Business or Pleasure? - why not both

The benefits of Social Business 2/2

2012-02-28T00:16:00.000+01:00

This post is the second in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Business, part two of two. While yesterday's was all about the history of Business, this one will fill in the gaps left by it - it will deal with the present and the future

1. The need for trust

Yesterday I showed how the relationships were stretched over the centuries and millennia. How we grew from trusting friends and friends of friends, to putting faith in friends of friends of friends, and eventually relying in a religious way on entire communities of likeminded.
All this, to make up for the increasing lack of proximity that brought with it anonymity, which forced out the intimacy we once knew - and once automatically led to trust, which now is out the window

2. The provision of trust: branding an image

The final answer of the businesses was to bring us image - I said design but that wasn't the right word. Today's perfection of image is indeed design (think of Apple, Facebook, and all the schmarketeers giving you advice on how to style your weblog (making it end up looking the same as all the other "styled" blogs out there), but what businesses try to do is provide us with an image of their brand so we can identify with it - and cherish it, hug it, cuddle it

Am I overdoing? Maybe, but all within the bandwidth, I think:

Would you buy a used car on the corner of a street, from a stranger? No, that would be considered unwise
Doing the same, yet replacing the location by "a recognised dealer"? Nothing should keep you from doing so, should it?
Doing the same, yet replacing the person by a neighbour, a friend, a friend of a friend even? Usually, that would imply a bit more risk but certainly an acceptable one, especially if the spend is relatively low

3. Personalisation and closeness directly relate to trust

Bringing back the distance between buyer and seller and intimacy will automatically reintroduce trust into the relationship.
All branding is aimed at making products feel closer to you, so the trust is automagically brought back. (Semi-)automated direct mail, email, even spam these days tries to play that trick on you. Google ads in e.g. your Gmail? Scary how they bring products to your attention that you Googled just a few seconds before, right? You did want to click those links the few first times you saw them, right?

Forget the fast retail stuff like Coca-Cola, cigarettes, potato chips (crisps for the UK readers) and other products you buy a dime a dozen. Longer-lifecycle products like cars, loans, houses, mortgages and life insurances: you buy them from "companies that feel good and reliable".
I buy freshly chopped pork from a farm up the road, one of our neighbours is the intermediate in distributing and selling it. Anything could be wrong with the meat, but that thought never crosses our mind. It tastes great, is good on the price, and most of all: it's produced right next door

4. The move to label products as services

We've witnessed the shift from products to services within this context as well, with crazy exceptions that people tried to pass pretty much every product as a service, just to bring that "tailor-made" feeling to you. Mass-produced products that are equal to all, turned into "custom-made services that suit your individual needs". Does that sound dumb? Yes, but does it work? For most, or at least a fair majority, it does

All these are the means and tools that have been tried and tested, all with the same goal: closing the ever-widened and still widening gap between buyer and seller, so trust enters the relationship again, and less money can be spent on "repairing" the "broken" product.
What does Social Business introduce? Customer communities that offer help forums, product reviews, mostly without money being exchanged, sometimes with a few company-paid administrators or moderators but mostly even without those.
It's not very nice to say, but these function a bit like the clueless layer of a company, forming a human buffer between the end-user and the company itself

I am well aware that the phrase Social Business was coined before Social Business as the Twitterati use it, formed. Dachis coined Social Business Design and the rest is history - so I'm looking for for-profit businesses that use Social as a means to do bigger and better business with the same resources

5. The two major areas where Social rocks

Social is strongest where it's closest to people: either reaching out to consumers in order to try to convert them into (paying!) customers, or reaching out to existing customers whose image of the product has been "damaged" - in plain English, those with customer complaints.
That pinpoints the best usage for Social at this very moment: in aftersales (customer service, providing that via communities and help forums) and presales (marketing and sales, providing that via communities and product reviews).
And, to be honest, the rest is mostly product - if not all. There are very neat product installation and FAQ / fixing web pages that belong to either end of the scale, or both, but you can't throw much more people onto a product than currently has already happened

6. Why Social works

Moderation is almost unnecessary as these communities appear to be self-moderating, largely because they start out small - like the villages and communities 5,000-2,000 ago in yesterday's post. Coincidence? No. Strong ties and trust grow naturally in small-sized environments.
Is it surprising that Social rises now? Now the biggest discrepancies in the industrialised world slowly disappeared?
Communism collapsed when The Wall fell in 1989, capitalism collapsed when Wall Street fell in 2008. Religion doesn't divide people like it used to - basically all rubber bands stretched so far that they snapped

Where does that leave us humans? In some state of limbo? We can only reaffirm our image of individuals as long as the group we form part of, shelters us from everyday nuances and fine-grained subtleties - usually by opposing to another group.
The outer groups have eroded, and at the same time we have been handed means to form and become part of groups on a daily basis.
The marriage-for-life to your husband or wife stopped being self-evident half a century ago, and slowly after the marriage-for-life to your work did the same. Now we're applying the same principle to other ties that "kept us in captivity" for somewhat of a lifetime: religion, political conviction, politically correct friends, just friends and acquaintances

We see other humans as humans now, in stead of people from other Groups, which ever those might be. Interacting with complete strangers on a daily basis greatly affects our perception, lessens our resistance, lowers our guard, and shows us that we all have many more things in common than we have differences

Social is the way forward, there's no denying that it is. It is not only giving us the feeling that people and products around us are less far away than we feel, but in the longer run it actually does bring both closer. Social makes us more Social, and this world a better place to be

The benefits of Social Business 1/2

2012-02-27T00:56:00.001+01:00

This post is the first in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Business, part one of two. It will relate the history of Business, and I'm sorry but that does take up an entire blog post - ask Socrates.
The definition of Social Business is this:

Social Business deals with business exceptions rather than rules, requiring flexible answers to complex questions in dynamic environments. As such, it isn't about giving predefined answers to predictable questions, it is about giving unpredictable answers to undefined questions.
Social Business serves best where an increased distance between people on all sides is negatively affecting business as a whole.
Social Business is best for establishing ties between unknown people.
As such, it will gradually replace distance by proximity, thus swapping anonymity for intimacy

The quote is taken from my Social Business (R)evolution freeBook, except for the part in bold that I added. I felt that I had to state the goal more clear in the definition itself: Social basically could / should undo the negative effects of economies of scale

So let's take all the Social we can imagine, and throw that to the current way we do business, and see where the benefits are

1. Back when everything was Social

Let's start at the point when everything was swell: 5-2,000 years ago when there were farmers, shepherds, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Just taking a few of the professions here who provided us with the most necessary food and non-food. Either you knew each of them personally, or you knew them because they were referred to you by people you knew. Trade was local or regional at best, and travelling distance a few hours or days - customer service was far, far away, so everything was based on trust

Basically, this model closely followed our own circles: friends, and friends of friends - close relatives, and distant relatives. You might have never seen or even heard of uncle or aunt X or Y, but they were family - so you could trust them

2. The departure from Social into So-So

When larger habitats such as cities started to form, the circles widened: in stead of buying from friends or friends of friends, you'd be confronted with friends of friends of friends, or complete strangers - the thin line got thinner even, and the "blue eyes trust" got questionable.
Chances of hearing about a product, or successfully complaining about it got slimmer

Fast forward a few centuries: brands formed. in stead of buying bread, you'd buy a Registered North London Bakery's bread (just making them up as we go), and for lumber or carpentry you'd visit North Hampton Lumber Jacks (dito) - or one of their subsidiaries fo course. Money is a great and solid example of trying to take away fear, uncertainty and doubt: banks formed (no giggling please, back then it was a really great and much called for achievement)

What do we see there? We see individuals growing apart, due to distance, and we see the traders form larger groups in order to close the widening gap, and bring back trust to the level it was at

So, proximity lessens, distance increases - and intimacy gets replaced by anonymity

There, my friends, is the problem at hand that we all are confronted with - regardless of your belief in Social Business: we buy on faith, rather than trust

3. The Metropolis Metaphor

Society grew bigger, larger cities formed. Not hundreds or thousand, nor tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands came to live in the same "place". Friends of freinds of friends of friends? People lost count, naturally. The rubber band of trust and faith was met with yet another dimension: religion

You could buy from, and / or sell to, people from the same religion. Religion was an invention and allowance that stretched beyond the ancient frontiers , and desperately tried to justify everyday demand and supply. It crossed nations, international waters and continents, and as long as you were on the right side of religion, it worked wonders for you

4. The future of now: "design"

We live by the brand - most of us believe most of what we're told. We still are just people, who want stuff: that makes us consumers in the eyes of most, and customers in the eyes of the few evil-minded companies that claim our acquaintance before they have earned it.
We are marionets that get played by marketeers, and we love it: our youth wear pants well below their ass, and we think they're making asses of themselves by doing so. Yet, they think they're cool. It's the new-found religion: fashion. Many gods this time, seems like we're back to beyond 2,000 years...

What do we see there? We see individuals growing apart, due to distance, and we see the traders form larger groups in order to close the widening gap, and bring back trust to the level it was at

Again. Yet, different

In the next post, let's see where this ends up at: we'll take all the known tools and best practices currently known and see how they can help to undo the negative effects of the last millennia, as well as spur the needs of the last decade

Will SaaS kill ERP? No, but it should

2012-02-21T23:53:00.000+01:00

It's been a busy few days. First a post on ZDNet by Eric Lai invented a few problems for Cloud, or rather SaaS, and especially multi-tenancy: inflexible, less secure, less powerfull and maybe more costly - is what Eric claims multi-tenancy SaaS to be.
Thomas Wailgum neatly nailed that via a counterpost, as did Frank Scavo, to whose post Eric commented, and back again

The circle of Inspiration? Yes, it evolves hardest and finest on Twitter. And here are my thoughts: we need to grow up

First, now I've got your attention anyway, a minor disappointment maybe: ERP in this title and post doesn't stand for SAP, but for the epitome of enterprise IT as we know it

Good and bad arguments were made in all posts and their comments, but there was a lot of comfortzone involved - and I'm challenging that very comfortzone: enterprise IT is a multi-billion dollar industry where customers get very, very little value for money
Surely it employs many people and that huge discrepancy between investment and return gave a great boost to India and other low-labour-cost countries, but let's face it: this industry needs to mature

1. The foundation of IT

In the beginning, there was a bit.
Then, it was assembled into bytes.
And bytes formed a double-word - and then the story really started

A poetic attempt at sketching the genesis of computers, but I really want to stress the fact that IT all started with hand-crafting something out of nothing.
Over the past decades, however, standardisation and tooling slowly took away the burden of doing everything yourself. Compared to writing, you could buy ink and goose feathers in stead of making your own. You could go out and buy paper, in stead of making your own parchment

In IT, various "straight jackets" saw the light: hardware first, then software, and in between the wiring: network protocols. Choices became economically limited to a few dozen, and those became half a dozen. Standardisation always starts at the infrastructural level, at the very bottom of the IT foodchain. Compared to housing, the foundation is standardised exceptionally well across the globe as the choices are simply very limited when you have a cost-efficient solution in mind

Right now, in Enterpise IT, we have a few choices in hardware. Half a dozen choices in operating systems. Over a dozen choices in programming languages. A few dozen choices in program language interfaces, and over a dozen dozen (sic) choices in applications: the closer you get to humans, the more diverse the choices you have

2. The IT exception and rules

The odd one out there is ERP. There's SAP and there's SAP. And then there's Oracle. Wait a minute - we're 1-on-1 customer-facing and we only have 1.5 choices? That can't be right...
It isn't, in my point of view. The diversity fans out bottom-up.
One more time, with feeling:

We're settling into the infrastructural machine layer all the things that we take for granted: the simple, static stuff that doesn't change, is highly structured, rigid even. The data, the smallest building blocks, bits and bytes. Order reigns here, where everything is subjected to business rules, and automation can thrive. It's boring and it should be: it's the foundation to our "homes"
Facing the very end, humans, the opposite takes place: we encounter complex, dynamic stuff that changes all the time, unstructured, flexible itself and requiring the greatest flexibility at the same time. It's where knowledge and information flows freely, uncapturable. Chaos thrives here, exceptions are the rule, and automation usually is impossible. It's where Social sees the light

3. How the one-size-fits-all oxymoron survived

So how come ERP is where it's at? Well, only because it's customised to death. I've been told that you can buy ERP for amount X, and will need to spend an additional amount of 7 X's to make it work for you. That is caused by three phenomena:

An enterprise-wide system is high up in the IT stack, yet if you want to ship & sell it off the shelf it needs to be as "flat" as possible: offer as little rules as it can (and that's rather easy to achieve, and achieved). There are no global rules, nor exceptions
All kinds of industry-specific, national, regional, local, partner-specific, customer-specific and department-specific rules and exceptions, as well as regulatory compliance issues, are impossible to keep up with by one global system. Technically, as well as economically.
Here's where Push is replaced by Pull (John Hagel and John Seely Brown can enlighten you on this one). There are many local rules, and exceptions
Vendors, but particularly System Integrators, love to provide you with people on a Time & Material basis to achieve your goals, meaning: building in all the business rules and exceptions that you need. This might take many months, even years. The long payback time on ERP investment usually means any cost here gets sanctioned

Invest a few million in getting ERP, then being confronted with having to invest yet another few times that in actually getting what you want, slam onto that the annual "support" fee of 22%, and you'll be glad to pay off that initial investment before you die - it's an obscene lock-in. That initial 3-year horizon and payback time will slowly turn into a 20-year one, and keep you from further growth even.
A proper ERP implementation will lock you in for 15-20 years

4. The blame game and the solution

Is it the fault of ERP? Of SAP? Of Oracle? No. We still adhere to our Genesis: hand-craft from scratch.
ERP mainly is a, albeit rather huge, manifestation of our desire for one-size-fits-all customisation - which is an oxymoron by default

Look at housing: the fundament is standardised, as are the bricks, but everything else is up for grabs
Look at transportation: the roads are standardised, but you can pick a variety of vehicles to travel upon them
Look at the sky: the airports are fixed, but the variety of carriers is offering you all the choices you'd like
And then, look at IT: one choice of ERP is all it offers. Well, 1.5 maybe...

