Consulting

CATA website launches!

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:51:00 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that last night the Artemis Web Team successfully launched the new website for CATA (Capital Area Transportation Authority) at www.cata.org. This project is to date is one of the largest efforts undertaken by the Web Team and will add a great new feather to our caps for its combination of user-centered design, accessibility compliance, e-commerce capability and trip planning system integration. Congratulations to all members of the Artemis Web Team for coming together to create a fantastic new website for this high-profile client. Well done!

Happenings at Enliven Software

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:21:00 GMT

I trust that you all are periodically checking out the latest at Enliven Software.

If you haven't, here are some of the things that has been going on in the past 3 months or so:

Enliven has a handful of great News stories that we’ve recently added to our website that we wanted to share. Check it out!

Enliven embarks upon a strategic partnership with Alliance Payment Technologies

Enliven has finally done it! We’ve grown so big so quickly that we’ve grown right out of our payment processing and invoicing facility! Rather than add another floor to the tower…

Magnolia Management, LLC signs on with Enliven Software’s ePayables Program

Enliven Software brought Magnolia Management on late last week, with its ePayables solution.

Healthcare System Connections Joins on as Enliven Software’s Newest Partner!!

Earlier this month, Healthcare System Connections signed on with Enliven Software to be a reseller of the Enliven Software Suite of Solutions.

Enliven Software blown away by new Payables client SkyVenture

SkyVenture, the world’s leading manufacturer of vertical wind tunnels, purchased Enliven’s ePayables and ePayments solutions, earlier this month.

Enliven Software thrilled to sign Crown Asset Management

Enliven Software brought Crown Asset Management, LLC onboard late last week, with its ePayables and ePayments solutions.

Welcome Friends of Adalin Farnum to the Enliven Software family!

Early this month, Friends of Adalin Farnum signed up with Enliven Software to have us help them with their payment gateway needs using Enliven Software’s ePay solution.

PEAK 10 Signs on with Enliven Software’s eInvoicing and ePay products!

We are pleased to announce a new member to the Enliven Family: Peak 10! Peak 10 has signed on with Enliven for eInvoicing and ePay, to be able to send their clients electronic versions of their invoices from Microsoft Dynamics GP, and then receive payments online.

Artemis rolls out another great website!

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Today Artemis and the Capital Region Airport Authority launched the new www.flylansing.com. The new site is an example of another great project helping to promote the Lansing region, and we’re really proud to be a part of it. The launch of this site is the focus of a new marketing effort by CRAA to promote traveling through the Capital City Airport rather than making the trip to Detroit Metro. Be on the lookout for TV, radio, print and billboard ads all promoting the new site!

The development of this site was the definition of team effort with nearly every member of both the Web and Custom Dev teams contributing enormously. Well done team, and thank you for all your hard work and passion in making this yet another project to be proud of!

Highlights:

Completely re-designed look and feel, both adhering to FlyLansing.com’s new brand image and best practices in web usability
Integration with real-time Arrival and Departures, Flight Radar, and online booking engines
Revised information architecture, promoting logical and intuitive navigation
Interactive Visitor’s Map based on Microsoft Live Earth

I was reading someone's resume today...and I found something interesting

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:44:00 GMT

In his objective, he states:

“To approach work and its opportunities and challenges using a goal centric and value addition paradigm as my mantra”

