Serving customer experience

Last few days I went through two separate incidents reminding me of poor business applications resulting into bad customer experience that can easily be avoided – should customer view point is considered while automating any business process. 

1. My elder daughter who is now 17+ was in the process of buying a car. I decided to have her apply for an auto loan where she can be a secondary co-applicant with me – hoping it will start to establish her credit history. We spent multiple hours at one of the major national bank filling out the paper work, etc. only to be reminded after few days that loan can’t be granted with her as a co-applicant given she is a minor. How hard it is to have a simple work flow in the loan application process to error out on the age of a minor while filing the application when certain conditions are not valid? Think about the countless hours wasted of the banker; someone from their lending department and leaving customer with a bad taste who unnecessarily have to go through this long process. 

2. A national university suggests we pay bill on-line to get student registered to their college. We all conduct commerce on-line and now assume certain level of service. However, this university only accepts MasterCard as an acceptable form of payment. It does not accept Visa cards or other popular on-line payment forms. Visa and MasterCard are the big gorilla in the credit industry. In fact, hands down Visa is #1 in the industry with 60% of the market share. MasterCard comes second with close to 30% market share. We happen to be fortunate and had few days left before the deadline for us to apply snail mail way posting cheque in mailbox. Why tout on-line when you can only serve a percent of the customers? 

Anyway, it brings me to the point – automating business processes are to provide improved customer experience. Making business applications usable and customer connected is important.

We experience similar trend in the enterprise software industry – particularly products that have been around for decades and has accumulated lot of features over time. But if those features are hard to use and don’t provide basic reminders or simple error checks – what is the point as they anyway end up in lost productivity and unsatisfied customers. Just ponder – how few features get used when the product is difficult to navigate and hard to use. Feature rich is good – but product build without customer experience in mind is simply not a recipe for success. Applications has to be usable and not just functional to serve desirable customer experience.

Usability matters and it is much more than just cosmetics.

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.

Simplicity – Next frontier?

Recently, a blog post on Sandhill suggested how Simplicity is the next frontier for Enterprise Software.

This topic usually gets its share of debate – particularly what it means in the enterprise space. I tend to agree that Simplicity need to be on the cross-hair of an enterprise development organization. I will venture and suggest Simplicity to augement the definition of “Quality” and make it measurable while product is in development. To continue to differentiate in the market place, enterprise software simply need to go beyond functional and be usable as well.

There are various studies/surveys that suggest enterprise software functionality usage (or lack of usage) due to the end users challenges working with the applications. Functionality already in the product that gets overlooked and don’t get to see the light of the day…

Good news is much of the enterprise industry is investing in usability and developing best practices for wider adoption. The real gains though start to happen as Simplicity becomes part of the culture; grooming champions within the organization; including it as part of the software development process; encouraging indivduals to address Usability issues with the same sense of urgency as it would to the Quality/functional issues. Of course, sooner in the release cycle the better.

 

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.

 

Organization Productivity

As enterprise software continues to evolve from automating paper/pen/fax based tasks to business processes/workflows – next frontier remains to tap the collective intellect of the organization and harnessing social power of its workforce to find the competitive edge.

The trend continues as personal web and enterprise web converge. As the next generation of workforce joins the rank it is increasingly important to carry forward the expectation of personal web into an enterprise. Individual experiences of managing various social interactions, relationships and personal preferences define the corner stone of various personal web phenomena. These set of technologies enable targeted communication and mass scale collaboration needed to unleash huge productivity potential in an enterprise.

Enterprise applications remains an exciting space to watch for as several upcoming web technologies makes inroad providing either make over to the current set of products or helping evolve new type of applications.

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.

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!!

…

Simplicity

There is much chatter about Google and its product strategy in the blog circles lately. Particualry after it announced closure of the “Google Answers” earlier this week.

Few posts are here, here and here suggesting reasons and how strategy could be changing at Google. Also, Brin suggests simplicity as way to succeed in future.

Simplicity is also key consideration for building successful enterprise product .

It reminds me of Steve Krug suggesting how development should be thinking about building products that customers can use in “Don’t make me think“.

On a side note – wikipedia remains impressive updating its entry on Google Answers real time. Living to the promise of social web providing accurate and relevant information available on timely basis. What a simple concept.

Data everywhere, Information somewhere, Decisions nowhere

Sometime back, I wrote my thoughts around Enterprise 2.0 and how it is about leveraging social communities within an extended enterprise. I was asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is just another round of attempt to deliver on the promises of better analytics and knowledge management. I have already covered my thoughts on why Enterprise 2.0 is more than that. Regardless, I believe progress within analytics/business intelligence space is key towards achieving Enterprise 2.0.

Relevant data that provides everyday vital information is key to making decisions. And it is a powerful notion that influences people behavior.

