doingITbetter

Getting to the point of change 3 - The 'How to" post

2014-08-21T15:23:00.002+01:00

So far lots of whining - but the frustration comes from the fact that as an enterprise you can lift your chances of success by an order of magnitude by just following some basic principals when you undertake any kind of technology driven business change. In this post I want to share some actions that I have seen work time and again. Alone none of them can guarantee success, combined none of them can guarantee success. But as a passionate backgammon player, I know that probability is all. The fact is nobody can guarantee you anything in the IT and change world, and anyone who claims to is a best economical with the truth. But what I know for sure is that the probability of success increases dramatically if you follow these four simple rules:-

1: Be honest.

If you plan to reduce headcount and/or restructure the way folk work then say so up front. Explain your reasons why as early as possible and define what the ideal end state looks like. Will people be happy? No, but they know they are dealing with an honest person/company and not a snake.

2: Engage with stakeholders right from the get go.

Engaging with stakeholders unfortunately is often taken to mean talking to managers. Though managers have a critical role to play, its not managers that get the nitty gritty work done in an organization. Whomever is doing the nitty gritty work should be very high on your stakeholder priority list. I could fill a book with stories of IT projects that deliberately avoided engaging with the folk doing the actual work they were going to impact, only to later only sincerely regret doing so. Trust me, when a manager tells you the process his or her charges follow to get work done, the 'charges' version of affairs is almost always very different.

3: Do both of these things way before you chose technology options

One of, if not the most common reason for IT projects to fail is to get involved in procuring (buying) technology way too early. Until you have clearly mapped the 'As Is' situation, mapped the desired 'To Be' situation. Broadcast the need to change, and started to engage and listen to stakeholders etc you should stay well away from technology. A project I was involved with many years ago had raised a budget of several million dollars to tackle a particular problem and buy technology to address the problem. When my colleague and I pointed out on day one of our engagement that the problem was far more simply resolved and could be fixed without any technology...... we were sent home and our contracts cancelled. Fair enough. But way too many big IT projects involving new or replacement technology can be resolved without any technology investments at all.

4: Embrace failure

Its a cliche but any successful person (Richard Branson for an ultra cliché example) will tell you that to get to where they are involved a lot of failure. IT projects are started, change is decided upon - often though a sinking feeling emerges that questions whether this is a good idea or not. By planning and inserting multiple go-no-go milestones in your project plan. By honestly assessing where you are at any point, and whether this project still makes sense you will increase your chances of success ten fold. Embrace failure, walking away early on is far better than undertaking a death march to oblivion. Sadly most projects once started are determined to get to the end, regardless of whether they deliver any value or not.

Clearly there are many more factors to ensure success from building a business case to managing time and resources effectively. But the above four I highlight here as these are fundamental and need to be addressed from the start of any initiative.

Getting to the point of change 2

2014-08-19T19:57:00.001+01:00

At the end of the day people are people, and its not really in the remit of a technologist or consultant to try and change the human state. Even so a basic understanding of how we all tick should be at the core of any business change activity. Like it or not successful leaders and advisors do understand how folk tick, its why they are successful. But that does not mean that they are neccessarily empathetic or caring - it means that they know how to get things done and how to get people to change ingrained habits and processes. Enterprise technology projects are seldom led by strong leaders, rather they are led by folk with a good understanding of the technology, the company or both.
As such major change projects that would have otherwise had input from HR professionals or outside specialist consultancies elsewhere in the firm, are classified as IT projects and don't get that input.

If business change is involved, and it almost always is in Enterprise Software and Services situations, then you need to start planning the change process long before you get involved in selecting technology. You need a no holds barred discussion at a high level about where things are going, and most importantly the risks involved in the change and what could potentially go wrong.

In my experience IT projects are seldom open and honest about what changes the firm is hoping to make with the new technology, either with themselves or with others. Project failure, despite it being so common is simply not considered an option. This whole area is something to explored at another time. But the issues of openness in general is relevant to this particular discussion.

For example, in a few cases I have seen projects essentially run 'secretly' with the the new product or service being delivered as a fete accompli (or so they think). The other common approach is the co-operative approach, where management tries and listens to everyones views/needs and to accommodate those views/needs. Neither approach works.

In the former approach (withholding information about the full or true nature of the project) you almost guarantee significant and often very successful resistance at roll out. In the latter you run a high risk of ultimately losing control of your destiny. The truth is you meet everyones needs, nor should you try.

