Tuique Digital was established 1997 as a boutique development studio specializing in building databases and websites, and then smashing them together. Tuique Digital cares more about building improbable functionality than coming up with reasons why it can't be done.
Tuique Digital's mission is to give organizations tools and abilities far beyond the current status quo. We've been teetering on the bleeding edge long enough to see the things we built as an act of defiance a decade ago become mainstream. We are motivated by the spirit of the übernerd. This has little to do with poor hygiene--it's about building things for the sheer challenge involved. We build it because it sounds interesting. Hopefully, someone will pay us for it later.
Ideas are important but we are aware of the economics involved in actualizing a vision. Many of our mainstream revenue drivers today were either built as a labour of love or partially funded by previous clients, enabling us to offer them to you at a discount. We provide services that span a full development cycle--from business analysis and requirements gathering to end user training, and all points in between.
We help you get where you need to go today, rather than waiting it out with the rest of the herd.
Dispense with the geek-talk and what does it mean? Isn't a database just like a bigger, more powerful spreadsheet? Through 12 years of professional database experience, we've certainly seen a lot of spreadsheets posing as databases. But don't be fooled. They're only as similar as bicycles and airplanes. Both help you to get around, but you'll be pedalling up a lot of hills if you thought you were getting a plane and got a bike instead!
Here's how good database design can help your business:
+ You have the information you need . . .
"I updated the contact's phone number but my changes won't show!" "Why can't we make this company the parent of these other two and roll up the payables?" "All my sales history has disappeared!"
These scenarios, and many others are brought to you by that old trickster, the spreadsheet in database dress. Like the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing, it looks familiar and non-threatening. But the bleeding will start--usually sooner that you'd expect!
Maybe you've already experienced this: An important meeting is scheduled. Decisions will be made. Two different people each spend time collating sets of numbers. At the meeting, the numbers don't match! Whose numbers are correct? Are either correct?
A poorly designed database (PDD) leads to confusion. A classic PDD approach is to store important information in multiple places which eventually end up out of sync. This makes deciding among competing numbers difficult. In a PDD, the usual strategy of last resort is to promote one number as the number, by fiat. What else can you do? And then the next year, as new functionality is rolled out a different number might be chosen. This type of confusion is endemic to PDDs. When designing databases, the more is better approach does NOT apply!
+ You have the performance you need . . .
Some businesses experience their activity in spurts. Maybe there's a particularly intense month when orders flood in and require processing by a certain deadline. Or a seasonal wave of employees must be entered. Or it's tax time again. Either your systems will cope (fingers crossed!), or you will be forced to spend money on consulting or hardware in order to limp into each new season with a freshly applied set of bandaids. PDDs tend to require a lot of bandaids.
Financial reporting is one activity that can stress a system. What happens if you start a monthend process and your systems seize just as point-of-sales orders start coming in? Or the tax deadline approaches and you try to enter a new tax code only to have 3 offices in the next province go offline? PDDs can hurt you in strange, bewildering, and expensive ways. We've seen these scenarios play out. Years of bandaid workarounds all coming unglued in a perfect storm of bugs...
Well designed databases are predictable in their hardware demands and performance. Your systems don't fight each other. Your business processes don't spike the hardware. Sales systems remain available. Who can't appreciate that?!
+ You have cost savings . . .
Performance and cost are usually connected when it comes to technology. There is a certain amount of flexibility in the relationship, but PDDs will cost you, guaranteed, through the continual need for workarounds on top of fixes and a complete inability to handle new business requirements gracefully. In contrast, a well-designed database will shield you from having to constantly pay someone to squeeze new functionality and adequate performance from your overheated systems.
An analogy: automobiles have 4-5 gears. While driving down a highway, most people don't stay in second. The engine could blow. A PDD is a car that may not even let you get out of first! How to drive down that highway? Band-aid approaches to increasing PDD performance typically involve something like paying expensive welders to attach giant wheels to your car. You'll still be stuck in first gear, but maybe those huge wheels will help you move a little faster...