Various opportunity areas where much progress is happening within enterprise industry are (this is not a comprehensive list, feel free to add others that you see missing) :-

1. Delay between generation of data and for the corresponding action to take place - How to quickly get to decisions? New analytical models around SOA/Events based architecture paradigm are emerging here. How this system will scale and perform as the trend continues to evolve from batch to realtime for widely available 24×7 system with more internal/external end users will be the testament and tipping point for possible Internet scale adoption.

2. Disjointed analytics from everyday business process - How analytical information get closer or be embedded within business applications like billing, accounting, other ERP applications, CRM, etc. so that users have their transactional and analytical information available side by side to take action when things happen. Much progress is happening here on daily basis by the application, analytics and integration vendors trying to bring analytics closer to business processes. 

3. Automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions - How to overcome or provide additional intelligence needed in the data to be able to identify and isolate bad information generated due to the noise from the actionable good information? Today, much of these interpretation happens manually. I am sure some level of human involvement will be needed but the idea remains how to automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions needed to keep things flowing on everyday basis. SOA/BPEL/Events based architecture has the promise to potentially automate “most” of the tactical decisions. But the challenge will be how to eliminate noise before acting on some information. You don’t want some automatic tactical decision being made due to a noise that result into potentially more bad situations.

4. Meaningful presentation of various analytical knowledge – gleaned from wide variety of information at different level of granularity. Information need to easier for human to read, interpret, drill down and act upon. So much progress has been happening here due to Web 2.0 and touted reverence to the dashboards that demos so well. The need here is also to continue to make it pervasive, available wherever needed, and making it available in wide variety of form factor.

5. Ever increasing size of data - Advent of new technologies like RFID and increasing automation of processes has opened up the flood gate of data (structured/unstructured)that needs to be analyzed and aggregated on daily basis. This is growing data size to manage and analyze by leaps and bounds. Increase bandwidth, much innovation in the storage and other industries for faster access continues to push the limit. One hear terra/peta/exa byte much more often in conversations – something not common just few years back.

6. Quality of data that gets integrated and aggregated from various sources - Maturity of the integration/EAI products, better cleansing and aggregation tools, increase automation, etc. are helping keep data fresh, consistent and actionable.

Analytics future is exciting as the technologies are maturing, business use cases are evolving where market is looking beyond aggregated historical trending information to reflect the current or future needs. Companies are asking for front view (real time, forecast data) beside rear view mirror (historical information) to run business. Continued consolidation of the industry – Reporting, Performance Management, Analytics, Data Warehouse, Knowledge Management, etc…will keep this space exciting and help bring several of these information islands closer.

SOA will kill ERP?

AMR wrote an article sometime back whether evolution of SOA will kill ERP.

I would think, if anything it will spur ERP backbone growth and help unlock various enterprise vendors to build better (and complete) stack for different industries, sub-industries, geographies, emerging markets, etc. that are currently unreachable due to the time and energy needed by the close systems. SOA based ERP system will create far reaching vibrant franchise ecosystem needed on successful ERP backbones to truly scale the business by reaching beyond the current markets/industries thus paying off better margins to the companies who end up having successful SOA enabled ERP backbones. Key will be around how to create and manage successful franchise.

It is all about Business Processess…

There are several upcoming technologies that will have much impact to the enterprise applications like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. Various pundits have already touted the technical advantage of all these technologies. To prove the point, every major software vendor today, has a SOA strategy. So how does all this cool technology will help businesses whose only job is to manufacture, sell and service some simple widgets and not necessarily care about what technology they uses. Infect, they probably don’t care whether it is Web 2.0, SOA or some RPG/Cobol on a green screen terminal.

Business deploying enterprise software (ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, HRMS, etc.) uses technology as a business enabler to help them manufacture the widget cheaper/better/faster or service its customer better, etc. Successful companies proud themselves on their business processes making them unique and differentiating them in their respective market. Technology wow factor is usually not the front runner. Much of enterprise businesses remains slow on the technology adoption curve. At best, it may either be classified as “Early majority” or “Late majority” if not outright “laggard” trying to avoid “Innovator” or “Early adopter” technology adoption curve.

So how would all the upcoming technologies help existing business processes of a company? To do that let’s look at the key components of what makes a business process and understand how these upcoming technologies can be applied to make aspects of business process better. One can certainly add or refine the list here.

• Information – Information is critical to any individual executing a business process successfully. As technology continue it improves it is providing new benefits that were not available before like –
  1. Reliable information that provide deeper visibility into what goes on in a business
  2. Real time information when you want it, where you want it
  3. Information from relationships – multiple degrees apart and from extended sources like partners, suppliers, outsourcers, employees, market places, etc.
  4. Information from unstructured sources – capturing knowledge, increase integration with email, files systems, document management systems, etc.
  5. Vastly improved searches for mining the sea of information and analytical tools to come to deliver what you want and understand Patterns, Metrics, goals, etc.

