Be Strategic

Gesture Control Demo

2011-08-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about visiting clients is getting a glimpse of new technology that will be showing up soon in our offices or our living rooms.

Case in point: Here's a demo of a gesture control system that uses stereo vision to detect people and objects at 60 fps. The TYZX G3 Embedded Vision—that's the small white camera mounted above the flat-panel display—enables a user to manipulate images simply by moving his hands.

The TYZX G3 camera system shown here works both indoors and outdoors.

For more information, check out TYZX.

QA Cafe Looks Ahead

2011-07-13T06:23:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of having lunch yesterday with Joe McEachern, founder and CEO of QA Cafe. Joe's company has two main product lines. The first, CDRouter, is a test solution for Customer Premises Equipment such as DSL modems and wireless routers. Over the past decade, a truly impressive list of customers have adopted CDRouter to ensure that their products comply with RFCs and industry standards and are easy and straightforward for consumers to use.

The second product, CloudShark, which the company introduced at the SharkFest Conference at Stanford in June, is a virtual appliance for securely storing, cataloging, and sharing packet-capture files. Instead of leaving capture files scattered over the network, enterprise IT teams and service providers can upload them into a secure repository and share them with authorized users over the Web. Which means, yes, you can now analyze capture files on your iPad.

What's new in Joe's world? In the past 6 months, droves of CPE vendors have adopted CD Router's IPv6 solution. QA Cafe introduced its IPv6 tests a couple of years ago, but it's been only recently that organizations responsible for consumer products have shown a lot of interest. Joe's conclusion: the SOHO networking industry believes it's finally time to bring IPv6 to consumers.

The other big news at QA Cafe is the ongoing development of CloudShark. Joe's team is working with prospects and customers to turn this into a truly enterprise-class IT management tool. Watch for more announcements about CloudShark in the months ahead.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

2011-06-24T12:34:00.001-07:00

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.

Smaller, Faster, Easier

2011-02-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

Computing is going lightweight. The first laptops were more luggable than portable. You risked putting your back out carrying an early Mac laptop.

Over time, though, laptaps did really become light. And powerful. And thin. Now have laptops so thin that you can pack them in envelopes and call them Air.

But sometimes you don't need a device at all—even an iPad, netbook, or remote control wand.

The next generation of devices, such as televisions and some compute systems, will include 3D vision cameras that can interpret hand signals.

It's sign language for communicating with the digital world.

Here's a sign of the times: 3D vision company TYZX has received a Notice of Allowance for a new patent for using stereo vision (3D) cameras to read gestures for controlling systems such as televisions. TYZX's 3D vision systems work in variable lighting conditions and process data at 60 fps. A snap of the fingers in other words—or a wave that can be interpreted and acted upon.

The TYZX Web site has more information about their ultra-fast, ultra-compact visions systems, which are in use today in robots, interactive art installations, security systems, and more.

Photo of a hand by striatic. CC Some Rights Reserved.

The Erosion of Privacy on Facebook: Read the News and Audit Your Account

2010-05-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

Could Facebook have grown its community to hundreds of millions of users so quickly if it had not promised to protect the privacy of its users? I suspect the answer is "no." Users trusted Facebook, and they signed up in droves.

Evidently, the company feels it has grown big enough that it can rescind its earlier promises about data privacy and weather whatever micro-storm of protest ensues. As has been much reported, the company is changing its privacy policies and—just as importantly—its UI for controlling privacy settings.

The policies now lean toward disclosure rather than containment. The new UI controls require one to click, click, click with the perseverance of a busy switchboard operator to regain most of the privacy one enjoyed a few months ago. Alas, it's impossible to regain all of it.

Facebook wants to ensure that it and its partners have access to as much personal information as possible. That's how they'll make money.

Their loosey-goosey manner of opening the floodgates leaves users vulnerable to all sorts of hacks, exposing private data not just to Facebook and its partners, but also to any hacker or marketer with sufficient diligence and cunning. (See Wired Magazine's article, Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook.)

Users, understandably, are unhappy. Fifteen organizations have banded together to file a complaint to the FTC. User defections are becoming more common and well publicized. Facebook management is scrambling to the respond.

For a quick summary of what's changed, what's new, and how exposed your own Facebook account is, consult the following.

Analysis

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Updated: Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information

Quote from this second article:

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. . . .

But even for an innocuous interest like cooking, it’s not clear how this change is meant to benefit Facebook's users. An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.

New York Times

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (a chart showing the hierarchy of Facebook's new privacy settings)

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Report of Findings into the Complaint Filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (2009)

Wired Magazine

Public Posting Now the Default on Facebook (December 2009)

Quote:

Facebook estimates that 80 to 85 percent of its users have stuck with the default privacy settings, which means hundreds of millions of users will soon be publishing to the entire net, by default when they type into their status box. The previous defaults for status updates were “Friends of Friends” and networks, including geographic ones with millions of users, while photos defaulted to everyone.

Audit Tools

Profile Watch: Scans your privacy settings and rates your exposure on a scale of 1 to 10.

ReclaimPrivacy.org: Scans your Facebook privacy settings and provides detailed analysis of your exposure, along with links to the Privacy Settings page on which you can make adjustments for a particular score.

If you know of other useful audit tools, please let me know.

Thanks to Sarah Evans for the link to Profile Watch and to Chris Marino for the link to Reclaim Privacy.

Photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/ / CC BY 2.0

A Gentle Critique of McAfee Product Marketing

2010-05-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

Fifteen-second summary of the marketing lessons discussed in this post:

1. Write, chat, and speak in plain English.
2. Don't put populating fields in your CRM system above serving your customers.
3. Create demos that really demonstrate.
4. Build Web sites with tiers of information, so if customers want to dig for details, they can.

If you've already practicing what these lessons preach, feel free to click away and find useful instruction elsewhere.

But if you harbor a sliver of a doubt about your own organization's ability to do all the things I've listed above, then read on . . .

The Story

One of my systems needs to go into the shop for repairs. It's an old system, and it's got a ton of files on it. Some of the files are confidential, so I'd like to encrypt them. I don't need to encrypt the whole disk, just certain files and folders.

I know that there's disk encryption software out there, and I'm sure that David Strom (a writer I know and like) has written about this sort of thing, and I thought about digging up his old columns. But I'm a customer of McAfee's. Their AV software came installed on my laptop, and I'm pretty happy with it. So I decided to start there. Actually, I decided to look at McAfee, Symantec, and PGP.

Let's take these in reverse order. PGP emphasizes whole disk encryption and encryption for email (not something I'm looking for at the moment). Their disk encryption software, which I'm sure is very good, starts at $99 (though that page is a little hard to find; looking for it just now, I ended up on a page for a similar product costing $149). Not egregiously expensive, but more than I was looking to pay. After all, I just want to encrypt a few folders.

A quick glance at Symantec's Web page describing their security products for Home systems leads me to conclude that they offer a bunch of nice features, but not disk encryption.

Which brings us back to McAfee. Of the three vendors, McAfee's positioning for the home computer market seems to be the strongest. Their Web page design is bright and clear, and Web copy doesn't suggest that you need to place an order of 100 units or more to begin to be interesting to their sales organization.

Here's their Web page for their encryption product, which it turns out is called McAfee Anti-Theft.

I think this page is well done. (None of my quibbles concern McAfee's UI design but rather their UX design.) To call attention to just a few things I like about this page:

It's clear and legible. There's a product shot and a check list of key features.

There's a bright "Buy Now" button with a legible footnote explaining exactly what it is you're buying.

The ribbon-like design treatment in the upper right reinforces the suggestion of trust conveyed by the gold badge. It looks like they've won a badge for merit.

More technical details, such as the fact that the product supports AES encryption, appear below. (As they should. Headlines up top. Details down below.)

You'll notice that below the photo of the box, there's a View Demo button. That's where my trouble with trying to purchase McAfee Anti-Theft began.

The demo animation runs for roughly 2:30 (two minutes, thirty seconds). Of that, 1:30 is a slide presentation basically recapitulating the information that appears on the Web page. OK, fine. I realize you're selling to the home market, and you need to spell things out really clearly. The last minute presents a demo showing how to set up a "vault," assign it a password, and drag files into it.

The last minute of the demo—the real demo part of the "demo"—is good as far as it went. But it only showed a file or two being dragged into the vault. I wondered if I could drag whole folders. I mean, yes, almost certainly in 2010, I would expect that a product like this would accept folders, as well as files. But the demo didn't show any folders being dragged in. The Web copy doesn't mention "files and folders"; it repeatedly just says "files." The 2-page data sheet, which I opened as a PDF, does not include the word "folder." Which made me wonder: can you drag in whole folders? Wouldn't that have been an easy thing to show or mention, if it did?

Every now and then you buy a product assuming it will do X and Y, and you discover that no, it only does Y.

OK. This is a pretty straightforward question. Can I drag whole folders (preferably a multi-layer hierarchy of folders) into a McAfee Anti-Theft Vault. Yes or no? Yes, folders, or no, just files?

I click around the site. Suddenly there's a chat window popping up on my screen. OK, fine. I'll start a chat. This should be easy.

Here's a transcript. (With names changed: I have no interest at all in impugning any individuals here; I'm simply concerned with site architecture and process. I have a great deal of sympathy and admiration for people who work in call centers and help desks, and my admonition to myself [which I admit to sometimes failing to heed] is to always be unfailingly polite.)

Chat Conversation	Commentary
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you... Hello, welcome to McAfee Chat. My name is John Doe. Please briefly describe your goal or question so I can connect you with the best resource to meet your objectives.	Wow. Who wrote that? It's so stilted. It reads like it came out of a committee that drew a diagram on a white board analyzing customer requests ("some of the users will have goals and others will have questions, so our copy should reflect that"). It reminds me of a story a tech-writer friend told me about starting at a company where a fellow writer greeted her with the words, "I'll be happy to show you the supply cabinet where you can obtain all the supplies which you'll utilize." And it makes me admire companies like eBay who make a concerted effort to make their Web copy clear and friendly. McAfee's chat greeting is a cold bucket of corporate-ese splashed on a user who on the Web site was treated as an ordinary home computer user trying to protect his tax returns or pictures of favorite grandchildren. But this opening copy, though awkward, is important. The person I'll be chatting with is not someone who has answers; he's not even someone who is supposed to have answers. He's less of a support rep and more of a concierge who will direct me to someone who really does (supposedly) have answers. Two thoughts here: First, McAfee should make this process quick. This hand-off provides no direct value to the user; it's simply an implementation detail for McAfee. Second, let's explain this role in a friendly way. Something like: "We have a lots of different groups at McAfee. First we're going to connect you to a Customer Service Concierge who will find out what you're looking for, then transfer you to the right group. We'll make this quick." But for now, I need to describe my goal or question. Then I'll be connected to the best resource.
John Doe(the name I'm giving the rep in this blog post): How can we help you today?	That's better. "How can we help you?" Friendly and to the point.
Customer: Quick question. With the Anti-Theft product, do I have to drag files into the vault one at a time, or can I drag entire folders and subfolders? John Doe: Were you considering purchasing protection today?	Uh-oh. To answer my question, you shouldn't need to know whether or not I'm about to purchase. I'm happy to talk to a sales rep at some point, but a lot of inside sales people don't know technical details. But OK, fine. I'll go along with this.
Customer: Yes. John Doe: Ok, what I can do for you is transfer you to one of our Sales Agents and they can assist you in processing your order and make sure you get the appropriate product Customer: Before I buy it, though, I'd like an answer to my question. Customer: I'm comparing it to PGP's product, which apparently lets me encrypt folders. John Doe: A Sales Agent will be able to assist you with your questions as well John Doe: My purpose is to direct you to the best resource that can help you with your inquiry. By asking a few questions I can determine what kind of assistance you need, in this case our sales team Customer: OK. John Doe: OK, I will need to collect some information in order to manage your request appropriately. Can you please provide your first and last name email address and your phone number	So I'm in a chat session in which a customer service rep needs to collect more contact information so McAfee can answer a question about a basic feature of a product. Chat sessions imply instant service; that's why users join them. If I had wanted to get talk to a salesperson on the phone, I would have called Sales. But already we're talking about "processing my order." I still don't have an answer to my question.
Customer: I don't want a phone call. I just want an answer to my yes-or-no question. You can email me at [ email address ]. John Doe: As per your question you have to simply drag the files to the vault. Is anything else I can do for you? Customer: I know I can drag individual files. Can I drag entire folders? Customer: If I have a folder hierarchy with 120 files, do I have to drag them all individually? The demo on the Web site is pretty cursory, and it shows only individual files being placed in the vault. John Doe: If you need assistance with that you have to contact tech support, as I mentioned I am only an operator to direct you to the appropriate department to assist you. You can visit www.mcafeehelp.com or contact them at 1866-622-3911	They won't answer my question by email or by transferring me to another chat agent. They have to have a phone number. Or I can call Technical Support. What's wrong with email? Why offer the chat session at all? Why not just post numbers for Sales and Tech Support? Somewhat stunned.

Oh, if only that 2:32 video had been 2:37 and showed a folder being dragged. Unless, of course, it couldn't.

So I called McAfee sales. I spoke to a service rep. She asked if I was a customer. I said I was, but that it shouldn't matter: I was calling about a different product, and I just had a simple question. She said she needed my email address before she could continue. I gave her a valid email address. It turned out not be the one in their records. I asked her if she could direct me to someone technical who could answer my question. It's a yes/no question, I reminded her. She told me to look for technical information on the Web site. I told her I wasn't going to buy her product and said good-bye.

As I mentioned earlier, I was almost certain that David Strom had written about disk encryption products for personal computers. I surfed to his site, www.strominator.com, clicked on a few tags, found the relevant article, saw that he uses PGP Disk but also recommends some free open source products.

I found an open source product that supports AES encryption of files and folders. Installed it. Encrypted my files. Yes, the interface is not as friendly as the interface to the McAfee product, but it's the end of the day now, and my files are encrypted. I still don't know if the McAfee product can encrypt whole folders in addition to individual files.

And now, nor do I care. I've solved my problem. And my biggest expense was time dealing with McAfee marketing and customer service.

A Lesson

I understand the temptation of sales and marketing folks to capture every interaction in a CRM. Budgets are tight, and accountability is more important than ever.

But workflows shouldn't put collecting CRM data over fast, friendly service. A single rep with a good, old-fashioned FAQ or knowledgebase would have made my day more pleasant and McAFee $29.95 richer. That's chump change, I realize, but I wonder how often interactions like this play out across all the various call centers at McAfee.

A Reminder that Digital Doesn't Mean Forever

2010-04-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed Alberto Manguel's earlier book, The City of Words, so now I'm reading his new book, The Library at Night. In a chapter called "The Library as Space," Manguel reminds us just how fragile digital data can be:

"The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD-ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multi-media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh-century census of England compiled by Norman monks. More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded "life in Britain" during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve-inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data, but none was entirely successful. "There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem," said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. "Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost." By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable."

It's sobering to think of all the business and family records transferred to CD-ROM, supposedly permanently, so that paper originals could be done away with. A great deal of copying lies ahead. . . .

Photo of the Domesday Book in public domain.

The Biggest Problem in Social Media is Content

2010-03-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

Producing it, that is.

Without content, Facebook fan pages are as empty and hapless as a shuttered shopping mall.

Without content to link to, tweets are endlessly chatty and will likely fail to produce measurable returns.

Without a steady stream of content, blogs are updated irregularly, or with the turning of the seasons. Or perhaps those intermittent posts uncannily coincide with a product marketing manager's dental appointments, when he or she finally has some down time with a laptop and a mouth too numb to return calls.

We've all seen the pattern: Company X is won over to the importance of social media. They figure out what their blog will be about, who will write the drafts, what the approval process will be, and so on.

With much fanfare, the blog is launched. And the initial post sits there. And sits there. And who has time to write a second post? Or update the Facebook page? Or tweet?

To help company X (and companies Y and Z, as well, because this problem seems common), here are some suggestions for getting content on line.

Leverage What You Have

Has your company just launched a product, published a white paper, or hosted an event? Write a short description and link to the relevant Web page, PDF, or Flickr photo set.

(Speaking of Flickr photo sets, make sure someone on your team has a digital camera. Then set up a Flickr account and link to it from your blog, your tweets, and so on.)

Put Blogging on the Agenda

Track the production of blog posts, Facebook updates, and other social media content just like you track the production of anything else. Like any accountable activity, each content production task should be assigned a name and a date.

While your team is discussing projects, events, and announcements, ask what can or should be shared through social media. What could be published on a blog or Facebook page? What news or links could be tweeted?

Get in the habit of asking what social media content can be wrung from any major activity or milestone.

Let Us Join Your Great Conversations

Over lunch, you and a colleague had a great discussion about something relevant to your industry.

Share it with us. Ask for our comments. When we post comments, respond.

Make Jotting Ideas Down a Habit

Create a folder on your desktop for blog ideas. Or if you use a note-taking application like Evernote, set up a Notebook for blog ideas. Or simply carry a notebook or a stack of index cards.

When an idea pops into your head, jot it down. Then spend 15 minutes a day, sorting through your ideas and filling them out, converting your hasty note or outline into a short post of 250-500 words. It's best if you make that 15 minutes early in the day, before you're interrupted or trapped in meetings.

The nice thing about this approach is that you're suddenly able to accomplish big things (writing that content you haven't found time to write) by taking a bunch of little steps. You never have to face the daunting prospect of a Blank Page Expecting a Complete, Well-formed Piece of Writing (cue organ music and the Wilhelm scream). You're simply jotting down idea you've already thought of and that's practically begging you to record it, or you're developing an idea you've already written down and simply producing a short, pithy elaboration. And you're writing regularly. And your blog and your Facebook page are living up to your expectations. Wow.

What Have You Read or Seen that Inspired You?

Tell us. Ask questions about it.

Make Lists

Like this one. You can't only make lists. But a list now and then is a fine idea.

And The Most Important Thing Is . . .

Get going. Now.

Shopping mall photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akasped/ / CC BY 2.0

Gandhi's Convertible Terms

2010-03-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

A well known saying of Gandhi's is, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." Often this is shortened to, "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

The shorter version makes the relationship between you and your effect on the world sound provisional. You have a choice. You can be the change (that is, you can be the way you would like the world to become), or you can not be. Perhaps you lack the motivation or rigor be that change right now. The world, in that case, will drift on its way . . .

Elsewhere in his writings, Gandhi links actions and ends more explicitly—and he doesn't let us off the hook. Gandhi says that means and ends are convertible terms. (In logic, convertible terms are terms that can be swapped.)

Your means are your ends; your ends are your means. Since you are always engaged in some kind of means (since you are always taking action, even if that action appears to be inaction), you are always shaping ends, and the nature of the former directly determines the nature of the latter, regardless of excuses, manifestos, talking points, or tweets.

In other words: Be the change you wish to see in the world? You are the change, right here, right now, whether you like it or not.

So how are you being right now? Because that's the way you are shaping the world.

Application for Business

No moment is a wasted moment. No interaction with a prospect or customer is unimportant. You are always shaping the company you hope to create some day.

Most people realize now that a company's brand isn't its logo or its Web site copy; it's the sum of its customer experiences. That recognition applies here, as well.

Photo of Gandhi statue at the S.F. Ferry Building by Yves Remedios. Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

Using Social Media to Manage by Objectives

2010-02-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Times recently ran an interview with Mark Pincus, the C.E.O of Zynga. It's an interesting interview. Pincus talks about the importance of employees feeling like they're in charge of something: everyone should be C.E.O. of something. He also talks about hiring people who are still hungry for success and managing people by asking them to articulate a few key objectives for the week.

Regarding his method of managing, Pincus says:

John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.'s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.

We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.'s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.

Then I ask everybody to write down on Sunday night or Monday morning what are your three priorities for the week, and then on Friday see how you did against them. It’s the only way people can stay focused and not burn out. And if I look at your road map and you have 10 priorities for you and your team, you probably don't know which of the three matter, and probably none of the 10 are right.

I can look at everyone's piece of paper, and their road map shows every item you were going to do and your predicted results and actual results, and then the results are in red if you missed them, yellow if they're close and green if you passed them. I think road maps are a great principle just for managing your life. It keeps everybody focused, and it lets me know what trains are on or off the tracks.

For me, the phrase that leapt off the page here was "piece of paper." Sure, one could track all these objectives on paper, but I think it makes more sense to post this information on blogs or wikis, where the objectives would be visible to all and where tagging could be used to tie individual objectives to larger departmental or organizational objectives. In other words, instead of using paper, use Jive or MindTouch or Thought Farmer. That makes the objectives amenable, too, to importing into BI tools or simple graphing tools sometimes included in these platforms. And if some objectives are sensitive or confidential, role-based access controls could be used to make them visible only to authorized managers.

There's been lots of talk about how social media platforms help workers share information and expertise. The oft-cited example is a worker discovering which colleagues in other departments have relevant expertise. Social media platforms help people discover and nurture such connections.

I hope that in the coming years, more organizations realize what powerful tools these platforms can be for strategic planning: for collecting information for use in strategic plans and for disseminating and tracking strategic objectives. Let's use these platforms for sharing information up and down the organization, as well as across, and for making strategic objectives visible and understandable to all.

Software Development by the Numbers

2010-01-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, I was working with a software start-up that had designed an integration framework that could be used for transporting and transforming data for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). As we prepared for our product launch, we talked to analysts about RIAs, and we evaluated partnerships with software vendors who were building toolkits for RIAs. We listened to podcasts about RIAs. We watched developer presentations. We had RIAs on the brain.

Around this same time, I attended an event hosted by the American Marketing Association in Boston. During the festivities, I struck up a conversation with someone who turned out to be a principal at a local Web application design firm. They had been in business for nearly a decade and had some big name clients.

"Getting much interest in RIAs?" I asked.

"What's an RIA?" he answered.

Wow, I thought. Is my client way too much out in front, or is this nice gentleman's Web firm a tad bit behind? Was I paying too much attention to analyst blogs and Adobe's development plans? Had I entered the "reality-distortion field" of analyst pronouncements and vendor slide shows? These new Web technologies were undoubtedly cool, but how many people were really using them?

Who's Building What

A new survey conducted by Forrester Research for Dr. Dobb's answers these questions, and more. The survey of over 1,000 Dr. Dobb's readers reveals:

Over a quarter of the programmers surveyed said they were developing RIAs. The survey authors note that "RIAs are slowly replacing HTML when it comes to Web site development."

The survey also found that:

Nearly 80% of programmers are using open source software for development or application deployment.
Over 33% of developers use Subversion for source code control. The next most popular source code control tool, Microsoft SourceSafe, has a market share about one third that size.
The most popular databases for application deployment are (in order) SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgresSQL.
Most developers still write code on Windows PCs (only 5% use Apple), and Linux and Windows are the primary operating environments for deploying applications.
Only about 4% of developers are deploying applications in the cloud (a surprisingly low number, I think, given all the talk about cloud computing).
Less than 15% of programmers spend all their time writing in a single programming language.
Agile processes are increasingly popular: 45% of developers are using Agile processes, and of those, 20% say agile is a key part of their project's success. How about project overhead? Dr. Dobb's found that "only 2% of Agile developers feel that their methodology creates significant busywork, compared with 27% of developers doing waterfall development."
An impressive 60% of developers don't consider their work just a 9-to-5 job. They apply their skills in side projects and for other organizations.

Forrester sees the world of software development as being in transition. (In a sense, it's always been in transition.) Their advice?

