deal architect

My Happy Place: New Florence

The New Florence. New Renaissance innovation blog was born in March 2005. Facebook had a different name then. No one had heard of the iPhone. Or SpaceX.  Or AWS. Honestly, I thought I would run out of material in a couple of years. After 6,500 posts, I can safely say I grossly miscalculated. If anything, innovation keeps accelerating.

Someone asked me if it took 15-20 minutes to write a post. He was off by a 10X factor. Much of the effort is in deciding what to profile. I note down everything interesting I read, I see on TV, I experience in my travels, I see in my advisory work. One in 5 finally makes it to a post. Then I find a couple of articles and videos to embed which provide different perspectives on the topic. Digitizing much of the content takes surprising amount of time. I used to go to Barnes and Noble once a month and run through a bunch of magazines and get ideas from them. Now I get them from over 50 magazines on Apple News, similar number of channels on YouTube TV and some direct subscriptions. The next challenge is to find as many non-paywall versions of the content to embed. Some of them annoyingly will not even let me access the full content even though I have paid for them via Apple or Google. Why would I burden my readers with those pubs?

In the last year, I have launched a whole bunch of video series (on the Deal Architect YouTube channel) and several travel posts on Instagram. I have been busy helping a CEO narrate a book, and work on several advisory projects. All that has reduced time for New Florence. But I carved out time for it in the last few weeks. 

And it has been a joyous time. I got to research the drones, the autonomous shuttles and other technology at the Tokyo Olympics. I have explored what Paris will offer at the 2024 games. I have seen Jeff Bezos pivot to space, Mark Zuckerberg to his vision of metaverse, and Elon Musk to domestic robots. I got to profile our trip to the sites and history of Wyoming and South Dakota. Much more coming.

In contrast, I see so many people continue to scare others about COVID or harp on woke stuff. Whatever. To me, the world moves forward when people deliver innovative products, amazing customer service and creative solutions to problems. They deserve to be profiled.

I chose the title of the blog 16 years ago because I thought Florence must have felt as vibrant and creative during the European Renaissance. I am even more convinced of that.

It is a great time to be alive!

Burning Platform: Architectural Trends in Enterprise Software

Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here . Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras and Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research

This time it is Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. He follows architectural, platform and other technological underpinnings of application vendors like SAP and Workday and of hyperscalers like Amazon and Google.

He talks about how the public cloud has scaled amazingly during the pandemic. He also says first-generation SaaS players will have to adjust to the growing strength of the hyperscalers. SAP has been talking about its 4+1 strategy and Salesforce has announced Hyperforce. He sees an opportunity for application vendors to not emphasize their platforms but to re-imagine business processes. Traditionally, they have relied on customers and SIs to help them codify business process logic - now they can lead using new technologies like ML that their traditional sources of guidance are not that familiar with as yet.

We talk about AWS, Azure and Google and why Europe still does not have a player like Alibaba. We discuss the prospect for Oracle in this segment.

We talk about how it has been an amazing year for new data streams - COVID-19, election polling, census, shortened sports seasons, all kinds of planning/forecasting scenarios, video streams and new players like Snowflake and Palantir. In the enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth" Yet the citizen on the street is actually cynical of much of the data because definitions are inconsistent and the media has been cherry picking data to suit its narrative. It's the Mark Twain's quote updated for today - Lies, Big Lies and Big Data. We talk about how to build trust in data.

We discuss developer communities - Salesforce Trailblazers, SAP breathing new life into ABAP, Apple, Microsoft and Google expanding their developer communities and what that means in the meta context of building v. buying enterprise applications.

Finally, we have some fun. You can see his playful side and how he convinced a Starbucks barista to brand my cup as "Sugar Daddy". I was the only one on the Southwest plane who did not realize it, even though they were laughing at me. He finally showed me a photo of my cup. No more freebies for him:)

Really invigorating session.

Innovation Season

My innovation blog, New Florence will celebrate its 15th birthday this March. It will have clocked over 6,500 posts. I recently looked at various patterns on that blog. Innovation stories and news ebb and flow from different industries and geographies. One particular search tried to identify the most active phase of the year I get to curate from. I would have sworn it would have been the enterprise conference season when I attend a number of events.

