deal architect

Find this in a resume!

Scoble created a bit of a firestorm with his post last week about not applying for jobs which required old fashioned resumes. His blog is his resume.

So many of today's recruiting tools are tired. People have learned to "game" resumes - inflate their capabilities and use key words to get through resume scanning software.  Reference calls have been castrated by attorneys to mostly yes/no answers. Interviews are often better indicators of a person's confidence and social skills, more than their competence. If blogs can provide more insight into a person, why not? With the cost of a web presence down to a few dollars a year, and far flung ability to create digital content and other IP, soon we will be wondering about recruits who cannot showcase either.

Naysayers point to the juvenile stuff kids post on MySpace.com as indicator that blogs will only show negative aspects of a recruit. I like to think more recruits, would like Roman, draw up a strength/weakness matrix as he suggests and their blogs show more of their passion, positions and competence. Not too many resumes today which show this level of self-analysis....

"Crowdsourcing"

Wired magazine on using communities of labor pools - see also my previous post Amazon, Accenture and Anthropology

Oracle's Party

First of all, kudos to Oracle for a great quarter and overall, the year. When application revenues jump 83% year over year, you have to say "Wow!".

But the NY Times extrapolates that to say "Oracle's shopping spree finally pays off". Shades of BusinessWeek saying 12 months ago ""That means Oracle pulled off quite a smooth merger (PeopleSoft/JDE) in short order."  I called it a premature celebration then. I think it still it premature to celebrate too much - may be a glass of cheap champagne.

Viewed against the lens of the fact that Oracle has invested $20 billion in acquisitions like PeopleSoft, Siebel and Retek in the last couple of years, the $ 500 million increase in application revenues is not that overwhelming (especially since it had a substantial application business to begin with). Which means Oracle is still very dependent on retaining the maintenance revenues of its acquisitions over the next decade to make the investment pay off. Far more complex than Oracle would have you believe.

Fusion is an ambitious project and an even more ambitious  migration for its customers.  For many going off maintenance is an attractive near term option even if they have to re-license when Fusion is stable. SAP continues to chip away at Oracle customer base. (At Sapphire last month, Oracle customers representing sales in excess of $ 100 billion were being wined and dined). Third party maintenance options continue to proliferate.

Oracle disclosed during its earnings call that it has 8,600 employees in India and the number keeps growing. That is already almost 20% of its employee base. It is naive to think it will be able to keep those shrinking costs to itself. As I have written before, customers are not chumps about global sourcing efficiencies.

So Oracle should celebrate its strong year - but as I said before with cheap champagne.

The Real Deal: S. Sadagopan on Offshoring and IP protection

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well.

A couple of weeks ago, a Chess Dad who is also a tech investor walked up to me and asked "How's your friend in Singapore?". He couldn't remember the name and I thought he was talking about a family friend who recently moved back to the US. Finally, he said "your friend who blogs about technology".

I have only met Sadagopan once but we talk and email and read each others blogs often (he sets  a very high standard for prolific blogging), so I am proud to call him a friend. He heads consulting for Satyam - one of India's largest service firms - in the Asia Pacific, Middle Eastern and African markets and is based in Singapore. I invited him to write about the thorny issues  around  IP particularly in an offshore setting. Here's his take:

"Generally speaking, around the world, Intellectual Property (IP) is not clearly defined and leaves room for varied interpretation. The US & Europe have differing standards for granting patents – so European competitors are sometimes seen to have registered patents for technology essentially invented and patented in the US.  Many developing countries are effective in enforcing globally defined copyright laws but their treatment of patent laws is substantially different. Consequently, it is seen that there are rising concerns of patent abuse and at the other end of spectrum , it is seen that in some cases in the US context, the frenzy to patent is actually undermining real innovation – the one-click patent that Amazon.com held is an example.

Seen from the perspective of organizations planning to leverage offshore delivery models, IP protection is a major issue.  Some independent research suggests that ten percent of firms may experience some form of IP theft during their engagement. But guess what – onshore employees are twice as likely to steal confidential materials as your offshore team. The research indicates this problem is most commonly caused by the disassociation the onshore team will feel due to the implementation of the offshore strategy. Nonetheless, offshore IP protection is also essential.