Conversely, a well designed database entirely avoids the need for ludicrous and expensive workarounds. It may seem amazing that seemingly simple design strategies can have such far-reaching effects. But workarounds and fixes due to PDD propagate costs geometrically. The best strategy is to avoid PDD from the outset.
+ Your business can evolve . . .
Only one ongoing concern has ever had a business model unchanged since day one. He works out of the North Pole, keeps a list, and checks it twice. Santa Claus. Even so, I bet he's refined "Naughty and Nice" into something with a little more... subtlety.
Even if you still sell the exact same product to the exact same customer year after year it's likely that your information needs and business processes have changed. Regulations change. Customer expectations change. No business process is perfect. They all require periodic adjustments. A well designed database allows you to roll with the times and modify things easily.
A couple of reasons why:
Data is only stored in one place. You know how much a customer really owes you because there are not 12 different places where that information might lurk.
Data is atomic. Forget geiger counters, "atomic" just means that your data is accessible in the form you need. For instance, you won't have to tie yourself in knots trying to extract apartment numbers from the rest of the street address. And if you need to start tracking some new piece of information, it's a trivial task rather than a potentially destructive attempt to shoehorn new data into an existing set of spreadsheets. Uh, I mean "database tables".
+ You have choices (and more cost savings) . . .
Some mid-to-large software vendors sell software suites that are very, VERY complicated. So complicated that only their own consultants can reliably diagnose problems or make modifications. And the hourly rates of the company men tend to be twice that of good third party consulting. Complicated doesn't always imply poor design, but the two have a tendency to associate as either measure increases--especially so with PDDs. Sometimes even the company men end up lost and bewildered. But don't expect a discount.
In contrast, a well designed database can be looked at and understood by just about anybody with professional database experience. There's no need to hire a specially trained "data priest" who has spent 4 years in a cube sweating over the intricacies of one particular system. You can figure on cutting your hourly costs in half by being able to hire good third party consulting.
PDDs also greatly increase the amount of time required for diagnosis and modification--roughly by an order of magnitude. Not only does it take significantly more effort to understand tables, data, and relationships in a PDD, one has to frequently make decisions, by fiat, choosing one set of candidate data over another. There is always the additional need to build elaborate, often byzantine workarounds to deal with all the corner cases and patchy logic. Add in time for additional testing and debugging that should have been entirely unnecessary. Voila! A 1 hour job on a clean design balloons into a 10 hour PDD job. If you're lucky. Do you feel lucky?
At Tuique Digital we manufacture your luck for you, through good database design that protects you from the outset, and whose beneficial effects will multiply over time. Business requirements change? No problem, good design facilitates that. Performance requirements change? No problem, well designed databases offer reliable and predictable performance. Need to bring new technical people onboard? Again, good design will drive down your costs by being robust and relatively easy to understand.
It doesn't take a geek to appreciate good database design!
Data-driven websites are changing the world. Google. Blogs. Facebook. Flickr. Youtube. These days everybody's an author. Everybody's a director. And a critic. Expectations have increased.
Back when the internet was young we all built static pages with eye-watering backgrounds and lots of scrollbars. We built long, skinny pages with links to help you get back to the top. Those were simpler times. Standards for web design did not exist.
One of the first lessons we learned is that static pages are boring. Where's the motivation for a second visit? Electronic brochures are not compelling. A page last updated 8 months ago will not draw today's viewer back 8 months from now, if ever!
One of the first exciting websites I encountered was called the Surrealist Compliment Generator. Every time you reloaded you get another utterance from the clocksprings of a peyote-fueled robot nihilist. Strangely compelling, and different every time.
I quickly graduated from static websites to streaming data into webpages. The world of corporate intranet portals beckoned. Things have continued to get more interesting. The online world keeps evolving. The business that can truly afford to ignore this is rare indeed.
A dynamic web presence offers visitors a reason to return. It can build goodwill and create online communities. Maybe you appreciate the ability of a compelling web presence to drive foot traffic through your door but you hesitate over the technical challenges or costs involved?
