Dilbert has a harsh view of the world that also contains some truth. I almost laugh when people tell me that human or cultural factors play no role in IT failures.
Well, maybe I want to laugh, but actually, those views make cry.
In general, technology from reputable vendors does work as advertised. Yes, the software may contain complexity, but enterprise software reflects real world business processes that are… well, you know, complicated.
Enterprise software success, in both the SaaS and on-premise worlds, requires healthy collaboration among business owners, vendors, IT, executives, and so on. Deal positively with the people side of the equation and technology happiness will follow closely behind.
If you think this is Kumbaya wishful thinking, then propose a better solution. I’m listening now for the deafening silence.
What do you think about this cartoon and its meaning?
There’s been a lot of chatter in the market these past few weeks about acquisitions. Some larger players are clearly headed to Costco to look for warehouse bargains (smaller formats and Ma and Pop shops aren’t worth the time for these larger players, it seems). As someone pointed out to me the other day, Ariba has clearly spent quite some time attempting to clean up its top line to show higher-quality SaaS revenues–perhaps to argue for a higher valuation in the SaaS multiple range–while quietly pushing increased CD upgrades in Q1 to show the installed base is still alive. Might Ariba be on the shopping list for these larger players? I’d be surprised if wasn’t, but then again, it has been for some time. It’s just a question of valuation.
More important than who will be at the dinner table–and who will get served –is the question of what consolidation in the sector will mean for customers. Personally, I think we need to break this question down into multiple areas. From a BPO and consulting perspective, customers shouldn’t get too worked up over acquisitions if they’re buying services or outsourcing today. But they should scrutinize their contracts to see what flexibility they may have under change of control to, at the very least, help with their negotiating options.
In the case of enterprise software (i.e., installed or hosted in a non-SaaS environment), customers should look at acquisitions in a similar manner, although they should be wary about acquirers phasing out support for older versions of applications to force upgrades and/or increasing maintenance costs…
One of the great unsolved Java problems is a lack of modularity. OSGi is a technology designed to solve the problem. Wikipedia says:
The OSGi framework is a module system and service platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and dynamic component model, something that does not exist in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot; management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail. Life cycle management is done via APIs which allow for remote downloading of management policies. The service registry allows bundles to detect the addition of new services, or the removal of services, and adapt accordingly.
Cote said OSGi could underpin a Stackless Stack, but I wonder whether we should have called it a VMless VM. OSGi allows for component-based development and production in Javaland. It has been enthusiastically adopted by Java application server and ESB vendors.
But while OSGi solves one problem – a lack of modularity – it creates another – the need to manage dependencies. In order to see OSGi widely adopted by developers and IT organisations the industry needs to solve the dependency management problem. If everything is componentised, runtime management becomes exponentially more complicated.
Dependency management, or lack of it, is a barrier to adoption for OSGi.
My client Paremus has an elegant solution to the problem called Nimble, and I recently shot some video on the subject – talking to Paremus founder and CEO Richard Nicholson and the developer of the tool Robert Dunne.
Lets kick off with a high level overview of Paremus, OSGi and what Nicholson calls The Service Fabric
OK that’s the CEO stuff out of the way. What about the developer’s view, and a demo? Tomcat? Jetty? That’s just configuration decision…
Very cool… As Dunne says “the dependency stuff becomes an advantage”.
Nimble isn’t the only game in town – its worth looking at the Apache Felix Bundle Plugin for Maven. For disclosure sake I should say the Apache Software Foundation is also a client. Another fix, another client – SpringSource implements its own Spring Dynamic Modules Framework. SpringSource Tool Suite version 2.0 packages some tooling for building modules and managing dependencies graphically.
For further context its been a big news week for OSGi – IBM’s WebSphere Application Server v7 is designed to make it easier to use OSGi, in the shape of the snappily named Feature Pack for OSGi Applications and Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0 Open Beta. Arguably though Lotus has been a more enthusiastic adopter of OSGi.
Paremus Nimble is elegant, and although its free (with the caveat that people that don’t want to pay a nominal fee to use the software will need to regularly re-register to use it), its not open source.
disclosure: seems like everyone is a RedMonk client.
If someone pinned me down and asked my opinion about the broadest and most universal trends in procurement in recent years, I’d have to say that organizations of all sizes and sophistication are gaining access to an ever-increasing amount of information to make decisions. That being said, this information may be leading them to make the wrong decisions rather than the right ones. That’s because more information in and of itself isn’t necessarily a positive thing. I’ve seen firsthand numerous examples of data that misleads companies and becomes a negative, disruptive force rather than a positive one. Does this mean that we should all go back to the stone Spend Management ages and continue to make decisions in a vacuum? Absolutely not. We owe it to ourselves, the business, our suppliers, and our shareholders to not only focus on gathering more information, but also to ask ourselves about its integrity, accuracy and how we can best act on it. Consider, for a minute, the following examples of how data can mislead an organization, potentially lending credence to the ignorance-is-bliss argument:
- A procurement organization, through the combination of ETL tools, a performance management dashboard, and related scorecards, begins to collect a range of quantitative pieces of information on its suppliers. Over a period of three months, the data shows that a supplier’s quality has suddenly deteriorated. The company mobilizes resources to investigate, only to realize that the problem lies with the fact the sample size of data for the most current period was based on a single truckload shipment (with a single defective part) versus ten defective parts the period before, due to volume declines, order timing, etc. But this information did not show up in the aggregate dashboard roll-up.
