Market-ing: Make it personal

We live in a time where communicating to broad audience alone one way has limited reach and stickiness. To make a message sticky and gain viral spread – you want to communicate through your audience. You want to foster a community of influencers who can help spread your message and communicate for you.

Ask someone who is running a business and they will more likely suggest that bigger risk they run is not getting adequate market recognition making sales cycle harder for them. Putting businesses in a position to not able to compete effectively in the market place. Unless you are doing some ground breaking invention – not many will cite they run technology/product risk as the primary reason to go out of business. Market risk usually trump over the product risk. Largely products adopts and evolves to follow customer/technology life cycle. At least until it meets a disruptive trend.

Several well known Marketing gurus have suggested how to effectively target marketing message to create the viral adoption taking “Marketing” from job function perspective to “market-ing ideas that spread” broadly. e.g. Seth Godin…around his thought process “Ideas that spread – wins” or Tribal management. or Forrester on its analysis around how to create Groundswell. Web is littered with such case studies and adoption stories – some more successful than others.

It is one of the reason - more businesses from the get go are increasingly embracing social media and encourage employees to rather share ideas broadly. Folks will invest from the start building community of developers/influencer/promoters needed to give business a market edge. Taking the discussion beyond Marketing department to engage every one involved in the endeavor to help promote your business; ideas; product; etc.

At the end of the day ask yourself – who best positioned to spread what you do best and all the creative ideas about your business than your own employees. So start the journey with your team and go get your ideas out…

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won

Tough time present opportunities otherwise not available. Current economic environment is just one such opportunity.

Much depend on how we as individuals act and enable others to act to make the best of it. It is  our collective attitude that determine how an organization will fare as the rough weather passes.

Few thoughts:

1. Know yourself – recognize your strength and weakness. Position where your strength can make a difference

2. Work with people, regardless of their position, who share optimistic perspective on things (equally important shield yourself from individuals with negative attitude)

3. Know where you are going; bring focus on critical few; and make hard choices necessary to accomplish

4. Have sense of urgency to achieve. It should be driven out of what you plan to accomplish and not fear. Fear usually motivates but in the wrong direction

5. Roll up your sleeve and get involved directly with your customers, products or whatever your line of work. It helps appreciate perspective otherwise missing

Lastly –  communicate openly and candidly.

Remember, in the current environment – it is high time to demonstrate the winning attitude and make a difference. Opportunity is knocking at our door step – question is who is prepared to respond?

Convergence

We live in a time of convergence where examples are littered show casing various technologies or products converging to enhance end user experience. One case in point digital media and home entertainment serving to improve everyday experience. Just pick one category of your liking and you will soon find someone is pushing the envelope either bringing adjacency services closer or building one if it doesn’t already exist.

Same is true for the business software community. It remains an emerging trend to converge and deliver enhanced experience for business users.

I usually put the convergence in three categories that overtime gets delivered as one unified solution. These are:

 

 

1. Improve a person’s productivity in the workplace.

2. Improve the ability to make decision easier based on historical or projection based heuristics

3. Improve an individual social standing in the peer community

 

 

 

Well done is better than well said…

Earlier today, I was watching an interview of Arnold Schwarzenegger on ABC. In response to a question he quoted his belief around “Well done is better than well said”. I love it…

Action just speak louder than the words. It is great to be of creative mind and think new ideas. But the fun is in converting those ideas and making it real.

Which idea do you want to work on today?

PS: This quote gets originally attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

People process

Bob Bennett from Sage Payment Solution Division recommended “The Future of Management” and also send me a copy to read. It is an interesting read and the book compares the management practices of the yesteryears to what is needed now to build an innovative/high performance organization. Management Innovation is called out repeatedly touting empowered employees in a self managed, transparent organization where peers hold each other accountable to build a high performing organization.

Truly, at the end of the day an organization success is a direct product of the people it employs. I like the example of Toyota’s TPS (Toyota Production System) fondly known as “Thinking People System” is a good example of how it can be a differentiator in tough industry environment. It is keeping Toyota healthy despite all the challenges within the automobile industry.

A team from Detroit once took the tour to Toyota to find out the difference. Initially, success was attributed due to the Japenese culture and different work ethics resulting in Toyota (and similar other Japanese auto marker) an edge over its Detroit counterparts. It soon got belied as Toyota expanded its manufacturing base in US. Now, even within the same cultural context and country Toyota continues to make the difference that has made it famous.

