deal architect

From “Feel Good” to “Good Feel”

I was reading Bruce Rogow’s nicely done summary of his series of CIO “Odyssey” interviews at Cognizanti (subscription required). Bruce, my former Gartner colleague, is one of the more strategic IT thinkers in the industry

One section specific to collaboration jumped out at me:

“The emphasis has shifted from “feel good” efforts such as the chairman’s blog or an employee Web portal, to an array of collaboration efforts that deliver bottom-line benefit, such as accelerated product development, splashier products, better customer support or more tools for more timely
and accurate decision making.”

I look at the agenda at the Enterprise 2.0 conference coming up next month. The agenda has steadily improved over the years with an increasing number of client success stories. But too many of the sessions  are still titled “social”, “community” - touchy feely stuff. And as I written before the moniker itself – Enterprise 2.0 is a feel good, frankly pompous term

I keep hearing excuses about why business cases are so hard to develop around Enterprise 2.o. Cisco is doing fine with its collaboration play – telepresence – because it has solid travel expense reduction as business case, even with its premium product pricing. Zoho is doing fine selling SaaS tools which allow for collaboration, but as a recent discussion I had highlighted : would they be better off changing their tag line from“Work. Online” to “Work at a fraction of cost of today’s Microsoft tools”?

Which is what Bruce is saying.  Take the top 4-5 burning platforms most CEOs are focused on – customers, products, expenses. Take the KPIs for projects around each and show how social tools can help  on each.

Focus on tangible successes. Then you can call it Social Computing or Enterprise 2.0 or Web 3.0 or whatever.

BPO – how overpriced?

Phil Fersht analyzes an announcement from Wipro and Oracle about a mid-market focused BPO Offering. Good to see Oracle go beyond traditional BPO partners like Accenture and IBM.

But the economic reality in the HR market looks something like this

1. if Oracle/Accenture BPO is a cost factor of 100
2. Oracle/Wipro would likely be a factor of 75
3. Wipro/SaaS vendor like Workday would likely be a factor of 50
4. SaaS vendor/Cloud Outsourcer/Nextgen SI like appirio would likely be a factor of 25

What was intriguing was a comment that Oracle/Wipro will “partner” with Hackett to provide HR benchmarks.

Which begs the question – why would Hackett provide any benchmarks which would make this solution look bad – or showcase scenarios 3 and 4 above?

Tech and my Hobby/Passion series continues

The series on the New Florence blog on how technology has influenced people’s hobby/passion continues to grow nicely – it’s up to 62 contributors.

The first 50 were here

Recent ones:

Jeff Nolan	Woodworking
Jim Berkowitz	Jazz Music DJ
Guenther Tolkmit	Opera
Frank Scavo	Grandchildren, Grandparents
Charlotte Otter	Writing
Richard Hunter	Second Career in Music
Will Scott	Long Distance Community Svc
Gretchen Lindquist	Soprano Singing
Jim Holincheck	Disney World
Naomi Bloom	Friends
Mark Galloway	Low-tech Horse
Harald Reiter	Martial Arts

Deal Architect announces new partner

Well, I have not discussed it with him yet and he does not even know I am even thinking about it…but I talking about David Dobrin, the “Applicator”.

Years of coaching clients on negotiating hard of maintenance has earned me the moniker of “Vinnie Maintenance.”

But I never had the cajones to propose a real simple solution David does. Not 30% off. Not 50% off via third party maintenance.

David says don’t pay at all

I better bring him in as partner before he drives me out of business :)

Seriously, David is one of the smartest people in the industry. And unlike so many market watchers unafraid to say it as he sees it. He also plays a mean game of bridge. Partner or not, I am not playing on the same table as him…

More Innovation

On the innovation blog

Technothrill: 2009 BMW 7 series

Organic LEDs

Star Tech Tech we use today (almost)

Yield Management and Baseball

Beam me up, Scotty!

Good people. Bad Process or Technology. Or Something.

I was telling Mr. CRM – Paul Greenberg – about my Verizon FiOS experience and interactions with 13 of their employees/contractors in the last week.  What I also told him was each of them was polite, gracious, apologetic. One of them even told me:

“We are trying real hard. This is our future. But don’t forget we were a monopoly which understood copper wires and screwdrivers. How we are into hyper-competition in a new world of fiber and IP. So we are still learning”

Paul described to me his experience with DirecTV. After hounding them for months after some problems he got as penance a senior customer service exec from the company to write on his blog a quarterly update  on improvements they were making to their customer service.

Today, Paul says about DirecTV

“The executives I spoke with today resolved all issues and have convinced me to remain as a loyal customer... While I'm still not enthusiastic about the conversion from TiVo to the new R-15, I do believe I am a customer of the best digital television service available.”

If a kind soul at Verizon wants to use my platform (and probably Paul’s) to periodically update on how Verizon is improving FiOS processes, they are more than welcome to. 

Recruiting via social networks

Good to see New York Times recognize my friends at appirio and their matching engine via Facebook.