- Using a spend visibility toolset, a company analyzes spending data for a common item rolled-up on a category or aggregate level. It finds that the purchase price variance (PPV) for a given part or item shows moderate and rising volatility between periods. But what the system fails to show–and where the organization wastes time spinning its wheels–is that the PPV is nearly all attributed to a single facility supplied by a given supplier who is working with multiple plants, who have not realized the same behavior. What are the potential reasons? It could be that the plant manager has authorized expediting (and freight costs are bundled in) because of particular demand in his region. Or, perhaps volume spikes have outstripped the ability of the plant’s ability to source only from a single, preferred supplier. Regardless, from an aggregate perspective without this level of site detail, the procurement organization could find itself chasing a problem it believes is company-wide in scope but in fact is highly targeted…
Eleven Siberian tigers died of starvation in north-eastern China’s Liaoning province after a cash-strapped zoo fed them only chicken bones, state media said Friday. The 11 tigers died over the past three months at the privately run Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo, the China Daily newspaper quoted Liu Xiaoqiang, a local wildlife protection official, as saying.
The European Union is set to achieve its self-imposed target of deriving at least 20 per cent of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020, the bloc’s executive said on Thursday. The target is part of the EU’s so-called 20-20-20 strategy, which also foresees a 20 per cent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels and a 20 per cent increase in energy efficiency, all by 2020.
The water utility in Edmonton, EPCOR, published the most incredible graph of water consumption last week. By now you’ve probably heard that up to 80% of Canadians were watching last Sunday’s gold medal Olympic hockey game. So I guess it stands to reason that they’d all go pee between periods.
But still—the degree to which the water consumption matches with the key breaks in the hockey game is stunning.
Cisco has taken up a pilot program for a packaging diet, and will see a savings of about $24 million just by getting smart and rethinking the materials and size of packaging, and the transportation of products
I’m somewhat of a traditionalists. The 21st century corporation was an interesting experiment, but we have 100s of years of people-based businesses to drawn upon. The Hanseatic League was a tremendous ecosystem predicated upon a shared involvement, a value exchange mechanism, where people did right because they would meet again.
The corporation that emerged was taylorists and specialized. It brought us scale. Great, don’t want to downplay the benefits of it. But we can do things differently. Bureaucracy an business friction 1.0 is when structures that dampen network effects to get worse the more people use them.
But now we have network effects and collective intelligence. Structures that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. We can have intimacy at scale.
The old way to think about efficiency should be questioned. Anything value added more than a MacDonald’s job needs to be. What used to be “me” is now “we” said John Chambers. The meeting culture is broken and process-driven control is very expensive to police. Trust is cheaper than control.
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things” -Drucker
How can we design more effective organizations? There are some basic pointers:
Think about behavior, incentives and the way these play out in social networks. People are lazy, self centered and if they don’t get something back they wont play ball.
Are current organizational structures encourage or suppressing talents. We are starting to understand how people work collectively in networks. William Foote Whyte studied the social structures of an Italian slum, and found the bowling scores mapped to social hierarchy. If you happen to be smarter than the middle manager, that is not always a good thing, it could work against you.
In social networks, positive behaviors (and negative) can be highly contagious. Obesity is contagious. Happiness is too. Pay it forward works even in three degrees of separation. Make performance drive through structures.
Leadership as network influence; synthesizing, making links and making sense. Influence, passion and a good leader can subvert the structures under them.
Some basic enablers:
healthy internal and external social entworks
open data driving performance and feedback
a culture of getting things done together
sharing as a by-product of doing work (Lee gives a nod to Michael’s work)
Collaboration and collective action have never been easier or cheaper. This has profound implications for organizational design. Ridiculously easy group forming.
The curious case of corporate IT is that it codifies and gives longevity to bad structures.
Create an operational framework with foundation services plus specific vertical applications. Making these capabilities available will let users tell you how they should be used.
Build situated tools for specific needs and use cases. “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product” said Jeff Raskin.
Start by supporting existing behaviors with better, networked tools and features. Take advantage of Crackberry addiction.
Measure, monitor and use open data to create positive feedback loops.
Don’t fall into the ROI trap and measure the wrong things just to get the seal of approval. What’s the return on attention, not return on the cost of the system.
There’s been much buzz in the Apple community about whether Apple will be able to meet initial demand for its new iPad. Many Apple enthusiasts would agree with the statement that Apple’s new product supply chains usually take time to flex to keep up with order demand (not to mention early supply chain/supplier quality issues). When it comes to early defects, it feels like Apple sometimes sweeps issues under the screen, so to speak (when the 3G iPhone came out, someone close to my local Apple store told me to hold off on buying one until they worked out the supply chain kinks, because of overheating and battery issues). After reading stories like this, which suggest potential problems with iPad suppliers such as Foxconn (AKA: Hon Hai Precision), it would seem that the iPad may continue Apple’s tradition of disappointing hopeful customers who must get in the virtual (and even physical) queue for the product.
