Wow, the weather has been beautiful in Houston this week. Clear skies, highs in the 70’s, lows in the 40’s. Nice. Makes a guy think he ought to spend more time outside doing more nothing more often.

But alas, it’s been a hard working week. One of those vortexes that pulls you in with it’s challenges and even a few mysteries, and spits you out the other side feeling swelled and spent, and maybe even a little wiser.

See - this week, I’ve been moving from the planning to the execution stages of a very interesting project. The idea is to assess a company’s very-broken-web-portal, decide what’s important about what clients are actually doing there, and then blow the whole thing up and redesign the portal to actually do those things. You’d be surprised how far from the mark one of these B2B web portals can stray. Years of operating with no vision for the product, no standards, no meaningful client input, and no resources… well, that can really mess things up. The good news is that most (ok, a lot?… ok, I’ll settle for “some”) of the functionality that needs to be there is there. The bad news is that the architecture for delivering it is broken, and users have to have a PhD in using the portal to be able to squeeze anything out of it.

These are not lazy or stupid people who built this thing, either. They thought they had all those things. They did the best they could with what they had as they went along. It’s ended up a little bit like the Winchester Mansion. I’m sure it gets much worse than this, but I’m also not sure I want to witness it if it does.

So I’ve managed to wade through the Swamp of Preparation. I’ve done the interviews and read/discussed the as-is documentation. I’ve waded through the wishlists. I’ve listened to all of the assessments of the technical hurdles and the occasional naysayer predicting (hoping for?) total doom and failure. It’s gelled. OK, gelling. I can see how it needs to be transformed.

Now comes the hard part.

In other news, I talked to my dad today and he almost shot his age (75) in golf last week. 76 at Champions on the Cypress course. Champion indeed. He said that putting felt like rolling the ball into a big bucket, and he sank 3 putts over 30 feet. My old man, in the zone.

I bet he could integrate enterprise-wide workflows within a web portal with one hand tied behind his back…

A couple of days ago, I decided that I’d like to put some effort into blogging again. Yes, again . As I upgraded WordPress (they are doing a great job with WP!) and moved some of my old blog posts over here, it became obvious to me - I’ve caught this bug in the 4th quarter of the last 2 years. The only real effort I’ve put into blogging has been in Oct-Dec of ‘05 and ‘06.

Reflecting on this, I think it may be due to a couple of things. First, this is the time of year that I begin to reflect on life, the last year, what I’ve accomplished and what I want to focus on in the upcoming year. Somehow blogging is something I’ve failed at by most standards, yet it keeps coming up on my want-to-do list.

Secondly, this is often the time of year that I get a breather between the worklife crunches of the summer and year end. Another opportunity for reflection and whatnot. Let’s see if I can apply some of the improved focus I have in other areas of my life to this blog, shall we?

In the meantime….