“Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.” — Benjamin Franklin 

The thought of debt can be a scary one that conjures up images of credit cards, mortgages, car payments, and sleepless nights.  To most of us, it’s simple to define:  an amount of money you owe someone else. 

But, the concept of debt is not always related to dollars and cents.   

This was weighing heavily on my mind last week as I was looking at my end-of-year-calendar. 

In the IT field, the term “technical debt” is often used to describe the habit of taking technical shortcuts that, over time, accumulate and cause more work down the road.  Because it’s hard to quantify and often hidden from management until it’s out of control, the buildup of technical debt on a project is sometimes even more dangerous to a company than money owed on a balance sheet. 

Delaying IT infrastructure upgrades to save money, not testing software thoroughly because of a tight deadline, blowing off doing a disaster recovery plan—these are common examples of shortcuts that build up technical debts that will always come back to bite you if not paid off at some point. 

There are other types of debt as well.    

Some of us (me) eat too much and build up an “exercise debt” that we must pay off at some point if we want to maintain a healthy weight.   Some work too much, building up a “sleep debt.” Others play too much and amass a “work debt.”    

These non-financial “soft” debts are more difficult to measure than what we traditionally think of as debt, but they have real costs nonetheless.  And just like money debt, if you’re not careful, you can spend all your time and resources paying the interest instead of paying down the principal. 

Proactively managing different types of debt is an often overlooked but critical skill that determines the long-term viability of every business.  Soft debts should be tracked and managed in much the same way that financial debts are. 

In tech, we call it a “backlog.”  It’s simply a list of any tech-related shortcuts, band-aids or items we skimp on because of deadline or budget constraints, along with estimates of how much work (debt) it will take us to fix them down the road.  Some technical debts are intentional – a conscious choice to save time or money. Others are accidental, discovered in the form of bugs.   

As the backlog list grows, the key is to treat each item as a debt owed, the same way you would as if you were making payments on a bank loan.   This involves planning your “savings” (in the form of time) so that you can eventually make your “payments” (in the form of future work).    We basically mark off time on our calendars for every project to pay off our backlog debts. 

Earlier this year we began to explore this simple backlog approach to managing other areas of debt in our company.   As expected, just like tech, the constraints of time and budget created a backlog in everything from HR to marketing.  Things like updating our employee handbook and standardizing our email signatures made it to our backlog.  And just like tech debt, we have marked our calendars for our end of year payments to clear out the backlogs. 

Thinking of debt as something that is beyond a purely a financial metric has changed the way we operate.  It’s forced us to justify any shortcuts we take company-wide, because we are now tracking them as real costs rather than forgotten to-do lists that will inevitably come back to haunt us. Sleep well. 

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba.  A Nashville IT consulting and custom software development firm.  Visit www.atiba.com or www.atibanetworkservices.com for more info. 

Sometimes the best thing about loving your job is being able to share it with other people. Atiba believes in investing in the future, and a few weeks ago, Atiba employees hosted a group of young software developers in our Nashville office for “Shadow Day.”

Here’s the feedback we got…

My Shadow Day at Atiba:

I came to Nashville last Tuesday to do a shadow day  at Atiba. I am a recent graduate from the school Bowling Green State University in Ohio and am looking to become a full time web developer. On Wednesday I got to see what the Tech scene in Nashville is like in person and it is very cool.

The office at Atiba has a very unique aesthetic as it is located in an old car factory that now is host to many different businesses. At the top of the office is were all of the coders at Atiba work and it reminded me of a scene from AMC’s show Halt and Catch Fire. For the majority of the day I got to talk to and learn from lots of different coders while they worked on their projects. One big thing that helped me is seeing what languages and programs are used in the industry so I could see what I still need to learn. Later on I got to go out to lunch with all of the programmers at Osake for some of the best sushi I have had. After we got back I got a chance to watch some C programming and understand the workflow of the programmers at Atiba

After having the chance to see a real tech company in action, it has made me want to dive into the programming world even more than before. I am very excited to see what things will come next in the tech world and for myself.

Shadowing is one of the most valuable job experiences someone new on the job market can have.  Interested in shadowing at Atiba?   Email us at jobs@atiba.com !

A Day in the Life of an Atiba Nashville Angular Developer

Sharing what we do Atiba so both clients and potential employees can see the behind the scenes of what’s it like being a coder in Nashville is part of our culture.  AngularJS / Angular coding along with ReactJS has been some of the main coding we have been working on for our clients the past few years.

Here’s a peak at a day the life of an Atiba Nashville Angular developer:

• We did our stand-up meetings with clients and/or internal development teams first thing every morning at 8 am each day.
• From there, I usually connect into Jira to look at the user stories I will be working on for the day
• I started in Angular but now I have been focusing in Angular 2.x development.   I have 2 main projects I am working on.  One is working on the front-end of an intranet site and the other is for a large public website we developed and support called Guitars.com.
• Lunch! We usually pickup lunch (we have a Microsoft Teams Channel we use to coordinate lunch plans.  Sometimes we all go out / depends on the day.
• After lunch I either keep the Angular coding going — or depending on deadlines I will use some of my learning time that Atiba builds into the week to study new tech (currently working on learning PHP Laravel)
• Wind down ~5 pm or so, some days stay later others done a bit sooner.