Spend more time understanding what your developers are doing both and work and outside of it, and solicit their ideas about how these technology could speed up development and cut costs for the organization.

Good advice.

If you're a developer or working on a project that involves software development, I strongly recommend that you read the full article, which was written by Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research, and which you can find online here.

Photo of numbers Creative Commons License, some rights reserved, by hegemonx.

Making Email a Better File Cabinet

2009-11-12T06:18:00.001-08:00

Yes, Facebook and Twitter are popular, but a recent study by Osterman Research found that email remains the most important channel for business communications. The same study found that 55% of business users say that over a quarter of the information they need for work is tucked away in email folders.

Clearly, we're all still using email, and we all still need ready access to the information that's buried somewhere in email. Search tools built into applications like Gmail, Thunderbird, and Outlook are a big help for tracking down messages that contain a specific search phrase or keyword. Nonetheless, there are a few guidelines that email senders can follow to make it easier for recipients to find the data they're looking for, even if the message arrived months or even years ago, whether or not recipients are using email application search engines.

Make the subject line factual and descriptive.
For example, instead of "Chaa-ching!", write something more prosaic like "Sales Order from Liberty Capital." You can add "Chaa-ching" at the end of the line or in the body of the message, if you like, but keep the first part of the subject line—the part someone notices first when skimming down a long list of titles—purely descriptive.
Label like messages in like ways.
If you're sending sales orders and you title every message containing a sales order with the formula, "Sales Order from . . . ", you'll make it easier for your recipients to lay their hands on the order they're looking for, no matter how cluttered their email inbox is. When I send clients review drafts of business plans, white papers, or other business documents, I always write, "PLEASE REVIEW:" followed by the draft number and the document title. My clients are busy people, and I hope this formulaic titling makes it a little easier for them to notice that a new document has arrived that needs their attention.
When the subject matter of an email thread has changed substantially, begin a new thread or change the title accordingly.
At the time, it might have seemed natural for the discussion on the new office printer to somehow become a discussion of the a new network monitoring feature that product management is trying to cram into the next software release, but two months from now, when you're looking for the market data to back up product management, you might not think to look at messages whose title refers to the new HP printer on the second floor.
Tag a message high priority only if it really is high priority.If you label everything as high priority, then 1) after a week or two your recipients will roll their eyes and ignore your sense of urgency, and 2) when they need to find that truly urgent message you sent, they'll have a harder time.

Paying any attention at all to email subject lines might seem pedantic, but I think it behooves all of us to recognize that we're swamped with information that's chaotically organized, and that's little things can make a difference.

Microsoft did a study a year or two ago and found that business users spend roughly one day per week just looking for the information they in order to do their jobs. That's a colossal waste of time, isn't it? One day of your week, every week, just hunting for data? That's the equivalent of showing up for work every day between January 1 and mid-March simply to tidy your office. Wouldn't you rather be able to use that time getting things done?

Enterprise search tools and improved email applications obviously help with this problem. But a little discipline in email authoring can make a difference, as well.

File cabinet photo by mrmanc, licensed by Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Can Joyent Create a PaaS Platform More Cost-effective than Amazon EC2?

2009-07-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

At last week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I had the opportunity to talk to James Duncan, Director of Platform Strategies at Joyent. Joyent is a cloud computing vendor in the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) market. They sell virtualized servers called Joyent Acclerators, which customers use for running Web applications.

The idea behind IaaS is that customers can grow or shrink their infrastructure dynamically. Expecting a surge of business, or need to crunch vast amounts of data for a rush project? No problem. IaaS lets you instantly access as many servers as you need: 50, 500, even 5000 or more. Project over? Again, no problem. Shut down the servers at once. You've managed to meet your computing needs without buying, configuring, and managing racks of servers yourself.

In January, Joyent bought Reasonably Smart, a cloud computing start-up that James and his business partner Bryan Bogensberger had founded the previous summer. First on their own and now at Joyent, James and Bryan have been developing the Smart Platform, a PaaS solution that lets programmers develop server applications in JavaScript and then deploy these applications to the cloud using Git, an open source version-control system. Now branded as a Joyent solution, the Smart Platform is ready to go into a private Beta test.

I asked James why he chose JavaScript as the programming language for the new platform. Why choose a language famous for improving interactivity in a browser, instead of a language more commonly associated with server-side applications, such as Python or Perl or Java?

He pointed out that JavaScript was designed from the outset to deliver a lot of functionality in a secure, self-contained environment (known in programming as a "sandbox"). Secure autonomy is a great feature for applications and services running in a shared environment such as a data center, where virtual servers from several customers might be running on the same machine. He also pointed out that more money is going into training and documentation work on JavaScript than into other popular languages, such as Ruby, PHP, and Python. And, of course, JavaScript is a proven language, already popular with lots of programmers, who have been using it for years to develop sophisticated client-side Web applications. Now these programmers can apply their knowledge of JavaScript to the development of fast, efficient server applications that run in the cloud.

The Smart Platform offers a couple of other advantages that cloud computing users may find attractive.

First, the platform is open source. Joyent hopes that customers will like Joyent's PaaS services so much, they'll subscribe to Joyent and pay them to run the platform. But customers and even non-customers are free to move the entire stack in-house. Running the platform in house could be helpful for developing prototypes, running private clouds (shared, elastic services run entirely behind the firewall), or combining private and public clouds, as needed. Also, by making the platform open source, Joyent expects to ease customers' concerns about being locked in to a particular PaaS vendor. (Vendor lock-in has been much discussed lately in cloud computing circles.)

Another important advantage of the Smart Platform is that it's truly priced like a utility: customers pay only when an application is servicing requests. They pay nothing when is present on a virtual server, but inactive (that is, not processing data or interacting with other applications). This utility pricing model has the potential to make Joyent far more cost-effective than even Amazon's highly affordable Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service.

James offered this example. Let's say you're hosting your Web site in the cloud for a month. On Amazon, you would pay for the Amazon Machine Image (the Amazon virtual server) for the entire month, even if the Web site gets only a few hits and actually active for a few seconds or minutes.

On the Joyent Smart Platform, in contrast, you would pay only for those few seconds or minutes of activity; you would pay nothing for all the time the server is hosted on the Smart Platform inactive. As a result, your bill should be a small fraction of what it would be from Amazon.

Pricing based on activity rather than deployment could make a big difference for customers whose hosted applications are active only sporadically. It could also be attractive for customers who have forgotten to decommission servers once a project is over and have then been surprised to receive a big bill from a cloud service provider.

If you're interested in participating Beta of the Joyent Smart Platform, visit www.reasonablysmart.com.

The Wit and Wisdom of Scott Cook

2009-06-22T03:46:00.000-07:00

Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," which I wrote about here, featured a lively Q&A session with Scott Cook, Intuit's founder and chairman of the executive committee. Scott—who impressed me as knowledgeable, personable, and down-to-earth—offered a couple of sage remarks I particularly liked.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease of use."

Scott talked about the pains Intuit went through, especially in the early days, to eliminate complexity from their products' user interfaces. Convincing novice computer users to adopt Quicken as their tool for managing household finances was quite a challenge, particularly back in the days when an unformatted floppy drive could flummox a new user. (Intuit's solution: never tell the user the floppy drive is unformatted. Format the drive automatically, and let the user get on with his or her work.)

On a quest for usability, Intuit bought the rights to the interface of another product that was already popular and easy to use. Intuit engineers copied that other product's interface, pixel-by-pixel, and built it into a new version of Quicken.

"Familiarity is 90% of ease-of-use." If an interface design is already familiar, users don't have to think about using it. They simply use it and get on with their work.

I think Scott's advice about familiarity is spot on. Don't try to be overly creative or clever with your UI. When it comes to UI design, simplicity and familiarity are the cardinal virtues.

Later in the Q&A session, Scott Cook said this:

"Behind every successful entrepreneur, you'll find a supportive spouse and a couple of very surprised in-laws."

That remark rang true, too, and made me chuckle.

What Cloud Computing Offers Startups, Part 2

2009-06-17T04:18:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I discussed the operational and financial benefits of cloud computing for start-ups. Today I'd like to discuss another benefit that's just as important, and that has far-reaching implications for the direction of IT development in the coming years.

Cloud computing makes it easier than ever for software companies to deliver innovative, business-critical services to Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).

Until recently, most software start-ups avoided the SMB market. Selling products and services to SMBs seemed daunting for several reasons:

Limited Budgets: SMBs are well known for having spartan IT budgets. Beyond buying basic networking gear, Microsoft Office, and perhaps an accounting system, a small business may make hardly any IT investment at all. Even larger, mid-sized businesses tend to be conservative spenders, leery of risk and demanding a clear ROI from a new product—even though it's often difficult or impossible to demonstrate an ROI with a brand new product.
Distribution Overhead: Reaching SMBs has traditionally required a channel (e.g., a distributor who served SMBs in a given area or industry) or, worse, many channels and lots of advertising. Channels require a lot of attention in the form of training and support, and they take a bit out of a start-up's profit margin.
Deal Flow: To achieve sufficient revenue, a start-up would need to close tens or hundreds of small deals to equal the same amount of revenue possible from one or two large enterprise sales. With limited staff, attention, and marketing funds, most start-ups (with the hearty encouragement of their investors) have preferred to pursue opportunities in the enterprise market.

But in the past couple of years, cloud computing has knocked down all these barriers. In fact, cloud computing solutions often start with the premise that the customer has limited time and money for managing complex, but important IT operations. The cloud computing vendor rushes in as the SMB hero, managing everything behind the scenes, while offering the customer an easy-to-use, comforting Web interface.

Old Obstacle	Cloud Computing Solution
Limited Budget	Cloud computing solutions, such as SaaS applications or hosted storage, can be delivered cost effectively. There's no need for on-premises hardware and time-consuming installation and configuration services. Customers buy just what they need, when they need it. Delivery on popular platforms such as Force.com and QuickBase greatly reduces customer-acquisition costs, which normally the vendor would have to pass along to the customer.
Distribution Overhead	Cloud computing services are marketed, sold, and delivered over the Web. Customers can discover point solutions built on cloud platforms offered by vendors they already know and trust (e.g., Amazon, Intuit, Microsoft, Salesforce.com). There's no need for a large sales team and offices scattered around the country, nor is there a need to sign on and train large numbers of resellers. Sales and marketing take place online.
Deal Flow	Through promotion in established platform communities, as well as through viral marketing, blogging, and targeted marketing efforts, vendors can find tens and then hundreds or thousands of new customers. At a time when enterprises are cutting their IT budgets, reaching SMBs who are looking for cost-saving, operational improvements and strategic advantages offered through new capabilities, seems like an attractive idea.

Cloud computing has changed the nature of the typical start-up. Instead of a capital-intensive organization building "enterprise-class" solutions for large companies, today's start-up is more likely a small, nimble team, taking full advantage of the economies offered by platforms like EC2 and open source, and delivering online services that are valuable to companies of all sizes—even another five-person company down the hall.

Photo of man and clouds by donabelandewen, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

What Cloud Computing Offers Startups

2009-06-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

At the Intuit's mini-conference on "Startups and the Cloud," the discussions, which varied from investment to technology, repeatedly raised the question of what advantages, if any, cloud computing offered startups.

To answer that question, we need to know what cloud computing is. I'm going to borrow the definition developed by NIST, which Longworth Venture Partners analyst Vishy Venugopalan cited in his overview of cloud computing, which kicked off the day's events:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, storage, servers, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Five or ten years ago, it was not uncommon for a newly-funded start-up to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure. Servers, disk arrays, back-up power supplies, management and monitoring software, an air-conditioned room with a raised floor—the list of capital expenditures could be impressive, and this investment needed to be made before engineers could begin any significant work developing products.

Cloud computing changes all that: it minimizes infrastructure investments, so that companies only need to invest in IT services when they're needed.

Cloud computing eliminates the need for that air-conditioned room filled with expensive server racks. It eliminates the need for the local IT manager to watch over them. And it shortens the management team's list of headaches, by sparing them the details of back-up tapes and server upgrades. IT can be provisioned cheaply and immediately—today, this afternoon, now, and development can begin right away.

Todd Hixon from New Atlantic Ventures put it this way:

Cloud computing gives you a sandbox for delivering solutions while assessing demand. It enables you to avoid needless investment in infrastructure.

Jeffrey Beir from North Bridge Venture Partners agreed:

Cloud computing allows developers to focus on the IP (intellectual property) that's unique to them.

After all, it's that unique IP that's ultimately going to make or break the company. It's the unique IP—not a rack of Dell servers in a computer room—that's going to be the quintessence of the start-up's brand, differentiating the company from the hundreds of other start-ups and thousands of larger companies already crowding the market.

By minimizing infrastructure costs and infrastructure management costs, cloud computing enables young companies to spend its precious capital on what's most essential. For young companies in this time of tight budgets and hard decisions, cloud computing is a financial and operational boon.

The Six Traits of a Fundable Entrepreneur

2009-06-12T05:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon in Waltham, Massachusetts, Intuit hosted on a mini-conference about the opportunities that cloud-computing offers start-ups. "Startups and the Cloud" proved to be an engaging event, packing a small auditorium on the campus of Bentley College. Sessions ranged from Longworth Venture Partners' Vishy Venugopalan's overview of the cloud computing marketplace to an open Q&A with Intuit founder Scott Cook to panel discussions with venture capitalists and CEOs about cloud computing and the changing economic environment for young companies.

The venture capitalist panel featured a seasoned team of investors:

Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Venture Partners
Jeffrey Beir from North Bridge Venture Partners
Todd Hixon from New Atlantic Ventures
Shawn Broderick from
TechStars

This group offered much wit and wisdom on a variety of topics. For now, I'll simply offer their composite profile of a fundable entrepreneur.

In response to a question from the audience, the panel offered this list of traits that they look for in an entrepreneur:

Passion
Domain expertise (the entrepreneur knows his or her area thoroughly, and isn't just coming up with an idea in response to a news story, for example)
Unfair advantage (something that gives this team of entrepreneurs a sustainable head-start in the market)
Street smarts (knowing how to get things done in difficult situations)
A whip-smart mind
Salesmanship

And Shawn Broderick offered this observation, which deserves to be mounted on a plaque over every entrepreneur's desk:

"Execution is insanely important."

Good CEOs May Lack Empathy, But Their Companies Depend on It

2009-06-09T05:48:00.001-07:00

In a recent column, New York Times columnist David Brooks summarized recent research that found that successful CEOs were usually not empathetic, novel-reading, team-oriented people. On the contrary. The research—conducted by Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov and Morten Sorensen and published in a report called "Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?"—found that people skills were overrated for CEOs.

"They found that strong people skills correlate loosely or not at all with being a good C.E.O. Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies.

What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."

So, can we throw empathy out the window? Not at all.

Empathy is vital to any company's success. Empathy underlies every successful customer interaction, even if it doesn't play an obvious role in some high-level decision making. Ignore the customer requirements in product design, or continually snub customers on the phone, and a company will find itself in trouble, even if it has a remarkably efficient, highly analytical CEO.

Take the case of Apple. Apple products are so attractive and easy to use, people flock to stores to buy them as soon as they become available. In surveys, Apple's customer service consistently beats out that of rival PC makers. And Apple's commitment to empathy is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the Genius Bar, a walk-up help desk you'll find in every Apple store. At the Genius Bar, helpful Apple employees will listen to you describe your problems with an Apple product and try to resolve them—for free, unless the product requires a physical repair.

Apple is truly an empathic company. Empathy—expressed through great product design and great customer service—is an essential element of its success.

Yet Apple's CEO is, shall we say, not always known for his calm, patient, empathic demeanor. This hasn't slowed Apple one bit. Steve Jobs has always been passionate about building insanely great products for customers and serving customers well (even if the company has made a few misjudgments in this area over the years). He clearly values empathy, even if he doesn't always embody it himself. He pushes the people around him to serve their customers well—and they do.

So while it's true that organizations often take on the character qualities of their leaders, it's also true that a CEO with a cut-and-dried, even brutal leadership style can build and lead a successful, highly empathic organization.

Empathy photo by Pierre Phaneuf, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.Apple Genius Bar photo by maebmij, Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.

Content Is Still King in IT Marketing

2009-04-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

Another finding of the TechTarget/Google research I mentioned in yesterday's post, was that content is still king when it comes to marketing and selling SMB and enterprise IT solutions.

White papers, email newsletters, and case studies still play important roles in helping customers understand technology and best practices, and in helping customers with choose one product over another.

Customers look for different types of content in different stages of the purchasing process.

White papers are important in the awareness and consideration phases of purchasing. They're much less important in the final decision-making stage. By then, customers are interested in product comparisons, case studies, and, above all, trial software.

The table below describes how customers use various types of content. (For an explanation of these phases, see yesterday's post.)

Content Type	Purchasing Phase
Postings in online communities	Awareness Consideration
Email newsletters	Awareness Consideration
White Papers	Awareness Consideration
Case Studies	Awareness Consideration Final Decision
Product Literature (e.g., Data Sheets)	Consideration Final Decision
Online Vendor Demos	Consideration Final Decision

One conclusion from this study: Social media, however popular, doesn't eliminate the need for traditional marketing, when it comes to selling sophisticated IT products or products in highly competitive markets.

Google/TechTarget Research Ties Keyword Search Terms to IT Purchasing Cycles

2009-04-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting insights presented by TechTarget at this week's ROI Summit in Newton, MA, was this:

IT purchasers change their search terms as they move through a multi-month purchasing process.

TechTarget reached this conclusion after undertaking an extensive study with Google of 2,200 professionals who play decision-making roles in IT purchases.

Phase I: Awareness
TechTarget and Google found that IT purchasers begin by searching for information about an issue or problem (e.g., data leak protection or VoIP quality).

Searches might include keywords such as "risk," "troubleshoot," and "optimize."

Phase II: Consideration
Once IT purchasers are familiar with the nature of the problem and the types of products available to address it, they begin searching for information about specific products and solutions.

Keywords might include the word "solution," as well as specific brand names.

Phase III: Decision
Finally, as they focus on a few key vendors in preparation for making their final purchase decision, they search for information comparing one product to another. They no longer search for general information about the problem; they understand the problem well and want detailed information about product capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Searches will likely include product names and the word "comparison."

The Changing Prevalence of Search Keywords in IT Purchasing Cycles

The chart below shows how keyword searches evolve across the three phases of the purchasing cycle: Awareness (of a problem), Consideration (of various approaches to solving the problem), and Decision (as to which product to choose).

Conclusion for marketers: Make sure you have content and search keywords that address each phase of the buying cycle.

Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

2009-04-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote recently about social media metrics and quoted Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang talking about how difficult it is to measure the value of social media communications.

In some areas, such as tweeting and blogging, numbers are essential, because frequency is important. In other areas, such as video, frequency may actually dull results. (See this Technology Review story about an HP study that found an inverse correlation between the frequency of videos posted on YouTube and the videos' popularity. If you post lots of videos, the popularity of your videos tends to decline.)

In addition to measuring hits, tweets, and posts, it's important to benchmark your organization's responsiveness to social media communications. If you're at a dinner party, it would be rude to sit silently for 5 minutes before responding to a comment or question that was addressed to you. Similarly, online, it's rude—or at least a missed opportunity—if you wait too long to respond to a tweet or blog post, especially if it's from a customer.

How to Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

Pick 3-5 important social media events from the past week. These could be tweets, blog posts, or blog comments. They could occur on your media properties or someone else's. They could even be press releases or announcements of importance to your business, but not originating in a social media tool at all.
Check the time of the event and the time of your organization's first response.
Examine how the conversation developed. Did it broaden, involving multiple departments? Did the right people respond in the right way? Were the right people notified in time? Which tools did people use? Did a tweet lead to a tweet, then to a blog post? Did the conversation end up involving legal or PR?
If you uncovered any breakdowns in communication, or learned any lessons about the importance of promptness, review them with your team, and try better this week. You might need to fine-tune email aliases, ensure that blog readers are updated with the right RSS feeds, establish corporate policies regarding the content of social media communications (e.g., respectful, nothing off-color), and so on.
Repeat this exercise in a week or two, and see how you're doing. Did any past problems reappear? Did you notice any patterns?

By benchmarking your responsiveness, you can ensure that your organization is ready to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to important communications from customers, partners, the press, and the online community at large.

Stopwatch photo by wwarby, some rights reserved.

Tired of Jumping from One Google Tool to Another to Manage a Campaign? Try Google AgencyToolkit

2009-04-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

At a SEMPO meeting last night in Cambridge, I got a chance to see a new Web site that Google has put together to make it easier for marketers to find all the tools available for running a highly effective Google AdWords campaign.

Now, instead of jumping from the AdWords Editor to Hot Trends (to see whether certain key phrases are becoming more popular or less) to Google Optimizer (for checking the results of your latest A/B tests of Web site content), you can start from a simple, clean page that presents all these Google tools in one neat, orderly place.

The new destination is Google AgencyToolkit. The site groups tools into four categories:

Plan
AdPlanner, Insights for Search, Blog Search, Hot Trends, Traffic Estimator

Place
Placement Tool, Ad Preview Tool, Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Create
Search-based Keyword Tool, Campaign Optimizer, AdWords Editor, AdWords API

Measure
YouTube Insight, Analytics, Conversion Optimizer, Conversion Tracking, Website Optimizer, Webmaster Tools

(If you roll over the links above, you'll see just how widely scattered these tools are across Google's properties.)

The site looks like this:

If you're running an AdWords campaign or if you'd just like the convenience of having all these in one location, give the site a visit.

How to Measure the Results of Social Media Marketing

2009-04-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

In some ways, marketing has changed a great deal in the past few years: there are fewer big tradeshows, there's a lot less paper collateral, no more middle-of-the-night press checks, more time spent online, more time spent tweeting and Webcasting and podcasting, and a great deal of focus on SEO and SEM.

Yet the mission of marketing hasn't changed. It's still the function that represents customer needs and wants to the rest of the business, directing the development and delivery of products and services. And it's still the function that introduces, explains, and promotes the product and services the business has created. Marketing is just doing that work with a lot more @ signs these days.

But does social media marketing, which relies of Facebook rather than direct mail and Twitter instead of phone banks, deprive marketing of the instrumentation it has come to rely on? Consider:

Over the past decade, marketing has become increasingly instrumented, and marketing professionals have been measured (and sometimes compensated) according to their results.
Online advertising, which allowed click-throughs to be measured, facilitating A/B testing and brutally frank assessments of a campaign's ROI, contributed to this Taylorization of marketing. So, too, did CRM systems, campaign management systems, marketing automation systems, and a variety of other management tools. The goal of this instrumentation to eliminate the vague connection between effort and reward that seemed inherent to marketing, especially in advertising. That vagueness was neatly captured by John Wanamaker's quip: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Web 1.0 and 2.0 marketing automation promised to clear up the mystery.
As a result of both consumers and businesses working and playing increasingly online, businesses have reduced marketing investments in print and in live events, while increasing marketing investments in e-commerce, online promotions (e.g., email marketing and Web seminars), and other Web-centric activities.
No doubt that many of the decisions supporting this change were supported by the glaring metrics made available by sales force and marketing automation systems mentioned above.
In the past year, social media marketing has emerged as the hottest area in marketing.
Companies are trimming and sometimes slashing investments in other areas of marketing and focusing on social media activities: tweeting, blogging, interacting with customers on Facebook, etc. For example, I know a mobile services company that has trimmed marketing to two people: a product manager and a social media manager. I suspect that there are many reasons for companies making this switch. Customers are increasingly familiar with these tools from their recreational time outside work. Most of the tools are free, so companies investing in them largely are only paying for their marketing staff's labor. And the use of the tools must be effective. Customers success stories about Comcast and Zappos on Twitter, for example, demonstrate the viability of social media marketing.
Measuring social media activity itself offers little information about the value of social media activity.
Are 60 tweets better than 30? It depends on how the tweeter's audience responds to the tweets. Ten thoughtful, empathic, and helpful tweets will likely be received more positively than twenty hype-laden tweets. Mere numbers alone can't convey the effectiveness of social media, because social media rely on human values such as tone and empathy that resist numerical characterization. This is an important point that Forrester analyst Jeremy Owyang made during a panel discussion on April 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's a summary of his remarks on this topic from Susan Etlinger of the Horn Group:

Jeremiah says that most marketers are measuring social media incorrectly; they're focusing on the measurements of yesteryear. There is no access to server logs on Facebook and other tools/networks, so you have incomplete data. And even if you had that data, it wouldn't tell you what is happening: there just aren't good enough automated methods to measure changes in tone. (As someone who does this regularly, I can attest to this: quality analysis doesn't scale that well.) A lot of companies are trying to tackle this problem.

