Homo technologicus' asylum

Last week, I was doing some research about my upcoming trip to Tanzania. I was browsing the web, looking for good deals on trip packages, reading feedback and comments from people who went on a similar trip, checking prerequisites (shots, visas)–basically general research anyone would do when going on a trip to a place where they’ve never been, or looking to buy a new product and trying to choose from the selections. Later that week I was checking my Gmail account, and, what do you know? The news ticker above the email showed me: NYT Travel – Next Stop: Off Tanzania, Serene Mafia Island. Obviously the article was targeted specifically to me, based upon my research over the few previous days, and it did provide me with some new information. But, is it a valuable service that companies provide, or an invasion of privacy–an abuse of the collected data that was never meant to be public?
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I’ve talked at length about the importance of business process monitoring alongside of system monitoring, but in discussions I found that sometimes an overview and simple examples are not enough to convince people about the benefits of this approach. Business owners think they don’t need to know anything about the operational performance of their systems as long as they have their numbers, and engineers often don’t feel they need invest time into understanding the business they are supporting in detail, finding examples shown too “common sense.”
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I recently was invited to join RSS Ray during his weekly radio program “Online Marketing with RSS Ray” broadcasted on WS Radio, to discuss the challenges in creating and operating business online. We covered a lot of great topics that would be relevant to anyone trying to either build or improve their web presence, starting from pointers on what to look for when selecting a vendor, to scalability and security considerations, and all the way to the tips on choosing the right CMS for your business. You can listen to the two-part podcast below.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) have become one of the most powerful internet-related products. What once was a gadget for web developers and technology geeks is now a must-have tool for various business units. Because of the pace at which the world of internet technology changes, and the high demand for up-to-date content availability, there are thousands of products (commercial and open source alike) that offer a myriad of features to the companies in need of a solution to publish their content.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, the term “CMS” has become a buzz word, a commodity if you will. Everything web-related (short of social media, and that’s changing nowdays as well) has been rolled into those three characters. Originally (loosely) defined as “web application to create, edit, store and publish online content”, CMS has transformed into a much larger beast, covering e-commerce inventory management, SEO tool, workflow creator, and much much more. There are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of “How to choose CMS” articles out there, all composed from different perspectives, starting from a designer usability stand and ending with a CFO financial point of view. This article is not one of them. The goal here is to separate the term “CMS” into two very distinct components, and analyze the impact and/or the importance of each in a context of selecting a system to support your business.
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“OMG, Facebook is DOWN!!!” was the cry of the millions when Facebook was unavailable for about 3 hours because of the network issues. Given the nature of Facebook service, the downtime did not have any long lasting effects on it’s user base. In fact, some say that the productivity significantly increased during the 3 hour window without access to Facebook. Bottom line is – the unavailability of the social networking service doesn’t negatively impact the users (ego and reputation of the service aside). Question is: does it also hold true for the companies leveraging Facebook, or other social networks like Twitter, Flickr, FourSquare, etc., in their daily operations?

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