deal architect

The Marathon Man

SAP is introducing an Innovation Weekend around its annual TechEd event in Berlin and Las Vegas next month. It gives participants a chance to “Gain hands-on experience with some of SAP's coolest and newest innovative technologies, taking an idea from concept to prototype.”

Given my book’s focus on innovation, Craig Cmehil, one of the event’s main drivers has been discussing with me a presentation there. Distracted by all my other book and consulting travel, it only dawned on me last week that I was committing to weekend travel. And he really perked me up when he said “of course we can work around your sleep pattern”

You see it is a 30 hour non-stop event. Yikes!

Craig has been an unbelievable champion for SDN and other community involvement at SAP. That has earned him the title of Open Innovation Manager. But not just Open, he should also have Rapid and Agile in his title. He is big on marathons. For two years in a row he has also run a call-in marathon for Doctors without Borders on his weekly radio show. Again in the spirit of openness he has invited various bloggers and associates to present on a variety of topics, and simultaneously raised money for a worthwhile cause.

So, I asked this insomniac about these marathons:

“ One of the amazing things about my job, various jobs I've had, has
always been the access I have to new and interesting technologies not
to mention many new and cool innovations. The downside was finding
interesting ways of sharing what I had access to on the inside with
those on outside. It was during a few late night projects I began to
think that I need to find a way to give back and to share more, I
always tend to spend so much online and around computers and was never
a stranger to long hours working on different projects and as we began
the Hacker Nights during the SAP TechEd events and the 24 Hour
Marathon during the Friday Morning Report show that I began to realize
that I was not alone and thus this year the Innovation Weekend was
born - a formalized event around things we've been doing for years
already but with a larger goal of reaching out to more people with new
technologies that have not even gone fully out the public yet. It's
exciting to be able to finally bring some of these cool technologies
to even more people in such a public setting - I've always said we
don't lack innovation just a good communication around it!”

Enterprise software moves at a glacial place. Here we are looking at Oracle OpenWorld this week still looking for clues around Fusion after 6 years of development.  Even Craig’s employer SAP has taken years maturing ByD.

Craig is a diamond in that rough. Openness and intensity. Enterprise software can use much more of that.

Selfish Disclosure: I am being generous to Craig with the hope that I get a half way decent speaking slot in those 30 hours. After all the parties at Oracle Open World I will need to hibernate like a bear :)

Deja Vu, all over again?

Good friend Erik Keller writes this in his reaction to my book

“I sometimes worry that too many efforts will be no more than recycled centralized mainframes with a pretty lipstick-on-a-pig user interface rather than something very different and useful. My former Gartner colleague Chris Jones often called the late 1990s ERP solutions no more than MRP II on steroids. He was spot on. It will be up to all the new polymaths to ensure that this doesn’t occur yet again.”

He hit on something I have been thinking about quite a bit this summer.

Frank Scavo sent me a review copy of his firm’s new report “How to evaluate a systems integrator” (for sale here). And it reminded me of my time at Gartner between 1995 and 2000 when I wrote and presented extensively on that very topic as companies looked for help implementing SAP, PeopleSoft and other functionality in the Y2K stampede.

I have recently reviewed a couple of SaaS RFPs companies were getting ready to send out. And the feature/functions in modules like General Ledger seemed awfully like those I did as a Price Waterhouse consultant in the mid 80s

In my book travels this summer across US, Canada and Europe I have noticed a marked deterioration in voice services. Either I turned my mobile phone off to avoid hefty roaming charges, or I could not even make VoIP calls at hotel wi-fi at $ 20-30 a day or I have been on many conference calls where echos, dropped calls seem so routine. And then when I lost my wallet in paris and called back to the US to various credit card companies, the familiar AT&T bong on the operator assisted-calls put me back to the early 90s.

In so many technology areas I wonder if we are substantially moving the ball forward, not just letting old stuff be “spray painted”.

A modern author’s blessing: Rapid, global reader feedback

Since my book came out, I have been blessed with an unbelievable range of feedback – from readers I have known for a while, others i have never met, and those I have been meeting on the book tour. To most it is about how technology is changing business but to many it is about a rethink of personal priorities and to many others it is about revisiting various ethical issues around technology.

I have posted on the New Florence blog some of the reader reactions. Here are more reactions

Other readers – please feel free to send in other feedback. Look forward to it.

The “Cobalt Blue” Oracle OpenWorld?

Last year, Larry Ellison invoked Chanel fuchsia and puce as he mocked cloud computing. Well, fashion folks in New York tell us this Fall’s hot color is cobalt blue.

With Sun firmly in tow and a career hardware exec, Mark Hurd coming on board Oracle has a chance to redefine cloud computing as I wrote here.

So, will we hear much about its “cobalt blue” cloud at the Oracle Fall classic next week?