I was wrong - it was actually a "quarter" from the end of November through early March. Here's some of what shows up on a regular basis, year after year.

Holiday festivities

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and the Chinese New Year always allow opportunities to highlight spectacular decorations, fireworks and meals. Black Friday, holiday deliveries and returns allow for showcasing advances in ecommerce, same day delivery and reverse logistics.

Winter travel

The growing global passenger traffic and weather challenges always allow for showcasing how airports, airlines, traffic control and meteorologists are perfecting their craft.

Industry events

Plenty of innovation is showcased at CES, NRF (Retail) and HIMSS (Healthcare) events. In the past, the Detroit Auto Show in January would also provide fodder.

Sporting/entertainment events

The NFL SuperBowl commercials lineup usually brings out the best from Madison Avenue. The game itself allows for reviewing stadium, on-field and broadcasting technologies. Daytona 500 showcases auto and broadcast innovations. The Oscars usually allow for a review of how STEM is helping Hollywood innovate.  Fashion weeks in Paris, Milan and elsewhere, the Westminster Kennel Dog show in New York often provide other ideas. Every four years, the Winter Olympics provide inspiration.

End of year

There are usually plenty of "best of year" and "forecast for next year" stories to select from.

Other inspirations

The US President's State of the Union address, Bill and Melinda Gates annual foundation letter, Warren Buffett's annual Berkshire letter, and the WEF annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland usually have nuggets of progress in healthcare, government and elsewhere.

It's not to say the rest of the year does not provide innovation inspiration - I average a post a day, come rain or shine, but for this "quarter" from late November through early March, I could easily have 4-5 posts a day.

I will share thoughts on other patterns I noticed across the 6,500 posts over the course of the next few months.

America’s Cup: A Polymath event

Oracle invited me and a few other analysts to Bermuda to witness a few of the races in the 35th America’s Cup. It is a vendor of many technologies to the US team and I was interested in all the analytics it supported before, during and after each race.

What was eye opening was the multitude of other STEM disciplines that I was exposed to at the event including:

• aerodynamics of fixed wing sails
• fluid control concepts to move power generated by the grinders/cyclists
• material science in the foils, sails, hulls, crew gear
• health science to monitor extreme crew performance
• meteorology to keep up with wind patterns
• broadcast technology from helicopters, drone, and the vessels
• telemetry from vessels
• data science around so much to analyze before, during and after each race.

Rocket scientists from Airbus, Parker Hannifin, Medtronic, GoreTex and, of course, Oracle are just some of the brands which have contributed science and technology to the sport.  I will be profiling many of their innovations over the next few days.

Son of SMAC

Cognizant popularized the acronym SMAC for the stack of Social, Mobile, Analytic and Cloud technologies where most innovation IT dollars are going. Indeed Malcolm Frank,  EVP Strategy and Marketing was talking about it as far back as November of 2012.

In a more recent survey of over 2,000 executives around the world, they found continued interest in those SMAC areas, but growing interest in IoT, automation, and cybersecurity. The core of digital technologies keeps growing. CEO Francisco D’Souza also provided some color commentary on the survey results in my interview last week. 

Download a copy of their latest Cognizanti magazine for more details on the survey and lots of stories of digital transformations.

 

This is what Florence must have felt like during the European Renaissance

Florence was an incredibly wealthy and innovative place in the 1400s

“The artists, architects, thinkers and political figures who led the Renaissance were all born on the fertile soil in and around Florence, within the same century: Masaccio, Donatello, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Verocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, Lorenzo the Magnificent de’ Medici and Machiavelli, just to name a few.”

Inspired by that time and place, I named my innovation blog New Florence. New Renaissance. Over the last dozen years it has given me immense joy as I have cataloged over 5,000 posts and hundreds of pages in my books on innovative people, products and places. I am even more convinced today we are living in an incredibly blessed time.

