April 4th, 2008
Want Surface but not the cost? Try wii’ing
Courtesy of Charlie Bess, an EDS Fellow and another of my Irregular colleagues, I stumbled across this awesome demonstration of using Wiimotes and light pens as an alternative to the $10,000 Surface device.
There is none of the hoop-la that accompanies Surface demonstrations but a simple, matter of fact show and tell. Even better, Johnny Chung includes the software source code link to make the rig run. It wouldn’t take much to run applications of the kind that Surface uses and compete directly but at a fraction of the cost.
Which reminds me and it’s worth mentioning again, The Colgate Twins did a fantastic demonstration of using Wiimotes to control SAP applications in front of 4,000 developers at TechEd 2006. (Disclosure: They’re Irregulars too and mighty proud we are to have such innovative folks alongside curmudgeons like me.)
I’d like to see more innovative use of devices like Wiimotes so if readers have use cases then I’d be more than happy to look at them.
April 4th, 2008
Seesmic, Twhirl, Newsgang: whereto for RSS?
Yesterday’s announcement that Seesmic has acquired Twhirl is no surprise. Loic LeMeur, CEO of Seesmic was muttering something about it when we met last month but asked me to keep quiet. What is far more interesting to me is the long term impact on desktop client applications like Twhirl to enterprise information consumption.
I’ve long held the view that mashing up text, video and podcast ‘radio’ provides one of the richest experiences for any information consumer. Today we only have glimpses of what that might look like. Services such as Jerry Schuman’s Newsgang simlucast for Newsgang Live where the user can sit in on Steve Gillmor’s Newsgang while participating in a Ustream chat session hosted by Jerry are emerging as a representating ways to not only consume but parse information through informal channels. While Jerry is doing his thing, Steve is able to see what’s going on while the show progresses and respond to observations made over at Ustream directly into Newsgang Live. My thought is that Seesmic/Twhirl as a proxy for an AIR client to this type of environment, brings the potential for a new dimension to that experience. That’s only the start.
I’m a huge RSS fan but increasingly find that my primary source for surfacing interesting things is switching to Twitter, accessed via the Twhirl client. Once a service for telling the world what you’re doing in 140 characters, Twitter is evolving (at least from my perspective) as the place where I find the nuances that enrich the news announcements in which I’m interested. It’s where I see the Techmeme and ZDNet headlines, the comments people add and the discussion that ensues among the 700+people I follow. It is interposed with the personal information people choose to share through the ‘direct message’ back channel. That’s how I learned of the Seesmic/Twhirl deal. It’s how I learned that one long time friend is pregnant while another had her car burglarized, recording the post trauma on Qik and notified the Twitterverse. In short, it reflects the way I seamlessly communicate and consume across the blurred paths of my work and personal lives. Where does all this go?
April 3rd, 2008
The trouble with Groundswell
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff at industry analysts Forrester are bagging a lot of positive blog hype over their new book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
…is the best book on social media I’ve ever read, and it may be the best book ever written on the subject.
Or this from B.L. Ochman:
I’ve read a few dozen books about Internet marketing, new media, blogging, etc. Many are well written. Some have flashes of brilliance. But Groundswell trumps all the new media marketing books written so far.
If you read this blog with any regularity, you know I don’t gush. Rant yes, gush no. But I’m gushing about Groundswell.
No-one should be surprised because these positive comments reflect a world view with which these writers concur. And yes, I have seen examples of tools that allow marketers to more effectively engage retail customers. But they are relatively thin on the ground. Then I came across Des Walsh’s analysis:
…I was a tad concerned by the following statement in the excerpt:
Technology, the second force driving the groundswell, has changed everything as far as people’s social interactions are concerned. For one thing, nearly everyone’s online - in 2006, that meant 73 percent of Americans and 64 percent of Europeans, for example. (Excerpt, p. 10)
“Nearly everyone”? Ahem, it’s not a lot more than 16% in China (growing certainly and the percentages for Beijing and Shanghai are higher, but still not as high as for North America, although approaching the European).