The message is clear: standardisation at the bottom allows for customisation on top of that. Customising the standardised parts itself? Ridiculous

Software as a Service comes to the rescue here: it will offer standardised solutions. Multi-tenancy, of course. They will offer you vanilla out-of-the-box and not much else. It'll be old-fashioned ERP as it came on the CD, yet pay-per-use
Where will the required standardisation come from? The need to comply with regulatory laws?

5. Turn the tide

From another SaaS, of course - or you can build it yourself, or maybe someone will offer it on-premise - or all of that combined. Do you need a business case for that? You could shop together your desired functionality online, just like a regular consumer. I hope Marc Benioff is paying attention...

SaaS will make this industry mature. It will straight-jacket enterprise IT buyers, and finally put an end to the ridiculous customisation on top of multi-million dollar ERP packages. Much like the car industry, it will force you to choose a brand, make and type, and allow you a few accesories - and that's it. If you need anything else, go get it and plug it into your Enterprise Integration Hub

SaaS your tertiairy business processes, or get them off-the-shelf.
SaaS your secondary business processes, or find a local shelf to pull them off from.
SaaS the boring core of your primary business processes, and create the specials yourself just like currently ERP makes you do so. But now, you can choose to buy local, Private SaaS them, or make - or any combination of that

That will leave you with a few disparate solutions to integrate - but SAP nor Oracle have solved that problem for you, now have they? At best, ERP's lack of strategy and consistency regarding Integration has cost you dearly.
And you know my answer and solution to that last question, of course

IT needs to mature, and become an adult industry. Pun intended. That's a multi-billion dollar business as well, yet I hear a lot less customer complaints from them

Big Data? No. Big Information as a Service

2012-02-21T00:14:00.002+01:00

I've been going through the Gartner hypecycle these last few weeks, regarding Big Data. I've been through the Trough of Disillusionment and back, and rocked back and forth a bit even, and I now figured out what's been bugging me so much about it.
It reminds me a bit of #E20...

First, I didn't think much of Big Data. Then, I thought it would be a great next new thing and bandwagon to jump onto: like datawarehousing it's closely related to Integration so I might get some spin-off.
But, that whole last idea quickly faded.
And then I went to Pervasive's integration World and got sucked into it all by Mike Hoskins's enthusiasm. Petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes - if you count all the bits and bytes there will be an awful lot of data to crunch in the next decades

I see the largest growth in machine-generated data. Measuring and spitting out data at increasingly closer intervals, I've seen it happen in my own profession: Enterprise Integration.
We used to do things in batch, once a day. Synchronise databases across space and / or time, our own company ones or those of partners, suppliers, customers

Then, the batch windows would grow smaller, or rather: the demand for updates would increase. So next to pushing data out in the evening once a day, we'd also allow inbound pulls during the day. We'd change the batch job at the end of the day into an hourly job that would aggregate changed data, add it to a file and mark it as processed. Our eager friends would call in (via a perfectly secure hard-coupled leased line) at regular times during the day, gather the little intel present, and figure out for themselves the pointer to their last piece of information

Then, demand increased even more and our hourly batch job turned into a real-time job, adding data by having that being triggered by data-changing events. Still, connectivity was kind of costly so that new info was still pulled from the outside.
A little later, pull changed to push: for the really time-critical stuff we'd not only build up new data event-driven, but also push it out on the spot to that very select group of the best of our friends and partners.
Just a little after that, connectivity costs dropped dead to almost zero and all of a sudden we considered pretty much everyone to be our best friend

From batch, we went to event-driven - it's unclear whether increased time-to-market demand increased the scale of connectivity so much that its cost flat-lined, or vice versa - but probably both. The end result? The same data being available to everyone else within seconds or minutes, versus once a day after close of business or just before that

What changed, was the speed at which information came available - nothing else. But decisions could be made sooner, and there was a minor trade-off there of course: we'd now also send out e.g. orders in the morning that would get cancelled in the afternoon, whereas this situation would result in no record whatsoever in the old situation

I envision something similar with Big Data - yet very, very different. It's not called Big Information, it's called Big Data: you now get data at the speed of light, or you can process it at a ridiculously high speed (for the record, I do drool at the showcases where millions of records get processed per second).
But you'll still have to turn all that data into information yourself

I can picture the typical vendors smiling brightly. I can also see new vendors rise and shine, and preach the gospel of Big Data and how it will save you from purgatory. I see hardware sales increase, software sales and licenses explode, and a whole new service will see the light: BIaaS

That's right: Big Information as a Service (coined on the spot, btw LOL). Why is it going to be the next big thing?

Turning Big Data into Big information? No, that's not going to happen. Business Intelligence hasn't been successful at all, datawarehousing neither, and Business Process Management suffers the same ill fate: it takes ages to structure unstructured anything - especially if both unstructured and structured keep changing, which is going to happen increasingly faster, parallelling what we witnessed in Enterprise Integration.
Occurring from both sides, the sandwich image is clear
Dragging Big Data indoors even? Hell no, the new bottle neck here is bandwidth. All fair and square that you can analyse petabytes of information within hours or even minutes, but where do those gazillionbytes come from? Outside our data centre, where ever that maybe.
Currently considered okay bandwidth for those? 2-3 Gbps, given a few thousand users. Big Data? Coming to you at a few Terabytes at least, preferrably Petabytes. Bytes versus bits there (a factor 8), and Giga versus Tera (a factor 1,000) or even Peta (a factor 1,000,000).
Looks like DHL and UPS might make a good buck from transporting Big Data - redefining the meaning and use of the carrier pigeon, hey?
Getting Big Data? Well, I don't know about you but it seems to me that we find the most interesting that which doesn't belong to us: houses, jobs, cars, women - the list is endless. And while we're on the subject: that involves money, right? A lot of it, usually? Yes

So, what's the business model going to be? Like in the old-fashioned days of Integration, batches of Big Data will be waiting for us to pick up from some gateway or server, at 2 Gbps, while the data is 2 TB? That means a 24-hour download for just one file, if absolutely nothing goes wrong, and then to analyse it within 5 minutes - where's the gain here?

My guess is, we'll quickly follow the path travelled by Integration: forget batch, we'll go straight to real-time. In stead of big batches of data, we'll get very small real-time bits and pieces: Small Data, not Big Data.
Maybe even tiny Data - but that doesn't sound so sexy now does it?

I see a good and sensible solution to bandwidth spoiling the Big Data game: owners of Big Data providing the service of Big Information. After all, one Terabyte of Data will give you only a few Megabytes of Information at best. Possibly incredibly valuable Information, but extremely limited in size

Big Data? We need a whopping 2,000-lane highway in order to make that happen without constantly being stuck, waiting to make it to our destination - to spend another few days or weeks on turning that same data into information.
Oh, and act upon it...

Where will the social developers code? And what?

2012-02-17T02:03:00.000+01:00

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a very interesting piece, and I missed it. But thanks to John Rymer I picked it up.
John shared an interesting question indeed:

Client gives up on enterprise PaaS deal with #Salesforce.com, asks me for options. Focus is "systems of engagement." Interesting question.
— John Rymer (@johnrrymer) February 16, 2012

We had a small conversation on that and I read Dion's post.
While I disagree with some statements like

But systems of record are increasingly 1) becoming commoditized by SaaS and the cloud and 2) most organizations have reached the carrying capacity of the approach: There’s very little left to store and automate that isn’t already

I do adhere to the idea that we're settling into the infrastructural layer all the things that we take for granted: the simple, static stuff that doesn't change, is highly structured, rigid even. The data, the smallest building blocks, bits and bytes. Order reigns here, where everything is subjected to business rules, and automation can thrive

What is left and floats on top, is what is closest to humans: I said it 15 years ago and will keep repeating it, but humans will always stay on top of the food chain.
It's where the opposite takes place: Complex, dynamic stuff that changes all the time, unstructured, flexible itself and requiring the greatest flexibility at the same time. It's where knowledge and information flows freely, uncapturable. Chaos thrives here, exceptions are the rule, and automation usually is impossible, and when it seems to be so, that often turns out to be a very dear fata morgana

Systems of Engagement - that would be a good name for that all, but regardless of that, it's the very place where they would reside. Dion gives a few examples of SoE (just making up the abbreviations as we go here) but I'm not too fond of "online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs" as SoE's, although they're Dion's invention of course, and it's hard to automate what can't be automated, like I showed

But maybe I just have to sleep on it and, as the hardcore business application guy I am, who thinks anything can get automated, everywhere, and effectively and cost-efficent even: have I ever envisioned what the future of automation is when indeed most is automated, and what remains simply can't be automated?
No.
But I know what it will look like. It goes something like this:

As discussed above and in my freeBook, Social is all about people-stuff, and comes with all the mentioned characterisations and attributes. And that is far, far away from infra. So can it be automated even? Well no, hardly. It's a bit like the cop standing on a highway, redirecting you to different lanes because one or two have been closed down due to an accident. Yes it's a rule, but is it worth automating? No. Never. Or hardly ever

So, back to John. PaaS? Salesforce? To "do" Systems of Engagement? There couldn't be a worse place. Yes you can PaaS your communities and run your default bulletin boards on them, but if you really want to fence them off you need good... customisation! And that you do close to the customer, local, with the vendor or an SI.
While I personally (hope to) see an end to both their ways, there'll be a few Winters and Springs before any bark will set sail in that direction. At the top of the foodchain customisation will reside, as always, and it will be lifted up from down below by SaaS driving the tertiairy and maybe secondary business processes to a company. The primary business processes are by nature what distinguishes them from the competition, and will never be SaaS-ed

Having said all that, it seems that Dion's Systems of Engagement will reside in the same place where a company's primary processes will be automated: the top-notch stuff will be developed in house or maybe outsourced, but certainly not will they be fit for SaaS

PaaS? If you think PaaS is a good place for your Systems of Engagement, why don't you just hand over your money to me? I promise I'll spend it all in one night at a bar, and that will ROI more than what you had in mind

Why it pays to keep rats on a starvation diet

2012-02-16T23:40:00.001+01:00

Full credit to Dennis Howlett for this title. I tried to locate the very tweet he sent out years ago, but failed. If memory serves me correctly, he compared enterprise employees to rats being kept on a starvation diet.
Why enterprise employees? Maybe because they come by the tens of thousands, I guess. But I vividly saw the image in front of me

I often hear people complain about the way they are rewarded at their job - usually financially. And when I say people, I don't mean the top 1-2% in an enterprise that surf ahead of the wave and automagically keep their feet dry when it drops on everyone else

Somehow I always used to have a bit more data than the people around me. Or the same, and I would turn it into information. Tables, graphs, the works; visualising the trends, discrepancies, similarities, etcetera: I had data on years of retention, acquisition, profit and loss and revenue, per business unit, country, continent. Salary, rate, hours worked - I attracted it like a magnet, and then people start coming to you with a few tables of flat data - "Hey can you do some fun stuff with this?"

Oh my, fun I had. Imagine the feeling you have X-ray eyes and can see through people? Well, I had that with quite a few people around me. Transparency is all swell and such, but some information better just stays hidden, trust me

VP's and CxO's would state something like "Country A is still suffering from slow revenue growth" and I'd show them some stats and say "Well don't forget to mention that their profit has grown 35% last year and almost back to normal - oh and btw your country's profit growth got stuck at 14%".
People would come to me and say "You know, I'm 39 now. Been with this company for 12 years, and only making 60K a year. When TF am I going to hit that magical 100K, if ever? And how many people have outrun me by now?"

