Today was my last full day heading technology at BusinessWeek (or CIO as my superiors acknowledge).I’m very proud of the BusinessWeek Technology Team’s accomplishments during my tenure. Some of our product accomplishments have been very public. We launched, Business Exchange, a social platform for business professionals. If you haven’t checked out this platform then I encourage you to spend some time on it and see how you can use it to find interesting business content promoted by users in topics you’re interested in. My favorite business topics include CIO, Agile Software Development, Enterprise 2.0, Open Source Software and Social Networking. There are many gems in this product; integration with both LinkedIn and Twitter, a profile page that SEOs well and highlights your business interests (see my profile), a news feed from business professionals you select to follow, and the simplicity of aggregated business content in topics of interest. But like all social products, Business Exchange needs time to mature. When it launched a year ago, there were only 200 topics – now there are over 1600 with many more people contributing great content to the top topics. It’s had sponsorship and ad revenue since its launch day. There’s been some interesting press on BX recently, but let’s just say not all the ‘facts’ some news sites published on this business are accurate or complete. It’s a good product, backed by some good technology and a smart team.

We had many other product launches and improvements; a new BusinessWeek.com home and channel pages (tech, finance, innovation…) , upgraded tools for the Business School channel, and a mobile product to name a few. We also made many internal improvements in editorial process, upgraded Salesforce.com reporting, and deployed other innovative analytics solutions.

What you couldn’t see is what we were doing behind the scene. Our newest products were built on a new technology platform based on web standards, XML, and algorithmically generated content. We established an on/offshore agile development and delivery model. We figured out how to integrate agile within a larger enterprise organization, helped develop a feature prioritization process with Product Management and have a real answer on how to integrate QA into an agile process. Our teams were collaborative and innovative, but not reckless. We were agile and nimble, but had a very strong, regimented product planning process and agile application lifecycle.

I’d like to thank everyone on the technology team, and everyone we collaborated with at BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill for all of this success. It’s been fun, challenging, noble at times, and full of innovation. Congratulations to all of you making the journey to Bloomberg and I hope you will continue to grow the processes we established. To those seeking new adventures, best of luck to you and don’t forget to clap.