Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in BarCampBankCharleston. A cross-section of bankers participated, including representation from technology, marketing, branches, and even disaster recovery groups, leading to discussion in many areas. My company, Cornerstone Advisors, was pleased to help sponsor the event along with ECPI who provided the space and ClairMail.
I won’t go into the historical origin of BarCamps, but the way a BarCamp works is that participants arrive in the morning, sessions are pitched (meaning the group decides what will be discussed the rest of the day), and the conference is off and running. We had more of a fixed agenda for this, with sessions on social media and business continuity planning already on the agenda.
Attendance was lighter than hoped but better than last year. All that attended were passionate about the work that they’re doing and contributed to the discussion. First Federal of Charleston was well-represented as usual, with George Pasley stepping up again in a leadership role in organizing the event and garnering some great press along the way.
Jared Smith of ReadWriteWeb and slick-Charleston-weather-twitterbot fame provided the highlight of the day with a discussion on how companies are using social media to engage in and monitor the conversation about them. Jared taught the group a new trick on how to use geolocation in Twitter Search to narrow search criteria—just use the “place” in advanced search. He also discussed another tool that can be used for real-time blog, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media site monitoring called Collecta. Charleston has a great technology community, and Collecta is yet another example.
Adrienne Cobbs of First Federal of Charleston did a nice job of boiling down the salient points of what makes a good disaster recovery and business continuity plan and where the holes typically are. During the presentation, the group discussed Yammer’s potential as a tool for getting mass-notifications out to employees during an incident using its ability to send SMS messages en masse.
I had a chance to close out the day with a discussion of some of this year’s technology trends, including payments evolution, mobile banking, delivery channel renewal, and improved technology risk management. There’s lots of action around payments right now, and for those looking to fill the holes left by overdraft legislation it’s a good time to look at those POS Network contracts. My one plug to the group was that EFT spending has easily eclipsed core spending in many institutions, so let us look at those contracts.
The bottom line: it was a great way to spend four hours with people genuinely excited about their craft, and I left looking forward to the event next year and possibly trying to organize one in Columbia.
Posted by Quintin Sykes on Feb 28, 2010 with tags Tech Spending, BarCampBank, Social Media, Risk Management, Electronic Delivery
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I've been banging the drum for simplicity for some time, and a couple of posts caught my attention this week. Ryan at 37signals was discussing the suckage-to-usage ratio with the Kindle keyboard as an example of a feature that might be inadequate on its own but infrequently used and thus unimportant in the reading experience. The post speaks to nailing the important requirements first, leaving the nice-to-haves for later (if ever). Users are willing to put up with missing features in exchange for (1) getting a product in their hands faster and (2) nailing the requirements that are truly important to them.
Over at Wired there’s a story on Duke Nukem Forever (NSFW), what is (was) supposed to be the sequel to the legendary videogame Duke Nukem 3D. After a decade of development, the game still hasn’t shipped. What held it up? The developers couldn’t lock the design down, constantly adding/changing features. Compounding matters, they had an unheard-of budget that let them get away with feature creep for years. Constraints can be your friend, forcing you to work on the important stuff first and to actually deliver.
I always think about the 80% solution when I'm confronted with something new. Chances are it’s going to take a lot more time and resources to get that last 20% of features/requirements added, so deliver the important stuff first and challenge that last 20%. Steve Jobs said “real artists ship”—keep it as simple as you can and don’t let feature creep get in the way of delivery.
Posted by Quintin Sykes on Jan 01, 2010 with tags Simplicity, Project Management
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I made the pilgrimage to Boston earlier this month to attend the BAI Retail Delivery show. Was it worth the trip? Read on in my GonzoBanker recap.
Posted by Quintin Sykes on Nov 26, 2009 with tags Retail Delivery, GonzoBanker
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I'm lucky to have a job where I can do some serious digging into something I'm interested in, write about it, and have fun doing it.
In October I shared some Technology Spending findings in GonzoBanker from the upcoming Cornerstone Technology Report and look forward to issuing the report in the next couple of weeks. Contact me if you want me to let you know when it’s available.
Posted by Quintin Sykes on Nov 26, 2009 with tags GonzoBanker, Tech Spending
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