Data is on the streets. Forget Big Data, data has always been big and present in abundance, but most people can't turn it into information - and that problem will remain the same. Big Data? Companies like IBM will again make tons of money selling you sexy and offensively expensive hardware and software that really does round up data like cattle, and leave it up to you to turn that very Data into Information - or offer $500 an hour consultants who'll do it for you. Nothing ever really changes, does it? Of course not - unless you do so first

Anywayz, I could turn data into information on the fly, and still can. I would take this person aside and give him a round through the stats. I'd shuffle my data a bit, sort some to the left, hide some to the right, multiply some others to get them into the same graph, and give him a one-page handout like right above

"There", I'd say, "there you are" and I'd point at a spec on the map. Your salary is this, thus your daily rate is that, your average daily rate should be X, and people with your salary are on average 43 and have 13 years of work experience. "There's the 100K barrier and those people are on average 53, with 25 years of work experience".
They'd look at the stats.
They'd ask about the next salary level, and the one after that.
I'd answer all their questions, including showing in which percentiles they were - they usually were in the top 10, or even 5

"Hmmmm", they'd go. "Well... not too bad then, I guess. Right?" and there'd be a little smirk on their face even

Amazing. Right in front of me these people would turn from dissatisfied into satisfied. And I hadn't even tried to make them happy or keep them unhappy, I just showed them the stats.
I hadn't even said "You know, with such a rate you might as well be 5 salary levels up, or down", pointing at the odd yet stubbornly repetitive pattern the actual rate shows. Nor did I show them the exceptions, like the 60-year old on a salary that would be average for a 37-year old, or the odd 35-year old who'd make a top salary

I merely showed them the stats. And they'd go on, and stay at the company for many years to come. And I'd think of my wife's quote "The company's goal is to keep their employees just not dissatisfied enough".
Transparency is a b*tch

Whitney would have approved of this post

2012-02-12T19:19:00.000+01:00

Whitney Houston, rest in peace.
I read up on last night's tweet stream this morning, and that's how I found out: Whitney Hoston died at age 48 in a hotelroom in Beverly Hills, California, US of A.
I remember her debut on Dutch television somewhere in the eighties, as she was announced as "Tina Turner's niece". Although that wasn't true, when you're cousin to Dionne Warwick and have Aretha Franklin as your godmother, you've got your fair share of musical talent and attention I think

One of the tweets I saw read "can we please give it just 30 minutes before we start ripping apart dead people", and another one read "... it's just how Whitney would have wanted it"

It always happens: once some one dies, we automatically make up the balance. Before closing the book, we reach a conclusion, need to give a small summary, voice our opinion. Seems like we're taught that we need to have learned a lesson when an action completes?
On one side of the spectrum, Whitney's death is just (big) news and even anticipated by a few who thus have some material lying ready - just in case. Some people just have to write about it, it's their professional commitment.
On the other side, there are the opportunistic people, like me for instance. I have never bought an album or record with Whitney on it, I do think we have a few albums of her on the network but I have no idea really

Why write this? To write about the silliness of perceived relationships.
One of those is the phenomenon that people that are close to each other, know each other well. As we like to reverse cause and effect, there are many people that try to get to know everything about others, so they can "prove" they are close.
Predicting what Whitney would have done (very easy to get away with now she's dead) is one way to show your own greatness: it shows how close you were to Whitney, how much celeberity you are yourself.
It simply is a way of working yourself up over someone's dead body

Does that have to do anything with Whitney? No.
One could write about any aspect of her life, after all she's had over 30 years of a singing career. A phenomenal voice as well, and very impressive record-breaking sales. Still, the focus will be on the negative stuff, as "misery likes company"

People try to find compensation for what they feel lacking. Basically the fact that they do this, is bad enough as it is, although some compensation turns out less bad than the rest

There are compensations that only affect the body: bulimia or anorexia. Going nuts in the gym is not recognised as a disease yet, nor is running, but these are known to be labelled as "way of life" by many.
Converting yourself to Jesus usually does less harm, as does conversion to Allah, Buddha or who knows who. It's all in the mind and you might put off a few people but usually it doesn't take casualties on either side.
In between are compensations that affect body as well as mind. Alcohol and drugs, the best celeb killers there are...

Meanwhile, down on earth, we meddle with what's within our reach: a bit of gossip here and there to distract our mind, fast food to compensate for our slow evolvement in life and career and the television to offer us both: mind-numbing coach potato time, best filled with watching sports - how gross can the contradiction be?

It doesn't really matter whether you're a celebrity or just an ordinary human being, although, if you ask me, I'd rather be the latter (less supervision). All that matters is that you're happy, and that you don't have to show that to anyone in order to actually feel happy. Like I said in one of my tweets today, a lot more concise that in this entire post:

There is no amount of outside which can fix your inside. Just listen to your heart

SAP, Integration and Star Trek: the future is now

2012-02-07T23:14:00.000+01:00

I ~~commented~~ ranted on an SDN post yesterday. Submitting it failed, and I lost the +/- 500 words. A bit more miffed after that, I wrote the comment anew in Notepad, and copy/pasted that - it worked.
I got a few reactions, some of which inviting me to post on the topic on SDN via a blog post in stead of just a (lengthy) comment. While I appreciate the invite, I'll just do it here for now

Let me explain about Integration first. I'll keep it short, but if you like the long version, there's my free eBook on Enterprise Integration

Enterprise Application Integration is about getting information from one container into another, across frontiers of time and space. As Star-Treky as this may sound, it is much simpler and involves a lot less Tech, if any - but the journey is equally exciting. I have been practising Integration for over 15 years now and call me a bore but I would love to do it for yet another 15 years, and then some

The starship Enterprise has as a mission "to boldly go where no man has gone before" - and that is exactly the goal to have in mind. Integration is a necessary evil, and a means at best: certainly not a goal

The starship Enterprise (Enterprise from now on, not to be confused with my usual word for fat-bottomed multinationals, thank you) is a vessel, which can carry people, packages, other spaceships, fighters, humans and droids or androids alike: it can encompass pretty much everything.
In Integration terms, the Enterprise is the envelope that can carry messages and their cargo. All kinds of messages: old-fashioned, current, brand-new, and even unknown. EDIFACT, X12, SWIFT, SEPA, HL7, XML, JSON, CSV, flat file - some of these are related, similar or even identical; but the Envelope can carry them all.
This Envelope makes everything transparent for headquarters: they just deal with the many starships there are, and address them in a uniform way, because they are uniform. This way, the universal diversity that lies underneath is hidden to the business. Headquarters simply exchanges business information between itself and the starships, and that's the end to that

The Enterprise can also transport all these messages in various ways: of course it can transport itself in its entirety, at various speeds: regular speed, light-speed, warp 1 through 10, you name it.
Next to that, it can deploy messages by the hundreds, dozen, or even per person: it can use other carriers for that, beam people and cargo up and down, and even separate itself from its core.
In Integration terms, the Enterprise can support high-volume to low-volume, and high-speed to low speed. It is capable of batch and event-driven alike, regardless of transport protocols.
There are certain limits to each means of transportation, of course - but there's a best approach and one or more alternatives to any of them

The Enterprise has the bridge, or central command, that logs and monitors each and every movement: nothing goes unnoticed or untraced. All information comes together here, and is handled as uniform events, no matter what they are. Decisions can be made that will trigger other events, and if we conveniently ignore the fact that all the tough decisions that make an episode exciting are 100% exceptions, there is a mega "iceberg" below the bridge that handles all the rules.
In Integration terms, the Enterprise can support Business Process Management (done below the bridge out of sight) as well as Complex Event Processing (done on the bridge). All in all, it's an Event Driven Architecture that allows for both branches

So, there we have it: the uniform business-envelope supports all messages, all transport protocols, and central monitoring and logging. By doing so, it allows for handling rules (BPM) as well as exceptions (CEP) and errors

This is what Integration is all about: getting information from A to B across frontiers of time and space. Everything else isn't about Integration:

XML? Limiting the Enterprise to only carry humans, or droids, or cargo - you'd have to build three separate Enterprises to allow for only these three types of passengers
SOAP? Limiting the Enterprise to only beam up and down, in between planets that support it
REST? Forcing the Enterprise to beam down to places that support it, and beam up from other ones that only support beaming up
Web services? UDDI? xBPELx? Guess what...

What has SAP's integration strategy been so far? Not building an Enterprise, that's for sure.
Netweaver facilitated building carriers and fighters at best. XI was a carrier, but couldn't carry cargo, only lifeforms: it had no support for the most widely used B2B standards, it supported XML or flat file at best. PI was a little bit better, or should I say less bad, but converts life-forms to cargo and vice-versa under the hood (it's entirely XML-based)

Is this future-proof? Hell no - it's not even present-proof, or past-proof for that matter. Any-to-any is the base requirement: support of any message kind, any transportation means, and transformation of any message to any other message, respectively transportation means.
Like I said in my comment: apparently there hasn't been a need for SAP to develop such an Enterprise scale platform. However, if you look at how SAP's revenue and profit has evolved over the last 7 years, you'll see that revenue per employee hasn't grown, whereas profit has taken a 20% nose-dive

This next decade (and these past few years have already shown a few signs) will give SaaS an increasing piece of the enterprise software pie. Social will come in sideways, taking another bite. Mobile will continue to create applications at the speed of light, and real-time time-to-market will finally become business as usual - if IT can keep up. What does that mean? An end to adopt, and a beginning of adapt. Survival comes to those who can adapt, business opportunities will be harvested by those who can manage them.
All different types and kinds of humanoids, cargo, carriers and teleportations will come to life. And it will all happen at warp 11+

Is it time for a cunning plan for SAP? I most certainly think so. Would e.g. TIBCO-like Integration capabilities enable them to take on this decade and next? Oh yeah, definitely. Does that mean they should they buy TIBCO? Most definitely not - that will merely repeat the Oracle-BEA scenario

Pervasive's Integration World Europe 2012

2012-01-31T23:37:00.000+01:00

I was at Integration World Europe 2012 today, organised by Pervasive at the Cumberland hotel in London.
A nice environment and a party of a hundred plus, today's topics were Big Data, Data Integration, Cloud and Strategic Business Solutions.
Clear divisions were made on Cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and public, private, community and hybrid

Shawn Rogers from Enterprise Management Associates showed an extensive amount of tips and tricks on how to make sure you get the Cloud solution you need, being honest about the small print. The 50-page report he squeezed into one presentation showed many insights, and I'll certainly study it

In their journey to the Cloud, Pervasive swapped almost all their internal (largely .Net-based) applications by various external providers, mostly Cloud-based. Some of those really solved business and compliancy problems, others just saved a lot of money, and some where an alternative over a big upgrade or an entire product replacement.
Of course, integrating all that is not an issue for Pervasive. There is only one issue, and that is user management and single sign-on (read: synchronised password expiration) across all those different solutions. Great session by Steve Padgett

The biggest issue that lies at the root of all problems is master data. Hot almost 10 years ago already, it seemed to somehow have been conveniently ignored - at least in my world it didn't reach the hype it promised to be.
Geoji George presented a rapid approach to one version of the truth: data quality leads the way there. Pervasive uses a good range of products here: Data Integrate to extract, custom industry-based libraries to cleanse a first round, MatchMerge to apply filtering and cleaning rules, and then Data Integrate again to load. MatchMerge has a good set of capabilities including fuzzy logic, and the combination of it all seems like a strong combination to improve data quality so it can end up in a database to serve MDM purposes. Pervasive doesn't really mind which database that is, they support more than a few.
Pervasive doesn't offer MDM as a product or solution themselves, but the hardest part of getting there from scratch is supported very well

Finally, Pervasive's Mike Hoskins, CTO, showed Pervasive's Big Data products and solutions for Extreme Computing. This will be released / revealed in the coming months, and unfortunately the future session was under NDA so I can't tell you more - I wish I could

I couldn't attend all sessions of course. Pervasive Data Integrator 10 I would have liked to see for sure. It's offered on-premise, off-premise, whatever suits your needs. It just so happened all my sessions were presented by Pervasive people, yet I'd liked to have heard from customers and only half of the sessions were given by Pervasive people so I made a somewhat unlucky choice there - although I have no regrets.
I managed to finish attending the panel session which was okay but only got very interesting towards the end, but then had to run and catch my flight which I managed to do with only half an hour to spare - next time I'll change my flight strategy for sure: I missed a very valuable part of the day

My takeaway from this day: the market for Integration is growing faster than ever, and the notion that it's not about either-or is slowly getting through. If the last decades in IT have taught us anything, it's that there is no next new thing that will take all our problems away.
Our problems persist, because we seek new business opportunities every day.
Our problems persist, because we find new business opportunities every day.
Our problems persist, because these new business opportunities pose different challenges to us every day.
Forget about building a house on rock versus sand: you will be building right over a vault line no matter where you do so - evolution will simply go on no matter what

Did you think things were settling down? Cloud will tear up your IT solution whether you like it or not, and Big Data, which isn't a problem now, or in the next few years, certainly proposes a lot of business opportunities right now.
The last decade and then some has shown a convergence from batch-oriented processing and thus execution towards real-time and in some cases even event-driven operation. While the amount of information has increased within enterprises, the time to keep it has done so as well due to regulations and compliancy, among others.
To be able to crunch that, and metaphysical data which becomes available in abundance, you and your competitors all take weeks, which is fine, because you all do it, right? Now what if that were just days, or even minutes? What if you could decide, e.g. in retail, to sell an item at half-price for like an hour? Before the competition knows it, your run is done and you've made a quick buck, just because you could act much sooner on information available - because it was you who turned data into information.

Turn it around: what if you can analyze today's data on the spot and thus spot trends that no one else can - yet? It'll feel like you're trading stock based on real-time information while the others have day-old information. Analysing quickly and swiftly gives you the ability to trend and look into the future - or at least gives you the audacity to do so

What matters, is being adaptive. Adopting new solutions and thus waiting for them to become available (for the whole market at the same time too) is just plain silly and only pleasing the typical vendors and system integrators. Has client-server solved anything? We're back to dummy terminals now with Cloud. Has ERP or CRM solved anything? It gave us more customization than bespoke could ever dream of, while at the same time threatening us with a major update every other year.
Has ERP solved the integration problem? No, we now just have SAP- and Oracle silos that are still bespoke on a functional and technical level.
Integration? It's still on the agenda, and if we focus on replacing SOAP by REST, and Connectors by API's, it will still be on the agenda 10 years from now - in a useless way.
If we keep on talking about Cloud, that will also be on the agenda 10 years from now, unless we address SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, how we get to the various flavours via private, hybrid, community and public cloud and explore how we can keep all that together with on-premise or other off-premise where it needs to be.
When it comes together, we need to realise that the average dictionary is so big because it pleases everyone: in the next few years we'll find out that it's a truth that also applies to the enterprise, when we jot all our increasingly becoming disparate stuff together.
My vision for the future is clear: diversity is here to stay, because time-to-market and real-time decision making will dictate so. Out go the dinosaurs (although they'll manage to squeeze out another few updates on an increasing discount), in come the packs of velociraptors. That means slowly converge from on-premise to off-premise where that will ROI, and do something else or stick to proven solutions where it doesn't

What I especially like about Pervasive is the fact that they're hype-free. They tell it like it is, and show that being sincere and open can lead to great success. They know what they talk about, and can relate that message to any audience. Their great promise is DataRush, which you should be watching closely. I know I will

Wanted dead or alive: any Facebook user, $ 125 reward

2012-01-30T17:26:00.001+01:00

With the upcoming IPO of Facebook this week, I got a little worried. I told a few people "Mark my words, this IPO is going to blow the Social Media bubble once and for all" and even "Wouldn't be surprised if FB's IPO is going to start the final leg of this crisis and finish everything off".
A bit gloomy, I admit. But I really need to get something off my chest here: you could put a value on people, but not in this context, and certainly not at a price like this

Amounts have been predicted as low (yes, "low") as $ 10 billion, and as high as $ 100 billion for Facebook's IPO. At their claimed amount of 800 million users, who miraculously seem to be logging on every second day at the least, that would mean at least $ 12.5 per user, at maximum $ 125.
A maximum amount of one hundred and twenty five dollars per Facebook user, dead or alive - would you offer such a ridiculous amount of money if it were your own? Of course not

The thing is, I'm afraid this IPO just has to succeed. We've been fooling and fudging around in social media for so long, suggestimating and guesstimating profits and ROI (look up 'evangalyst' on my blog) and now the time has finally come: monetisation is here!
If you aren't going to monetise on Facebook's IPO, hell, when and on what are you going to monetise? Never, on nothing, if you don't do it here. This is the biggest and baddest thing that has happened to Scoial Media, and it's here and now: this simply has got to be the most humongeous success in the last few years. Golden parachuting our way out of this crisis - who doesn't want to do so?

