doug.wilson's blog

2011 is looking to be a difficult year for organizations wishing to execute their application development plans.  Application developer is one of the fastest-growing job categories on dice.com, a leading IT recruiting job site in the U.S.  Some of their app dev postings grew 300% in March alone.  See Dice's "The War for Tech Talent Heats Up for more details.

This explosion in application development is essentially the need for organizations to build product and applications in anticipation of the broader economic recovery, but more importantly, it is coupled with the explosion of development platforms.  Mobile development and the cloud have brought both more opportunities to write and deploy software, but also to further specialize your skillsets.  Developers proficient in Apex on the Salesforce platform are not the same dev skills you need to build on Amazon's web services, nor are they the same dev skills you might need building on Microsoft's Azure platform.

The sudden increase in mobile platforms has created hundreds of new hardware target platforms, all hungry for applications that turn them from simple communications devices to smartphones and tablets.  Each of the five major hardware platforms, in addition to their own programming language and sophisticated API, has their own domain specializations - gaming, business apps, geolocation apps, social apps, etc. that require their own specific domain expertise.

Added together, this is a huge opportunity for organizations that deliver application development services.  Breakthrough has responded to this challenge by redoubling our efforts to find the best local technical staff in the Midwest, aggressively training personnel on new skills and languages, and recruiting and enticing developers from a variety of social networks.

These efforts are paying off.  We have more than doubled our staff, and this month, we’ll have built out the adjacent suite to accommodate another 15-20 developers in our Evanston office. The Breakthrough model is to create small, smart teams of highly capable software development personnel and find exciting development projects to execute with our growing list of clients.

Stay tuned this month for an expanded success story section of our website as we begin to talk about some of the great success stories we have had over the past few years.

It's an exciting time for software development; it’s an exciting time to be an engineer working in America, and an exciting time to be Breakthrough Technologies!

At Breakthrough, we have witnessed many steps in the infancy of open source software.  We remember its early steps as a concept first expressed in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, as well as its noisy splash with Linux and several other ground-breaking "experiments," like the release of Netscape's Navigator source code to the public in 1998.  What followed was a lot of public and media curiosity, some interesting statistics, and a broad mixture of optimism and skepticism.

Well those days are long past now.  Open source software, as a concept, is now celebrating its twelfth year, and we as an industry of software development professionals now see open source as simply part of the landscape.  It's time for other industries to see it that way as well.  Open source has had some amazing advocates: Tim O'Reilly, a visionary in publishing and now with open government and Healthcare 2.0 initiatives, remains a proponent.  The current White House administration also sees tremendous promise in open source, including deploying the WhiteHouse.gov site on an open source stack: Drupal on Apache and Linux! Click the link to see the Drupal login page!

Now open source is penetrating server operating systems (Linux), mobile operating systems (Android), rich Internet development environments (OpenLaszlo and Adobe Flex), as well as a variety of interesting business platforms:

• SugarCRM for Customer Relationship Management
• Drupal and Joomla for Web Content Management
• Ubercart for ecommerce websites
• Moodle for learning management systems
• JasperReports for Business intelligence and professional reporting frameworks
• Alfresco for Enterprise Content Management

And the list goes on.  Each of these open source communities boasts thousands to hundreds of thousands of users and implementations.  All of a network of organizations who routinely deploy and customize them.  All have networks of third parties who extend and add on to these systems with the open source software at the core.

Licensing has matured as well.  There are a variety of open source licenses available for use by a software community, and they range from very restrictive to extremely liberal in the terms of use for the software.  A simple inventory and license glossary is all that is required to manage this within your organization, and some basic legal consulting is appropriate if you are building or extending these platforms.  For the most part, however, the software is free to use as is and is quite available for extensions in the future with few restrictions on distribution.

What is the value of these systems?  We see them as threefold: first, there is a lot of functionality that you get for free; second, the ongoing development stream; third, the ability to resist platform and vendor lock-in.  Let's discuss each of these in turn.

Getting it for Free

This is a compelling value proposition: being able to pull something off-the-shelf and utilize it for your organization at no cost.  In the past, software of this kind was simply a demo or a taste of what a full software product would do for you, with the idea that license fees and a "professional" version was lurking just around the corner.  Many of the open source offerings do have up-sells to premium versions, but the fact remains that the core software modules are extremely powerful and valuable by themselves.  How valuable?  Well imagine if you were going to build a framework as powerful as Drupal.  The Drupal development group has sunk over a million dollars of man hours into its development.  Not to mention the fact that it has been continuously refined architecturally by some of the finest minds in content management on the planet.  Now, not only do you not have to pay for that development, you also don't have to become an expert in content management in order to implement it professionally for your site.  The continual oversight of these contributors has done that for you.

If you think back in the history of business, when was it possible to get a work product that might cost millions to build out yourself, for free?  Not since the exploitation of the natural world or indentured servants have businesses had access to this kind of value for free. The only difference is that the reuse of this software is not only legal, but naturally contributes to a growing community of global good in the world.  This is a win-win like no other in modern times.

The Cost of Ownership

So let's talk about a second consideration of open source and custom development:  the cost of ownership.  The sad truth of software and technology in general is that it doesn't stand still.  You can invest everything you have to build and craft a perfect system for today, but it will need to change tomorrow.  Operating system upgrades, security flaws, broader technical innovations will require you to keep expanding your system and improving it to keep it from becoming stale and irrelevant over time.