Is it true then that marketing, which has become increasingly quantified and Taylorized, can't apply metrics to its hot new practice, social media? Well, yes and no.
No, because, as Jeremy points out, measuring the frequency of tweets is largely meaningless, and measuring Facebook activity is difficult and in some cases impossible. (True, you can measure some Facebook activity, such as the number of fans who have signed up on a company's profile page, but most activity will be difficult to quantify.)

However, outside of social applications themselves, marketing teams can certainly measure key performance indicators such as:
- customer satisfaction (through surveys)
- inbound leads to landing pages referenced in tweets and on Facebook
- length of sales cycle
- mean-time-to-resolution on trouble tickets
- sales overall
Think of social media activity as a conversation. If you have lots of good conversations with lots of customers, you would expect that your customers' overall opinion of your company would improve and that your new sales and maintenance renewals would increase—so measure those things.

The companies that have cut back on data sheets and trade shows and invested in Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are doing so not because they love being tactful and responsive 24 hours a day, but because they think it's the best way of serving their customers and growing their business. Recession notwithstanding, if a company treats its customers well, serving them through any channel of communication, then it should see positive results on the bottom line. And those traditional bottom-line results are probably the best metrics for judging the success of social media marketing.

I'm launching a social media project for a new client, and that's how we'll be measuring the project's success: by the numbers of inbound leads and units sold. The marketing technology might be new, but the nature of a business's bottom line hasn't changed at all.

If you have other ways of measuring social media marketing success, please share them in a comment!

Photo of a weighing scale by pareeerica, some rights reserved.

Companies That Drift Off Course Often Begin by Facing the Wrong Direction

2009-04-02T05:07:00.001-07:00

I have a friend who's a senior network engineer. He spent many years as the top network troubleshooter for a major U.S. bank.

Yesterday he and I were discussing the NetFlow analysis features of a particular network management product. (NetFlow is a protocol for measuring network activity—top applications in use, amount of traffic flowing through a router, etc.) He was disappointed that this particular product's NetFlow capabilities were so minimal. Other NetFlow analysis products could access the same raw data and present more more useful analysis to network engineers.

The problem, he said, is that the engineering manager who built the product didn't believe that you had to know a lot about the market or technology you were working with; instead, you simply had to be smart.

My friend and I agreed: It's always a mistake to base your products and services merely on what you know, instead of what customers need. The customer should always be your primary focus. And if you need to understand customer needs in a mature market like the network management market, you'd better learn a lot about network management fast, if you're going to start building products.

So don't ask, "What can I build with what I know?"

Instead ask, "What does the customer need, and how can I build it?" If you need to learn something new along the way or hire industry experts in order to build that new thing, so be it.

Otherwise, you'll end up making a half-hearted attempt, come up with a half-baked product, and reap so-so results.

Lesson: To avoid drifting off course, pay attention to the direction you're facing when you start. Don't face inward, toward your own team. Face outward toward the customer. And stay focused there. Your steadfastness will pay off.

Token Ring Network Manifesto Attracts Little Interest from IT Industry

2009-04-01T03:32:00.000-07:00

April Fool's Day Archive:

A recently leaked manifesto proclaiming to set forth "self-evident, immutable" principles for Token Ring Networks has elicited scant interest from IT industry press and analysts. The six-page document, watermarked with what appears to be the remnants of a frothy coffee drink, points out that networks have become essential for business, that businesses ought to be able to count on cables that are firmly attached to sockets, and network drivers really ought to be kept up to date.

Unlike the bolder, declamatory manifestos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which called for the casting off of chains and the purification of society, this manifesto strikes a conciliatory tone, offering to "begin a conversation, not define it."

A copy of the manifesto was recently found lying on a table at the Church Street Starbucks in Cambridge, MA. Whether the document had been left there as part of a guerilla marketing campaign or simply out of a lack of interest on the part of a bored reader, was impossible to say.

Starbucks photo by dichohecho, some rights reserved.

Flying Blind with Regard to Application Performance

2009-03-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

By now, these trends are pretty obvious:

Organizations are becoming increasingly distributed, spanning remote offices, strategic partners, outsourced workforces, and ad hoc teams in order to take advantage of the most talent for the lowest expense
Organizations are cutting headcount and trimming operational budgets, making employee productivity more important than ever before
Networked applications are involved in nearly every aspect of business operations, including product design, production, sales, marketing, accounting, logistics, and customer service

It would seem prudent, then, for organizations to monitor the performance of their applications, since networked applications are 1) the tools most workers are using, and 2) at risk of reducing worker productivity through performance problems and application outages.

But many organizations don't systematically monitor application performance at all. This jarring revelation appears in a study about cloud computing just published by InformationWeek.

The study noted that 40% of respondents didn't have a system in place to monitor internal applications, let alone cloud applications. An integrator interviewed in the study remarked that fewer than 30% of his customers had application monitoring systems in place; in other words, more than 70% didn't monitor applications.

Given the rising popularity of video and voice applications, which require high-performance, low-latency network connections, and the rising popularity of cloud computing—in use or about to be in use at 27% of the organizations surveyed—the lack of application monitoring seems like trouble in the offing.

The InformationWeek article offers a number of helpful suggestions, including the use of WAN optimization for accelerating applications serving remote offices. Application performance monitoring solutions from companies such as Blue Coat, Fluke Networks, NetScout, and WildPackets can also be helpful. A new standard called Apdex, which attempts to measure the quality of service an application delivers, is gaining a following and also worth a look.

Disclosure: Blue Coat is a client.

SaaS Credibility Survey

2009-03-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

As you probably know, many businesses are wary of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications because of concerns about security, reliability, and vendor lock-in.

In addition to building the absolutely best IT infrastructure possible, what can SaaS vendors do to assuage end user fears?

Take this short survey (2-3 minutes) and let your voice be heard.

Two Strategies for Putting Enterprise Social Media within Everyone's Reach

2009-03-19T08:44:00.001-07:00

When Jive Software recently announced its new SBS platform, Dennis Howlett at ZDNet raised the issue of user adoption: in many organizations, it's difficult to get users to contribute content to social media platforms. Usage patterns typically follow a 1/9/90 rule. About 1% of users contribute heavily. Another 9% contribute periodically, while 90% of users lurk, reading content, perhaps, but not contributing any content of substance.

How can social media platform vendors overcome the 1/9/90 habits of the crowd?

One approach, which most vendors are taking, is to make the platform interface richly featured and easy to use. These vendors hope that rich features will spur the creation of rich content, which in turn will make enterprise 2.0 dashboard indispensible—that is, the dashboard will become one of the few windows users always keep open on their desktops. These vendors are taking other steps, too, such as offering consulting services to train users and inculcate useful social-media habits.

Another approach, complementary to the first, is to use widgets to embed social media platform interfaces in Web applications, such as Gmail, that are popular with users. Social media start-up Socialcast is following this route.

This second approach makes sense. Certainly it can't hurt to put access to the platform . If my Socialcast interface is right there in Gmail, I'm more likely to post something to it, perhaps in response to something I've just read or sent in email. I don't have to switch windows. The gadget lowers the amount of work, including context-switching, I have to do in order to use the software.

Socialcast has widgets for a few major applications available now. Many more coming soon in their next release. I look forward to seeing what they come up with and how their user community responds.

Monastic Ireland Provides Cloud Storage for Western Intellectual Capital during Cultural Blackout

2009-03-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

During a cultural outage, now known as the Dark Ages, monks in Ireland copied important works by Aristotle, Galen, and others, creating essential back-up copies, which were later downloaded back to the Continent and used as intellectual capital to launch the Renaissance.

That's one story (recounted with different terminology in Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization) of Ireland's contribution to the world at large.

There are many others, and of course, there's an ever-growing, superb canon of writing, and wonderful music.

It's a shame, then, that here in the U.S., for children especially, St. Patrick's Day means so much time wasted on anything having to do with leprechauns.

I don't mind people talking so much about leprechauns on St. Patrick's Day, as long as, when the time comes to talk about German culture, they lead off with a discussion of poltergeists. Or when it comes to talking about England, they start with duergars, rather than Shakespeare. Or when surveying New York culture in the 20th century, they skip over the architecture, Abstract Expressionism, the poets at the Tavern, jazz, and the Met, and focus instead on the fortune tellers at Coney Island.

Have I made myself clear?

Good. Let's all have a round of Smithwick's and continue.

Irish culture. Today, we celebrate it. Wear green, pick up a good book by a fine author like John McGahern or Anne Enright, and listen to some fine music, like Martin Hayes below.

And if you've got kids, skip the leprechaun nonsense and pick up The Island of Horses, which I'm reading now to our 7-year-old, and which is a fine tale.

Erin Go Bragh!

Irish pub photo by nicksarebi, some rights reserved

How Good Is The Interface to Your Web Site or SaaS Application? Find Out Now

2009-03-12T14:15:00.000-07:00

I've written before about the importance of customer experiences. When I look back on the companies I've worked with over a couple of decades in high tech, the quality of experience a product provided largely determined the success or failure of the product overall.

In the software market, user interfaces obviously play a major role in a customer's experience and, hence, in a product's success or failure. Complex, cumbersome interfaces confused users, prolonged sales cycles, and often limited buyers to sophisticated engineers working in solitary roles. Streamlined, easy-to-use interfaces, often developed in concert with customers, led to faster sales, more efficient operations, and greater business success overall.

There's a wealth of material available on the importance of user interfaces and customer-driven design. Jakob Nielsen, Jared Spool, and Steve Blank all have important things to say on these topics.

Of course, if you're in the middle of a product launch, or you're a product manager working to an aggressive schedule, or you're a programmer sweating to make your deadlines, you probably don't have a lot of time on your hands to do in-depth reading and learn a new set of best practices.

Nonetheless, you'd probably like to make sure the Web site or software you're building meets the needs of your customers to the greatest degree possible, since this is the most direct and cost-effective way to:

ensure rapid adoption by customers
shorten sales cycles
reduce customer support calls

So, busy with development and probably short on time and money, how can you ensure you've got the best user interface possible? How can you nip a problem in the bud now, before it turns into a full-fledged customer support nightmare later?

Introducing Mad*Pow

You can take advantage of a new service I'm now offering with my new business partner, Mad*Pow.

I didn't want to merely write about improving customer experiences, wringing my hands without offering a concrete solution. Instead, I wanted to be able to help any interested companies address this problem quickly and directly. So I met with usability designers, explained what I was looking for, and ended up forming a partnership with Mad*Pow, a leading experience design agency.

They're great folks. They're based in Portsmouth, NH, and their clients include:

Aetna
American Express
ESPN
Google
Intuit
Journal of New England Medicine
NBC Universal
Starwood

You can check out some of their projects here.

Incidentally, Mass High Tech just named Amy Cueva, Mad*Pow's Founder and Chief Experience Officer one of its "Women to Watch" award winners.

The company was founded in 2000, and, as you can see from the client list above and from their Web site, they've clearly grown into a dynamic, successful company. I'm thrilled to be working with them to address the user experience problem.

Rapid Strategic Analysis of User Experiences

So what does our new service entail?

First, we’ll interview you to understand your business objectives and design goals. Then we’ll conduct a thorough assessment of your Web site or Web application. Our analysis will include:

Heuristic analysis by multiple testers and designers to uncover usability weaknesses.
Competitive analysis (2-3 competitive or comparative sites)
Marketing and messaging analysis

We will then deliver an annotated slide deck and a written report detailing our findings, including:

Analysis of content, navigation, design, brand, and messaging
Vision for the future—suggestions for improvements in all areas analyzed
SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis summary of the user experience overall

Our report will answer these vital questions:

Is your Web site or Web application’s user interface as easy to use as possible? Are any design elements confusing or cumbersome? How well does the interface serve its users?
How well does the interface serve your various audiences?
Does the interface support customers making full use of your offerings? Does it facilitate upgrades and cross-selling?
How does the interface compare to those of your competitors?

In addition, you can ask Mad*Pow's design team to offer various design alternatives for your site or application.

We've designed this process to achieve quick turnaround: we expect to work from kick-off interview to delivered report in 5 business days. And we've priced it in fitting with the budgets that are prevailing in today's, um, wonderful economy.

You can read more about the service here. (PDF)

If you're interested in having our team kick the tires on what you're building, please contact us at experience @ bennettstrategy dot com.

Lightbulb photo by rpongsaj, some rights reserved.

Data Security for SaaS, PaaS, and Social Media

2009-03-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

One of the most common objections to cloud computing is that cloud computing poses too great a risk for data security. Internal data that is being stored safely in an internal data center may be subject to interception in transit to or from a remote application. It might also be vulnerable when stored in the cloud itself.

Cloud vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce are going out of their way to demonstrate tight security controls to major clients. Nonetheless, a lot of CIOs, CSOs, and others have their doubts.

It's worth pointing out that, whether they realize it or not, most enterprises are leaking—nay, hemorrhaging—data to the public Internet. As I wrote nearly a year ago, summarizing some fine reporting in InformationWeek, P2P applications alone are responsible for massive data leaks even at large, public companies.

When InformationWeek reporters investigated P2P networks to find out just how much confidential data was being accidentally leaked by P2P networks, they were shocked at what they found. Users were inadvertently publishing "spreadsheets, billing data, health records, RFPs, internal audits, product specs, and meeting notes . . . files with the home and cell phone numbers of senators, confidential meeting notes, and fund-raising plans [for a state political party] . . . spreadsheets listing patients' names along with their HIV and hepatitis status . . . [and] a slew of court documents regarding a sticky divorce."

Fortunately, there's technology available to detect and thwart such leaks. Data leak protection (DLP) products, often available as network appliances, can scan data leaving the network and raise an alarm about confidential data leaking out. A lot of companies have jumped into this market; a few years ago, no less than 46 different start-ups were tackling this problem. A few companies have emerged as leaders. You can learn more about DLP at this informational site: www.dlpindepth.org.

Certainly it makes sense for any medium or large enterprise to have a DLP solution in place. Once it's in place, it should provide effective monitoring and control over data posted to the cloud.

DLP doesn't address the problem of security vulnerabilities in cloud storage, but it does address vulnerabilities in cloud communications, and it also enables enterprises to ensure they know what data is being posted to the cloud in the first place, regardless of whether the destination is Salesforce.com, AWS, Facebook, or some other app.

What Is Blogging? What Is Pay-for-Post? A Socratic Dialog at Tweeto's Villa

2009-03-12T04:28:00.000-07:00

Archeologists working on a dig (actually, a kitchen remodel) at a Greek restaurant on El Camino in Palo Alto recently unearthed this long-lost dialog that fills out Socratic canon and touches on the recent hoopla (no, that's not a kind of Thracian soldier) about pay-for-post blogging.

The scene. The courtyard of Tweeto's villa in the Los Altos hills.

Persons of the Dialog

Socrates

Tweeto, a wealthy landowner and venture capitalist

Flakoles, a partner in a PR firm

Glaucon, a junior employee of Flakoles

Hackaun, a programmer

Interns

SOCRATES. Greetings, friends. I am surprised to discover you outside now, for though the day is fair, and the sun graces us with her warmth, yet I know by habit you prefer to linger indoors, hunched over your Macs.

FLAKOLES. The Internet's down.

SOCRATES. That explains your glum aspect. Entering now, I wasn't sure if I was beholding my dear friends or a motley of actors in some final, dreadful scene by one of our tragedians. Do none of you get good 3G reception?

FLAKOLES. Yon fair hills, whose tawny grassy ripples like the flank of an anxious stallion stamping before a race, do block all our coverage as surely as a stone wall.

SOCRATES. Ah, Flakoles, I know you make your living in PR, but your remarks show you to have been an English major. So none of you have network access. But where is Flippanes?

HACKAUN. Flippanes is the sole exception. He had the good sense to sell all his CountryWide stock in 2005, so he's sitting in his Porsche, dialed up over his satellite phone.

SOCRATES. Flippanes is a man who is, if not wise, at least shrewd. But come, Glaucon, why do you, more than the others, blubber so? Surely a few minutes or even a few hours without network access could not reduce a man to such a disconsolate state? Your cheeks are red, and I can that you have rent your toga in one or two places, which, I might add, has not improved the lines of the garment. As well, I can see that your chest has not been out in the sun in many months.

FLAKOLES. Be gentle with our friend Glaucon, Socrates. He has had a miserable week. He spent Monday pitching pay-for-post blogging to all his accounts, and now they either shun him entirely or send him nasty emails whose language would even make great Bacchus blush.

SOCRATES. It would seem, Glaucon, that you have misunderstood the nature of blogging, or perhaps we should say that you and the community have differing conceptions of blogging. Perhaps it would be worthwhile, as long as we are sitting here waiting for—which ISP?

TWEETO. SBC

SOCRATES. Very good; waiting for SBC to get their act together, to ponder the nature of blogging. Shall we begin? Wait, where's Plato?

PLATO. I'm over here, sir. Strictly speaking, you shouldn't be mentioning me.

SOCRATES. That is our custom, I agree, but shouldn't you be taking notes? How are you going to immortalize my thinking in one of your little dialogs?

PLATO. I'm recording everything in my netbook. Then this afternoon I'll have it transcribed using one of Amazon's Mechanical Turk services.

SOCRATES. The engineering of our western colonies never ceases to amaze me. And this transcription will be one hundred percent accurate?

PLATO. Absoglubely.

SOCRATES. Excellent. Let us begin. It would seem that the cause of Glaucon's misfortunes lies in some confusion regarding the nature of a blog. Glaucon, perhaps abetted by the recent Forrester report on the subject, has believed a blog, or rather a blog post, to be one thing, and his clients have understood it to be something else. Perhaps it would serve us well to identify the true nature of a blog.

TWEETO. That's pretty obvious. The name blog comes from the term weblog, which suggests a series of entries posted in serial form on the World Wide Web.

HACKAUN. It's posted using special software that is usually configured to accept comments, so I think part of a blog involves the idea of commentary and dialog.

SOCRATES. Excellent. Who writes blogs?

HACKAUN. Everyone these days. From independent bloggers to programmers to mothers who knit.

FLAKOLES. Many of our clients now have blogs. And we blog ourselves. I've been posting about best practices in PR, for example.

SOCRATES. Now we are getting closer to the matter at hand. First, it is evident that commercial entities, such as Tweeto's firm and your firm, too, Flakoles, have blogs. Let us also point out—which may offer young Glaucon some comfort—that a blog is a written form of communication, and that in many other circumstances, commercial entities expect to pay for written forms of communication that promote their products and services. I am thinking of press releases—which our friend Flakoles here writes so fluently—and white papers, case studies, Web copy, and so on. So I do not think Glaucon's error lies is assuming that companies should pay for promotional writing. They often do, and no one reproves them for it. (No one attacks Cisco or Oracle, for example, for publishing white papers.) No, the backlash, which has crushed our poor friend as mightily as the frothiest wave at Stinson and left him draped over the stone bench there like so much dried kelp, has to do with some other sense of violation. There are other types of writing that treat commercial products and services; trade journalism, for example. It would be offensive, I think we can agree, if Glaucon were offering to pose as a journalist and turn out pixelated prose, measured by the board foot, and adorned, no doubt, with all manner of banner ads and interstitials. We have all seen such so-called news sites, with their gushing prose and their click-through geegaws, and we can all agree, I think, that these sites deserve our opprobrium. But Glaucon wasn't offering to pretend to be such a journalist, from what I understand. He was simply offering to write as himself.

HACKAUN. All bloggers write as themselves. That's what makes blogs so opinionated!

SOCRATES. An astute observation, Hackaun. A blog, unlike many other types of writing, even commercial writing, is written in a personal voice. Can we agree, at least provisionally, that individual authorship and a personal voice are essential elements of a blog?

TWEETO. The personal aspect is what differentiates a blog from the other writing on a Web site.

FLAKOLES. That, and the timeliness. The sense of writing on occasion, reacting to news in the marketplace or even something that has happened in one's household.

HACKAUN. It's the spontaneity makes blogs so interesting, or sometimes so annoying. They offer personal voices, people's real opinions. Even if someone's writing for a company, there's often a disclaimer that their views do not necessarily represent those of the company.

TWEETO. That's a legal disclaimer, of course. Our lawyers insist on it.

HACKAUN. But it also makes the blog more interesting than all the other marketing fluff on a site. Blogs are edgier. Because even if the author works for a big company like Microsoft or SAP, you get the sense that you're reading their genuine thoughts and opinions. They're straight talk.

FLAKOLES. Hackaun is right. And all the blogs from mothers who knit and guys who hang-glide reinforce that idea. You're hearing authentic voices, at least when they're not just link-baiting.

SOCRATES. So Glaucon's error may have been in offering to be authentic for pay. That, truly, would have people wagging there tongues in the polis, or if not the polis, at Stanford Mall.

FLAKOLES. I should say, Socrates, in young Glaucon's defense, that people expect a company's own bloggers to say encouraging things about their products. And though Glaucon is not an employee of any of these companies, he is genuinely excited about their products. He even uses some of them. The speed-dating Web site didn't quite turned out as planned, but he genuinely likes the other products and services he was offering to blog about. He wasn't being insincere. He wasn't offering to fake his enthusiasm. He was simply offering to capture it in writing, which of course would benefit the companies he writes about. I could ask, taking his side for a moment, if he writes something, and it benefits a company, why shouldn't he be paid for it?

HACKAUN. He can be paid for it, there's no law against it, but it violates the sense of trust that readers extend to the authors of blogs. It's fine to put sell your point of view in a white paper; just don't it in a blog. It's the wrong medium.

SOCRATES. Excellent, Hackaun. So we can say that a blog, which originated as a personal medium, retains that personal nature even when it enters the marketplace. And though some blogs, even news blogs, are sometimes shill pieces, promoting companies to which the author serves as an advisor, for example, still we expect the medium to present authentic voices. Can we say that we expect bloggers, enjoying the liberty that circumstances have afford them for spontaneous discussion, to select their own subject matter?

TWEETO. Yes, Socrates.

SOCRATES. Then let me offer the following story, which may illuminate the remaining dark corners of this issue. Our host Tweeto is famous for the wonderful dinners he serves, and he has been gracious enough to invite me to many of these events, where I have eaten heartily and enjoyed the fruits of Bacchus, including a couple of Russian River Pinots in which that merry god really outdid himself—perfect balance of fruit and tannins, nice berry overtones, good finish—but I digress. I remember a dinner laid out not twenty feet from this very courtyard two weeks ago, when we dined sumptuously. The occasion was the granting of a term sheet to young man from the provinces, who had just launched a SaaS B2B offering, for which he had the greatest enthusiasm. I remember that, just as dessert was served, he delivered a long, gushing monologue about his new service. Do you think that was improper?