Yes, in the resources for reviewers, there are some tables which include consumer data from a wider group of countries including Japan and South Korea. What I looked for in vain so far is evidence of involvement at the corporate level in some of these “other” countries.
It may be that the data is not there, or not accessible. Perhaps the book spells that out.
Just hold that thought about corporations for a moment.
Des reckons that an un-named South African winery the Groundswell authors refer to is Stormhoek. I know this case well and Hugh MacLeod, the blogger behind it. Hugh came up with an inspired way of reworking the classic but normally non-scalable word of mouth marketing technique that combined Hugh’s edgy approach to marketing messages, his blog popularity and the old ‘free sample’ technique. As a marketing exercise it worked spectacularly well. But as part of a broader business model it failed because the main UK distributor ran out of money and went out of business. This was something I warned about in 2005.
At the time, Hugh was figuring out how to send Stormhoek into hyper growth and I said that if the company didn’t make sure its supply chain was geared up to handle massive growth then it would get into trouble. That’s pretty much what happened.
Now twist this sideways. Rising creative marketer Sam Lawrence has been talking about the disconnect between existing internal systems of communication and data handling, the new forms of emergent collaboration and the manner in which corporations are organized. In his latest post, Sam says:
The new people-focused enterprise wants its head back. They want the place for the people to easily unify and get to the point. You can call this “Enterprise 2.0″ you can call this “social productivity,” it doesn’t really matter what you call it other than it’s going to turn things right-side up.
Sam is right to draw attention to this issue even though it is really a veiled attack on Microsoft Sharepoint’s file centric approach to collaboration. Even if Sam’s nirvana materialized tomorrow we’d be faced with chaos and the likelihood of many Stormhoek disasters. No responsible management team will allow that to happen.
To date, there has been no considered discussion about how the unstructured world of information discovery and action gets married to the hyper growth world of groundswell marketing or the transaction systems that demonstrate the results companies are looking for - improved effective asset usage. It’s a massive flaw yet representative of the very disconnect to which Sam refers. Do you know for example that most supply chain problems are solved on disparate non-shareable spreadsheets? Has anyone given serious thought as to how you engage the wee machine shop in Kansas that happens to make vital parts? Is industry as a whole looking hard at the value of telemetry across the whole supply chain? What about vendor relationship management that takes the principles of CRM and applies those to suppliers?
I hope Groundswell does well and that it allows companies to find new ways to be more effective in their marketing strategies with technology driving those trends. But what industry needs now is some balance. Without that, I fear that the marketing mavens will find their worlds come crashing around their ears and an intensification of the siloed behaviors that Sam and others are so keen to see put out to grass.
April 2nd, 2008
Apotheker on the offensive
In the second of SAP’s press calls today, Leo Apotheker brought some of the sex and sizzle for which he is well known to the discussion around the previously announced boardroom changes. Asked to comment on the fact Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO was pretty much silent about the BEA acquisition at the last Oracle earnings call, Apotheker quipped: “Maybe he had a sore throat or something.”
Apotheker also confirmed that 2008 is the peak year for SAP R&D investments and that over the coming years, SAP will scale back its investments by around one percent per annum. He chose not to indicate the extrent to which R&D will be scaled back but did say this is not a case of providing additional funds for sales and marketing: “We have a highly optimized marketing budget and we will not spend a penny more than is necessary.” That can only mean one thing. While SAP is clearly on a changed path with sales firmly in focus, SAP is now moving to become more cash and profit generative.
This must be as a direct response to the way Oracle and Microsoft are continuing to generate huge cash piles from enterprise sales and service revenues. Oracle has been able to take advantage of its cash machine to make some $25 billion in acquisitions while SAP could only stand by and observe. It also means that unless a price cutting war breaks out, SAP will continue to look for 22 percent (of sales value) maintenance revenues, which in turn generate high profit and cash returns.
I’ve said before but it is worth repeating: profit levels for SAP, Microsoft and Oracle are at extraordinarily high levels, reflecting a maturing industry. That cannot continue indefinitely without customers asking why they should support a declining R&D model. How well SAP is able to navigate that discussion will be a crucial part of how well it performs financially. It will be a key metric upon which analysts will focus.
