Keeping it Simple

We have a general philosophy here to keep things as simple as possible. That manifests itself in terms of trying to minimize the number of different technologies we are using. This keeps our environment simpler. It also allows us to be much more flexible and nimble in flowing technology resources into areas where they are most needed. This allows us to deploy our technical talent more broadly across the board, rather than pigeonholing people into a particular technology space that is providing a narrow set of benefits to the company. We also look to select technologies that we believe have "legs," ones that we expect to be around and supported down the road. As a Fortune 500 company, we assess the long-term value of technology very carefully - when we put in a technology, we need it to scale and we expect it to last. We are growing very rapidly and have to make sure that things that we select today are going to meet the needs of the business several years down the road, not just today. That is sometimes difficult to do when you are growing rapidly in the dot-com space, where the technology is often immature. We are still using things that we built three years ago, but we have had to regularly update them to meet the changing current and future needs of the business.

It is easy to get caught up in looking for the most elegant technical solution for a problem, not realizing that the best technology may not provide the most value to the business. I believe in standardizing and picking technologies that may not be the most technically elegant, but that can be applied broadly to do multiple jobs well and that we know are going to have very strong vendor support down the road as well.

When we do a new project, we always look first at the technology we already have in house. Even though another technology may have a slightly higher degree of fit to our requirements, we will not bring in a new technology unless we have a compelling business case to offset the increased support and complexity costs of adding it in.