FLAKOLES. I remember the speech well. The fellow was so excited he didn't notice that his sleeve was resting in the meringue. Improper? No. He was boasting about his own company. Going on a bit perhaps, but not unexpected.

SOCRATES. So even in a conversational setting, in a dialog where one employs one's authentic voice, we don't mind a bit of commercial promotion, as long as it is spontaneous and heartfelt.

TWEETO. Certainly not. I expect that kind of enthusiasm from the people we fund.

SOCRATES. Suppose, however, that though he delivered the same speech with the same passion, you discovered that he had been paid to make it. How would you feel then?

HACKAUN. Offended. That would be incredibly crass. Even the most die-hard salespeople I know wouldn't do such a thing.

FLAKOLES. It would violate all bounds of decency. Paying people to make speeches at parties? Unheard of. Unspeakable.

TWEETO. God forbid, and if you what you say is true, Socrates, we will take up the matter at our next board meeting with the fellow. He may find himself painting curbs in Redwood City.

SOCRATES. I am sure, good Tweeto, that his speech was genuine. I was merely using the man and his loquacious enthusiasm as an example. My story was false, but it has served to guide us closer to the truth of blogs. Blogs, in all settings, present themselves as freely written; they are frank, and they open a discussion the way a frank utterance does. Perhaps the key to your clients' offense lay not in paying for blogging per se. I am sure that in your contract to serve them, you mentioned blogging. Many analysts blog, after all. They are paid by clients, too, and they blog about them. PR agencies blog, sometimes about their practice and sometimes about their clients. The public is not surprised or dismayed by these things. I think our story of the dinner party shows us the nature of poor Glaucon's offense. I expect someone from a company to blog about the company. I expect them to talk about the company, too, perhaps even at a dinner party. But to receive pay for a specific speech or post—to use a medium that is typically spontaneous and conversational—is as offensive as a putting a taxi meter on a dinner table, and charging by the word. I am afraid more Glaucon has sadly miscalculated.

TWEETO. Look at him blubber so. I had thought my garden had gained a second fountain.

HACKAUN. His tears are soaking his toga and showing us the outline of his physique. Would that clouds would come quickly scudding in and darken this scene.

SOCRATES. You may find escape from the aquatic sorrow you're beholding, yet. Look, another intern approaches.

INTERN. I am happy to report that the Internet is back up. I and my colleagues have prepared mocha double-whips for all present, except for Glaucon, whose stomach cannot abide such things. For him, I have set aside a soy chai in a china mug.

TWEETO. Then all is ready. Come, friends, we have solved the riddle of young Glaucon's offense. Let's go within and see what they're writing about today on TechCrunch.

Urn photo by jtstewart, some rights reserved.

Who's Using PaaS? The Answer May Surprise You

2009-03-06T04:25:00.000-08:00

When Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Coghead hit the skids recently, other PaaS vendors such as Intuit QuickBase and TeamDesk were quick to offer Coghead customers free conversion tools and migration solutions, so they could keep their applications running smoothly in the cloud.

I was curious about the customers making this move. Had they been they using Coghead for in-house skunk works, pilot projects, or operational applications? In large companies, did management concerns about data security, SOX compliance, and other regulations relegate PaaS to department-level projects that were, shall we say, off the management radar screen? Is PaaS (when not an extension of a proven SaaS solution such as Salesforce.com or Sugar On Demand) simply a way of getting code up and running without having to requisition a server from a bureaucratic IT department? Or is PaaS something more?

To find out, I emailed TeamDesk, asking about their customers and the types of applications they were running. I promptly received a phone call from Val Karmazin, co-founder of ForeSoft Corporation, the company that offers TeamDesk. Promptness, it turns out, is a habit at ForeSoft. The company prides itself on prompt, reliable customer service.

ForeSoft offers four cloud computing solutions:

BUGtracka project management and issue-tracking application
dbFLEX, a platform for building business Web applications
CRMdesk, a help desk application
TeamDesk, a platform for building and easily configuring database applications, primarily for the back office

The company was founded in 2001. It's been profitable from the start and hasn't taken any outside investment. TeamDesk, launched three years ago, is now the fastest growing part of the business.

In our conversation, Val made a number of interesting points:

The TeamDesk user community is a mix of people, and most of them aren't developers. What? I thought PaaS would appeal mostly to developers who were comfortable with Ruby, Python, Java, virtualization, and so on. That's not so in the case of TeamDesk. The platform is so easy to use and so easy to configure, thanks to a configuration dashboard, that many of the users are small business owners or IT engineers who know enough about databases to establish a relationship between two tables, but not much technical knowledge beyond that.
Companies of all sizes are using the service. In addition to small businesses, Val named a major telecommunications carrier, a major shipping company, and a European office of a major Silicon Valley technology provider. Company size doesn't predict whether or not a customer will use PaaS; instead, the determining factor is company culture—how willing is the company to trust a PaaS vendor to do things right. Val says customers take advantage of TeamDesk's free trial, discover how easy to use and reliable the service is, and stick with it.
Val points out the distinction between PaaS and SaaS is often illusory. When his customers use his platform to develop business applications that they then rely on day after day, haven't they created in effect a SaaS solution? Read TeamDesk's case study about the sales management application that Hochkoeppler Initiatives created for a customer, and you'll see what he means.
TeamDesk users sometimes require a little more hands-on assistance from ForeSoft when they're getting started with the service, but so far the support workload remains manageable.

A couple of conclusions:

PaaS is ready for prime time: customers are using it for business applications, not just for development projects.
With the proper tools and application user interface, a PaaS vendor can reach beyond the development community to less technical users, broadening the pool of potential customers.
Small, focused cloud computing vendors who execute well can run a profitable business.

Business Strategy and PR

2009-03-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

If you work for a PR agency or hire PR agencies, ZDNet blogger Jennifer Leggio's recent report on PR firms and social media is a must-read. The report summarizes the results of a survey that Jennifer conducted between November and January. Six hundred forty-two people responded to the survey. "The primary targeted respondents were PR decision-makers at companies with 1,000 or more employees, with small business / start-up owners as secondary targeted respondents."

The heart of the survey examines how well PR firms understand and take advantage of social media. It's relevatory data, but I'd like to call attention to another question the survey touched on: how well PR activity aligns with a company's business strategy.

I've written elsewhere how important it is for a company to create an annual strategic plan, complete with measurable objectives. Once adopted, this plan should direct all major activity in every division and department.

So I was intrigued to see the survey responses to the following statement: "Agency understands how PR needs to fuel entire business strategy, not just news coverage."

Less than a quarter of respondents agreed with this statement (22%), and only 12% strongly agreed with it. Another quarter were on the fence. And fully half of respondents reported that their PR agency did not understand how PR could support the company's business strategy beyond merely getting news coverage.

This breakdown in strategic understanding and execution could explain why, elsewhere in the survey, only 44% of respondents reported that their overall experience with their PR agency had been "good."

What's preventing PR firms from understanding how to support business strategy? I expect the answer is different at different agencies and different clients. But here are some likely explanations:

The PR form is working by rote. Take product news, take messaging guidelines, craft press release, pitch, brief, distribute. Repeat. Critical analysis and planning isn't part of the process.
The PR team doesn't have a solid understanding of business strategies beyond the strategy of getting coverage.
The client has not adequately explained its strategy to the agency. If the strategy is conveyed at all, it's conveyed by:
- A VP or CXO stepping into a conference room for 15 minutes to brief the PR team and a couple of marketing people on the company's direction for the year.
- A slide deck that covers high-level trends and initiatives that is emailed over to the PR team.
- A couple of sentences in a messaging document.

In other words, the problem likely lies sometimes in the capacity of PR agencies. Other times, it likely lies in the poor job the client is doing explaining its strategy in the first place. And other times, it's probably a combination of both.

Ideally, a company should be able to presents its strategy in a 5-20-page document that summarizes 5-10 key objectives for the company and supports them with measurable milestones. The document may include a few pages of background material upfront. The objectives should be bold (perhaps BHAGs, as described by Porras and Collins).

A company should be able to present this strategic plan to its PR agency, as well as to every internal employee. It should review its progress against the plan at least quarterly. Of course, it should also review the PR agency's activities against this plan.

There's nothing wrong with a VP or CXO stepping into the room to explain the big picture to the team. And there's nothing wrong with sending lots of background material in the way of slides and white papers to educate the agency. But the more clearly a company enunciates its strategy (through a formal strategic plan), the more likely everyone involved in the company—from internal teams to external agencies—will able to act effectively to achieve important strategic goals.

Pop quiz: If you had detail your company's business strategy to a new PR agency or a new internal hire 15 minutes from now, would you be able to do it?

Big arrow photo copyright, some rights reserved, Mikl Roventine.

Socialcast Helps Teams at NASA Communicate More Easily and Capture Tacit Knowledge

2009-02-27T10:22:00.000-08:00

NASA, where the hard work literally is rocket science, depends on timely communication: not just between control centers and distant space craft, but also among workers distributed across NASA's ten major R&D centers. Recently the issue of inter-center communication has become especially important, as NASA undertakes its Constellation program to update the Space Shuttle. Previous NASA missions were usually developed at a single NASA center. The Constellation project, a major technical undertaking, spans centers and requires far-flung research and engineering teams to work together efficiently.

So it behooves NASA to find broadly applicable solutions for employees and contractors to exchange information—exchange it, and record it, too, for another transformation NASA is facing is the aging and retiring of its workforce. The average NASA employee is nearly 47 years old and has worked at the organization for 17 years. There's a lot of NASA history and knowledge walking around in lab coats and business casual. And many of those employees are beginning to retire. To preserve the organization's intellectual capital, NASA needs to find a convenient, unobtrusive way for employees to record and share their tacit knowledge.

These challenges were evident to a group of NASA JPL engineers who attended the KM World conference back in 2007. There they heard a talk by Tim Young, CEO of a social networking platform solution called Socialcast. Tim talked about the benefits of Socialcast, a SaaS service that enables company employees to post status messages, ask and answer questions, share documents, and so on.

The NASA engineers were intrigued and decided to launch a pilot project. Celeste Merryman, a pilot manager for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) at NASA JPL, and Douglas Hughes, a project manager at NASA JPL, ran the pilot project, which involved customizing Socialcast for the NASA environment. The new SaaS service was dubbed NASAsphere.

Now the results of that NASAsphere pilot are in, and they're quite compelling.

NASAsphere participants invited 398 of their colleagues from around NASA, with 55% acceptance rate.
Within the 60-day span of the pilot, the NASAsphere community grew from 78 activated accounts to 295.
Communications truly crossed geographic centers. When employees posed questions, 93% of the answers came from users at remote locations. By the end of the pilot, at least one person from every NASA center had participated in the NASAsphere community.
A survey of NASAsphere users found that 52% recommended the platform be implemented for contractors and civilians, in addition to employees.
In the same survey, 45% of users said they expected they would contribute to the NASAsphere platform weekly.
Not surprisingly, the report recommends a broader implementation of the Socialcast solution.

For more details about the pilot and its results, check out the NASAsphere SlideShare presentation here or the final NASA JPL report here.

Cloud Computing Predictions, Revisted

2009-02-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

All right, I'm going to strike the tentative tone that had crept into one of my predictions for cloud computing in 2009. When I read about the success of Marketo, Central Desktop, and others SaaS vendors, I can more evidence of young SaaS vendors racking up impressive sales by solving important business problems. So I'm revising prediction #4 to read:

Small vendors who apply their domain expertise to bring the power and convenience of cloud computing to business areas underserved by IT, can gain market traction and growing a profitable business by delivering exceptional operational business value to customers.

I still believe that, as one commenter to this blog put it, "PaaS is a tough nut to crack." But SaaS offerings that are focused and immediately useful should have a very good 2009. Which, of course, is wonderful news.

LiquidPlanner Integrates Micro-blogging and Time Sheets with Statistically-based Project Management

2009-02-24T09:43:00.000-08:00

In a blog post last week, I cited LiquidPlanner as a SaaS company that was tackling an important business problem—project management— in a new way (applying statistics to change guesses into estimates, thereby dramatically increasing the accuracy of project plans).

Today, the company announced its 2.0 release. I'd like to call attention to a couple of new features in the release.

Integrated Microblogging

LiquidPlanner has integrated micro-blogging in its project management interface. This makes a lot of sense.

Thanks to Twitter, a growing number of people recognize the power and convenience of micro-blogging (posting short messages, perhaps containing links, that can be read by large numbers of people who opt in). Twitter, of course, is mostly a public forum, the exception being any hypothetical network of users who all password-protect their updates.

Internal business communications call for a separate, parallel channel to Twitter. Hence the launch of Yammer, a company that replicates basic Twitter functionality for closed communities, such as companies.

But Yammer's tweets or blog-posts aren't integrated with any other business software. It's unlikely that Yammer users are going to abandon Twitter, so it's entirely possible that someone might end up using:

Twitter for the public commmunications
Yammer for internal communications
37 Signals or Microsoft for internal project management

with no integration between Yammer and the project management program.

LiquidPlanner offers the advantages of Yammer—secure internal microblogging—with the added advantage of context and linking: I see find all the micro-blog posts related to a specific project, for example. Or put another way: now micro-blogged posts become another convenient information source for tracking the development of projects.

LiquidPlanner calls this feature "workplace chatter." It looks like this:

Users can see everything, including "chatter" and design documents, related to a project.

Time Sheets

Another new feature is time sheets. LiquidPlanner 2.0 offers built-in time-tracking, obviating the need for separate software to track the hours that people are putting into a project. Time-tracking data can be exported in standard formats for use in HR and billing applications.

Putting It All Together

These new integrated features make a lot of sense. In addition to posting documents and status, why not blog about a project and track hours, all in the same program? LiquidPlanner creates a workspace where customers can manage and record everything having to do with a project.

I expect we'll see more integrations like this in the SaaS market.

Disclaimer: LiquidPlanner is not a client.

Postscript to disclaimer: For information on becoming a client, contact me.

Which Do You Offer a Weary Traveler: A Unicycle, a Bicycle, or a Segway?

2009-02-24T07:54:00.000-08:00

A guy is walking down a long road. He's tired.

Three trucks pass him, then come to a screeching halt. The drivers hop out. They open the backs of their trucks. They're salesmen!

The first driver offers the traveler a unicycle. It's low-cost and easy to maintain, possessing only half the tires and less than half of the moving parts of a bicycle. It doesn't require any electrical charging system or cables. If you forget to plug it in when you go to bed, it's still ready for use in the morning. Very nimble. Low cost. Agile. And it's pretty cool, too. How about it?

The second driver offers the traveler a bicycle. Of course, everyone knows how to ride a bicycle. Yes, it has more moving parts than a unicycle, but it's easier to use. Yes, you still have to pedal, but how hard is that? It's easier than walking if you're tired.

The third driver is wearing a suit, and he comes gliding up on his Segway. Here's the best choice of all, he says. Turn-key solution. No walking required. Minimal training. The Segway handles all the forward motion for you. You just stand still. Yes, it's more expensive than the other solutions, but you end up doing less work, and you'll have more energy for other activities. Now, let's talk about a charger and a service contract.

Which vehicle does our weary traveler choose?

Which business model would you bet on?

Unicycle Products

Unicycles are exciting and fun, but they require our traveler to learn new skills. I'm going to bet that most people reading this post think that the unicycle is the least likely choice for our traveler.

Yet how many companies bet their business on weary, overworked customers learning new skills (programming languages, complex UIs, etc.)? The novelty and supposed low cost of an approach blinds companies to how things look to a customer. Even if the customer isn't consciously opposed to novelty, he or she is just not likely to get around to learning new skills in order to realize the vision promised by a vendor.

Segway-style Products

At the other extreme, we have Segway-style products. Ingenius. Turn-key. More maintenance overhead. If a novel programming framework is a unicycle, an enterprise software suite from SAP or Oracle is probably more like a Segway. Lots of features. Minimal tinkering for end users. High cost.

Bicycle Products

The bicycle is somewhere in between. Our weary traveler still has to do work to ride a bicycle, but he already has the skills to do it. Yes, there's potentially some maintenance involved, but bicycles are so ubiquitous, there are repair shops everywhere. And maintenance costs shouldn't be exorbitant. So, yes, the bicycle doesn't eliminate all work, but the traveler can begin riding right away without breaking his budget.

My guess is that he hops on the bicycle. (Unless he's also wearing a suit and has the budget and corporate mandate to go for the Segway.)

(In 2007, 18.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States.)

Moral: Even in a tough economy, a bare-bones, low-cost product will have difficulty gaining traction if it requires customers to change their habits and do things they've never done before.

As always, comments welcome.

Unicycle photo Creative Commons Copyright (some rights reserved) by Julian Meade.

Two SaaS Companies that Solve Business Problems for Customers

2009-02-20T06:55:00.000-08:00

In a couple of recent blog posts (here and here), I raised the question of what type of cloud computing start-up would be likely to succeed in today's business environment, in which companies of all sizes are interested in cutting costs and minimizing risks. I suggested that business customers would feel comfortable with new programming paradigms (e.g., Salesforce.com's Apex) offered by large, stable companies, but shy away from similar offerings from smaller vendors. It's not that the smaller vendors won't get any customers; they just might have a hard time getting enough to stay in business.

Cloud Computing Opportunities for Start-ups and Other Small Companies

But, aside from infrastructure offerings, there are lots of great business opportunities for small cloud computing vendors. I believe that most of these opportunities share these traits:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Being small and new won't be problems (i.e., risk factors in the eyes of customers) for small vendors who demonstrate that:

they thoroughly understand business process problems that are important to the customer, and they are dedicated to solving these problems
they have a solution that directly addresses these problems in an immediately effective way

Getting Down to Business

Here are two software start-ups that offer examples of what I mean.

Compli is a SaaS company based in Portland, OR, that offers a software platform that enables car dealers to measure and manage their compliance with industry regulations. Through the Compli SaaS platform, car dealers can deliver compliance training to employees and employee test scores on compliance tests. As regulations evolve, and new state-specific regulations appear, dealers can distribute new compliance content to the appropriate employees and demonstrate "good faith" efforts at compliance.

Compliance is an important issue for car-dealers, an operational head-ache of sorts, and Compli's SaaS solution gives them an easy way to stay on top of the issue in a cost-effective way.

If you visit the Compli Web site, you'll have to hunt hard to find any references to SaaS and cloud computing. The words "SaaS" and "cloud" don't appear on the home page at all, and in the video featured on the home page, President and CFO Lon Leneve mentions SaaS only after discussing the scope and importance of compliance for car dealers. The company is focused on solving a business problem, and they're leveraging SaaS technology to do it. How's Compli doing? Last year was a record year.

I've written about Liquid Planner before, and I'll be writing more about them next week. LiquidPlanner offers a hosted project management solution that brings probabilistic analysis to project planning. In another words, while other programs like Microsoft Project force project planners to give a fixed estimate for how long a task will take, Liquid Planner lets planner input ranges and probabilities, so they identify risks up front. The result is planning software that's more detailed, more accurate, and more informative.

The solution includes other collaboration features, as well, but I'd like to point out that once again we have a SaaS company focused on solving an important business problem—project management—in a new and compelling way. Factoring probability into project planning makes so much sense, I think LiquidPlanner would be an attractive offering even in a traditional, in-house deployment; delivering LiquidPlanner as SaaS, so it can reach all members of a distributed project team while lowering hardware and software costs, only makes it more compelling.

And how's LiquidPlanner doing? Quite well. Business is growing. The company itself is a small, lean-and-mean team of ten people whose founders have extensive experience in data center management from Expedia. Steve McConnell, who has written authoritatively on rapid software development and software estimation, is an advisor to the company.

These two companies, Compli and LiquidPlanner, demonstrate the business opportunities available for SaaS start-ups. Both companies are focused on solving important business problems (regulatory compliance and project management) in new ways. The problems they're addressing will remain important to customers even in an economic downturn. The companies are leveraging SaaS to deliver their solutions broadly and cost-effectively. Both companies share share these characteristics:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Disclaimer: Neither Compli nor LiquidPlanner is a client.

Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2009

2009-02-18T19:09:00.000-08:00

Short and sweet.

The cloud computing market will grow in 2009.
Most of that growth will be enjoyed by a small number of large vendors (e.g., Amazon, Salesforce.com) with solid reputations for technical prowess, reliable service, and financial stability. (The financial stability part is not to be underestimated; it will win over CFOs and CIOs.)
Despite all the buzz at conferences and the cheery encomiums exchanged in blogs, new entrants and small vendors—especially vendors who try to replicate or enhance in a minor way the offers of the major vendors—will have a tough time closing deals and generating cash.
Small vendors who pursue niche markets and apply their domain expertise to bring the power and convenience of cloud computing to business areas underserved by IT, stand a chance of gaining market traction and growing a small, profitable business by delivering operational business value to customers.

The success of this last group will depend as much on their domain expertise (e.g., about problems with insurance claims processing) and consulting skills as on their particular cloud infrastructure.

Comments welcome.

Coghead's Demise is a Reminder to Sober Up about Cloud Computing's Promise

2009-02-18T18:25:00.000-08:00

I was sorry to learn that Coghead, a Web 2.0 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, announced it was shutting down.

PaaS is an interesting model: a company offers a hosted service for developing, testing, running, and monitoring new applications. Customers can use the PaaS platform to launch new applications—or scale up existing ones—without deploying any local hardware or software at all. Sounds intriguing. Possibly very convenient. Possibly cost-effective.

It's proving to be too futuristic a vision. First, Bungee Labs, another PaaS provider, ran into trouble in 2008. Now Coghead is shutting its doors.

You wouldn't think this would be possible to read all the hyperventilating blog posts about cloud computing: how the time is right for cloud computing, everything will run in the cloud, what is the cloud—do we include PaaS? SaaS? If we don't define cloud computing properly, the cloud will perish! Many industry insiders are in a lather about these issues. It's as though the lottery has come up with the winning letters, which spell cloud computing, and now we have to scratch off the bonus letters just right to multiply our winnings or be sent home with a PC, jr. Nerves are a-jangle. Fingers are flying.

But if cloud computing is such an obvious remedy to the IT woes of business, why are these vendors in trouble?

Let's come down to earth for a moment. Let's consider this situation from the business customer's point of view. The business manager asks, Do I need PaaS? Is this really the most convenient, least risky way of building and deploying new applications?

I don't want to sound pedantic, but I think many cloud computing services will have trouble overcoming the obstacle that's snared many other technically impressive solutions in other IT markets of yore: just because you can build it and it's cool, doesn't mean that business customers will be comfortable with it. How many business customers in this increasingly risk-adverse environment are really going to adopt new programming paradigms and hosted services from small, evidently risky providers? Not many, I'm afraid.

Businesses want low cost and convenience. They want reliability and low risk, just as much. And (almost) nobody in business likes to learn anything new unless they have to.

I do think there are attractive opportunities for cloud computing in 2009. I'll details those in my new post. (Don't worry. It will be short.)

Note: Thanks to @chris_marino for tipping me off to the sad news about Coghead.