But maybe these two approaches, and all those in between mask the true path to success. To be clear honesty is as always the best policy, and organization both big and small are terrible at keeping secrets. Either the truth will out at an inopportune moment - or just as bad people will simply put their own (usually negative) interpretation of events onto the situation. If perception really is reality, then you have serious issues across the board. Honesty, even if its brutal (quite different to uncaring or malicious) is essential. For example, telling folks up front that the purpose of this IT project is to provide support for a headcount and cost reduction and will likely involve the restructuring of some business units - isn't going to go down well, but at least its the truth and people can work with that. Either to find timely new employment elsewhere to support themselves and their families, or to find a new role and adventure in the changed organization. But honesty and clarity, though important isn't enough. Folk have to want to change, they have to be excited about the change, they have to be uncomfortable about the status quo. They also have to embrace the risk and be committed to making the change - accepting that all will not go smoothly, there will bumps in the road ahead - but they have the drive and vision to navigate a road through.

To be continued (maybe)

Getting to the point of change

2014-08-18T16:18:00.000+01:00

One of the key things I have observed over a couple of decades in the IT world is that even though change in organizations if often imperative, it seldom happens. Deliberate planned change, no matter how essential seldom occurs. I have seen countless major IT projects involving information and processes undertaken, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on software, hardware and services - and yet the status quo remains at the end. Take a typical SharePoint project that was all the rage 5 years ago, these projects were going to transform the way organizations managed and shared information - making companies more efficient and collaborative. Few of these projects delivered on that promise.... It wasn't Microsoft fault, in fact the same is true of most projects. Though there are many reasons projects fall short of expectations, poor project management, poorly set expectations, the over reliance on technology to fix business problems etc - I think the number one reason is. People don't like change.

A firm I have worked with needs to change. It is profitable (sort of), it has grown like many in this sector over the past 10 years or so from start up to employing a few hundred people. It's established, it works and its unlikely to fail anytime soon. It has a window of opportunity that will close soon to make a step change to the next level. It's competitors are not doing so well, customers like the firm, it has a good reputation and good products. But for the last several years its business has stagnated, and when this window of opportunity closes the firm will likely move to a slow and ultimately terminal decline. It needs to change now to secure its future and to grow. The firm has brought in new management, it has a new and ambitious strategy - in fact the firm knows EXACTLY what it needs to do to transform itself into a bigger stronger and better company. But despite all the talk, all the meetings, all the planning, all the spend - its not changing.

Like many firms it is run by a charismatic and very smart CEO who knows where the company needs to go. But the staff of the firm, see things differently. The staff are comfortable, life is good enough for them, the company is good enough for them, the way they work has worked well enough to this point, so why they say, do we need to change? Or rather they don't openly question the need to change. In fact they openly and volubly support the change, but they never seem to do anything about it. Their day to day concerns always seem to take priority. Risk is scary, risk means things might go wrong and change means changing, and they don't want to change. Even senior hires who enter the firm full of enthusiasm and passion for change are fairly quickly reigned in by their subordinates, pulled into the nitty gritty of today's work - and not the future shaping work they need to do.

The challenge for any leader or advisor is to communicate a NEED to change to a willingness and PASSION for change. Folks who are complacent need to be re-energized, reminded of the the enthusiasm and passion they first had, excited about the next chapter, and eager to turn the page and close this chapter out. In tech projects this sort of thing is usually poorly understood, dismissed as 'arm waving' or 'management theory' - but without it nothing ever changes.

I would love to see and maybe even be a small part of changing this mindset - or at least developing new tools and processes to better enable it. Enterprise technology today (and anyone who has heard me speak or read my research over the years will know my position on this one!) is way ahead of the folk that buy it - its potential is incredible, but failed or disappointing IT projects remain the norm. Surely its time for the industry as a whole to re-examine where its at and maybe look again at the success and failures of the 90's era of Change Management & Re-Engineering. Much was wrong then, but not all - many lessons were briefly learned but then all too quickly forgotten. I believe its time we need to start this discussion again, pick up the pieces and stop accepting mediocrity, stop tinkering with the system and move again to mindset (to quote Tony Robbins) of massive determined action. Tech for tech's sake is of very limited value, the Silicon Valley bubble that is disconnected from the real world is once again a bubble full of hot air ready to pop. If ever there was at time to change, it is now.

