Platinum Solutions recently rolled out “Success Factors”, a web-based hosted application that we use for performance reviews and goal management. The company, SuccessFactors, touts their product as a “Performance & Talent Management” system. This system replaced a tired MS Word template that we have used for the past seven years.

I recently completed my first review for one of our superstar software developers named Navid. While I have sat through a lot of demo’s Success Factors when we were evaluating it for purchase, this was my first real hands-on use of the system.

Over the past seven years at Platinum Solutions, I have learned a lot about reporters and the press. However, I am always surprised at the angle a reporter chooses to take with a story, or what they consider to be newsworthy in general.

Take last week as an example. On Monday, the Washington Post ran a story about Platinum Solutions on the front page of the Business Section. The article was also featured on the front page of the washingtonpost.com website, and was one of the most frequently viewed articles. I received a ton of calls from friends, customers, and colleagues mentioning the story. It received a lot of attention.

I work in the software engineering industry, but my undergraduate degree is in civil engineering. During my undergraduate days, I spent a lot of time writing software programs to solve structural engineering problems, and I ended up pursuing software as a career rather than civil engineering. As a consequence of my degree and early jobs as a civil engineer, I often find myself comparing the software industry to the engineering and construction industries. For example, while some schedule slippage is common in the construction industry, it is nothing like the software industry, where schedule slippage is (unfortunately) almost expected and universally accepted as a reality of the software process.

In the July-August 2006 issue of American Scientist, Henry Petroski (a Civil Engineering professor at
Duke University) wrote an enjoyable article entitled “A Great Profession”. In this article, Petroski quotes mining engineer and
US President Herbert Hoover, who wrote of engineering:

It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

Welcome to the PlatinumSolutions blog.

PlatinumSolutions is a software development company that I co-founded in 1999. Since that time, I have had the privilege of working with some of the best minds in the software industry, on projects that are vital to national security, public safety, and the health and wellbeing of US citizens. We have an incredible team of software developers, engineers, and data management experts who routinely “do the impossible” in areas as diverse as codebreaking, image analysis, computer forensics, and mission support. Our team is called in when a customer has a particularly challenging problem that absolutely must get solved quickly - often after one of the large software contractors has tried and failed. It has been an incredibly rewarding six years, and I am looking forward to many more.