General stuff

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 05:01:00 GMT

Amazon SimpleDB service – we spoke about this a couple of EBiz meetings ago…Amazon SimpleDB is REST-ful?? Urghhh…. http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/12/21/AmazonSimpleDBTheGoodTheBadAndTheUgly.aspx NBC selects Silverlight for Olympics video (Beijing)..kinda cool. It will be cool to see how it goes: http://www.centernetworks.com/nbc-selects-microsoft-silverlight-for-olympics-video Steve/Karl and I had a debate on the DVD format that will win…it’s looking like I may be wrong…? http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/05/i-bet-on-the-wrong-hd-format-sorry/ I LOVE twitter In fact, the Enliven team communicates all day, all weekends via twitter. I wish we could write a myPM plugin for twitter – I hate asking folks what they are doing. What is twitter? http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=461. twitter team blogs about Enliven, and how we use it for intra-office collaboration: http://blog.twitter.com/. I predict that twitter will be a big force in social networking/collaboration in 2008. I must say though, it’s mostly people who already blog that enjoy it. Also, if you feel like joining us after hours/weekends to talk about tech, new buzz, geek talk, brainstorm some ideas – aka an expansion of the ebiz meeting – what’s new section…just give me a buzz so that you will get an invite. It should be a fun time. Some individuals from other companies may also join up. Weekend of the 25th is likely the first meet-up. If you are one of the folks that already get pumped about some of these new cool toys

Embracing change in the face of fast moving waves

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:05:00 GMT

The idea of “change” is nothing foreign to anyone

The idea of “change” is nothing foreign to anyone. In fact, it is one of the few inevitable realities in life. The human race and every other surviving organism have had to naturally evolve at the gene level, in order to not be extinct. Why is it then that we still resist change? Why is it that we sometimes get complacent with the status quo, instead of striving to do more, be more, find a better way? From the most fundamental perspective, the biggest challenge that we all face is realizing, accepting, and embracing the concept of change.

In order to survive, we must keep in sync with the pace of change required by the times that we live in. I propose that the critical battle that we all fight today –as individuals, organizations, companies, countries, etc. is adjusting our “clock” of change to sync with that of the times around us. People who can’t evolve as quickly as their ecosystem requires become extinct. Those who adapt can evolve and continually challenge the status quo to move from good to great.

Envision a sine wave, with a certain frequency, time and amplitude. There is what I will call the wave of “life” – unconsciously, we are all striving to make the oscillation of our wave be in sync with that of life. Most low-performing individuals or organizations have a wave pattern that is slow, sluggish or inconsistent with that of the life around them; they cannot keep up. Thus, they become irrelevant and forgotten. When it comes down to it, I believe that in striving for greatness, we are all simply trying to get our arms around the intense speed at which change is happening in this day and age. We are trying to evolve our personal and corporate strategies to change at a pace that is on par, or quicker than, the “wave of life” around us.

The rate at which knowledge and information become stale today is far quicker than it has ever been in the history of earth. The half-life of any piece of information these days is way too short, thus requiring that for survival and success, organizations and individuals must be open to change. Their strategies must also adapt, evolve and change at the pace determined by their marketplace, competitors, neighbors, environment, etc.

As a business leader who finds him/herself leading a business in the year 2008, imagine this - you think you are the first to market, and you have no competitors…tomorrow, you realize that there is a new company in Bangladesh that provides the same products you have, with better quality, and at a fraction of the cost. In order to survive the fast paced, knowledge driven, global reaching world today, first and foremost, you must embrace change within yourself and your organization so you can stay relevant. In fact, you must learn to thrive on change by refabricating the genetics of your organization, just like human genes go through gene adaptation in order to combat evolving diseases and environmental conditions.

Thriving on change is crucial - in the form of continuous improvement, relentless pursuit of a better way, and constantly challenging yesterday’s known facts. “Be open to change” is one of the famous mantras of management in the past decade, but being open to change is no longer good enough. This is not about accepting change, not about tolerating change, not about adapting to change – rather, it is living and loving change, and thriving on change at every possible opportunity. The most groundbreaking ideas, concepts, companies and organizations come out of abandoning conventional wisdom, and making fundamental changes in how things are done.

There have been several studies of what it takes to be successful as an individual and as a company in a global world. Most agree that the first step is realizing that the world is flat, or I guess it just got flatter. You are now competing with people not just within your local geographic boundaries, but with people all over the world – which is smaller now than it has ever been.

Secondly, in order to navigate and compete effectively in this small world, one must be disciplined. Jim Collins, in his book titled “Good to Great” said “All companies have a culture; some companies have discipline. But very few companies have a culture of discipline. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get a magical alchemy of great performance.”

