deal architect

The IT Reality Check

InformationWeek tells a depressing, if not surprising, story

“But when we asked 382 business pros--a mix of IT and non-IT people--about how IT is perceived in their companies, we were shocked by what we found in both the responses and the emotional comments that accompanied them.

The data shows a disparity between how IT views its performance (not bad) and how non-IT pros view it (not good). For example, asked if their companies' business users are at least moderately happy with the quality, timeliness, and cost of IT projects, two-thirds of the IT pros who responded to our survey said yes, but just half of non-IT pros said so. Asked if IT is foremost a support or maintenance organization (as opposed to the innovation engine it might want to be), 39% of IT pros agreed, but 54% of non-IT pros agreed. Again and again, the data shows a disturbing gap between IT's perception of itself as reasonably innovative and effective, and non-IT's lukewarm view.

As powerful as the data is, the free-form responses we received--and we got dozens of them--cast an even harsher light”

Of course, many technology vendors are only too eager to pile on and say things like “oh, we long ago gave up on IT and only sell to business executives”. Not so fast. Their project charges and maintenance fees and roaming charges are classified as IT spend at most companies. And most executives and analysts are  waking up to the fact that 80 to 90% of their IT/telecom spend is with vendors. So, when the business executives malign IT, they are also blaming the vendors.

So, not surprisingly, Randy Mott, CIO at GM who is quoted in the article has announced plans to move from 90% outsourced to 90% insourced and to start with has planned to transfer 3,000 staff from his outsourcer (and former employer) HP.

Expect more such moves. The expectation and composition of IT are going through a tidal change.

More New Renaissance

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Simulator to combat distracted driving

Dreamforce sounds and sights

Man-machine conversations

Bill Clinton, the optimist

Elon Musk: The Iron Man

Breast Cancer Breakthrough

Who will  maintain our tech-heavy automobiles?

Hotels and industry events

I generally prefer industry events at hotels/resorts over those at convention centers. It means less wasted time on shuttle buses, and it usually means a somewhat manageable audience size.

But it is also showing up in some hotel negatives I have noticed in last couple of years.

1. Poor network support

For the large check the sponsor writes the hotel, it is shocking how often the stage network fails.  I was at a conference this week where the presenters joked it off as poor Apple and iPad technology, but the  sponsor deserves much better. As for the audience or guest room wi-fi, many hotels view that as a way to make another $ 15 to 20 a day, and often not deliver. And this after many have negotiated free wi-fi and “resort fees” in the room rate with the sponsor.

2. Master account billing

As a speaker or invited media guest, I am fortunate to have my hotel bill picked up by many event sponsors. At check-in I provide a credit card for incidentals. It is depressing how often at check out they have also charged for the room and you have to wait for the reversal accounting process. Master account billing has been around for at least a decade, and yet many hotels cannot seem to get it right.

3. Loyalty recognition

When your room charge goes to the Master you know you will not get credit on your frequent stayer account.  But what’s annoying is some hotels also ignore your other privileges like free water bottles, late checkout etc.  It’s almost as if they are punishing you for staying at the group rate (which often far exceeds AAA or other negotiated rates the hotel offers other guests during the same time period)

4. Spam

I cannot tell you how many event hotels automatically add you to their marketing database. I don’t recall consciously opting –in during check-in. I wish event sponsors would negotiate a blanket opt-out for their guests.

5. Catering

You hear of problems with individuals with unique dietary requirements, but how do you explain no coffee at all during an event break? Or water fountains with no cups? In general, hotels handle well the sit-down feeding of large masses of humanity, but the buffets (which would seem much easier) often break down. Sandy Kemsley, the process expert recently blogged about how the tea/coffee station could be improved

Whatever our individual complaints, I really feel sorry for event staff for having to put up with our wi-fi, billing and other complaints. They thought they had outsourced all that to the hotel and must tear their hair out for becoming the first-line help desk for those issues.

