Jon battled 32+ degree heat to complete the grueling IRONMAN triathlon along side his brother-in-law Pat.  It was a family affair and a point of pure pride for the Holt’s, the Teucher’s and everyone here at E-By Design Technologies.   Congratulations to you both.

Join us and raise a glass to Jon for having the strength of an Ironman and integrity to match!

Cheers,

Eunice

The first speaker, Ms. Shelley Hessian, presented us with the statistics of exactly where we stand with regards to representation in this industry.  The truth is we are under represented in the field and that under representation gets more and more significant as you move up the career ranks.  It is shockingly low when comparing the numbers of start up founders and C-Level positions held by women versus those held by men.

The third speaker, Chadia Moghrabi, enlightened us on the challenges and statistics of positions and income levels of females in Academia.  Similarly the differences in salary and opportunities for women in technology and Academia in general are significant.  As women it is often our careers that suffer in the face of heavy obligations outside of our careers.

These challenges are real, significant and surmountable.  I have been extremely fortunate to have bucked the trends outlined by my fellow speakers.  I graduated from a high tech college, I climbed the career ladder to the directorship level and I started my own tech firm.

The most significant statement I would advise women to take from the forum was a question from Ms. Simpson-McKay.

The question was: “Eunice, Did you have a mentor ?”

The answer is that I have had a mentor throughout my entire career, someone that advised me, helped me navigate my career for the sake of my success.  In the coming posts I will write about my mentors, how they became my mentors and how they allowed me to be as strong and committed in this career as I have been.

So I have a question for you.  Are you a women in technology, do you have a mentor?

Form over substance

If you’ve been following along, you know that the form information takes is pretty important to me.  So when I sat down to pull together my thoughts on my goals for 2011, the first thought that occurred to me was “how am I going to record this?”  Notepad, google docs, blog post all flashed quickly through my head.  And then I thought “hmmm, I wonder if I could do the mapping from high level to low level goals, how could I use visio to graph the whole thing?”  ”How would that look?”  ”How could I update the lower level goals quickly and easily without messing with the big ones?”  And here I am writing a blog post about how I’m setting my 2011 goals, rather than actually setting them.  See a common theme there?  Yup, how.

If what’s on second, how’s not even on the field

It occurred to me as I was beating myself up for an inability to even get started on this goal setting that defining how is what I do.  I define how a client captures their data.  I define how they’ll interact with software.  I define how that software is deployed.  I define how the web servers, integration servers and database servers interact.  I define how data is stored.  I define how data is accessed. How, how, how.  The what I leave to the clients.  So when I sit down to do something for myself, all of a sudden I’m the client and forced to define the what.  And its haaaaaaaaaaard.

The difference between knowing and defining

I know what my goals are.  I know what I want to achieve.  The hard part is verbalizing them discreetly.  The hard part is writing them down in some meaningful way.  The hard part is defining what I know in a way that makes sense outside of myself.  And so through this process, I think I’ve discovered one of my goals for this year:  engage earlier in the process and help my clients define what they know.

Now to define the rest of them.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The best piece of advice I can give is to never spend your goodwill where you can spend your good dollars.  Goodwill is a hard won trophy built with an investment of character and integrity.  You earn it by showing yourself as honorable, reliable and worthy of a friendship at least and a partnership at best.  With goodwill a partner can share it with others and it never diminishes.  Like ideas, goodwill never separates, it duplicates, creating more and more goodwill.

Dollars on the other hand can be earned in many ways far more easily.  They can be replaced if lost and simple to find if needed.  Dollars take little effort and can be managed by hired guns or summer students.  They are undiscriminating, and unfettered by accountabilities and responsibilities.  Dollars can be stolen or gambled and, truly, you cannot take them with you when you go…to a new job or a new relationship.

So when you think to yourself “How can I save money and get this done” make sure you are still spending money not goodwill.  If you find you are spending goodwill, make sure you can afford it.

On October 9th we moved from 3196 Capstan Cres to 4003 – 1178 Heffley Cres and what a beautiful move it is.  We still over look the scenic North Shore.  The west side of the office offers a view straight out through the inlet and Lion’s Gate bridge.   On the south a beautiful view of Mount Baker.

If you find yourself in the neighborhood stop by E-By Design Tech in the Obelisk building, the tallest building in Coquitlam (I’m told).

• Banks are required to carry capital of at least 7% of risk-weighted assets
• Banks are required to carry capital of at least 3% of all assets
• Banks are required to carry sufficient liquid assets to cover 30 days of liabilities

The question I have is, so what?  Credit Unions in this country have been doing that and better for years.

I’ve been involved in credit unions for years now.  Mostly I do it because of their commitment to community and if you’re from a small town like I am, you’ll know how important that is.  But there are many very good financial reasons to get involved to.  Learning from the best is part of why I sat on the Board of Directors for Servus Credit Union.  But back to Basel III.

