Workday, SaaS, and Failure: ‘A matter of trust’
Software as a service (SaaS) vendor, Workday, which sells human resources applications, recently had a 15-hour outage, during which time its system was unavailable to customers. In an unusual twist, this post is about success and not failure. Background. The story begins when I heard about the outage through an anonymous source. To learn more, [...]
End of the day, on to the evening #BTF09
Jim Haney, CIO of Harley-Davidson, presented on how they’re taking the Lean principles that they already use in manufacturing, and applying to their IT operations. They’re obviously focused on their customers: he started with a picture of a grey-bearded biker in bandana and shades, and pointed out that they do everything for him. [...]
Designing compelling customer-facing user experiences #BTF09
For the last breakout of the day before the final keynote, I attended Mike Gualtieri’s session on designing customer-facing user interfaces. He started with the idea that application developers have to be involved in user experience design, and not just leave it to the designers (which is, of course, exactly what we did in the [...]
Can packaged applications ever be Lean? #BTF09
Chip Gliedman, George Lawrie and John Rymer participated in a panel on packaged application and Lean.
Rymer argued that packaged apps can never be Lean, since most are locked down, closed engines where the vendor controls the architecture, they’re expensive and difficult to upgrade, they use more functions than customers use, they provide a single general [...]
How Can Lean Software Enable You To Better Serve The Business? #BTF09
John Rymer and Dave West presented a breakout session in the application development track on how Lean software development practices can be applied in your business. This obviously had a big focus on Agile, and how it can be used within large organizations. Unlike what some people think, Agile isn’t cowboy coding: it is quite [...]
Adobe MAX 2009 Highlights – RIA Weekly #63
Ryan Stewart and Coté go over their favorite news from Adobe MAX 2009.
Waterfall contracts and iterative development don’t mix #BTF09
The post title is the best quote from Tom Higgins, CIO of the Territory Insurance Office in Australia, who came all the way from Darwin to speak at both the Gartner and Forrester conferences this week. I had a chance for a chat at the airport with him while waiting for our flight from Orlando [...]
Embrace Lean thinking to enable innovation #BTF09
The morning finished with a panel moderated by Dave West of Forrester, and including Kevin Haynes of Dell and Dave Smoley of Flextronics. West started out talking about the inertia within IT: more than 60% of IT is spent just keeping the lights on, legacy systems inhibit change and vendors are slow to change. There [...]
Why Windows 7 Will Be a Success, Whether Good or Not
Windows 7 hasn’t even arrived yet but the speculation started: What’s wrong with Windows 7. To be fair, the speculation is fueled by an unlikely source: Steve Ballmer himself. He is trying to manage a potential fallout by warning us: “’The test feedback (on Windows 7) has been good, but the test feedback on Vista [...]
Selling that Technology: Functions, Features & Fools
We got a lot of pitches from technology companies at the recent HR Technology show in Chicago. Each of us asked vendors “What are the top 3 things we should remember about your firm?” and often we were met with blank stares; a litany of functions and features; or, that rarest of all, a polished set of messages any analyst or prospect would love.