More New Florence

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Not your parent’s Greyhound

“Fast Fashion”

WellPoint: Big Industry Changes, Big Data

Microsoft Data Center evolution

The 747 SCA (Shuttle Carrier Aircraft)

Augmented Reality Kitchens

Marc Benioff as Charlie Rose

StayFit program for Truckers

SAP’s rollout malaise

Reading Dennis Howlett’s update on HANA, you get the sense it is the first time SAP has had rollout issues

I can point to several more lethargic product rollouts in the last few years

• ECC 6.0 available since 2005 is still only up to 80% penetration in the customer base
• The ByD – Business By Design - product introduced in 2007 (after a few iterations) is still at only a few hundred installs
• The SAP Mobile Apps store shows fewer than 100 new apps introduced in 2012.

SAP says it has 194,000 customers worldwide. It should be able to bribe, cajole, coerce at least 5% of its customers to adopt anything – so it should not even bother to talk about progress till it has shipped 10,000 units of anything. It has hundreds of partners who should be developing thousands of new mobile apps every quarter.

SAP has not forgotten how to develop. It has not forgotten how to sell. But I strongly believe it has forgotten how to launch new products. The pricing, the use case development, the business case guidance, the partner ecosystem management when a product is immature all call for skillsets which cannot be assigned to developers or salespeople. It needs a dedicated product launch team whose prime target should be “get us to 10,000 customers in a year”

SAP’s repeated tendency to announce products way ahead of critical customer mass has led me to ask them to take me of their briefing list. But I don’t matter – the company’s entire credibility has suffered in the last few years as a result of its rollout malaise. 

“The Incumbents are not prepared”

Aneel Bhusri of Workday comments to The New York Times show the confidence in one of the locker rooms I described in “Halftime in Enterprise Tech”

The Workday I.P.O., Mr. Bhusri said, completes a four-part model of cloud-based enterprise software. The first cloud, exemplified by Salesforce.com, he says, concentrates on customer-facing software, like sales and customer collaboration products. The second, occupied by Workday, looks inward to the processes that run the business.

An information technology automation cloud, which Mr. Bhusri says is dominated by ServiceNow, is the third element. ServiceNow went public in August. A fourth cloud would consist of business- and industry-specific applications developed by independent consultants and in-house engineers.

“From a customer standpoint, if you can get the best of breed from each, throw in Google for e-mail and documents, how is that not better? How is a large vendor going to compete?” Mr. Bhusri says.

Some would argue he is a bit casual about the fourth cloud, but in reverse you could argue that most industries have morphed significantly in the last decade and the industry solutions of the incumbents don’t give them much of an edge.

Like I said it should be an interesting second half.

Software AG’s “Agility Layer”

I spent some time at ProcessWorld, Software AG’s annual event. I very much enjoyed TUCON, Tibco’s event, and I wanted to hear about AG’s own events processing, SOA, collaboration and other initiatives.

The conference started off with a very promising positioning statement “We bring agility back to enterprises who have lost it by implementing packaged applications”.

Since AG tools like Aris have long helped companies document their enterprise processes (and in the 90s Aris was almost synonymous with SAP projects) I wanted to hear how AG breaks the “concrete” companies have poured around themselves with their ERP, CRM and other packages. I also wanted to hear about agility in companies which have similarly been stuck in long-term SOA projects.

Instead of sticking to that theme and showcasing case studies around it, the conference felt the need to latch itself to the hot buzzwords of today – Big Data, social, in-memory, mobile and cloud.  So, the announcements around WebMethods 9.0 talk about extending its integration layer to cloud based applications. WebMethods Pulse supports instant mobile notification. Aris 9.0 introduces a Connect feature for social networking. The Terracotta acquisition allows distributed caching and in-memory computing for Java. Adabas is one of the oldest NoSQL databases around.

Cannot blame AG for wanting to leverage these market trends. I just don’t think it has enough customers around these new features. Indeed, I attended a nice awards ceremony today where 8 AG customers were honored for innovation. The categories reflected Software AG’s traditional value points – Process excellence, IT/Business Alignment, Productivity etc not the more recent Social, Big Data etc categories.

Having said that, like at TUCON, I saw a wide range of industries represented at the event – healthcare, casinos, beverages etc. And most talked about their innovations using AG tools rather than the sob stories of project overruns and upgrade headaches that you hear over and over at so many ERP conferences.

I would love to go back next year and see more substance around the Agility messaging, and yes, seeing the innovation categories reflect the social, mobile, Big Data so we can see more customers rather than just product announcements with those buzzwords.

