We believe in being up front. Honesty. Transparency. Frankness.
So we’re a bit disappointed that we won’t be joining you guys for some conferences this year. We could, but … well, we’d have to pay to be there. I’m not talking about the registration fee. I’m talking paying to be up on the stage.
Yep. There were several conferences we looked at that were eager for us to speak – as long as we were willing to pay for the privilege. Whether we had something good to say wasn’t the criteria, and that just didn’t sit well with us. Kind of a switcharoo on those who want to hear from people of substance and not just those of means and opportunity.
That kind of wheeling and dealing certainly doesn’t increase credibility for vendors who do take the stage. And hurts attendees by not focusing on what makes for good content first. Our call to conferences would be to cut the games and judge presentations on the fit for the audience first and foremost and only. (And for you, the attendees, to demand and expect that!)
Understand, we’re not trying to whine about it… or whinny. We’re just sorry we won’t have as many opportunities to “spread the gospel” of learning standards and meet as many of you as we originally hoped. However, we will be able to catch you at a few places in the next few months:
- Learning Solutions – Not a speaking gig, but you can hook up with Mike next month in Orlando.
- e-Learning DevCon 2010 – Mike gets the really technical, heavy-lifting presentations. He’s got two at this conference, one talking about what to include about SCORM in an RFP for an LMS (based on his white paper) and a hands-on technical session showing how to take advantage of our open platform to develop modules and plugins and extensions that take learning anywhere.
- International Conference on e-Learning in the Workplace – Tim and I (or one or both) are scheduled to present here. Two sessions, one explaining SCORM in plain English (as plain as I can make it) and one looking at the kind of reporting you can get out of SCORM.
- Campus Technology 2010 – Mike will be in Boston for this one with a longer version of our SCORM in plain English presentation. Check him out on Wednesday afternoon (July 21) and be sure to ask a lot of questions.
Got something specific you’d love to see us cover in a session? Let me know and we’ll make sure to answer it! (Well, OK, I’ll try to make sure it’s on the agenda. Can’t control what happens after that sometimes.) Going to be at the same conference? Definitely let us know because we love putting face/voices/reality to online connections.
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“You want to work here.” That’s how we’ve always begun our job postings, and we constantly strive to live up to that promise. Being a great place to work is at the essence of Rustici Software. Tim and I want to create a company that we enjoy working on everyday and where others are just as pleased. We think we’ve done a pretty darn good job, but we’re pleased to see that others agree. Last month, the Nashville Business Journal announced that it too thinks Rustici Software is one of Nashville’s Best Places to Work. So thank you NBJ. And thank you employees…it’s really easy to create a great company when you have a group of talented and driven folks making you look good!
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People often ask us to recommend an LMS for them. We shy away from doing so because we don’t want to pick favorites amongst our clients and potential clients. More significantly though, we really don’t know all that much about the functionality and utility of a particular LMS beyond its SCORM interface.
“Well then,” the inquisitor asks, “who has the best SCORM interface?”. Well duh, our SCORM Engine clients of course.
“Come on,” he presses, “who else is good at this stuff?”. One of the first names that comes to mind has always been SumTotal. That judgement is far from a scientific; we don’t go out and technically audit the details of every LMS’s SCORM implementation. Rather, it is an empirical judgement based on how many problems our content customers report with an LMS. More than that, though, it is the experience in working with the vendor if a problem is found. Are they receptive and supporting? Do they have a pragmatic attitude that leads to collaboratively fixing the problem rather that just passing blame?
Historically, we’ve rarely had to deal with SumTotal problems. That bodes really well for the quality of their implementation. On the few occasions where we have had occasion to iron out a problem, we’ve had the pleasure of working directly with their lead SCORM developer, Ben Clark.
SumTotal is closing its Bellevue development office and sending Ben’s job over to India. When we heard the news, we jumped at the chance to bring him onboard. He accepted and will be starting with us next week!