Lastly, surrounding yourself with a team that understands and embraces this culture of change is critical. Individuals who understand what is going on beyond their immediate surroundings will help you see that wave of life, so that you can pace yourself accordingly. You must be around people who pay attention to the trends within their immediate environment, as well as on the other end of the world, like Bangalore or Dalian, China.

In looking into why the pace of change today is so fast, we discover some of the key drivers of the shrinking of the world. These are referred to as “flatteners”, as Thomas L. Friedman describes in his book The World is Flat. They include global competition, outsourcing, the China Boom, knowledge economy, and telecommunication. When these drivers are coupled with the constant advancements in technology, the result is higher productivity, easier access to information, and exponential growth in emerging markets. The increased pace in a variety of areas combine to speed up that wave of life in a geometric progression.

To apply this to my situation, here at my organization, Artemis Solutions Group, we strive to ride on the coattails of change. Rather than approaching change with resistance and fear, we embrace it. We love it. We seek to help our clients achieve the same. Many of our clients are now used to the concept of meeting frequently – several times per year, just to ask ourselves – what could we be doing better? How could we use technology to leverage our organization’s asset to make us best in class? By sitting down and consciously going through the exercise, we are most often able to find innovative ways to do more with less; and to strategically position such clients differently in the market place.

Within our company, we find that the best way to adapt to change is by bringing new improvements to our processes, services and methodologies each and every day - continuously reinventing ourselves. We listen to our instincts and take action. Because we are not afraid of treading ground we have never seen, we know we will make mistakes. But we also know that we will learn from them, and those mistakes will make us stronger. Although uncharted territory is unnerving, the truth is that the greater risk lies in mediocrity. This is yet another reason why here at Artemis, constant improvement is everything. “Some people make change happen, some people watch things happen, and some people say shoot, what just happened?”

In order to support our craving for change, we’ve engineered an effective process to develop new ideas and concepts. We achieve this for our clients through client consultation, internal concept brainstorming, researching client competitors, observing the shifts in market forces, and evaluating new technology platforms that can energize our clients’ business.

We also hold bi-weekly innovation sessions, where ideas for products, add-on modules, future services, practices and processes are vetted. From there, we advance to the research and development phase, and an initiative champion pushes the concept into production as quickly as possible.

Is your change cycle in sync with the wave of life?

What about your business, or our beloved state of Michigan? If not, there’s no time like to present to ask ourselves what we can do to get up to speed.

Custom EBusiness Shops / Web and Application Development Consulting companies

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Artemis is one of those types of companies that you would consider a boutique shop - we envision, develop and implement web based solutions to business problems, to drive revenue profit and improve business efficiency.

The challenge is that as we grow, it has been very tough to manage the shifts in roles and responsibilities, and to evolve our Project Management methodology we coined CADIUM. We went through a rigorous excercise to refine CADIUM, define clearer roles and responsibilities. Create a platform for defining and managing capacity.

I will plan on publishing our findings over time! What an exercise it was!!

Technology Consulting - Application/web development

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:37:00 GMT

What you need to know to be a Technology Consultant, developing custom ebusiness solutions:

Always start your research from

1. Wikipedia

2. Vendor's product page

3. History of product (previous versions/origination) / Google search

4. Blogs (technorati)

You have to choose a camp. In my perspective choose the Microsoft camp - it keeps things under one roof and simpler, with vendor support. Benchmark others against it to get a breadth understanding.

