deal architect

Burning Platform: Winning in the 4th Industrial Revolution

In the 73rd episode of Burning Platform, we host (again) Marty Groover, CTO at C5MI

In previous appearances he has talked about applying 4^th Industrial Revolution concepts in companies like Caterpillar.

Here we use his new book, Speed of Advance  as backdrop to discuss the changed US industrial sector with more reshoring and supply chain rethinking. SoA is a Navy term which calculates the speed of a ship anticipated along an intended track. As a surface warfare officer, Marty Groover spent more than two decades leading an intricate operational symphony of communications processes, computer systems, and weapons programs.

In our digital world, we often underplay the role of the physical, blue collar world - we still have to make, grow, transport, service lots of "stuff". Or we try to just throw technology at the problem and think that will work miracles. The labor shortages, process changes and breakdowns during the last couple of years have been a wake up call.  

In this book, Marty shows how to create an enhanced, synchronized system between technology and the people who use it to produce winning results in the 4th Industrial Revolution. The technologies include robotics, 3D printing, IoT and others which are helping redefine the shop floor, the warehouse and so much else.

Marty has a Kindle eBook launch pricing promotion at 99c for the next few days. Take advantage of the offer here

Burning Platform: Architectural Trends in Enterprise Software

In the 72nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Product and Technology at Workday.

Sayan is, in many ways, a rocket scientist. He has degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT. He started his career as an engineer on interplanetary spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on the early commercialization of global positioning systems (GPS).

However, in his career he has influenced more of the arc of enterprise software. He arrived at Workday in 2015 through their acquisition of GridCraft which he co-founded. Prior to that, he led teams focused on next-generation collaboration products at Oracle. Leading up to that he worked at several startups for two decades

So, the conversation is a bit of a walk down memory lane. We invoke terms like SOA, CPU speeds and OLTP as we discuss today’s microservices and how Workday deals with scaling of massive transaction volumes across finance, hcm, procurement functions while also becoming a powerhouse in the planning/analytics space.

We have a bit of a debate on whether consumer tech is leading enterprise tech when it comes to ML and AI. That leads to threads on data regimes and bias in AI.

We have an interesting section on the need to rethink enterprise application categories and definitions, to break down traditional silos and to rethink business processes. As he says, the pandemic has forcefully shown us an enterprise is not just a “campus of buildings”. He discusses how Workday’s string of acquisitions has already helped challenge some of the traditional thinking.

This a master class on IT architectures.  You can see and hear Sayan's high-energy and passion for his role in shaping the industry in his body language and tone.

An absolute must watch.

 

Burning Platform: Enterprise Software in Emerging Markets

In the 71st episode of Burning Platform, we host Hyther Nizam, President, Middle East and Africa for Zoho.

Let me start off by saying I became a fan of Zoho way back in 2006 after this session with the CEO, Sridhar Vembu. Over the years I have written plenty about their business model,  his leadership style,  his humble philosophy about life and rural revival and what he calls “transnational localism” 

I had a chance to talk to Hyther about an exciting new product release (he also wears a product development hat) announcement planned for early March. I asked him if we could also talk about “transnational localism” as applied to his region which spans 10 countries across the Middle East and Africa. He does in the conversation below and you have to marvel at the product enhancements (like RTL – right to left UX needed for Arabic and other scripts), the sweat equity, the pricing subsidies and other investments Zoho makes in developing each market.

Contrast that to most other enterprise software vendors who try to replicate their expensive direct sales, partner heavy model when they look at global expansion. Additionally, most of them prioritize English speaking countries in their global plans. No wonder most SaaS applications, even after two decades, have very little customization for most of the world’s local languages, currencies and regs.

Zoho’s investments in MEA are clearly paying off as Hyther shares. His is one of the fastest growing regions at Zoho. Not sure other vendors can match their pricing model, but there are several philosophical and behavioral attributes they should consider emulating.

Personally, I am in awe of how Hyther managed to accomplish so much with global travel constrained in the pandemic affected last couple of years. And how he seems to fairly easily juggle his product responsibilities as well.

More on the product announcements next week.      

Burning Platform: Experiential Design in Enterprise Software

In the 70th episode of Burning Platform, we host Jeff Gelfuso, Workday’s first ever Chief Design Officer.

