but they wouldn’t even be selling the product that they just spent a week learning and reading about.  His justification to this?  He wants only the best of the best, so he rigorously tests them.

Is it Legal? Absolutely.  If they click ‘I have read and agreed to the terms of conditions’, then we’ve done our part.  How about Effective? Beyond fantastic!  If you think you’re an inch away from a job, you’ll sign anything; this has the potential to be a jaw-dropping scam!  Ethical? Absolutely not.  Justifiable? That depends on your acceptable level of integrity.

Technology is Power

I have always wondered what the impact of having automated technology, like automated lead management, schedule management, account management and payroll would do to a budding company.

Every enterprise level business has automated business tools.  They have CRMs for customer management, ERPs for enterprise accounting management, HRMS for human resource management, project management gateways for…  Well, you get the drift.

What would happen if we give the power of these tools to small and medium businesses?  What would happen if you gave the average small office organization the power to do more…  For less?

I have been doing some research lately on this subject and I’ve heard three general excuses on why people don’t operate a CRM:

• Cost is too high.  This is a multi-faceted issue…  Cost is not necessarily price – it includes:
  • System downtime
  • Training time – too steep of a learning curve
  • Implementation costs
  • Licensing fees
  • IT support costs
• Our current system works fine.
• We only have one person that deals with that.  No one else needs to know that information.  (This is typically the CEO talking about him or herself)

Unfortunately, these companies desperately need to hire someone in operations.

There are three rules about employees that we must remember:

1. Employees won’t always know what to do,
2. Employees won’t always do what they’re supposed to do, and…
3. Ultimately, they will quit. (or retire!)

The goal of every business should be to create a residual income, so why create a dependency on the owner or CEO?  Any good owner would want to move onto his next venture – and establishing the infinite loop is very important to the sustainability of your company.

For these CEOs that create a dependency on themselves, how do you enforce that your employees are following through with your requirements and tasks, and more importantly, that your customers are being handled properly if you’re, lets say, on a business trip to another country?

It would be great if you could check on the status of your business – your clients – your projects – and your employees from any computer, anywhere in the world, wouldn’t it?

Enter the Business Management System…  <more to come>

Call Center Dreams

I’m working on a conceptual call center management application based on my call center experience.  I’ve used all of the applications, and I’m very aware of the flaws of the call center world.  There are so many things we can do to improve the flow, yet none of them are done.  This is extremely prevalent in outsourced call centers and typically, cannot be solved by the client, but there are still things that can be done to improve flow.

First of all, they should start using web technologies, not remote desktop.  The majority of call centers I’ve worked at use remote desktop to access our call center apps.  There are MANY problems with this from a user interface perspective:

• Some systems will run at full speed, some will run quite slowly – if at all sometimes!  (as they are remote desktop and rely on the network)
• There’s no integration between the applications.
• Some call center positions that I’ve had have required us to open a total of 14 different applications (!) before we even started working!
• Adding more features or adding another workflow typically means adding another program.  (Or 5…)

Employees hate the fact that they have to start work 15 minutes before they get paid to get these systems up.  IT hates having a thousand programs and systems to support, and training makes new agents cry.

Why in the hell do we still have these problems?  I mean, really.  With the advent of RIAs, these applications should be easily built into a single front-end – even if they have 25 back-ends.  What’s more is they can be completely and entirely web-based – no more need to open 14 different programs and windows.

When does simplicity go too far?

One thing that always gives me a headache is the question of, “Are we going too far?”

Simplicity is excellent – Photoshop increases photographers’ efficiency by 10s of 100s of folds.  This is excellent, of course, to the photographer, because it enhances their ability to do their job.  This becomes a problem, however, because with the advent of 10 megapixel cameras, SLR technology and amazing do-it-yourself kiosks, the tasks that the non-technological professional photographer does to enhance the quality of their photos is self-destructive.  We can now duplicate effects that would take hours upon hours to do as a traditional professional photographer in a matter of seconds.

The problem with the simplification of software is the ignorance we gain by using it.  We lose respect for these who spend hours upon hours perfecting their trade, because we can duplicate what they do in mere seconds compared to what takes them hours, sometimes days to do.

I guess that ignorance is bliss, right?