April 2nd, 2008
Strong sales focus as SAP shuffles the board
Following today’s announcement of board changes at SAP, it is clear the company is looking to strengthen sales representation. As I suggested earlier Henning Kagermann will retire next May handing over the CEO’s spot to Leo Apotheker. He will be supported by Bill McDermott who now has a global sales role for large enterprise as well as an overseeing sales role. Peter Klaey, who has been spearheading the Business By Design unit will take responsibility for smaller business sales.
In the last year, SAP has been fighting an uphill struggle for public mindshare as rival Oracle has successfully bedded down its acquisitions. This has seen Oracle accelerate revenues, which until recently had included healthy license sales growth. Strengthening the board in this way changes SAP’s emphasis and I suspect it will mean the company becomes more aggressive in the sales cycle.
The appointment of Erwin (Ernie) Gunst as COO represents a further strengthening of SAPs sales team. On the call, co-founder Hasso Plattner said the company ‘desperately’ needed someone capable of moving internal processes forward that would get SAP closer to customers and speed up the sales cycle.
One huge surprise is that when Peter Zencke retires at the end of they year, he will not be replaced. Plattner said Zencke’s duties will be distributed around the other board members. Zencke will retain a consulting role. Zencke is the man who led the Business By Design engineering effort and not having a direct replacement is a mis-step if SAP is to achieve the large numbers of sales it has been predicting. Whether Klaey can take up the sales slack remains to be seen, but with a de-emphasis on design and engineering, it is hard to see how SAP will maintain the momentum for this product line which is only at version 1 status. SAP will argue that its bench depth will mean the company doesn’t miss a beat but I would be surprised if that’s the case.
UPDATE: I subsequently spoke with Redmonk analyst James Governor. His view was broadly similar to mine. He added: “I don’t know anyone who is intimately involved with SAP as a buyer who doesn’t admire the engineering effort the company puts into its products. I hope this doesn’t signal a reaction to Oracle and that the engineering effort will continue. The company has plenty of talent it can promote, that’s evident from the changes it has announced today. It’s for that reason that I’m less concerned about Business By Design.”
April 2nd, 2008
Leo Apotheker appointed joint CEO at SAP
According to sources, Leo Apotheker is set to join Henning Kagermann as joint CEO of SAP. Previously, Apotheker held the post of deputy CEO.
The move signals that rather than extend his contract of service with the company which runs out in May 2009, Henning Kagermann has decided to hand over the reins of power to the company’s top sales person. Together with Hasso Plattner, co-founder of SAP, Kagermann was co-chairman of the SAP Executive Board and CEO from 1998 to 2003.
While the move came as something of a surprise, SAP has a tradition of appointing co-CEO’s as part of a transition in power.
It will be interesting to see how the management team shapes up. I would expect to see a more prominent role for John Schwartz who came over to SAP when the company acquired BusinessObjects.
Further details are expected later in the day.
April 1st, 2008
A surprise conversation with Larry Ellison
Late last evening I received an invitation to attend Oracle’s Collaborate08 conference in Denver. I had to decline, living some 5,144 miles away from this year’s venue and, being a blogger, barely have two red cents to rub together. Imagine my surprise when I got a return call from Oracle’s PR offering me a 15 minute conversation with Larry Ellison provided I could do the call pretty much immediately. As someone who has developed a reputation for keeping hours not dissimilar to Mike Arrington, it would have been rude to refuse even if I did think it was some sort of prank. This is the transcript of what followed:
Larry: Hello there, what do you want to know? (Side note - anyone who has seen Larry Ellison appear in front of a crowd of journalists knows this is his usual opening line)
Qu: Tell me, why have you entitled this year’s event Collaborate08?
Larry: You’d have to ask Chuck (Charles) Philips that one. As you know I prefer to go all out to win so collaboration isn’t really on my radar.
Qu: Last quarter’s earnings were a bit shabby on the license growth side, care to add some color?
Larry: We don’t think the Street yet understands we’re in the annuity business and that new licenses are not really the growth engine around here. Of course it’s always good to note when we’re taking deals off SAPs table and I think you’ll find they’ve had a pretty tough time when they report.