Emergence of intelligent content platforms

2012-11-16T11:33:00.001+00:00

I have been researching, writing and advising on the topic of ECM for well over 20 years, I have been called a cynic on many occasions (sometimes even to my face) and it is true that I am often dismissive of hot new trends in the marketplace. In my defense though most hot new trends are rehashed old trends under a different banner. They didn't work first time round and have no more chance this time. But over the past year or so a couple of overlapping trends have started to make a really deep and lasting impression on me. The first of these is the importance of Social technologies. On the one hand it is fair to argue that the hype surrounding enterprise Social is ridiculously overblown. There are very few firms that can really build a measurable or worthwhile business case to implement Social technologies. The reason for this is that the terms social and collaboration have become conflated, and are often used interchangeably. They are very different things, for collaboration by definition means that you work together to reach a common goal (writing a report, building a house, settling a legal matter). Whereas social is an activity without a defined end goal, the hope is that something unexpected (yet of value) will emerge from social interactions. What this means in practical terms is that some businesses are interested in investing in collaboration tools that support team and project based working. Why wouldn't they be, after all it helps them become more efficient and fulfill the perennial aim of doing more with less. Social though is a much tougher sell as few people really see the benefits here, how many really want to see a twitter like stream that relates to our colleagues activities? In fact social technologies generate an awful lot of noise (awful being the operative word), but ironically it is here that the value lies. All that noise/data can be analyzed, processed and ultimately utilized to automate decisions and recommendations. It's early days, but that is where this is all heading. Marry this with sudden arrival of cloud based file sharing and sync services, and we have the emergence of a new and important computing/working environment. Don't be too quick to dismiss the "consumerization" of IT, or systems such as Box, Skydox, Accellion or Citrix ShareFile, in my opinion what they represent now is only the start. For combine what they do today, with the analytical capabilities they will possess in the future (and they all will), and we have the ability to easily build powerful content centric applications, that in turn leverage the promise of intelligent analytics and big data. That's game changing by any standards.

I am back....

2012-11-13T21:41:00.002+00:00

Just a quick note to say I will begin posting again here soon. I am in the process of writing a book on the topic of "Why enterprise IT projects so often fail". Will be sharing thoughts and updates as I research and write. The chapter structure has been built, the publishing proposal drafted and a sample chapter written. All I need to do is get a publisher, and I am working actively on that right now...

Seven years ago I started this blog as an outlet to pull thoughts together for this book - but life and other writing commitments got in the way in the intervening years. That may happen again, but fingers crossed this time round I will finally get the job done!

Will the CMO really outspend the CIO?

2012-11-13T19:58:00.001+00:00

The mantra in the digital marketing world is that in the future the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will become more important in terms of technology spend than the CIO. Yet try as I might I just struggle to fathom the logic here. Marketing is a vital function in any company but its structure and role is morphing at a rapid pace.

Marketing has become a strategic and co-ordination function. Strategic in that the Marketing Director has to manage and execute on campaigns and a consistent vision - co-ordination in that most marketing today is actually done by external agencies and contractors. The other major shift in marketing is that Marketers are ever more being explicitly tasked with generating leads, and broader marketing concerns such as visibility and brand trust have been relegated. Pushing marketing back to its original home as a subset of Sales.

In my experience, CMO's are not technologists, nor do they want to be, as they have better things to do with their time. So though much more money will of course be spent on digital marketing efforts in the future trusted external agencies that will become key stakeholders in any technology decision making process.

ECM with a purpose?

2012-11-11T11:34:00.001+00:00

It's been a long time but for some reason I just wanted to distill some rambling thoughts here on the state of ECM what it might all mean.

IBM, Oracle, EMC, Microsoft & OpenText define the bulk of the market - collectively between them they account for the vast majority of revenue in this space. They have all been at it a long time, and I have spent a career watching and advising them. At various times all of these players have seem lost and without a clear purpose, defaulting into a world of cash cow status. With the exception of Microsoft all of them in the past year seem to have rediscovered their real purpose in life and are trying to get out of comfortable ruts. Documentum seems reinvigorated and has returned quite rightly IMHO to its roots and is making a real fist of sorting out its usability history. IBM is really meshing together the worlds of structured and unstructured, Oracle is truly excited about web experience and the promise of related big data, and OpenText seems to really want to move on from holding company to innovator again. All of these are gargantuan tasks and only time will tell how successful each is - but its good for all of us surely?

