aqualung

Chrysler and the F-Bomb

2011-03-15T10:12:21+10:30

When an employee of New Media Strategies dropped the f-bomb in a tweet from client Chrysler's Twitter account March 9, it might have been chalked up to one of those things that can happen to someone on a bad day. Instead, Chrysler decided not to renew its contract with the agency.

via adage.com

There's a lot of noise around this situation that focuses on the language used rather than the message. In the end, I think that the situation (handled properly) would have been no harm if the use of the f-bomb was the only problem. But the larger point from Chrysler's perspective is the negative sentiment to their home city, one they have trying to overcome with the Eminem ads and the "Imported from Detroit" tagline - the offending tweet was NOT the message Chrysler is trying to put across.

From my perspective, the even bigger problem is that Chrysler doesn't use its own voice, but an agency with its Twitter presence - sorry, but I don't see that as engaging in a conversation, nor do I see it as an authentic presence in social media. Social media/PR/marcomms agencies may be great at helping you set up a socmed strategy and presence, but they are a lousy proxy in a relationship - intermediaries just get in the way of hearing and being heard. Is that a lesson that companies STILL haven't learnt about social networks?

The Fragile to Agile Enterprise Architecture Framework

2010-11-02T16:46:21+10:30

The first question to answer is why did Fragile to Agile develop its own framework rather than use an existing framework like Zachmann or TOGAF? ... Firstly, in our experience none of the existing frameworks resonate with non technology people. The general reaction of business executives to Zachmann or TOGAF is akin to “ah, that’s an IT thing; I don’t need to understand that”. This is a poor starting point for a discipline that must be engaged with the business from beginning to end to be successful.

via www.fragiletoagile.com.au

While TOGAF (with version 9) has made some steps towards a greater business orientation, it DOES have an IT background, and will take some time to shake off that tag, if it ever does. TOGAF and other "high-ceremony" methodologies, taxonomies and frameworks also threaten a large and expensive project to implement - F2A is applicable out of the box, and can create value in a matter of weeks.

Synthesisers v Gatekeepers

2010-10-29T16:41:16+10:30

Response: Obvious to Him . . . Perhaps?

via www.euansemple.com

I was watching Euan Semple's video of his DO lecture, and at one stage he spoke about middle managers as intermediaries, and their potential for extinction as social media began to disintermediate them as it begins to permeate enterprise consciousness. Very briefly, he made what I think is an important distinction, one which is often overlooked in this type of conversation: there are two types of intermediary - "synthesisers" and "gatekeepers".

Synthesisers offer value as integrators, bridgebuilders, hubs and filters - they link people to other people, link people to information, and help make sense of information flow. This value will become more important, not less. These middle management incumbents will have the best chance of survival (they will still be subject to "shotgun" redundancies actioned by senior management with eyes on numbers rather than value, so they're not immune to the threat) as information flows increasingly become more important than information stores.

Gatekeepers, on the other hand, only offer interruptions to information flow, and attempt to hoard, rather than share, information. These will be most threatened by social media behind the firewall, and most likely to be disrupted by information flow.

New achurch & associates site

2010-10-19T13:37:42+10:30

For some time now I have continued to blog (albeit spasmodically) on this blog for topics which would probably have been on a "company" blog if I'd had one (I did set up an "achurch" blog here on Typepad, but wasn't particularly happy with putting more content here - I am really looking to take back some control of my own web presence!). I readily confess to having dragged the chain unforgivably on that front, but am pleased to say that (finally) I have my own hosting in place and have a new WordPress site at achurch & associates.

You'll notice it's a fairly unassuming design - a man needs to know his limitations :), to paraphrase Harry Callahan. You may also notice some of the content gets re-posted from here to there - it's not going to be a lot, but it makes sense to repeat some posts on the new site, and they will probably get a bit of an update in the process.

So what happens to this site? It will still get social media, politics, music and personal stuff posted to it - things which aren't specific to my business. Likewise the "small pieces" site will get snippets of interest from around the place re-blogged still.

So those of you interested in enterprise architecture, IT strategy and industry analysis - that will be at the new home. Everyone else - as you were :)

Exposing the Fatal Flaw in Social Network Marketing | Newsome.Org

2010-08-04T11:36:12+09:30

Companies should send their support department to the social networks, not their marketing department.

via www.newsome.org

Kent says what I wish I had the time and chops to - the big problem with social media marketing is that the consumer doesn't want it ... I think that businesses should be findable on social media, but it isn't a marketing channel, it's an information-sharing and support system

Thoughts on the #telstradesire "controversy"

2010-05-20T23:02:02+09:30

If you want the backstory on this, Mark Pesce's purpose-built blog is a good place to start (most of the reviewers seem to be posting their reviews on blogs, but Mark has opened up a post specifically to garner reactions, so it's worth looking at the comments), or search Twitter for the hashtag #telstradesire - I'm more interested in the apparent controversy about the reviewers collective reputations/integrity, and the whole "social media" experiment that Telstra is conducting.

