It’s almost a meme in itself how impenetrable the job category Information Technology has been since its inception.

Ask someone in IT what they do, and not only will you be quickly over your head in a quasi english soup of terminology, but no two answers will ever be the same.

Now ask an IT person if they do any web tech.

If they do, it is suddenly and almost inexplicably a brand new conversation, despite the fact that browsers do a lot of the heavy lifting on what we consider now to be IT.

Why, though?

Welcome to the Wild Wild West. It’s truly a lawless, largely unregulated frontier built almost entirely by individuals who (meme-ingly and therefore not holistically) want to do things the way they want to do things.

As in every classic spaghetti western, ain’t no one going to tell a cowboy (programmer) what to do. Mostly because let’s be honest, most people don’t really understand what they do.

There is No Standard

Throughout a career working in web tech, I’ve heard from so many people: “Just build it using best practices.”

Yes.

Those don’t really exist in web tech though. There are a few standard UX features that we as users all understand. However, that’s the end of most of our grip on the whole mess. You want the app or website to work when you tap buttons. How it works is secondary.

It’s like a car. There are a few people out there that know in very granular terms how a car works. A lot of us put the key in and pray, especially in SK when it’s a howling -40.

However, unlike a car, web tech can be an actual incomprehensible mess, and can be nearly impossible for another “mechanic” to figure out if that product was built “creatively”.

I’ve walked through our office and have heard every programmer at some point say WHY WAS IT BUILT THIS WAY?!

Yes.

There is, However, a Pattern

We’ve been working in web tech for a decade, and we’ve seen a lot of patterns. Namely, that programmers have a language and platforms that they believe are the best, and that those programming languages and platforms may or may not be the best choice based on business strategy.

That’s not really surprising. Programmers are programmers. Business owners are interested in business success. Sometimes the 2 mesh. Often they do not.

The moral of the story being that there might be a dozen ways to catch a cat, but given your business circumstances, one way will definitely be better than another, and a programmer may not grasp the big cat catching picture.

So What Now? Back to Paper?

Nope absolutely not. Companies in Saskatchewan have been really getting on board with tech advancements, and that’s great. Many are building products that simplify and streamline their processes, and that’s amazing.

In some cases, that also means that companies are hiring developers to do this work for them. From startup to big business, having an internal IT/Web development team can be a huge advantage. We are excited by the changes!

However, for companies that hire a dev or IT person to manage their browser based tech, issues can come up. Namely, there are only a handful of business owners that understand tech enough to say whether their employee is making the best business decisions given their long term business goals.

Oh and Here’s the Pitch

Yes there is a pitch, but it’s gentle.

We have a lot of very smart devs working for us. Masterminds of deciphering a wide range of tech languages and platforms. It’s kind of what we do.

The thing is that despite the fact that we sell tech, we don’t really have any skin in your particular game. If you have a good team and a good digital strategy, we know that strategy does not include our tech base.

However, we also know as business owners that trusting a significant piece of your digital process to a single person or even a small team is a gigantic risk if you can’t sufficiently judge if they are making the right decisions based on what you need and where you are going. Plus, if that person builds you your holy grail, are you certain that product will still work if that individual decides to head to other opportunities?

I personally applaud those that take the time to try to understand the process. As a non-technical person, it’s taken me 10 years of HARD TRAINING to learn the very small amount I know. I wish you luck on your tech journey.

So What Can We Do?

We are tech consultants to a number of companies. We can look into the code base, direction and decisions made by your devs and give you an idea if they are going in the right direction, and give you that outline in a business language you understand: money, efficiency and time.

We’re also a pretty open team, meaning that if you have one lonely dev working on your internal digital strategy, they might like to talk to some other devs sometimes about their decisions.

Welcome to Levis Tech - we help programmers.

Basically, we take tech and make it accessible to devs and to business owners. We are the bridge between programming language and business language.

How Much?

Yep, hiring a consultant ain’t always cheap. Fortunately, the feds seem to understand that digitizing processes is both vital to our supply chain and also ouch to the bank account.

Currently, we work with a fine fellow at MNP, and they are certified digital strategy consultants who can also get you access to some of that federal grant money through the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP). The program provides up to $15k in cashola for implementing a digital strategy.

Cool right?

If you’re interested in advancing your digital processes, hell we can help you out man! Give us a call and we’ll hook you up!