This turnaround in the past year reminded me why I got hooked on this industry in the first place. I fell from a burgeoning career in TV (researching/writing) into document management/control to pay the bills, and then found I was fascinated at the beauty and complexity of information management. Over time I grew more and more attached to this unloved discipline, and passionate about its value to society. Over the years I have personally been involved and seen it deliver incredible returns in joined up justice (police through prisons to probation), averting oil spills in the North Sea, saving lives in healthcare, targeting the right bad guys and gals in intelligence and defense etc. I have also seen sloppy information management do the opposite with disastrous results. In a world of spectacular waste and irrelevance, a world of economic and humanitarian crisis, a world driven by technology, data & content - doing IT and information management badly has real world consequences. This belief is what gives purpose to my work.

But the same thing applies to large organizations - they are no different really to individuals. Without a purpose they drift or expend their energies in pointless and ever more lackluster directions. With a common purpose they are energized, focused and make a difference. I don't care about ECM firms making money (that's for them to worry about) but I do care about them driving innovation and providing the right tools to manage information efficiently and accurately at such a critical juncture in our history.

ECM In India - Again

2011-09-30T22:30:00.002+01:00

I am recently back from a pretty remarkable week working out of our Delhi office with my colleagues Apoorv and Sanjeev. Remarkable in that though I have been to India many times before, there is clearly a groundswell of change underway, and its major change at that. Hence I am excited that we are investing in our business there, and am looking forward to working more directly with buyers of technology in the future.

So what is this change? Well it comes in a number of different ways, firstly India is in and of itself an emerging market for content technologies, and one that in some regards is jumping ahead of western countries, by passing the PC and Laptop world and leaping straight to the mobile handset. The mobile consumer market is frankly years ahead of anything one sees in the US. In the enterprise the change is equally revolutionary but maybe less sexy and obvious. India is, if nothing else a huge bureaucracy on a scale and complexity that would have stumped Kafka. It's not just Government and the public sector, but it spreads to corporate organizations and is in large part a result of both embedded cultural and historical factors, important to note is that much if not most of this huge bureaucracy is paper based.

Yet a strengthening middle class, and an influx of former ex-pats from the UK and US are driving change. You can see it in the US style shopping malls that seem to be popping up on every corner, and the impatience of folk of doing things the 'traditional' way. To highlight all this, during the past week I was privileged to watch and experience the Anna Hazare led protest against corruption, a protest that though focused on rampant and often blatant corruption, goes deeper. It is not for me to take sides (though hopefully we are all against corruption) but I can be a casual observer. It goes to the heart of the problem in India, that old institutions and ways of working, simply don't work any longer, and people are impatient for change.

In my own remit of research (Document Management) it was confirmed to me that imaging and capture along with associated business process management (including Case Management) are hot topics and look certain to grow substantially. This is a trend that is not limited to India, but the potential for growth is more likely more extreme there. Furthermore I have little doubt that in such a rich media savvy nation that the demand for DAM (Digital Asset Management) will also grow substantially there over the next couple of years.

However, tied to all this potential is the very real problem of immature and overly burdensome procurement practices for IT. Though India is surging ahead in some areas of technology and there is surely an appetite to do so more in future. Plus there is the dominance of Indian system integrators such as TCS, Sapient, and Infosys in the world of IT,there can be no doubt that India has a surfeit of tech skills and knowledge. But in terms of thorough product selection and buyer driven procurement processes I don't think India is there yet, nor it should be said in many cases are firms in the US or Europe. Yet my hope is that Real Story Group can in some small way help contribute to this situation in the coming years.

To the visitor India seems to change slowly, you see visuals from the car and street that look unchanged in millennia, yet at the same time India seldom does things by halves and I think buyers there are going to take content technologies in some new, dramatic and exciting directions over the next few years, going from laggard to cutting edge in the blink of an eye.

Sybase acquired by SAP

2010-05-13T14:54:00.004+01:00

Another blast from my past as SAP announced that it is acquiring Sybase. I remember Sybase as much for their lavish AR (Analyst Relations) than anything else. I attended quite a few of their events, most memorable of which was held at the NYSE - with lunch in the Boardroom, and this not that long after 9/11. How they pulled it off I have no idea, but it was an amazing and quite surreal experience.

Long dismissed as has beens Sybase (though I never truly understood their business), recognized that they had lost the database battle long back, and very smartly and quietly consolidated their business in high finance, and in Asia - whilst making serious investments in the mobile world. From a skunkworks set up in Canada its the mobile infrastructure piece of the pie that has added to their spectacular price paid by SAP - $5.8 Billion - a lot of money for a company written off by most everyone.