So, you see, if you're not in on this, you're a sucker and a failure. VC's will finally have a way to blow their funds again, millionaires who forgot to buy gold and oil can now make a decent wager, in short: this IPO is going to open high and reach beyond the skies, beyond the heavens, and maybe even tickle Gawd's balls - that's how high it's going to get

Did you see Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy? Somewhat like the final scenes is what I imagine when I think of FB's IPO. People will buy, buy, and buy, and somewhere along that buying frenzy, people will start to sell, and make a huge profit, conjuring that out of thin air. Instantly making fortunes. They eyes of the world will be directed at FB's IPO, and this economy isn't luxurious and laid-back enough to deserve or undertake an IPO like that. Hundreds of millions of people will be watching it, and as soon as something seems to be very wrong, people will go mad, panic, and dump FB like crazy

IPO a Social Network? What were you thinking?

How Klout could make Twitter a better place

2012-01-28T02:05:00.001+01:00

I've written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called "Why I have doubt about @Klout"

At the beginning of that I stated

First of all, I highly appreciate the service

- and I ended with

11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the one hand comforts me, and on the other makes me think about the stability and value of it all...

Since then, I've become increasingly weary of the product, especially because of the consistently incosnsistent quality of the product, its lack of service, and its continuous drumming on the marketing machine nonetheless - no wonder 2.5 million people instantly killed their Klout profile as soon as they finally got the chance to do so

Today, I present a way for Klout to actually create some goodwill on Twitter

If you are on Twitter and have been for a while, you will have noticed the increased amount of spam. Search for "amazon" on Twitter search and you'll find 25-30 tweets per second spawned by bots to redirect you to Amazon.com. Just tweets, that's all.
Apart from that, spam bots send tweets to you (to get your attention) and bring similar content to your attention

Foxy is a fine example. On Twitter since November 14th 2011, this bot has produced (at this very moment) 34,261 tweet. It follows 8, one of which being Klout, and has 263 followers, and doesn't appear on any list. Yet, Klout values it with a score of 36, accrediting it the usual BS achievements.
Go to Klout influencers tab in this particular case, and you'll see that

foxy hasn't been influenced by anyone recently.

Well, Klout got that right...

I'm not trying to prove that bots can achieve great Klout scores. That's been proven already, beyond a doubt. I'm stating that bots can be detected in an early stage by Klout, who is after all catching up on Twitter stream at best.
Taking foxy again, here are the bot's stats:

75 days on Twitter, 457 tweets a day (i.e. 19 per hour), relatively no followers at all, and not following anyone, no lists, no favourites: that's clearly a sign of "the odd one out".
This is default behaviour of bots: very few followers, very few people they follow, yet many, many, many tweets. What have I seen, in the last 3 months?

Bots that have almost no followers, don't follow anyone, yet send out a few messages every hour, sometimes even every minute, sometimes every second. Whenever they send me a message, they have 0 followers, follow 0 people, have 0 lists, and 0 favourites, and have usually sent less than 10 tweets. Next to that?
They have no Klout score

And that's where Klout could - and should, IMO - enter the arena. It is simple, really. Here's my proposition:

Twitter and Klout should cooperate on spam detection and blocking. The possibilities are endless, and the algorithms could end up so complex that they can only be maintained bu a regulated crowdforce, but that is worrying about the future. Today, the patterns are simple:

If a user without a Klout score gets blocked for spam at least once, there's a moratorium of 24 hours on Klout before they can profile it / him / her
If a user gets blocked three times within a Klout moratorium, the account is suspended on both sides: Twitter notifies Klout
Klout must enable marking an account for spam as well: only registered users can apply. Klout is the best place to establish the trust level required, and will probably enable this feature for profiles with a given score and up
Twitter will receive the "mark for spam" reports from Klout and immediately suspend the account at hand. The eventual quantity and quality of complaint(s) following will determine the degree in which they (dis)qualify the initial report, and its reporter's credibility - for current and future references
Bonus as well as malus points will be settled on both sides. Too many malus points will lead to a life-ban, too many bonus points will lead to scrutiny by a wider committee for every case at hand

This is a proposition. I would very much like your reaction(s) - I get increasingly more Twitter spam every day, and I would just love to do without it. How about you?

tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its

2012-01-25T22:31:00.001+01:00

Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it - as usual I'd say.
"In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr to unify people, data and businesses processes to get work done"

A clear message: ...to get work done. In my opinion, tibbr dramatically reduces unnecessary human intervention in the workplace, thereby making work less unpleasant while freeing up resources for the really interesting work.
Not the greatest nor shortest sales pitch - but then I'm not selling anything here

tibbr brings back the balance in our lives: after decades of automation and computerisation, some, if not most, of us have become slaves to the machine, walking the last mile from rule-based machines to exception-based humans: the travel agent, the secretary, the project planner, the project manager officer: basically they're all data entry clerks and data exit clerks at the same time

What's a data exit clerk? Someone who takes data out of a machine and feeds that into people's heads, usually by a telephone call, an email, or whatnot. The trigger for that? A booked flight, a cancelled reservation, hours not written down in time, a SKU running low, etcetera: these employees sit on data hubs, continuously scavenging them for information they can relay to colleagues or customers.
tibbr, released February 1st 2011 in London, ended that:

when information is available, it comes to you

My biggest take-away from that? The fact that tibbr cut out the middle man, the data entry clerk, by enabling people to follow and directly subscribe to events themselves - people could pick the low-hanging fruits again

That was then, and now tibbr takes the same principle out onto the streets, where pretty much everything is a perfectly isolated silo of information. Did you ever have to switch supermarkets because your favourite one was closed? What a drag hey? You knew they sold basically the same stuff, but had no clue how the new store was organised

tibbr's new feature would have come in handy: tibbr GEO. In the example above, you'd simply subscribe to your points of interest, e.g. grocery, bakery and the beer section, hold up your mobile in front of you and let the augmented reality guide you through the store (like shown in the picture above).
Revolutionary? Again, absolutely affirmative. Of course, you could also leave a note to say that the baguettes have run out, or leave an extra order for the weekend? Management could use that info for marketing and sales, inventory and many, many others purposes

Again, tibbr discloses information directly, with as little human intervention as possible, greatly increasing efficiency and decreasing margin for error. Other examples are using this at an airport to show information around e.g. a gate or flight, so flight crew or passengers get the latest of information automatically.
It would be ideal for me: it takes me ages to get my head around directions, I'm missing a few if not all of the required 3D-genes I'm afraid. Catching that flight on a new airport while you're late and almost missing it? Follow your mobile and you won't walk one unnecessary metre. Has the gate changed? You'll be notified automatically.
(To me, all airports are brand new. Even Schiphol, after over a hundred flights, is a labyrinth to me, so I see a solid business case here)

Of course airports resemble slow-moving goods, but how about trains, or taxi stands? Trains don't change platform often, but their departure and arrival time certainly does. Wouldn't it be nice to get that alternative earlier train suggested, without having to find out for yourself? Taxis offering a discount ride because they need to get somewhere and pick up a passenger, but would love to make money on the way up? ("Offering half price to London Liverpool Station within the next 10 minutes" would be an attractive offer, wouldn't it?)

I see business cases by the dozens here. tibbr 3.5 socialises the entire world, inside as well as outside the enterprise. Everywhere people, applications and data hubs are megaphoning their information to you at the top of their lungs, but you only hear what you weant to hear...

Of course that would mean that everyone goes out and gets tibbr. I'm sure tibbr wouldn't mind that, but that does mean that tibbr has to be really device- and platform-agnostic, and stay that way. Can't be developing all kinds of functionality for all the different mobile / tablet OS's in the world, and still smile genuinely all the time.
So, tibbr made a bold move on the technical side as well: the entire application is now HTML5. I saw it, felt it, and you wouldn't say so, if you didn't know - it's just an app. Great extra bonus? It all works offline as well, just like you're used to with email and / or your browser. You won't get the latest news of course, merely running on life support. Ideal for dropping connections out there in the wild, and we all know there's plenty of that...

Again, tibbr astonishes. Then again they have around one million active users now, all gathered within a year. Paying users, mind you

tibbr is silently disrupting the world, and will continue to do so. Their secret, if you ask me? Doing all the adapting for you, so you only have to adopt tibbr - and stay a few miles ahead of the pack

Apple margin per device - expressed in Chinese

2012-01-23T23:16:00.002+01:00

[Image by Sven Teschke]

An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing "only" twice as many employees in the US than overseas - but indirectly more than ten times those combined, none of which in the US

I've published on Apple's revenue and profit a few times now, last of which was two months ago. A historical year for Apple: it surpassed Google on profit per employee - operating profit so before taxes, by the way

But, let's face it: Apple's success coincided with turning away from the United States for manufacturing their products, and towards the East. Correlation but no causation? Fair enough.
Here's what makes China so great, according to the article:

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes

Imagine that? Spending $ 100 for a human being who works 72 hours? That's one-and-a-half dollar per hour, $ 1.50 for those who like to see numbers over words.
Can anyone beat that in the West? No. The article then goes on to claim

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

Well excuse me for laughing out loud. Sixty-five dollars is the equivalent of a 48-hour Chinese workweek. Hard choice there? I don't think so. And I doubt the "hundreds of dollars profit per phone" there, so I did some calculations

Taking 2011, you can see from my latest post on Apple that they manage $ 560,000 profit per employee, but that's before taxes. Regardless of taxes, employee revenue amounts to $ 1,791,000 - yes, that's almost 2 million dollars.
Two million dollars! Where does that revenue go?
No idea, but if we just play dumb this simply means that the average Apple employee costs $ 1,231,00 - over one million dollars.
That can't be true of course, and it isn't. Like Google, Apple's cost are mostly hardware related. Look at the old HP in my post, and you'll see that hardware makers have extremely high costs per employee - so let's just look at the margins per device for Apple, shall we? Taking the last fiscal year, 2011 (iPhone and iPad figures include related sales, such as e.g. carrier agreements, services, and accessories):

Unfortunately, and understandably so, Apple doesn't give away sales / total cost per device - so we'll have to find a way around that.
The blunt way is to divide total profit after taxes by total number of devices, which leads to a figure of $ 158 net profit per device - but that wouldn't be fair to the iPod, or their desktops, now would it?
We could assume they make the same margin per device, percentage-wise, and then these figures are the result (the margin per device would be the same margin as the net profit margin of course, being 26.82%):

Hundreds of dollars profit per device? Not really, dear New York Times. Yes, for the desktops and laptops, but those are the least quantity sold: together, they make up for only 10% of total units.
On the iPod Apple doesn't even make half a hundred dollars, and iPhone and iPad reach well over one hundred, but not even two hundred dollar per device - and in my book "hundreds" means at least two hundred, usually four to five hundred on average

Anyway, I was wondering how these margins relate to the margins for the Chinese workers that build these. I consulted the Chinese tax system, and the current exchange rate that tells me 1 dollar equals 6 yuan, and then I learned that the average Chinese worker employed by Apple earns 600 yuan for a 72-hour workweek. They probably work 50 weeks a year too, with an average of 5 to 15 paid leave days a year. Notwithstanding the fact that a 72-hour 50-week work year would be the equivalent of 1.8 years for the average American, annual pay would be 30,000 yuan, being 2,500 yuan per month

According to the tax table mentioned above, monthly tax would be 10%, being 250 yuan, minus the quick deduction, being 105 yuan, leaving the employee with 2,355 yuan monthly income: given the exchange rate, that's a net monthly income of $ 392.50 - just a little over the net margin Apple makes on a desktop.
So, with 300 hours of work in a month, a Chinese employed by Apple makes a net margin that's less than two average Apple devices

If this Chinese were to work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, like his average American counterpart, he'd net $ 213.70 per month: not even enough to equal the two lowest-margin Apple products (in my theoretical example), the iPad and the iPod.
In other words, the net margin on 15 iPhones / iPads would pay for one entire employee year.
Jobs coming back? Impossible, of course...