But what if instead of building that system, you borrowed it?  And what if instead of owning and specifying every required change to stay current, there was a global team tasked with doing just that?  And what if those releases came out each quarter to each year and you were allowed to download them, sometimes with a click of a mouse?

Sound like paradise?  That's exactly the way new product releases work in this world of open source.  All you pay for is the assessment of the changes, any tweaks required to ensure whatever customizations you've applied are not broken, and then a simple deployment and regression test procedure.  Any competent partner would be able to execute such tasks with a modest support budget.  And what a value given the previous scenario!

Freedom to Move

The last salient point for our discussion is that of freeing yourself from the concept of platform and vendor lock-in.  One of the great banes of software development in the old model was that although you think you are making a choice of a software technology, there are a broad array of choices bundled with that.  The development firm who is delivering your system will likely be around a while, so qualifying them as a partner for the next 3-5 years is important.  Also the platform that you are deploying the technology on better be one that you are familiar with, because you will probably need expertise and possibly invest in the licenses and servers that will provide its infrastructure.

So how does open source help?  Well, first, because you have selected a platform, there are many different organizations and individuals who have expertise extending and customizing that platform.  That means that just because you select Breakthrough as your initial partner for your website, there is no reason you can't switch to an internal resource or another firm should your relationship with Breakthrough terminate.  Many of our customers come to us with an aging content management system that was built by another vendor and not only do they not want the vendor to continue supporting it, many of these vendors are announcing that they no longer support their own system!  And on top of that, they often refuse to give their customers access to their source code unless they pay some outrageous sum!

That puts our clients in a very difficult position - forced to abandon a platform they have invested in with precious few options except rebuild it in another platform.  The open source option provides a way out, because it allows us to select a code base and platform that is bigger than just one company and now you have options as to the best way to service, extend, or grow your solution.  In a sense, open source provides a de facto standard that allows us to build solutions using the same building blocks and design that gives us freedom to move as an organization with agility and flexibility, as opposed to crushing costs and few choices.

The Association and Non-Profit Angle

So what is the benefit for associations and non-profits?  The simple answer is that they are the same as other organizations and businesses, with one exception.  Associations and nonprofits have no incentive to develop their own unique technology for many of their service domains, like CRM and reporting and the like.  They simply need an efficient, scalable, extendable technology platform on which to conduct their business.  The open source platforms we have discussed today provide many of these attributes out of the box, and are effective systems as sustainable technology components of an association's business strategy.  All that's missing is a good partner to help you make the smart decisions, and support you through the transitions and implementation events.  Breakthrough would love to be that partner, but frankly, we feel that it is more important that you make good sustainable technology choices than accumulate every customer we can, so please let us know how we can help you.  I am always available for consultation or my association business development manager, Brian Ryback, can also help you wrestle with some of the decisions you have before you.

I hope this discussion has been helpful and can shed some light on the opportunity before us.  If you have any questions we can be reached at wilsond@breaktech.com.  Thanks for reading, and enjoy!  It's a great time to be in business!

This weekend is the DrupalCamp Chicago!  Breakthrough is sponsoring the event with some other fantastic Chicago development organizations.  Check them out here.  Unfortunately, we have already sold out with 200 registrations, so if you haven't signed up yet, you'll have to wait until next year or check out the content on the web after the fact.

I warned you that it was an exciting platform...

Just lefta couple of great sessions at ATP 2010 this morning.  I was able to attend the Innovative Item Type Development panel with some looks as to what some cutting-edge performance-based programs are doing (AICPA, ARDMS, and the NBME) as well as some lessons from practioners on a process for correctly executing an innovative item type program.

Met lots of folks who were very interested in these topics.  I had a few thoughts along the way...

1.  The state of the art is pretty dated.  I have worked firsthand with some of Craig Mills' great people at the AICPA.  The items they showed from their current testing program delivered under Prometric have a number of usability issues that this team had bumped into and resolved years ago.  It is obvious that they are struggling under the limitations of their current exam delivery platform and it is certainly a governor on their ability to deliver innovative content to their community.

2.  The NBME showed where the trend is headed - away from recall questions and towards items that can assess dimensions of ability that are not easily factored into MCQs.  These dimensions include judgement, research, synthesis, analysis and a dozen others.  Utilizing cinical simulators is certainly a trend we'll be seeing more of in the future.

3.  Innovative item development is not just presenting and scoring an item.  It was obvious from a mature innovative program like the AICPA that they have had to turn their attentions and pocketbooks towards solving secondary innovatiion problems.  They have developed and maintain a proprietary CMS called CCMS - Complex Content Management System.  They use this as an environment for managing the innovative item types they support, creating and publishing new items and sample items, and probably accessing the rather customized packets of result data that their testing vendors provide.  We at Breakthrough believe that we will all see real innovation in the extension of these tools and proceses as they are stretched to accommodate innovative item types.

4.  Also the consulting duo of Cynthia Parshall and Lynn Webb presented a six-step framework that is a must-read for anyone considering venturing off down the non-MCQ path.

Anyway, some great sessions today, looking forward to more tonight and tomorrow.