I chose the image above, as I still have sitting on my desk a rather lovely brass Kaleidoscope given to me as a gift by Sybase AR in 2002 - that has Mardi Gras (AR event clashed with the start of Lent) beads in it.....

Best Practices

2010-04-09T22:24:00.003+01:00

Every consulting client asks if I can provide them with best practices as part of the advisory engagement. I don't object to these requests, in fact I can fully understand why they ask, but my advice to any one out there looking for such things, is beware of the person who offers them to you.

Best practices scare me a bit, they remind me of the nonsense of the late 90's when everyone was benchmarking, trying to mimic best practices and getting enthusiastic about Business Process Re-Engineering. What we learned, or at least should have learned from all that is that what works well in one place does not necessarily work well anywhere else. For sure there are wrong ways to work, there are inefficient ways to work and there are downright stupid ways to work - but once you eliminate the plain bad options, there are a multitude of possibilities left.

You need to match your needs, goals, organizational psychology (culture/dynamics) and resources with elements of what has worked well elsewhere and make up your own patchwork quilt of what works best for you, from what has worked for others....

Server sales rise dramatically in 2010

2010-04-08T13:27:00.002+01:00

This morning whilst reading the FT and sipping my coffee I started reading about the dramatic increase in server sales that the market is currently experiencing. Everyone from IBM and HP through to AMD and Intel have seen sales rise dramatically.

It is as they say "a perfect storm", as budgets are loosened after a year of belt tightening, old hardware and software is reaching a point where it has to be upgraded, and the new server technologies pretty much guarantee they pay for themselves in a matter of months. They pay for themselves due the spectacular rise in computing power they deliver over previous generations, and simultaneously a spectacular drop in power consumption.

This all took me back to project I was involved in whilst at Wipro. To this day I have no idea why but I somehow became the link man between Wipro and Sun Microsystems, to partner on a Solaris 10 initiative. It was slam dunk financially, as Solaris 10 was open source, as even if one only got service revenue and ran Solaris 10 on non Sun hardware (HP for example) the cost savings were so huge compared to say Solaris 8 or pretty much any other flavor of Unix, we were doing well.

The problem was we did not do well - the Sun brand at that time was so tarnished, so connected with failure that it was like climbing a mountain even to get a meeting with some clients to discuss the potential. Sun had great people, and some awesome technology, we had a clear cut business case - but no means to spark a conversation, due to perceptions around the brand and the potential future of Sun.

It's likely (or at least it should be) that Oracle is now reaping the benefits of all Suns hard work and expertise. Not just because of an improved economy, but because people feel secure with Oracle. Its the same with IBM and Microsoft and that is to some extent why they dominate the IT world, sentiment and perception carrying more weight in buying decisions than we realize.

Something of a ramble as always, but that's the point of a personal blog - but reading the FT really did bring back some memories.

ECM does not equal Green IT

2010-03-25T19:52:00.005+00:00

There are two things that instantly get my back up these days. ROI/ Pseudo scientific IT calculations and the claims of the Green IT movement. To be clear upfront, I am the resident Tree Hugger at The Real Story Group and take the environment and our stewardship of it seriously, I also believe that information management initiatives can and do deliver clear and measurable results. But maths that only tackle one side of the equation, and Green claims based on hot air really do not resonate with me.

So imagine my apoplexy when I read an article today that claimed that you could radically reduce your carbon footprint by utilizing ECM software. Again, to be clear - my blood pressure is not rising because I don't believe its possible, rather it is because of the wacky math that is used to support such a claim. In this article (including graphs) the measure of success was the fact that this University 'saved' 347,000 paper pages in the admissions process this year. Instead of the paper documents, they used electronic documents. The carbon footprint reduction came through saving lots of trees (43 trees to be precise based on their calculation of 16 reams of paper from a single tree). This all seems like laudable stuff until one stops think about what is missing in this lopsided calculation.

First, and fairly obvious is that the University has not apparently heard of recycled paper, secondly and probably more importantly there seems to be an assumption here that electronic documents do not have a carbon footprint. No apparently, the toxic time bomb that constitutes a computer these days counts for nothing, nor does the power to run the computers, servers, data centers etc. No discussion either at the ease of proliferating multiple and redundant copies electronic documents. I have no idea what the actual carbon footprint tally for running a document management system is, but I know its not zero.