In general, offshore locations in developing nations may not have well defined civil court mechanisms for speedy dispute resolutions and the damage claims and recovery may not provide adequate cover.  Here are some practices to insulate yourself:

A.        Work on a rigorous due diligence exercise about the vendor history and its track record in terms of IP enforcements/violations
B.    Explore opportunities to sign the contract with European or American entities of offshoring firms, should such an option exist.
C.    Begin with pilots – spend adequate time to institutionalize streamlined processes between locations and build mutual trust with the partners.
D.    Consider employee screening with comprehensive background checks (Possible in  well developed offshore markets like India)
E.    Continually broadcast about the sanctity of IP protection to offshore teams as much as the principal would at onsite premises.  Have  independent top security/IP experts beam messages to the offshore team regularly on this topic.
F.    Define rigorous offshore security mechanisms to include separated rooms, well isolated networks and copy free environment.
G.    Keep a tight control on integration of modules (say at onsite location) or by keeping the timing a closely guarded secret.  A network of trusted partners in various locations working together in a centrally coordinated manner may also help. 
H.    Maintain a central repository for all documentations, technical builds, with well defined versioning frameworks. Conduct rigorous quarterly audits on its structure and usage.
I.    Conduct IP audits to look for copyrightable resources, purging unauthorized software, ensure ownership relationships are well defined and kept up to date.
J.    Make sure that in all meetings, appropriate credits/references are attributed to the creator/owner of the work and make this a movement within in all occasions."

Read his prolific blog at http://123suds.blogspot.com/

The Attack of the Wiki Clones

In a galaxy far, far away when I was at PwC we caught Lotus Notes religion and we created databases for every thing - sales, recruiting, favorite restaurants. I think the IT group was shocked at how virally that technology was adopted in a conservative firm (and more scaringly, the duplication and storage cost to the firm).

Courtesy of Jeff Nolan, I saw this post by Brian Keairns's post on top 10 applications for an enterprise wiki...Brian, I could dig up a list of 1,000 I think I still have from my PwC days...but then again, may be that genie should stay bottled up.

The Painful Annual Ritual

At Gartner in 1996 I described the budgeting cycle as the painful, annual ritual.  10 years later does not appear to have changed much even though analytical and forecasting technology has improved.

Jack and Suzy Welch write in BusinessWeek  - Stop the B.S. Budgets.

"It begins in the early fall when people in the field start the long slog of constructing the next year's highly detailed financial plans to make their case to the company brass...they construct plans with layer upon layer of conservative thinking.

Meanwhile, back at headquarters, executives are also preparing for the budget review, but with exactly the opposite agenda....

You know what happens next. The two sides meet in a windowless room for a daylong wrestling match..."

Also, courtesy of Paul Kedrosky I saw this quote from Bloomberg's new book

"It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan -- for months."

Sportsmanship

An enduring image at the end of the NBA game this evening was Mark Cuban, tech billionaire and owner of the losing Mavericks standing on the court applauding the winning Heat (and his own players).  It was a hugely disappointing loss for them after being up 2 and a half games, so it was good to see that gesture, especially after his rant after game 5.

Oh, I am sure his blog will continue to be colorful, but good to see Mark recognize the Heat came from way back to win...

The Mashup "Sheepskin"

In this post, I mentioned the SOA wolf is trying to disguise itself as the Web 2.0 sheep.

Ross Mayfield reports from a conference "IBM GM of Lotus, gave a talk on mashups (largely as a rebranding of SoA)"
James Governor comments on IBM plans for what he calls a "mashup server".
Jeff Nolan tells about reaction to Oracle's plans to coin the term SOA 2.0

Do I sound like the boy who cried wolf too many times?

Social Network at 35,000 feet

Ross Mayfield on a Lufthansa flight and Jeff Nolan on the ground share their banter. Thomas Otter adds in the comments that once he got on the WI-FI network on the plane he used Sykpe to call someone. We may soon be able to use our cell phones - though many are ambivalent about that.

I have an idea for Bose - develop a mouthpiece that routes voice to a USB port on a  laptop or to a cell phone, but cancels out the voice to rest of world...or plane in this case.

Then if we could also put on white paint, like Marcel Marceau we could also provide the flight entertainment....

The Other Net Debate

Jason Busch and Tim Minahan square off on supplier payment terms - Net 30 etc.

I agree with Jason's sentiment - I think it pointless for a supplier (or a group of suppliers) to bad mouth a customer in public about anything - not even payment terms. Build it in to the price. Complain in private.

Now to Tim's point. There are bureaucrats in a number of companies who enjoy playing the float game. They want umpteen pieces of documentation. They want more concessions while they hold up payment. It's just bad business.

Now my thoughts. Smart, progressive companies think like Boeing when it buys titanium for its entire supply chain. Other companies are leveraging shared service economies for their network of dealers and suppliers. Big companies can get better financing than their smaller suppliers.  Why not leverage that to the advantage of your whole supply chain, rather than play games and lose supplier invoices in file cabinets?