Blog 20: Exit Interview

(1) What is your essential question and answers?  What is your best answer and why?

• EQ: How can an IT department best meet the demands of a real estate company?
• Answer 1: An IT department can best meet the demands of a real estate company by improving customer relations with social CRMs.
• Answer 2: An IT department can best meet the demands of a real estate company by creating a website tailored to the company's needs.
• Answer 3: An IT department can best meet the demands of a real estate company by ensuring a robust and efficient infrastructure.
• Best Answer: An IT department can best meet the demands of a real estate company by improving customer relations with social CRMs.

(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

• Research into how a Real Estate company can be more successful led me to the conclusion that gaining a larger client-base is one of the best ways to do so. It then came down to finding ways that IT can help with this leading to my answer 1.

(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

• Some problems I faced included finding research for my third answer, and one way I resolved it was through the use of the Cal Poly Pomona databases for more research. Another problem I faced was my mentor having to leave to San Francisco due to a family emergency, in order to deal with this I made sure that my 3rd answer and 2nd independent component wouldn't really require her presence for any assistance.

(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

• Taylor, Anne. CRM FOR REAL ESTATE PART 1: WHY CRM? Jersey City: HIPERCEPT, 2012. Web.
• This article helped explain major standpoints as to why having a good CRM in Real Estate is important, along with some of the social aspects that the CRM should make use of or have.
• Weir, Tracy. "In Real Estate, It’s About the Relationships." Web log post. Nimble. Nimble, 29 July 2013. Web. 25 Jan. 2014.
• This post was on a blog run by a CRM company & employees, it went over how a company should work with clients and how their CRM and the use of Social CRMs improves the "relationship" aspect to doing business in Real Estate.

Blog 19: Independent Component 2

Literal

1. I, Carlos Cerrillos, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents more than 30 hours of work, currently 35.5 hours, which is still rising.
2. The articles I felt best helped with this independent component were:
1. Price, Seth. "How to Build a Better Real Estate Website." Web log post. Inman News. N.p., 13 June 2013. Web. 6 Feb. 2014.
2. Yank, Kevin. "Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL, Part 1: Installation." Web log post. Site Point. Site Point, 2 July 2009. Web.
3. Look to the right for the log of hours. or click here
4. Through my research and work at my mentorship, I've been toying with the idea that a proper website can really help a company grow. Unfortunately my mentorship was not in any current need of a website, so I went to where there was a demand for a website, and that was iPoly High School. I decided on this independent component so I could experience what it is like to lead a team to create a final product, a website, and to also take part in the creation of it as well. To be concise, I've spent time researching different ideas of what things are important to have on a website, and how to actually go about doing that. I then went from researching this, to actually creating a site which is currently being hosted at http://ipolyhs.org/

Interpretive

An important part of actually achieving success in the component, creating the website, was the research that went into how to go about creating a website, making sure that every aspect is planned out and prepared for. After that was an approximate three hours of work that went into establishing the expectations of what the site would have, along with preparing content to be put on the site. A majority of the rest of the thirty hours was spent actually programming the framework for the site, designing and changing layouts, and filling the site with content and formatting it properly. This all showed an example of what it'd be like creating a site for Real Estate, except it lacks some functionality that a Real Estate site would have, such as an IDX search & real estate. However other features that work well on Real Estate websites to draw in clients would also work well for a school website when trying to improve their admissions and outreach, such as a school blog that gives insight into the student life at the school, and as with a real estate blog, it is important for it to be updated and maintained.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, there are three places where evidence of 30 hours of work can be seen, the first is simply the site, as it is for the most part the final product of this component. The second and third are logs of work that have been kept throughout the development of the site. One of the logs is the history of GitHub commits, which can be interpreted as "checkpoints" through out the development of the framework/design of the site where features were completed. The third log is the logging part of the framework of the website that logs changes to content that I had created to give the site the functionality to undo changes made to content, and who made those changes. The reason I am adding links two logs that provide evidence is because once major parts of the framework were completed, little in the actual code was change, and the changes and updates that occurred after that were done on the site, as each page is generated from information stored in a database, no page is hard coded into its own file, making the site very flexible when it comes to adding/changing/removing content.

iPoly Website | The GitHub Commit Log | iPoly Page Log

The above screenshot is a graphic that I find very interesting that summarizes contributions to the site (can be seen on GitHub), the reason I find it interesting is because it gives you an idea of when I was most productive with this project and what time throughout the day I spent working on it. This is not a summary of one week, but of every single commit from the beginning aggregated into a summary view.

Applied

I felt that this component helped me answer my EQ by helping support my answer 2 and all the work that goes into actually creating a site. A specific example would have to be when I had meetings with the administration to discuss their expectations and requirements for the site, which must be done when creating a site for Real Estate, along with the creation of layout that attempts to be intuitive. Many pieces of research stated that it is very important for a site's design not be overly complicated and to make sure that the site is intuitive. Along with the work that's going into creating a blog built into the site that can be used to promote the school and bring in more students, just as a Real Estate website should, showing that they will get a great experience working with the company.