According to the above-linked story on Cnet, Peter Misek, an analyst with Canaccord Adams, suggested earlier in the month “the production issues could be bad enough to even delay the launch for a month.” Misek further notes in the article that “the upcoming iPad launch may be somewhat limited as a manufacturing bottleneck has impacted production of Apple’s newest device…an unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision, will likely limit the launch region to the U.S. and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March, far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K.”…
In this, the fifth of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to the CEO of Tropos Networks, Tom Ayers. Tropos develop wireless broadband networks for Smart Grid applications and offer complete network management, as well as enhanced security features. Tropos is the only wireless broadband network provider with FIPS 140-2 certification.
Tom and I had a great chat, we talked about:
Tom and Tropos’ definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
Why we need Smart Grids and the efficiency gains we will achieve from them
The security issues round wireless Smart Grids
Tropos IP, Smart Grid standards and open protocols
Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed. As I looked through the list of things that the various teams created, I got chills of excitement.
Most of the companies we invest in release software at least once a month. Some release weekly, or even daily. I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuous deployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries.
If you are releasing at least monthly, it’s easy to do a full day hackathon at least once a quarter. And, rather than have it be an “engineering thing”, you can (and should) make it a full company thing. Here’s how:
Pick a date during the quarter for the hackathon. Monday’s and Thursday’s are best.
Designate one person in charge of managing the hackathon. This person has a budget for food and prizes and is encouraged to do whatever they want to publicize it throughout the company (easy for 10 people, not so easy for 1000 people). The goal is to engage 100% of the company in the hackathon.
Form teams. The teams should be between two and five people. The teams should be self-selecting. The Hackathon manager should come up with an easy way to manage the team list (hint – wiki). Each team should have a name and, in advance of the hackathon, should spent at least one meal together talking about what they are going to work on. People should be encouraged to work with folks they’ve never done anything with before, although this shouldn’t be a requirement.
The hackathon starts at 12:01am and ends at 5pm. Whatever is done, is done. Demos and awards start at 5:30pm. Food is included. The hackathon manager is responsible for coordinating all of this, including the mechanism for judging.
In the best hackathons, there is a wiki that is very dynamic during the hackathon. This way all of the activity is captured and can be reviewed afterwards. The goal is not to include everything from the hackathon in future releases; rather it’s to stimulate a bunch of ideas, generate some prototypes, end up with some useful code, but get everyone in the company thinking about all the products.
Not all of the hackathon projects need to be about code. I’ve seen things like help systems, new web sites, better customer support processes, better management of social media activity, and lots of business process stuff created and implemented during hackathons.
After the hackathon is over, publicize what you’ve done to the world. FeedBurner used to do a great job of this with a simple blog post that highlighted every project and the teams that worked on them.
Oh – and don’t forget to invite your board members. If I can make it, I’ll always spend a day at a hackathon. It’s one of the best ways for me to really engage in and help out the companies I’m involved in. Plus it’s a blast.
Yesterday, we reported that First Index, a sourcing marketplace for industrial parts and former consulting firm, had closed its doors earlier this week. My tip on the situation came from AJ Sweatt, a colleague and friend who serves as community and blog master for MFG.com Mojo. AJ’s employer is a competitor to First Index so there was some obvious gloating in his tone, but I’m appreciative for the tip and also his connection to colleague David Landsman, another MFG.com employee, who had previously worked for First Index and shared a number of details and thoughts with me about their history.
According to David, First Index’s final decline was very sudden. What’s more interesting than how it ended is how it began–and what made First Index different. First Index hosted an online site where it facilitated the exchange of supplier information to buyers, but the primary core of the business remained offline, where groups of employees would cold call buying organizations to drum up RFQs which they could then provide to their active suppliers, in effect “making the market,” just as a trader does on the floor of an exchange. Using this model as a foundation, First Index’s core revenue generation came from selling subscription services to suppliers (for anywhere from $3,500 to over $10K per year), and in turn gave them access to buyer RFQs. The primary categories they focused on were a near carbon copy of the early target areas FreeMarkets (not Ariba) tackled from a strategic sourcing perspective as well: machinings, stamping, fabrications, electronics, plastic injection molded parts, etc.
Two of the early leaders of the business, including Russ White, came out of the publishing business. This makes sense, because in many ways, just as MFG.com is doing, marketplace business models take supplier advertising revenue away from media and directory sources and more closely tie it to leads generated. In essence, it is really just a new form of publishing, whether such a model was carried out manually, like First Index, or in an automated manner like MFG.com. Owing in part to the slow growth of this core publishing/marketplace business in the nineties, First Index later branched out into offering sourcing and direct material supply chain consulting services.
First Index’s growth in consulting was relatively rapid…
