deal architect

More New Renaissance

On the New Florence blog

Hypermilers

Your next personal vehicle

Structure   '08

"The future of the Web"

"A business of one"

Weekend Stuff: Spray, Strikes, Schools and Scalps

Spending the weekend with my son in Upstate and western New York.  Been to Niagara Falls. Took him to Cooperstown to pay homage to Babe Ruth and so many others enshrined at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Drove by number of great schools in this state from Cornell to Syracuse to RIT. The piece de resistance - the reenactment of the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Carrillon at Fort Ticonderoga. Against overwhelming odds, the French,outnumbered 4 to 1, held the fort.

Lots of driving through this beautiful part of the country, but I am hoping he gets home and reads up on Wikipedia strange new words like Iroquois, Ithaca, Loonie and Rollie Fingers he has picked up on this trip.

Does AT&T eat its own telepresence dog food?

AT&T is moving its HQ from San Antonio to Dallas to get closer to better connected airports.

"Being headquartered near leading air transportation facilities is critical to global companies like AT&T as the airline industry continues to consolidate and reduce hubs and flights amid higher fuel prices and industry economic pressures."

Personally, I think they could have stayed in San Antonio and made themselves a showcase for telepresence.

Telepresence is very good business for AT&T - they are one of the biggest beneficiary of the Cisco telepresence success story . To run the QoS, 15mbps, low jitter pipe they can charge customers tens of thousands a month. And the ROI is still pretty good when companies look at reduced travel cost and related executive fatigue.

Airlines are competition - should be AT&T's new thinking, Instead this move just shows them stuck to an older model of doing business. I am sure there are tax incentives - typical in such corporate moves. But that likely pales compared to the telepresence revenue opportunity.

Weekend Stuff: "He's a moron"

Opinion of US Passport Officer of his Canadian counterpart a few hundred feet away. I shared with him my disappointment the Canadian would not baptize my son's new passport with a stamp, as we walked across the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls. I even asked the Canadian if he would get in to trouble if he sneaked a stamp in. Answer: Yes, we are not allowed to any more. But did not stop him from making a wise crack about my long sleeve shirt on a warm, humid day.

The US officer on the way back said "I'll make it up to you" and stamped my son's passport.

For years now, Canadian citizens have complained about irritating treatment from US officials and vice versa. Good sibling rivalry at play.

But lost in that pettiness is the PR value of a 14 year old who would have proudly shown off the Canadian stamp for years to come.

Best Darned HR Technology Conference!

Years after I took part in (and in my usual subtle way took over) their Analyst Panel, the HR Technology Conference has become the world’s leading event for everyone interested in that business and market. About 2,400 high-level HR practitioners (a third VP or above), software and service vendor CEOs, and all the industry analysts (including former colleague and now Gartner analyst, Jim Holincheck for nine years and fellow EI, Jason Corsello for four) attend from a dozen different countries. They come for the excellent no-sales-hype conference sessions, the largest show floor of 250 exhibitors, and what is indisputably the annual town meeting of this industry.

I asked my old friend, conference co-chair Bill Kutik, to extend a special discount to the 11th annual in Chicago, October 15-17, to readers of this blog. He agreed, and here’s how you can get it: Download the brochure or check out their program at www.HRTechnologyConference.com . If you want to register, type VINN in the Promotion Code box in the online form, and you’ll get $470 off the $1,545 regular registration rate. That discount is larger than any publicly offered, in print or online, and gets relatively bigger when the normal discount expires on August 1.

See you there...I will be on the lookout for disruptive HR vendors for this blog and HR innovations for the New Florence one.