If you look at the credit union act in your province, you’re going to find that it takes each one of these statements and one-ups it.  Lets look at each in turn.

Capital % of assets

 So what does Capital mean anyway?  Well, capital is basically the difference between what a bank owes and what it owns.  Banks are a bit tricky, though, because they look at things backwards to you and me.  To you, when you deposit money in the bank, that money is an asset.  Its money you have for later.  To a bank, that same deposit is a liability and it goes squarely against its liabilities, what it owes.  Money you owe the bank, like your mortgage, to you, is a liability.  Money you have to payback every month.  To a bank, that’s an asset.  The mortgage value and the interest it will accrue are booked as assets, what it owns.  In theory, the assets are there to assure lenders (the people that have given the bank money, including you with your savings account), that if things go south, they can liquidate assets and cover their debts.  The difficulty with banks is that they typically need to keep a bunch of cash around (deposited by you and therefore a liability) to cover off the mandatory capital requirements.  When you pair that with investors who’d like to see those assets liquidated in order to produce dividends, captital requirements are not popular.  And that is what got them in trouble in the first place.

Basel III mandates that banks hold (by 2019) 7% of their Risk-weighted assets and 3% of total assets as captital at all times.   Risk-weighted refers to those assets which carry a certain degree of risk of default or of non-liquidity and consequently the requirements are higher as they may not actually be convertible to cash in a time of need.  Those seem like pretty resonable numbers, don’t they?

So how about your local credit union?  Well, in Alberta at any rate (and most other provinces are similar, or identical), the capital requirements are:

• 4% of total assets; and
• 8% of risk weighted assets

a full point ahead of even the newest, most conservative measures in place for banks and they’ve been that way for years.  On top of that many of the credit unions, such as Servus hold capital in the range of 8.5% of total assets and 12.5% of RWAs.

Liquidity

And then there’s liquidity, the ability of a Bank to pay its liabilities without going to the market to sell any of its assets.  Basel III has the provision that banks have enough cash/liquid assets on hand to be able to repay 30 days of its liabilities at all times.  In big banks, that’s a lot of cash.  But that’s like saying that you are expected to have cash on hand to be able to pay all of your monthly bills.  While not all of us are that disciplined, its not a strech to conceive of being able to manage that, so why should we not expect our Banks to be able to pay their bills either?

Now, as I understand it with the credit unions, there’s probably going to need to be a change too.  Carrying a 100% of a months net cash outflows is a serious endeavor.  But at least they had a liquidity ratio requirement in Act:

• Under the Credit Union Act of Alberta the Credit Union is required to maintain a liquidity ratio of
  9% of two months prior average monthly liabilities.

9% of the last 2 months is a heck of lot more than nothing, which was basically what the banks were relying on before.

Guarantee

There’s also a little thing about guarantee.  If you read into the liquidity and more importantly the capital requirements, you’ll quickly realize that if everything went south, even with the high levels of capital held by credit unions, there wouldn’t be enough money to cover the total liabilities the bank holds.  So if everything went south, would you get your money back?

Well, in the banks, if you had less than $100,000 deposited, yes.  That’s what the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation assures you of.  And the credit unions?  Well, the Deposit Guarantee Corporation provides assurance of 100%, with no maximums.  So even if your credit union folded, you’d get every last penny back.  So protections of Basel III aside, which would you rather?

I’m not sure what all the hubub is about, really, but I guess its just an indicator of how bad things were before that this is heralded as the next best thing to sliced bread.  Be glad, I suppose, that the world is waking up and enforcing a certain degree of accountability on the banks.  But then go put your money in your local credit union.

There are many words like this in the technology industry but today’s word is Integrate.  We hear it often, we are building software that must integrate into our back office.  We are integrating our social media into our financials and CRM and so forth.

Software Systems Integration: the process by which smaller units of software are combined together to form a larger system of software – sometimes a very large software system – to solve design problems. – Wikipedia

Integration of units of software that are not small or do not resemble each other is a little more tricky.  When you purchase a system that you would like to complement an existing system the likelihood of integration is rather slim.  There’s a good chance the new system was not built when the old system was built.  Although the technology names are similar the technology is very different.  C++  is not the same animal and C#.  Oracle 7 is a fundamentally different than Oracle 11i and if you’ve ever upgraded Peoplesoft to Peoplesoft you completely understand why its called magic (or miracle, depending on your faith).

When you are “joining” two products produced by different organizations from different technology eras⁽¹⁾ integration is a term often used but as conceivable as having a pet dinosaur in modern day Alberta.  The actual event that happens is mapping, an application programming interface is built that is multilingual and adaptable to all eras that allows each system to live while communicating through time.

It is this type of “joining” the software industry refers to in design diagrams as “the Magic Happens Here”⁽²⁾

1 Technology Era: Period of time spanning 24 to 48 months.

2 Magic Decoder Ring Forging.  ”One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. ” –  The Lord of the Rings