Chris Cronn who is actively addressing the concerns of business across the country stated that “we are entering into an era we have never seen before”. That sentiment was echoed amongst the concerned business owners in the room, as we are entering into a brave new world of unknown regulation and enforcement.

Business Owner, Bobby Jenkins also expressed concern for the effect that it would have on his business, expressing the need for Healthcare Reform, but not sure if this is the answer. ABC Home & Commercial Services has always offered healthcare coverage for its employees, and he is unsure how this will affect his business long-term.

September 23^rd is D-Day for the first wave of regulations. Luckily, it will not hit all businesses like the invasion of Normandy, as these changes will essentially affect plan changes after September 23^rd.  Unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, businesses are aware of what is coming and have the opportunity to complete a cost benefit analysis as to whether to try and remain on a grandfathered plan, exempt to some of the provisions under the Healthcare Reform Act.

The Law Office of Melissa S. Roush PLLC has three main concerns for clients other than the increasing costs for healthcare coverage, which many of her clients and colleagues are already seeing, and additional taxes. First, the additional administration and reporting required by business and human resources professionals, from providing a 1099 to everyone and their mother, to the reporting requirements to Health & Human Services, and my favorite reporting on W-2s the value of coverage (which allegedly will continue to be non-taxable for employees). Second is the increased oversight and budgets of federal agencies to enforce Healthcare Reform. According to the IRS 2011 Budget 3.4 million is dedicated to enforcement. Finally, it is unclear whether anyone really knows everything that is in the over 2000 page bill that was passed overnight. The tan, botox, and teeth whiting tax might give us all a laugh, but what about the Long Term Care requirement, in which employers will automatically enroll employees in long term care coverage, which they will be able to access in five years. An employee must affirmatively opt out of this coverage.

Employers cannot use the wait and see method of business, rather they need all of their armed forces; Human Resources, Benefits Provider, Attorney, and CPA to prepare for battle through self-examination and create a strategy to address increased costs and exposure.

Melissa Roush is an employment law attorney in Austin, Texas who highly recommends careful review of how Healthcare Reform will affect your business-be proactive. Contact Melissa at (512) 523-8388 or melissa@msroushlaw.com.

Now Gary has launched his second blog named garyvaynerchuk.com where he dispenses business advice and comments on emerging technologies and cultural trends. As his following grew online, Gary became one of the first to reach Facebook’s friend limit and accumulated more than 800,000 followers on Twitter. Gary’s first business book, Crush It!, was released in the Fall of 2009 and debuted as a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

As Gary’s career as a speaker and writer continued to soar, companies of varying sizes approached him for consulting advice. The consulting role agreed with him, and in 2009 Gary and his brother AJ co-founded Vayner Media, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups. Gary is now also an angel investor in various startups, offering sweat equity to the projects he supports in addition to financial investments. Gary’s ultimate goal is to one day own the New York Jets. Although his various businesses obviously play an enormous role in his life, he always puts his family first.

It’s not often that a speaker of Gary’s caliber comes to Austin, so you should take advantage of this opportunity to spend a highly entertaining evening with Gary (and sometimes colorful language). It’s just for entrepreneur members to attend (including dinner).

If you are a member of Texchange, login and complete your registration.

If you are not a Texchange member, please email ashleyarkin@texchange.org to register.

Republished from AustinStartup.com

Forrester Research analysts Dave West and Tom Grant just published their report on Agile 2010. Here is the section in their report on managing technical debt:

Managing technical debt

Dave: The Agile community has faced a lot of hard questions about how a methodology that breaks development into short iterations can maintain a long-term view on issues like maintainability. Does Agile unintentionally increase the risk of technical debt? Israel Gat is leading some breakthrough thinking in the financial measures and ramifications of technical debt. This topic deserves the attention it’s beginning to receive, in part because of its ramifications for backlog management and architecture planning. Application development professionals should :-

• Starting captured debt. Even if it is just by encouraging developers to note issues as they are writing code in the comments of that code, or putting in place more formal peer review processes where debt is captured it is important to document debt as it accumulates.
• Start measuring debt. Once captured, placing a value / cost to the debt created enables objective discussions to be made. It also enables reporting to provide the organization with transparency of their growing debt. I believe that this approach would enable application and product end of life discussions to be made earlier and with more accuracy.
• Adopt standard architectures and opensource models. The more people that look at a piece of code the more likely debt will be reduced. The simple truth of many people using the same software makes it simpler and less prone to debt.

Tom: Since the role I serve, the product manager in technology companies, sites on the fault line between business and technology, I’m really interested in where Israel Gat and others take this discussion. The era of piling up functionality in the hopes that customers will be impressed with the size of the pile are clearly ending. What will replace it is still undetermined.

