deal architect

Forrester Strikes Back...

...at bloggers. Well, not quite - but it has released a paper (sub required) which analyzes design aspects of several well read blogs

"Forrester evaluated the customer experience of 16 blogs written by executives of large US companies, corporate product and branding teams, newspaper journalists, and today's most popular professional bloggers. While product/brand teams fared best, not one blog passed our usability tests, and even the best blogs we looked at had major flaws. To encourage new users to become regular readers, blog owners should leverage existing Web design best practices that make content and functionality easy to find and consume and follow emerging blog guidelines that help users feel more comfortable participating in online conversations."

Good read ...

I just have one question of the author, Megan Burns - when you are going to start blogging so we can start participating with YOU in on-line conversations?

I challenge Lou Dobbs...

...to mention this study, commissioned by the National Venture Capital Association, which shows the market cap of public companies founded by immigrant (to US) entrepreneurs exceeds $ 500 billion. It is chock full of other stats on immigrant entrepreneurs and professionals.

Fair is fair, Lou. You lead the negative talk around immigration. Share the positive news also.

Of course, some folks (including immigrants) will use this as justification to say only white collar, high value immigration should be allowed. May I remind folks that the dirt poor, mostly blue collar Irish, Italians, Jews who came in the last century made their own huge contributions.

As Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted - winner, Pulitzer Prize in history, 1952 wrote

"“Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history."

As I have said before Immigration is a US core competence. The Europeans, Asians have not learned how to leverage it. It will continue to be our competitive edge.

How often do 300+ sign up for a webinar?

All the time you say - especially when a new gadget is written about in TechCrunch. But qualify it further - 300+ companies looking at a just announced enterprise application?

That is what Workday told me they had signed up for a session just a week after they launched. 300 companies - each with several attendees! Of course, many of these will find they are not ready for a SaaS application. Still others will find the functionality in the current release basic - mostly HR administration and talent management. But most will admire the thought put in to the architecture which leverages SOA, globalization and organizational dynamism concepts, and the look and feel of an enterprise application which leverages several (but not all) web 2.0 concepts - an advantage of a product built over the last year versus the previous generation products.

It was good to spend a couple of hours with the management team - Dave Duffield, Aneel Bhusri, Ken Morris, Stan Swete and Mike Duffield. All had roles, big and small at PeopleSoft. It was surreal driving to Walnut Creek, 14 years after my first visit to PeopleSoft which was located a block away from the current Workday office.  I guess it  is fond memories of PeopleSoft many of the companies signing up for webinars have.   In the end, people do buy from people. And Dave Duffield is liked by many in the industry.

What to do with those pesky bloggers

I commented a couple of weeks ago that "blogger relations" was an immature art at most vendors. Nathan Gilliatt makes an attempt at formalizing blogger relationship management. He lists various types of bloggers - journalist, customer, opponent etc - and ways to deal with them - ignore them with silence, converse with them, respond using your own blog, back channel with the blogger, respond using more traditional media.

Not sure what type he would call me - I guess a customer sourcing adviser is the best description. I would add physical contact to his list of ways to deal with bloggers - as SAP did by inviting several bloggers to Sapphire, or as Sage did with Dennis Howlett this week.

Each blogger type does require different handling. I know James Governor's clients use him effectively to get their messages out through his blog. He has a vendor centric model and that works fine for him. While I like to talk to vendor references rather than just to vendor pitches, I tend to look at things critically from a buyer lens.

I recently had what Nathan would call a  "back channel" contact. An attorney for a vendor I blog about (and which usually gives me Nathan's "silent treatment" above while visiting my blog 2-3 times a day) contacted me about being an expert witness in a court case.  Nice conversation - I told him my market perspectives, that it was buyer centric and I tended to be hard on most large vendors, including his client. He said that was exactly the independent POV they were seeking in the expert (having been one in a few cases, it is what the judicial process encourages). I told him I was not sure the executives at his client liked my blog. He said that was proof of my neutrality but that he would check with the executives. Never heard from him again. Hopefully the case was settled amicably and the need for an expert went away.

One unresolved issue in formalized blogger relations would be that of funding.  Does it come out of AR, PR, IR budgets or is it incremental? The issue, I suspect is even more acute on the blogger side.  One hour of his/her time is a far bigger relative investment than an hour or two on the vendor's scale.

Lots of interesting issues to consider if blogger relations gets more formalized, as Nathan would like to see happening.

More on Patents

Guy Kawasaki stirs another debate on IP and Patents.

IBM/amazon, Microsoft/Novell...'tis the season.

But what do it do?

While some are already moving on to Web 3.0, it sounds like a good time was had by all at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. But I believe O'Reilly and Batelle blew a major opportunity to help Web 2.0 adoption in the Enterprise.

The focus of the conference was on digital media and consumer markets - so yes, the VP of Marketing would have been interested in changing consumer patterns. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley had a nice presentation on changing digitial demographics.

But what does it mean to the VP of Sales, HR, Supply Chain, the CFO? Sure there were token Benioffs and Mickoses of the enterprise world at the Summit, but for the most part it was about consumer stuff. Corporate executives like to hear from peers, not just media, vendors and talking heads.  Fellow Irregular Dion Hinchcliffe launched Web 2.0 University at the conference and hopefully his focus will be the implications for the broader enterprise.

For now, it's just more fawning about GoWinEAppS - just more contemporary with wikis, blogs, podcasts.

SaaS Sermons

Thomas Otter says both SAP and Microsoft worship at the Hybrid Church - not everything in their portfolio will make it to the web.

In the meantime, Microsoft encourages its flock of partners to move aggressively into SaaS with its On-Ramp program.

Phil Wainewright points out SaaS is changing software selling patterns - from outbound to inbound.

Brother SaaS's salvation show rolls on...whether outbound and traveling or inbound and in a pitched tent...

...pack up the babies, and grab the old ladies...

Post-elections SOX

Neither Rep. Sarbanes nor Rep. Oxley ran for re-election, and Barney Frank, the new chair of the Financial Services Committee is not a big SOX fan .

In this new environment, the WSJ (subscription required) reports:

"Business has won the battle to ease one of the most controversial requirements mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-reform law: that companies first review their own systems for ensuring accurate financial reports and then have them tested by outside auditors."

SEC chairman Christopher Cox set the ball rolling this week....as the Washington Post reports.

"Cheap to Fail"

I almost fell off my chair reading this post from my fellow Irregular, Charles Zedlewski. Charles works for SAP and we have bantered over long, complex software development and implementation projects.

He ends his post with:

"I think we’re going to find the brute force approach to software product development appearing in more and more places over time. Cheap to fail may become an industry’s new competitive weapon."

Now he sounds like he works for Google in their constraint-based development model.

Can you imagine what would happen if the rest of SAP and other enterprise software vendors and their systems integrators and project managers at customers got on the "cheap to fail" bandwagon?

Consulting 101

Brian Sommer lays out the principles on which he runs his small consulting firm - those that he learned and honed at Accenture, one of the world's largest consulting firms. My former co-founder and competitor and continuing friend is refreshingly old-fashioned in his values - but it is a good read whether you run a firm of one or are a junior consultant in a firm of 100,000.

Brian is also one hell of a story teller. Over the years I keep thinking I have heard everything about his college days, his days at the ranch, his projects around the world etc. But cannot recall him talking much about the Type 4s in his post...some thing to look forward to -)