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October 26, 2005
mapping boo
Sometime ago I wrote a short case study on my experience working at boo.com in the seven months leading up to its launch. This was the time when dot.com mania was in full swing and boo was the highest valued European Internet start-up of all time - the company chewed through £75Million in a year and half.
It's funny to think that for all that money, the underlying software architecture and all the production assets fitted onto a CDROM.
One of the most useful systems my team did was create a bespoke bug tracking system with a Flash front-end so that you could literally watch the progress of any given order around the business. Macromedia Flash worked well as a tool for process documentation and I'm still amazed at how little take-up it has had since for this purpose. Using Visio and Flash we were able to quickly create very detailed organisational charts and process flow maps that could be navigated in an easy to use interface, clicking through to real-time information in the database. All the round links to various live tracking systems are broken but you can still get a sense of the architecture by browsing the diagrams.
Posted by .M. at October 26, 2005 12:45 AM
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