The key to the success, as people find out, is the constant change that happens at Toyota – mostly driven by its employees who are always looking to optimize or making things better. It is widely touted as “Kaizen“. Contrast this with other companies where change is induced from the top when the need is drastic and employees resist change resulting in half hearted adoption akin to too little too late. Thus companies struggle to remain agile and difficult to keep up with the market need.

In mature market and competitive industry landscape where margins are hard to acheive and average growth remains minimal - it is such a boon for Toyota where employees bring gradual change among themselves ensuring organization to remain current with the need. Also, it fosters a culture of team work, collaboration, and change that thrive to remain agile. Essentially, Toyota is successfully reaping on the bright brains it employs.

Learning here is no different for other industries including enterprise software. Key to success remains empowering employees who regularly reflect on day’s work and adapt; fostering a cross functional team environment; and an environment where peers hold each other accountable for the joint success.

How you feed your Ecosystem

All of us are potential teachers and learners – in a collaborative environment we are both.

Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-

	Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Participants	Business Partners	Various (Partners, Customers, ISVs, Developers, System Integrators, VARs, etc.)
Purpose	Means to an end (Sales, Service and Support)	Way of life (Innovation, More Product, Reach and Scope, etc.)
Relationship	Business, Formal	Trusted, Collaborative
Communication	Mostly one way	Dialogue
Knowledge Sharing	Training	Peer Learning beside necessary Training
Problem solving	Mostly individual groups; limited sharing	Work with peers to solve the problem; and share learning with the world to follow suit
Process	Provide necessary steps to deal with the fiefdoms	Transparency
Technology	Phone, Email, Fax	Wiki, Blog, Forum, Bulletin Board, Youtube, etc. beside conventional means
Use of Web	Limited	Social. Can one live without it now?
World view	World is round	World is flat

For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives - closed/traditional source software or open source software – the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues.

 

Kaizen

A key measure of a successful product organization is its ability to deliver on Quality commitments. This usually is the cost of entry in a competitive market landscape. There is no magic formula for an organization to get there. Key remains building a culture of continuous improvement.

In Japanese, there is a term that describes “continuous improvement” mindset well. It is called “Kaizen”. Toyota actually mastered this and it later became part of the DNA of various Japanese companies causing them to win the marketplace primarily on the basis of Quality.  

Kaizen emphasize the culture of continual small improvements that yields large results in a form of compound productivity improvement over a period of time. The “zen” in Kaizen emphasizes the learn-by-doing aspect of improving productivity. Idea remains smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted as new improvements are suggested.

In our industry one way to measure Quality is considering how its “Quality curve” looks like during product development. It is plotting number of defects on y-axis during various phases of product development. A traditional organization that deals with quality late in the development cycle may look like the following:-

to another with the emphasis of bringing quality early on during the development cycle:-

So watch out next time as you encounter bumps that can be improved. What you do to get around those bumps and how you address it has an impact towards building winning organization. Every effort counts.

Power of an Agile Mind

Agile processes have come a long way. It is now available in various flavors and different names. All promises an organization’s ability to deliver customer value faster while enabling organization to deal with the change. Several successful stories ranging from start up entrepreneurial companies to established large software organization help Agile Processes continue to gain traction. 

However key to the success comes down to the people. Agile processes like Scrum are great enabler in tearing down the barriers and bringing cross functional organization closer. But at the end of the day it is about how people approach problem and tackle everyday situation. Individuals with Agile mind tend to accomplish things that otherwise remain unaccomplished. Agile is as much a state of mind and how individuals in an organization approach things as it is about process and structure.

So what makes an Agile mind – beyond the classic chicken and pig story? Here are few characterstics -

• Believe in working as a team and recognizing team success
• Embraces change and focus more on providing solutions to the changing need
• Works relentlessly to remove barriers and getting today’s work done today
• Take individual responsibility and pride in an individual work
• Focuses on big picture and understand customer needs
• Deals with conflict in a positive way

Interestingly as I was searching the Internet on Agile mindset – I stumbled on this link around how agile mindset is applied by the US Army in Iraq. Similar principles in a different setting demonstrating the power of good communication flow and empowered individuals.