Nonsensical calculations, and spurious eco-claims are totally unnecessary in the world of information management - just a look around at the information chaos we call normality is enough to tell us there is business value in doing the job properly. You can build real business cases, and use real numbers - you can measure information management success properly and accurately, there is no need to wander into fantasy.

New ECM Report out soon

2009-08-04T20:38:00.002+01:00

The headline says it all really, Jarrod and I have been working hard on a major update to our ECM research. Has been fascinating and I think we have uncovered many trends - and even added a bunch of vendors to our evaluation process.

This will be the biggest update to the report in almost a year - so expect me to go crazy in the next week or two via the CMS Watch Blog and the press on all the interesting things we have to chat about!

If one thing has been reinforced above everything is that ECM is moving into the mainstream - some might think it is already there (courtesy of MOSS) but no - it still has a ways to go, and its impact will be huge.

Bottom line (as they like to say at Gartner) this is far from a mature market, and some interesting stuff bubbling away beneath the surface.

Vendor Demo Hell

2009-06-28T23:18:00.001+01:00

A link to the finished article (see posting below):

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1624-ECM-Demo-Advice

What is an industry analyst?

2009-06-28T23:16:00.003+01:00

Industry analysts are for all intents and purposes technology critics...

I read this and thought it touched a spot:-

“The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says “this is good, this is bad” without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we’re innately convinced we’re right.”

-Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian

ECM Vendor Selection Day 2

2009-04-15T23:26:00.003+01:00

Day two, and vendor number two - this one got off to a flying start, then went downhill in the second half. So some more tips to vendors coming up:

1: If you list a product/module on your RFP price quote - be sure you know why its there and what it does

2: If the client makes a request in precalls for a certain chart/description to be included in your presentation, be sure its there on the day - and don't look like a deer in the headlights when it isn't

Overall, a better day - some great insights into this particular product suite that I will capture in the relevant CMS Watch evaluation. But vendor three tomorrow at least has the opportunity to close the deal on the spot.

Reflecting on yesterdays debacle, I thought it interesting that even today they could have come back, cap in hand and said "Wow did we screw up - let us try and fix this", it would have at least been worth a try, and done correctly it might have worked. Vendor sales people tend to fall into two categories, those who just can't accept they lost, and chase a deal long after it is clear they have no hope, and those that give up too easily and walk away. I guess that's just people in general....

Vendor demo implosion

2009-04-14T23:26:00.005+01:00

What a day! I shall marshall my thoughts and write something more considered for CMS Watch later in the week. But sufice it to say that I witnessed the worst vendor demo to a prospective buyer I have ever seen. It was a disaster, and yet it should not have been....

The vendor (who shall remain nameless) has the tools and the skills to set a very high bar in this particular product selection process. Yet they missed the boat by a mile. For some reason they arrived with 7 people (why?) and one or two of them clearly were not as briefed as the others. Unfortunately the weakest link in the team, was also the most important part of the demo puzzle today.

Just a tip or two to any vendors out there

Firstly, never ever under any circumstances (ever) display scripting during a demo. That is suicide, the only time the buyer should ever see it is when they ask to.

Second tip, listen to your audience - if they pep up and show interest build on it - don't drag them back to the stuff that glazed their eyes.

Third tip, people want to see real demonstrations that at least approximate their working environment and the issues they detailed in the RFP

Fourth tip, it is ok to show examples you made earlier. Yes we want a real live demo, but we understand you cannot build the empire state building in a day - its ok to show us a few examples of outstanding interfaces, processes whatever - alongside the real demo which by definition will always be limiting and limited

Not a good day - two more demo's to come, they left in a huff - we all felt bad. But with two days to go, they can't be any worse - can they?

The problem with Google

2009-04-06T12:31:00.003+01:00

I came across this excellent article originally published in The Guardian - one of the UK's higher quality newspapers - it is well worth a read:

http://www.kijo.co.uk/technology/google-is-just-an-amoral-menace/comment-page-1#comment-6810

Interestingly The Guardian, is also a high profile customer of, and indeed cheerleader for Google applications........odd

My other recommendation of the day is for all those who read George Orwell's 1984, to read the follow up penned by Anthony Burgess - 1985. Written almost contemporaneously (1978) by Burgess, 1985 is chilling indeed, and paints a picture of a nation awash with useless information, and suggests a future that is in many respects our current reality.