• Tasks – This has been the frontier as industry has been busy automating much of the human tasks aggressively since more than a decade or so. Also, as existing tasks gets automated – new set of human coordination tasks or extended responsibility appears in the horizon. Some benefits from new technologies here are:-
  1. Extending/changing existing tasks without writing code – STANDARDS is the way to go
  2. Easy creation of new tasks as new processes comes to life
  3. Enabling work-flows easier between automated tasks and human tasks
  4. Quick alignment/training of the team to ever changing processes regardless of location of employees
  5. Enables getting tasks done cost effectively without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction goals
  6. Enables ramping up new people easily and help extend enterprise frontier to newer geographies

• Interaction – A business is net sum of its people accomplishing their individual tasks and interacting with each other. This is their everyday interaction as they formulate, strategize, decide, work, act with each other to take company ahead one day at a time. Much is based on the foundation of real time visibility, availability and ability to engage everyone needed in a dialogue. Huge benefits from new technologies in this space:-
  1. Collapsing invisible walls that were between the parties/individuals as relationship maps become visible
  2. Continue to make world a small place to live, connect and make interaction real within it larger ecosystem
  3. Assess and establish new relationships quickly – expand ecosystem and extend reach
  4. Increased participation of many in decision making as several new communication channels reaching out to all becomes available – enabling the system to operate on power of many
  5. Capture, track and publish knowledge at determined time to feed into everyday work
  6. Speed up information sharing, decision making and rollout to the ecosystem
  7. Speed up feedback from market on decisions and place effective measure to correct

To sum it up upcoming technologies holds the promise of providing new kind of business processes not possible today or refining existing business processes that can help a company to remain differentiated and successful.

Just as an example – think today we enter more trades every day (couple of billions everyday on NYSE these days) than what we used to do in a week couple of decades (couple of million everyday on NYSE in early 70’s) back. All of this due to technology improvement that leverages the same process of placing, reconciling the trade, clearing the trade, settling the trade, invoicing, paying for the trade, etc. But now these tasks are automated, collapsed various walls that were needed in the past to place a trade, and provide real time information to a trader. New processes have evolved around technologies like real time information, increase self service, automatic trade placement, portfolio analysis, etc… that is changing the scale of business.

There are many examples how leveraging the right technology can help things scale quickly that is otherwise not possible. It is this promise with upcoming technologies like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. for businesses allowing them to unleash new level of accomplishment across its social communities – makes enterprise applications an interesting space for years to come.

Does LAMP need its CASE – Open Source in Enterprise

Much opinions have been floating on each side of the discussion why Open Source is or isn’t a good idea for an enterprise. Usual suspect like long sales cycle, implementation challenges, support concerns, etc. are cited as the barrier to entry. While free/cheap, no lock-in concern, open source benefits, etc. gets cited as the reason to support Open Source in an enterprise.

So as in life there is no perfect answer. This one is no exception to that. It comes down to making choices that suits the organization net positively and help accomplish business goals.

In my opinion, Open Source enterprise offering can have some legs. Companies like Compiere or other upcoming venture stand a good chance to replicate say what Redhat has done to further the cause of Linux. At current level of Open Source Company’s valuation this remains a viable business towards a targeted market. Although, some shrewd venture folks may suggest it is a matter of time before Open Source companies starts to get valued as a Service company given the margins are closer to that than a product company.

I would think certain market say where audience has embraced LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) should be supportive of Open Source enterprise product, if it can be successfully packaged, delivered, deployed, implemented and supported at no worse than the leading vendors. Thought process here, in some regard, is extending the open source stack to its preferred constituents and make it available at an acceptable total cost of ownership.

Figuratively speaking, does LAMP need to be in its CASE (CRM, Analytics, SCM, ERP) for a deeper adoption of Open Source within enterprise?

One example of Open Source friendly market is India. Lately, much news has come out suggesting how various state governments are favoring Open Source as the platform of choice.

Some may ask – Does the economic impact of software cost is more to companies in country like India? It all depends on how many companies can really afford $100s of thousands (after discounting) of software when earnings are not in hard currency? Also, different Enterprise structures adds to the discussion – like how many companies have revenue of $250M or more in India; need of larger number of seats (read more scalable software and support needs) as companies have more employees for a typical say $100M company in US; software cost impact to top line revenue depending on whether it hits operational or capital spending; etc. Some of these factors make Open Source more appealing to the market. One can add low implementation cost to this within domestic Indian market to make the overall implementation of Open Source enterprise software rather cheaper to accomplish.