Qu: Would you care to elaborate on the ‘annuity’ thing?
Larry: Well, we had a bit of a change in direction and decided that we’d test the waters for on-demand CRM. That’s an annuity business.
Qu: Does that mean rumors Marc Benioff has been coming around offering Salesforce.com at $75 a share is something you might consider?
Larry: Our track record speaks for itself in these matters. That’s where Chuck’s done a great job.
Qu: Even so, your last couple of quarters show a very healthy bottom line. Doesn’t it worry you that customers might think those profits are a bit excessive and demand a refund?
Larry: You remember when I said way back when that as an industry we’d been selling customers the wrong stuff in the client/server age and that I was really sorry about that?
Qu: Yes, I seem to recall…
Larry: And I said at the time I have shareholders to satisfy. Nothing much has changed in that policy but in any event, we can always justify our charges. They’re all in the contracts and as you can see from the service revenues, customers keep coming back for more so I’d say we’re delivering on what we said.
Qu: The recent tax adjustment on your private property caused something of a stir, would you care to comment?
Larry: My personal accountant and lawyers handle that stuff and to be honest I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out. Naturally I feel uncomfortable but then as you know, I do try to put back into the community, especially in areas like medical research.
Qu: A while back I saw a video where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat side by side on stage exchanging jokes and pleasanteries. Is there any likelihood that you might share a stage with Henning Kagermann?
Larry: I’m not ruling anything out.
Qu: I’m noticing that Oracle Aces are creating some great content outside the main Oracle website. How do you feel about news and information on Oracle being aggregated elsewhere?
Larry: I didn’t know that, but you can be sure we’ll be looking into it.
[End note: it’s April 1st and this is a spoof conversation that never happened…but you never know…it might, one day.]
March 29th, 2008
A fresh Firefox install: drastic but cathartic
Following last weekend’s mea culpa I thought I’d make amends this weekend with a post about how I nearly ditched Firefox but decided instead to do some housecleaning with a fresh install on my MacBookPro. The results were astonishing. Note: some of what I say only applies to Apple kit - Windows users have a bit more of a tortuous route but the results should be the same.
Over the last few months, Firefox has been driving me nuts. Performance was the real killer. Firefox would take ages to load, sometimes it would sit there apparently doing nothing but in fact fighting to grab memory faster than it was leaking. I was at the point of giving up on the old ‘fox when ‘bingo’ a light went on. Re-install.
Firefox instructions for deleting an existing install on Mac OSX are not well organized. If like me you’ve got years of cruff, It’s not enough to drag the application away from the Applications folder. You have to dump the profile information that sits in the Username/Libraries/Applications Support/Firefox folder. They tell you that but only ‘below the fold.’ I discovered this by accident because I did as Firefox recommends above the fold for deletion, grabbed the latest version and found nothing had improved. Where to next?
Looking through the extensions I’d added over the years it struck me the only ones that matter to me are Greasemonkey, Del.icio.us buttons and Shareaholic. I don’t need the Google Toolbar, I’m sure as heck not using the Mahalo Toolbar and most everything else is just accumulated cruff. But I do need my bookmarks for site logins and my most commonly visited sites.
Firefox doesn’t give you an easy way to export your bookmarks so I imported them into Safari first and quickly scanned to ensure they were all there. I then deleted my Firefox profiles folder and re-installed Firefox. On initial load, it asked if I want to import from Safari which of course I did. I then re-installed Greasemonkey, Del.icio.us and Shareaholic buttons. I also re-installed a couple of FriendFeed related scripts.
Since I was having a housecleaning session, it made sense to re-organize my bookmarks which were a mess anyway. That took the most time as I needed to think about how they could be placed into appropriate folders along with pruning those I’d forgotten about.
The whole process took around an hour but the performance improvement was staggering. As a bonus, I recovered some 14GB of space on the hard drive from the millions of items that had accumulated in profile cruff.
Lessons learned and observations:
- If you are using Firefox then be careful about what you add in. As an average power user, I don’t have time to get intimate with the geeky stuff around removing things I shouldn’t have in the first place or which I no longer use.
