The latest from our blogs
Microsoft on Software as a Service
“Software as a Service (SaaS) has the potential to transform the way
information-technology (IT) departments relate to and even think about
their role as providers of computing services to the rest of the
enterprise. The emergence of SaaS as an effective software-delivery
mechanism creates an opportunity for IT departments to change their
focus from deploying and supporting applications to managing the
services that those applications provide. A successful service-centric
IT, in turn, directly produces more value for the business by providing
services that draw from both internal and external sources and align
closely with business goals.”
We believe
We believe
. . . that smart people exist in every organization
. . . that the end of beaurocracy is in sight
. . . that conversations are the first truth
. . . that connected people are happy people
. . . that innovation is for everyone, big and small
Telling Stories
“User Stories” are nothing new in the world of software design. The iterative and detailed “stories” that they tell have been used mostly by Extreme Programmers for a long time now. Ideally, the customer would write these stories. A few sentences to describe what the software should do for them in some situation, and more often then now, we would use that story to hash out how long it would take us to implement this requirement. Usually culminating in 5-8 pages of additional documentations and graphs.
Building and designing Firestoker has been different. We have decided to write Stories About Users. Each interaction, or goal, is a chapter in a real story that explores the implications of each feature. From social, organizational, policy and personal points of view, our hope is to find out what components and features of our software will really make a difference to the user, and when we have them in a story format, they are much easier to share with others outside of our organization. The Story was the first standard humans have every created, and we remain fully standards compliant.
I will start to post some of our Stories About Users here as they are ready for mass consumption.
What is Firestoker? - The Idea
One of the most frequent questions I have been hearing has been what exactly is the idea behind Firestoker?
Firestoker is really the cross section of four ideas about how people work best (space to talk, space to think, space to play, and space to learn), which boils down to conversation, and safe spaces.
There are millions of people out there who work day to day in jobs that reward them with almost nothing. A paycheck, a Christmas Party, the occasional chance to raise some money for a charity. Some of us have never experienced that, but many do.
We know, from all sorts of research and by just thinking about it, that unfulfilled people can’t do a good job. It is literally impossible. If there is a space, where everyone from the CEO to the front end customer service staff can talk, openly and on the same level, we believe an organization can improve more rapidly and more effectively than through any other method, process or theory.
This isn’t a bunch of theory for us either. We began in the consulting world. Working with companies to help “make things work better”. We tried not to act like consultants, we didn’t claim to know their business better than they did, or to hold some magic key, and we certainly never used the typical fear tactics of most of the other consultants we ran into along the way.
We only claimed one thing: If our client (a CEO, a VP, a President usually) could check their ego at the door, and admit that they had no answers in comparison to what they could learn from their own people, then they could succeed. The easiest way to do that was to create a space on the web where everyone in their organization could talk about what they knew, and what they were learning. We called it The Sandbox and now it is Firestoker.
The Firestoker Project is our way of making that software available to organizations who are ready. We have always maintained that software should be cheap, easy and open, and we are going to do our best to make it all three.