deal architect

“It just works”

Ok, it has taken Microsoft 25+ years to acknowledge it – but it is good to see it appreciative of Apple products, As it mimics Google’s infrastructure around Azure, I hope it is also man enough to acknowledge that. And NetSuite and salesforce.com when it comes to ERP and CRM. And Cisco, Siemens and others when it comes to Unified Communications.

And by the way, how about acknowledging that admiration publicly rather than buried in some internal slide deck. Of course, in turn its competitors need to do the same. In the day of silly lawsuits it sure is nice to see a vendor admire another’s products.

An invigorating day with Talent Management executives

Readers know I like small, specialized services firms like appirio and Corefino. I have also been a fan of Knowledge Infusion and its work around talent management for a while, and yesterday that respect jumped multiple fold.

Oh, they gave me a chance to present on New Polymath concepts as they apply to Talent Management at their Executive Summit in Dallas. But importantly, it was impressive to see executives in the audience from 57 different companies from Target to Four Seasons. And most in the audience enjoyed the diverse agenda.

On the slate:

• Doug Ulman, President of the Lance Armstrong Foundation gave a moving presentation of his own cancer fight and how that foundation has grown virally through smart leverage of social networks – and of course, Lance’s own brand and solid supporters like Nike. In a nice touch everyone in the audience got a Livestrong yellow wristband – and John talked about how much that simple product has benefited from TV images of its presence on athletes and other public figures.
• John Schroeder of Nike showed off some very creative slides on how he sells the HR and Talent story to his executives. Talent managers are not always known for marketing savvy – John showed why pictures are worth many thousand words. 
• Judy Mcfarland of Northrop Grumman presented on their shared services journey with its growing sophistication and Six Sigma measurements and continuous improvements. She also hosted the event and organized tour of her facilities.
• Andy Valenzuela of Dell discussed how they are reshaping their HR infrastructure as his company becomes a “serial acquirer”. While most talent execs focus on on-boarding of employees, his team is focused on on-boarding of acquisitions.
• Libby Sartain (whose presentation I missed), was to talk about her experiences as the Chief Talent Officer at Southwest Airlines and at Yahoo! and themes from her book “Creating a Brand for Talent”
• Plenty of side bar conversations during breaks about HR and talent software trends.
• Several social activities the day before (I wish I could have been part of them)

It was a nice opportunity for all to network with so many peers and they appreciated the fact that there was little overt marketing by KI .  KI plans to do such summits every quarter around the country.

Try hard to get invited to one – they are selective who gets to go. It would be great investment of a couple of days.

Of Hollywood and ERP

I enjoy going to Judith Rothrock’s annual Grape Escape. She showcases 4 vendors and a customer each and tightly controls their communication to 8 to 10 minutes each. The rest of the time is a good chance to mingle with those executives, various industry analysts and enjoy the creative setting and menu she usually conjures up. Last year, the setting was The Old State House in Boston, and the menu was that the Obama White House served for his inauguration. This year the theme was Oscars and was held at The Calderwood Pavilion, home of the Huntington Theatre. The menu reflected that of the official ball down to the Sterling Reserve 2006 vintage wines (Judith had to ferret out that closely held Hollywood secret).

Of course, the vendors were at their dressy best. FinancialForce.com talked about how Chatter and VMForce is changing the sleepy world of accounting. Unit4 introduced its “Cloud Angel”. The CIO of Lee Spring announced its millionth order on the SYSPRO platform. Meridian talked about how many of its customers, including Disney, were opting for its hosting options. You could not help think ERP was going through an extreme makeover.

The piece de resistance last year was President John Adams in attire from the 1770s mingling with the guests. This time Judith invited Doug Nervik, an entertainer from New York who regaled the audience with his voice, his piano skills and the lyrics which serenaded the vendors. Too bad we did not have a video in the audience but the lyrics below should give you a clue about the good natured roasting.

The Beach Boys on FinancialForce.com

“We’re feelin’ just a bit schizy, not quite sure who we are,

Not only owned by SalesForce, but also Unit4!

A symbiotic connection and now it starts to pay!

FinancialForce has gone crazy, crazy USA!”

The Rolling Stones on Syspro

“We’ll never be your beast of burden

Our Syspro clients are never hurtin’

All we want is, for you to be family!

We got a president named Benadretti,

He’ll make an offer, when he is ready,

It’s an offer, a client can’t refuse!”

A play on Meridian’s Project Based Organizations -

“With all these funds in hand, we’ll go throughout the land and build!