I have been working at Atiba for 7 years.  I started as a C# coder and still work on some .Net but have enjoyed mixing it up a bit!

Atiba has some of Nashville’s best front-end developers with a crew of JavaScript gurus doing Angular, React, JQuery and more.   Let us know if we can can ever help you with you project!

The combination of tech and kid gets a bad rap.  Is tech bad for kids?  Not always…

JJ Rosen from Atiba — our bi-weekly Tennessean.com column on biz-tech topics for Nashville and beyond.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2018/09/28/technology-and-kids-really-such-bad-thing/1447161002/

A quick Drupal overview from Nashville’s Drupal Developers…

Drupal is free software, written in PHP, which has a wide and active community of users and developers who collaborate together in its improvement and expansion. Drupal is designed to be the perfect content management solution for non-technical users who need both simplicity and flexibility. This is achieved with a modular approach to site construction.  Unlike other CMSs, Drupal is not a prefabricated toy truck, but rather a collection of wheels, windshields, axles, frames, etc., that a toy manufacturer can easily assemble.

Drupal can be described both as a content management system and as a content management environment: a unified system that strives to have the advantages of both, without its shortcomings. In this way, if someone is looking to create a news site, an online store, social networks, blog, wiki, or something totally different, it is all about finding the right combination of modules.

This extension is possible because it is a modular system with a very consistent architecture, which allows modules created by any developer to interact with the core of the system and modules created by other members of the community. With Drupal, it is possible to implement a wide variety of websites: a personal or professional blog, a corporate portal, a virtual store, a social network or virtual community, etc … Directed to those people, with technical training or not, who want to start in the creation of Web Portals with Drupal. It is also very useful for companies or professionals who want to create their professional or personal web portal without external dependencies.

Drupal is an open source program, with GNU / GPL license, written in PHP, developed and maintained by an active community of users. It stands out for the quality of its code and the pages generated the respect of web standards, and a special emphasis on the usability and consistency of the entire system. Online help: A robust online help system and help pages for the ‘core’ modules, both for users and administrators.

Open source: The Drupal source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU / GPL license. Unlike other systems of ‘blogs’ or proprietary content management, it is possible to extend or adapt Drupal according to the needs.

Modules: The Drupal community has contributed many modules that provide features such as ‘category page’, private messages, bookmarks, etc.

Personalization: A robust personalization environment is implemented in the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized according to the preferences defined by the user.

Friendly URLs: Drupal uses the mod_rewrite of Apache to create URLs that are manageable by users and search engines

The European Union Parliament is set to enforce the most significant piece of European data protection legislation in 20 years. The General Data Protection Act (GDPR) goes into effect on May 25 of this year and could impact any organization that has or plans to have website/app visitors from the EU.

The GDPR replaces the Data Protective Directive of 1995 with the intention to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe. It is a comprehensive data law written to protect all EU citizens data privacy, and it applies to any organization that processes personal data of those residing in the EU, such as tracking their online activities. It does not matter if an entity does not have a physical location in the EU or is not based in the EU, if that entity is currently servicing people in the EU, or plans to, it must comply with GDPR.

Personal data applies to any information that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person or subject.

Key Changes

The biggest changes that the GDPR incites are an increase in territorial scope and a change in consent laws

• Territorial Scope: The GDPR encompasses a large amount of people as it does not matter where the company is located that is processing information as long as users reside in the EU.
• Consent: The GDPR will strengthen the conditions for consent. Under the GDPR, conditions for consent must for given in an intelligible and easily accessible form. People need to know what they are giving consent for without having to decipher legalese. Explicit consent will be required for processing sensitive personal data, but for non-sensitive data unambiguous consent is permissible.
• Data Protection Officer: A DPO is only required for public authorities, organizations that engage in large scale systematic monitoring, or organizations that engage in large scale processing of sensitive personal data.

Additional Rights

The GDPR also grants additional rights to data subjects, which includes:

• The right to be informed. Data collectors must be transparent about how they are using personal data and must inform subjects of their data usage.
• The right of access. This right improves data transparency and empowers the data subject to be informed whether a company is using their personal data, and how and why it is being processed.
• The right of rectification. When possible and reasonable, data subjects will be allowed to have their personal data edited if they believe it to be incomplete or inaccurate.
• The right to erasure. Data subjects have the right to have their personal data permanently deleted upon request. Reasons for deleting data include, but are not limited to, a withdrawal of consent or a lack of relevance of the data to the original request.
• The right to data portability. Data subjects have the right to the data they have previously submitted concerning themselves, and the ability to resubmit that data to another controller.
• The right to object. Data subjects are allowed to object to their personal data being used.

Steps to Prepare

To prepare for the implementation of GDPR come May 25, 2018, organizations should take the following steps:

1. Determine where data currently comes from and resides. Figure out what is done with that data.
2. Determine what data the organization needs to keep and what data no longer suits its needs.
3. Put security measures in place to guard against data breaches.
4. Review all privacy statements and disclosures to ensure they are in compliance with GDPR.
5. Establish procedures for handling the new rights available to data subjects under GDPR.