Airline ticket pricing: ticket prices compared

2012-01-22T17:25:00.002+01:00

After yesterday's post, some wanted to know "the best" flights / airline, regardless of surcharge(s). Fair enough, that probably means the cheapest ones, so I dove in again and came up with the following data (I calculated my own surcharge based on the experience I now have, so prices will differ from what you can find yourself)

(Like yesterday, I took a round-trip from New York to Amsterdam and back, leaving 21st of March and returning 4th of April. I compared both Economy as Business)

If you fly Lufthansa NYC-AMS, you can get an Economy flight for $ 230 plus $ 572.75 surcharge. Those are real ticket price and surcharges, with $ 50-60 variation in prices for the entire day.
Business Class charge you $ 5,030 ticket plus $ 742.75 surcharge for the only non-stop flight available, with the $ 646 fuel surcharge versus $ 476 for the same passenger in a different class that we saw yesterday already. One-stop flights both ways would cost $ 4,300 plus surcharge. Of course, like I showed, a pitstop will cost you an additional $ 40.97 surcharge.
By the way, also in Business there is only $ 50-60 variation in between tickets (then again there are only 5-6 choices per leg). They all depart late in the evening from NYC, and Economy as well as Business offer only one non-stop flight.
Interesting thing is, that half of these flights are operated by Continental - so let's go there shall we?

Continental's price for the Economy flights is the exact same, but for Business the difference is worthwile: the non-stop flight Lufthansa showed is now "free of charge", so to say: $ 4,300 and $ 742.75 surcharge: Continental must be reserving the best seats for themselves.
That exact flight is also the only one operated by Continental itself by the way, all the others are operated by United (vast majority), Eurowings or Lufthansa
All the others also make a pitstop somewhere, varying from Frankfurt, Denver, Chicago, with connect times from 12-15 hours, but also one with 3 hours connect time.
In Economy, these are all around $ 820 and vary from 10 hours travel time to 19, then jump to $ 3,200 for 12-19 hour traveltime, and finish off at around $ 4,800 and 14-15 hours.
For that last amount, you can also get a Business flight non-stop, with 8 hour traveltime. Speaking of which: after that, the usual: 10-19 hour one-stop flights for $ 5,000, $ 5,750, $ 7,200 and $ 8,200 - I fail to see any correlation there

So, from Lufthansa to Continental, we automatically get to United. What are their rates? (I know Continental and United are one and the same since May 2010, but who knows?)
The $ 5,000 Business non-stop flight is there, like the others: like Continental, all United flights but one have one stop on the way out, and back on the way in again. Business flights range from $ 5,000 to $ 8,000, with travel times in between 12 and 15 hours mostly.
Economy flights range from $ 800 (for the only one non-stop flight) to $ 3,000 (for "the Copenhagen connection") with most around $ 900-1,100 but I wouldn't fly United nor Continental unless you can get a direct flight. Paying double, triple or even quadruple for non-non-stop flights (sic) with up to 2.5 times the travel time is not a smart thing to do in my opinion.

Delta then? Offers non-stop as well as one-stop flights for $ 850 in Economy class including surcharges (with a neat and correct breakdown of those, well done Delta!) and variations are available for $ 970 or $ 1,289. Business class starts at $ 5,030 inclusing surcharge, and ends at around $ 6,000
All flights are in between 8 hours travel time and 12 although there's one with a 6 hour layover at Charles de Gaulle. A good amount of non-stop flights though, in Economy as well as Business

Last but not least: American Airlines. They use British Airways like Delta uses Air France / KLM, but don't offer a single non-stop flight, hopping over at Heathrow. Somehow strangely, they all leave in the evening, starting at 7 PM - just like Lufthansa.
No non-stop flights, all leaving in the evening, with the cheapest Economy flight at $ 870, maxing out at $ 1,070, I am certainly not attracted by AA's offers. Business Class then? Well, same flights, just different prices. So in stead of paying $ 870 for a one-stop late and long flight, I could also pick a seat in Business class and just pay $ 5,000 - or up to $ 6,100.
Hell, I could even fly First and pay $ 9,800 to $ 11,400 for the same inconveniences - why not?!

All in all, there is no difference whatsoever in price. Not at base prices, anyway. You can end up with huge differences if you pick the highest Economy or Business class tickets though, especially if you fly Continental / United.
Economy goes for $ 800 to $ 850 regardless of airline picked. Maybe that isn't so strange as all these airlines are somehow interbred: Lufthansa uses Continental, Continental uses United (sorry, is equal to), United uses Lufthansa, Delta is cooperating with KLM and Air France, etc.
Maybe that's why also all Business class flights start at around $ 5,000?

The major difference is in flight-time, which is determined by the airports used in between. Like in Lufthansa's case, it can pay off to pick a non-stop flight no matter what the cost is, see who actually operates that flight (Continental in my example), switch to their site and find out that you can save $ 700 on a $ 5,000+ Business ticket this way.
There is not much sense to make out of some flights: they fly later, longer, and cost you more. Maybe those get populated by the late-bookers who have no choice by then, but in my book that will teach you a costly lesson

Here are my picks, in order:

All planes fly late from NYC so that's left out of the equation
Delta offers plenty of non-stop flights at attractive prices, inbound as well as outbound, varying relatively very little from the base ones
Lufthansa limits your choice to 5-6 flights a day. They don't have a cheapest non-stop Business flight - but you now know how you can get that anyway - and only one non-stop Economy flight
Continental and United have a lot of choices, but those include also the really non-attractive ones given travel time and price. They offer one single non-stop flight
American is the worst choice of them all. No non-stop flights at all, and 5-10% more expensive for a base Economy flight compared to the others, they offer nothing compelling at all

You might think I only care about non-stop flights. Well, that's not far off the truth. Paying amount X for getting from A to B is greatly influenced by the ease you do that with. I laugh at the differences in price for Business versus Economy, let alone First (usually double or more than Business!), as they're all subject to the same travelling conditions.
They may have a bigger seat but e.g. 15-19 hours of travel time for an 8 hour flight is a nightmare no matter how you spend it. Time is money.
Want to really get comfortable for a low price? Buy two seats in stead of one. Heck, buy an entire 3-seat row and you can have all the drinks and meals you want, sleep stretched and all that for half the amount someone in Business pays (for half the space and service!)

A word on all the different schemes: Economy, Economy Flexible, Economy Premium, Business Special, Business Flexible, etc: those are all methods of extortion of course. Just like you can't buy a single-trip ticket for any decent amount, it's better to just buy cheap and rip up the ticket if you have to.
Upgrading an $ 800 Economy ticket to a refundable Economy one for $ 3,500 (well thank you Delta!) is just stooopid, especially if you dare to read their Refund terms

Regarding that single-trip: e.g. Delta offers that for $ 2,000 - one single trip in Economy class! So what do you do? Order a round-trip for $ 800 and just don't show up for the return. You might even tell them if you like but I'm sure most airline systems aren't equipped to handle that kind of information

I know there are also wild ways to charge you at the gate, for luggage, for booking and Lawd knows what, but maybe that's food for another post. My weekend has seen enough airline sites for now - I hope you find this useful

Airline ticket pricing: surcharges compared

2012-01-22T00:54:00.005+01:00

Lots of regulations and restrictions have been enforced in Europe, and some other parts of the world, to "keep airplane tickets transparent".
You must know from your own situation or someone else's how that too-good-to-be-true 200 dollar one-week trip to the sun turned out to be 550 after all extra charges (that applied to your particular situation of course!) got slapped on, only to find out that airport bagage rules and local customs had to get their share of the pie too. Oh well, so it cost 700 dollars in stead, but it sure was fun, wasn't it?

Damn right it was - for them

Since then, efforts have been made to ensure that advertised prices are end-prices - meaning nothing else gets slapped onto. And that has worked: the devil is now in different details

Let's book a few flights: plan that at least 6 weeks ahead so we don't get increased cost for being (close to) out of time, and let's make sure we don't enter some difficult period like around Christmas or new year's Eve and all that, when demand is high, supply stays the same, so prices go up. Ready?
It's Amsterdam to New York and back, from 21st of March till 4th of April

KLM: no matter whether you travel cheap, expensive, or far, KLM has very clear rules for surcharges. Booking a few flights in different directions and Economy and Business Class confirms that. For the example trip, there's a surcharge of € 324,86 in all cases where fuel surcharge is maxed out at twice € 125

BA: British Airways has a brief note on surcharges that spells out booking fee rates for half a dozen countries and currencioes, but leaves you in the dark about surcharges. They don't offer direct flights, Heathrow is used as intermediary stop, and UK passenger service charge is € 49,79. Total surcharge for Economy is € 364,65, for Business Class and First Class it's € 424,65 - now that's odd, isn't it? The difference is in € 300 fuel surcharge, in stead of € 240.
If you read BA's very undetailed note on surcharges, you'll see that it says

The (fuel) surcharge is based on flight duration and applies to all passengers, including children and infants travelling on British Airways operated international and domestic services

Well, not equally, apparently. For some reason you use more fuel when you fly Business or First class, and end up paying 25% more

Lufthansa: has a FAQ on surcharges, can't copy the URL as there is none, but rest assured: it is only telling that there are surcharges of various kinds, that will be shown during booking.
Lufthansa sticks to the exact same amount as KLM, € 324,86 in all cases. On a sidenote it's fairly scandalous how they dare slap on an extra 10 euro Ticket Service Charge on even a € 8,531.86 First Class flight

These three all have the following surcharges in common:

Animal & Plant Health User Fee (Aphis) - USA	€ 3.91
Customs User Fee -USA	€ 4.30
Immigration User Fee - USA	€ 5.48
Noise Isolation Charge - Netherlands	€ 2.00
Passenger Civil Aviation Security Service Fee - USA	€ 1.96
Passenger Facility Charge - USA	€ 3.52
Passenger Service Charge - Netherlands	€ 14.89
Security Service Charge - Netherlands	€ 12.68
Transportation Tax (Arrival) - USA	€ 13.06
Transportation Tax (Departure) - USA	€ 13.06

So all in all everyone uses the exact same surcharges for everything (€ 74.86 for government, authority and airport charges), save British Airlines that charges an additional € 49.79 for their mandatory stop in Heathrow, and charges € 240 versus € 250 per Economy passenger, while charging Business / First Class passengers € 300

Now, let's cross the pond, and see what the same trip would cost: picking Delta, United and American Airlines. Skipping Southwest as they don't fly Amsterdam

Delta: very informative on the surcharges, although the word fuel is not mentioned there. You get a nice break-down of surcharges during booking, and it is interesting to see that they don't pay the US transportation tax their European counterparts do. If you add all their taxes, you get to the same € 250 for fuel (which they call International Surcharge by the way) as mentioned above, but only € 48.74 for government, authority and airport charges - the € 13.06 for each journey (€ 26.12 for a round-trip) is absent

United: a lot worse than Delta. here's how precise they get about the biggest piece of the pie:

Fare includes U.S. excise tax, and carrier-imposed fuel surcharges (YQ) of up to 300.00 USD per direction of travel may apply. For travel to some countries, additional airport, transportation, embarkation, security and passenger service taxes/surcharges may also apply depending on destination

That's not very helpful, is it? So they end up with "Additional taxes and fees" of only $ 62.10 on Economy and $ 69.10 on Business / First, which is misleading to say the least. If you read the small print they speak the truth (and find out the surcharges are mostly hidden in the ticket price), but it's customer-offensive behaviour no matter which way you put it.
If they treat you like this at this point, you'll know what to expect beyond. Don't fly United, I'd say

American Airlines: like United, there is nothing to be found on surcharges, and it costs a few clicks to find out they charge $ 158.90 (Economy) and $ 143.10 (Business / First) "extra". It's equally impossible to find anything in general, let alone specific, via their web site's search engine. After a lot of search, a full list is found that shows all details about all terms used, and apparently even the place you use to book from influences the fuel surcharges.
Hiding surcharges into ticket price, just like United does? Revolting

Let's try to reverse the situation, shall we? Book the same flight, but then from NYC to AMS. Well, you can't do that with KLM or BA, only with Lufthansa

Lufthansa: Surcharges are awkward, and if I use an exchange rate of 1.28 I can perfectly relate them back, except for the Netherlands taxes, but that's highly likely because of differing exchange rates. What is very surprising, however, is the fact that all of a sudden the fuel surcharge is € 372 - close to 50% more than the same trip vice versa

Delta: same charges. Exactly the same
United and American? Same absence of transparency as above, so the verdict remains the same: don't fly these airlines - if they lie at you even before you started a transaction with them, Lawd knows what will happen next

Surcharges? Many of them, and I didn't even pay attention to luggage charges or local charges.
It shows that many surcharges are fixed globally or at least on a slightly smaller scale. However, there seems to be room for interpretation (...) and thus supercharge, and it all goes into the fuel post. If they don't show that at all, it's there. If they have a post called "International Surcharge", you'll know that means Fuel surcharge

What I don't understand though, is why fuel surcharge based on the same journey costs 50% more when starting from the US - and why US airlines are exempt from their own transportation tax to begin with

The evangalyst: preaching to the converted

2012-01-17T21:08:00.000+01:00

There are definite signs of evolution in social media. Where I saw some issues around mainstream adoption over a year ago, I can now rest assured.
Dozens of "priests and monks" have arisen all over the world to further aid the conversion towards social; Social Business now is the way to go and according to most InfoGraphics over 3/4 of all businesses all over the globe have either implemented social media or are very happy with it, or both

I sense a bubble like the Internet one back in 2000. Not stock-market wise, as we're currently in a crisis already, but this one is an equally inflated one, where anal-ysts and even complete companies and research groups cite each other's flawed studies to build a Tower of Babel that reaches far beyond the sky