As I flip through the Consumer Reports New Car Buying Guide I

see page after page of SUVs. Then I remember it does not include the smaller Marutis and Hyundai Cretas I saw during my recent visit to Mumbai and Chinese models I saw in Hong Kong. (Wikipedia has a fuller list here). Our parents would drool at the choice and the incredible range of options in each.

As I studied the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for my last book, I saw we have choices of over 800 occupations. For four years, the BLS has also reported 5 million unfilled jobs spread across these occupations. And that does not begin to catalog opportunities in hundred of franchises, platforms like Amazon Fulfillment and the iOS ecosystem, in alternative healthcare like chiropractors, at ethnic grocers and many others. Our grandparents would have drooled at all this choice in how to make a satisfying living.

And yet with all this abundance, you get just as much of an abundance of whiny stories.

“The Middle Class is Dead”

In each of the last two years the US middle class has bought 17 million cars, an annual record. The middle class which makes up the middle 2/3 of tax returns filed with the IRS shows $ 6 trillion in Adjusted Gross Income. This segment of the population has the majority of IRAs, 401ks and pension funds which account for over $ 20 trillion in retirement assets. No question, this wealth is not evenly spread, but to say only the 1 percenters have benefitted and to call the middle class “dead” is incredibly insulting.

“US Manufacturing is Dead”

We just accept the myth the US has offshored all its manufacturing. The National Association of Manufacturers says we manufactured over $ 2 trillion worth of products in 2015. Many of those 17 million cars mentioned above were made or assembled in the US. Boeing, Airbus, Embraer are all making planes somewhere in the US. Our Chemical production is doing very well with cheaper petroleum. Places like Greenville, SC and the Golden Triangle in MS have been reborn with advanced manufacturing. With President Trump we should see an every bigger boost to US manufacturing.

“The World is an absolute mess”

My friend Frank Scavo frequently tweets or emails me factoids on how the world keeps improving even though all we seem to see in the media is about strife and disease.

Here are some stats from Human Progress

• In 1966, average life expectancy was only 56 years. Today it’s 72. That’s an increase of 29 percent.
• Out of every 1,000 infants born, 113 died before their first birthday. Today, only 32 die. That’s a reduction of 72 percent.
• Median income per person rose from around $6,000 to around $16,000, or by 167 percent – and that’s adjusted for inflation and purchasing power.
• The food supply rose from about 2,300 calories per person per day to over 2,800 calories, an increase of 22 percent, thus reducing hunger.
• The length of schooling that a person could typically expect to receive was 3.9 years. Today, it’s 8.4 years – a 115 percent increase.
• The world has become less authoritarian, with the level of democracy rising from -0.97 to 4.23 on a scale from -10 to 10. That’s an improvement of 536 percent.

Yet we have so many cynics. Lies, Damn Lies and Stats, they say and ironically bring out stats which support their own gloomy point of view. Even President Trump is guilty of making things sound worse than they are. I understand part of his motivation — he can later take credit for improvements. But it is toxic to constantly whine things are bad.

Let’s savor our bounty. We are living in an incredible time and place. Let’s pledge to keep making it better and better. In the meantime, Happy 12th, innovation blog!

The Jigsaw of Modern Marketing

Oracle invited me to its Marketing Cloud event in New York City this week. While it was showcasing its growing portfolio of assets like Eloqua, Vitrue, BlueKai, Responsys and Compendium, I was as impressed with the range of conversations the event allowed with a number of high-powered marketing executives and Oracle’s own thought leaders.

John Harrobin, Chief Marketing Officer, Verizon Enterprise Solutions touched on the data analysis and transition from traditional to digital ad spend they started back in 2009. He said they have seen a 50% decrease in cost per acquisition. Not just the impact on its own marketing budget, as an ISP it also impacts their product thinking. Maryssa Miller, Director of Digital Commerce, JetBlue Airways highlighted how their email campaigns promoting available “Even More Space” seats have become more timely and targeted with demonstrable revenue improvements . Later I put in a personal request for similar emails which highlight flights which offer their gradually rolling out but blazing fast ViaSat wifi.  Luci Rainey, Vice President, Acquisition and On-boarding, Comcast described the 40% increase they have seen in their email open rates.  Clay Stobaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Wiley talked about his experience with Eloqua campaigns (as a Wiley author I spent a few minutes with him afterwards about marketing support authors can provide and would benefit from).