- When browsing habits change, what’s needed in the browser changes. If that’s true for you then maybe a re-install is appropriate.
- While Firefox continues to have memory leakage problems, it may not be the browser but your own accumulated cruff that’s causing problems. If that’s the case then consider a spring clean.
- You’re going to lose all your passwords but then it never does any harm to make a wholesale change. Until the open whatever movement comes up with a fireproof way of transporting your existing login information it makes sense to note those passwords that are business critical. For my blogs, I simple said ‘forgot’ and acquired new ones.
- Sysadmins have a problem. While they can create an image for the different installs users need, it is very difficult to legislate against all the cruff users accumulate. Providing a re-install and education service might be considered a serious IT value add and help get away from the ‘extinction crowd‘ while putting an end to all those performance support calls.
- It’s a pity that Safari is the only major browser out of Firefox, IE and itself to offer an export facility. Even though I’d prefer to use Safari for its speed, it isn’t well enough supported by way of extensions for me to consider it a day to day browser. I can overcome some things by getting Safari to emulate Gresemonkey but it’s a messing about job the average user doesn’t want to handle - and why should they? Others will suggest browsers like Camino or Flock but I need something that is very well supported with enough options to make me keep wanting to come back. Despite its memory issues, Firefox is the only browser that addresses the need.
- The flip side of all this Firefox goodness is that I still don’t have a watertight browser from any browser developer that will give me what I need. I’m told memory issues are addressed in Firefox 3 but like most enterprisey types, I’m not a beta tester so I’ll have to wait and see.
March 26th, 2008
Google for enterprise: my $500 bet
Robert Scoble believes that Google is making a run for the enterprise and that over the next five years will grab at least some share of that market, specifically in email. He might be right but I’m willing to bet $500 that he’s wrong. This is what I see as the core of Robert’s argument:
Enterprises will never move wholesale over to Gmail and Google’s other offerings. Users just don’t like that kind of change. There would be revolt at work, if CTOs tried to force it. But this way a CTO can let his/her employees use whatever systems they want and still have them synchronized. And there ARE major reasons to move to Gmail: Cost, for one. I also am hearing that Gmail’s email servers use far less electricity per mail than Exchange’s do. Environmentalism anyone? You think that’s not important for CTOs? It sure is. Both are going to be major drivers that will get Google’s offerings paid attention to.
Never is a long time so I wouldn’t use that term. Here are some of the reasons is why I think Robert is off base:
- Why would an enterprise worker care when all the signs are that email is becoming increasingly despised? Check Luis Suarez valiant efforts to wean himself away from email. Isn’t the broader question which forms of communication will dominate into the future? I’m thinking that a Twitter variant will provide significant value that you can’t get from email. I’m also thinking that current development by Lotus Connections, SocialText, HiveLive, Jive Software, Wordframe, Nuoscope, RedDot, Alfresco, Newsgator and about 30 other companies is way more valuable than Gmail or Outlook. And that’s before we start to think about what Sharepoint might bring to the table.
- What’s the point? Email is but one productivity tool among an emerging suite of tools where people require more than email. Enter Duet, the partnership between SAP and Microsoft that gives people a reason to stick with Outlook by integrating email to process activity. That’s a very powerful point of stickiness.
- The budget for email is so small in relation to the total IT budget, it is hardly worth the effort. In large companies, it is possible to negotiate the price down significantly so simply throwing out the cost angle doesn’t cut it. Check Phil Wainewright’s post for a deeper discussion on this topic because if you think the fractional cost of the software is the only angle then you’d be way wrong. When viewed in this light, there is no incentive to switch.
- The environmental angle is interesting but again, IT has much larger fish to fry than worrying about the gas an Exchange server uses. Rather, they’re more likely to call up HP and see what they’re doing in virtualization to drive down operating cost. Despite the attention given to all things green, sadly I see little appetite to take ‘green’ seriously.
- Google is an ad-driven business where everything else takes second place. The net result is that Google has yet to demonstrate any serious commitment to finishing off application functionality that comes close to the maturity of incumbent alternatives. Where for example are the Gmail roadmaps that will give the CIO comfort?