The pandemic has exposed all of us to the most honorable of customer services and in reverse, some incredibly disappointing experiences – in what I have called COVID copouts and Brexit BS. I worked on a project last year where I had a chance to ask a number of executives to catalog their good and bad personal experiences and I heard plenty around eCommerce, auto dealers, travel and other services. Accenture's design agency Fjord, has coined a term "liquid expectations" — "when you experience a service in one industry, it raises the bar for what you expect from other industries." I have a corollary to that: employee experiences play a huge part in customer experiences. Their frustration, fatigue, fear all negatively affect how they manifest themselves to the outside world.

With that backdrop, it was nice to host Jeff who has significant product design and R&D experience in the consumer tech world at Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. It is a fascinating conversation about the enterprise tech view of experiences and how wfh and hybrid workplaces have complicated the thinking.

Jeff talks about how he spent the first few months at Workday talking to over a hundred customer executives about their experiences and expectations. He also talks about the test bed of Workday’s own employee-centric culture and how that is helping his design thinking. His personal, virtual on-boarding experience and their HR moves like “Thank-you Fridays” during the pandemic are guiding his thinking. And how the HCM experiences are being adapted to Workday’s planning, financial, procurement and other applications.

I like his point about thinking about “end to end experiences” and being humble enough to recognize that you will never be able to anticipate how every user reacts to your software. And the resulting need to think about multiple roles, tailored experiences and to build flexibility into your design. We also discuss natural interfaces and the need to weave in external collaboration tools like Slack and Teams (and soon Metaverse tools).

He has a noble goal – simplification. He defines it as not pretending you can eliminate enterprise complexity, but pushing it more to the background. Other competitors have long promised ‘Run Simple”. Jeff is doing it in a vastly more complicated, hybrid workplace with heightened employee expectations.

Kudos to Workday for recognizing the need for a visionary design officer and recruiting someone from the consumer tech world. Jeff particularly impressed me with his empathetic approach to experiential design.

Burning Platform: Why are smart factories so dumb?

In the 69th episode of Burning Platform, we host Dan Miklovic of The Analyst Syndicate. He was a colleague of mine at Gartner and has over five decades of manufacturing experiences in various roles and industries.

We discuss massive changes in the industrial sector – robotics, 3D printing, the enterprise metaverse, IT/OT convergence,  the evolution of smart products, the trend of servitization in product companies and other trends. And why it is so difficult to re-shore production that was offshored, the talent shortages and the continued immaturity and the slow integration across various manufacturing technologies.

While we are snarky at times, we are both big believers in a strong US industrial sector.

And btw, the myth in the mainstream media is that US manufacturing is dead. The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world after China (3^rd if you count all of the EU as one country). We would love to see it get a lot more focus and create even more attractive jobs.

It was a pleasure catching up with Dan after so long, and you will find it an educational and entertaining half an hour

Burning Platform: Digital Value Trends

In the 68th episode of Burning Platform, we again host Tamas Hevizi, Global Head of Private Equity at Automation Anywhere to discuss trends he is seeing in digital markets from an investor perspective. He was previously a guest in December 2020.

He presents on 6 trends and we banter about each –  we get below the buzzwords and memes and discuss plenty of technologies and use cases across several industries

• Hybrid Workforces
• Decentralized Finance
• The Business Metaverse
• Digital Offshoring
• Convergence of Customer and Employee experiences
• The Autonomous Enterprise – not just individual processes

As he had written in his New Florence guest column, Tamas is always experimenting with new digital communication formats. He recorded this session on the riverside.fm recording and podcasting platform that he has been playing with.

In the previous episode in this series, we had discussed digital trends with Dion Hinchliffe of Constellation Research from a corporate exec perspective. Tamas presents a very different investor point of view (albeit with plenty of enterprise examples) in this invigorating half an hour.

Burning Platform: Sustaining Digital Transformations

In the 67th episode of Burning Platform, we host Dion Hinchcliffe, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT.

We talk about the progress around digital transformation projects and how the pandemic has affected them. Dion responds “the pandemic showed us we could transform quicker than we thought we could. IF we had the will to do it.”

Dion starts off distinguishing between “digitization" and “automation” as efficiency plays versus digital transformations which have at least some element of disruption, and think about the “art of the possible.”