PBObama, say it soft for the private sector;

Say it loud for the public investor!

PBObama, like manna from heaven—PBObama!

The most lucrative word I’ve ever heard—PBObama!”

Joni Mitchell on Unit 4

“You’ve seen the cloud from both sides now,

Traditional systems worked somehow,

But change is good you do recall,

You really won’t mind the cloud at all!”

Finally, I owe a big thanks to Judith for having me autograph the very first copies of my new book for her guests. As you will read President Adams at last year’s event inspired a few events in my book. Who knows where Judith’s night at the Oscars will inspire all of us to do next.

"The myth of the social customer" - part 2

Dennis Howlett blogged something I have been hearing from old publishing hands for a while now. Don't count too much on the social customer for book sales. The social customer is used to free. That customer thinks in terms of tweets and blogs not 400 page books.

Of course, I thought they were just old school publishing types who just don't get the power of communities and viral marketing.

So, I have taken advantage of much amazon offers authors - a page to put videos, events, the look inside "test drive" feature etc. The book has its own Facebook page. And LinkedIn group. And its own web site. I have been putting excerpts on the New Florence blog. And already even before release there are plenty of tweets, web mentions, Animotos, Youtube videos about the book (you can see a listing of mentions here). More importantly, and hearteningly, several positive emails from people who have read only a few pages of the book on amazon or the excerpts. People I have never met before with no reason to be nice.

Those old school guys are just out to lunch, I kept saying. In fact, am planning a promotion/contest next week aimed at this audience.

Well, it turns out my friends in publishing were not really dissing the social customer. They were pointing to the calculus in a business book like mine. The 100+ case studies/profiles in the book are ordering 10, 20, 200, 500 copies. Events I present at will order in chunks of 50, 100, 300. And of course none of these show up in amazon rankings. It's sheer volumes - the social customer buys one or two copies at a time. It will take an army of them. 

Well, I am confident that army will show up - because the social customer tells a friend who tells another friend! In the long run those sales will outstrip the bulk ones.

But you can see how traditional channels continue to be extremely vibrant. And from a business perspective much more predictable and easy to administer. Or how metrics we focus on in social media - like Twitter followers, amazon ranks etc - are only a part of the whole picture. And how old school types can be a bit wary of the social customer.

"Grand Challenges" for the E2.0, SAP and young entrepreneur communities

I am presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and the Sapience conference in Cologne, Germany this week. I also get a chance to spend some time while in Boston with students at Babson College - a school which has pioneered for years a focus on entrepreneurial studies.

In each event, I plan to discuss the Grand Challenges what I call The New Polymaths are addressing with their AND not OR mindset  ( as in GE with Net Zero Home, BASF with rice bio-engineering etc discussed in this video).

In addition, I am going to discuss some challenges and exciting opportunities for each community with other examples from my book.

For E2.0, the challenges will reflect what I see as the unique characteristics of its members:

• Ambitious community from day one – aiming for “enterprise”, not a single tech category
• People, more than machine, centric
• Early adopter of social networks
• Well connected around globe
• Ethical – advocates for transparency
• Media/PR savvy

For SAP, the challenges are very familiar to my blog readers

• How do you get more, much more innovation from the $ 75 to 100 billion customers annually spend on their SAP environments. Many of the innovations in the book are about Germany's Solar Valley, what BMW is doing with iDrive, what Siemens is doing in various vertical markets that the audience should be familiar with.
• How to free up IT money to apply to SAP planned delivery of innovations in-memory analytics, sustainability etc
• How to coax SAP to become more of a Polymath itself around ByD and other products and reduce dependence on such its large and expensive ecosystem of SI, hosting, offshore and other partners

At Babson, the focus is more on the opportunities:

• in a world where buyer organizations like GE are becoming the next generation of technology vendor
• as infotech converges with cleantech, healthtech, biotech etc.
• to deliver value through new generation supply networks like communities and crowds
• in a new global landscape, where technology ubiquity is lowering traditional trade advantages as Ricardo saw it

I have many to thank for these invitations but in particular want to thank Sameer Patel for recommending the talk at his alma mater, Babson and for along with Oliver Marks and Susan Scrupski making the case for my E2.0 session.

How vendor speak is shrinking our innovative minds

Apologies to Nick Carr for mangling the title of his new book, but ever since I spent time in Niskayuna, NY in January I have been puzzled. I had visited the GE Global Research Center as part of my research for my upcoming book, The New Polymath. I was blown away by the wide range of innovation (excerpts here) the scientists there were working on. Complex, compound innovation to solve many of our Grand Challenges.