- Does Robert seriously believe that Steve Ballmer is going to sit idly by and watch Google attack its installed base without a considered response? Robert says that Ballmer is handcuffed. Not true. The incremental revenue loss from giving away Outlook or heavily discounting Exchange (beyond existing levels) would be a blip in Microsoft earning. That’s because Microsoft has a lot more product firepower to call upon than email.
- The most frequent argument put out is that Google will make a serious dent in the SMB space. At one time I would have believed that to be true but today I am less certain. While software acquisition cost plays a factor, we can’t rule out the cost of convenience. Outlook is part of a larger, integrated view of communications where Gmail doesn’t come close. Neither do any of its other productivity tools. I’ve tried pulling Gmail, Google Reader and GCal together via iGoogle. It kinda works but is ultimately inconvenient. If Google works on this problem and shows the roadmap for getting there, I might think differently. Right now I don’t see the signs but then I’m not as close to Google as others so any input here is welcome.
- Google’s attitude to privacy is something of an Achilles Heel. Regardless that we’re all being indexed by the Google cloud, the company hasn’t shown serious commitment to resolving questions about business data privacy in a way that sells itself to the enterprise. Most recently, Steve Gillmor argued that Google is going through its ‘Microsoft period‘ of arrogance. He may be right and taken with privacy concerns, I have to ask what business person is going to take the risk with business sensitive data.
All these concerns could be worked out over the next five years such that Google presents the challenge Robert claims. But that assumes everyone else stands still. That isn’t going to happen. Certain vendors are sharing their five year roadmaps with me and if what I’ve seen is delivered then the email question will have faded way into the background by then. Call me a fool, but that’s why, when Robert asked if I am prepared to bet on it and I have offered to put $500 in escrow. As at the time of writing, I’m awaiting a response.
March 25th, 2008
The CIO’s innovation dilemma
The often uncomfortable relationship between IT and business is nothing new but has taken on fresh piquancy. The visibility achieved by the impact coming from the use of socialprise I have seen among major brands fuels that debate.
There is a history here and I sense that Mike Krigsman’s ‘IT extinction’ post was designed to take a specific view that reflects long term user frustration at what they see as an often intransigent and power crazed organization. As with all such positions, it reflects a partial reality. It is easy to understand how IT managers or those that routinely engage with IT decision makers might be concerned at Mike’s position. My colleague Vinnie Mirchandani had this to say:
I am amazed how arrogant the category of social software really is. Why does it feel the need to boil the ocean, change the enterprise? It has its role particularly in collaboration - but along side not instead of CRM, SCM, ERP, security, telecom and a bunch of other software categories. It needs to do its job well, not worry about the rest of the enterprise. When it hones its focus and shows appropriate payback, it will find the CIO or IT is not the enemy. Just a bunch of folks trying to juggle a wide range of competing technology initiatives.
Vinnie then goes on to talk about the shift in reporting responsibility away from the CFO towards the CEO in companies he advises. In our Google Group, he made the point that over the last years, IT has made great strides in reducing cost through activities like outsourcing. Despite the negative attention towards IT, I regard these as highly positive moves.
After the over selling (and buying) around Y2K, CEOs needed to bring IT spend under control, hence the role of the CFO. Now it seems, that spend has been exhausted or at least reduced to the point where it no longer matters. The net effect on IT budgets means innovation is genuinely hard for the CIO yet demands remain.
Michael Stonebraker, the man behind Ingres and co-founder of Vertica recently said to me that: “In data warehouse operations, DBAs are under the gun. They’re overwhelmed with user requests or demand but don’t have the right tools for delivering solutions.” The specific context for that discussion is for another post but the point is well made. He is describing a typical IT pain point where socialprise or new innovations can come to the rescue. So what about the place of IT in all of this?
Let’s not forget that IT has had the soulless task of bringing together many many disparate systems and it is therefore hardly surprising they want control over new things coming in the door. In the meantime, socialprise vendors work their way around IT with aggressive pricing and friendly interfaces that pass the ‘my mum could use this’ test. On-demand models save users the problem of installing and maintaining solutions while the seductive lure of ducking out from beneath the tyranny of the email inbox resonates with users in many departments. There comes a point though where IT has to be involved.
