Enterprise hits and misses - September 8
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky weekly review of which enterprise software articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica & beyond - for the week ending September 7, 2014.
A cheeky weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond.
diginomica hit: More public sector lessons and meltdowns - by Den, Derek, and Stuart
quotage: 'The severity of this issue shouldn’t be overlooked or undermined. No matter what tools the government introduces to make the public sector ‘better’ at IT, none of it is going to go to plan if civil servants don’t get better at managing their suppliers.' - Derek
myPOV: For the second consecutive week, biting analysis came in the form of public sector IT struggles. Derek kicks things off with the not-so-happily-titled Britain’s defence department wastes £70m on new Army recruitment system - yep, we're back to contract management struggles - albeit with a few twists. Once again failure has many parents; we can add a gross underestimate of viable recruitment candidates to the mix. This type of morass informed Stuart's post, Why won't governments take contract management seriously?
Stuart's take? While the UK's Cabinet office is making progress, 'contract management with large vendors remains a 'black art'. Uh oh. Meanwhile, the U.S. has a chance to learn from the UK, as well as from its own bloated mistakes - a topic Den weighs down on in White House taps Google’s Megan Smith for figurehead CTO role. While this appointment has been hailed as a boon for women in technology, the tougher question is: will Smith's appointment lead to better digital outcomes for the U.S. government?
In a word, Den says, well, no. Given the futility of what's come before, it's hard to argue, but I like the appointment. As a second term president, Obama is in a great position to push hard for a legacy of digital change - but time is running out. Bonus: Derek also filed a global comparison on public sector competitiveness which includes both the U.S. and the UK in the results.
Diginomica pick: Workday 23 – spotlight on financials and verticals by Den HowlettmyPOV: I've read gobs of glowing pieces on Workday (to be fair, we've done them too; Workday is executing well). But: it's good to read a piece that gets into the nitty gritty of product features - what's there and what's not quite there (yet). Den dishes plenty of up to date information on Workday financials and verticals. He also reassesses Workday's vow to release a report writer/generator, and where the future challenges lie in the multi-national arena.
Customer use cases:
- Janine Milne kicks off her weekly HCM diginomica features with Virtusa tunes into GenY with home-grown social media hub. Welcome Janine!
- Jessica Twentyman's use case series rolls on with Birkbeck College provides an education in effective BPM, where she shares how Birbeck College has transformed 'archaic' processes with a new approach to BPM.
Vendor coverage: Diginomica has a vendor grab bag for ya this week, starting with Derek in Salesforce fleshes out its plans to become the platform of choice for wearables (Derek bounced his wearables skepticism off of Salesforce’s VP of Platforms in EMEA, Adam Spearing prior to the latest launch announcement). The HP-Autonomy legal skirmishes keep getting more absurd, but HP's CTO is confident looking forward - Stuart's on the case in HP CTO – we still have what it takes to invent and innovate.
Setting the table for BoxWorks, Stuart brought Box to the 'tipping point' (including its 'never say never' turnabout on Microsoft) in BoxWorks – is the Dreamforce effect really the sincerest form of flattery? Meantime, Derek penned a popular ditty on Coupa's international forays in Coupa’s Irish eyes are smiling as global customer support moves to Europe. Phil also sparked a bit of a Twitter frenzy with his intriguing/speculative piece on SAP's cloudy spend management possibilities in The logic of SAP buying Concur.
Best of the rest
Cloud Won't Cure Licensing Woes by Doug Henschenquotage: 'We asked the software buyers in our survey to rate SaaS and on-premises software contracts on a 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied) scale. On-premises earned a 4 or 5 from 58% of respondents; SaaS got that high rating from only 43%.'
myPOV: Information Week's Doug Henschen had himself a vigorous posting week of posting, including a lovely collection on software licensing and audits. The above was soon followed by another warm and fuzzy, 5 Signs You'll Face a Software Audit. Henschen completed his buyer trifecta with Software Licensing: Move From Defense To Offense, which cited results from another Information Week survey that upwards of 37 percent of organizations have been audited in the last two years - not a miniscule number.
So what to do? Well, for starters, don't wait for a yucky letter, start today with a license inventory across systems. Then you're in a far better position to pro-actively extract meaningful concessions.
Other standouts
- In Give Your Supply Chain Planner Some Love Today, Lora Cecere delves into the low morale amongst supply chain professionals and what to do about it.
- Phil Fersht of HfS raised the outsourcing alert to orange in Welcome to the era of churn, where 50% of outsourcing contracts are at risk.