Introducing CodeGlide, a New Open Source Mashup and Data Integration Company

2009-02-18T07:11:00.000-08:00

Economic downturn or no, the open source data integration market remains active. In late January, Talend announced a $12 million C round of financing. Over the past two years, the company's open source data integration solution has been downloaded 3.3 million times, and the company now boasts hundreds of customers. Other vendors in the market, such as SnapLogic, continue to add connectors and develop their capabilities.

And now comes a new vendor to the scene: CodeGlide, an open source company with a broad business application platform and big ambitions. I spoke recently with Mauro DeGennaro, CodeGlide's co-founder and Vice President of Software Development. He filled me on the company's approach, offerings, and direction.

CodeGlide was founded in May 2007. The company's goal is to offer a comprehensive suite of open source business applications, including:

Fusion, an open source data integration platform for building mashups
SnapCRM, an open source CRM suite (with a provocative title, since the company competes against SnapLogic)
Rendezvous, an open source collaboration suite, which offers calendaring, document management, and project management features

These three platforms are available in an Enterprise Suite bundle, which is the company's most popular download.

Speaking of downloads, CodeGlide seems to be off to a fast start. The company's Web site came on line on January 15. I spoke to Mauro about a week ago, and already the company had racked up 11,000 downloads of its software. Through its partners, the company has sold its Professional Edition to six different companies.

Partners are also lending their expertise to help the company develop other applications, including an E-learning application, an ERP application, and a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that will compete against Coghead", LongJump, and other PaaS solution providers.

CodeGlide has a core development team of ten programmers, who are augmented by free-lancers and sub-companies that offer domain expertise in areas such as ERP. Business people and design experts design new features, which the developers then build. Of course, being an open source company, CodeGlide can expect to receive further enhancements and features from its open source community, as well. The company is small, but global: development is based in Argentina, Q.A. in India, sales in Europe and the U.S.

The CodeGlide Approach

CodeGlide's goal is to offer open source business solutions for the SMB market. It wants to make mashups and data integration solutions available to developers without advanced programming skills and even to business people. Accordingly, the company offers a visual tool for building mashups and creating widgets. For example, using Fusion, it's possible to construct a mashup that reads two Excel files and extracts data for a Sales report. A customer is using the product to read VoIP usage reports for billing. You can watch a video of that mashup being built here.

To keep development simple and straightforward, the company has developed a high-level scripting language, X#. The CodeGlide platform converts X# to Java. Of course, creating a new scripting language is risky: anything new or different can be a barrier to adoption. But if the scripting language really is both powerful and simple, and if the design tools minimize even the exposure to X#, CodeGlide may find that its reach really does extend to less technical users, who may have shunned mashups and Web 2.0 development until now.

To build mashups, users drag connectors and logical functions onto a design pane. Right-clicking on a connector or function opens a dialog box for configuring it. To select content or check for conditional status, developers use a filter function. There's also a foreach component for processing input items in turn.

As far as data integration goes, the company boasts an extensive set of connectors, including connectors for popular databases, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and DB2; common file types, such Excel; email services, such as POP3 and IMAP; and Web services, including WSDL-based SOAP services. A "screen-scraper" connector enables developers to access content displayed on Web pages.

Overall, it's a broad feature set for a young company. CodeGlide software is licensed under GLPv3. The Professional Edition of the Fusion mashup and data integration platform is available for $10,000, which is a one-time fee. DeGennaro points out that this price is far below the price of other mashup platforms, such as JackBe.

Low price. Lots of features. Big plans. CodeGlide could do well in an IT environment where business are looking for lots of bang for their buck.

Not All Data Integration Connectors Are Alike

2009-02-16T04:28:00.000-08:00

Connectors are a vital part of any data integration solution. No matter what data sources you're integrating—databases, applications, flat files, Web services, etc.—it's awfully handy to have a preconfigured connector or at least a template to minimize the amount of hand-coding required to move data out of or into a particular data source.

The importance of connectors is perfectly clear to customers. In news stories, such SaaS Integration: Real-World Problems, And How CIOs Are Solving Them, which appeared in InformationWeek in October, customers are blunt about their expectations regarding connectors: vendors need to have a lot of them, one for every piece of middleware being integrated, and vendors better know how to make them work.

[H.B. Fuller CIO Steven] John is asking SaaS vendors lots of questions related to middleware, such as whether they have developed plug-ins for a specific middleware package and whether they have direct experience implementing that middleware. "If they say no to either, it's a strike against them," he says.

Recognizing the importance of connectors to prospects, most integration vendors parade their list of connectors on their Web sites.

And certainly, if you walk the tradeshow floor at events like the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference or the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, you'll find vendors rattling off the names of the connectors they have.

"SAP? Oh, yeah. We've got a connector for that."

I've written before about the misleading simplicity of this approach. Data connectors aren't like Converse sneakers. You can't simply amass a bunch of them (red, orange, purple, black), and assume you have what you need for every occasion.

Different data sources have different security and access requirements. Applications integrating with protected data need to ensure that the data remains protected. You certainly don't want to bypass all the security and access controls protecting, say, a SAP ERP system, simply so that social platform users can pull ERP data into their wiki pages. These requirements become even more pressing when you're dealing with data in the cloud, where it's outside the perimeter of an internally secured and controlled data center.

Another integration requirement, above mere "connectivity," is transformation. Data might need to be transformed ("groomed") or narrowed before being presented to a group. For example, if I'm pulling in sales numbers from the Tokyo office, I'd probably like to see the amounts in yen converted to dollars. It would be nice to have the integration solution do this, so that I know I'm using a tested conversion tool that the company officially endorses.

Beyond merely connecting, then, connectors may need to work as part of an integration solution that supports access controls, transformation, auditability, and orchestration (e.g., before providing data set X, ensure than operation Y is complete, so that X is valid and up-to-date).

The NetSuite Example

The other fallacy of the "Converse sneaker" approach to connectors is it assumes that all integration endpoints and APIs are more or less alike. There's a DB interface or a middleware API. You write to it. You're done.

Not always.

Some APIs are more interactive and complex.

NetSuite, the hosted provider of mid-market CRM, ERP, and accounting solutions, now has 6,600 active customers. So lots of people have reason to connect to NetSuite data.

Integrating with NetSuite, however, is more involved than integrating with other SaaS applications. Why? Because NetSuite provides a great deal of flexibility in customizing their basic record schema and in defining custom records. You can query meta data to discover some, but not all, aspects of the customization. So a connector cannot rely on an automated process for discovering how an account has been customized and access its data.

Ideally, a connector should mask as much of this complexity as possible from the IT user creating the integration, so a good NetSuite connector will take advantage of the flexibility of the NetSuite API, while hiding as much of its complexity as possible from the user building or using the integration.

SnapLogic, an open source data integration company, offers a NetSuite connector that automates as much of this discovery as possible, while supporting integration that works with custom NetSuite records. Here's an explanation from the SnapLogic documentation pages:

NetSuite allows customization of its schema by allowing users to define custom record types and by adding custom fields to existing records. This extension package can automatically discover all the custom record types in a NetSuite account at install time. However, NetSuite does not provide interfaces which allow the extension package to discover custom fields have been added to all existing record types. The extension package is able to do this discovery for some kinds of records (like entity records, item records and CRM records), but not all. For this reason, a manual approach has been provided for specifying the custom fields of records. The user can use the NetSuite UI to browse the records and find custom fields that are of interest. The user can then use the utility: netsuite/resources/customize_resources.py (provided by the extensions package) to manually add custom fields to the SnapLogic Resources that represent a given NetSuite record types.

The connector automatically discovers of the accounts data schema as possible, then supports one-time additions for custom data. Once this set-up work is done, the user has a collection of ready-to-use, snap-together building blocks for building integration pipelines.

Because the connection reads the NetSuites schema, generates components, and supports customizations, it's able to provide NetSuite customers with a flexible solution for integrating NetSuite with other applications and data sources.

A more perfunctory connector would look just as good in a check list of available connectors, but it wouldn't serve users nearly as well.

Empathy, Market Research, and Product Design

2009-02-12T06:17:00.000-08:00

Product Development: Real-World Examples

Over the years, I've had the good fortune to work with many different software development teams, all populated with bright, talented people. While equally smart, these teams sometimes took very different approaches to designing and developing products.

Flying blind. One group of developers had really no idea how customers used their complex software product. The developers understood the basic idea of the product, and some of them had a thorough understanding of the technical minutiae underlying certain screens and tools, but over the years, as features accumulated and screens became ever more cluttered, the developers themselves lost track of what was important, what was useful, and how the customer, trying to solve a problem quickly, would use the various features of the product in a particular sequence. They were grateful whenever a field engineer spent an afternoon showing them how customers would actually go about using the product to solve a specific problem. Even with this understanding, though, it was difficult to undo the complex product architecture that had evolved, or accreted, rather, over time. The product remained a cluttered collection of screens that often bewildered new users.
Academic certainty. Another group of developers based their product design on ideas from their academic research and from a very early Beta test of the product that occurred two years earlier. They were certain that the product's interface couldn't be improved, until a seasoned UI designer was brought in as a consultant, questioned their assumptions, and showed them how their pretty good interface could be made even better.
Proud of complexity. Another group of developers was very proud of how complex and sophisticated their software was. Company slide presentations would boast, "Over 500,000 lines of code!" The software was so sophisticated (or perhaps so complex and finicky) that even whip-smart sales and marketing engineers had trouble getting it to work without assistance from the engineering team. Because the software was so complex, it had to be sold with lots of consulting. When the price of consulting equaled the cost of the software, and when deal sizes began reaching six figures, customers balked. Deals fell through. Complexity meant difficulty, and that didn't serve the business goals of customers.
Experience-focused. Another group of developers had the privilege of working from a thoroughly designed and discussed stack of PowerPoint slides that walked users and developers through all the common tasks the application needed to support. How did they come up with slide deck? The company's founders interviewed CIOs at major companies, looking for an important problem to solve. Once they identified the problem, they began designing the interface and software architecture. Coding didn't begin until the interface had been thoroughly designed. By then, the team knew what was needed on the back-end to support the features customers would be accessing through the UI. Because the UI was "finished" relatively early in the process, documentation and training materials could be developed in parallel with the software itself. Customers knew what they were getting, and management knew that customers wanted the product being built.

Of all these approaches, I liked the last one—the experience-focused one—the best. The company did follow a Waterfall model of development, which doesn't offer the flexibility of more modern agile development methods, but by focusing on the end user's experience, it ensured that every software release delivered a complete set of features for performing important tasks.

This latter team certainly avoided the problems of the first team, who wasn't sure about the workflows the customer would use, and who allowed the software interface to become cluttered and confusing. Ultimately, this clutter limited the appeal of the product. Technical people didn't mind it, but non-technical people did. Even though the product had real potential as a reporting tool for management, its busy, nuts-and-bolts-first interface restricted its user base to technical end users. That limitation proved to have economic consequences.

Empathy

One of the biggest challenges all kinds of businesses face is really understanding what their customers need and want. We all approach this problem with our own particular skills and work histories which illuminate some aspects of customer needs and obscure others. And, off course, customer wants and needs are not static. They change, as technology and markets change, and as customers themselves develop new capabilities, becoming more Web-savvy, for example.

The challenge for vendors is to find a way to systematically see through this clutter and find, not merely what customers will tolerate or find useful, but what they will find empowering, indispensable, and worth paying for with hard-earned cash.

It's all too tempting for company founders to sit around a conference room, discuss their past experiences, throw up some feature/benefit charts, and decide what to build right then and there. Mostly likely the arrow they design will hit somewhere on the target, rather than flying off into the trees, but it probably note strike the bull's-eye itself. Instead, there will be enough interest and heading nodding from prospects, reviewers, and journalists, that the company will proceed with its plans, which are only 65%-75% right.

A better and more cost-effective approach is to step out of that conference room and live with customers for a while. Here's a table offering a hierarchy of investigative approaches for better understanding customers.

Research Method	Advantages	Disadvantages
Online Survey (e.g., Survey Monkey)	Fast, cheap, and easy	A poor format for questioning underlying assumptions or reading visual cues from live responses. Provides at best limited insight into physical, cultural, and political factors that may ease or retard adoption of your offering. Also, requires a good list. If you're a social media expert, and you're surveying the people who follow you on Twitter, you're really learning about yourself, rather than the vast pool of potential customers who are not like you.
Phone Interviews	The more free-form format allows you to dig deeper, explore tangents.	More time-consuming, and you'll likely have to pay the person you're interviewing for his or her time.
On-site interviews and presentations of prototypes at your office	A good chance to see how people really react to what you're building. Richer, more accurate data than you can get from a survey.	Time-consuming and more expensive. Again, you'll likely have to pay people for their time.
Interviews at the customer's site (office or home)	The best way to research a product or service to understand the customer's world. Being there is the best way to gain that understanding. You may also discover other factors and business opportunities that you would have overlooked if you had kept your distance and communicated only through surveys and forums.	Expensive and time-consuming.

What's ironic (and somewhat frustrating) is that founders and investors will often dismiss face-to-face interviews and prototype-testing as too expensive and not worthwhile. Loic Le Meur, for example, for whom I have a lot of respect, once compiled a list of suggestions for start-ups that included:

7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.

I think this approach can work with public applications like Twitter applications and social media networks like LinkedIn. I don't think it will work with more complex applications, such as business workflow or, say, healthcare payment acceleration applications, where the number of variables to get right is high, and the development costs are likely to be significant. And obviously, if your solution involves on-site hardware, giving away free test versions is expensive, even if customers agree to install them, which is doubtful.

Another limitation of this approach is that more or less consigns you to a freemium business model, because it requires lots of users testing a product to refine it. This strikes me as the tail wagging the dog. Companies should select their business model (how they'll make money) independently of how they'll conduct research. I would advise against automatically adopting a freemium model merely to avoid the expense and hard work of upfront research. Yes, by all means, always listen to customers and improve your products and services accordingly (as the freemium model encourages). But adopting the freemium model—or any other revenue and distribution model—should be considered a strategic and game-changing chess move, made at the proper time and the proper circumstances, not simply a default behavior (like P-K4 [a conventional chess move, for you non-chess players]) of young companies.

A third problem with this approach, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, is that refining over time takes time and money. It might be more cost-effective to sit down with prospects up-front, really narrow down what the product or service should be, then refine it over time, having started from a position much closer to the bull's-eye.

A fourth problem is that some customers are simply not going to try your offering, even if it's free and it looks cool. Good luck getting someone in upper management or on a busy factory floor to even look at what your small, unheard-of company is offering. More likely, you're going to have to approach them, perhaps in the company of a third-party research or design firm, and there's going to have to be a financial incentive. You're going to need to buy their attention, but chances are, the expense will pay off for you handsomely. You'll reduce development costs and bring your offering to market faster, perhaps even with some endorsements from the customers you've interviewed.

The goal, here, is empathy. Not just a list of features, but a real understanding of the environment in which your product or service will be used, an understanding of the pressures your customers are facing, the cultural factors driving or inhibiting adoption of what you're offering, and the best language and visual interface with which to present your solution. No matter how talented a founding team is, they're simply not going to derive all that from a few long days locked in a conference room. Getting in front of customers repeatedly, gauging their reactions to prototypes, and really listening are what's required.

Outcomes

So how did the companies I mentioned back at the beginning end up faring?

Flying blind. This company's core technology that the business continues, though opportunities have been missed, and a major engineering project (developed by a senior programmer who was unfamiliar with the market) ended up getting scraped. Recently, though, under new management the company upgraded its old flagship product and aced a major product review. So, somehow, they're soldiering on.
Academic certainty. Product delays, in large part caused by outsourcing to the wrong company, resulted in lost sales, dwindling revenue, and dwindling staff. Eventually the company was sold. The product had to be rewritten (mostly from scratch, I believe) to catch up with current technology trends.
Proud of complexity. The impressively complex product never turned out to be a big seller. Fortunately, the company had acquired other related products, and the company's engineering team developed these into the best products in its industry. However, the company itself never became profitable. It had gone public during the bubble. It stock price hovered in the $1-3 range for many years. Eventually the company was acquired.
Experience-focused. Within a few years, this start-up, while still private, was acquired by a major Silicon Valley technology company. A happy ending.

Twilight for Ad-based and Freemium-Model Start-ups

2009-02-09T09:22:00.001-08:00

A recent article in the New York Times breaks the news that "Angels Flee From Tech Start-ups": angel investors (wealthy individual investors) have lost money in the stock downturn and are no longer as willing to fund early stage companies. Angel investors typically make investments ranging from $10,000 to $1 million to help companies when they are just beginning. Once a company, applying its angel funding, has built a functioning prototype and perhaps even won a few customers, it can proceed to ask for more substantial funding—perhaps $1-5 million—from venture capitalists (VCs).

But, of course, getting VC funding is getting a lot harder, too. Ask anyone in a start-up these days, and they'll tell you that the spigot of VC funding has been turned almost entirely off. VCs like Sequoia Capital recognize that difficult times call for tight fiscal management (see Sequoia's famous Presentation of Doom to get a sense of the VC community's apprehension about the economy).

Even aside from the plummeting economy of the past few months, the angel/VC model for starting a company has been becoming increasingly problematic. Angels and VCs put money into a company, of course, hoping to get a substantial return, often 10x or more, on their investment. But as Om Malik pointed out in his recent post, "IPO Drought Hides Bigger Tech Woes," only a handful of companies from any industry have gone public over the past few years. He writes:

Look at some of the numbers: in 2008 there were nine IPOs in the technology, telecom and media (TMT) sector vs. 77 in 2007. In 2008, there were only six VC-backed IPOS and only one from Silicon Valley.

Without a viable IPO market, the only way a start-up can deliver a big return to investors is by being acquired. But if acquirers know the start-up has no alternative but to be acquired, they can stall negotiations and work out a low price. And large companies, of course, can only acquire so many small companies. Many small, worthy companies will likely go begging for suitors. Which is another way of saying that many VC investments, however well managed, will not deliver their expected returns.

The classic Silicon Valley model of investing in a company, growing it over some number of unprofitable years, and then exiting through an IPO or M&A activity is looking increasingly sketchy.

Here, then, is the lunar landscape start-ups find themselves inhabiting:

A moribund IPO market
Declining consumer spending
Business spending curtailed
Inventories growing
Non-essential purchases by consumers and businesses deferred indefinitely

No wonder VCs are holding onto their cash. Pouring $5-20 million into a company that remains unprofitable for years just doesn't make a lot of sense in this environment.

Web 2.0 Business Models

The lack of angel and VC funding for has several implications for the types of business a software start-up can pursue. Or perhaps, without wanting to sound too catty, I should say that the lack of angel and VC may force a growing number of start-ups to behave like traditional businesses.

Far too many start-ups these days build technology (typically a Web site) and assume that they'll find the business model later, maybe much later, years later, if ever. I'm not opposed to this approach outright. Twitter came about this way because a company was willing to invest in a technology without a clear business case, and I think the communication on Twitter can be powerful and useful. But I think the high tech industry loses something—more than a lot of money, I mean—when the normal model for launching a business is, "We'll figure that out later, and besides, we can start selling ads next quarter." The industry's business acumen is becoming dull or at least severely constrained.

A friend recently directed my attention to a blog post, "Web 2.0, Revenue Models and Profitability: A Web 1.0 Comparison," which summarily points out that the Web 2.0 Emperor of Revenue is looking a tad bare:

"As we recently learned that Digg was still losing money on revenue numbers that look quite paltry, it occurred to me that Digg and some of Web 2.0's other hot young startups really aren't hot young startups anymore.

Facebook was launched in February 2004. Digg was launched in November 2004. Twitter was launched in July 2006. Facebook is almost five years old, Digg is just over four years old and Twitter is two and a half years old.

They all share a common trait: none has developed into a self-sustaining business whose financial future seems assured.

One of Web 2.0's biggest myths: it's far easier and far cheaper to get a startup off the ground today than it was a decade ago.

Citing the wide range of mature, open-source technologies and the abundance of talent available today, Web 2.0 proponents have told us that taking an idea from concept to reality, getting it launched and growing it can be a cheap affair.

If that's the case, one would logically assume that today's Web 2.0 startups would have developed into lean, mean revenue-generating machines. Instead, we see the exact opposite."

The ad revenue many of these companies generates almost seems like an afterthought to me, as though the management team was saying, "Well, we've got all these users on our site. We might has well make a little money off them by advertising." Revenue isn't built into the business; it's tacked on, literally as far as HTML goes, in the form of banner ads and text ads. These companies have a technology model, they also probably have service and community models, but they don't really have a business model, per se. The business aspect of their businesses is decidedly an ancillary concern.

Risks for Freemium Businesses

A popular business model among Web 2.0 companies is the so-called freemium model, based on a coinage by Jarid Lukin of Alacra. As Amy Shuen explains in her book, Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, the term "freemium" was first introduced by venture capitalist Fred Wilson on his blog, A VC, where he described the model this way:

Give your service away for free, possible ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

The word "freemium" is a portmanteau word combining free + premium. Offer a free service, then charge for Pro services you develop over time.

From a business point of view, the freemium model has clear advantages over simple ad-based models, in that Pro features can deliver real value that customers will pay for, regardless of whatever's happening in the pricing and ROI of online ads.

But the freemium model poses its own risks, which are exacerbated by the tight money market and the widespread disappearance of discretionary spending:

It can take quite a while to develop services to the point where add-on Pro features are worth paying for. If it takes a start-up 12 months to develop its community, 6 months for its Pro features to mature and begin gaining traction, and another 6 months for the Pro features to catch on with users (in an economy where much non-critical spending is being cut), does the start-up have enough money in the bank to survive? Have its investors run out of patience?
While the company is growing its community to attract enough purchasers of Pro services, its data center needs and operating costs continue to grow. If not managed shrewdly, these mounting costs, along with increased tech support costs for Pro services, may erase any financial gains realized by revenue from Pro services.
The company has to find the right dividing line between free and Pro. Give too much away, and the company won't make enough money from the Pro. Give too little away, and the company won't attract a sufficient number of free users to sustain the community and its services in the first place.

I think there's lots to admire about freemium sites like Flickr, but less mature, freemium-based start-ups may find themselves racing against an unforgiving clock.

What Start-ups Founded in 2009 Will Likely Look Like

Without the luxury of $5 million in the bank (or even $1 million in the bank, courtesy of angels) to grow a user base that doesn't cover its own costs, new start-ups will have to focus intensely on revenue generation and profitability from the get-go.

This is not a bad thing. It is, oddly enough, an unfamiliar thing to many people founding start-ups. The requirement for short-term revenue might even strike some founders as mind-bloggling, unfair, and needlessly constraining.

To me, such a reaction signals how dependent the high tech industry has become on VC funding—on having a sinecure, more or less, for creating and selling advanced technical solutions. I'm not against VC funding by any means, but I think it's troubling that so many people in technology have difficulty even considering building a company that, like most companies in most other industries, actually makes money sooner than later. And I think, as the Centernetworks author noted above, it gives lie to the Web 2.0 idea that it's faster and easier to build a business thanks to LAMP stacks, affordable hardware, etc. People using those technologies aren't building profitable businesses. They're delivering services to growing communities, and often as not losing money hand over fist.

Striving for short-term revenue (perhaps, 6-12 months, based on the credit limits of the founders credit cards and the balance in their savings accounts) and possibly even short-term profitability (12-24 months!) will require significant changes in the thoughts and actions of founders.

