Collaboration is King

For the past two years, I've been working with my friends at Vantage Credit Union developing a CRM system. Check out what Matt Fagala, CRM Director had to say about our collaborative effort.

This has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Together, Vantage and FORUM have a solution that makes a difference for their members.

Vantage has created a team dedicated to the CRM system which they call Vision. These guys (John Osborn and Dan Shelby) have created some fantastic applications in the CRM system.

Vantage's Chief Operating Officer Eric Acree has been the champion of this effort. Eric's main goal was to build a system that enabled their employees to focus on the member. He wanted to remove the layers that exist between the credit union and member as well as the front office and back office staff (as shown below).

Rave: Bento

For months now, I have been doing the online thing with sites like
MindMeister, Highrise (37signals). For the most part, the experience
has been great.

Recently, I downloaded FileMaker's Bento. I have to tell you that
this is one of the best (if not the best) information management
systems around. Bento can connect to your address book, calendar
and other program's data. It can tie all your information
together. You can use it to track your projects, RSS feeds, etc.
You can build your own libraries of data and customize data entry
forms. Awesome!

If you haven't checked it out. It will be worth your time.

Sent from my iPhone

Last Week in Chicago

Last week, we went to Chicago to visit a college my son is planning
on attending when he graduates.

He will be going to Columbia College. It was an incredible experience.

As we were going through this process it hit me....my son is going to
college. This was a very emotional experience for me. My little
boy is becoming a man. I couldn't be prouder.

I was in awe if him. The chance to spend four years in Chicago.
The experiences he will have; he will remember forever.

My wife and I almost enrolled ourselves.

The Aim Of Art

Aristotle said,
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. "

Recently, a project that I had been working on for two years went into production. This was a project where I actually did some coding. I have not done hunkered down coding for several years. Needless to say, my skills were a bit rusty on many levels. Let's face it, the programming world had passed me by on so many levels. Basically, I knew enough to get the job done. Was I worried? Absolutely! Everyone who reads my blog, knows that I'm not a fan of Microsoft's development tools. On this project, I chose some unconventional tools. I chose Flex for the user interface and FileMaker for the database. This was a high end application. Using these tools; I'm sure some very smart computer scientists would say I was nuts. I tend to choose tools that focus more on the artistic design elements versus the technical elements. Plus, these technologies are very easy to use. However, in this case all the logic would tell you that this approach is suspect. For a period of time, I agreed. I can't tell you how much I worried about whether or not FileMaker would choke. I also worried whether or not Flex would hold up. Many sleepless nights over this.

Live day approaches and I'm one nervous dude. Well, live day came and went and the application was a raving success. Not because I wrote some great code --- this organization had hired its own programmer that I'm sure fixed a great deal of my programming flaws. Nevertheless, I was still worried.

Then it hit me. I was worried for the wrong reasons . I was more worried about the tools instead of worrying about the design. Would this design solve the problems this organization was facing?

Don't get me wrong, I'm still a little nervous about the choices I made on this project. However, it's much easier to switch out the tools than trying to find a better design. The significance of this project was the fact that we had found the answer to a big problem that was troubling the organization.