- Larry Dignan wades into the robots-versus-jobs debate in IT jobs' big threat: Robots, automation; The solution: More humanity. Recommendations for staying employable include excelling at the human traits of empathy and collaboration. Fine - but Dignan left out cynicism.
- The New Stack added some useful stuff on the DevOps and Docker side in Why Did Docker Catch on Quickly and Why is it so Interesting? Then Michael Coté flexed his podcast chops in The VMware Cloud Explained, Software Defined Talk Podcast #009. (If anyone can explain the VMware cloud, it's Coté).
Finally, I've been asked to comment on SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner's post The Benefits of the Business Suite on HANA. Plattner's post, which sparked considerable social reaction as one might expect, was a response to ASUG's HANA customer survey, as well as a passionate articulation of his own views on the power of HANA innovation, in particular Simple Finance.
I'm gonna hold back on my views on this for a while, because frankly I don't think I can advance the conversation on this topic. And when I lack the confidence to do that, I shut up, wait, and do my darndest to dig deeper on all sides of the issue. But, I will say that I am a little baffled by some of the social heat I have seen towards the ASUG survey results. To me, the survey is a valuable (if imperfect) report card that gives SAP a view of how HANA is maturing and the work that lies ahead.
The rest is just a noisy social kerfluffle of 'hot takes' which are certainly entertaining but offer little, aside from a fleeting 'social media analytics sentiment score' I view as irrelevant. But: 'ups' to ASUG - this is not my grandmommy's ASUG; the new leadership and board should be recognized for documenting the views of its members so diligently. Keep it up please.
I'll dig into this further at SAP TechEd Vegas in October and promise to weigh in then. Also: SAP distinguished itself in the Plattner's blog comments with several executives chiming in, offering to further the feedback loop between externals and those inside of SAP. That's the hidden jewel of social if you ask me. Plattner's collegial response to Vinnie Mirchandani's HANA post also brought a welcome sense of engagement and important clarifications. SAP has a significant cloud event in Walldorf in a week's time that should impact this discussion - yes, diginomica is on the case.
Whiffs
Is a whiff before the whiff still a whiff? Maybe not but let's be unfair, starting with Buzzfeed's Let’s Not Freak Out About Twitter Turning Into Facebook. (Buzzfeed's moving gifs are a whiff in their own right, no?). Now, I have genuine hostility (and, yes, a grudging respect), for Facebook's algo, which makes a host of wrong assumptions on what I want to see at any given time.
I make my own content umbrellas which includes a stream of the unexpected. Twitter for all its massive flaws thrives on an algorithm-free openness. Granted, Twitter has jumped the shark already so maybe I dwell too much on hypotheticals. But the filters that shape our world matter.
This isn't quite a whiff either, but I found the assumptions underpinning this GigaOM piece odd. The title itself rankles me: We’ve reached the end of “build it yourself” software. Eh? For commodity services and configurable SaaS solutions, yes. And savvy UX partners/external designers will play a role.
But many companies are pursuing mobile apps or smart devices as a competitive advantage (the intelligent suitcase letting you know in real-time how it is being mistreated can't be far away). As I type this, I am headed to Apigee's 'I love APIs' show. If my fellow attendees reject APIs for digital business in favor of out-of-the-box solutions I'm in for a underwhelming week. I suspect I'm in good hands.
Officially off-topic
I almost tagged Town Becomes a Beer Ad, but Residents Don’t Feel Like a Party a whiff, but its horrifying audacity demands a different category. Get this - the happy town of Crested Butte, Colorado will soon be willing/unwilling hosts to 1,000 'young adults' on a quest for the eternal party (well, it's only one week, but I'm guessing it will feel like an eternity to everyone not in the now-legal substances business. This demands a follow-up.
Title of the week is a dead heat between Fake links to nude celebrities crash New Zealand Internet, Jeans facing uncertain future amidst yoga wear rage, and the semi-reassuring Detroit Satanists say they won't sacrifice animals, people.
After all the downer content on (the ongoing) lack of women in tech, it's cool to see a major series of documentaries underway and unsung history recorded.
Sobering Ebola headlines, but contrast that with some upbeat reports that Bill Gates' funded HIV vaccine is showing promise. And how about Bill Murray crashing a screening of Ghostbusters and dishing up some very original career advice (have you heard 'relax your way to success' before?). And that's where I'll leave you - boarding shortly. See you next time.
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. “myPOV” is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang, who has now trademarked the phrase. :) Special forgiveness for typos requested this week...
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Businessman Choosing Success or Failure Road © Creativa - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Salesforce and Workday are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.