Enterprise hits and misses - January 27
- Summary:
- Jon's weekly round up of of which articles hit (or didnít) on diginomica and beyond - special Tuesday blizzard edition.
diginomica pick: World Economic Forum - the enterprisey review. A series of pieces by Stuart Lauchlan
quotage: "...European CEO Coloa broke ranks with the US companies' relentlessly upbeat vision to inject a note of pragmatism to the blue-sky thinking. That’s not to say that the worldviews of Schmidt, Nadella and Sandberg are any the less admirable, but cutting to the chase of who pays is a very important question."
myPOV: With the constant "what's next" pressure of the next tweet/conference/Facebook share/conference call, it's rare to see an event tackled from all sides, which Stuart did in his series on the World Economic Forum in Davos. In order: World Economic Forum – dealing with the new digital context, World Economic Forum – who do we trust in a post-Snowden digital world? (part 1) - and part two. Then: World Economic Forum: global digital vision is upbeat, but who picks up the tab? Lots of gristle to digest here; the contrast between the idealistic tech leaders versus pragmatic realities in the "who picks up the tab" is a precise description of our digital conundrum.
diginomica bytes: my fave piece by each diginomica contributor- Den - Ol' "vendorcrusty" was blogging on all cylinders this week, but forced to pick one, I'll go with Weekend rants: Box IPO, engagement, Facebook freebooting and Apple Watch, which manages to crush Facebook freeloaders, make sense of the Box IPO, and, a bonus dismantling of the notion of brand relationships for the "personalization creepshow" file.
- Jessica - The case study queen is back with LeasePlan UK sumo wrestles CRM gamification, wherein she tells the tale of how LeasePlan UK spurred user adoption of Salesforce via gamification (sidenote: I may have to rethink my thoroughly grouchy view on gamification if Jessica keeps serving up winners like these).
- Derek - Our man is on form with NHS director argues big data in healthcare is a ‘moral obligation’ – care.data relaunched, which tackles a PR cauldron of big data-meets-privacy concerns - tradeoffs which are going to force us to make tough choices.
- Janine - From her HR stomping grounds, Janine issued Self-service HR ends tyranny of the ‘print, sign, scan’ loop for Mitsubishi UFJ - a use case on Mitsubishi's HR complexity challenges, and how standardizing on a cloud HR system addressed the potential chaos of growth, while putting a stop to HR complexity run amock.
- Phil - In Cloud or on-premise? Egnyte lets you choose, one file at a time, Phil draws an interesting contrast between Egnyte and other cloud storage providers (Box, Huddle, Dropbox), with Egnyte allowing a decision on which files stay on-premise and which go to the cloud.
- Dick - Right before my cut off point, contributor/SAP Mentor/researcher-par-excellence issued SAP S4HANA – a cloudy preview from the peanut gallery - timely, since SAP's earning calls were filled with references so S4HANA, another delightful acronym for those playing acronym bingo on snow day.
- Martin - The master of the understated zinger, Martin unfurled this doozey in his concluding take: "This conference highlighted, albeit indirectly and perhaps unwittingly, real learnings on the real uses for analytics..." Albeit indirectly and perhaps unwittingly - classic! I'm gonna steal that from you Martin, just letting you know. The piece is: Slam dunk – business analytics tactics from the NBA, which shows why modern sports analytics have a broader relevance than you might expect.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style - Following on last week's upbeat SAP Q4 2014 earnings numbers. Den put SAP on the clock again in Understanding SAP’s 2017-20 outlook (an important piece if you want to grok SAP's cloud transition and how SAP is handling the transition to subscription revenues across acquisitions). Meanwhile, Den kept the fire hot with Workday knocks on SAP’s door with German expansion. Oh, and if you are partial to digging into UX, you might enjoy my wee piece, Inside the Enterprise UX revolution – a day at Infor’s Hook & Loop (kidding about the wee part, it's a bit of a long form story).
Jon's grab bag - If diginomica always agrees with itself, that's duller than dull, right? So Derek and Den came up with two very different Uber takes this week - not so much fisticuffs as different angles that takes us further than we could get with one Uber mantra. Derek: In defence of Uber: South Africa should embrace the digital disruption - Den: digibyte: Uber bigger than BART in San Francisco? I call bullshit.
Derek tackled a story of geopolitical import in The Open Data Divide: UK & USA lead the world, but others fall behind. Meanwhile, Den roasted up that professional graffiti wall of useless endorsements in Friday roast: LinkedIn – a dating site where no-one gets laid?
Best of the rest
IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have interesting weeks by some interesting peepsquotage: "The more important question is, will IBM's moves be enough to put the company back on the path to growth? The short answer is, no. The company's 2015 outlook does not foresee overall growth. Instead, the best the company can hope for is achieving higher margins in 2015." - Doug Henschen
myPOV: Of the three, IBM had the least desirable news week, with rumors flaring of a massive reorg still to come. Henschen's piece analyzed the source of IBM's revenues woes, and how it's trying to shift to cloud models (IBM Can't Shrink It's Way To Greatness). Meantime, re/code was on the Oracle’s Ellison Picks Data Center Hardware Fight With Cisco story, in which Oracle didn't surprised anyone by talking tough to a rival (Cisco), but did surprise folks by announcing it would compete with the "lowest price."
A high performance/lowest price Oracle folks! That should keep Cisco execs mainlining Java (of the liquid kind). Meanwhile, Microsoft might have had the most interesting week, acquiring Revolution Software for Deeper Analytics. This one caused a buzz in backchannel, but we'll have to see how well Microsoft can integrate R with existing SQL flavors and assets. "Lowest price " Oracle and "open source" Microsoft make for an interesting year in #ensw, no? Microsoft is also trying to put Windows 8 firmly in rearview - see what Windows 10 Questions Larry Dignan thinks need a better answer.