The guys here often joke that I am “one of the top ten SCORM professionals”, well in my mind, Ben is a fellow “top-tenner”. We’ve worked together on the ADL Technical Working Group for several years and Ben has always impressed me with his insight, knowledge and reason. He’s equally adept at seeing the big picture and navigating the technical weeds.
SCORM is at a crossroads now. It needs to evolve and needs to be improved. There will be a lot of work done at ADL, LETSI and others over the next couple years. We plan to be heavily involved, contributing our time, energy and vision to ensure SCORM’s successful evolution. Ben will be joining me in this effort and should enable us to provide a lot more bandwidth to standards development activities. We’re looking forward to great things to come.
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I spent last night the Music City Future 50 Awards dinner for the 4th year in a row (we were also just selected for the BusinessTN Hot100 for the second year in a row). If you make the Future 50 five times, you get inducted into the “Hall of Fame”, and that means you have to give a speech at the awards dinner. This year, there were a record-setting seven HoF inductees…which means a lot of speeches. We listened to Clint Smith and Will Weaver of Emma do a stand-up bit, pink-boa-toting Hannah Paramore managed to (jokingly) credit her success to T&A and Jerry Bostelman of Vaco even busted out a little Kanye West impression (props to him for actually pronouncing our name correctly!).
All the speeches gave me some time to think about what I’ll say next year if we’re fortunate enough to earn the honor again. Every speech includes the requisite thanking of the employees, the spouses, the Chamber, etc. True, but boring, boring, boring. Tim thinks we should do a song and dance routine. That’s probably a little outside my comfort zone, but the possibility should inspire everybody out there to buy a lot of software from us in the 2009 fiscal year.
What struck me most about the possibility of being in the hall of fame next year is just how small we are. It’s amazing what a small group of highly talented people can accomplish. I sat there looking at companies with 150 employees and I felt no jealousy. There’s something special about a small cohesive group doing exceptional work that I never want to lose. Now, how do I turn that into a non-sleep inducing speech?
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“She picked us. She actually picked us!”
Categories: Culture, Ideas and Thoughts, SCORM Cloud
29 Jul 2009
By background, Mike and I are both technical folks. We went to the same school, graduated from the same program. While we both speak conversational English (as opposed to off-puting tech), neither of us has great expertise in marketing. Opinions? Yes. Expertise? Not so much. We have known for years that we would eventually need help in sharing Rustici Software’s products and abilities with the world. We just knew that finding the right person would be a magnitude more difficult than finding the right developer.
So, what did we do? We punted. We just kept finding great developers, handing over our development responsibilities to them, and taking on more of the marketing work ourselves.
A few months ago, I was perusing Seth Godin’s blog as I often do, and I came upon this post about his alternative MBA program. First off, the program itself sounded incredibly interesting. Second, I came upon someone’s bizarre concept of hiring a boss. This was intriguing. Bold even. So, I clicked through.
Can you say SERENDIPITY? (My mother certainly can; it’s among her favorite words!)
I kid you not… Mike and I both read Susan’s site cover to cover and immediately knew that she got the single most important thing to us… tone. SCORM we can teach. Tone, in our book, is something that has to be innately understood. We were going to be asking someone to help us market our company, and it was fundamentally important to us that her voice, her ethos, be consistent with ours.
So, we started to work our way through Susan’s well defined 10 step process. By about step 3, everyone in our offices knew that I was pretty excited. By about step 7, my dad was wondering what this was all about. (No, Dad, hiring process aren’t exactly what they were when you worked at the industrial brush company.)
And finally, step 10, where Susan comes to work, is set to occur August 24th. We’re thrilled. Sincerely. Susan is going to be helping us define, market, and evangelize the SCORM Cloud and the applications that get built around it. We hope you’ll come check up on Susan, Rustici Software, and what we build together over the next months and years.
Kudos to Susan on a bold approach to finding the right job. Kudos for voicing what we could expect of her and what we couldn’t. Kudos on her great taste in bosses. 
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