I will be responding to Tom’s good question in various posts along the way. For now I would just like to mention the tremendous importance of automated technical debt assessment. Typical velocity of formal code inspection is 100-200 lines of code per hour. Useful and important that formal code inspection is, there is only so much that can be inspected through our eyes, expertise and brains. The tools we use nowadays to do code analysis apply to code bases of any size. Consequently, the assessment of quality (or lack thereof) shifts from the local to the global. It is no more no a matter of an arcane code metric in an esoteric Java class that precious few folks ever hear of. Rather, it is a matter of overall quality in the portfolios of projects/products a company possesses. As mentioned in an earlier post, companies who capitalize software will sooner or later need to report technical debt as line item on their balance sheet. It will simply be listed as a liability.

From a governance perspective, technical debt techniques give us the opportunity to carry out consistent governance of the software process based on a single source of truth. The single source of truth is, of course, the code itself. The very same truth is reflected at every level in the organization. For the developer in the trenches the truth manifests itself as a blocking violation in a specific line of code. For the CFO it is the need to “pay back” 0K in the very same project. Different that the two views are, they are absolutely consistent. They merely differ in the level of aggregation.

Effective August 23, 2010, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released final rules on how companies can store their Forms I-9 electronically.  Through the period from 2006 to this publication 4 years of questions have arisen and the answers to those questions have been incorporated into the final rules.

There are five key clarifications that have been provided since the interim rules.

1. I-9s must be completed within three business days, not calendar days.
2. You may use electronic or paper systems or a combination of electronic and paper systems.
3. You may change to electronic storage systems provided that the systems meet the performance requirements of the regulations.
4. There’s need to retain audit trails only when the I-9 is created, completed, updated, modified, altered or corrected, but not for each time a Form I-9 is viewed electronically,.
5. Your company is not required to provide a confirmation of a Form I-9 unless an employee requests a copy. If an employee does not request a confirmation then it is optional for the employer.

With the latest push to save filing space in offices the “e-filing” will likely be a welcome change.  You should notify your HR, Payroll and IT departments are all aware of the change to ensure compliance with the new rules.

Melissa Roush is an employment law attorney in Austin, Texas who highly recommends an audit of your verification practices. The Federal Government is focusing on the enforcement of this issue–be proactive! Contact Melissa at (512) 523-8388 or melissa@msroushlaw.com.

One of the cool things about helping judge/select the mobile sessions for SXSW Interactive Festival is that it is like taking the pulse of the Mobile industry — how the mobile industry and technologists feel about the state of things.

This year’s mobility and new technology submissions show how Geo & Social, AR and Big-Data continue to evolve and are key technology areas in the mind of many mobile technologists and marketers alike; a not surprising trend. Some NFC/RFID and barcodes came up. And the topics of native vs. web continues but not as strong, same with Flash, perhaps indicating native as the preferred approach to mobile apps, at least for now.

A lot of very good sessions this year; it was a bit tough to choose… congrats to all who submitted.

ceo

Here are five steps to get you started:

1. Move Beyond Direct Mail. While direct mail used to be the only way to find individuals willing to support your cause, there are now many additional channels you must explore to stay relevant (email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc). Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s new book The Networked Nonprofit makes a fundamental argument about how nonprofit organizations can use social media to leverage people outside of the organization (donors, volunteers, supporters) to build momentum (resources, funds, mind-share, advocacy, etc) for their cause. If nonprofits more effectively used social media to build their networks, individual donor fundraising could be revolutionized.
2. Don’t Separate Donors From Other Supporters. Just as fundraising is often sequestered from the program work of the organization, funders are also often kept separate from other organization supporters.  Volunteers are often left off funding appeals for fear of asking them to do “one more thing” for the organization. And funders are not asked to become volunteers or advocates. Instead of putting organization supporters into silos, open all opportunities to everyone. Better yet, ask (or allow) supporters to create their own ways to accelerate the work of the organization (like tapping into their own networks to help). Once integrated, the possibilities for building support are endless.
3. Stop Fearing the Major Donor. Many nonprofit organizations would love to have major individual gifts coming in the door, but don’t know how to find and solicit those donors. The process, once understood, is actually pretty simple. You must identify, qualify, cultivate, solicit and, most importantly, steward donors. Use your board, volunteers, supporters to help identify and qualify people who meet three criteria: 1) belief in the organization’s cause 2)connection to a person at the organization 3)personal capacity to give at your major donor level. Once board, friends, supporters are involved in a well-defined process, major donors are sure to follow.
4. Get Your Board Focused. Boards of Directors are often misused in fundraising. They serve on event committees, write grants, make cold calls, or seal envelopes. Instead of using them for these low ROI activities, give them one fundraising job and one job only: to help move major donors through the cycle outlined above. Even if board members don’t have networks of wealthy friends, there is still much they can do to help raise major donor dollars. Board members can help identify major donor prospects, uncover information about potential prospects, invite prospects to a cultivation event, go on a major donor call, send thank you notes or make phone calls. The board is a key part of your organization’s network, put them to their highest and best use.
5. Do Away With the Pity Ask. To effectively raise money from individual donors, especially major donors, you have to move away from the pity donation and toward the investment opportunity. Donations and investments differ in every aspect:
   And investment opportunities are not only for the major donor. Even your smallest donor can be made to understand the broader impact of the organization’s work, how important their dollar is, and what the return on investment can be.

