i’ve stumble upon, hopefully, my last big technological project. we’ve been touting the ‘efficiency’ of all departments for the company and today i signed a 3 year contract with salesforce. that’s a pretty big commitment in a very short time but the writing has been on the wall. our systems have been unable to grow with us and it’s breeding a bunch of headaches and inefficiencies. the question is if this huge time/money investment is going to pay off. it will pay off, it just a question of how long before we get out of that ‘unsweetened’ spot where we don’t quite have the economy of scale. i’ve made a lot of technological investsments in the past 11 years and although there have been a few duds, quite a few have stuck on for the better. first was migrating to a out source hosted option of our photos. god, i remember having to code everything myself in java and shit. i am so glad those days are over. then our internal servers where a mess to maintain until we moved to google apps. and then there was the case of the self hosted CRM. again, the story again and again was that i need to move everything towards a cloud base system when i want to focus on the business. as much as i like the initial control of the technology, i have learn to ‘trust’ the cloud, certainly i knew i couldn’t barely keep 80% uptime for all the tech crap. anyway, i am hoping this latest investment will have the biggest impact of all the systems we have ever used. as expensive as it sounds, $125/per user per month and for a company size of 10, it adds up quick. still, when i think about how much time is being wasted in being inefficient, it’s a fairly easy calculation to show that as the company grows, the efficiency gain of robust system will easily outpace the expense of the investment. anyway, i’ve been in a big ‘development’ mode for the past several weeks so i don’t know if i will write again until this project is done. i want to get it done by dec 1st so i can train peopple and take my sabbatical.