Who knows?

OOW has an interesting format where Larry bookends the conference, but saves the substance (and entertaining mockery of competitors – this year IBM will likely be spared as Larry Dignan writes – more reason to celebrate blue this year) for the very end. In a way, that is polite to his executives to not steal their thunder, but the reality is only snippets of information are released till his closing speech. Wonder how many of Naomi’s list of questions will get answered? My guess less than a quarter.

The parties over the 4 days and the miles of walking to and in Moscone do give you a nice opportunity to network.  I am looking forward to meeting friends like Karen Tillman and Susie Penner at Oracle. I look forward to visting with various Oracle partners on the shop floor. Meeting several of the new Enterprise Irregulars colleagues. Slipping out a do a book event or two.

And listening to folks like Zach Nelson and Marc Benioff and Seth Ravin who take advantage of the gathering to remind folks there’s nothing wrong with puce and fuchsia.

The "Perfect Storm" for IT Outsourcing

As I present to outsourcing audiences on the book tour, they pick up on several new services markets the book outlines - Accenture's Mobility Operated Services. Cognizant being involved in the clinical tests for the high-profile H1N1 vaccine last year. Appriro's various Social CRM projects. Wipro's product engineering services as "buyer" organizations embed more and more technology in their products.  BPO combined with SaaS as in the Genpact relationship with NetSuite, and others.

They also need to be aware that 3 "systems" described in the book are rising to create a perfect storm which will decimate traditional IT outsourcing markets

a) Clouds are reshaping expectations of infrastructure services: As they read Mike Manos describing the Azure infrastructure he built for Microsoft (he is now at Nokia), outsourcers should be in awe and fear. He describes modern day "pyramids" - new-age data centers costing several hundred millions of dollars and containing 200,000+ servers. The scale of the capex budgets is way beyond what most outsourcing firms are culturally used to. The energy and tax efficiency of these centers puts most outsourcing data centers to shame. Finally, outsourcing firms are used to 5 year contracts - watch them struggle to adjust to the model amazon web services is defining where they happily sell you compute and storage in hourly units!

b) SaaS is reshaping expectations of application management services: Read about salesforce in the book and how they support 70,000+ customers in a multi-tenant model with a fraction of the staff even the most efficient offshore firms need to support applications. And talk about 5 minute upgrades compared to 2-3-4 month SAP and Oracle upgrades the service markets have been accustomed to. 

c) Agile is reshaping expectations of systems integration services: The case study around an agile project - with its iterative design/development and minimal planning project in a regulation heavy environment at GE Healthcare should open some eyes. The logical question is why it is not more mainstream in SI world in less compliance sensitive industries . And by the way, that is still a tame form of "agile". There are plenty of talent pools like the one I recently wrote about in Toronto which is into "extreme" development models.

Interesting times ahead for the industry...

“You can’t handle the truth”

Hurricane Earl was whistling by the East Coast the week prior. Oracle OpenWorld comes up next week where I am sure we will be bombarded with talk about Exadata and other analytical tools. I am thinking ahead to my keynote on data and analytics at Defrag.

Given all that, in the last few book events I have found myself talking about the National Hurricane Center case study in the book just a bit longer.

My voiceover about the NHC goes something like this:

“After trillions invested in analytic technology over the last few years, most businesses blew - badly – their forecast of our “economic hurricane” in 2007-2008. We did not even come close. In contrast, The National Hurricane Center has steadily improved its forecasts. The track forecast error in the 1980s, 48 hours out, was 225 nautical miles. Today, that error is a little less than 100 nautical miles.

Living in Florida, I am glad the NHC keeps improving its forecasts. But I am even more grateful for their reduction in“false positives” – they don’t make me evacuate unless absolutely necessary. Evacuations typically cause chaos – emergency services, panic shopping, and other community disruption. Over the years, the improvements in track forecasts have amounted to hundreds of miles of coastline not evacuated and billions of dollars saved in emergency services. Think of the ROI – how many enterprise analytic projects even attempt to show a quantifiable payback?

To deliver those forecasts, the NHC team takes an invasive approach to collecting a wide variety of external, real - time data.  They use satellites, dropsondes, Hurricane Hunters, ocean buoy based sensors to collect air pressure, humidity, temperature, wind, and plenty of other data points.

Then the information is processed using multiple forecast models – many contradictory -  both for redundancy and for validation. They want models to challenge each other. Errors are a statistical reality. And then each year they audit and publicly report their forecast accuracy.

Finally, it is impressive in how many different formats the NHC reports its data from the simple bulletins radio stations read out to large streams of data that websites like StormPulse use to generate awesome graphics of the hurricanes”

So, here comes the Jack Nicholson admonition. Most enterprises cannot handle the truth about their analytics, nor can vendors about their customer’s analytics about why they missed the “economic hurricane” so badly. Here are some things we need to face up to:

• Most companies don’t seek out primary, real-time data.

