When we migrate business software like CRM, Accounting, Fundraising, Student Information, Collections Management, Content Management, or anything else to the Cloud or to SaaS (which is probably on some Cloud–so I’m going to use the terms interchangeably in this post), we accrue a lot of benefits. Remote access is easier, and you don’t need any […]
Author: Matt Morgan
A simple marketing plan for an advocacy startup
In 2014 I took a job as Director of Product Management at America Achieves, working primarily on their Raise The Bar program. America Achieves is a nonprofit startup accelerator, and Raise The Bar was its program dedicated to aiding parents in supporting their children’s education. It was exciting to get back into advocacy (1993-1999 I […]
Moving a small business to the Cloud
Early this year (2023) we began working for Astral Artists, a talent agency for upcoming jazz and classical music performers. Astral Artists is actually a nonprofit, which like most small businesses has to be really careful with expenditures. Astral Artists, with only seven employees, is too small to have its own internal IT staff. Tech […]
What we did for AIC (the genesis of our Concierge CIO service)
The American Institute of Conservation (AIC) is the largest professional association for people dedicated to the conservation of artistic and cultural works. They hired me (Matt Morgan) to be their Digital Strategy Advocate; we didn’t know it at the time, but that was the birth of Concrete Computing’s Concierge CIO service. As a Concierge CIO, […]
A few words about the Metropolitan Museum of Art Website Relaunch
I was the primary lead on The Met’s website relaunch 2009-2012. We called it a “relaunch” rather than a redesign or rebuild because it really was about the whole site–strategy, design, technology, workflows, marketing, fundraising, everything. In 1999, The Met launched a website that made a lot of news and broke some new ground. There […]
Car rental is the opposite of service
I don’t rent cars a whole lot, but for six years I had a job where I traveled a lot, about 6 times a year, and I needed cars most places I went. I worked in NYC, and the other offices were in DC, LA, Oakland, Boulder, Austin, and Raleigh, only DC was realistically a […]
In Support of LGBTQ+ Neighbors and Friends
In the wake of the over 380 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in the US this year alone, including many recent bills explicitly targeting members of the transgender community, Concrete Computing unambiguously stands with the LGBTQ+ community and against fear, misinformation, and hate of all kinds. LGBTQ+ people are our friends and family. They are our neighbors […]
What “Zero IT” means
“Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery This quote is a maxim — almost an ideology — in user experience design (UX). We believe in making websites, consumer products, interactive devices, brands, exhibition spaces, retail shops, you name it, as easy […]
Copyright and privacy in generative AI
ChatGPT knows a lot about us, but it won’t say what it knows about us. If you want, jump to the conversation below to see where I tried to get it to tell me about me. Or read on for some commentary first. Concretecomputing.com–at least, the parts that pre-date 2021–must be in ChatGPT’s training data. […]
Super-simple improvements to your information security
This is something I learned from experience: your most frequent security issues are going to result from Breaches or leaks at other large businesses (Twitter, Tumblr, DoorDash, Bitly, eVite, ParkMobile, ShareThis, TicketFly …) resulting in emails, usernames, passwords, and security question answers getting stolen Phishing attacks against your users, wherever they may be. Since most […]