Back from AIIM Expo 2009

2009-04-02T20:19:00.005+01:00

Yesterday was a long one (if fun) for me, and I am relieved to be home and back at my desk. I did 3 sessions at AIIM and they were all demanding. I did a point/counterpoint argument/debate with Dan Elam that the crowd loved (as did I). I then did Stump the Consultant in the afternoon - another full house - drawn I suspect to see the 'experts' humiliated on stage - a session made somewhat complex when two of the randomly selected questions from the audience happened to be from CMS Watch customers! I Finished the day off with a co-presentation on SharePoint with Tony.

What of the Expo? Foot traffic was clearly down on last year, the On Demand portion of the show continues to dominate, our new booth looked awesome. But......not at all bad, was my conclusion. A bit quieter than we would have liked at times, but we met with a lot of our customers, and met (hopefully) many new ones. Lots of good sessions (though maybe a few too many scheduled side by side) providing a solid education track.

Attendance at the pre-conference tutorials and Tony's SharePoint workshop today have been surprisingly high, and the 3 sessions I mentioned above (along with the Analyst panel we hosted the previous day) were all in large rooms, and were full or nearly full. Considering the state of the economy and the associated difficult in getting budget to attend such events, it was a success.

I will be thinking more about the information, gossip and observations I got at the show - and writing more about the for CMS Watch once things have filtered through, but I was struck with two things in particular at the show.

1: Microsoft, Oracle and SpringCM (big suprise) acting as virtual hubs on the show floor
2: The notable reduction in Java offerings for ECM outside of the very high end - something that was glaringly obvious but unoticed by me till Kas pointed it out

Much to ponder - a good week overall - much better than I expected.

2009-03-29T19:37:00.002+01:00

I read a very interesting article last week in the Financial Times regarding India's struggling outsourcing business. At least that was the tenor of the article, but I am not so sure that it is struggling quite to the degree that the FT claims.
It was apparent a few years back when I worked for Wipro that things would mature and change, recession or no. And natural change is occurring there, albeit at an accelerated rate now.
For where India has been smart, is in spreading its bets - in the last few years more an more work has been coming in from Japan (for example) and the smart executives recognized long ago that the US and Europe were already reaching a point where growth could not continue at the same unrelenting pace. What India has, is a huge amount of highly educated technical folk - and India has continued to invest heavily in education whilst the West has not.
You can't take this huge educational advantage away from India quickly, and insourcing work once it has been outsourced a few years is not a lightweight task. I believe that just like China, India will survive and do well.
Where India may be hit I think is in the call center area - many firms are slowly and at times reluctantly coming to the conclusion in the US and Europe that local support just can't be beaten - and probably never can be. IMHO a lot of outsourced call center work was done simply to cut costs - often to meet a quarterly reporting demand. But it was done at the expense of quality and the value of a local touch. There is a good reason to move call centers back to the right time zone.
And in the US it is pretty likely that the new administration will impose even tougher H1B restrictions, but the outcome of that will be more outsourcing not less - as near-sourcing becomes increasingly difficult to enable and support (see comment on lack of skills above).
So though call centers might be hit, IT outsourcing in general will do ok, its too late now to turn back - and too many things still remain favourable for India. The access to a highly educated technical (and growing) skills base, the cost of change - and the short termism of most Western organizations.
The only thing that could really hurt India, is India itself (witness the horrific events at the Taj in Mumbai, and the implications around the IPL moving to South Africa) - sadly self destruction remains a possibility.

Why did I leave Facebook?

2009-03-26T21:23:00.004+00:00

This week I deleted my Facebook account, and so far have suffered no withdrawal symptoms if anything I am annoyed that I did not do it earlier. I left because:

I felt it was invasive - I was finding out too much about other people, and visa versa.
The attempt to change the contract with Facebook users and gain ownership of data a while back was a trigger.

And frankly it seems time to move on from such things - and gain some control back over privacy and private data. We are moving very quickly into an Orwellian world, the UK is already way ahead of us in the States, with CCTV's on every street, face and license plate recognition software everywhere. It has happened so remarkably quickly, and probably as a result of the speed of change we behave as if we have no say in the matter. We do have a say, and currently we do still have some controls and safeguards. We do still live in something similar to a democracy, with legal safeguards and a press that still (though only just) represents a balance of sorts..

