cOgwisE sOlutions & LocalWrkx–>

A Good Corporate Citizen

I feel that the best way to run a business is to be friends with as many as possible, share resources, be transparent and give back to the community when possible. It seems to me that there are a lot of companies who take advantage of the public, horde resources and are very opeque when it comes to their operations. My goal has always been to be the oposite of the problem. I guess some would call me an idealist and attribute that to my youth but some can do that if they like. Corporations have the rights of a citizen but the actions of this type of citizen are far from the actions of most other citizens due to the fact people can act on behalf of a company with very little or no personal responsibility.

Wealth In Ones & Zeros

As a company I feel the wealth we provide to our clients is not the software we produce but the holistic approach we take to development. We treat every client as a partner and as if their own success is relevant to our own success. I believe that in many cases our success is tied to that of our clients. Our image and whether or not people decide to work with us is based on the projects we have worked on and the caliber of clients we have. Though the primary programming language we use is Ruby on Rails we really are technologists in the fashion we approach the general goals of a website or software package and apply whatever technology we have at our disposal to see an idea from concept and theory to code and design and lastly marketing and promotion. Our value is in our ability to execute and the wisdom and knowledge about the application of technology to create something beautiful and functional.

Our Work Model

As a company we have adopted a 80/20 model of 80% contractors and 20% employees as to decrease the risk to our company, ourselves and to adopt a strategy that would allow us to serve the smallest clients in the hardest of times and the largest of clients we have when the demand is there. We keep a team pool and an individual contractor pool who have many varried skills and abilities. These contractors are familiar with our standards and internal practices which keep the quality of our development high. When we have the demand for a project we select from our team pool and individual pool the correct people with the right skills to develop the software. Some of these developers are all over the world. With the proper communication methods and tools it's like they were in our backyard. The only difficulty is cultural barriers, which we have overcome for the most part within our own developer pool and is only relevant when we have to expand to new contractors. Also, we always put in a very highly skilled project manager to lead any of our projects. That PM is always well versed in our standards and procedures that are modeled after an agile/scrum style of development. Without this element the project would fall apart. Lastly, we don't do credit. We are a financially responsible company that only spends what they have on hand. Our costs stay low, standards high and production quality is the utmost.

How'd We Get Here?

It seemed impossible at first. The projects we took on early before CogWise became a company (under the Bluepaw brand) were difficult and we were still forming our standards. We had very few contractors in our pool and every developer we would bring on would be a craps shoot about whether we could train them to meet our standards. We invested a ton of time, energy and creativity in producing resources that would make our offering better and internal standards/processes that made us more valuable. Bluepaw was more or less an experiment that lead to what CogWise blossomed in to. It would not be possible without a complete disregard for the ability to fail which all of us who have been building this have been endowed with.