Individuals are able and want to do so much more. If nonprofits more effectively seized opportunities to engage and invest individuals, the sector could become more sustainable and better able to create change.

Related posts:

1. Financing Not Fundraising: The Plan
2. Financing not Fundraising
3. Financing Not Fundraising: A Social Velocity Blog Series

Having such brutal honesty offline AND online is hard. People don’t like being told their babies are ugly. They don’t want to hear that their UI sucks, their competitor is leaps ahead of them in advancement, or that there aren’t many compelling software companies founded by women. Michael Arrington has faced criticism from all angles and from every part of the planet, because he and his team happen to run the biggest technology blog the world has ever known. People want power, they believe they deserve power, and telling them they haven’t earned it yet will get some people angry at you.

Shira Ovide singled out the culture of TechCrunch in her Wall Street Journal piece as a factor for why there are so few women leaders in technology. Arrington found this unfair. He, after all, has a female CEO whom he picked himself because of her skills. He would LOVE to see female entrepreneurs in the space and end the sausage fest. So he responded with an invite that TechCrunch is happy to cover software created by women that actually interests people.

I read the piece and thought, “Man, he doesn’t get what it’s like to be a woman out there”. It’s not his fault. He’s a guy, and it’s easy to assume that if YOU are cool with having a female CEO, others would be as open too. I disregarded the post entirely until I noticed commenters saying that women just don’t have the right skills for software. I thought this was a bogus statement, so I commented back. It isn’t nature that ensures there are no women in the tech space. I used to be quite good at math and science. I just gave it up because there are a lot of societal pressures on women and frankly, the sciences are a very lonely place for us and I like having friends.

What ensued honestly freaked me out. People would state their impressive credentials and then would put out some of the most illogical, hateful statements I have ever seen. I continued to comment, trying to keep my cool figuring it would do me no service to be nasty about it. I was continually painted as a whiny, know-it-all manhater, almost always by anonymous or obscured commenters. I was called beyond horrible names. It was bizarre enough to almost be funny. Almost.

Prior to installing Disqus, an innovative commenting system, the men behind the curtain of TechCrunch (in this case Arrington and MG Siegler) would have deleted the nasty comments and then grumbled to themselves that humanity is going to hell in a hand basket. But Disqus is real-time and comments show up literally as fast as people can type them. When a nasty comment would pop up, Arrington or Siegler would attempt to delete it and thirty, often nastier threads would show up after it. As the real-time web becomes more prevalent, it will become easier and easier for online mobs to take these pot shots at people with little fear of repercussion. After all, the moderators can’t control them anymore.

People want power. Nice people want it and mean people want it. Like it or not, TechCrunch has it, so it attracts the good AND the bad element no matter what. That’s just reality. As the web speeds up and becomes more connected, it will be up to US to ensure that this blog and other blogs we read are fair and civil for everyone. It’s up to decent men to tell the sexist ones that their jokes and vitriol are not acceptable. It’s up to women to stand up for each other instead of tearing each other apart, or simply ignoring the the problem. Not just when it is easy to add a +1 to a blog post opposing such buffoonery like my last one, but when someone is getting hounded by trolls for standing up for what is right, when it’s brutally hard. The web, like the real world, can be a cruel place. You can’t expect the man behind the curtain to fix all the nastiness for you. It’s just too hard of a job for one person to handle.

Share and Enjoy:

Pictured above are speakers of the forthcoming Cutter Summit. Between the seventeen of us we will cover a broad spectrum of IT topics such as Agile, Enterprise Architecture, Business Strategy, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Governance and Security. Inter-disciplinary seminars, panels and case studies will weave all those threads together to give participants a clear view of the unfolding transformation in IT and of the new way(s) companies are starting to utilize IT. Click here for a details.

As Jim Highsmith and I continue to develop our joint seminar on technical debt for the summit, I would like to give readers of this blog a sense of where we are and ask for feedback. Right now we are considering the following building blocks for the seminar:

• The Nature of Technical Debt
• Technical Debt Metrics
• Monetizing Technical Debt
• Constructing Roadmaps for Paying Back Technical Debt
• Risk Assessment and Mitigation
• A Simple Software Governance Framework
• Schedule in the Simple Governance Framework
• Enlightened Governance
• Baking in Quality One Build at a Time
• How Often Should the Project Team Regroup?
• Multi-Level Governance
• Extending  Technical Debt Techniques to Devops
• Use of Technical Debt Techniques in Agile Portfolio Management
• The Start Afresh Option
• Technical Debt as an Integral Part of a Value Delivery Culture

In the course of going through a subset of these building blocks, we will cover the latest and greatest from the October issue of the Cutter IT Journal on technical debt, present two case studies, and conduct a few group exercises.