Enterprise hits and misses - retail blowout + no-BS communication for execs
- Summary:
- In this edition: retail extravaganza as retail giants push for traction against Amazon. Plus: the executive's guide to no-BS communication, and the media perils of financial illiteracy. Whiffs abound, including a booby prize for PR buzzword bingo.
This is a special Tuesday "back from a long weekend" edition of hits and misses
diginomica hit: Summer retail analysis blowout - the mall versus the omni-channel - pieces by Stuart and Derek
quotage: "The distinctions that we talk about today between stores, apps, pick-up, delivery and sites are continuing to blur into the background for customers. For them, it’s just Walmart." - Stuart quotes Walmart CEO
myPOV: Fancy a retail coverage binge? We've got that for ya, starting with Stuart's Walmart halts online slowdown amid big changes for digital future. Now, I'm an omni-channel basher (see recent podcast bashing), but surely, if the so-called omni-channel comes to fruition, it matches that blurring-into-background quote above, right? It's not only that Walmart's e-commerce numbers are finally up (11.8 percent) - it's the blurring of channels that matters. Stuart, not one to give out gold stars and cupcakes, likes what he sees here, pointing to the jet.com purchase and the JD.com tie up as evidence of a viable strategy in play.
Target doesn't get a cupcake: Target misses the digital bullseye as Apple-fatigue blamed for revenue decline, Stuart: "I’m decidedly unimpressed." Throwing Apple under the bus is an interesting deflection; Target may need non-IoS life jackets going forward. And in Loving the stores - Kohl's builds omni-channel thinking around retail real estate, Stuart hits on how brick-and-mortar stalwarts are finding their stores an asset in their omni-battles with Amazon. Derek picks up on that theme also in Foot Locker running towards digital, but CEO says “malls far from dead”. That's your retail fix...
diginomica four: my top four stories on diginomica this week- Financial illiteracy – a dangerous media trend - tip for the jaded: don't tell Den you can "learn the basics of accounting in a weekend," - unless you want to get yourself bloggerized. The fast-and-loose media is a bad combination with the rigors of financial analysis, ergo Den's horrorshow dissection of poorly-reported stories that made us all dumber. Brutal examples abound, including misreporting on Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka's clear comments on Brexit, later disregarded. Not sure how much will change, but we can now consider ourselves warned.
- PSA evolution part 2 – how I’d like to see PSA software develop - Brian unfurled a two part think piece on PSA software (Professional Services Automation). It's a wish list of what true PSA solutions could do, and, click heels, fix that which is broken, as in: "PSA vendors need to create a new work relationship toolset for contractors and 1099s." Oh, and here's part one.
- Measuring end-to-end business performance with APM - Phil on a software category (Application Performance Management) that has re-invented itself for the digital era, pushed by a new breed of upstart APM vendors.
- US regulator charges Deutsche Bank over multiple systems failures - Most of our regulatory stories seem to be about reading the Euro oversight tea leaves, but as Derek reports, the U.S. can put a policy hurt on a company also, in this case, the beleagured Deutsche Bank.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- Tableau taps Amazon exec for CEO spot as Chabot steps aside – what it means for buyers - Den makes a rare foray into executive turnover for this big story: "These will be interesting times for Tableau customers. If past history is a good teacher then over time, I would expect to see smaller customers get frozen out as prices are adjusted and rebalanced to reflect a firmer enterprise focus. That of course is speculation but we do have precedents for that."
- Intel Developer Forum – what comes next for the data-center is scaling racks and fiber everywhere - Martin with the first of a two-parter on a notable Intel event: "The last 18 months has seen the share of enterprise infrastructure run on private clouds has risen from 12% to 20%. This means there is now a need to move up from the accepted standard unit of computing from the server to the rack."
- Is Quip Salesforce answer to collaborative document ambivalence? We think so. - Kurt parses an acquisition many found perplexing: "Salesforce could do for enterprise collaboration what Google and the myriad others inhabiting various collaboration software niches have so far been unable to achieve: deliver a viable alternative to document-centric communication processes."
A couple more vendor picks, without the quips:
- Salesforce gets smarter with smart data analytics acquisition - Stuart
- ClearChain wants to fix manufacturing’s flawed supply chain - Phil
Jon's grab bag - Den struck a robotics chord with Silicon Collar – a book review. He sparked a blog comment debate including author Vinnie Mirchandani. Credit to keeping it civil and smart - thx folks. Different angle but I liked Jessica's use case on collaboration amidst diversity, Uniqa adjusts policy on unifying a diverse workforce.