The conversations with Kevin Akeroyd, GM of the Oracle Marketing Cloud and Reggie Bradford, SVP of Product Development covered an even wider range of topics. The continuing role of agencies who in many ways play a bigger role than systems integrators when it comes to marketing technologies. The competitive landscape for Oracle in the space –particularly vis a vis Adobe, Salesforce and Microsoft . The growing opportunities for marketers for rationalization of omni-channel CX across in-person, web and mobile platforms. The complexity of social listening and sentiment analysis across borders and cultures. The growing importance of content marketing as B2B buyers do more of their research in self-service mode rather than wait for product details from salespeople.

I also had a short conversation with Judith Sim, Oracle’s CMO about how she is using all this new technology in-house and how it is improving sales field productivity. It should make for a very interesting story - I hope to have a much longer write up when I spend more time with her.

Of course, all this was in a savvy digital setting.

A few blocks away the billboards in Times Square and the major network studios are proof traditional advertising is not exactly dying. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal today profiled Laura Desmond one of the largest ad buyers in the world who explains why TV advertising continues to be resilient (with over 12X global spend compared to that on online video). If you talk to marketers at Coke and Colgate or Ikea they explain why cricket stadium sponsorships in India, storefront campaigns in Indonesia, radio and catalog marketing in other markets are not disappearing any time soon.

All this just makes for an exciting time for a modern marketer. So many channels to optimize, so many technologies to evaluate, so much customer and product data to crunch.

Way past Systems of Record and Engagement

InformationWeek has kindly run a column on the new book The Digital Enterprise. My basic premise is IT has become fun and profitable for most of the companies we interviewed for the book. The reason is they have moved past systems of record and even systems of engagement and are focused on systems of advantage.

Read the full column here.

During the edit, they dropped for reasons of length some other examples I had included in the column. They included:

• Celso Guitoko, Global CIO at Nissan Motor, described the “steering-by-wire” and electric vehicle innovations their technology investments are enabling.
• Echo Entertainment described how its casinos in Australia are exploring digital technologies such as RFID and facial recognition to provide better customer service.
• Magne Frantsen described the Statoil Management System the company uses to manage safety and promote operational excellence across its massive exploration assets in the oil and gas industry. Optimized for its North Sea operations, the system is evolving to support the fact that 70% of its production is expected in 2020 to come from vastly different sources such as shale fields in North America and CO2 injected gas fields in Algeria.
• Several executives talked about how customers increasingly expect personalization, so they'll have to embrace new marketing and production techniques around mass customization and agile shop floors to support it.

Of course, this is just a small sample of what the 350+ pages in the book describe. Other customers talk about complex event processing, agile robotics,  semantic product memories, wearable computers, 3D visualization and many other technologies they are leveraging in their industries.

Download a Kindle version for only US $ 3.99 or EU 3.99 and read about the systems of advantage these companies are creating .  And feel good doing so - Software AG is donating net proceeds to charity. Enjoy!

A month of passion

Starting on January 13, there has been a gallery of 15 guest posts on New Florence about how science and tech are evolving people’s passions, hobbies, interests. Even more impressive few repeat the ones from the similar 2009 series.

Please enjoy each and if you have an interesting work-life balancing activity, please consider contributing. I will help you embellish your draft.

Live to Air Broadcasting – Robert Lavigne

Urban Walks – Giovanni Rodriguez

Working Out - Ben Pring

White-Collar Rock – Krishnan Chatterjee

Target Shooting  - Scott Schenker

Genealogy – Catherine Marenghi

Classic Rock - David Deal

Museums  - Jeanne Achille

Music - Brad Callahan

Environmental Conservation - Mark Crofton

Birding – Margaret Newman

Ham Radio – Peter Coffee

Fitness – Jarret Pazahanick

Hockey – Eric Dirst

Cycling – Nick Hortovanyi

The Big Data of Innovation

Next month, the New Florence blog will celebrate two milestones  - its 9th birthday and 4,000 posts. Add to that the 00s of hours of my consulting and book case study interviews and I have a nice database to analyze for patterns.