I am not against electronic information - heavens that is how I earn my living! But...there are huge implications when it comes to the misuse of data, and the lines between valid, less valid and downright invalid uses is being blurred by the day. And that is not something I am personally comfortable with. For me its way too late, everything from my Marital status to my DNA is held online, but its not too late for most, and its certainly not too late to make a stand and say enough is enough..

Recession? What recession?

2009-03-26T21:12:00.005+00:00

I can't believe its been over a year since my last post......

Anyway I am getting fed up with the doom and gloom regarding the 'recession' as I think as some commentators suggest "this is different to past recessions". It is, and without a doubt many people are being hurt by it and much fall out is yet to come. But its starting to feel like people understand now that there will be no quick fix, and its time to get on with life.

In my industry (ECM) there are more than a few shoots of optimism out there. Job postings are still strong, many vendors are telling me that the market remains not only steady, but in many instances growing.

On a side note, the ECM Maturity model that we (CMS Watch) along with Apoorv at Wipro, Erik Hartman and Dave Smigiel jointly developed was released into open commons a month ago. To my (if not our) amazement it really seems to have taken off with a lot of downloads, and so far some very complimentary feedback. Check it out here: http://ecm3.org/

8 things you didn't know about me!

2008-01-18T20:52:00.000+00:00

I have been tagged by Jesse Wilkins - this is my second time to be tagged - hence I shan't tag anyone else at the close of this one, and shall attempt to avoid repetition of the tags...(enough tags in one sentence?)

So here goes:-

1: I am a collector of vintage photography - and would also collect contemporary photography if it were more affordable. My collection hinges around two key things - the work of Angus Mcbean and a broader collection of the portraitists of the Hollywood era - Clarence Bull, Eugene Richee, Ernest Bachrach, Hurrell etc

2: I am a qualified Clinical Hypnotherapist (DCH LCCH) - and began training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in London - one day I hope to return to this study.

3: I have read every book in the Bible (all 66) back to front - literally in my case as I started with the New Testament :-) It took me 2 years....

4: My favorite place in all the world is/are the Western Islands of Scotland (Mull, Iona and Gigha)

5: I once sang lead vocals in a post punk band called the Blue Movies, I currently sing as a bass in our Church choir

6: I saw some success as an artist/photographer in the late 80's - my work was shown across the UK - and I became C list famous in Russia and The Netherlands ( I have the posters to prove it! )

7: I am crazy about Rugby League (Leeds Rhinos) and will be traveling to Jacksonville, Florida in a couple of weekends to watch their World Club Championship warm up match against the South Sydney Rabitoes (Russell Crowe is the owner)

8: I love cooking and am (like Jesse) a pretty serious foodie - I can cook pretty good Indian and Italian - my all time favorite food dish is Mutter Paneer -with warm puri's

With this - my rants on the CMS Watch blog and my entries on Facebook I am in danger of having no more secrets - the mystery will have evaporated.....

Blog Pause

2007-11-29T02:50:00.001+00:00

There is just so much going on at the moment - finishing report updates - travel - speaking - new reports and research.....etc etc

I just thought it worth a post to say that this blog (obviously) is becoming less and less regular.

I do blog on the cmswatch blog regularly, so please check that out - but personal blogs just don't seem to be forthcoming at the moment - my apologies....

Boom time again in Silicon Valley?

2007-11-12T14:49:00.000+00:00

Just back from a week in San Jose, where I was running a conference track at KM World, and a workshop for Enterprise Search West. It was a good week personally and for CMS Watch - with a lot of work done, some great new contacts and conversations - but I left with most was the strong impression that things are reaching simmering point again in the Valley.
It was noticeable, and commented on by others that though not near dot.com boom levels, the energy and enthusiasm levels in the Valley were higher than they have been in a very long time. That traffic is getting back to boom level congestion and that local businesses are thriving.

Lunch at the Googleplex was also something I have returned with (not the lunch itself) but rather a thousand conflicting thoughts regarding Google and where it is going. Long term readers of this blog will know that I have at best mixed views on Google. And this visit hosted by a friend of a friend left me with more lingering doubts than I could have imagined. I was deeply uncomfortable there, not sure what it was - but there was something cultish, and elitist that left me wondering what it was all about - I am sure I am not brilliant enough for the likes of Google, but even if I were, I doubt this is a place I would want to work.....

Anyhow enough musings - I am trying to finish off the delayed ECM Suites Report V2 - and prep for a return trip to California in the morning to attend Oracle OpenWorld...