In no particular order, my thoughts:

I think Telstra has come up with a very interesting way of getting attention and reviews, and demonstrates a maturing approach to social media - it's not perfect but it is fairly well thought-out
I haven't paid much attention to the hashtag on Twitter - i was actually surprised that some were complaining about the "torrent" of Tweets about it - I'm interested in Android devices, but not in Telstra :)
I know quite of a few of the reviewers (some of them in real life even!) and I don't believe any of them will be anything but honest in their reviews, and I am capable of making my own "adjustments" for any perceived bias anyway
the deal would probably have been less controversial if the devices were to be given back at the end of the review period - any consideration of value gives rise to a suspicion of influence ... again, this is a matter of perception rather than reality, but it is real nonetheless (and Mark Pesce is treating it seriously and sensibly, which is great)
IF (and I won't be drawn into an argument about whether this will happen or not), IF there is any "reputational damage" to the reviewers then it is unlikely that it will be enough for me to lose any respect for them - it's a misdemeanour at worst, not a crime :)
I AM paying attention to the reviews, because I'm seriously interested in the Android OS (and amused at the unfavourable comments about Telstra's "customisations" to it)
personally (MY stance, which you don't need to agree with): I didn't enter the "competition", and would have refused the review opportunity if it had been offered - maybe I feel my reputation isn't as secure, maybe I'm over-sensitive ... but that's me

No - privacy is NOT dead!

2010-05-14T13:29:55+09:30

Facebook has been in the news recently over (yet more) changes to its privacy settings, and its sharing of your personal information. If you want to know how much noise the recent changes caused, you can start here. Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying that privacy is dead, quoting statistics that suggest that each year we have doubled/will double the amount of personal information we share on the internet, as if it were some Moore's Law of personal data, ever increasing exponentially.

This is an incredibly flawed viewpoint, for a couple of reasons:

given the increase in sharing of personal data, I would have shared with the world everything it is possible to share fairly quickly - once I am completely transparent, I don't have an endless supply of new "secrets" appearing ... so there's a real limit
and as we share more, what we DON'T share becomes more and more important

What IS changing is our threshold of privacy - what I thought was private a couple of years ago wasn't worth sharing, maybe I think it is now; what my kids are prepared to share about themselves may be more extensive than me. But that doesn't spell the death of privacy ... it actually INCREASES the value and necessity for privacy - what we decide not to share is what we really, really want to keep private.

The other issue is control - if Zuckerberg can convince us all that we have no privacy, we will be more willing to cede control over our personal data to Facebook. But regardless of how open we are (I'm active on Twitter - virtually everything I post there is visible to the world) we still need to have control over WHAT is published, and HOW WIDELY it is published (arguments about the ease of finding stuff on the Internet notwithstanding). Facebook's premise and promise was that it was a social network where you could share as little or as much as you wanted, and you controlled who it was shared with. That was a heady incentive to millions of people who were uncomfortable with creating an internet presence for themselves "in the wild", and they took it up in droves. For many people, Facebook IS the Internet ... and now the trap is being closed on them in this massive bait-and-switch exercise as Facebook opens up your social graph to advertisers and commercial partners - with you having NO choice in some instances how (e.g.) your "personal interests" information is used, other than to remove it completely.

As Jeff Jarvis pointed out, Facebook started out in the "relationship" business, and now wants to be in the "identity" business - these are conflicting and conflicted ambitions, and need to be denied.

Apparently my opinion is worth asking for ... who knew?

2010-05-03T18:31:52+09:30

Had an interesting email last week from the Senior Marketing Manager at Software Advice who asked me to read, comment on and link to his boss’s blog post about SAP’s SME offerings. My first thought was “if somebody wants to engage with me, why aren’t they talking to me themselves?” … my second thought was “so they want me to help them get some Googlejuice?”
This was last week - so I’ve thought about it a bit. And I’ve decided (against @dahowlett’s advice ☺) to write it up … for a couple of reasons:

The company seemed interesting
The post contained some useful information (for its intended audience)
The situation reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about SAP for a while

The company: Software Advice offers what is potentially a useful service to small to medium sized businesses - enquirers about business software can self-serve via a simplistic sequence of questions which lead to a suggested software package for their needs, and if that’s not enough they can ring up a consultant for more detailed advice. Or you can select a category of software (CRM, ERP, HRM etc.) you’re interested in, and check out all the vendors that have signed up for the “other end” of the service. The service is free to the enquirer - Software Advice gets paid by software vendors for qualified referrals. They’re up-front about that - it’s on their site, and the Marketing Manager was quite happy to explain the deal to me … it looks like a workable model.