Not complying with the GDPR will result in fines of up to 4 percent annual global turnover or $25 million, depending on which is higher.

Microsoft partnered with CELA (Microsoft Corporate, External, & Legal Affairs) back in 2015 to bring productivity tools to law firms and departments with security and seamless integration being some of its goals.

Dedicated to helping consumers work smarter and not harder, Microsoft Matter Center combines the best offerings from Office 365 and Microsoft Azure (a secure cloud network) for a legal department’s needs.

Matter Center integrates directly with Outlook meaning that users can get the same functionality of shared calendars and email communication with additional security encryption for the most sensitive of cases.

Matter Center also incorporates key functionality specific to law firms/departments. For instance, Creation of Matters lets users create cases in Office 365 and add notes such as the case description and case conflict verification. These notes can be uploaded and managed from Office 365 through Matter Center. Matter Center also streamlines the process of tracking information for cases. It provides a centralized information tracking mechanism for people to work on cases individually or as a group. Users can share notes and discuss the case at length over the document.

Matter Center is the easiest tool to incorporate into daily practice. It serves as a central location to upload documents and allows employees to work remotely with ease by providing access to all the case information online.

Atiba is a leading Microsoft Partner able to provide expert level consulting services on many Microsoft products, including Matter Center. Reach us at 615.353.1921 or info@atiba.com for assistance in switching your legal department to Matter Center today.

There has been a lot of buzz around Nashville over the last few years about the arrival of Google Fiber. There are T-Shirts, Twitter posts about fiber being installed in neighborhoods, and a general excitement about the potential what this high-speed network option has to offer.

Some small businesses can get overwhelmed at the thought of setting up a new network for the office, especially if they have been using the same provider for years or decades. Questions about data security and cloud computing hang in the air, and many businesses don’t know where to look for help.

That’s where the Google Fiber Tech Partner program comes in. Google has authorized small to medium sized businesses with IT capabilities to officially help businesses to make the most of their new Google Fiber connection. Google Fiber Tech Partners can help with:

• VoIP
• Virtualization
• Email hosting and spam protection
• Cloud computing
• Enterprise IT architecture
• Virtual data centers
• Disaster recovery
• Help desk services
• General hardware consulting

Atiba is a proud Google Fiber Tech Partner. In fact, we were the first company in the greater Nashville area to be named to the program. If you need help or guidance setting up your Google Fiber network, call us at 615.353.1921, drop us a line at info@atiba.com, or fill out the Nashville Google Fiber Partner form online and we’ll let you know how we can help.

Many established businesses that don’t provide technology services have an on-site IT team out of necessity. As a company grew, there were enough desktops, laptops, servers, networks to maintain that an IT staff was necessary to keep everything up and running smoothly.

However, times are changing, and with more and more computing and storage being moved to the cloud, some companies are finding themselves with fewer IT situations to have to keep up with. That’s where CIO To Go services come in.

Outsourcing your IT services can be far more efficient and effective than having a dedicated full-time staff. There is little to no up-front investment involved, and no salaries and benefits to keep up with.

With CIO to go, you don’t necessarily have to completely eliminate your IT department if you don’t want to, but you can use a third-party company to handle specific aspects of your tech needs, and only pay for the time that you use. For example, if you have legacy systems that are still critical to your operation, you could keep maintenance and updates to that in-house and outsource everything else.

As you add new processes and start using the cloud more, outsourced IT services may begin to make more sense. Your CIO To Go service provider keeps up with the latest technology and trends, and can guide you and keep you up-to-date on all your technology systems.

It takes time to transition to a CIO To Go, also know as It as a Service (ITaaS), and it can create a cultural shift in your company, so weigh your options carefully. If you’re thinking of switching, call us at 615.353.1921 or send an email to info@atiba.com and we’ll be glad to go over your options.

Drupal and WordPress are both excellent Content Management Systems (CMS) to use as a foundation for a business website. But there are differences. If you are looking to build a new business website, you might be wondering which platform is right for you.

WordPress started as a blogging platform and is a great choice for most basic websites that need robust content and navigation, need to look good, and might need to be updated by you or a non-technical team member at your company quickly and easily. Good examples are tourist attractions, law firms, non-profits, event websites like music festivals or a beauty and fashion website. Those are just a few examples. Most basic businesses that need a website to get information out about what you do should consider using WordPress.

Drupal is the platform to use if your website is going to do a lot of heavy lifting. If your site is going to be very complex with a lot of content, like an eCommerce marketplace with a million items (SKUs), Drupal is probably the choice for you.

Similarly, having individual users on your site can be a very complex management task, especially if the user base is expected to be large and will need to be sorted by many different data points for different functions.

A lot of enterprise projects use Drupal, like government and school websites, because you can program several different sites (for different departments) with different databases, but still use the same Drupal base code.

This is a simple explanation to get you started thinking in the right direction. If you’re unsure, talk to a company like Atiba, with experts on staff in both WordPress and Drupal, to find out the best way to build a site for your business.