Tuesday Aug 04, 2009
Establishing business leadership through social media
This is a presentation that I have been working on over the last year. It is being well received, so I thought I'd share it with
you through slideshare. Have embedded it here for your convenience.
Love to gain your feedback or thoughts on the issues presented in it.
Saturday Apr 11, 2009
Coding and being productive
I still cut code! Yes, and I enjoy doing so. But many people, have never learnt to or have forgotten how to and the mere thought of writing a computer program is considered to be an inane task, that should be given to others.
When its given to others, a considerable amount of effort is required to translate domain knowledge into a form that the developer can learn from and then use to write the application. Most people underestimate the amount of effort involved here, the complexity of writing down, I mean really spelling out in its simplest form what needs to be achieved and hence do not put the effort into the required activities. This leads to a mismatch of expectations and systems developed that don't meet the dreams and aspirations of the original requestors.
How do you fix it? The simplest way (forgetting politics and previous training) is to get the people with domain knowledge to be stronger participants in the construction of the system. Am I saying that they should cut code? Yes!
They will understand what is feasible and realistic to be achieved. Far too often, I see one sentence requirements, being one of many functional requirements, that upon further investigation would require their own system to satisfy.
I saw today an interesting post on 3quarksdaily where a US College will be training Journalists also in IT. That is combining the skill sets, so Journalists will be code savvy.
Where else does this issue exist? It actually exists in ICT itself, where Business Analysts, in Analytics focused organisations, have developed strong skills in Spreadsheets (eg Excel) but can't write programs to harness data from other sources (eg online data from government or other providing organisations). What happens when the volume of data grows to Terabyte or greater sizes? Are these guys going to be able to process the data in Excel? More importantly are they going to be able to respond in a timely manner to ensure the Analytics that they produce give you a competitive advantage?
There is a wealth of new information being created that can be consumed through electronic means over the internet by writing a computer program. He who can leverage it in a timely manner has an advantage.
The person that can't write a computer program has no productivity advantage!Tags productivitiy business coding skills analytics ict | Comments 0
Tuesday Jan 13, 2009
Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester
I came across this interesting article on slashdot this morning - Companies using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester.
"A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
It was easy giving up on Microsoft software for work. I now use a combination of Open Office, Google Docs and iWork depending on what I'm trying to achieve. So don't believe that the only option is Microsoft Office. If you haven't tried some of the other products give them a go, you will be pleasantly surprised.
Tags microsoft ooo office business iwork forrester google+docs | Comments 1
Wednesday Jan 07, 2009
Is SOA really dead?
A blog post titled "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services" was directed to me by a couple of persons. It highlights, what I first started to describe a couple of years ago as "Journalist led technology"; sometimes I do believe that it is Analyst led as well. That is, that the potential promise of the technology genres and acronyms, in this case SOA, take over. Without necesarrily having the real world experiences to back it up, to cut through the hype.
We most not forget that SOA means Service Oriented Architecture. It is an architectural style, that is a different style, then what has been used in the past in the client/server world of old. "to SOA or not to SOA" which I wrote about a couple of years ago, is always an interesting question.
"What are the alternates to a SOA style architecture?" still holds true in my opinion, that if you are not using a monolithic 80s/90s style client/server model, then there will be a business tier that exposes services at some granularity to be consumed by a presentation tier or another business tier service. Its the pace layering that becomes the issue (my thoughts here on timeless software).
To me Anne has highlighted the true issue that has been missed which is the important stuff: architecture and services.
Tags soa saas middleware technology analyst cloud journalist business | Comments 0
Wednesday Dec 31, 2008
The rise of the intangible business model
Around this time last year I wrote a prediction blog entry for 2008 where I used my then delicious cloud tag as the basis of formulating the subject of the entries. Well this year, the top two tags from last year, being SaaS and Business are still the same. So instead of repeating what I did last year, I thought I'd summarise what I see emerging in 2009 as more dominate, being that of the intangible business model.
Let me explain this over the next few paragraphs. I work, and most likely if you are reading this you do to (or at least in your department), in a business that is focused around the production of intangible assets - they cannot be seen, touched or physically measured. That is, there is no physical product or building (bricks & mortar) produced.
However, to produce these intangibles assets some property, plant and equipment also known as fixed assets (eg buildings, land, software, computers) are acquired. In the case of a software company that hosts software for other organisations, this may also extend to include a production data center. These costs quickly mount up, and financing operations until profitability or an exit is achieved has become near impossible. Not to mention the expectation of customers to not pay as much for the software or services as they view it as a commoditised transaction.
This means you either need to sell more volume at a lower price, or reduce your costs to achieve a cash positive position sooner.
Cash is good, Assets are bad
I've heard the above phrase a number of times in the past, and the first time I heard it, I was a little confused as I thought Cash was an asset to. Which it is, but I believe that it is a current asset (eg cash, receivables, inventories and prepayments) as opposed to a non-current asset (eg investments, fixed assets, intangibles and deferred tax assets). I also thought that not all non-current assets are bad, maybe it should really say fixed assets are bad.
I apologise for all the accounting speak, it is not my native tounge either, so I hope it is making sense so far! If you have an accounting background and I've got this wrong, please be gentle on me; but please tell us where?
The intangible business model in my mind, will minimise fixed assets, hence the need for debt (liability) to finance it. Who is going to be able get financing anyway in 2009? (unless of course they already have it)
In the case of a software company, how are they going to get the costs down? They'll provide it as a SaaS based service over the internet, right? If they host it themselves, up goes those fixed assets and liabilities through the debt to fund it. Well, thats not going to work is it? (fixed assets are bad) So they'll use cloud based services, such that costs will rise propotional to sales and the major non-current assset on the balance sheet will be the intangibles comprising the software service. Operational costs will be reduced, thus lower pricing for customers in an increasingly commoditised SaaS world.
So in my humble opinion I'm predicting that in 2009 we will see the rise of the intangible business model. Hopefully also better recognition that a larger preportion of our economies depend on them and not on factories that produce physical products with inventories.
Tags saas intangible tangible assets business | Comments 0
