Nearly half-way through the first month of lockdown and there's the sense of an adjustment sinking in. Supermarket shelves are still a tad sparse but don't have the empty apocalypse-movie feel of past weeks. And despite lockdown being extended there's talk of peaks in infection being reached and noise about confirming a relaxing of isolation rules and a return to normalcy. A lot's been written about the pandemic and its mismanagement . There's dire forecasts about the economy and predictions the virus will act as a driver for tech adoption . The shadow that Covid casts is as much financial as it is health-related. The virus strikes at 2 things most of us consider fundamental to wellbeing  - financial security and social connectedness. IT and IT services has a certain worldwide industry mono-culture. But often, particularly for the global implementations, your team-mates can come from all over the world and I've been lucky to work with people from many d...

On a recent assignment I had the opportunity to work on a Mulesoft-SFMC integration. Mulesoft, recently bought by SF, is one of the leading enterprise ETL PaaS providers and readily integrates with third party platforms using industry standard RESTful/SOAP API endpoints. Mule Anypoint Generally I was impressed with the Mule suite of features and components. The Mule Anypoint platform provides quick, efficient integration capabilities along with out-of-the-box patterns and functionality for streamlining data flows from source to target systems. These patterns allow rules to be implemented that can schedule, consolidate and error-handle large batches of data in near-realtime if necessary. On top of that Mule has a suite of connectors allowing low-code out-of-the-box integration with third-party platforms like SFMC. Connector API limitations Like Marketing Cloud Connect the Mule SFMC Connector uses the SFMC SOAP API. The SOAP API is a good fit for most requirements involvin...

(Credit:  https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/86l0s2/someone_figured_out_the_reality/ ) One of the strangest but nicest things I've ever heard a client say was "We're interested in doing things in a more Agile way and you embody it". Nice because everybody likes a compliment. Strange because I'd never considered how I work as "Agile" in the project methodology sense. But we were both thinking of the same thing - getting good results at pace. Agile as a project methodology has been around for yonks and is now the approved way of delivering Salesforce and IT projects in general. But projects still fail (a lot) or are late or simply deliver product clients don't use. Large projects, particularly in the IT sector, often go bad says Gallup . And from experience I'd agree a lot of IT projects are needlessly painful. There are 2 interesting points that the Gallup report surfaces: Process isn't necessarily key. But people ar...

In The Beginning The early 2000s was the heyday of outsourced IT. Better global telco networks, higher speed internet and remote working meant offshore IT professionals could be easily deployed to implement and support Monolithic systems like Oracle and SAP databases. This involved kind of longterm transformation programs that guaranteed revenue streams for the IT services companies doing the implementation and maintenance work.  And for a time, it was good A golden age of profitability and expansion for IT services had arrived. Clients had straight-forward but manpower-intensive problems that meant long luxurious engagements where the technologies were either legacy or emerging. Want to reduce costs of your IT overhead? Improve efficiencies and streamline processes? Take 5, no better yet, 10 years to implement the latest Monolithic information system. And of course you have to use an external implementation partner to provide the necessary  specialists...

It's been nearly half a decade since the Big G's foray into the consumer electronics market. Despite some clumsy attempts to make Glass fashionable , complete with a reality TV worthy scandal between a then-married Brin and a Google "cheerleader , there was a shortfall in terms of public interest and appeal. My last post on Viral Mojo (way back in 2013, time flies!) highlighted the potential, or lack of it, for Glass to go mainstream and create a new category of wearables. In the final analysis Glass failed at capturing the public imagination or turn Google into a viable competitor to Apple as a category definer. Even with its past experience with the Chromebook it's easy to say Google was stepping away from its core competency as a software vendor and lacked the organisational DNA necessary to execute truly category-defining wins. From a purely business perspective this would be true and could be perceived as a case of operational expertise, along with hype, fai...

Early last year a pic of a guy wearing Google Glass surfaced. He was in the shower, clearly having a great time.  The big deal? The issue commentators found with the pic was the fact that the guy in question, a developer at Google, seemed a little compromised in the “coolness” stakes. Other images showing nerds (and I’m allowed to use the word as I am one) wearing Glass began to paint a picture of a product decidedly less-than-cool. To Google’s credit they’re trying to bring an entirely new product category into the mainstream, t aking the crown from Apple as consumer electronics category creators. But the challenge with Google is going beyond making geek chic. If anyone can challenge Apples' dominance of the consumer electronics market it’s a contender that can take great UX and translate it into an enjoyable hardware-mediated physical experience like wearable computing. Even if Google is able to pull off truly category defining product marketing it still means comp...

The majority of recent posts have been around technology and media. Rightly so! But it's been a while since I've blogged about general internet awesomeness. And on that note, the Harlem Shake. The first Shake video was uploaded on Feb 2nd and has already spawned tens of thousands of homages and parodies. Not to mention the inevitable backlash and Gangnam Style comparisons . All over the space of a few weeks, scary even by lightening quick meme standards. Admittedly, the homage vids and parodies are probably an acquired taste for some but drawing music video parallels for a 30 sec clip misses the point. Whilst probably the finest four minutes-something to have graced Youtube since that kid on his way home from the dentists , Gangnam was a fullon music video complete with set pieces and choreography. The Harlem Shake vids are pure DIY Gonzo collaboration celebrating random anarchy with production values sometimes just stretching as far as a camera phone. And that...