What is DevOps? It’s a buzz word, to be sure. It’s a practice. It’s a process. It’s a culture. It’s a tool set. It’s all of those things, and more. Sometimes, its definition will change depending on who you ask and what problems their organization faces.
In this final post of my 3-part series on Digital Accessibility, I close by contending that the future of accessibility is here – and it’s time to get on board. In Part 1, I asserted that digital access was a human right requiring our protection. I laid out a strong business case in Part 2 that studied the economic benefits of accessibility. Here, I conclude with one final argument and declare that the future of accessibility is now.
In this second of our 3-part blog series on Digital Accessibility, we present the business case in favor of digital accessibility. In Part 1, we argued the moral imperative and studied the legal consequences for infringing this basic human right. Here, we argue in support of accessible design by examining the economic benefits for businesses in service to vast, underserved market segments.
In this first of a 3-part blog series, learn why digital accessibility is usability, and consider the compelling case for protecting digital access as a fundamental human right.
Adobe ColdFusion is a robust and reliable development platform for many businesses. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll stay on ColdFusion forever. Even if you’ve been using the platform for years, there are many reasons you might want to make the switch to a platform like NodeJS, Rails, or Java. Perhaps you’re ready to scale …
A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots.
A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots. The best teams, who perform with precision, purpose, and efficiency emanate vitality and optimism. These teams universally have great clarity of vision, intrinsic motivation, confidence in the competence of their team, and the proficiency that comes from their ability to execute well together. I call this combination of four leadership levers (vision, motivation, execution, and capabilities), The Momentum Framework. It is represented by a bounded four-quadrant model that represents an organization’s inputs, outputs on the horizontal, and its strategy and tactics on the vertical. When a team is firing on all four of these cylinders, pulling on all four of these levers, it manifests in clarity, creativity, adaptability, and proficiency (represented in the diagram by the orange arrows).
A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots.
A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots. The best teams, who perform with precision, purpose, and efficiency emanate vitality and optimism. These teams universally have great clarity of vision, intrinsic motivation, confidence in the competence of their team, and the proficiency that comes from their ability to execute well together. I call this combination of four leadership levers (vision, motivation, execution, and capabilities), The Momentum Framework. It is represented by a bounded four-quadrant model that represents an organization’s inputs, outputs on the horizontal, and its strategy and tactics on the vertical. When a team is firing on all four of these cylinders, pulling on all four of these levers, it manifests in clarity, creativity, adaptability, and proficiency (represented in the diagram by the orange arrows).
When it comes to maintaining robust web applications, Adobe ColdFusion is a tried-and-true development platform. However, general ColdFusion adoption is in decline, and Adobe is retiring old versions of the software. In 2022, successfully running ColdFusion web applications requires more external support than ever. If you’re developing, managing, and troubleshooting your web applications in house, you could be overlooking some serious …
Authentic, self-determined loyalty only occurs after hard-earned, authentic trust is well established. This is true for interpersonal relationships just as it is for the relationships between customers and firms or between employees and firms. Trust is always a fundamental prerequisite to loyalty. If you are serious about earning sustainable and authentic loyalty, you must have established an authentic and thorough foundation of trust.
Once you have gained trust, the next natural step in your customer relationships is loyalty. The “buy 12 cups of coffee and get the 13th cup free” type of loyalty behaviors some companies use to bribe through discounts or freebies are not sustainable. You have to keep giving the discounts to continue to get the behaviors. The type of blind loyalty demanded by drug warlords or mafia boss “leaders” who use fear, manipulation or outright bribery is generally feigned as well. When a more powerful, more frightening or higher paying leader comes along, loyalty is quickly questioned.
One of the greatest teams I ever worked with delivered some amazing, impactful software for a small scrappy startup. We were building something amazing for the world and we knew it. Some of the technologies we worked with were cutting edge. Very few people in the world, at the time, had experience with some of these technologies and documentation was scarce. Our team had to figure a lot of things out and many mistakes were made. Additionally, when we started, we were working in a domain that we knew nothing about. We had to acquire both a tremendous amount of domain knowledge and the requisite technical skills in order to succeed together. The team had many ups and downs and overcame some incredible challenges. In the end, the company was successfully acquired by a multi-national, multi-billion dollar enterprise and their services were incorporated into their offerings.
The team learned at an incredible rate and was able to accomplish what felt like super-human things that none of us could have possibly accomplished on our own. If you have had this type of experience in your career, you know what a feeling it is to be a part of a team like this. It is amazing. Looking back, you will reflect on these experiences as the best working experiences of your life. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls these peak experiences for individuals “flow.” This concept of flow extends to high-performing teams. When a team of competent people “flow” together, creativity emerges and they thrive.
Your teams want to produce great things together. They want to build things that will change the world. Change that is worthwhile requires the coordination of many competent minds, communicating and cooperating at scale. Most teams that accomplish worthwhile things, however, don’t start out with all the knowledge required to succeed — they have to figure out how to get it. When equipped with a motivating, worthwhile vision and some initial skills and knowledge, teams learn together and innovate and deliver amazing things. The more they learn, the more they realize how much knowledge is out there that they will never know, but this shared quest is a powerful, creative force for change.
When you have the right people on your team, those who care deeply about solving the problems you intend to solve, they will crave the kind of work environment that pushes the limits of their creativity.