Tuique Digital has affordable website solutions for businesses of all sizes. That includes restaurants, galleries, dentists, cafes, and you! We've built the framework. We'll help you come up with the images and words. Now is the time to leapfrog your competitors and get yourself on the right track. Don't let your business become a cautionary tale!
Running a conference smoothly and successfully is a demanding exercise where innumerable things may go wrong. At Tuique Digital we specialize in configuring and monitoring temporary networks and virtual infrastructure so that your message gets delivered without a hitch.
We've been onstage, backstage, and under the stage, invisibly making sure things work at conferences ranging from 250 to 5000 attendees. We've worked the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Gaylord Centers in Atlanta and Orlando, The Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco, and the Estrel Center in Berlin. We have the know-how to make your conference a stress-free event.
Example scenarios we can help you avoid:
During your presentation, the onstage laptop can't reliably connect to a backstage server due to questionable network configuration and hardware
The video feed in a break-out session goes offline because a server got unplugged during stage breakdown in the main conference room
During the mid-morning break, 350 frustrated attendees cannot access their email because the hotel infrastructure is underequipped to handle the surge in network traffic
Your servers get held up in customs, and are released exactly one week after the conference has wrapped
Got a service level agreement in place? Great! We'll make sure its provisions are met. Think of us as your IT enforcer. While you're teeing off on the local golf course, we'll be teeing off on the onsite IT manager about one or more of the following:
Pacific National Exhibition ERP customization Extend functionality while avoiding exhorbitant consulting fees
Our database and web design experience came together on a customized version of Exact Software's eSynergy Enterprise Resource Planning application. New functionality was required and Exact Software's consultants had worn out their welcome by overcharging and under-delivering.
We seamlessly enhanced the underlying databases and then wired up new pages to make user's lives easier. We created parent and child relationships between companies and allowed payables to be rolled up under one contract. We automated mailouts and diagnosed & fixed many data issues--at half the hourly rate of Exact's consultants.
www.framagraphic.com Dynamic websites drive revenue and they don't have to cost a lot.
This database-driven image gallery allows its owners to promote sales of original art and prints. Inventory management and other website configuration functions are done via an intuitive web interface. Bulk data import functionality makes uploading data sets fast and easy. Thousands of pictures are handled efficiently by a relatively small number of dynamic webpages.
Three corporate intranet web applications Good design pays ongoing dividends through reuse
Crystal Decisions' Sales Effectiveness Online Certification Webtraining We built a database-driven web application to provide online training and testing for the sales department. XML datastreams from MSSQL stored procedures are efficiently transformed into a full-featured web application complete with user-input data validation and secure management reporting using Crystal Reports.
Crystal Decisions' Competitive Win Repository The success of the Sales Effectiveness Online Certification webportal led the corporate intranet group (a team, it should be noted, that already included several web designers) to request an expansion and repurposing of the entire framework for a second initiative to facilitate sales effectiveness through an online exposition of winning sales strategies.
Business Objects' International Users Conference Survey Another repackaging of the dynamic webportal framework described above. This time the Marketing department solicited our services to harvest information from attendees of the International User Conference 2006.
These 3 separate projects all based on a common design framework demonstrate the economy of good database and web design--successive iterations provide a geometric return on investment. Despite the considerable in-house development resources of a major software manufacturer (6,000 employees, $1B+ USD in yearly revenue), our design framework was repeatedly reused due to its high functionality to cost ratio.
Database design and software development for Ingenium Techologies Good design enables dot com survival
On this project we designed from the ground up a database-driven subscription engine to control web access to McGraw-Hill’s Construction Information datafeed. We created a replicated database architecture to facilitate high availability. Performance was maximized through adherence to best practices in table design, disk management, and normalization. Web access time was reduced from minutes to seconds.
Data quality issues were also top priorities. We wrote stored procedures to parse the datafeed and generate cleansed master data almost a decade before "Master Data Managment" became a trendy buzzword. We wrote a custom data transfer service for Windows in order to minimize data loss.