We cover examples from retail, healthcare, food service, real estate and several other industries. He talks about tools which are definitely helping customers – digital transformation target platforms, process mining, low code and AI driven code generation. He cites use of incubators, industry consortia and centers of excellence around emerging technologies.

We discuss service providers – firms like Accenture and Deloitte, growing role of strategy firms like McKinsey and of hyperscalers like Google on such transformation journeys.

Are we hitting a point of exhaustion with such programs?  We better not  – he says only 15% of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud. In some ways we are still in the “crude, cave painting” phase of the journey. He is worried about mid market companies and companies with plenty of technical debt and those who have under invested in technology. We also cover the risk that companies will take short cuts like they did during the re-engineering wave in the 1990s. We reinforce it is a marathon, not a sprint.

We also discuss his personal digital lifestyle. This blog post about his "every day carry bag" shows you he practices what he preaches.

It is a fascinating half an hour of wisdom from Dion.

Burning Platform: A Christmas musical card

In the 66^th episode of Burning Platform, we repeat another holiday tradition, this time courtesy of Bonnie Tinder, founder and CEO of Raven Intel. Last year, Sandy Lo of Zoho had contributed Christmas carols on her piano.

Bonnie is immensely gifted. We had discussed her business which monitors project management trends and SI quality metrics here.  She has written about her figure skating and about her immensely entertaining lab, Grommet in the passion series on New Florence.

Here she introduces us to her flute and to her talented, 16 year old pianist son, Wally and mother Barbara Duncan (who is also Wally’s piano teacher)

Bonnie and Barbara start with What Child is This? and at 5.07 play Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. Wally plays Silent Night at 2.13. He is joined by Grommet, who is very well behaved. I suspect he is quietly scheming his next adventure.

Last week I shared the Curmudgeon Christmas Card with Dennis Howlett. That was a lot of fun. This one is pure joy - certainly has been the easiest episode for me to edit:)

What a talented family and what a beautiful gift to this series. Thank you, Bonnie.

Merry Christmas, everyone

Burning Platform: Analyzing the Analysts

In the 65rd episode of Burning Platform, we host Duncan Chapple, Co-Director of the Analyst Observatory at the U of Edinburgh.

He presents a summary of their 20^th annual Analyst Value Survey. It is a fascinating discussion of how the influencer space keeps evolving.

We cover dramatic shifts in technology buying centers  – verticalization and the impact of the pandemic, the growth of Asia/Pac, shadow IT and the fragmented landscape of advisers they turn to – traditional firms like Gartner, advisory firms like Everest, the Big 4, peer review sites like G2.

We discuss the changing role of the Analyst Relations functions in vendors and the likely move away from somewhat static, formulaic approach to market research to more scenario based planning.

We discuss several other topics – using analyst firms for influence v intelligence, the perception of analyst independence and the value of their content and market research.

The session ran long but we could have easily gone much longer. As an example we did not touch much on the impact of strategy consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG especially in complex digital transformations , and the advice, blogs and videos a small firm like mine brings to this landscape.

Burning Platform: Innovations and vertical trends in ERP for SMEs

In the 64th episode of Burning Platform, we host Rainer Zinow, who heads product management for SAP’s mid-market ERP offerings and Jory Lamb, CEO and Founder of VistaVu, a SAP midmarket partner which also offers their own complementary products

In the Analyst Cam episode I ran yesterday, Rainer presented the positioning of Business One v Business By Design v S/4HANA 

Here, Jory kicks it off by presenting on a customer, SEF Energy which provides Industrial Field Services in the oilfield equipment vertical. It nicely brings out IoT, predictive maintenance, employee health and safety and rental revenue angles. We next discuss the wholesale and distribution sector where they similarly have verticalized offerings which are getting increased focus given the many supply chain issues during the pandemic. He talks about how they prioritize across SAP’s many verticals. He also discusses implementations and automating labor on their projects.

Rainer talks about agriculture and the food and beverage supply chain. He also shows off a book which he says describes hundreds of SAP micro-verticals and innovations with a SME focus.  That book is available here 

The two episodes bring out nicely SAP’s strength in the mid-market contrary to the market perception as them only being a choice for large, global companies