Too much business forecasting today is based on internal data or looks at Google for answers or external sources such as Bloomberg and Gartner for its “primary” data. That data has typically being rinsed of most of the original “nutritional value”

• Most enterprises are too impatient to deal with contradictory models

Most enterprises data strategies are designed around “the single version of the truth”. Paul Kedorsky is quoted in the book saying “Why does the drunk look for lost keys under the lamp post even though the keys were dropped far away? Because that’s where the light is. They are looking for confirmation when they should be looking for falsification”. How many enterprises balance contradictory models like the NHC?

• Most enterprises keep looking for the elusive “universal report writer”

Yes, the holy grail is a single tool which will represent structured, unstructured, transaction, balance, matrix, drill down, web and every other form of data increasingly available. How many like the NHC look to present 15-18-20 views of the data?

• Most analysts focus on slice and dice, not decisions. Most vendors sell slice and dice.

David Axson argues in my book we have been focused too much in the last few years on analytical tools, not decisions. Vendors talk about pivot tables and schemas. Most enterprise team are just as bad – they talk about doing a BusinessObjects implementation, or being an Eloqua shop. What does any of that to do with the end-decisions?

• Historical data keeps exploding and is mostly worthless

Howard Dresner is quoted in the book as saying “Nassim Nicholas Taleb of The Black Swan book fame talks about “ highly improbable ” events and how historical data simply cannot help us fully anticipate them.”  In a volatile world, “Black Swans” are increasingly common. Yet we keep archiving petabytes of historical data (often multiple copies, at exorbitant storage costs) then stretching the limits of technology to do in-memory analytics.

• Few enterprises have the right analytical talent

Sure, everyone has Excel analysts and DBAs. How many enterprise have the equivalent of the brave Hurricane Hunters that fly into ferocious storms to collect data points? How about statisticians? Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has been quoted as saying, “ I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.” Paul Kedrosky is a bit more poetic “I see a new generation of artists — not just data jocks, but those with the appreciation of the aesthetics of data.”

It would be nice during OOW to hear from customers – and Oracle about its customers – about adjustments they have made to their analytical framework, data sources, talent etc since 2008, not just about more speeds and feeds.

PS: The book has other examples besides the NHC of other impressive analytic applications such as at BestBuy and its customer analytics, Google with Flu Trends. IBM's Many Eyes and several others.

The Art of Wimp

My fellow Enterprise Irregulars were discussing the HP-Mark Hurd lawsuit yesterday and old Sun-Tzu came up ( digression – this is as close to author porn as you can get) and two of the reactions were:

“Art of War tells a General what to do, not a committee (board). Oracle has a general. HP not so much.”

“Art of War would send the ninjas over in the dead of night to Redmond Shores to cut their balls off.  If sending these lawyers is the best Art of War HP can come up with, Larry and Mark are going to laugh all the way to the bank. “

Well, they accurately called HP. Today acting CEO Cathie Lesjak goes:

“At the end of the day business will prevail. Ultimately we’ll go back to being good partners. I believe HP is important to Oracle and Oracle is an important partner of ours,”

Are you kidding me?  Have they learned nothing from how Oracle has twisted and turned its “important partner” SAP in that lawsuit? If you want to go after Oracle (oh wait, HP says it is suing Mark, not Oracle – yeah, right) you need a Churchill, not a Chamberlain.

You need a street fighter like Rimini Street. Seth Ravin, the CEO, is quoted in my book about his firm’s legal tangles with Oracle:

“Oracle started this war. I intend to finish it with a clearly free and open market for enterprise support providers.”

In the meantime, another EI came up with another Art of War metaphor

“A little more hammering on the stock price by Larry (Art of War redux) and he might be able to land HP for (that) $70B.”

Like I said it will be an interesting OOW. Fusion? What’s that?

Oracle: The Polymath moment?

Mark Hurd replaces Charles Phillips at Oracle.

In joining the company, Mark commented "I’m excited to be a part of the most innovative technology team in the I.T. industry.”

Yes, if the IT industry is only defined as IBM, HP and Oracle that would be a true statement. But those three entities barely qualified for 10 pages in the 400 pages of my book on innovation.

It gives Mark Hurd a second chance to do what be did not do at HP. Emulate what Marc Benioff and Zach Nelson and Aneel Bhusri have been doing for years now - blending data centers  and software and application management and upgrade services.  He now has all the building blocks, including application software he did not have at HP.

On a personal note, I am sorry to see Charles go. Oracle customers have lost one of their biggest champions at Oracle. That's another challenge Mark will have to step in and meet.

Should be an interesting OOW in a couple  of weeks.

(Mobile) Labo(u)r Day!

