Calling All Graphic Design Firms

"This is a wonderful service you offer the design industry and you should be congratulated for supporting your peers."

--Rick Tracy, Creative Director, Cambridge Design Group

For over ten years the Graphic Design Directory on greawriting.com has been one of Greater Boston's most frequently referenced online resources for finding great graphic design talent. Now it’s time for its annual update -- and this year I am casting as wide a net as possible. If you’re part of a great graphic design firm, this is one more opportunity to make yourself visible on the web. And if you know of a great graphic design firm, please pass along this invitation.



Getting listed is easy . . . just go to greatwriting.com/design and fill out the form. The listing is free and without obligation (although subject to my editorial review). You can also update the directory at any time either by completing a new form or sending me an email.

Warfighters and Developers

“You can imagine, you’re on a mission and an Error 404 message comes up. That’s the last thing you want to see.”

-- Boeing program manager

When the U.S. Army needed a Warfighter’s Machine Interface (WMI) it turned to Boeing. When Boeing needed interface technology beyond what was currently available off the shelf, it turned to Bedford, Mass. based Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS). And when ICS needed a writer to explain how all the different moving parts in this story fit together -- organizationally and technologically -- it turned to me. (Read the customer case here.)



The challenge, as so often is the case, was to make the story both technically robust and dramatically interesting. So I told it from essentially two perspectives -- the warfighter and the developer.

The warfighter needs a clear integrated on-screen representation of the battlefield, populated both by sensors in the field (visual, auditory and more) and by information received from globally deployed databases. The developer needed a new development environment, which the developer would have to create by extending existing tools, before even starting work on the actual interface itself.

Weaving these two threads together -- the battlefield imperatives and the development challenges -- made the case work on both levels.

Every Business Needs a Single Idea

“We reinvented how consultants get to work.”

If your company is founded on a single idea that either cannot be expressed or has not yet been expressed, that’s a problem. If you can’t express it, then it is not really an idea. And although you may have a company, you may not actually have a business.

That was once the fundamental issue facing my client, the ERP Consulting Exchange (ECX). However, it is very clear now what this enterprise is all about:

• Use social networks to create an affinity group of 3000+ ERP consultants by offering them low cost access to running SAP systems, career building services and paid consulting work they can do anytime from anywhere
  
  
• Offer virtual consulting to ERP customers looking for cheaper richer alternatives to traditional maintenance contracts
  
  
• Spearhead the virtual consulting effort with an elite team-within-a-team; then brand it as the model of an enterprise-size version

This “SAP Helpdesk in the Cloud” project has spanned 12 months so far and multiple companies — ECX and its various partners. Just word smithing a tagline alone wasn’t enough. The campaign worked by embedding this theme day-to-day throughout a variety of activities, including websites, blogs, newsletters, videos, slide decks, online consultant database, a resume writing service and more.


Maintaining a single clear informing idea of what a business is all about is harder than coming up with the original idea -- no easy task in itself -- and just as critical.

Otherwise, what became the first-ever cloud-based SAP helpdesk could as easily have become just another social network full of retreaded content.