The post: There’s no new information in it, and any analyst/interested party who follows the big ERP vendors will find nothing exciting there (in fact, SAP has a similar summary on its own site). But the cognoscenti aren’t the audience, and while it was easy for me to be a little dismissive, for a non-technical small/medium business person it was a concise and informative summary of SAP’s offerings - not a bad thing. It would possibly generate more questions, but that works right into the business model - any prospective customer who follows up with more questions will be a better-qualified lead.

What’s missing: While the post made good reference to the SaaS nature of Business By Design, it didn’t say anything about SOA or the “on-demand” aspect of Business By Design - not entirely Software Advice’s problem, in my opinion. I’m a services kind of guy, and sometimes viewed as “anti-ERP” (not an impression I argue against, either ☺). Business By Design is SAP’s opportunity to disrupt itself, rather than be disrupted by someone else. Their on-premise/hosted apps will still have a life - there are plenty of customers who won’t fit the BBD model (as it stands - there’s no particular reason why it couldn’t be scaled up to larger enterprises eventually), plus there’s plenty of customers who still have a long payback period for their current implementation and won’t be in any hurry for a replacement exercise. But the future is less likely to consist of on-premise installs, plus SAP needs to move to a more SME-friendly position if it wants to continue any reasonable rate of growth (or relevance, even).

And it’s NOT because they don’t have the ideas … as Ray Wang suggests (in his wrap of last year’s SAP Influencers Summit) SAP just aren’t making enough of their innovations … they’re caught flush in Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Despite my “anti-ERP” stance, I believe that SAP is in a good position to change the way they approach the provision of business functionality, and BBD is the key to that (I certainly think it has a better chance than Netweaver, SAP’s previous attempt at SOA-type architecture). The question is … do they have the balls to disrupt their historical business model and commit to a service-based offering?

Somebody’s going to do it …

Organisational Effectiveness vs. Personal Efficiency

2010-03-20T13:30:15+10:30

It's all about organisational effectiveness. How fast, efficient and correct all information is disseminated, how effective hand-overs in the workflow happens, how visible and easy to understand the process is, how effective the capture and subsequent dissemination of knowledge is and how little time you spend on making the flow happen.
That counts. That means better profits. That means more time for the kids and less stress.

via blog.thingamy.com

Sig has another crack at enterprise software and its emphasis on efficiency, and the gap it leaves in effectiveness - doing the right thing, not just doing the thing right.

Dennis Howlett also weighs in, contrasting Sig's view with the current Enterprise 2.0 push, which he sees as perpetuating the "efficiency" approach:

Wind back to what I was saying about Enterprise 2.0. If they can change the focus to one that talks about effectiveness and less about efficiency I am willing to bet they will see truly astonishing breakthrough value. The question is - are they up for the challenge or are they prepared to continue trying what amounts to Band-Aid technology application?

I had something to say about this a while ago:

It's probably no secret that I believe that there ARE benefits to an organisation, directly and indirectly, in this idea of moving the work to the network, assisting connections to the short-term detriment of personal productivity. This shouldn't be a foreign concept ... we've been urged for years to be "team players" and "collaborators" - why has it taken so long to realise that those objectives are the antithesis of personal productivity? (or has the urging to team play been less than genuine in the past?). And how many times have we been told as we moved through our careers that it's "not what you know, but who"? It's ALWAYS been about the network; that is how most stuff gets done ... it is very rarely a lone hand effort.

Note: there's nothing wrong with enterprise software and efficiency per se - social media/E2.0 shouldn't be trying to replace those things, but to augment existing business process with a cross-silo conversation to help improve WHAT we do, as well as HOW we do it.

How Oracle gets customers to keep paying | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com

2010-02-25T09:44:25+10:30

Despite all the great things Oracle has done in the past, customers are becoming disillusioned with the financial penalty. The word is:

Fusion will be heavily diluted in an effort to get something out the door in 2010,

JD Edwards’ forward development has pretty much become stagnant,

There are growing concerns over Oracle’s ambition to resurrect the ghost of Tom Watson as Oracle moves towards becoming the 21st century IBM, while

Oracle remains firm that it will not budge on 22%.

via blogs.zdnet.com

WTF, "Fusion will be heavily diluted in an effort to get something out the door in 2010"? Just how long is it going to take for Oracle to get this story together, let alone right?

... and there's a few people in my town who won't be happy to hear about stalled development on JDE.

The rest of the post has a couple of interesting points about how Oracle monitors its licenses, and again points out that its maintenance revenue (at 92% margin) is the only thing keeping Oracle profitable ... Ellison wants Oracle to be the IBM of the 60's - if he's not careful they'll end up the IBM of the 80's instead.