I have written before that US immigration policy is dated – we focus on country based quotas, family reunification, lotteries, and there is way too much angst about the social cost of Mexican migrant labor. We have lost sight of an increasingly mobile global workforce which does not necessarily want to immigrate but wants to spend productive working years in the most welcoming environments. Young Irish who move around every few years, young Indians who come here for an advanced degree and a few years of experience then move back are the new “immigrant”. They can do what my late father-in-law, Tom could not do in 1915 – they can be in a new country in a matter of hours. Tom’s parents took 2 months to move back from Los Angeles to Ireland.

Last week I sat down to lunch with this new breed of “immigrant”. Bruce Stewart, my colleague at Gartner, is now Director at the iSchool in Toronto. He is a Canadian but spent years in Connecticut and then the Netherlands with Gartner. He then spent a few years in Vancouver, which distance wise and culturally, might as well be another country. He was telling me about the point system Canada uses to attract specific types of qualified talent – successfully if you see how multi-cultural both Toronto and Vancouver are. It is estimated in both cities, half the population was not born in Canada. Bruce, however, feels that Canada could do better. When an immigrant lands, there is little effort to help them integrate. From Bruce’s research about potentially spending time in Australia, he feels they do a much better job integrating new immigrants into professional societies and chosen fields of focus.

That was confirmed by an Indian taxi driver in Toronto having immigrated to Canada a few years ago, now wants to move to the US. Another driver from Hong Kong, in Canada for two decades, may consider moving back to the bustling new China. This is the new “immigrant”.  Like capital, much more fluid than ever before and willing to move wherever they feel most welcome.

I came home to see a letter from the Irish consul in New York. My daughter, taking advantage of her Irish mother, wants to get an EU passport so she can position herself to easily work there in the future. More signs of the new “immigrant”.

As we celebrate Labor Day in US and Canada, it is important to reflect that much of the world celebrates it on May 1, Australia does it on the first Monday in October, New Zealand the fourth Monday in October. It is a subtle indicator we view labor differently.

Many of these countries also add what we consider a redundant U in labor. But that U is a sublimal indicator of how welcome they make this new mobile immigrant feel. It is the next frontier in talent management.

Toronto Technology Tornado

I find myself in Toronto every few years and my image of the city has been one of a financial services capital, a baseball town, and a well-run large city – someone called it “New York run by the Swiss”.

But in a 24 hour period I managed to catch many glimpses of the wide technology landscape of the city. Pretty impressive as you will see.

The trip was anchored around a presentation to Cognizant’s Insurance practice in the city. In a beautiful, spanking new delivery center I had a chance to discuss how various insurance companies are learning to leverage pattern recognition, healthtech, sensors etc, in various life, property, auto and other markets.

In a complete change of pace, William Mougayar invited me to visit Xtreme Labs in Toronto (where his startup eqentia has office space).  While the insurance industry freely admits it is cautious in adoption of new technology, Farhan Thawar, the VP of Engineering there is redefining “agile development” with his beehive of young developers, many of them interns many from the nearby U. of Waterloo, and busy developing mobile, gaming, search applications. Xtreme by the way comes from worship of “extreme programming”.

I had a chance to visit with Bruce Stewart, former colleague at Gartner and now Director at the iSchool at the  U. of Toronto. As I learned during my presentation there, the school does not want to teach you to code but is focused on “ information in all its forms, whether cultural, technological, or archival, interacts with society, and how it helps to shape, and is shaped by, technological and human concerns.” The conversation there mostly focused on the chapter on ethics in technology.  Bruce is bringing an impressive set of external speakers to the iSchool to cover a wide range of strategic technology topics.

At night, I was one of the presenters at Ignite. Think stand up comedy (yes similar language, also)– bunch of young and not so young (@pippinlee tweeted: I'm claiming @tedlee and i are the youngest here by at least half a dozen years), mostly geeky folks come and listen to speakers who stumble and fumble to present 20 slides in 5 minutes. Amazing variety of topics presented as the agenda here shows.  My presentation is here – I should have limited myself to 2 slides, but the rules required 20:)

Marnie Landon kindly gave me a ride back to the hotel and was describing various other aspects of the local tech landscape including MaRS – which was started with the question ““Is there a better way to capture the commercial potential of Toronto's $1 billion in annual science and technology research spending?”

And there was a meet up of three local tech networks – Knowledge Management, Wikis & Semantic Web - who came bright and early just prior to Labor Day weekend to listen to me talk about the themes in my book. No 5 minute limitation here :) Frankly, I was disappointed I could only spend a couple of hours there.

All that in less than 24 hours. So many people to thank – but biggest takeaway was Toronto tech is a hidden gem more of us need to get to know and leverage.

PS: I could easily have spent a few more days visiting RIM, my friends at Descartes and others in the tech suburb of Waterloo.