No, no panel for me. Bill does not need any more hijacked panels...besides I would not want to be on some old-fashioned Analyst Panel, When Bill renames it the Social Influencer Hypervisor 2.0 Mashup Panel. I will seek out my rightful place on it :)

More Innovation

On the New Florence blog

Cross-State and Cross-Sensor Traffic Data

Metrics to measure innovation

Corporate Innovation Competitions

Anthropology and Technology adoption

High-tech health breakthroughs

The Real Deal: David Axson on why most BI projects disappoint

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

I first met David Axson in 1996 when he was pioneering concepts around process benchmarking at The Hackett Group and have stayed in touch. He is noted author and speaker in business management and technology. He is currently working with a number of organizations on the translation of technology promise into tangible results – which should keep him busy for many years. He was also a former Head of Corporate Planning for Bank of America. 

"Remember when just a few years ago it appeared that SAP stood for Solves All Problems? Well now the focus is squarely on the power of business intelligence to drive increased competitiveness, value creation and any other appropriate buzzword you care to mention – and SAP’s right there with their acquisitions of Business Objects, Outlooksoft and Cartesis to its portfolio. Can their cure for cancer be far behind?

Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate the potential of business intelligence tools and applications to dramatically contribute to an organization’s success,but I also see numerous initiatives disappoint. Why the gap between expectation and realization?

Having observed and participated in numerous “BI” initiatives over the last twenty years I think the problem is easy to understand. Take a look at the exhibit below.

 

This is the David Axson view of all IT projects. It’s incredibly simplistic and devoid of acronyms – not an OLAP or XML in sight; but it does encapsulate the main elements of every BI program. First we collect data from somewhere; then the structure it; before putting into an efficient and accessible storage vehicle;the data can then be accessed in order to perform certain transformations or analysis that can be automatic or user-defined; and finally we use it to make decisions. Pretty simple really. However the disconnect comes when one considers the relationship between cost/effort and value. In any BI project, the first four steps consume 95% or more of the effort/cost. We spend lots of time and money sourcing data, cleansing data, organizing data and transforming data. However, when you adopt a value perspective close to 100% of the value occurs in the fifth step when the resulting intelligence is actually used to make a decision. Now in the average project plan and budget, consider how much money or how many tasks are devoted to the first four steps versus the fifth step. All too often the “training” line is minuscule and consists of teaching users how to print and providing them with the number of the help desk which is usually staffed by folks who know little or nothing about how to use information to make better decisions. We deliver incredibly rich applications with little or nig guidance on how to use them effectively. It’s the business equivalent of giving your car keys to your sixteen year old and the only guidance you offer is to, “Go have fun.”

Until we give at least equal weight to the use of information and the associated skills, authority and confidence necessary to make better decisions as we do to the “cool” technology we will continue to lament the disappointing ROI on BI."

David  can be contacted at [email protected] or at www.davidaxson.com.

"Plum Jobs"

I happen to think Forrester is often less analyst, more cheerleader in several sectors it covers, but I had to admire Josh Bernoff's recruiting message on his blog.

Why just depend on your HR to find you candidates? And why not use the opportunity to tell the world your product is doing well?

"I've been an analyst for 13 years and it's the most fun I've ever had  in a job." "Forrester is an extremely collegial place." "Working here is a blast."

No job is perfect (I suspect between the excitement in the late 90s and the more recent excitement around social media, Josh would have been more subdued about his job) but when your boss-to-be is so positive, it sure helps.

Get this lady a H-1 Visa

As in Viviane Reding.

She is the telecommunications/media commissioner in the EU and "having capped roaming fees on international mobile phone calls, plans a new move to lower cellphone charges that could result in even greater savings for European consumers." reports the International Herald Tribune

H-1 visas require specialized knowledge. She definitely qualifies - our regulators have not demonstrated the ability to influence our international roaming charges. Look at AT&T's roaming rates here - as high as $ 4.99 a minute from some countries. Plus $ 5 a month to get those "discounted rates". Plus taxes of say 15%.

No wonder the American businessman spends on average $693 in roaming charges on an international trip.

Et Tu, Intel?

Loved the Brutus analogy in this NY Times story that Intel has decided not to upgrade to Vista.

I expected the story to misquote Mark Antony

"I come here to bury Vista, not to praise it..."