NF is categorized by nearly 50 topics from Data Visualization to 3D printers  and I periodically summarize the global sources they are coming from, but even more interesting is to see the “entities” they are coming from. It is a constantly shifting kaleidoscope – but here is a loose categorization.

Large technology vendors – 25%

Amazon, Apple. Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, SAP etc etc …get plenty of media and analyst coverage which should suggest they get the majority of NF posts. Actually they make up only about 25% of this blog’s coverage. When you look at innovation projects at (business) customers the tools of these vendors are usually too horizontal or too expensive to make too much of a dent. They have much more impact on back office and infrastructure IT.  NF does like to write about the operations of these vendors  - their supply chains, their data centers  etc– and how they are themselves innovating. Of course with their sprawling portfolio of skills, these vendors can pull together machine learning. cloud infrastructures and other assets which allow them to create standout solutions, just wish they did so consistently.

Large non-tech companies – 25%

Ever since my 2011 research for The New Technology Elite where I cataloged 75+ industries which are embedding technology in their products and services, this blog has cataloged product, process, marketing and business model innovation at companies like BMW, Corning, Delta Airlines. GE, Keurig, Lego, Siemens and countless others.  Most bloggers and media find this innovation boring or difficult to categorize in their market TLA classifications. Still others in an honest moment will tell you they don’t make any money from these companies so feel little incentive to profile their innovations.

Fast growing vendors – 15%

This blog has cataloged a number of SaaS/cloud and mobile vendors over the years. Entrepreneurs and VCs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere provide a steady diet of posts. It is a joy to see firms like Workday and Appirio and HireVue and FireEye evolve and thrive years after I first write about them. Often a trip to Toronto or Lexington, KY will allow for opportunities to profile local tech communities. I also like to stay in touch with VARs who keep expanding their portfolio of products  into innovative POS, collaboration and other technologies for SME customers who typically have light internal IT capabilities

SME non-tech customers – 5%

I find the German Mittelstand – its ecosystem of mid market companies – fascinating and profile companies from there and often similar ones from Japan, Poland and elsewhere. Ditto with creative and artisanal communities in the US, Italy and elsewhere.

Academia/Research Units – 5%

Basic research at several universities, at labs at Microsoft, GE, elsewhere and papers from professors I meet through book research and stay in touch with provides a bit of a different and forward looking dimension to the blog

The “Calendar” – 10%

Events and holidays which repeat every year like the State of the Union speech and St. Patrick’s Day and those that repeat every few years like the Olympics provide a steady stream of posts. The changing technology and design thinking provides a nice timeline of innovation and our zeitgeist – the changing spirit of our times.

Personal Life – 10%

The guest series I ran in 2009 and am running again this year where people talk about how science and technology is helping evolve their passions/hobbies provides a fascinating glimpse of how pervasive technology is in life. As houses and cars and clothes get “smarter” they provide plenty of other posts.

Unexpected Places – 5%

Search the blog for Estonia, Dubai, Singapore and you will see plenty of  posts. Uganda and Ukraine have far fewer but the blog likes to also profile what may appear low-tech but helps evolve life for its citizens and qualifies as innovation.

The percentages I have above change quite a bit from year to year as companies and regions ebb and flow with their innovation output. But when I hear people complain they see innovation slowing down, I tell them they are not looking wide enough.  I am part of many communities across these areas and unfortunately folks in each believe they are the only innovative people. I also see too many analysts and bloggers cling to their unique market segments be it CRM or data centers and “project” innovation from that view out.

The NF pace of posts keeps accelerating. Based on average of 100 posts a month in last few months, New Florence could have a 1,000 post year. In contrast, the first 1,000 posts took the blog 3 and a half years to achieve. And this pace accelerates even though my definition of what qualifies for including on the blog keeps getting much more demanding. 

9 years later with this wave of relentless innovation I am even more convinced this is what Florence must have felt like during the European Renaissance and glad that I named the blog what I did.

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