The end product was a high performance database that facilitated intelligent access to denormalized fact, aggregate, and detail-level data without the need for investment in additional hardware. Our ability to process the nightly datafeed within a restricted time window and present it as a web application was audited twice by McGraw-Hill, and we were able to achieve success within 4 months of startup.
Despite significant investment ($13M USD) and a huge disparity in resources and experience, McGraw-Hill was unable to achieve this web portal functionality on their own. One of their main stumbling blocks was a terrible database design from which they were unable to recover (we travelled to New Jersey to have a look at what they'd done--uuurgh!).
By way of contrast, our user permissions could be managed by entry-level employees and allowed us to sell highly specific subscriptions, along the lines of "all military projects in the pre-bidding stage valued $1M USD and above, located in these 6 states plus these 3 additional counties, which include the following words in the project description, plus any projects by these 5 architectural firms...". This advanced functionality coupled with high performance significantly enabled Ingenium's user base to continue expanding without additional cost through the worst period of the dot com implosion.
Custom web development for Creo Products' corporate intranet Pushing the boundaries of possibility
Advanced user interface design include dynamic cascading data controls--a user's input on one area of the page cascades its effects downwards to other related section. For instance, chosing Product X automatically filters the entries available in the Assemblies and Parts dropdown lists. This functionality can be chained to create high volume data input webforms.
Have you ever wanted to punch the screen because a poorly design user interface (Peoplesoft? Salesforce.com?) makes doing your job more difficult? We feel your pain, and have a solution already built ;0)
The Fraser Valley Regional Authority 911 Emergency System databases Nothing fancy here, just rock solid
We installed, configured, and tested 2 clustered Microsoft SQL Sever 2000 databases to provide a high availability backend for this mission-critical system.
Database and frontend integration for BC Lotteries SportsAction prototype website Moving beyond the limitations of in-house talent
A proof of concept was built to demonstrate the technical feasibility of online hockey betting. Additional deliverables included custom data migration and consultation with third-party hosting services.
Custom Portfolio Management Application Avoid ongoing fees for services you can own outright
Completed all phases of a project to develop a custom stock portfolio solution for Cundill Investment Research. using MS Office technologies. Project management services were provided, from requirements gathering through coding, documentation, and end user training.
The successful deployment of this solution enabled Cundill to cancel a data subscription that was costing thousands of dollars every month.
Member of Worker's Compensation Board Outlook Migration Project Your projects can finish on time and under budget
Developed and deployed Outlook98 custom forms to replace a legacy messaging system. The forms were routable, using CDO technology, and were programmed for a variety of approval workflows. Base Outlook functionality was extended by server-side scripting and a custom HTML print solution. A rigorous development cycle included user interviews, formal functional specifications, multiple rounds of testing and sign-off. This project was completed on time and under budget.
Alex - Motivational Drooler
Responsibilities: Sleeping through the night, if possible. Charming the ladies. Drooling.
History: Very little so far.
Toolset: Drool. Giggling. Strange noises.
Interests: Being carried around. Sticking things in his mouth. Working out on the Jolly Jumper.
Carol - Amazon Princess Comptroller
Responsibilities: Strategy, Finance, & Business Research.
History: Graduated with a degree in Finance from Beijing University. Immigrated to Canada nearly a decade ago.
Toolset: Sense of humour. Calculator. Her repository of Ancient Chinese Secrets.
Interests: Knitting, bikeriding, reading.
Peter - Mad Scientist Designer
Responsibilities: Database and website design. Programming.
History: Began Tuique Digital in 1997 after graduating with an English degree. Has officially been a geek since taking his first computer science course in 1982, on a Commodore Pet 4096 with 4K of RAM.
Toolset: MCDBA. Linux, Mac, & Windows platforms. TRANSACT SQL, XML/XSLT/HTML, Java, Visual Basic, Perl, C.
Interests: Snowboarding, guitar, reading.
Freya - Cat-friendly Chief of Security
Responsibilities: Maintained a presence on the deck when sunny.
History: Arrived unexpectedly and provided 13 years of love.