The legitimate question of Return on Investment, asked and evaded since the very beginning of Social Media crazyness, now gets "proven" by the dozens, no, by the hundreds even - of course I'm being sarcastic here. The post at hand, by Peter Kim, got perfectly ~~butchered~~ analysed by Olivier Blanchard, who does know (more than) something on ROI, especially when it comes to social media - although ROI is fairly independent of the subject, of course

Peter Kim, who I also liked, really, until I read his response to Olivier's post, then goes on to suggest Ford would make a fine Social Business! It's almost as he has to make his blog post target before the end of the year, but both these aren't even a week old, and the new year is still very, very fresh. So why, oh why, this embarrassing amount of content-free socmed hallelujah? Not New Year's Resolutions, I hope

I have written about social and social business many times before, even done a bit of research and published a small book on it, in which I try to divide the world and businesses in convenient squares in order to cut the pie in edible pieces. Stressing the fact that Social Media is best to connect people who don't know of each other's existence (there's email, telephone, chat, fax, telex, and Lawd knows what other technologies to get into contact with people you know), I show that in businesses, people facing other people have the best use for Social.
In general, that would mean employees facing customers when a company's product doesn't have customer registration (e.g. food and retail), or consumers where it does (e.g. banks, insurance companies, and others who have very detailed records of the people they already do business with)

That means product-facing people are least likely to benefit from Social. Especially when they're product-driven too, that makes for the worst business case in my book: assembly lines.
So I'm stunned to read Peter's latest thoughts, although I sense that he is really writing about Social Marketing, not how Ford is a Social Business. But he perfectly helps the Social ~~Bubble~~ Dream to grow bigger, doing a bit of analysis on the side to sustain the wild success.
Ford just does what most people do: they watch their neighbour do something new they don't really know about, and being afraid of being left behind, they start to copy that behaviour. Before you know it, the bandwagon is full speed on its way to new frontiers (cough)

Is this post about Peter Kim? No, not really - but this past week he just perfected the art of turning an InfoGraphic into words, as so many others have tried and done in the last year(s) and are continuing to do - so I gladly use him as an example

Behold the evangalyst: the social media evangelist in disguise, pretending to have objectively analysed and researched his suggestimations. He's even better at lulling you into sleep than his former appearance - oh and even more easily offended

Do uneducated vote conservative - in the USA?

2012-01-12T23:37:00.000+01:00

My last post of the year was about the correlation between conservatism and education. I took the results per state of the US 2008 election, showing the margin percentage for Obama, and related that to total education spend per state

The outcome was astonishing: all but 3 states fit perfectly into the newly found rule. The odd ones out were Sarah Palin's state, Dick Cheney's state, and Louisiana. However, Pat McGuinness slapped me on the wrist 4 times in a row, assuming his ass off, calling me ignorant and prejudiced, and spreading dumb and unsupported rumours. So here's my answer.
The data in the table above is based on data from the National Center of Education Statistics and shows actual education level in 2006-8
Again, read from left to right, for example: Home-of-Dick-Cheney state Wyoming is least likely to vote Obama, hence should have lowest level of education, according to my hypothesis. Well, it doesn't: its actual level is 94% different from what you'd expect it to be. Same for Mormon state Utah: an 84% deviation there

First of all, thank you Pat for your lengthy comment. I safely assume you're a hardcore conservative - even though you claim to have a PhD (LOL). Second, here goes. I've taken your words but left out the capitals - they distract from the content

Spending on education is not educational result - Correct, it isn't. With regards to Pat's comment: Washington DC actually has the lowest education level in the country (see the second column) - but maybe that's because these figures are from 2006-8, when the Bush administration was still in charge? Just joking - well not really LOL. Okay, seriously now
Ranking by education result will show that actual educational results in the us have almost no correlation to state-level spending - well it's considerably less, but I certainly see some correlation. Maybe Pat and I should agree on the exact amount of standard deviation deemed tolerable?
The average percentage is 28% now, whereas it was 19% for the education spend. That's half the correlation - not too bad, I think
You've managed to prove that Obama voters live in places with a lot of Government spending - only if your government spends only on education. I'll just redirect to wikipedia here where you can see the US spends 3.5 trillion every year, 600 billion of which on education: 17% of US government spend is on education. Some say less than 50% of education spend "goes to the classroom"? Yet another fable - only 6% of education budget is spent on administration
The more knowledgeable and educated voters in America lean Republican, with the exception of the post-graudate degree holders (aka academics) - apparently, there's a content-free post with one single, dead link that proves "Democrats draw mostly from those with little education and with a graduate degree, while Republicans draw from the middle". Three decades of data - on 40,000 people? Sure. I guess seeing is believing?
Under President Bush, federal spending on education doubled. I guess he was a non-conservative - oh and now all of a sudden, education spend does count? Anyway, it's yet another fable. Here's showing that expenditures per pupil in fall enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools rose 15% between 2000 and 2008, the George W. Bush administration period
The educational attainment gap broken down by race in USA is significant - I have no idea what Pat means to say here, unless it's "blacks are dragging down white scores". Maybe Pat can comment on this in particular? I certainly can't
You made a fundamental error in making a theocratic definition of conservatism - it's my definition of conservatism. Conservatives in general are people that live their lives in fear, and control others by fear. They wield the tools of exclusion, you're either with them or their mortal enemy that must be destroyed, and segregation based on religion, country and territory is how they divide their good from their bad.
Typically, conservatives are haters, not lovers. When they say they love you, they mean they want to control you and correct your errors, make you perfect - their definition of perfect, of course

In 1988, I was a senior in Highschool and graduated. The level of education was appaling, and I doubt it's much better now. American friends tell me it isn't.
However the current state, I wrote the first post to prove a theory: if conservatives / Republicans get their votes from significantly undereducated people, that would hand them a clear business case to destroy the institution of Education.
Needless to say, if the opposite were proven, it would give liberals / Democrats an identically solid business case

Have I proven my point? In my first post, most certainly. In this one, less so. However, the splendid wikipedia handed me a great article, that shows Republicans have been trying to abolish the entire Department of Education over the last three decades, under the pretext of the 10th Amendment

Now, if you really believe that's the real reason behind it, you must be stupid - or vote conservative?

On the correlation between conservatism and education

2011-12-31T01:44:00.000+01:00

I was in a fairly regular Twitter conversation with Vijay Asankarv (meaning: anything goes) and it happened again: right in between the bartalk, something clever was born. See the dialogue above please, top-down, transscribed here:

@vijayasankarv The abundance of ignorance and misinformation among Americans, especially conservative ones, is staggering

@MartijnLinssen not sure if that is a problem with just conservatives..ppl think in extremes on both sides I think

@vijayasankarv I guess so. It's just that conservatism and lack of education is highly correlated - throughout the world

@vijayasankarv Having said that... if there *is* a correlation, that means conservative parties/govs must do their best to cripple education

@MartijnLinssen that is an interesting hypothesis

I never thought about that, or it - but this hit me like a truck. A piece of the puzzle for me.

If true -if true!- then there must be a correlation between conservative countries, and level of education. Maybe not elementary school, but higher education for sure: I'll consider any education followed after elementary school to be "higher"

Of course, there must also be a certain threshold to education for each country: the more conservative the (current?) government, the higher this threshold. It will be formed on the very basis of what we've assumed to be the most basic rules: time and space

Education will thus either be limited in space (low number of education places, or small amount of students to be admitted) or time (chances to get the education you want are once-in-a-lifetime, or educations span long periods).

And then, there's the basic influencer of all: money. Money can make education scarce, abundant, and anything in between

So, here's the hypothesis: where (higher) educations are relatively small in numbers, length in years, expensive or all of the above, governments will be conservative, given the last few decades, and do their best to make education less valuable, less attractive, and scarcer and more expensive

Scary? I think so. If there is a correlation between lack of education and conservative governments, then that must mean those governments will certainly not allow education to be improved. On the contrary, it must be kept at the current level, otherwise it simply endangers future governments

When we go to the marvellous wikipedia, there are a few entry points:

The Education Economics page is inconclusive and too short to be of much help
There's the Education Index that gives just about every country in the world a number: Scandinavia and Northern Europe are in the very top, and USA is no. 20 but Japan is no. 34. However, looking at the very bottom of the list, I get the feeling that "it is generally in line with my thinking". Although poverty and (civil) unrest seems closely related to the list set-up, as is religion
An overview of School Leaving Age seems to be fabricated (have a look at the map, compared to the table) so isn't very helpful either
Worldwide conservatism gives a list of political parties per continent. And here we run into the definition issues: what is conservative, actually?

You can eat your heart out at the Conservatism topic - but I'll settle for continental conservatism, and especially where they don't support separation between Church and State, yet heavily focus on patriotism and nationalism. Yes, very much like the US GOP

So, nothing concrete there, alas.
One last attempt: I'll look at US states in particular, and see if I can derive some data there - otherwise I'll call it an interesting hypothesis, like Vijay, and hope that someone else might have a go at proving it either wrong, right, or anything in between

The US Education page is very helpful. Especially the cost part, with a graph illustrating the increase in tuition. With public higher education costing 20,000 dollars a year, and a private one twice as much, and the dramatic increase since 1980, it is largely due to decreasing state support that the cost of education has exploded this much:

Looking at the graph, you can see when the Republican governments were interrupted by Clinton in 1993-2001, can't you? Nice correlation, but I was actually looking for something like state-based level of education versus political preference as shown in e.g. voting behaviour

The Digest of Education Services has a neat one on that right here - it shows direct general expenditures per capita of state and local governments for all functions and for education. It's way too large to include here so I manipulated part of it. Let's compare that to the US 2008 general election outcome (sorted on Obama % margin, the last column).
I sorted the expenditure, ranked the states, then sorted the election states by percentage in favour of Obama, and ranked them. Then, I compared the ranks, and percentualised them (sorry if this hurts your head, let me explain)

Ideally, in this example, New York which ranks as 48 on expenditure (almost top of the line in education spending) is among the least conservative at exact same position, thus also ranks 48 there.
It doesn't, it ranks 47. So that gives them 1 point difference: on a scale of 52 states, that is 2% difference

Treating all the states the same, I ignored positive and negative difference. So in the end there is a difference of minimum 0%, and maximum 100% (e.g. state with lowest expenditure has highest Obama positive margin, in case of 100% difference).
For an easy overview, I applied a three-colour scale there that uses green for anything from 0% and up, orange for 50% difference, and red for the full 100%. Here is the astonishing result (take the state at the left, and look at the colour at the right):

Looks very green-ish, doesn't it? 2 Deep red exceptions there, Alaska (Palin's turf, so okay) and Wyoming (Dick Cheney's turf, so okay). Louisiana? Apparently Obama didn't take it seriously - all news organisations predicted it would go GOP anyway

Having said that, is this a clear indication of a serious relationship between (lack of) education and conservatism? Aye, I'd say

While I've failed to show a worldwide correlation between (lack of) education and conservatism, I think I absolutely nailed it when it comes to the United States.
So, dear GOP: keep them voters dumb, trash education any which way you can, and you're guaranteed to reign?

Ticking the TOS box means you Agree

2011-12-28T23:17:00.000+01:00

There has been some fuss about Google+ deleting someone's profile picture as it showed him giving the middle finger, aka flipping the bird.
Google deleted the profile picture, without notice.
Apparently Mr. Siegler doesn't like G+ doing so, as he can have the same profile picture on Twitter "and other services", as he claims. What does that have to with the price of tea in China?
Mr. Siegler then continues to whine about Google's real naming policy, as if that has anything to do with it either

I'm tired of grown-ups complaining like kids about Terms of Services they didn't read because they were too long, and that the Terms are stupid, etcetera

The Terms may be stupid, or too long - but if you don't read or agree with them yet check them, then you are the one who is stupid.
And if you violate the terms and action is taken according to those terms, and you write a blog post about that, in which you mostly whine about unrelated other stuff, then you are plain stupid

Was G+ unclear? No. it's clearly stated in their very short User Conduct and Policy terms what it is all about:

When we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review and take action, including limiting or terminating a user’s access to our Services

G+ kept word there, so that's 1-0 for G+

Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content. For example, do not use a photo that is a close-up of a person’s buttocks or cleavage

Getting the middle finger is considered offensive around just about the entire world. Flip the bird to a cop anywhere in the world and you're in trouble, length and depth of which largely depends on the country you're in at that very moment.
Mr. Siegler's profile picture contained offensive content, so that's 2-0 for G+

I've had a few conversations with people about this today, but their "last words" are not very helpful:

It isn't the method, it's the intent that's mind boggling: that one can distinguish 'offensive content' AND AUTO-DELETE IT!
The thing is there need not be a line at all. Google+ policing pics chills expression
Absolutely, simple rule saying any nudity in avatars will be removed should suffice - anything else is a slippery slope

Reaction number one is over-reacting: Google images has perfected this for years now - the auto-delete is just an assumption of course, I'm fairly sure a human intervenes at the final stage (but that is just an assumption too). Want quick proof? Google someone from the adult industry (usually called porn actor or actress), go to Google images, and try Safe Search or without filter. Impressed? I was

I asked the same person what he'd do when G+ were to give him 24 hour notice, and the answer was childish:

@MartijnLinssen Since my algos would autoinform me that a flipped bird in an avatar is a national security threat I'd delete it immediately!

