eXperts UnLimited (XUL for friends, pronounce “zool”) is a new experimental approach for IT consultancy. We are not a company, we are a network of IT experts who are passionate about technology and share knowledge and discoveries with one another. We all know a lot of things about a lot of different technologies and together we can answer a lot of questions, solve a lot of problems.
All of us have been or are still regular IT consultants, working in big IT departments and we have all been confronted one day or another to the situation where one of our customers needed external advice on some very specific issue, but the problem didn’t justify a full-blown consultant intervention. So they ended up asking various guys inside their company, posting questions on public forums waiting for an hypothetical answer. And of course, the more they looked at the issue themselves the more difficult it was to step back and see the problem where it really was.
Let’s say you are a company employing a lot of IT professionals, people with various levels of experience and expertise, more or less broad views of your technology spectrum, and you regularly have questions like the following:
- What’s the best protocol/library/framework to connect A and B?
- What’s the typical reference architecture for such kind of application?
- What are the pros and cons of solutions A, B and C for this specific problem?
- Etc.
Let’s say you have people able to answer those questions but they have trouble coming to a consensus, or you just want a complementary view on the problem. Or maybe your people are just too “junior” to consider all the constraints of your environment. Let’s just say you are fed up with bad decisions made because you didn’t have the time to wait for an answer, or the resources to hire an experimented consultant just for those questions. That’s precisely where XUL will come into play.
Imagine a network of IT experts at your disposal to answer all of your questions at any time, whatever the number of questions you have. Imagine those IT experts are connected to one another in such a way that there is always the right set of skills for your problems, available in no time because you don’t need to wait for them to come to your office, you don’t need to sign a contract, you don’t need to wait for weeks before they free themselves from their current customer. Finally, imagine that, instead of having to pay for entire days of consultancy just to answer specific questions, you can pay a monthly subscription fee and have ALL your questions answered at any time.
Welcome eXperts UnLimited: the first unlimited collaborative network or IT experts at your disposal.
Well… at least that’s our dream. For now, it’s merely an experiment and this blog is the first step of the experiment. The goal is to assess whether there is a real need, a real market for such an innovative offer. We are just a bunch of friends, IT professionals and technology watchers who have a real passion for solving problems and answering questions.
So what we are going to do here is simple.
If you have a specific IT-related question looking like one of the above, just use the contact form to send us your question or problem. Every week, we will select one question, we will get back to you to have more information, we will elaborate an answer and publish it on this blog. Then if there are other experts out there who have other solutions or comments about our own, they will be able to post comments on this blog.
The goal of this first step is threefold:
- Evaluate the need for such a service offer based on the number of questions received and the proportion of problems we can actually solve this way.
- Characterize the kinds of skills we would need to add to our network in order to offer the best service possible, based on the questions we cannot answer.
- Recruit other experts based on the quantity, quality and pedagogy of their comments.
If the need is real, if a lot of people ask a lot of questions and we are able to answer most of them with good satisfaction, then we will launch a commercial offer that will make it possible for subscribers to ask any number of questions to the network against a fixed monthly fee, and experts in the network will share the benefits of those subcription fees.
Of course, we have a lot of other ideas for eXperts UnLimited, and there are a lot of things to figure out before we get to this commercial offer. But we would love to hear your opinion. Do you have questions or suggestions about the service itself? Would you be a potential customer and how much would you be ready to pay for such a service? Would you like to join our network as an expert? What limitations would you see in such a system? All your feedback is welcome.
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