1. Portals and collaboration

a. Sharepoint Portal (competition BEA Weblogic server, Vignette)

2. Processes and methodologies

a. Application Development processes (Software development life cycle - SDLC)

b. Usability

c. Accessibility

d. RUP, Extreme programming, SCRUM, CADIUM

3. Application Development languages

a. C#, VB.NET (competition J2EE, Java, PHP, Perl, Python)

4. Web technologies

a. ASP.NET (competition PHP, Python, J2EE)

b. Javascript, Jquery

c. CSS, XHTML (vs HTML)

d. Content management systems

i. Dotnetnuke

ii. Sharepoint (formerly MS CMS)

iii. Drupal

iv. Wordpress

v. BEA Weblogic

5. Reporting and Analytics and Datawarehouse

a. **Blue Ocean Strategy, Balanced scorecard strategy

b. PerformancePoint Server

c. Analysis Services (Oracle datawarehouse)

d. Proclarity

e. Business Scorecard

6. Database

a. SQL Server (versus Oracle, IBM DB2). MSDE (or SQL Express)

b. Access (lightweight)

c. Datawarehousing – Cube, KPI, dimensions

7. Virtualization

a. Microsoft Virtual Server (VMWare)

b. Understand Gartner maturity model as it relates to this

8. Server technologies

a. Windows Server

b. ISA (PIX Firewall)

c. Virtualization

d. Security

e. Disaster recovery

f. Workstation and Laptops

g. Email and Collaboration

9. New technologies

a. Web 2.0

b. Mobile programming

c. Wiki

Some new cool services you have to checkout!!

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:17:00 GMT

This is the very best thing I have discovered, since the last time I discovered www.Lookoutsoftware.com (which got bought out by Microsoft 3 weeks after I found them).

The new coolest tool on the block: Xobni (www.xobni.com) - search and “analytics” for email. This is an AWESOME idea!!!

Mint (www.mint.com) is also cool as an alternative to www.yodlee.com (which I use extensively). If you get Mint though, make sure to get LifeLock (www.lifelock.com) just to keep you safe! haha.

Cool microsoft products...

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:59:00 GMT

Has anyone seen the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager? It’s extremely nice!

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx

I’ve started using it at home now. Firstly, if you have adopted the whole virtual machine strategy on your network at home, you will relate with this. I have about 8 virtual machines with different images, which is nice…backup is easy, I can roll-back the machine state to a point in time, I can make my little Dell PC become 3 machines (with enough RAM)…I actually have 1 domain controller, 1 certificate server, many visual studio dev machines, I even have a few people who remote into various virtual machines on my network from remotely using RDP! Anyway, Virtual machines are the way of the future. If you are not on it, you are behind.

Anyway, what’s cool is this Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager… which is THE thing that most people using Virtual Server have been waiting for. Essentially, I can drop the SCVVM on any machine and use it to truly holistically manage all the virtual machines I have (if you don’t manage them, they can be a mess…since you can easily create a new machine for yourself by copying and pasting like 2 files). The best part about this tool though is that you can point it at ANY machine on your network, and it will virtualize that physical machine for you. Through the Physical-2-Virtual converter… What I’m saying is, one machine with all it’s configuration, applications, etc will PRODUCE for you, a single VHD file and a VMC file…which you can then drop on any virtual server…and your box is up and running. This is just crazy. It means, you have a dying machine…or you want to swap out hardware…just virtualize that baby…throw the box away. Copy the VHD and VMC file to your new machine. Start virtual server. And your machine is up and running – with the same machine name, apps, data etc.

BTW, it will only run on Virtual server 2005 R2 – it’s free anyway.

Get faq here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scvmm/bb871039.aspx

Has anyone checked out Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007…This is so cool.

http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/default.aspx

For any of you who have interest in complex datawarehouse, numbercrunching, data-visualization type stuff…you will be excited. Basically, this is all about Business Intelligence – datamining, scorecards, cubes, dimensions, ETL, KPIs, and all those cool stuff. A whole business or business unit can be setup to just focus on BI projects, and I believe it will be extremely successful.

Basically, this product is replacing the Business Scorecard Manager…and most importantly, the highly successful Business Intelligence tool that Microscoft recently purchased – ProClarity.

Anyway, I’ve always had strong interest in BI projects…and we have developed about 2 in the history of Artemis…they were always quite cool – even though back then the tools available weren’t robust enough. If you have seen that little “Microsoft Analysis Server” icon whenever you install SQL Server – well, that’s BI right there.

Quick intro to BI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence

Features: http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/productinfo/features.aspx