Facebook

Last month or two, blogsphere is abuzz about Facebook. Particularly, after Mark Zuckerberg, wonderboy CEO of Facebook, announced F8. For those who missed F8 announcement - this is Facebook launching a development platform to building applications leveraging social networks. A very good analysis of Facebook and its new social platform is done by Marc Andreessen at his blog here. I will recommend reading it.

F8 platform provides a good extensibility model around Facebook at interfaces/API, data access and user interface level. I also like the fact how it makes a close system – Facebook site in itself, open to building and extending the system – like building other applications on top of Facebook plus the governance model around it.

This move towards providing a platform for build social applications and access to its social network is fuelling speculation on how Facebook is going to be the next big thing. Pundits are already putting Facebook in a different league than MySpace given its open platform and ability to attract and build healthy and bigger ecosystem.

Personally, I like the move as it continues to influence and challenge traditional development thought processes by opening up the development paradigms necessary to embrace social style of development. An approach that embrace opening up development paradigm to foster healthy eco systems required to serve products and services necessary to deliver unique customer experiences. I have covered this topic in different contexts here, here, here and here.

What’s cooking

Some screen shots from MAS 90 – BIE (Business Insights Explorer) demo that we showed at Insights.

Taking the data view ->  

and generate on the fly, configurable charts based on various filters, dimensions and more.

  

Stay tuned…

Insights 2007

May 14 to 17th, I will be at Insights 2007 – our annual partner conference. I would love to meet you if you are around.

This event is always a special event. But this year it is more special due to the recent reorganization at Sage Software. Bringing old walls down between small business and mid-business; front office and back office products should be a welcome move by customers and partners. This will serve our customers well and it should enable partners to foster an healthier eco-system.

I look forward to catching up with several of you at Insights.

Growing the ecosystem

Application grows Technology

Ecosystem grows Application

One example is Google maps. Although a late entrant in the world of maps with an established competitor Mapquest. But by opening up its APIs and encouraging it to be used beyond “driving direction” has promoted a healthy ecosystem of building unlimited solutions around geographical mapping needs.

Now Google maps based mashups are available around the world on almost any concept. Innovation is happening daily expanding the influence of Google Maps without Google breaking a sweat leveraging the power of many that grows everyday.

Similarly, healthy ecosystems around enterprise applications continue to differentiate among current players. Organization and product encouraging ecosystem that goes beyond basic enterprise need expanding it to address niche markets, new industries, micro verticals, various local/global needs etc. find itself scaling faster than its competitors regardless of the size. Key remains how to nurture this ecosystem towards delivering end to end customer experience consistent with the core throughout its life cycle.

One success factor is when organization is able to tout “proudly made elsewhere” rather than tied to “not made here” syndrome. An example is P&G – in the March 2006 issue of HBR there is a good case study on how P&G found its new innovation strategy. The Article titled “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation” discusses how “invent-it-ourselves” was restricting its growth and what it did to turn around.

So support your ecosystem to spur innovation and growth needed by enterprise products to scale new heights.

You get what you measure (or lack of)

As the saying goes “What you can’t measure – you can’t improve”. Paul Kedrosky mentioned in his blog various metrics an enterprise software company to use. It lists a score card of a typical good enterprise software company.

Personally, I am a number kind of a guy and also emphasize measuring various aspect of business – be it around what we do (building, selling, supporting, etc.) in a company or how (process, organization structure, etc.) we do it. It makes decision making objective and helps the organization to focus on the right things. Although, people need to keep in mind common sense and an aspect on subjectivity before making decision – as sometimes indicators don’t tell the whole story.

Also before instituing any metrics, an organization management, should carefully consider what it is trying to accomplish. Metrics drives behavior within organization. So good metrics drive good behavior and bad metrics drive bad behavior in the organization.

Paul Kedrosky’s blog suggests few key measurements around various aspect of the business. It also include a typical score card that can be used to benchmark. Check it out.

In product development, few of the metrics that I find helpful are around the following:

1. Utilizing capacity and resources

2. Progress of current work in development

3. Several quality metrics of work in progress during various development phases

4. Quality of releases in the market

5. Customer satisfaction metrics

6. Various organization metrics

un pour tous, tous pour un

Oh! I just love it…

One for all, and all for one. Teamwork rocks!!