But the high tech industry has worked through transformations of similar difficulty over the past decade or so. Remember when you could take 18-24 months to develop your first product? Now it's weeks or a few months, at most. Remember rigid waterfall development cycles? Now agile development is becoming the norm. Remember lavish tradeshow booths and offset-printed brochures? Now you if you market through tradeshows at all, you're likely using a popup booth and telling people to download the PDF. Or you're reaching customers through Web seminars, forums, Twitter, and Skype. I expect that, having endured the brutal realities of 2009, a growing number technologist will come to embrace the new, old way of thinking about business and revenue.

Focusing on proximate or even immediate revenue generation has several implications for a company's business model and its founding team.

The company may need to begin with consultative selling, so the founding team may need to include one or more people who can sell services and manage client interactions. Instead of waiting 6-12 months to hire a salesperson, the company might include one in the founding team.
Companies will not have the luxury for long iterative development cycles; they'll still likely use agile development and iterate, but it now makes more economic sense than ever to invest in customer experience analysis, really analyzing what customers need and want, rather than trusting the founders' hunches and correcting misperceptions over a matter of 6-9 months.
Faced with curtailed spending by businesses and a wealth of sophisticated technology offerings from both large and small technology vendors, a start-up's best bet may be to focus on narrow problems specific to a particular industry. might be a good idea to tackle a difficult problem that requires domain expertise and tenacity—more expertise and tenacity than large vendors have been willing to contribute. Implication: the founding team will likely then include one or more members with deep expertise in a vertical market.
If start-ups have adequate resources, they should consider a blue ocean strategy, creating a new uncontested market that solves problems not addressed by other products and services currently available.

These implications and market pressures apply to start-ups that don't have the luxury of having millions of dollars in the bank. They obviously don't apply to existing companies that are already well funded. And I'm far from expecting or hoping for the demise of any big-name Web 2.0 companies like Digg or Twitter. In fact, I expect Digg and Twitter and other big-name Web 2.0 properties to survive, in part because they're important enough in the technology ecosystem, which includes the business managers who effect M&A transactions, to last until they find some sort of shelter. (I'm titled this blog post "twilight," not blackest midnight and not noon. Some entities will linger for a long time. But things that were possible earlier, will likely not be possible again soon.)

But for every Digg or Twitter, there are probably dozens of smaller, less well-known Web 2.0 companies that will find it increasingly difficult to survive. I wish them well. At the same time, I hope that most of the teams founding start-ups this year will not follow their example. Instead, I would encourage founders of new start-ups to think more like traditional business people.

If you're not taking in VC funding (because you can't get any), you don't have the pressure of delivering a 10x return in a few years. Instead, you face the different, but still daunting challenge of growing a profitable business. That's hard to do in any market, but it's a worthy undertaking, no less noble, and no less difficult.

Founders, listen: Business is hard. You're smart and motivated. Get on with it.

Tips for Running a Successful Web Seminar

2009-01-28T13:01:00.000-08:00

With travel budgets tight and the need for lead generation more pressing than ever, I expect that this year we'll see more interest in Web seminars than ever before.

In the late 90's, I worked for one of the first Web conferencing companies, so I have over a decade's experience seeing what works and what doesn't in Web seminars.

Here are tips I've picked up over the years. Feel free to comment and add your own.

1. Inform, Don't Sell (Well, Don't Sell Too Much).

People attend Web seminars to learn something: news about market trends, tips for using a software program, best practices for their profession—something that's genuinely useful. They might assume that you're going to do some selling in the course of your presentation, but if you lay on the sales pitch too heavily, you'll turn off your audience. And they'll show it by hanging and disconnecting from the session.

If you're presenting genuinely interesting information is a compelling way, you'll lose only a few audience members in the course of a 30-60 minute presentation. If you're dropping audience members every few minutes, it's time for you to go back and rethink what you're presenting and how.

2. To Inform, Present New Information That's Not Readily Accessible.

This is where guest speakers come in. Opening your Web seminar with a 20-minute presentation by an analyst or expert sharing new research is a great way to drive up registrations and keep your audience engaged.

The other advantage to guest speakers is that they often have their own mail lists and promotional materials, which can dramatically bolster the size of your audience.

3. Keep the Format Lively and Varied.

Studies show that audience members begin to lose interest in a presentation after hearing only one voice talk for seven minutes, so never let one person talk for more than five or six minutes straight. Be sure to have at least two people in the seminar, even if one is a moderator who only introduces the main speaker, then interjects comments and questions from time to time.

Some of my most highly rated seminars followed the format of a radio talk show: a conversational tone, real back-and-forth dialog, a little humor. (After all, what would you want to listen to for 45 minutes in your office? A dry presentation of a script or two people really engaged in conversation?)

Here's a format that's worked well for several of my clients:

1-2 minute introduction and overview by moderator
20-30 minute presentation by guest speaker with comments and interjections by moderator or another speaker
10-15 minute product and service overview by sponsoring company; if the company is promoting software, a live demo is worth a thousands words of narration
5-15 minutes open Q&A with audience members
1 minute close by moderator; if the seminar is part of a series, point audience members to a Web page listing other events

4. Give Audience Members a Chance to Ask Questions.

Whether they type questions into a Q&A feature of your Web conferencing software or ask questions at the end, do give audience members a chance to ask questions, express doubts, and dive deeper into the subject matter.

5. Give Audience Members Extra Time to Get the Software Started.

Inevitably you'll have audience members racing to join your event after getting out of a meeting or coming back from lunch. Some of them won't have downloaded or tried out the seminar software ahead of time. Give them a few minutes to get through the download and start-up process. Greet your audience a few minutes before the event, and then every minute or so let them know that you're going to start a few minutes after the hour to give everyone a chance to join the event.

6. Always Let Audience Members Know They've Come to the Right Place, and Where to Go for More Information.

You don't want audience members wondering if they've come to the right place when they connect to your seminar. Fifteen minutes before the seminar starts, post a welcoming slide identifying the title and time of the event, along with contact information for technical support or questions.

In the final moments of the seminar, display a slide or Web page offering phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs where people can get more information or contact the presenters.

7. Avoid Interruptions.

Always mute the audience's phone lines during the main presentation. Otherwise, you'll have some audience members conducting side conversations in their offices, ignoring your requests to mute their lines, and turning your carefully planned event into a cacophonous jumble. That ping-ping-ping sound is the phone system letting you know that other audience members have lost patience and are hanging up.

So keep the audience phone lines quiet until the Q&A session, and do everything possible to keep attention focused on the presentation itself.

By the way, be wary of those free conference call services. I've found them to be unreliable. One of them—a popular, free service used by many IT companies—disconnected our main guest speaker, just as he was beginning his presentation. It took him several minutes to rejoin the seminar. The other speakers and I were able to cover for him, but it was nerve-wracking (and potentially a waste of a speaking fee).

8. Rehearse. A Lot.

I can't stress this enough. I recommend at least three complete run-throughs of any seminar. In the course of rehearsals, you'll discover that the flow of your presentation can be improved, that some material is redundant, and that other material is cryptic. Especially if you have two or more speakers, you'll want to rehearse transitions from one section to another.

I ran a Web seminar series for a client last summer. We had different guest speakers every week for several weeks in a row. (We had just launched the company, and we wanted to make a splash.) We rehearsed daily, sometimes twice daily. Everyone agreed that these rehearsals dramatically improved the quality of our presentations. They also gave us an opportunity to get to know our new business partners and to better understand how they presented their offerings to customers.

That's my list. What's on yours? Post a comment, and let me know.

Green IT: Now More than Ever

2009-01-21T02:47:00.000-08:00

"Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. . . . We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. . . . All this we can do. All this we will do."

— President Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

In yesterday's moving, historic inaugural speech, President Obama set a new direction for America, or perhaps I should say he returned America to its true direction—a course where progress is achieved through responsibility, trust, compassion, creativity, and hard work.

Like many people, I was pleased to hear Obama's pledge to restore science to its rightful place. For the past eight years, the federal government has rejected science and its truths for ideological talking points and purblind dreams of grandeur. One of the areas where the administration's suppression of science has been most publicized and most perilous is global warming. The administration has stalled on policy and questioned what no longer bears questioning.

If you would like a vivid reminder of just how compelling the evidence is, how fraught the dangers to human society and natural habits, and how galling governmental inaction has been, I strongly recommend a short, highly readable book written a few years ago by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert: Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

The title might strike you as alarmist, but by the time you're done reading this book, I suspect you'll be alarmed—and frustrated, too, by our country's inaction.

As the phrase "field notes" suggests, Kolbert reports on research being conducted in the field: in Alaska, Greenland, England, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And the findings of this research are damning:

The earth is now warmer than it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Since 1979, the perennial sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by roughly 250 million acres, an area roughly "the size of New York, Georgia, and Texas combined." The loss of this ice reduces the earth's ability to reflect sunlight; instead of reflecting light, the exposed seas absorb sunlight's energy, further heating the planet and melting more ice.
After studying satellite data, James Hansen, a NASA official, has warned that if greenhouse gases aren't controlled, the Greenland ice sheet could melt, potentially, in time, raising sea levels 23 feet.
Nineteen biologists from around the world studied the effect of global warming on eleven hundred species of plants and animals. If the species proved to be mobile, 15 percent of them would be "committed to extinction." If the species were stationary, the extinction rate rose to 37 percent.
Heavy rainfall is expected to intensify in some of the most densely populated areas on the planet, such as the Mississippi Delta and the Thames basin. By 2080, England will likely be experiencing so-called century floods every few years.

The data goes on and on. The consensus among the scientific community is, for all intents and purposes, universal. The earth is heating up, the heating process has acquired a momentum of its own and will continue for decades, even if we were to curtail the emission of greenhouse gases immediately. But we're not curtailing them, and the Bush Administration had no interest in doing so.

I recently read the Harmon translation of Kafka's The Castle, and the evasiveness and circularity of Bush administration officials in their interview with Kolbert reminded me of scenes out of Kafka, minus the droll humor.

"[Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs] Dobriansky began by assuring me that despite how it might appear, the Bush administration took the issue of climate change 'very seriously.' . . . At one point, I asked the undersecretary if there were any circumstances under which the administration would accede to mandatory caps on emissions. 'Our approach has been predicated on: we act, we learn, we act again,' she said. In response to a question about how urgent the problem of stabilizing emission was, she replied, 'We act, we learn, we act again,' and in response to a question about what would constitute a 'dangerous' level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, she said, 'Forgive me, I'm going to repeat myself: we act, we learn, we act again.'"

I take it back: I've been unfair to Kafka's characters. Their evasions are far richer and more subtle than anything offered by Dobriansky and other Bush-era flacks.

But here's the thing: what are you doing about global warming in your business? Don't fall into the trap of "I read, I groan, I read again." Take action. Make green IT and green practices part of your strategic plan this year.

And if you need motivation—if you want a good jolt of pursued-by-a-grizzly-bear variety adrenalin for your and your staff—buy and read Kolbert's excellent book. It's available from Amazon, Powell's, and probably your local independent bookseller, as well.

Questions Worth Asking at the Beginning of the Year

2009-01-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

Strategic Planning

Has my company identified 6-10 major objectives for the year and identified 3-6 supporting milestones for each objective? (For more about this, click here.)
Has this list of objectives and milestones been broadly communicated throughout the company?
Are directors and managers using this information to drive their departmental planning and budgets?

Product and Services Development

Has my company identified the user experiences that our products and services should provide?
Have these experiences formed the basis for development of products, including the identification of features and benefits?
Does my company have a process in place for assessing customer experiences and ensuring they meet our goals?

Strategic Communications and Customer Management

Does my company have up-to-date messaging guidelines available for all relevant parties, including not only executives, marketers, and sales people, but also all the other employees who might be interacting with customers and the public through forums and other social media?
Does my company have a systematic approach for monitoring social media interactions and responding promptly to situations that arise in these ad hoc communications channels?
Does my company have IT systems in place to integrate outbound communications with CRM and other internal IT systems?

Two Predictions for Open Source Software in 2009

2008-12-31T03:28:00.000-08:00

Prediction #1: The adoption of open source will accelerate in 2009.

Open source is on a tear. It's being adopted more quickly and more widely than ever before. Evidence: In November, Gartner announced survey results that found that 85% of enterprises are already using open source software, and the remaining 15% plan to start using it soon. (And my guess is, a good portion of that 15% are already using it, but management doesn't know.)

On the Optaros blog, Bruno von Rotz offers a good summary of what's happened in 2008 in the world of open source, and a lot of it is encouraging news for open source vendors (sales growing faster than expected, more rounds of funding, etc.).

With companies in all industries hitting the pause button on spending, open source should prove especially attractive in 2009. If you're a project manager, and you're being asked to do more with less or even with practically nothing, you're likely to take a good, hard look at open source, at least for a pilot project, even if you've had qualms about the maturity or stability of open source products in your area of expertise.

Earlier this month, Gartner analysts advised their clients to prepare two IT budgets: one with a 2% increase in spending, the other with a 20% decrease in spending. If your IT budget really does get slashed by 20% or more, you'll have little choice but to consider software products that offer a basic version for free, and whose paid products have prices that will turn out to be highly negotiable.

Bottom line, then: 2009 will create many new opportunities for open source vendors to get their feet in the door.

Prediction #2: Many open source vendors will continue to struggle, and some well-known vendors will shut down.

Unfortunately, getting your foot in the door is no guarantee of success. Despite the impressive adoption of open source and the continued rounds of funding, many open source vendors are struggling to make money—in some cases, even after receiving many tens of millions of dollars of VC investments. The sad truth is that even some of the well known names in open source—companies with good products and impressively high numbers of downloads—are having trouble converting those downloads and installations into a viable business.

Part of the problem is that the free version of products are often good enough to satisfy customer requirements. If customers don't have to spend money to get features, and if the product is reliable enough (or not mission-critical), customers won't spend money on licensing and support.

Part of the problem is that while the download numbers are growing, the company has yet to find a repeatable sales model for converting downloads to sales; end user requirements are simply too varied to build a profitable business.

Part of the problem also is that free has to compete with cheap (or at least comparatively inexpensive). On the Open NMS blog, Tarus Balog recently pointed out that open source network management products have to compete with low-cost, easy-to-use products like Solar Winds. He's absolutely right. And Solar Winds has been on its own tear for many years, now. Another up-and-coming NMS platform is AdventNet's ManageEngine, which knits together network management and service desk functions into an easy-to-use, highly affordable whole. AdventNet now has tens of thousands of paying customers for its network management products—an enviable achievement from the point of view of many open source vendors. If price is what's driving you to open source, and you're not particularly interested in having access to a product's source code, you may end up choosing one of these highly affordable non-open source alternatives instead.

Another part of the problem with open source companies comes down to simple execution: building what customers really want rather that what the core development team feels comfortable with (especially if the company is VC-backed and has real targets to hit); solving customer problems promptly and effectively through support, documentation, and training; marketing well; etc. Most open source companies are developer-led organizations, and some (decidedly not all, but some) developer-led organizations fall into the trap of expecting their potential community to share the internal team's own predilections and priorities. (If you hear an engineering manager saying something like, "That should be reasonable, it shouldn't be that hard for the customer to figure out," stop the design discussion right there: customers should have to figure out almost nothing.)

A few vendors may find financial salvation by converting or substantially augmenting their open source business with a SaaS business and close deal that are SaaS subscriptions rather than on-premise software licenses. But for other vendors time will eventually run out. Investors will shift new funding other more viable ventures. Staff cuts will paralyze progress. Projects will be left to linger on SourceForge.

This is why I expect 2009 to be a mixed year for open source vendors. It will be a year of unprecedented opportunity for most, and a year of hard reckoning for some.

Zoho CloudSQL: An interview with Rodrigo Vaca

2008-12-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, Zoho announced CloudSQL, a new SQL interface to Zoho Reports, its popular Web application for online reporting and business intelligence. Zoho applications (in case you haven't heard of them) are credible alternatives to Google Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications such as Google Docs. Launched three years ago, the suite of Zoho applications has grown dramatically in number of applications, richness of features, and size of its user base. The company now boasts over 1 million users for its 19 applications. More applications are on the way.

Here's how Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho's Director of Marketing, described CloudSQL in a blog post earlier this week:

Zoho CloudSQL is a middleware technology that allows customers to interact with their business data stored in Zoho through the familiar SQL language. Customers are able to access Zoho cloud data using SQL on both other cloud applications as well as through traditional on-premises software.

At a high-level, Zoho CloudSQL serves as the bridge between the external application and the data stored inside Zoho. It receives the query in SQL, interprets it, delegates queries and aggregates results across the Zoho services.

There are in particular 3 things that stand out about Zoho CloudSQL:

It's the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL.

It supports multiple SQL dialects. We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix.

With our JDBC/ODBC drivers, developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database.

A Quick Interview
I got in touch with Rodrigo Vaca to ask him a few follow-up questions.

JB: From your announcement, I'm gathering that CloudSQL is a SQL-based service for accessing data in Zoho applications. The interface will be of interest to engineers working on integration projects where they would like to simply work with SQL queries, rather than dealing with JSON or RESTful data access. Is this an accurate characterization?

RV: Yes, that's accurate. Zoho CloudSQL is about making the data in the Zoho cloud more accessible for our customers. SQL is something that most corporate developers know and are familiar with.

JB: The diagram on your December 2 blog post shows CloudSQL being able to access other Web services. Are there non-Zoho Web services you plan to support? Say, any Web services from StrikeIron, ProgrammableWeb, or even Google, etc.?

RV: Ah! You were paying attention! You noticed something that most other people missed. Yes, Zoho CloudSQL can be extended to non-Zoho services. At this point we're not focused or actively pursing that, since we need to first make sure that other Zoho services are accessible through CloudSQL first.

JB: Finally, I was intrigued to see that you're doing entity-mapping, which makes sense. It makes me think of the work Microsoft has been doing in its Project Astoria group (creating a framework now called ADO.NET), where they're using entity mapping to present a non-SQL-based interface to SQL-Server data. Do your RESTful APIs make use of this entity mapping? Does Zoho have plans to publish an Astoria-like interface to Zoho data?

RV: Our REST API should provide all the necessary details for developers, so we don't have plans for entity-mapping like Astoria. We would recommend CloudSQL, as the standard interface for developers, especially as we increase its coverage across Zoho applications.

To learn more about CloudSQL, visit this Zoho wiki page here.

Au Courant: Making the Most of Twitter for Business

2008-11-25T14:42:00.000-08:00

Lots of high tech companies still don't use Twitter or use it well (e.g., they read tweets, but never post; they don't monitor keywords related to their business; they never initiate dialogs with strangers).

These tech-savvy but Twitter-naive companies could learn a thing or two from the world of letters. A growing number of small presses are taking advantage of the Twitter platform and 140-character tweets to share news, build communities, and offer promotions.

New Directions Press (@NewDirections) regularly posts about upcoming publications (and since they frequently involve Roberto Bolano, I update my bookstore wish list accordingly). Richard Nash of SoftSkull Press (@softskull) is another frequent Twitter user. He recently used Twitter to announce a new catalog:

Soft Skull Spring 09 catalog now available, yo. Download http://is.gd/8zrR & email for review copies. (Here's Winter 09 http://is.gd/8zE1 )

Today he retweeted a promotion from highly esteemed Graywolf Press (@GraywolfPress):

RT @GraywolfPress: REMINDER: get 25% off your entire order at www.graywolfpress.org. Use code "twitter25" in customer notes Good til Monday.

Businesses of all kinds, including software companies, could learn a thing or two about social media strategies from book people like Nash and the Twitter users at these other presses. And, of course, business people will also want to take advantage of that promotion from Graywolf—a longtime publisher of wonderful books. And then there's the new catalog from SoftSkull and ...

Moore's Law for Data Integration

2008-11-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

The year is 1999, and your company wants to customize its new CRM system so sales people can access contract records from the Finance department's database. The CRM system itself took 9 months to deploy. Everyone's tired of the training classes. The six consultants who implemented the CRM system have lost a few people and gained a few people. Looks like they'll be bringing in someone else to manage this customization, which should take 4-5 months, tops.

Flashforward to 2008. It's September, you're using SugarCRM as your CRM system. You'd like to, again, integrate your CRM system with your Finance system. This time you'd like to do it using MindTouch Deki, a popular open source wiki and collaboration platform, and SnapLogic, an open source data integration framework. Good choice: the entire project, from start to finish, is completed in under two weeks.

No big, expensive consulting contracts. No "tent village" of Big Four consultants camped out by the computer room. An IT manager conceives the project, and within two weeks, it's done.

There's a paradigm shift that's occurred in enterprise IT, and it promises to make the next few years genuinely exciting, despite the downturn.

Over the past decade, application vendors have learned the wisdom of first, opening their APIs, and second, eliminating the complexity of their APIs by adopting a RESTful Web services model for integration.

The result has been a increase in agility for business users and IT department that is proving to be as dramatic, in terms of applications deployments and end user experience, as Moore's law has been for hardware development. Moore's law, you'll recall, is Gordon Moore's observation, first made in 1965, that "the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years" (Wikipedia). Thanks to Moore's law, your bookbag can hold a laptop more powerful that a mainframe from a few decades ago. And you watch videos on your MP3 player, which is roughly the size of a pack of gum.

Open source and RESTful APIs (which make use of basic GETs and PUTs, rather than relying on more complex messaging schemes) give enterprise IT organization powerful building blocks for rapidly building new, powerful application solutions—applications that literally would have required man years of programming less than a decade ago.

A year ago, there was a lot of buzz about enterprise mashups that blended two or more data sources. Mashups are still exciting, but what's equally exciting is a kind of mashup occurring at the application level.

Today's announcement by Salesforce.com that its Force.com development platform would work with Facebook APIs, enabling Salesforce.com's 100,000-strong developer community to more easily access the vast library of applications built on Salesforce, is more evidence of this trend.

Other evidence of this trend:

The ongoing success of the Web site, ProgrammableWeb, which serves as a portal for discovering application APIs and mashups. ProgrammableWeb now has 1,000 APIs in its API directory. Clearly, a lot of companies are publishing APIs.
Once published, APIs often become the dominant channel for accessing an application. As ProgrammableWeb's John Musser points out in a blog post about the 1,000-API milestone:
- 60% of eBay's listing come from their APIs, rather than through their browser-based interface.
- Twitter's APIs carry 10x the traffic of its Web site.
REST is becoming the dominant programming model for APIs. 63% of the APIs listed in ProgrammableWeb's directory are RESTful.
New Content Management Systems, such as Alfresco Enterprise 3.0, feature REST interfaces so they can easily access business data from other IT systems.
New applications, such as an increasingly popular network management/IT operations platform offered by an Indian company, use REST APIs to facilitate communication among components. RESTful integration enables one product, for example, a network troubleshooting tool, to easily pass information to a related component, such as a trouble-ticketing application used by a help desk.

Enterprise Management Associates analyst Dennis Drogseth is fond of saying that enterprise IT organizations know they need to move to a "lego world." No single IT system has a monopoly on vital data. Best practices call for the automated flow of information seamlessly from one system to another: from a network diagnostic tool to a help desk application, for example, or from a finance system into a wiki, which in turn is embedded in SugarCRM. The key to that flow is having components designed to fit together with other components, even from other vendors.

It sounds like a lot of work. It's dramatically less work than it used to be. Thanks to open APIs, REST, and Web-centric architectures, data integration and application development can beneft from a Moore's law of their own.

Getting Strategic

2008-10-23T13:31:00.001-07:00

Whether you're embarking on your normal planning for the next calendar year, or participating in emergency planning sessions in response to the economic slow-down, it's worth remembering the core attributes and benefits of a strategic plan.

Here's a summary from an earlier post.