Reaction number two is equally immature. Policing? No, just good housekeeping

You have a Game, Rules, people agreed to them, maybe some complain, but you "uphold the law".
That may sound hillbilly but it's simple. It's your game, you offer it for free, you have certain expectations of the product or service, and what value that adds.
You round up users, fence them off, and that's where perfection should start. Catch a violator? Give 'm a treat of the rules they agreed to, done and dusted

Reaction number three is true yet false at the same time. Swastikas? Orifices? SM bondage pictures? The list is endless - you really can't define precisely what is not allowed

Globalisation is a biatch, as they say - bringing together people, habits and cultures from all over the world, the Book Of Rules just gets bigger and bigger - and so does the Book Of Exceptions. If you offer public services, that means you'll just have to compromise all the way down to the very bottom

If you can, the best way is to approach it from two sides: top-down and bottom-up

There are rules at the top-level, and exceptions at the bottom. Local culture influences both, but location will only help you 90-10 here: people will be abroad and still expect the same treatment, and within countries you got finer cultural differences as well.
Look at me in my village: you'll never have enough accuracy to guesstimate my preferences based on my location. I might be visiting my fundamentalist neighbours - good luck with keeping me apart from them

Of course, the easiest thing to do is have people choose a filter level like Google's Safe Search, but that means your service is closed, and we all know how many (many many) regrets e.g. Mark Zuckerberg has about that. Amost one billion users and hardly a proper way to monetise on them... that's not what Google has in mind

So, what is the end verdict?

A service has Terms of Service, and people who tick its box agree to become Users of that same service, while not having read most or even any of those same terms.
And that they'll feel injustly treated when they violate those same Terms, while getting treated according to those same Terms

Awkward? Yes. Fair? No.
People just have to get used to taking responsibility for their own actions - it will take time

Afraid of socmediots? Email works just as well

2011-12-28T18:23:00.000+01:00

A giant reputation drama has been unfolding since yesterday: Ocean Marketing's Paul Cristoforo has made a complete ass of himself and his company.
A nice compilation is provided by Doug Collins on his blog, and it's aptly called How to Commit Career Suicide

The (apparently almost) entire email thread can be found on Penny Arcade's website right here. It's long, and unbelievably persistent in its bad form

Especially given the time of year and the usual predictions, I find this a splendid example of the fact that email isn't dead yet, and that you really don't need a social media policy

You just need to be polite period.
I've never been fond of all the segmentation that has been brought along by social media ~~lovers~~ fanatics. It's an annoying splendor display of inside-out thinking that I've seen so many times before in IT and IRL, and so inherent to people that haven't been around much

Apparently, you need a:

social media policy
social media strategy
social business portfolio
social business manifesto
social business code of ethics

No you don't. All this is just money thrown away. What you need is common sense and reuse what you've been successfully using so far. You didn't have these for telex, fax, or email: all technologies that enabled your employees to contact the outside world "under your company cloak".
So maybe it was due to lack of an email strategy, policy and code of ethics that this so very rude and long email thread came into existence?
No

So what has changed then? Simple - people have become much ruder, and less afraid to vent that. Especially with working from home, the boundaries get diffuse: dressed in a suit or uniform and being at a different location around your colleagues and customers usually flips a few checkbits.
So when you e.g. got up late, say 8:30, and are sitting in your pyamas sipping on your first coffee, skipping through your emails, it might not really feel like you're 100% representing your company - but you are

But that doesn't mean that this is caused by the new way of working. Authority has slowly eroded over the last few decades, which is good because people have learned to think and act for themselves, slowly relearning to take responsibility for their actions, and bad because not everyone has learned to cope equally well with the new duties

So, lessons learned from this one?

The slicker the website, the more likely it's just a front for something really ugly
You don't need any policy, manifesto or code of ethics unless your company is a collection of anonymous people not held together by anything. Or a one-idiot army, for that much
Email is the main artery of the vast majority of companies, and that will not change anytime soon

And last but not least: if you have created such a stinking mess, you better not ignore it. If you do, it will only get bigger and explode in your face - over and over again

The Law of the Handicap of a Headstart

2011-12-22T17:27:00.000+01:00

In discussions about SAP's new stealth weapon, HANA, I have come to become a wee weary. At SAP Inside Track NL we joked about it:

@jonerp @dahowlett @ragtag @applebyj like we said at #sitNL "When lost for words, just end your sentence with HANA and you'll be fine"

What is HANA? In short, it uses SSD storage combined with a lot of in-memory to speed up results. SAP's claim is 3600 times faster results achieved with SAP HANA 1.0 with one 4-way, 8 core server (2.27 GHz clock speed) with 0.5 TB of Main Memory, 2 TB of SSD storage, 1Gb Ethernet running on an open source operating system.

Ain't that nice? It really is. But - at the moment all talk is about HANA, and not much else (well there was this minor acquisition of some HR software maker). Is it so new then? No, absolutely not. Oracle used shared memory in the last decade, and Sybase - the company SAP acquired in 2010) supported Gigabytes of memory back in 2001 with their ASE 12.5 release and theoretical Exabytes on their 64-bit version:

So, what's the big deal? Well maybe there is nog big deal, or it only exists in the eyes of SAP people?

Regardless of opinions on that, let me make one point in this post: if SAP uses HANA to HANA-ise the vast majority of its on-premise stuff, it will be digging its own grave

I can see how dramatically increasing existing performance can offer a competitive advantage over the threat that Cloud forms (when I say Cloud, I always mean SaaS, given my background in Information Systems) but Cloud is more about speedy delivery of new functionality that SAP is certainly not capable of.
I can see how dramatically increasing existing performance can offer a competitive advantage to clients, over their competitors, but then there's still that ability to execute that's needed - but there will be plenty of business cases for superfast BI

But supersizing SAP all across the lines, or even a minor majority, will make them fat and lazy and seriously put them in a backwards position. If HANA is indeed this marvellous superb invention that no one can compete with, then they can - and will feel a great urge to - lay back in the next 5 years, casually raking in the money by the billions. Work hard on Cloud? Meh. Mobile? Pah - too complicated to fit onto SAP.
And why work hard when the sun is shining and everyone is smiling?

SAP doesn't need a homecoming queen at this moment, it needs a firm kick in the butt: their world is dramatically going to change and their on-premise will be 25% less what it is now, in 2020. The monolith days are over, the Borg have been stopped, and there is one thing that is apparent: after trying for a decade, SAP will never be able to replace all or even the majority of IT in an enterprise

So, it needs to work hard at integration - very, very hard, given its current state. SAP Netweaver gateway? Slightly better but so very complicated, limited, and hard-coupled. Based on REST and Open Data? here we go again, reinventing the wheels, making bilateral point-to-point interfaces.
Rumor has it every 2 years or so that SAP will buy TIBCO, but what it really should do is pay them a visit and open their ears. SAP should stop reinventing new ways to integrate every few months, and start writing down a strategy and live up to it

Also, SAP needs to work hard at Cloud. Every next new functionality customers want and ask for, will be developed in the Cloud - simply because that takes a few weeks or months, and not years. SAP is looking at a future where they stand in the corner while everybody else is invited to dance.
Please explain to me how it is not a solid possibility that SAP will not sell any new functionality starting from now, simply because others will have offered it to clients way earlier, oh and cheaper?

Talk about cheap: mobile applications are created on the fly, and also threatening to take a piece of the pie. Not saying that clients will choose between ERP and mobile, but being able to "mobilise" an app will also increasingly weigh in decision-making.
And in the meantime, SAP has SuccessFactors and that will pose new problems as well

So, SAP's ways are being threatened from various sides. Back home, state of affairs is still being measured by revenue, profit and earnings per share - basically. But, if you look at revenue and profit per employee for SAP, revenue is exactly the same as it was 7 years ago, while profit declined with 20%

In the light of all this, SAP will be tempted to use HANA to keep up their figures, and steal a base for the coming years. But if they ignore and don't work on their real problems in the meantime, one day they'll wake up and realise they've lost

The Perfect Self-Help Mistake

2011-12-15T16:24:00.002+01:00

[Photo by jessamyn]

The world is full of Self-help books, coaches, trainers, teachers, gurus - basically anyone self-taught to self-help him- or herself, is also able to help anyone else - it seems

Naturally these self-helpers all preach different ways to the same solution: heal yourself, make yourself better. Quotes that make sense or "go straight to the heart" are one manifestation of this that they all share, and in general the similarities can be summed up into two simple truths: 1) they promise you a better life, 2) if you do what they tell you

Where have we heard that before? Thousands of years of oppression by religion, politics, tradition and in one word, institutionalisation, come to mind, each of which has used these same rules. I've come to call it the False Promise, and it's based on a Lie you're not allowed to question

Do what the priest says and you'll be saved from Purgatory (suggesting that you'll safely make it into Heaven). Question him and he'll claim "You're questioning The Word Of GOD?!"
Vote for your regular party and they'll get you out of this recession / war / mess the other party created. Ask why and how and they'll frown "Are you being disloyal to the party?!"
Work hard to achieve your targets and you'll be rewarded at the end of year by your manager. Question why you're getting mostly sales targets while being a consultant and doing a consultant's work, and the answer will be "You're getting the same targets as everyone else of your standing. Are you saying you're not up to it?"

Funny, isn't it? All these promises which you just have to believe, and aren't allowed to question. Now compare that with this post by Justine Musk (for clarification purposes, I'm not trying to pick on Justine in particular, but this post originated from a conversation with her and Tim Kastelle, over that specific post - and it is a good example)

I give you seven awesome reasons to kill your inner nice girl. That's 7 promises if you do what she says you should do: kill your inner girl. You'll get to be:

kind
authentic
stand for something
to live off your ragged edge
love up your inner voice
to be the hero of your own freaking life
to have a voice

Awesome, right?! No. All well-meant, but this is only suggesting that none of this has been achieved (enough) so far. And the worst part? You have to recognise first you have an inner nice girl, and that she should be killed. Why? That's probably in a different post - not in this one.
Don't get me wrong. I like what Justine is saying to some extent, but mostly posts like these order you to swap one mental model for another. Hence why I said:

@timkastelle I'd really like to see @justinemusk drop the entire concept of mental models, in stead of merely battling the obvious ones

What do I mean by that? I mean that people have many mental models they live by, some stronger than others. Read the list below and you'll agree to at least 3 of them, and probably most if you add the word "more":

If only I were rich
If only I were loved
If only I had friends
If only I were valued
If only I were appreciated
If only I were not alone
If only I were in charge
If only I had power
If only I were famous
If only I were fashionable
If only I had x Twitter followers
If only I had x people reading my blog
If only I got x comments to my blog

If you listen to all this, you Promise yourself that it / you will get better when you do achieve your Goal. But who is the judge of that? You yourself - and that's wherein lies the catch.
You'll always have e.g. less Twitter followers than someone else, and when you do have the most Twitter followers, that's probably because everybody else moved back to MySpace.
At some point you will be appreciated, in charge, in power, in control, loved - but will you cherish those moments, value them, count them, or even see them? Will they add to the pile, and give you satisfaction? Enough satisfaction?
So will you be able to achieve any of these goals? Well no - and yes. Yes because the world never stands still and tomorrow we have more Twitter followers than today, no because it's never enough

It simply is never enough, because these are not solutions to your problem. The problem will persist regardless of these achievements. You'll go to Justine or someone else and say "Hey I killed my inner girl and I'm kind now, and have a voice, but I still don't feel whole". Maybe you'll be told to love up your inner voice more, to stand for something - all just more instructions, more orders, more need-do based on hear-say

The Problem will persist, because it is based on a Lie. The Lie is not even that you have an inner girl, or that you should kill her, or that she is even bad for you; the Lie is that you're not good enough in some way, and that your inner girl is one of its causes, or maybe even a main one.
You can change the Rules: kill your inner girl, become authentic, raise your inner voice, whatever - but you'll keep playing the Game.
The Game is that you're not whole, and that you'll become whole if only you obey the Rules

It is a silly game, but one that almost everyone plays for some reason, without knowing it. Look around you:

that influential friend who gets to be first in every new committe, is simply someone who feels utterly powerless
that overachiever there is simply someone who feels unappreciated, undervalued
that great neighbour who has all these friends over during every weekend, is simply someone who feels very alone
that girl friend who wants something in return for everything she gives, relatively insignificant though they are? She's feeling absolutely not loved by anyone

It's the game of believing the Lie in your head, and overcompensating your way towards the False Promise. Because everyone fails to achieve the objective (regardless of what it is, everyone fails in different ways, yet with the same outcome), they start doing their best more than ever, and giving all they've got.
Of course that still won't make them feel successful, so they'll start changing the Rules to the Game.
That is only natural of course: either you are failing, or the means to your goal. Well you did your best, didn't you? You tried, didn't you? Gave it all? Hell yes!
So it must be the means they acquired: whether they make money, friends or targets, they'll make more of them, different ones. That doesn't help, so they switch currency, take away other people's friends in stead of making new ones themselves, or fake having achieved a target (and on and on and on and on...)

Nothing ever works. Nothing. You can never find something you haven't lost, you can never prove yourself innocent of a crime you didn't commit, you can never get cured from a disease you don't have

All you do, when you play the Game, swapping one Rule for another, is continue to play the Game - you are not changing anything. Paying attention to something only makes it stronger, gives it more importance, and switching your approach, attack or game-plan will make sure that you can't see the forest for the trees

Stop changing the Rules. See the Game for what it is: an eternal, vicious circle, a broken record, an arena or labyrinth you once entered and can only leave when you realise it's all around you.
How?

Easy. Take your demons that get handed to you each and every day. Say to yourself:

I CAN NOT (BE)

kind
authentic
stand for something
live off my ragged edge
love up my inner voice
the hero of my own freaking life
have a voice

Start at the first one, and go into detail, dig deeper:

What does being kind even mean?
What does it mean that you can't be kind?
When did you try (to be kind) and fail, the last three times?
When did you try and succeed, the last three times?
When did you NOT try yet still succeeded, the last three times?
Where does this thought come from?
Whom does this thought come from?
Should I stick to this thought?