…

Changing Web

Web is changing. Here are the symptoms:-

1. Web is becoming a trusted medium
2. Web is getting self governed
3. Web is becoming reliable
4. Web is the knowledge
5. Web is becoming the way of life – this life and second life
6. Web is social for both social and anti-social people
7. Web is the place for people to hang out
8. Web is the great equalizer – brings power to all
9. Web gives it – Web takes it away. Don’t earn notoriety on the web.
10. Web is changing personal habits. 

And for the nerds

1. You can sell web sites for over $1bn

Social communities and interaction within enterprises

Enterprise 2.0 is a catchy term. If our history teaches us something about hype cycle it is the over usage of trendy terms. However, well known terms also are the best way to capture much of the broader context to convey the essence and help with the mass adoption. So to better describe what Enterprise 2.0 to look like – I am sharing some examples here.

In my opinion – Enterprise 2.0 includes effort beyond just capturing collective knowledge for deeper insight into businesses. It should also provide application building paradigm mimicking interaction model needed within different social communities of an enterprise. Something unleashing new values and making current challenges in an enterprise disappear.

Let’s briefly discuss “Social communities” within an enterprise and their “Interaction model”. At a high level an enterprise consists of various social communities of internal and external stakeholders. Some examples of these communities are say Sales community – which includes direct sales organization, marketing organization and partners, etc. or say a Product community which includes development organization, contractors, implementation partners, outsource vendors, end user customers, etc. So a web of individuals that are stakeholders of some set of common interests like what is needed in a product, success of the company, working on similar project, need to solve similar kind of issues, etc.

First version of Enterprise, if someone calls it as such – was about automating much of the paper process. Applications were built to automate the work traditionally done by filling paper(s) – hence much of the current generation of enterprise applications are build around user experience that mimic the paper process – be it invoicing, pick slips, order, entry in financial books, etc. These applications did good job of automation of routine work and brought in a level of consistency within an enterprise. It established best practices for doing everyday task.  Quite a win in this regard as overtime companies shifted IT budget towards packaged enterprise software.

However, current solution limits the collective knowledge captured to the extent of the structures defined within an application – its schema model. Also, the focus is much more on routine tasks rather than enabling various social communities within an extended enterprise to have an effective interaction.

This is a promise that people are hoping Web 2.0 based technologies and emerging/successful web based models can be deployed in the enterprise arena. Today, much of the interaction within and across social communities is either done poorly by software (like having notes kind of field in all application to key in any unstructured information) or done in all sort of fashion – say pick the phone and call the other person, capture information in a spreadsheet and share, emails, browsing/researching multiple sites, etc.

Enterprise 2.0 – as the promise starts to get shaped – has the potential to overcome it and provide much more than that. Some of the macro reasons that are adding to the trends this time compared to in the past are: -

1. Confidence of the enterprises around adoption of Web based technologies to run the business (quite a jump from green screen to client server to web based computing)
2. Maturity of the work force and their comfort using web and computers
3. Shrinking geographical boundaries creating more distributed and virtual organizations whether it is for manufacturing or outsourcing
4. Thus driving the need to capture knowledge and effective knowledge transfer within a social community 
   • Also read – capturing of graying or displaced workforce vital knowledge for the new comers to be successful
5. Create more knowledge workers than routine workers

Some examples of successful interaction model within Social communities of a company that Enterprise 2.0 could address are: (My apologies in advance as my examples are biased towards product communities within an enterprise as that is my focus. But there are similar examples on every community that exist within an enterprise)

• End customers rating usefulness of a feature (and providing feedback to its implementer/developer) directly for future improvements – ala digg it; embedded within a product
• End users forming community and sharing best practices of how-tos and influencing industry wide business process definition and consistent adoption – ala wikipedia; available within the self service dashboard
• End users subscribing to the interests in product features/updates that are in development and getting auto updated when the feature/patch is available – ala RSS feed; embedded within the product administrative suite
• Distributed, virtual product development organizations effectively capturing knowledge, aggregating information to ramp new knowledge workers quickly
• Above can be extended to include Implementation Partners for know how to extend/customize right from the guts of the system
• Sales organization acheieving higher success rate of business leads converting to opportunities due to better visibility of contacts and degree of relationship with prospects within the community
• Quick growth and scaling of an eco-system across multiple geographies for a company by its Partners/Distributors
• Remain aware of the changes to business processes by learning from similar companies/industries and get knowledge workers transitioned
• Quick market wins due to an organization ability to pull together right skills/people from an extended enterprise
• Finding the network effect helping business open up opportunities not available/hard to do at present – say building economies of scale with like minded community to acheive desired results
• etc…

Anyway, there are tons of other example that people can think around Enterprise 2.0, which has the foundation around how to enable successful interaction model for various communities of an extended enterprise.