About that Economic Slowdown

2008-10-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

Another sign of the slowing economy: a sharp drop in retail sales in September. Here's the news from AP:

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday retail sales decreased 1.2 percent last month, nearly double the 0.7 percent drop that had been expected. It was the biggest decline since retail sales fell by 1.4 percent in August 2005.

The bigger-than-expected decline significantly increased the risks of a recession because consumer spending is two-thirds of total economic activity.

How big will this recession be? How long will it last, and what will the economy look like on the other side? Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky offers his predictions, which include:

"The unwinding of all this credit bubble will take longer than most people expect, and the damage will continue to be broader than most expect. Beyond banks and financial institutions, it will include many municipalities, some large-cap tech names reliant on major debt-financed network buildouts, a host of debt-financed non-financial companies, and some sovereign nations. Total cost: Bridgewater's $2.7-trillion looks close enough to me .
We are already in a recession that will last well into the the fourth quarter of next year.
Unemployment may touch 9% in the U.S. at trough.
Housing will fall 10-15% further in U.S., and we are only beginning major declines in Canada, U.K., Australia, and elsewhere.
U.S. consumers will become much more aggressive savers, both through debt reduction and direct saving. Similarly, future fiscal stimulus will largely be saved in service of this overdue need to fix domestic balance sheets.
Commodities will stay under pressure for the next two years,and then reverse savagely as developed countries emerge from recession at very similar times. We have newly resynchronized the global economies, which will have immense consequences.
Coming out the other side, we will see a barbell economy, with growth and investor interest at the mega-cap consolidator end, and at the entrepreneurial smaller end. The latter will be driven by major developments in clean technology, in particular, which was just given a two-year window to gestate before the major economies worldwide turn higher and begin driving energy prices straight up."

Read more of Paul Kedrosky's analysis here.

Two Suggestions for Social Media Strategies

2008-10-15T05:12:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who runs a PR agency called me yesterday, asking for my thoughts on social media strategies. Here's what I told him.

In addition to all the standard advice—start a blog, comment on other people's blogs, participate in forums, communicate and collaborate with your customers online, etc.—remember that an effective social media strategy involves both online and offline work. The online work is fairly obvious (the aforementioned blogs, etc.). The offline work may not be obvious, but it's pretty simple. Go meet with the people in your online communities. Blog about topics, then go to events where people talk about those topics. Meet new people there, and continue the relationships online. Your customers and partners are real, walking, talking, full-blooded people, not just users who who filled out profiles on your site. Meet them face-to-face, and have conversations you would never have online. If you think social media means hunkering down in a cubicle, blogging, linking, and fine-tuning SEO, think again. Social media is about being social with other people, online and off. Budget for travel. Get your social media marketing manager out there at trade shows, in restaurants, in blogger's lounges, and at any other location where your community hangs out.

Second, as I've said before about growing communities in the open source world, you've got to both "do" and "show that you do." In other words, you've got to document all your community work. If you show up at an unconference attended by 250 people in Cambridge, chances are that 50 people at most will remember meeting you (maybe 100 or 200, if you're already a big name or especially vocal or you're the guy wearing the weird hat with the flashing lights—but do people really know that guy?). None of your prospective customers in St. Louis or Chicago or London will know you went there. So you need to blog about. Post photos on Flickr. Link. Document your sociability and your community involvement. That way, your community involvement will have a much broader reach.

Ever notice that social media pundits are always posting pictures of themselves drinking good burgundy or Belgian beer with their fellow social media pundits? Now you know why. (Besides the fact that they're just having fun. Which is a good idea, too. And good burgundies should be celebrated, I suppose.)

Now, if anyone out there would like to grab a beer and continue this discussion, just let me know.

Data from a Straw

2008-09-26T16:42:00.001-07:00

I originally wrote this piece after attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June. I'm just back from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, and I see that the ideas still apply. So here are some thoughts on data integration and social computing platforms. -JB

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, there was a lot of talk about data. By applying Web 2.0 technology and practices—blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS, etc.—Enterprise 2.0 would transform enterprise IT infrastructure and foster the collaboration and knowledge-sharing promised by earlier technology practices such as knowledge management. In this new era, users at last will be able to find data easily and discover who else in the company has similar interests and pertinent knowledge. Through collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint and Jive Software Clearspace, data previously buried in email messages and PC desktops would be published on company blogs and wikis, where it could be found, read, and elaborated upon by coworkers and, if appropriate, by partners and customers.

The software companies creating these portals recognize that a lot of valuable data isn’t found in email or Words documents; instead, it's distributed across data centers and departments in databases and data warehouses. So the portal vendors talk about being able to access Oracle and SAP and other enterprise data sources, in order to pull this data into the collaboration platform.

But as I talked to vendors, I found their views of data access in many cases to be overly simplistic. Their premise seemed to be that all one needs to do is attach a connector to a data source and suck the data out, much as one might stick a straw into a paper cup and extract whatever concoction is sloshing about inside.

If you talk to data integration experts in data centers—or if you talk to security officers for Fortune 1000 companies—you quickly discover that the requirements for data access are much more varied and nuanced. It's rare that you’ll actually want to simply extract data and, say, stage it in an Excel worksheet on a server where it can be accessed by a homogeneous group of authorized users. More likely, you’ll want to apply access controls before the data even reaches a collaboration server, and you’ll need several different views of the data, based on business needs and permissions.

Instead of simply extracting data, it's more useful to think in terms of data access, data transformation, and data delivery. The tables below compare these approaches.

First, here’s the kind of straightforward data access that software vendors often talk about.

Table 1: Simple Data Access

Data Source	Data Access
Customer database	Post customer records as Excel spreadsheet for SharePoint

Next, here's a more realistic scenario, at least for organizations operating under security policies or industry regulations that mandate data security and data governance.

Table 2: Data Access with Support for Data Transformation and Data Delivery

Data Source	Data Access	Data Transformation	Data Delivery
Customer database	Query customer records, presenting only columns 1, 2, 5, and 7	Convert dollars to Euro	Post results to spreadsheet or Web page accessed by EMEA marketing group
	Query customer records, collecting columns 1-5 and 7-9	Add a unique ID to each record for use in this project	Post results to portal used by Private Client Group
	Query customer records, returning columns 1-4		Make this query executable for customer service agents working on the customer service portal

In enterprises operating with strict security and compliance controls, it's rare for data to be simply dumped from a database and made broadly accessible. Policy compliance requires tighter controls over data access (permission to extract the data from its source) and data delivery (the presentation of data to specific users).

Businesses—and software vendors—ought to recognize the critical importance of data transformation: changing, reformatting, or editing data to suit its particular purpose and audience. There's no point in delivering too much data, or financial results in dollars when they should be in yen, or raw data from three sources that end users have to combine for themselves through machinations with spreadsheets. In the real world of harried workers overloaded with information, data transformation is an essential capability for any effective solution for data management and knowledge sharing.

Just as Enterprise 2.0 frees workers from the clutter of irrelevant email messages, so flexible data access and transformation practices can ensure that the right users receive the right data at the right time. The goal should be to get everyone all the data they need—and nothing more.

Conclusion

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, it was obvious that software vendors of collaboration and community platforms have made clear progress developing attractive, usable front-ends. Now it's time to apply that same energy and thoughtfulness to developing the back end—data access, transformation, and delivery—in order to realize the full vision of business-ready data platforms for Enterprise 2.0.

Postscript: Since I wrote blog post back in June, SnapLogic, an open source data integration vendor and a client of mine, formed a partnership with MindTouch, an open source wiki company, to create a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution building on the kind of custom-tailored data access, transformation, and delivery I described above. In the SnapLogic-MindTouch solution (summarized with a diagram here), CRM applications such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are extended with collaborative dashboards based on MindTouch's wiki platform. The wiki is configured with SnapLogic data integration pipelines, enabling CRM users to securely access financial data and customer support records for prospects and customers. No tell-all spreadsheets insecurely posted on servers. Instead, a wealth of account-specific data is made available to authorized users.

I expect will see more partnerships like this one in the coming months.

In the Flesh

2008-09-23T18:34:00.001-07:00

I had to laugh at one of the visitors to the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo last week.

The scene: The expo floor of the Javits Center on Thursday afternoon. The show is winding down. A couple of exhibitors have begun taking down signs and packing up laptops, though officially the show will remain open for another half hour.

On business for a client, I've been here and there on the show floor, talking to potential business partners. When I return to my client's booth, I find a middle-aged, pot-bellied man standing in front of our demo station, talking to a buddy of his. The pot-bellied man has set his laptop on our table and he's instructing his buddy, who's ill-shaven and looking a little worse for wear in his black suit, about which companies he should go call on. The pot-bellied man is unabashedly treating our booth as his private conference area.

I ask him if he'd like to see a demo. He says sure. I take control of our demo station, and I show him our demo: CRM software integrated with a Wiki. It's been wowing people all week.

He nods, but he's not really interested. I ask what he does. He offers to show me. He flips open his laptop, positions it in the middle of our demo table, and starts running online ads. You've seen them: video ads featuring a well-dressed model who wanders in from the side of the screen, blocks the Web page you're trying to view, and starts talking to you. He has a long list of demo links. I watch nattily dressed salespeople blocking the Web pages of several national retail brands.

I point out that my client sells software primarily to IT people, and that IT people have a low tolerance for anything that smacks of marketing, let alone anything as out-and-out slick and salesy as this. He slaps his business card on our table, makes perfunctory social remarks, and moves on.

Later, it occurred to me. I've always found ads like that intrusive, presumptuous, and annoying. And what kind of person would create and peddle ads like that? Someone who is himself intrusive, presumptuous, and annoying. Someone who would take over your booth at a tradeshow and use it as his personal office, blocking your computer and carrying on.

"By their fruits, ye shall know them." I had just seen a grating interstitial ad in the flesh.

At Web 2.0 Expo in New York, an Instant Solution for CRM Integration

2008-09-17T06:22:00.001-07:00

The first Web 2.0 Expo in New York kicks off today. About 120 vendors will be showing off the latest in software and services related to community, Web-contributed content, and other aspects of Web 2.0.

Among the exhibitors will be SnapLogic, a client of mine, who just announced an OEM deal with MindTouch. The two companies have created a new software solution that extends CRM applications such as SugarCRM to include live data from other business systems, such as finance applications, databases, and more. The diagram below captures the gist of the solution.

Why is this useful? Now a salesperson reviewing customer data in a CRM application can also see relevant data from other business systems. Is this customer due for a maintenance renewal? What's their payment history? Do they typically pay on time? Have other sales, marketing, or support people left comments offering advice about working with this customer? Deki for CRM puts answers to questions like those right in the CRM application window, formatted in a readable, editable wiki workspace.

Five years ago, a solution like this would have entailed tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and a six- to twelve-month roll-out of a major CRM application like Siebel. SnapLogic and MindTouch put the solution together in a matter of weeks. Customers can have it up and running in a day.

You can read more about Deki for CRM here.

Integrating SaaS Applications

2008-08-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) certainly qualifies as a hot trend in IT. According to Gartner, the SaaS market is growing at twice the rate of the software market overall. SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com are especially popular with SMBs, but even large enterprises with more than 25,000 employees are devoting 11% of their current software budgets to SaaS.

SaaS, then, is big and getting bigger. But getting bigger, too, is the challenge of integrating SaaS applications with the rest of an organization's IT infrastructure. After all, no organization can afford to let the latest SaaS application it subscribes to become another data silo. SaaS applications need to share data with other enterprise applications and IT assets.

Integrating SaaS applications can be difficult, in part because there's an technology mismatch between SaaS application design and the community of SaaS customers. Most SaaS applications feature SOAP Web services interfaces whose complexity and sophistication are far beyond the programming reach of SMBs, the biggest users of SaaS. Even in large organizations with SOAP programmers on staff, SOAP programming often remains a rare skill. SOAP programmers are usually assigned to big internal initiatives. They're usually not available to help a department integrate its data sources with a new, cost-saving SaaS application.

One of my clients, SnapLogic, has published a new white paper on SaaS integration. If you're working with SaaS applications now, or thinking of subscribing to Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, or any other popular SaaS application, the white paper is probably worth a read. You can register for it here.

Two Pictures of Hope on a Friday Night in Boston

2008-07-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

Friday night, I walked up Boylston Street on my way to Fenway Park for the Red Sox-Orioles game. Just past the Hynes Center, I encountered a line of people stretching down the street and wrapping around the corner. Some hot new club or restaurant? No. People waiting to purchase new iPhone 3G's at the Apple Store.

At Fenway, the Orioles pulled ahead in the first inning and held on to win the game. But at the bottom of the ninth, there was one of those moments that makes me love baseball. Baltimore was up 7 to 3, but through hits and walks, the Red Sox found themselves at bat with two outs and the bases loaded. Kevin Youkilis came to the plate. The count went to 2 and 2. The Red Sox fans were on their feet. If he hit a grand slam, the game would be tied. Fate could change in an instant. And then . . . who knows?

Alas, he swung and missed. The Orioles won.

Oh, well. It was a perfect summer evening, and everyone left the stadium in a good mood.

Is Your Schedule Based on a Guess or an Estimate?

2008-06-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

Clearcut Ideals and Messy Realities
Ever work with Microsoft Project? Ever spend hours and hours—or rather days and weeks—gathering project requirements and schedule projections from team members ("how many days do you think your part of the project will take? OK, we'll say three"), so you can generate draft after draft of Gantt charts and timelines, leading up to the official copy that you present to management, then print out—page after page of solid lines presented in a staggered order like a vast, irregular staircase—and tape up on the wall of your office?

If you've ever worked on a project plan like that, you may find yourself holding your breath now, because you know, in the pit of your stomach, that the process I've just described is only the beginning. It's only the beginning, because inevitably, important aspects of the project change. Some tasks finish late; others finish early; others disappear from the schedule entirely, while new ones, unimagined in the planning stages, miraculously appear. If you're lucky—and a lot of people are—the team will manage to complete the project—or some semblance of it—overall.

When the project is finished and you look back at all those charts you printed out and taped do your wall, how do you feel? Don't those solid lines and neat demarcations—progressing across the page with the neat precision of a well drilled marching band—now look hopelessly optimistic—like the budget projections of a politician or the crop forecasts in a Soviet five-year plan? I mean, how could anything as random as a bunch of human beings working on complex project ever proceed in such a neat manner, with such precision?

But what's your alternative? You can't afford to be vague when you're scheduling a project, can you? And you do have to produce some kind of schedule or plan. And whether you use Microsoft Project or some other planning program, most likely the output is going to be hard lines, those promises of firm dates, neat beginnings and endings.

Nothing really ever works out that way. Precise project scheduling is like penciling in a landing strip for a water balloon.

A New Approach to Planning
One of the most useful products I saw demonstrated at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston didn't really have much to do with Enterprise 2.0, as far as I could tell. It's a piece of collaboration software, but it's no more collaborative than Project or other planning tools that have been around for over a decade. It doesn't explicitly make use of network effects, though it does support discussion threads and Web-based scheduling. Most importantly, though, it offers a new and potentially very useful approach to planning.

The project is called Liquid Planner, and it's based on the premise, which seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, that accurate planning should be based on estimates and probabilities, not hard certainties.

Bruce Henry, whose title at Liquid Planner is Director of Rocket Science, explained the "Ah-ha!" moment that led to the founding of the company. He and some of his colleagues from Expedia were taking a class from Steve McConnell, the author of Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art and Rapid Development, among other books. McConnell pointing out that when you ask how long someone will take to do something, and they say, "4 to 6 days," and you say, "OK, we'll call it 5," you're making a guess, not an estimate. Estimates are based on ranges and probabilities. Guesses pick a number and use it as the basis of planning.

Most organizations base their planning on guesses. It's not surprising then, that most schedules slip, and that most Gantt charts end up looking hopelessly optimistic.

Two of Henry's colleagues from Expedia—Charles Seybold and Jason Carlson—founded Liquid Planner to address this problem. Henry joined them and wrote the probability engine that's at the heart of Liquid Planner's software. The goal: make project planning more accurate by enabling teams to base their schedules on realistic probabilities rather than unrealistic "certainties."

Here's a screenshot of the software, showing probabilities and date ranges for tasks.

Henry points out that seeing a list of probabilities can raise red flags early in the planning process. For example, if managers notice that a particular task has only a 30% chance of completing on time, they might ask why. They might discover dependencies they weren't aware of. They might be able to apply people and resources to address any dependencies or shortcomings, greatly increasing the task's chance of completing on time.

I haven't tried this software myself, but it seems like it's worth a look for any team beginning a new project.

The company launched its public Beta at the DEMO Conference in February, 2008. Since then, over 11,000 users and organizations Philips, Butterball Farms, and Reed Business Information have signed up for their online service. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June, 2008, Liquid Planner announced its commercial version.

The service is free for teams with up to 3 members, for 501(c)(3) non-profits, and for educational users. Larger teams can take advantage of a free 15-day trial, then pay monthly or annual fees per user. You'll find pricing details here.

All That Data

2008-06-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

None of my clients were exhibiting in the demo area of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, so when the demo floor was open, I had the opportunity to stroll through the aisles and talk to various vendors instead of manning a booth and explaining a particular product or technology to passersby.

The Enterprise 2.0 movement—applying Web 2.0 technology to problems and processes within the enterprise—promises to transform the online experience of workers in companies large and small. Instead of being deluged with email and interrupted by IM, workers can access company news and information in RSS feeds when it's convenient. Instead of emailing Word documents to everyone on a team and trying to coordinate all the changes and comments, authors can jointly edit documents with tools like Google docs. The table below summarizes some of these changes:

Category	Web 1.0	Enterprise 2.0	Benefits from New Approach
Knowledge sharing	Email and irregular postings on portals	Wikis and blog posts	Publishes data in a more permanent format Makes information easier to discover Reaches stake-holders outside one's immediate group Enables non-technical users to post information without requiring custom clients or help from IT
Notification of changes and news	Email and phone calls	RSS	Occurs automatically when blogs or wikis are updated Reaches all interested parties, even those the author might not know about

(For more about this new way of working, and some thoughts on the pros and cons of email in particular, see this recent post by Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee.)

Clearly, these platforms and portals are going to store a lot of data. How do we make it searchable? How we enable a product manager for a new leather cleaner product to find the blog post from three months ago that discussed product requirements for a similar product being developed by a partner in Switzerland.

One solution is to apply tags—meta-data keywords that summarize the content of a blog post, Web page, or some other piece of content. For example, the tags for that product requirement blog post might be "leather cleaner, research, product requirements, survey, partner, Switzerland."

Thomas Vander Wal is a consultant who has spent a great deal of time thinking about tagging and classifying data. He coined the term folksonomy to distinguish a bottom-up approach to classifying data, in which users apply the tags they think are relevant, from more traditional top-down approaches that rely on formal vocabularies and specialists in information taxonomy.

Getting users in the habit of tagging content and tagging it usefully can be a bit of a challenge, however. As Vander Wal pointed out in his presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, you can end up with problems like users not tagging content at all or using tags that are so general they prove useless in future searches. He gave the example of a company promising to reward workers who tagged documents, then discovering that workers were meeting this requirement by applying tags like "document." More tags are better than fewer, and overall, however they are applied, tags must serve the purpose of distinguishing one document for another.

The creators of software tools have a role to play here. They can create applications that prompt users to tag data. Some applications might even analyze data as it's being entered and propose tags for it.

Shortly after Vander Wal's talk, I found myself strolling through the demo area, wondering how the many social collaboration programs on display handled this important issue.

At the Microsoft booth, I heard from someone demoing SharePoint that customers simply don't use tagging all that much. The idea of tagging, in this person's opinion, was not turning out to be a success.

At the ThoughtFarmer booth, I met Darren Gibbons, the co-creator of the ThoughtFarmer intranet solution, and the president of OpenRoad Communications. I asked Darren what he thought about tagging. Should be automated? Left to individuals? How could it be made to work?

Here's a video with his answer, which is that tagging works best when it benefits both the tagger and the community overall.

On the next aisle, I got talking to Padmanabh Dabke, the founder and CTO of a company called SpigIt, about the challenge of creating meaningful tags on a large scale. SpigIt makes software that enables companies to collect from large communities of employees and customers, then rank the ideas to decide which ones should be pursued. In addition to offering guidance for investment, the software helps managers identify which employees and customers are consistently coming up with the best ideas.

Nabh pointed out that some older technology—namely, expert systems—could be applied to sort through the torrent of data in online communities and aid in speedy classification. (Pardon my shaky camera work in the first few moments of our conversation.)

Any conclusions? Yes. It's clear that companies are replacing or upgrading their old Web 1.0 intranets with these new, easier-to-use community platforms. Workers are getting used to blogging and using tools like Wikis and RSS feeds. Tagging will make all these tools more useful, and the best practices for tagging will probably combine user habits, helpful user interfaces, and powerful processing engines like that described by Nabh.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston

2008-06-11T02:22:00.000-07:00

I'm spending this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Monday started strong with an overview of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and tools by Dion Hinchcliffe. That evening, leading cloud vendors—Amazon, Google, and Salesforce—sat on a stage with potential customers in a lively, in-depth discussion arranged by TechWeb's David Berlind.

Tuesday's sessions were more uneven. One of the key topics of the day turned out to be tagging. Thomas Vander Wal, a social bookmarking consultant and the coiner of the term folksonomy, offered a look at the pros and cons of various approaches to managing tagging on a grand scale. Later in the afternoon, my discussions with software vendors in the demo area of the conference returned to the subject again.

More details—and a few video interviews—in upcoming posts.

Creativity in the Organization and How to Present Like Steve Jobs

2008-05-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

Two articles worth reading:

First, an article recommended by Dion Hinchcliffe on Getting Down to the Business of Creativity. After conducting a three-year study of the daily creative work of hundreds of people, Professor Teresa Amabile at HBS offers these suggestions for fostering creativity in the workplace:

"Support employees' progress in their work every day. Set clear and meaningful goals for them; provide direct help, versus hindrance; offer adequate resources and time; respond to successes and failures by drawing on the experience as a learning opportunity, not just a moment to praise or reprimand; and establish a culture where people are treated with respect."

This article also offers an apt definition of entrepreneurship: "The pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control."

Second, article over on Bnet.com about How to Present Like Steve Jobs. Lots of people, including me, consider Jobs the best presenter around, so it's worthwhile to consider his approach to planning and delivering a presentation.

Two Upcoming Events in Boston

2008-05-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

BarCampBoston 3, where coders and entrepreneurs will meet to share ideas and to hack code. The fun starts on Saturday, May 17 and continues through Sunday afternoon.

O'Reilly's Ignite Boston 3 on the evening of May 29 at Tommy Doyle's at Harvard Square.

Fast-paced and fun. Lots of ideas. Oh, and there's beer, too.

Learn more here.

The Numbers Racket

2008-05-15T05:55:00.001-07:00

As bad as many of the economic numbers are these days, is truth far worse? Are the numbers proffered by the government and batted around by financial analysts simply wrong?

In an article called "Numbers Racket" in the May 2008 issue of Harper's, Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money, presents a blow-by-blow account of how, beginning with the Kennedy administration in 1961, Democratic and Republican administrations have jiggered economic indicators and other numbers to minimize the bad news that would otherwise have to be reported. Rising housing costs are excluded from inflation. Rising fuel costs are excluded from inflation. People who would like a job but who have given up looking for one are excluded from unemployment numbers.

What would a more accurate assessment of our economy look like? Phillips writes:

The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession.

Certainly, at least to our household, inflation seems higher than the low numbers reported by the feds would suggest.