In a recent CIO.com interview, Ross Mayfield, president of SocialText and another Irregular noted:
Five years ago, we didn’t deal with IT at all. But now we end up working with IT because it’s an inevitability. We have things like an admin dashboard that we developed for IT, but pretty much every other feature beyond that is flat and accessible by every single other user. And that’s purposeful, because otherwise what you end up doing is creating tools of control, and tools of control creates a barrier to collaboration. If you want to accomplish very big things with technology, it’s not just IT; it’s line of business management engaging the base of stakeholders and champions.
Ross’s argument is based upon the assumption that many of today’s internal business problems center around two things: exception handling and collaboration, both of which are inherently human activities. He gives the example of wiki being used to assist call centers in problem solving.
Wiki is possibly one of the easiest socially oriented solutions to sell into enterprises because the shared benefits are strikingly easy to see. It is when you start combining the emergent technologies of wiki, blog, IM, interactive multi-media and RSS where things get muddied. These evolving products play directly towards the integrated consumerization of technology and the consumers that many businesses are trying to satisfy. Business has finally realized that the transaction based approach to service as epitomized by ERP and 1990’s CRM doesn’t work. In contrast, the new breed of software holds enormous promise, is delivering value and is satisfying the board level imperative of improving effectiveness, not just efficiency. It’s an entirely different mindset that puts the order to cash transaction into background and brings service into sharp relief.
This is an alien world for many folk in IT who have been conditioned to build control over repeatable, automated processes based on architectures that were never designed to support the ad hoc, infinitely variable nature of problem solving at the interface between one person and another. I think this lies at the heart of the dilemma faced by many IT organizations and not, as Mike largely suggests, a combination of turf defending attitudes, understandable though they may be. Put another way and to quote from Ed Yourdon in an earlier Project Failures post:
Because IT is clearly so critical to the day to day operation of almost any large organization, IT has to serve as somewhat of a gatekeeper guarding the crown jewels, so to speak, so that they don’t get damaged or hacked into, either by insiders or outsiders. That has become a more pervasive and annoying responsibility.
Part of the alignment problem we see when users get excited about new technologies is the notion that IT is preventing the users from getting their hands on these technologies themselves. That sets up a bunch of conflicts.
What we’re seeing is the wholly human problem of an organization that has been variously called upon to deliver ‘value’ from an evolving IT landscape that once placed emphasis on control but which now demands productive innovation. Both demand very different ways of working, require different disciplines and absolutely require change.
Change is one of the hardest things that humans have to address as this 2007 article by Joaquim P. Menzies for Candid CIO amply illustrates:
Bottom line: those spearheading change projects in organizations – and CIOs are increasingly finding themselves in this category – are in effect treading a very difficult middle ground between sensitivity and decisiveness; between attempting to get grass roots buy in for a change from all stakeholders – and then forging ahead even in the midst of resistance (and handling this resistance firmly and creatively).
Keeping to this middle ground is getting very difficult today. With many large business all sorts of external and internal pressures are forcing them to introduce change very quickly – usually with less than heartening results.
Last year [2006], in an IBM survey of 765 CEOs, more than 80 per cent admitted their organizations haven’t been very successful at managing change in the past.
Menzies argument centers on the negative impact of trying to do things too quickly, something I see reflected in the urgency of those pounding the socialprise drum. Right now there is a sense that if ‘we’ don’t change and do it right now, then we’re going to be eliminated from the competitive landscape. Fortunately, business leaders and IT are not that easily persuaded.
In closing, I’m reminded of the words used by ‘Captain’ in Cool Hand Luke to express the problem of Luke’s rebelliousness: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” If socialprise wishes to become a leading category for IT spend then perhaps it needs to drink some of its own Kool-Aid. It can draw from Ross and others’ experience as one of the legs upon which IT can be brought to the party. Then maybe we’ll start to see the breaking down of the siloes that allow enterprise to effectively address the tough problems that innovation seeks to solve.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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