I wrote about it a while ago on the New Florence blog – Service as Software

FiOS Saga Continued

Saturday morning. The power is back. The electrician confirmed the Verizon FiOS technician had ruptured a wire.

All’s well that ends well.

Except I interacted with 6 more Verizon employees and contractors yesterday - and a total of 13 over last week.

7.30 am – call Verizon dispatch center. Tell them I cannot see my ticket logged from call night before. It’s there but your web UI does not show it. Technician will show up between 4 and 8 pm

8.30 am – bell rings. Verizon tech. “A bit early?” He has no clue what I am talking about “between 4 and 8” I was told by dispatch. Walks around house asking me where the tech day before had drilled. Multiple places, I show him. “We need to get an electrician here”

3.45 pm – phone rings. I think it the electrician in the 4 to 8 slot. Nope someone called Jimmy. No idea what I am talking about. “I was just calling to see how how your FiOS experience has been so far”.

3.50 pm So I tell him and he says “Hold on let me get my supervisor”. James comes on the phone after a few minutes. “Hmm…we have a breakdown here. Let me make some queries and I will call you back”.

4.10 pm. Lady calls on her cell phone. “I am the supervisor of the tech who did the original install”. “I have been in meetings all day and did not get the tech’s message from morning till now” “We will get you an electrician next week”. Her cell phone battery dies.

4.15 pm Lady calls again. I tell her next week is not acceptable. She promises to have their handy man contract service call.

6.30 pm Handy man supervisor calls and arranges for visit

Between last week and this, I sure hope this was an exceptional installation experience. And I sure hope any future repairs do not require so many interactions.

Weekend Stuff: Why success of iPod and iTunes was predestined

Give Apple and Jobs credit, but if you are in tech give yourself a pat in the back also.

Music is in your blood.

In the “Technology and my hobby/passion series” I have been running, 9 guest posts (so far) have been music related – see below.

When I shared my thought that 15% seemed unusually high in the population (given all the sports, travel, charities and other interests we all have), I got this feedback from some of the authors:

• Richard Hunter at Gartner:  “A decade or so ago, Esther Dyson wrote a piece commenting on the high density of serious musicians among the ranks of database technology developers.  In 1990, I did a piece for InformationWeek discussing the reasons why music figured so prominently in IT organizations.”
• Gretchen Lindquist at Halliburton “The ability to see and understand both the forest and the trees, as we do in hearing simultaneously the whole and the distinctions among all four parts of SATB music or the many voices and instruments of an opera performance, is critical in working application support in today’s complex ERP landscapes.”
• Guenther Tolkmit at Lawson Software: “I could staff two orchestras (one classical one big band) out of my developers”

Here are the music themed guest columns:

Jim Berkowitz	Jazz Radio DJ
Guenther Tolkmit	Opera
Richard Hunter	Second Career in Music
Gretchen Lindquist	Soprano Singing
Mike Laven	Musical Discoveries
Ray Wang	Vinyl DJs
Gerlinde Gniewosz	Organ Playing
Joe Thornton	Big Band Jazz
Devan Sabaratnam	Guitar Rock

FiOS Week 1

Signed up for a Verizon upgrade for home line last week. Much faster speeds than previous DSL as SpeedNet confirms. At a lower cost. Cannot beat that.

But what’s the middling ISP rating of 3.4 for?

Probably because many folks are going through this experience

a) The outside line drop was supposed to take place last Saturday. Wednesday, the Verizon truck arrives. Thought the job was done while we were away Saturday. “Oh, may be they wired the wrong house”. (wow!). Are we allowed to water the lawn you are uprooting? “Just call us back and we will replace whatever does not grow back” (more wow!)

b) Inside job scheduled for yesterday between 10-12. Wednesday night get a confirmation call. Nice. 10.15 am get a call “You tech is running late. Should be there in 15 minutes” Thanks for the update. So far so good.

1215 I call back. “That time was just an estimate. Your tech is having issues at his previous install”.  At 1 another tech shows up. Takes him a good 5 hours but we have FiOS service.

c) at 7 pm, after tech is long gone, we discover one of the restrooms near where he worked has no electricity. Try the circuit breaker routine. Dead.

d) 8 pm Call Verizon help. Usual help desk routine – want more info from you then they provide. Sends me an email “You recently contacted the Verizon Fiber Solution Center regarding your voice service over FiOS. My objective was to provide you with outstanding service. As promised, I am providing links to the Verizon website that will assist you with managing your voice service in the future. “ It is signed “FiOS Solution Center Team” and has the ominous “This message was sent from a notification only email address that cannot accept incoming email messages.”

What does this have to do with the electricity problem? He ends my call with “Dispatch will contact you within 24 hours”. No I yell at him - just get that very tech back for 10 minutes and he may know exactly what he tripped or cut. But the rep was too busy gathering even more info about our household.

e) 10 pm – Check Ticket status on line. Error message “Module MSA Trouble Ticket is temporarily unavailable.”

f) 7 am today – same error message. Time to call dispatch and go through another likely runaround.

After thousands of these installs, I am surprised at the sloppiness of the process. 3.4 out of 5 ISP rating is generous at least for the install process.