This book is divided into five parts:

• Part I — what is technology and how it affects your business and daily life
• Part II — who are the technologists
• Part III — explores your technology needs and helps you create your technology plan
• Part IV — helps you learn how to manage technology
• Part V — helps you standardize your approach to technology

Part I: Choosing Your Flavor of Technology

The goal for this part of the book is to give you an idea of what technology really means today. Like everything else in life, technology has many flavors. The dominant flavors are:

• Microsoft — technology for the masses
• Open Source — masses for technology

A boutique flavor that is worthy of mention is Apple — technology with style. In this part of the book I will discuss these pieces of the technology puzzle to give you an idea of how they might play role in your organization.

Chapters in this sections are:

• Chapter X: The Microsoft Way - the paved road to the empire
• Chapter X: The Open Source Way - the rocky road to perceived freedom
• Chapter X: The Buzzy Way - the alphabet soup
• Chapter X: The Pragmatic “Whatever Works” Way

Part II: Choosing Your Technologists

This part of the book focuses on the people behind technology.

• Chapter X: Religious Technologists - War, Flame and Shame
• Chapter X: Consultant Technologists - Creator of Work at Work
• Chapter X: In-house DIY Brewery
• Chapter X: The Genius Freelancer
• Chapter X: Outsourcing far far away
• Chapter X: True Technology Partners - Lifestyle

Part III: Understanding Your Needs

• What are Your Technology Needs?
• Focusing on Your Big Picture
• Divide and Conquer Works

Part IV: Software Project Management 101

• Why Software Projects Fail
• Self-assessment of Your Existing Projects
• Managing Expectations
• Software is As Good As People Who Make’em
• Estimating Cost of a Software Project
• Lessons Learned
• Ten Steps to Avoid Failure

Part V: Policy Matters

Small companies do not have time for policies; they greatly operate on ad-hoc decisions or half-baked analysis. Of course, they have to as they do not have hundred grand lying around to hire a system analyst to study and report implications of technology choices.

However, with a little bit of massaging, you can really come up with some basic technology policies that can yield a great return over time. I have attempted to provide you with a set of basic framework-grade policies for the most common needs. The following chapters cover these base technology policies.

• Chapter X: Technology Vendor Selection Policy
• Chapter X: Technology Audit Policy
• Chapter X: Security Policy
• Chapter X: Privacy Policy
• Chapter X: Understanding Service Level Agreements

Appendices

• Appendix A: Great Software for Your Employee Desktops
• Appendix B: Great Software for Your Servers
• Appendix C: Code Quality Audit
• Appendix D: Quality Assurance
• Appendix E: Incremental Development Cycle