You don't have to finish this all within a minute, few hours, or even day(s). It is important that you ask the questions, and the answers will come to you over time.
When you're done with kind, pick a next one. It will take a few weeks and months maybe, but feel free to wrap it all up in one weekend if you like - it's all up to you

At some point you'll recognise that your whole life has been built around this Game, and that you've been changing the Rules since pretty much Day one. And when you real-ise that, you will no longer be able to look with the same eyes at the world. You'll realise that you can't heal yourself, because you aren't broken. As is no one else

SAP meets Cloud: something needs to vaporise first

2011-12-15T09:08:00.001+01:00

[Photo by John Kerstholt]

I have been comfortably following SAP Influencer Summit 2011 from my chair, and reading up on the various posts and vids released throughout the process. It won't surprise anyone that yesterday's keywords were cloud, ByD, business, SAPonDemand and sales - thank you, you 350 participants who produced 1,500 tweets during the last day

Many people ask the question: with such a traditional on-premise company, will these extremes form a perfect match that complements and makes for combined strength, or will it just be a very unhappy marriage?

In short: if nothing changes, the latter. The picture above is a type of arcus cloud called Shelf Cloud. So that is how that latter will look like (LOL)

Right, back to business. Of course Cloud is an excellent business opportunity for SAP. As long as I can remember, customers have been complaining about the lack of timely business innovation from SAP. "We've been waiting for this module for almost three years now!" is something you don't like to hear regardless of which department you come from.
Yes, SAP is a monstrous 8-legged mammoth if you consider the whole picture and that is its strength and, as usual, also its weakness. If you've worked in enterprise IT for 5 years or longer you know that repairs have to be made while the factory is running at full throttle: the bigger the factory, the more cumbersome this is

Trying to fit together new pieces while replacing some of the old, all in full flight, gets more difficult when the size of the object increases. In fact, SAP's recent failure to update SAP's Community Network reminded me of that once again. When I look at all the new parts that have been joined to SAP recently, I see that some of them get replaced even before bolted on

SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors is a good example of this: it is, in Dennis Howlett's words, an addition that totals the count to five different human resource management architectures - there's a bit of a waste somewhere there, if you ask me. As such, this is not the first acquisition SAP has made nor will it be the last, so maybe it's time to adapt the software stack to the "strategy stack"

Cloud to me means SaaS in this matter. Cloud will be extremely interesting for SAP, especially in the first years, as the greenfield aspect will allow for very quick development and deployment of new business-critical innovation at a thus unknown time-to-market: weeks, many even days at some extremes. The old 3-year wait is out the window for the next decade to come. After that, "SAP Cloud" will probably have wrapped itself in a bit of legacy just as Salesforce.com found itself after 10 years with the development of Chatter, and business development that was first measured in terms of years and then in weeks, will settle at months again - unless, unless...

Let's call that the Ghost of Christmas future in Scrooge fashion - we wouldn't want that to happen. Well the first part we would, but not the second part. Having said that and while talking about legacy in the first place, how on earth is SAP on-premise not going to collide and crash with off-premise?
My biased answer of course is Integration - with a capital I. The TIBCO announcement was about a cooperation between SAP and TIBCO with regards to BI and 3D visualisation of that and focused on tibbr. No mention of old-fashioned middleware so far

I would love to see TIBCO partner with SAP in the field of Integration / middleware / EDI you name it. I would dread SAP buying TIBCO and calling the shots as that wouldn't bring out the necessary change: only long-lasting relationships force you to compromise and "meet in the middle", and SAP needs to radically do so if it wants to successfully meet the many challenges it has engaged

There have been talks, discussions and debates about SAP's layers as long as I can remember. I'm talking about traditional OSI-layers here but their amount and content varies. The rise and shine of architecture as an IT profession has somehow caused a continuous shift in layers that seems to have no end, but certainly no goal that I can understand.
At some point I saw an SAP architect proudly present his 9-layer SAP architecture model and I just broke down and cried.
Last year or so they seemed to be back again at a sensible 3 (Data, Application and Presentation) but ever since the introduction of Layer Scalable Architecture seemingly everyone wants to add a new layer every month. Currently LSA is at 7 layers and this foolishness just has to stop. Having an e.g. Quality and Harmonization Layer just means that you're scribbling and screwing around - excuse my French

So, after this long introduction, what is the solution? Simplicity. Extreme simplicity. Back to 3 layers: input, throughput, output, or rather Presentation, Application, and Data. Or keyboard, computer, disk.
That application is a big BLOB in the case of on-premise, and shattergun-like bits and bytes for off-premise. The SaaS services can operate on your on-premise data in real-time, or you can synchronise SaaS data with on-premise on a daily basis, or anything in between.
You can portal-in the SaaS presentation into your on-premise, but to be fair no one's even talking about that anymore. Con-fusing presentation is way too complicated and costly and reinforces the old rule: the closer to the customer / human, the more dynamic, complex, flexible and exception-rich a solution needs to be

That is how I envision a future for SAP: radically simplifying its on-premise software stack and architectural approach, and in stead of adding architectural layers for components that don't perform or fit nicely, solve the problems where they arise. If you can't: take your losses and boot the parts that can't be fitted.
I see enterprises use SAP on-premise for say 60% and off-premise for up to 30% if they play this nicely. Those are just suggestimations but indicate that the (lack of) dynamics of an on-premise monolith just adhere to physics: it serves static, boring, rigid stuff full of rules that hardly ever (= never) change.
The sexy and shiney stuff, on the other hand, must be met with nimble services that simply dance around dynamic, exciting, flexible requirements that change every proverbial day.
And both need to share common ground: in the data layer

You and I see this every day: sea containers being shipped via ocean steamers, letters shipped via mail bags, passengers shipped via huge planes, trains and automobiles (buses): you can supersize what doesn't need to be flexible, but what does need to, must be small. Many, many times smaller - so it can travel freely, anywhere across the globe

Migration 101 - follow the white rabbit

2011-12-12T13:33:00.000+01:00

It seems that not every migration is welcomed by applause these days, reasons for which can usually be attributed to a definite lack of success. So, here's a checklist that will help you achieve success. Of course the list is condensed and a lot of detail is left out, as it's just a lot of work to do a proper, prepared and tested, migration - but this is a pretty good approach

The intake: what do we have? Hardware, software, versions, interfaces, IP-addresses, hostnames, etc, etc, etc. When the intake's finished, it needs to be validated: check what you just checked! Ask yourself, your vendors, their suppliers, and so on
The intake lists the AS-IS; now make an inventory of the TO-BE in terms of software, hardware, etc that fits your current / future IT landscape. What do we need? Extrapolate a bit for the future, compensate for faster hardware and software, etcetera
When the new environment's layout is clear, it can be built / assigned in terms of infrastructure: the very basics needed in hardware, operating systems, firewall changes and storage, databases. Make some savepoint as you will need to go back to this point in time many, many times
Now, make a plan - the most important part of the migration. You now have all the variables, the data, the volume, the timeframe: what do you need to do to make this all fit? What is the fixed part (that which you can do now), and what is the variable part (that which you need to do at cut-over)? How are you going to migrate, and who is going to do what?
What are you going to do now? Easy: execute the intake in the Acceptance environment. Install the software needed according to the installation manual, and execute the tests needed to verify that it has been installed correctly. Do this for every piece of software you need.
Most importantly: if you encounter any errors or flaws, adjust the operational procedure. If need be, throw away everything and start from scratch - but you won't really like to do that with large systems
Now, the most important part: add the full set of data that you now have; at this moment you have a fully operational new environment in perfect isolation. Once again, tech-test it: does everything work? Can you reach everything, log in everywhere, etc? Has the added data not lead to decreased performance? If you have verified all this, the infantry can move in: the functional acceptance testers
Of course the acceptance testers will find a few flaws, and you need to adjust for this as well. In the end, you have a successful acceptance test which is the trigger for the final start.
The tools for the go-live are now in your hands: the hardware / infrastructure set identified after the intake, maybe changed a bit, and the software needed, of which probably the installation manuals changed, plus the data, which you hopefully didn't have to touch, the timetables for this all, and finally the firewall settings, interfaces, connections, IP-addresses, host-names, and everything else needed to connect to the outside world.
If your journey so far was fairly rocky and filled with setbacks, you might want to throw away everything and install the Acceptance environment from scratch just to up your confidence
Go-live: of course you have a detailed plan for this as well, identified the bottlenecks, the timeschedules, made an extensive list of contacts with primary, secondary and tertiary, standby lists, etcetera, and have double-checked this with everyone. Oh and of course a fallback scenario, right?
Have a successful go-live! If you really are a perfectionist, after the successful go-live you'll throw away the acceptance / test environment and install it from scratch with the data that is now in production, maybe anonimised if need be

If you need to big-bang your way into production (and who doesn't these days?) then you might want to reiterate that until you are absolutely sure that you can manage it without any problems unless something really, really unexpected happens.
No one's watching you when you flunk around in Acceptance, but the eyes of the world are on you once you've announced a go-live date

Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW

2011-12-09T00:48:00.005+01:00

I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in - after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages.
A few months after that, Twitter finally changed its security model and now it makes a distinction between complete access, or access to the account without Direct Messages

A little bit better, but still a major failure - as just got proven by spammers

http://www.twitterscore.co.uk (intentionally not a clickable link) is the worst crapware site I've seen around Twitter so far. In fact, it needs to be destroyed, that's how bad it is - let me explain.

Twitter lets you authorise other applications via a secure authorisation mechanism called oAuth. The great benefit is that you authorise that application from within your twitter application - no passwords exchanged.
If you change your password (or even username, together called credentials) in Twitter, authorisation in between Twitter and the other application is not modified.
So, not only does the other application have no access to your password, but it also doesn't need to be kept up to date with your credentials

Now, what happened with this new oAuth? And how did this site take advantage of it? Apparently, Twitter's new oAuth forces you to decide about access to Direct Messages but that's it. I thought that was pretty smart but I've now changed my mind - here is the authorisation you give away period:

You can see the options:

Read tweets from your timeline
Check who you are following, and add new people to that
Change anything in your profile
Tweet in your name
(NOT) "Access" your direct messages
(NOT) See your twitter password

Now why is this list so very unsatisfactory? For many reasons.
First, if you look at your Twitter web tabs, here is what they give you under Settings:

Account: user name, email, geo, language, timezone, etc
Password: neither old Auth nor oAuth ever had access to that
Mobile: your mobile number and the country it's used in
Notifications: email actions upon messages, activity and update events
Profile: picture, name, location, website, bio, link to FB
Design: your twitter web background
Applications: all applications that have access to your Twitter account

and then on the Home page you can tweet, @reply, and view profiles of others, etc.
Next to that there is also a menu item called Profile, one called Messages, and even one called Who To Follow.
Can you match that with the above? No, absolutely not. So, what do we give away when we authorise an application? Simple: everything including full Direct Message access, or everything excluding full Direct Message access

Now take the Facebook permission model, in essence the same: a layered authorisation model where multiple specific premissions have to be granted by the user, with only a very few basic permissions that don't need authorisation. Better? Way better

So, Twitter, let's cut this post short please. What have the spammers done? They gained authorisation in the new way, where the application doesn't even have access to Direct Messages. But:

They forced everyone to follow @clare2284 who is suspended by now thanks to relentlessly being reported for spam by everyone I told to do so;
They changed the website in your Twitter bio to point to their website: http://qr.net/fwps (again, not a clickable link on purpose)
They made you tweet: "OMG I have spent 16:45 Hours on twitter!!, Find out how much time youve spent on twitter http://qr.net/fwps" or something like that, where the number of hours and minutes almost always is fixed

They did all that, with the minimum set of authorisation currently possible in Twitter.
So, you couldn't have give them less access to your twitter account, yet they did all that.
How to undo all this?

First, revoke the Access you've granted. Go to Twitter web, and your Application Settings: https://twitter.com/settings/applications and Revoke Access to all applications you don't know of - (you should do this on a two to three-monthly basis anyway)
Second, go to your profile and fix your website: https://twitter.com/settings/profile
Third, check who you follow: this spamware application will probably change the default follow now the account has been suspended. If you follow on a normal basis, checking the last 3-5 should be enough
Fourth, remove the original tweet you were forced to send out, minimalising the chance that someone else will click it

Update December 9th 13:48 CET: Application is also called "tocktickclock" and lets you follow Tweetsmania, which is not a spam account - on the contrary. This proves the adaptability of these spammers, and their evil intent. It also replaces your bio by Please Follow my best friend @tweetsmania which feeds the suspition that the maker of this is Dutch

The above application now uses as URL: http://qr.net/fzfv
Its next iteration is http://qr.net/fzgw which uses "topscore2283 by tweetmania.nl" as autorisation application title

Outdated information:

The bot now uses as URL: http://qr.net/fy03
It now forces you to follow: John Colt (please just go ahead and report him for spam, thank you)

This will change on a daily basis and probably even faster. Bots will keep tweeting old and new URLs, and this will become very ugly very soon unless we all stay sharp. Please fix your own account if it got compromised, and help others too. Nothing to be embarassed about, trust me. I've been a techy for 30 years, and caught as well...

Updated December 13th 15:03 CET: it seems to have decreased in aggressiveness. The current application is called "nice1 - just for fun" and it will only force you to tweet - not make you follow anyone, nor change your profile. It is unclear whether Twitter has fixed this, or the spammers themselves have changed it. Anyway, stay alert...

Twitter, this is just a little guy exploiting your sloppy permission architecture in an immature way. Fix this before someone really hurts the TwitterSphere - let me tell you, it is very, very easy this way