A gating factor for Open Source success stories will be how it extends and matures the eco system beyond development community – to cover every aspect of value delivery. It is vital for the Open Source model to scale and instill confidence in enterprise customers about their investment in Open Source. Like having enough partners who can effectively implement, sell, support Open Source products in various geographies. Time will tell how successful open source will be in an enterprise market.

So what do you think – do you believe LAMP need to be in its CASE to make Open Source successful in enterprise market?

More thoughts on Social communities within an Enterprise

Facebook on Tuesday added a new feature that RSS feeds changes on a member page to its friends like photos updates, profile changes say address, status, etc. This new feature got strong negative feedback from the user community. By Friday, CEO of Facebook has to come out and say how they messed up here and need to review and modify the feature. Read his blog here.

Anyway, the point here is what I suggested earlier on Social communities and interaction blog around how within an Enterprise a similar relationship can be formed between its social communities.

Like in this case among the end user community and the developer/implementation folks. Currently, within enterprise, this is accomplished in various ways to engage customers/users, capture the need of the end users while building an enterprise software and get user feedback on the feature. Several local or global user groups, customer consortium, product launches, conferences, regular meetings, customer surveys, etc. all try to gauge the need, establish requirement and later feedback on what’s working or not. This works for few customers that participate but misses out on the larger customer base. Also, the process is long and lot gets lost in translation as information changes hand from end user before it reaches developer/implementer.

In some regard, today, it is a discussion of haves and have nots. Today, it is a discussion of which customers have found ways to influence the eco system versus who don’t.

Can Enterprise 2.0 provide similar equalizer to all – small or large, local or global, vocal or supportive, successful or struggling, etc. - with an opportunity to choose and participate in defining enterprise implementation to morph to their need in a quick and efficient way? If done right – I think yes…What do you think?

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.

Enterprise 2.0

Much discussion is in progress about Enterprise 2.0 – including a large cry after “Enterprise 2.0″ was deleted from Wikipedia earlier. Here is my simple explanation of Enterprise 2.0.

Model every day enterprise users activity leveraging Web 2.0 based technologies (like Ajax, RSS, Wikis, blogs, IM, etc.) that can provide increased social interaction (like successful models of MySpace, YouTube, eBay, etc.) and enriched personal experience needed to build highly collaborative geographically distributed company/community (including employees, customers, partners, supply chain and other communities). A foundation that can help generate increase level of productivity necessary to manage both top line growth and bottom line control. Consider this along with other technology innovations (like RFID, SOA, etc.) and wider deployment choices(like SaaS, Licenced, BPO, etc.) – if anything enterprise industry is getting into some exciting time for innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 naturally enhances the current web based computing model that forces developers to think abstract application components rather than facilitating user interaction (say with your customer or salesforce) that is needed to provide the social experience of getting a task completed. BTW, this happens today although in a primitive way – today one person enters the info in a form that stores relevant data in one tableset that either a work flow or by some other trigger mechanism notifies other person who then picks the recordset from those tables; do some work; and put the modified recordset in another set of tables for another user to pick and do something about it. One can make this user interaction worse if you consider integrated legacy applications and best of breed suites in today’s IT environment – where users have to jump from one application to other hoping to find the relevent information needed to progress the work flow. Think about how this behavior of user interaction can be enhanced leveraging some of the successful and other upcoming future social interaction with the web when trying to accomplish a task.

Thre are other interesting scenarios as well that can be thought of as Enteprise 2.0 takes some shape. I can see much improvement in the CRM space to improve customer facing functionality. These new models will evolve in the time to come as technology gains wide spread adoption and as enterprise vendor catches on to capture social experince needed for them to continue to retain and grow their customer base.

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Fragmented international market

Read this story on Forbes today titled “Software Surprise” how in China a small local enteprise software vendor “Ufida” is capturing SMB market from the likes of Oracle and SAP. Article suggests that Ufida has captured 20% of the domestic business market. It touts the benefit that local vendor knows local rules, etc. supporting easy sell of domestic developed products to the less complex customer scenarios.

Although the article heavily touts the “price” advantage local company suggests it has over the large established leaders. I am not sure, if that is what is keeping Ufida afloat. At best it can be a short term ploy as price advantage don’t sustain too long. At least not against companies like Oracle, SAP that runs on high margin and generate enough cash to compete effectively on price point – if they decide to capture the market and keep thrifty competitor away.

One sliver line that emerges out of such success story of domestic product companies is the awareness they create around software intellectual property within the country. Local success stories will bring appropriate legal practices and improve the local enforcement situation to tackle privacy and other relevant issues effectively. Thus solidifying the path for large multi-nationals to increase their penetration and provide more sophesticated solution to the diverse geopgraphical market – in some regard leveling the playfield for competition.