Think for a while couple of years back our daily work was around paper/pencil/fax/todo lists, etc. Now people find it difficult what it was living without email, internet, etc. This is just another natural progression as technology matures and the younger generation (read more adaptive) gets in the workplace. 

Also, while I am at this topic – seems like Wikipedia has brought back Enterprise 2.0 discussion now under “Enterprise social software”. Thanks to SJ for pointing this out to me.

Enterprise-ready: things to consider

I have been talking about Enterprise-ready for over a year now on what is needed for a development organization to deliver enteprise ready product. So capturing some thoughts on what an Enterprise ready product should contain that need to be kept in mind during product development.

1. Basic product out of the box should simply work for what it is designed to do – Not just for happy path but also for not so happy paths and code detours that users might take.
2. Test more than what you code (Saying it again. I mean it. Test more than you code)
3. K.I.S.S. Use your brain. It is amazing how making things simple require some critical thinking.
4. Promote design patterns and architectural thinking before jumping on to code
5. Learn how to work well in a team; share; review; collaborate; learn, etc. Create team effect larger than the sum of all individuals.
6. Consider interfaces that people will rely on and pay lot of attention. Correcting any defect later will be hard to fix without introducing upheavel in the eco-system.
7. Document what you code
8. Consider global market impact – Language, Currency, TimeZone, Literal handling, etc.
9. Consider configurablity of the product to meet major use cases of the customer deployment. Say configuring a call center; dispatching calls; order of workflow; etc. Software configuration should be easy and simple to do that can be carried forward with each upgrade.
10. Consider how the product can be extended – it is better if extensibility is declarative. Best practices, APIs, guides, etc. should be made available addressing how to extend; test extension without affecting the base functionality; how to preserve extension as software gets upgraded, etc.
11. Consider how the product can be customized. Again, providing the necessary abstraction so that customization do not become invasive surgery on the base components and provide a path for future upgrades.
12. Consider product performance in Web environment. This should consider both for latency and bandwidth issues given companies are increasingly global and desire to achieve single global instance. Also, data centers are becoming huge and consolidation is the trend. Keep in mind several developing world may not have the best infrastructure available as well. Watch out for round trips and bad programming practices. Institure anti-patterns.
13. Consider product deployment choice – Hosted, Licenced, Multi-instance, Integrated environment, Global consolidated, etc.
14. Consider product scalability needs. It help if the product can be staless allowing better load balancing and clustering
15. Invest in user experience that can help end user get productive quickly. Make everyday tasks really easy to do and make it hard what you don’t want user to do, if can’t outrightly blocked it. As Krug and other usability experts would say – Don’t make me think. Idea should be represented intuitive and simple for user to get the task completed.
16. Consider making choices that most of end users will make. Sometime allowing every flexibility to be addressed by the end user makes a product hard to use and difficult to configure. Leaving less choices on the table is not a bad thing. Think iPod.
17. Centralize simple setup of similar product features – if acheiveing it is not possible for the entire product.
18. Invest in tools that can provide developer good information on vital statistics of code – complexity, path, memory checker, code scanners, etc.
19. Consider security and how application/technology fits in the larger enterprise eco system
20. Consider data quality issues and best practices needed to be deployed to keep data fresh. Keep in mind garbage in – garbage out. Think about purge and periodic reports on data.
21. Consider pre-seed data and setup data needed to get up and going quickly
22. Consider product development and implementation life cycle. How the change affects patch, update or upgrade.

Last but not the least… know developers are ultimately responsible for the quality of the products. Others in the value chain including QAs who touch the product either verifies or consumes what a developer develops. Hence…

• Learn quickly when a customer calls with a problem. It is not that customer don’t understand or use the product incorrectly. It is what the product allowed. You make more point with customer and marketplace by making the product work and share the learnings to avoid future pitfalls.