Bad data is deceptive, but it's pernicious in other ways, too. Artificially low numbers have led decision-makers to make bad decisions with far-reaching consequences. Phillips cites this example:

As Robert Hardaway, a professor at the University of Denver, pointed out last September, the subprime lending crises "can be directly traced back to the [1983] BLS decision to include the price of housing from the CPI. . . . With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates."

In economics, as in foreign policy, American are only too adept at spinning rose-colored fantasies, acting on them, and then blinking with the wonder of innocents at the mess that results.

You can find the article online here, but access is limited to subscribers. Of course, a subscription to Harper's has always been pretty affordable, inflation notwithstanding.

Organizing without Organizations (or Hush! Caution! Echoland! Here Comes Everybody)

2008-04-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

Consider the following:

In 1992, the Boston Globe runs news stories about a Catholic priest who abused children for decades before being pulled from rotation among parishes. Boston parishioners are upset, but their anger lacks any organizational punch. The most they can do is mutter into their missals and write a letter or two. The Church leaders treat the scandal as an internal affair, and the incident dies down. In 2002, the Globe runs similar news stories about yet another priest, John Geoghan, who abused children for several decades. This time the parishioners create an organization, Voice of the Faithful, whose ranks swell to 25,000 people within a few months. Voice of the Faithful's clout is such that after decades of successfully squelching criticism and revolt, the local Catholic bishop is forced to resign.
In the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s supporters organize online, produce surprisingly large crowds of supporters at events, and raise more funds than the rival campaigns. Despite this show of strength, Dean does poorly in the primaries and the nomination goes to John Kerry.
In 1992, a young Finnish programmer posts a message on a message board, announcing that he’s going to free operating system as a hobby. Fifteen years later, the free operating system, Linux, is running on nearly 40% of the world’s servers.
One morning in Cairo, an Egyptian blogger is arrested for libel. Using Twitter, a micro-blogging service (micro-blogging is blogging with very short blog posts), he informs his friends, who rally lawyers, and by 11 pm that night he is free.

What all these stories have in common is that social tools such as email enabled people to communicate and collaborate in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade or two ago. Email, wikis, blogs, and social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace make it easy for people to connect to one another and share information. The cost of communicating is negligible. The speed of communication is almost instant. The ramifications are many.

As Clay Shirky, an IT consultant and teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, writes in his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, social tools like email have changed social behavior forever. Not all online social endeavors will succeed—the Dean campaign failed because it had a committed core but lacked a broad, committed base—but many will succeed, a few wildly so. As the Boston diocese discovered, when large numbers of people suddenly have the ability to organize easily, they become a powerful, just about unstoppable force for change. New broad-based movements can start at any time. And no traditional organization or government can contain them.

We're all aware of at least some of the impact of these tools: all the teenagers on Facebook, solicitations from PACs for emailing Congress, and so on. But few of us have surveyed the broad effects of these tools in a systematic way to gain an understanding of how people, social contracts, and software are all interacting. Shirky gives us this survey, and it's lucid and thought-provoking.

He points out:

"We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. . . . These tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort."

Email, blogs, and wikis dramatically lower the cost of coordinating group efforts. They enable groups to organize quickly and easily and to take on daunting projects that traditional organizations, with their hierarchical structures and cost-consciousness, would never consider. When organization becomes easy, more people will organize. When more people can organize, new forces for change will sweep society, affecting government, business, culture, and personal lives.

In just under 300 pages, Shirky explores the characteristics, implications, and results of the new types of social interactions and organizations that have emerged in the past decade. Here’s a quick survey of some of his insights:

The power law distribution (think of the curve you’ve seen in discussion of the long tail phenomenon) describes all sorts of social behavior, from contributors to Wikipedia to the popularity of blogs to programming work done on open source software projects.
Participation in most social systems follows a power law distribution. A few contributors do most of the work. Most contributors do almost nothing. The work of the industrious few provides so much value to the less industrious majority, though, that they feel motivated to contribute, improving the breadth and quality of the entire project.
If the majority of blog entries, MySpace pages, and other online content strikes you as trivial and inane; don’t worry. It doesn’t really matter, because you’re not the intended audience. These communications are public, but their intended for a select audience of friends and family. Shirk likens blog posts such as “What’s happening, dude?” to a conversation overheard in a shopping mall. Comparing the artistic quality of a blog post or MySpace page to a story in the New Yorker misses the point. And you will be overlooking the manifest transformative power of these new tools, were you simply to dismiss them because of their low editorial standards.
As communication moves online, it becomes permanent through digital archives. Until now, most of what was preserved was official. Now everyday remarks are by default permanently "on the record."
Social tools like the Web site Meetup.com enable small, splintered groups to meet and form. People who have explicitly left organizations (such as churches) can now easily organize themselves.
Group projects follow this pattern: offer, tool, bargain. Someone initiates the group by making an offer, the group uses a tool to undertake group activity, and the behavior and expectations of the group are governed by an explicit bargain. Selecting the wrong offer, tool, or bargain can doom a project. That said, the particulars of group projects are so varied and complex, it would be folly to proscribe specific offers, tools, or bargains categorically.
The best ideas in an organization usually come from people who bridge social groups within the organization. They’re able to assess a situation with a fresh perspective, and they feel less compulsion for conforming with peers and for preserving the status quo of a department.
"No whining!" is a rule common to many social groups (and if that upsets you, please keep it to yourself).

Shirky does an excellent job analyzing the results—intended and otherwise—of new forms of social organization, such as meetups and groups like Voices of the Faithful. Whether you’re interested in applying some of these group dynamics to your business, or you simply want to read an engaging account of how these tools are changing the world you live in, you’ll find this book well worth your time.

POSTSCRIPT

As a Joycean, I feel compelled to mention that the phrase "Here Comes Everybody" is a kind of motif from Finnigans Wake, where the phrase serves as the basis for all sorts of other phrases with the initials HCE. For a list of HCE phrases, which you can imagine applying to social networks in all sorts of ways, click here. As you might guess, the title of this blog post, "Hush! Caution! Echoland!" is an HCE phrase from FW.

The Importance of Benevolence for Business

2008-04-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

Paul Graham of Y Combinator has a thoughtful essay on how wildly successful start-ups (e.g., Google) often behave like non-profits. He discusses how being good can help a company become more focused, resilient, and successful.

You'll find a print version here and a video version here.

Keeping a Small Business Focused and on Track

2008-04-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

In the CrowdVine discussion thread for the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, Tony Stubblebine of Crowdvine asked people what tricks they use to keep their business on track.

Here's my answer, drawing on my experience with a number of organizations:

To keep a business on track, I use:

1) A strategic plan that lays out major goals (e.g., win at least 3 reference customers in key market X), each of which can be tracked by objectively measured milestones or supporting goals. Almost everyone thinks of a revenue target as an obvious strategic goal—and it can be—but it's just as important to think about other goals that address the company's position in the market and the company's various capacities (engineering capacity, sales capacity, etc.). In some cases, it might be better to settle for a lower revenue target while managing the company in such a way to address a latent deficiency. For example, it might be better for a cash-strapped company to manage its activities and sales expenses to end the year with more cash (but lower top-line revenue), instead of blowing out a revenue number with expensive sales campaigns and ending up with nothing in bank (again) and no ability to, say, hire critical engineers for the product overhaul planned for next year.

The main thing is to ask: Where do you want to be by the end of the year? What do you want to have in motion? Capture those ideas in specific goals and objectives.

All the company's major activities should be subsumed in the strategic plan. If you're working on something, you should be able to identify which one of the 5-10 major goals for the company it relates to. (And if you find that you've identified more than 10 goals, pare them down, especially if this is your first time trying to manage operations for an entire fiscal year according to a strategic plan.) Every organization, even small consultancies and non-profits, should develop and manage to such a plan. At the end of the year, you should be able to look back and judge how well you've done. If you've developed a good plan, you're going to find that you've not only hit your revenue goals, but that you've built a stronger organization that's better positioned for success.

2) A company mission statement or a summary of core values (see Collins and Porras' "Built to Last"). For example, I consider being responsive to customers to be one of the highest values for my work. One of the ways I keep my business on track is by asking myself several times each day, "Am I being responsive to my customers? Is there someone I should be calling?" If there's a value or behavior that's key to your company, note it. Write it down. Live by it.

I also:

3) Align technology to support #1 and #2. Take advantage of what's new (e.g., some of the great stuff that's going to be shown off at the Web 2.0 show), but don't get distracted. Use everything you can find—from software to devices to the right office chairs—that eliminates distractions, promotes productivity, and helps your employees meet your organization's goals while working in accordance with core values.

4) Hire people who are genuinely interested in growing a great business. (Suggestion for hiring managers: mention that you have a strategic plan, and see how the candidate reacts. Does he or she ask to see it, or does he or she simply nod and move on?)

Fire and Motion

2008-04-10T02:36:00.001-07:00

If you had to reduce your business strategy to three words, what would they be?

For Joel Spolsky, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software and author of blog Joel on Software, the three words would be "Fire and Motion."

"Fire and Motion" is a military phrase that refers to firing your weapon (and causing your enemy to cower), while running forward (thereby gaining territory and through your promixity to your enemy, improving your aim).

Spolsky explains how everyone from small businesses to large companies like Starbucks can use "fire and motion" to drive their businesses forward.

Spolsky's article appears in the April edition of Inc. Magazine. You can find an online copy here.

As a metaphor, "fire and motion" does a good job of conveying the relentless activity that successful businesses engage in. But I find the idea of "firing" a little vague.

Spolsky cites the example of Starbucks throwing McDonalds off their game. Starbucks educated a lot of America about what coffee could be (at least compared to the watery stuff served in most restaurants) and offered customers a superior sipping and dining experience—purple armchairs and wood paneling beat hard plastic chairs every time.

But it's hard to derive this strategic approach simply from the idea of "firing." Firing is attacking the enemy. Undoubtedly Starbucks is attacking McDonalds by marketing good coffee and giving their customers a more comfortable environment for consuming fast food. But Starbucks could have interpreted "firing" with some other strategy for attacking McDonalds: cheaper burgers, more burgers, aggressive advertising, etc. And these other approaches would not necessarily work as well as the strategy Starbucks has chosen.

To fire with maximum effect, it's important to pay attention to Spolsky's comment about successful companies setting the agenda for their markets.

If you look at a competitive market, the successful company is always the one setting the agenda and forcing competitors to match it. For example, JetBlue's version of fire and motion came in the form of a superior customer experience.

This is the key: To fire effectively, you've got to be more than busy. You've got to set the agenda.

That's where a blue ocean strategy comes in. A blue ocean strategy creates new products and services that redefine the costs and benefits of a solution, enabling a company to move from an intensively competitive "red ocean" market to a new "blue ocean" market, free from competitors.

A blue ocean strategy sets the agenda for a market:

JetBlue redefined the US airline market
Starbucks redefined the fast food market
Yellow Tail redefined the US wine market (it's now the top selling wine in the US)
Salesforce.com redefined the sales force automation market

To gain sufficient fire-power, you've got act on a blue ocean strategy. Simply keeping busy with traditional tactics (promotions, store openings, etc.) doesn't cut it.

This is why I recommend that management teams develop value curves for their products and markets, then use those curves to develop a blue ocean strategy designed to deliver dramatic growth. (Value curves are described by Kim and Mauborgne in their book Blue Ocean Strategy. I help start-ups with this type of planning.)

By comparing value curves, I can understand how Starbucks is firing at McDonalds. I can see what Starbucks is adding and subtracting from the traditional fast food experience. I can get a sense of how Starbuck's choices relate to its costs and prices. And I can better understand how Starbuck's new fast-food agenda creates trouble for McDonalds, and why McDonalds is now responding the way it is (i.e., with better coffee and more stylish decors) to align itself with the market as Starbucks has redefined it.

So, be relentless. Use "fire and motion." But to figure out how you're going to fire and what ammo you're going to load, develop a blue ocean strategy.

Is Someone in Your Company Publishing All Your Confidential Files? How Do You Know?

2008-03-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

I've written about IT security, in one form or another, for almost a decade now, so I've seen more than my fair share of stories about virus and worm attacks, employees stealing confidential information, malware being used to extort money from large companies, and other nefarious acts of theft and sabotage. But I have to say that a pair of articles—one by John Foley and another by Avi Baumstein—in a recent issue of InformationWeek managed to rattle even me.

The topic is data leakage caused by peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications. P2P applications enable users to share and transmit files over a vast network of computers all running the same P2P software. In some P2P networks, a node simply makes files available for other nodes to discover and download. For example, I might put a bunch of documents in a sharing folder. You might use the P2P application to search for these documents, discover them, and copy them from my system to yours.

Another model of P2P network is specially designed for handling large media files, such as software distribution packages and movies. These networks use a "swarming" protocol such as BitTorrent to disassemble very large files, transmit them as hordes of little files, and then reassemble them into a copy of the original on the other end. Because there are hundreds, thousands, or even millions of computers functioning as nodes in the network, this type of P2P network offers a convenient solution for efficiently distributing large files, such as 150 MB software packages, without putting excessive load on any one CPU or segment in the network.

Sounds clever and convenient, right? But P2P file-sharing applications can also be dangerous, because many of them allow anonymous remote users to browse and transfer a lot more content that the computer owner may realize. Here's a typical example: Joe comes home from a long day's work at a large accounting firm. He wants to download a song he heard on the radio. He uses a P2P network to find a bootleg copy of the song. He downloads the song. What he doesn't realize is that when he's installing the P2P application and clicking Next, Next, Next, to get through the installation, he's making the entire contents of his laptop accessible to the P2P network. Other users of the network can now browse his laptop and download whatever they find.

His company's firewall? Bypassed. His company's security policies? Moot. Joe is not intending to do harm (well, other than perhaps grabbing a pirated version of a song), but by using P2P software, he's effectively negating the millions of dollars of security controls his IT has developed and implemented to keep their business data confidential and in compliance with regulations such as SOX and Gramm-Leach-Bliley. He's publishing all the confidential materials he has on his laptop. Chances are, he's got quite a few.

When InformationWeek reporters investigated P2P networks to find out just how much confidential data was being accidentally leaked by P2P networks, they were shocked at what they found. Users were inadvertently publishing "spreadsheets, billing data, health records, RFPs, internal audits, product specs, and meeting notes . . . files with the home and cell phone numbers of senators, confidential meeting notes, and fund-raising plans [for a state political party] . . . spreadsheets listing patients' names along with their HIV and hepatitis status . . . [and] a slew of court documents regarding a sticky divorce."

Limewire, the most popular client of a P2P solution called Gnutella, is supposedly installed on over 18% of all computers.

Three suggestions, then:

Read the full InformationWeek articles (here
and here) and encourage your managers and employees to do the same.
Forbid or tightly control the use of P2P programs such Limewire on your business computers.
Have an IT engineer use one of these programs immediately to discover if your business is already exposed.

Tracking the Recession

2008-03-18T05:27:00.000-07:00

The economy is all over the headlines, but if you'd like to see a lot of telltale graphs collected in one place, check out the DismalScientist's Recession Watch.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

2008-03-17T04:16:00.000-07:00

Skip the bad jokes about beer and leprechauns today. Here's a better taste of things Irish: two and a half minutes of sheer magic as Tommy Peoples plays a strathspey called the Laird of Drumblair.

Enjoy.

Time for a Check-up

2008-03-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

We're just about halfway through March, which means that Q1 is just about over. If you spent Fall 2007 or the first weeks of January putting together a strategic plan or business plan for 2008, it's time for a check-up.

A well-designed strategic plan includes measurable milestones supporting each objective. It's time to call a meeting with stake-holders and see how much progress you're making against your objectives and milestones.

Given the turmoil the financial markets are going through, it's probably also a good time to sanity-check your plans for the year. Adjustments to goals and changes of course may be in order.

And if you've made general plans that lack specific milestones and measurable objectives, it's time to sit down and define those specifics, too, so that you're able to gauge the progress you're making in each area. Judging activity against measurable outcomes is the best way to distinguish work that's truly productive from work that merely keeps everyone busy.

Casting a Critical Eye on Expenses of All Kinds

2008-03-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

Jason Calacanis, the CEO of a Web search start-up called Mahalo, has posted a list of recommendations of saving money when running a start-up.

What I like about the list is its thoroughness: Calacanis has really thought about where to invest (comfortable chairs so his employees will be able to work long hours comfortably) and where not to (he buys cheap tables, because all a table needs to be able to do is hold stuff). His recommendation to eschew phone lines in favor of IM, Skype, and cell phones reflects a reality I see in other Silicon Valley start-ups. The company phone list and traditional phone lines an anachronism, once everyone's on Skype. I even know one CEO who never answers his direct dial number, because the only people who call him on that line are vendors pitching him services. (How long before tradeshow vendors, printers, and PR firms realize that trolling Skype is probably going to be more productive than looking up phone numbers on Web sites? How long, after that, before executives begin guarding their privacy more closely on Skype and Twitter?)

Calacanis's recommendation to buy employees a second monitor reminded me of some research conducted by Jacob Nielsen, Sun's Web usability expert. Nielsen found:

Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600x1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you'll recover the investment in less than a year.

The examples of cost savings that Calacanis cites probably resonate most strongly with those in software companies. But managers in other industries could do well to think as critically about what employees really need in order to be productive.

Longstanding industry habits and daily routines can lead us to take too much about our work environments for granted. As a result, we might overlook simple changes we can make to increase worker productivity, minimize distractions, and perhaps even increase employee morale. (I'll bet the folks at Mahalo appreciate those monitors and iPhones.) As Calacanis's list shows, it's useful to critique everything from furniture to communication infrastructure, and put as much thought into what you're leaving out as what you're keeping in.

Beware of Vista

2008-02-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

For the second time in about a month, my Vista machine has automatically downloaded upgrades from Microsoft that have broken Word.

I have to say, don't go near this operating system unless you really have to.

Update:

Here's a Network World Community blog posting, describing the same problem:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23685

And here's a link to a Microsoft Support page telling users how to edit the registry and delete a registry key to fix the problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;940791

Second Update:

More problems with Vista, discovered by Microsoft executives no less, are detailed in this New York Times story.

Disrupted by IT

2008-01-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

When I lived in the Bay Area and would mention at some dinner the latest turmoil in the IT industry, my friends in other lines of work (lawyers, for example) would shake their heads in wonder. To them, the hectic pace and chaos of the IT industry seemed unfathomable. Down in Silicon Valley, Fortune's Wheel seemed to be spinning at a giddy pace, hurtling hordes of twenty- and thirty-somethings through comically rapid cycles of failure and success. By comparison, my friends' own jobs outside of IT seemed rational, stable, and predictable.

For a lot of people in industries other than IT, that rationality, stability, and predictability are now at risk. These days, industries that use IT, are succumbing to the turmoil that has long characterized the IT industry itself.

Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard Business School. Erik Brynjolfsson is a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. McAfee and Byrnjolfsson have been studying the way that IT technology changes markets and competition outside the IT industry. What they've found is that industries that invest heavily in IT are beginning to behave like the IT industry itself. In other words, take a non-IT industry, add IT infrastructure and ability to automate business processes, bridge operations, increase efficiencies, and so on—and you get the market turmoil and "creative destruction" for which the IT industry itself is famous.

McAfee and Brynjolfsson have published their findings in a Wall Street Journal article that you can find here.

In a nutshell, here's what they found:

"Over the past dozen years . . . information-technology consumption is associated the kinds of competitive dynamics we're accustomed to seeing the IT-producing industries. And because every industry will become even more IT-intensive over the next decade, we expect competition to become even more Schumpeterian."

Joseph Schumpeter was a leading 20th century economist who described the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalist economies. It's the process of incessant revolution in which an existing economic structure is destroyed by a new one that arises within it. Think of QuickBooks' effect on manual ledgers and hiring scores of accountants: creative destruction. Think of mainframe computing giving way to client-server computing giving way to World Wide Web. Incessant revolution.

What McAfee and Brynjolfsson are saying, then, is that technology is becoming a disruptive force in a growing number of markets. The greater an industry's investment in IT, the greater that market's instability. They cite examples of how CVS and Harrah's Entertainment were able to increase profits through the strategic use of technology.

In addition to McAfee and Brynjolfsson's advice, which I encourage you to read in their article, I would add these thoughts:

First, if you're in an industry where businesses are increasing their investment in IT, change your thinking. Don't begin this year with last year's assumptions about the pace of change in your industry and the opportunities available to you. Consider the application of IT—everything from Web portals to mobile computing—in whatever SWOT analysis or other analysis you're performing. How might competitors use technology to improve their offering? How might you use technology to beat them to the punch?

Second, learn from IT thought leaders. IT leaders and strategists have been living with creative destruction and incessant revolution for years. It can't hurt for you to learn from their ideas, their successes, and their failures. Pay attention to how businesses, even businesses outside your industry, are gaining advantage in the marketplace by applying technology in creative ways. How can you change processes and innovate in the area of products and services? Get inspiration from the people who ask these questions every day.

Third, consider bringing strategic IT expertise into your company. Learning to live with incessant revolution is probably a cultural change for you and your company. You'll need some people living and breathing incessant revolution for your own changes and strategies to take effect.

Goldman Sachs: U.S. economy will slip to #3 by 2050

2008-01-08T05:36:00.001-08:00

Just about a year ago, The Times of India reported that Goldman Sachs has revised its 2003 analysis of the BRICs nations.

"Productivity growth will help India sustain over 8% growth until 2020 and become the second largest economy in the world, ahead of the US, by 2050, Goldman Sachs has said, scaling up estimates of the country's prospects in its October 2003 research paper widely known as the BRICs report."

The nations with the largest economies would then be China, India, and the U.S. in that order.

I'll have more to say about this in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, the blog A Wide Angle View of India offers a summary of the updated Goldman Sachs report.

Getting the culture right

2008-01-04T07:06:00.001-08:00

I've been corresponding with a friend of mine who works at a software company that's struggling to roll out new products. My friend used to work at a major customer in the company's marketplace, so he has lots of industry knowledge and insights. Having been a customer, he understands the customer's point of view. He's frustrated, though, because within the four walls where he works, it's the developer's mindset, rather than the customer's, that prevails. The company was founded by developers and is run by developers. Their strategic point-of-view tends to center on what they've built and why it's better than everything else, rather than what's happening in the marketplace, what customers need, and what business opportunities can be seized.

Which reminds me of this dismal truth: the wrong company culture can thwart just about any strategy or plan.

So now, at the beginning of the year, as you're making your resolutions, cleaning out last year's clutter, and preparing to move resolutely forward, add this to your list of new year's resolutions:

Examine your organization's culture and the ways its mind hinder or support your plans and pursuits. If you're a manager of any kind, examine your own habits and behaviors—your own culture, as it were—and ask how you could change what you do to facilitate the changes and activities you'd like to undertake.

If you're a manager, your walk matters as much or more than your talk. In addition to planning change, make sure you're behavior supports it.

About this blog

2008-01-04T03:57:00.000-08:00

It's a new year, and it's time to kick off this blog.

I'd like this blog to evolve into a forum about strategy--developing it, implementing it, and benefiting from it. I have nearly two and a half decades of experience in the business world, working with large and small organizations, profits and non-profits. I'll present what I've learned about strategic planning and execution along the way, along with interviews and insights from colleagues and thought leaders.

I welcome your comments and suggestions. To minimize spam in the comment fields, I'm going to use Blogger's feature for moderating comments. But please chime in with your own insights and opinions.

Cheers,

John