1995 The Inspiration In December 1995, Mandy and Jeremy Lane, the founders of DEVdirection, began work on an Information Management strategy team for Halliburton/Brown & Root, a Houston based oil services company. The assignment - look into technology, information management and organizational learning to see if there was anything the company should be doing. By the end of the project it became clear that the company was doing all the right things, just geographically dispersed and organizationally isolated. The company didn't need to implement anything new, rather infiltrate what it was already doing throughout the company. The team recommended a number of pilots to begin achieving the purpose and managed to sell one of them, The Procurement Knowledge Network. Procurement was one are that spanned across all the companies business units and where knowledge transfer could have a direct effect on the companies bottom line. With no IT experience they needed a technology that could accomplish this, but that was simple, inexpensive, and fast to market. We looked at dozens of solutions and actually settled on a very limited web data integration tool Microsoft had out on the market called IDC. Fortunately ASP came out in beta just as the project started to require some more complexity. By the time The Procurement Knowledge Network was live we new that delivering information and knowledge using the simplest possible technologies was our destiny. And we began looking for an opportunity to start a business that achieved that objective. 1997 Getting Started Mandy and Jeremy move to Chicago with intentions of starting their own company. It started with networking and building up relationships. Slowly but surely they built up a contract base working at the time as sole propieters. Shortly, their projects became more substancial requiring the help of others. This is when they started collorating on projects with other contractors and collegues. The strategy had a flaw. This did not build a great deal of confidence with the companies who hired them. It quickly became apparent that it was time to incorporate and start building company brand awareness. 2000 The Bubble Mandy and Jeremy formed a company and began doing business under that company name, DEVdirection, Inc.. This was the hieght of the tech bubble and business was abundant. They had the opportunity to work on huge projects ranging from knowledge management systems to eCommerce sites. They moved into their first offices at 200 S Michigan in the Fisher building and had a staff of designers and programers working on projects. 2002 And the Bubble Bursts But the tech bubble burst and the consulting business got very difficult to keep rolling in the door. It quickly became apparent that they needed another strategy. By this time they had created a little bit of a company focuse. Most of their clients were in the consumer product manufacturing industry. Several were wanting ecommerce sites but were not in the possition to sell products directly because of contracts with their major retail clients. We figured, "Well if we can build successful eCommerce businesses for other people...why not build an eCommerce site which we own and operate?" And so we did. Our first clients were customers for whom we had built web based sales support systems or business-to-business websites. 2004 Changing with the Times The irony is that we started with a vision for major corporate communication using the web and now our primary business is eCommerce sites which we own and operate or operate under contract. Turns out we are pretty good at building a brand, we definitely have the technical expertise, and we are quickly learning the supplier relations aspects of the business. The best part of being a small business is the ability to become what you need to survive. So here is to the future and continued success.