But as I left and checked on the Twitter Stream from the Center’s blog (appropriately named Edison’s Desk) I was shocked to see only about 300 followers (it has since crept up to 450). 1,800 scientists, most Ph.Ds in every discipline known to man can only muster such a small following?

In contrast, I am staggered how much of my Twitter stream, blog reader, email every day is filled with vendor this and vendor product that, most of it extremely banal. It spikes whenever a major vendor has an industry event or product launch. Yes, I am just as guilty for adding to that torrent when I go to events like Sapphire or OOW. And worse, the majority of the noise is around  consumer and social products – truly “light” innovation compared to what is happening in Niskayuna.

Abbie Lundberg former editor of CIO magazine in her review of my book blames it on consumer tastes and Wall Street.  “As long as consumers demand and will pay for the next new advance in entertainment and convenience and stockholders demand the greatest possible returns, that’s where the innovation focus will be – not on solving the big problems that the average consumer is able to ignore from the comfort of their own couch. Perhaps the problem is less one of ability and more one of priorities, focus and resolve.”

I agree to a point - I think the sheer volume of vendor speak, that then gets amplified by traditional and social media is as responsible. That drowns out innovation at customers like GE and others. Innovation happening in their labs and from entrepreneurs far from Silicon Valley, often in far flung corners of the world. The industry analysts don’t help – when was the last time you saw a Magic Quadrant of innovations at customers? Buyers of course, are not blameless – they reluctantly disclose/discuss their innovations – and when they do their own PR folks often sound just like the tech vendor marketing folks.

This, of course, has led to a narcissist culture in vendor world. Oh sure, the press releases have a mandatory quote from a customer buried somewhere in the text but it’s mostly about them. How good they are, how innovative their product is.  And it shows in how they measure analysts, journalists, bloggers – what have you done for me lately? As in – when was the last time you wrote about me? More noise.

But who are we kidding?  As my book says the ratio of “aha” to “oh no” is off kilter. We really need to step away from Twitter and the Valley and go spend more time in places like Niskayuna.

Fastballs and foreign lands

Bill McDemott of SAP called ByD his “99 mile an hour fastball” that NetSuite would have to face. At Sapphire, he emphasized “ the suite always wins” suggesting ByD would enjoy that advantage over most SaaS solutions in the market today.

NetSuite does not seem too intimidated.  It has expanded its suite with manufacturing functionality – Dennis Howlett describes it here.

Now, I hope it takes its significant US lead of over 6,000 customers and uses that to advantage in the other 5 markets ByD is being launched – Germany, UK, France, China and India. It should follow the rapid path J.D. Edwards enjoyed as it leveraged the AS/400 in major markets in the late 80s and early 90s. 

Another advantage to that – McDermott's fastball will mean nothing in a world of cricket and soccer.

IT in 2030, er 2015.

As Gartner gets ready to celebrate 20 years of its Symposium , senior analyst Richard Hunter bravely  – and somewhat somberly - looks 20 years out.

“Have I mentioned that every 20 years, the world is a completely different place? I would predict increasing fragmentation of society. I would predict that privacy will be redefined in ways we can currently not conceive, because the 20th century definition of privacy is not viable in the 21st. I think we will see new social contracts — between citizens, between citizens and their governments – and it's possible that things get to be very dark, that technologies of information dissemination and analysis can also be used for control purposes, and that the world will tilt very heavily toward a controlled – and even conflicted – environment.”

I am not brave enough to look that far out - as Ray Kurzweil says “ We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today ’s rate). ”

I am willing to stick my neck out in a few areas over the next 5 years based on research for The New Polymath

• IT’s sphere of influence will grow way beyond IT – we will see growing convergence of infotech, biotech, cleantech, nanotech
• More of today’s buyers will become technology vendors as they embed more and more tech in their products
• The CIO will be a major recruiter in the next 5 years. After reaching a dangerously high 85% of tech and telecom spend with external vendors, IT will gradually reduce that percent to 70%.
• IT will also reduce its addiction to large vendors. A key metric IT will measure itself on is the percent of its suppliers which are less than 5 years old.
• Communities and crowds will make up 25% of tech talent needs emerging as a viable alternative to employees and contractors
• Today’s tech leading markets like Silicon Valley, Munich, Bangalore will be far less influential than they are today.

There you go – if you want more specificity, I will have to resort to Gartner’s probabilities :)