The “Roger Eberts” of Technology

My wife and I enjoyed The Bourne Legacy. In my case, it was after I saw it the second time. The first time I missed many of the nuances behind the spyware and pharmacology that define the movie (as I blogged here). So, I did some research on the web before I went to see it again, and I read (among others) Roger Ebert’s commentary.

Now, Roger is an institution as film critics go, but I was dismayed by his review of this Bourne movie

• “I freely confess that for at least the first 30 minutes I had no clear idea of why anything was happening.”
• “These meds are a virus that alters genes” (embarrassingly simplistic compared to movie dialog  including “a mitochondrial rise in uptake by 1 1/2 percent”)
• “one particularly determined undercover cop with dark aviator glasses persists beyond all reason.” (reality – not a cop at all, an example of the “Superspies” the movie is built around)

No offense, but Roger should stick to reviewing romantic movies like “Hope Springs” (which, btw my wife and I also loved and for which Roger wrote an authoritative review particularly about Tommy Lee  Jones).

I feel the same way about a number of tech industry “influencers” – analysts, bloggers, journalists. At OOW, I saw several who still wanted to hear about PeopleSoft features when Larry Ellison was talking about geotags and “the anatomy of a tweet” and explaining nuances of solid state storage (SSD) and PCI-based flash.

But broadly, I am more concerned about how even big analyst firms like Gartner are not keeping up with the explosion in technologies. As I wrote in my recent book

“search the Gartner database for 3M and you get very few hits. In Chapter 18 we saw 3M has products in 46 different technology platforms. Gartner is the largest technology research firm. What gives?”

A fellow Gartner alum was recently lamenting that analyst firms are hiring much younger. I have less of an issue with that so long as they are hiring a wide range of STEM backgrounds.

My book profiles a number of technologically “elite” organizations.  They deserve “elite” industry and financial analysis and media just as director Tony Gilroy deserves a tech-savvy kind of critic for his brand of “techno-thriller’.

More innovation

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Color Kindles and Nooks

Oracle’s Social Enabled Enterprise

This redefines the programming “school bus”

Algorithms and equations that run our lives

Good Design is Good Business

What data says about us

MIT Technology Review’s Annual List of Young Innovators

Imagination and Innovation

Halftime in Enterprise Tech

Friday morning, Workday executives opened the NYSE and their market valuation quickly rose to a staggering $ 8 billion. To me, it was a fitting cap to a fascinating month in enterprise technology punctuated by Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld and several other events.

It’s halftime.

At least that is what I got from a conversation with Mark Hurd at OOW. Talking about SaaS vendors he said they only support a handful of the 750 business processes he presided over when he was at HP. Since he left, HP has announced plans to implement both Salesforce.com and Workday, but Mark is right. HP and other large, global companies have all kinds of complex supply chain, lab, warranty and other vertical processes (see excerpt of HP’s supply chain complexity from my recent book) so far untouched by SaaS.

Moving on to infrastructure when I asked him how Oracle would compete against Facebook and Google cloud efficiencies (also excerpted here and here from my book) he pointed out enterprise customers have not benefitted from those (primarily) consumer tech offerings. Amazon, Rackspace on the other hand, he feels, have only “mildly interesting” offerings for the enterprise.

Those are second half opportunities.

But let’s look at how Oracle and others have fared in the first half.  As Tim Chou wrote in his guest column, Oracle was a cloud pioneer with BusinessOnline as early in 1999. SAP has had a string of next gen projects and acquisitions – Project Heidelberg, BYD, SuccessFactors. IBM first talked about OnDemand Computing in 2001, and since they have had Cloud Manifestos but little Cloud Magic. Microsoft has sunk billions in its Azure data centers. They have had plenty of opportunities, but the performance can best be described as the equivalent of “a number of fumbles.”

Yes it is half time. And Clint Eastwood looms large.

There is the inspirational Clint from the Chrysler Super Bowl commercial promising things will be much different in the second half. And there is the mocking Clint from the RNC – the one of empty chairs, or in our case empty clouds.

Mark, Hasso, Ginni and Steve have plenty of reason to keep the second Clint far away. And Meg presumably does not just want to be a bystander.

It should be an interesting second half.