Other standouts
- OK, a few more predictions, but this is it folks - I'm officially cutting off the tech blogosphere from any more predictions posts. Last week I swore I had hit the last of them, but relevant ones keep trickling in - this time from two thoughtful bloggers who like to grade themselves for their past year's accuracy and then look ahead. The "How I did" game is frought with the dangers of self-promotional navel gazing (yes, there is such a thing), but I still think these are worth a look. Check out Stephen O'Grady's Revisiting the 2014 Predictions and Dave Kellogg's Kellblog 10 Predictions for 2015.
- Outstanding SAP content on HCM and UX - Each year (that I can recall), SAP Mentor Jarret Pazahanick puts out his Future of SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Consulting monster post. Each year it is definitive, with Pazanahick pulling in expert views across the product line. SAP itself has a UX gem in Jocelyn Dart, who writes some of the best vendor-specific UX content out there, this time with The Best UX may be no UI at all... how the Internet of Things is changing the UX roadmap.
Honorable mention
The Perilous World of Machine Learning for Fun and Profit: Pipeline Jungles and Hidden Feedback Loops - Clever title, solid post, from a data scientist who wants data science to solve real world problems, and who sees a few pitfalls.
Why CIOs and developers are seldom on the same page - and why that's a good thing - Now here's a thesis I wasn't expecting - though the actual position is more about enabling developer experimentation, which I can get behind.
The Silicon Valley Lab is Officially a Defensive Strategy - A critique of Ford's attempt to foster innovation through a Silicon Valley presence. I get the critique, but giving the culture pot a stir is still a good idea sometimes.
Tech Buyers Want Vendors to Respect Their Buying Process - Those who want a better grasp on the modern enterprise buyer should be already be inhaling this Gartner blog. The buyer ain't gonna take your cold calls and may not read your emails, here we learn why.
Episode 627, Nerdist podcast with Bill Gates - haven't listened to this one yet, due to travelling broadband blues, but Gates and some self-effacing nerds seems like a good use of my time and maybe yours (p.s. love the photo guys!).
The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs - My newsfeed readers liked this one, so if you don't like it, you know who to blame.
Whiffs
Whiffs are like weeds, always more, and always more determined. Let's start with fresh green sprouts from this Media = Content + People post (and event replay) from Jeff Jarvis. Now, I'm all for building new media business models - though networked aggregation hasn't proven to be such a terrific deal for the media creator, which in turn threatens the quality of the media content we consume. Truth: I take Jarvis' networked business model personally, as it bears a striking resemblance to my own dystopia. This commenter brought the weedwacker: "This is so awesome! I would totally quit my day job to become a socialpreneur and make money by linking and monetizing everyone else's content, except that I have a soul." Job done, sir.
So with the Super Bowl on the horizon, we'll see plenty of social media PR whiffs - the Seahawks got the ball rolling with a tweet linking their quarterback's emotional post game moments with, yes, the life of Martin Luther King Jr. (Of course the nonsensical apology followed). So last week, Hits and Misses stalwart Frank Scavo (who has influenced this column with stellar feedback), sent me some absurdity passing as LinkedIn "Pulse" (though the pulse of actual insight seems to be lacking).
I wish I could link to the piece directly, but you'll have to be logged into to the endorsement zone, err, I mean LinkedIn, to actually read it. Anyhow, when it comes to culture building advice, "Don't hire someone with a hotmail account" is actually kinda funny, but that bromide is quickly followed by the virtues of firing people. Yeah, nothing beats firing people to energize a workplace! You don't even need carrots if the stick has enough smack to it. This blogger reads more into the psychology of "out of office" templates than anyone I've ever met. If you work with this guy, make sure you put in some helpful stuff in your auto-reply about how you can be reached/interrupted during your family time by needless inquiries, otherwise, you're gonna get the pink slip and maybe the iron boot. Don't you hate it when low achievers are working on customer-facing projects while the high achievers are fine tuning their "out of office" auto-replies?
Officially off-topic
So in 2013, fake news site The Onion satirically (and fictionally) mocked Overstock.com for getting into the streaming business. Well, yeah, you guessed it. Fiction is not safe from truth anymore folks. But even that doesn't top the breastfeeding conference that banned Moms from breastfeeding.
And since we haven't done enough LinkedIn bashing in this piece, you may want to check out the Ad Contrarian's ten tips for making LinkedIn less boring. It's been a rough week for copywriting hacks no matter which network they lurk in. Turns out robots can approximate their written copy, thank you very much Hal. When a robot figures out how to snark up a column that resembles this one, that's when I'll be all washed up folks. Looks like the machines are coming for me after all - after they send a few more copywriters packing.
But all is not lost - here I was thinking rock and roll might be on life support, if not pulse-free, and I find a number of female-fronted outlets that still bring it. So for now I'm thinking the future of rock will be written by women. Beg to differ? I offer up as exhibit A - Halestorm's Freak Like Me. I'll spare you the full diatribe, as I'm in Heidelberg and my pal Craig Cmehil awaits. See you on the other side of the Super Bowl, perhaps a final analysis of deflate gate hysteria to follow...
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. ìmyPOVî is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Businessmen with business trophy. Cheerful young businessman © BlueSkyImages - Fotolia.com, Snowboarder Crashing © dismagwi - Fotolia.com, Winter Sports © lassedesignen - Fotolia.com - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Oracle and Workday are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.