Gotta cut the Brits at diginomica some slack for their justifiable chest thumping re: GB's posterior-kicking performance at the Olympics. Den even found a way to do the peacock-feathers-with-a-purpose thing on diginomica, in Team GB lessons from Rio 2016 – a tech and HR perspective. Shall we wrap with another UK delight, an epic last-freaking-straw take down from Stuart, Digital dinosaur BT asks why customers need to do more than one thing at a time online? Wait - two folks working from home have to take turns using the BT "broadband"? (just one example). And I thought Comcast was the sux...
Best of the rest
Your executive guide to BS-free communications - pieces by Dave Kellogg and Josh Bernoff
quotage: "Fear drives much of corporate culture. Fuzzy, cover-your-ass writing is the manifestation of that fear. Every time you send an email, publish a policy, or write a report that’s full of equivocation, jargon that obscures meaning, and passive voice that hides responsibility, you are reinforcing a culture of obfuscation. Every time someone reads such a document, they think, “Ah, the people who run this company are full of bullshit." - Josh Bernoff, 6 reasons why an executive should care about writing without bullshit
myPOV: Josh Bernoff of writing without bullshit turns his attention to his old enterprise stomping grounds in the above piece on BS-free communications - something which the enterprise is unfamiliar with. Take note: his point about how we judge a company by each piece of communication.
Why? Because most enterprises experiment with transparent communications via some type of community or influencer program, but cover their rumps with other non-transparent/conventional/heavy-handed/ approaches. Unfortunately, we judge the totality, and tend to discount the more transparent stuff as either phony (unfair) or a fragile experiment going against the status quo (alas, totally fair).
Dave Kellogg takes us in a different direction in The Three Golden Rules of Feedback, wherein he gets into the three keys of feedback: honest, kind, timely. The "kind" part gets tricky though. I recently wrote about how painfully direct communication is preferable to seething. Give me honesty over withheld feedback any day. But Kellogg has a point about the "be kind" part: "I am equally certain that I could almost always have found a better way of expressing my feedback had I known about and applied the kind principle."
Other standouts:
- Cybersecurity is broken - except for bounty hunters - A couple readable security articles this week: Buzzfeed's Cybersecurity Is Broken And The Hacks Are Going To Just Keep Coming, and on the white hat side, The Guardian's Bounty hunters are legally hacking Apple and the Pentagon – for big money. Via Buzzfeed: “The first thing we do is tell our customers that the hackers are already in their system,” - good times.
- Platform as a Platform (PaaP) - It was a sterling blogging week for analyst Denis Pombriant, who issues a flurry of interesting posts on his Beagle Research blog, some of which are derived from Pombriant's customer loyalty book. As for platforms, Pombriant addresses the burning question: is is too late to build your own platform?
Honorable mention - the top five:
News Analysis - Workday, IBM Form Strategic Partnership on the IBM Cloud - The IaaS vendor - This warranted further coverage last week, making up for it now with Holger Mueller's blow-by-blow analysis, including takeaways for IBM and Workday customers.
Trusted Advisor - Ruminations on a term most consulting firms use, but few can adequately define.
Hype Cycle Reminders For Tech Providers - Including a surprising bent on the "trough of disillusionment" (hint: opportunities abound).
Ford Plans To Mass Produce Self-Driving Cars By 2021 - Self-driving auto plans and partnerships were a big storyline the last couple weeks - here's one.
Women In Tech, ‘Firing Line’, And Naomi’s World - Naomi Bloom with personal context on the women in tech video she shot with Bill Kutik. It's kinda sad to read her say, "I never imagined we would still be fighting those battles now, a half century later. Gender bias and income inequality in the workforce, particularly in my world of enterprise software, may not be as bad as it was then, but it’s bad enough that we’re still talking about it." Sad, but - necessary.
Whiffs
No point in piling on Ryan Lochte - except a thank you to the Americans who scrawled "sorry for Ryan Lochte" on the Rio Airport marker board. And a makeup call: you may recall two weeks ago I lamented that we lacked enterprisey analysis of the Delta system failure, instead falling back on the social shame festival?
Well, Larry Dignan did just that in Delta outage highlights how airline industry needs new IT approaches. Dignan hits on why "cobbled together legacy systems" are the wobbly platform that spawn such failures. Cloud is no panacea but resiliency, e.g. avoiding a single point of a failure, must be sounding pretty good to Delta and Southwest right about now. Last time I checked, they were still making excuses with Ryan Lochte.
And did you get a load of the lawsuit, finally dropped, between AT&T and Citigroup over how they say "thank you" to their customers? Though in fairness, both companies are far more used to saying "goodbye" to their customers than "thanks." Finally, PR pitches have been acronym-drenched lately, but nothing tops this one Brian Sommer sent me. How's this for an enticing lead-in?
I wanted to let you know that Scale Computing will now offer a robust DRaaS offering as part of their HC3 clusters.
AWESOME-at-SCALE, BRO! But can I get those with a side of homefries? I'm just annoyed Brian didn't show the leadership to leverage this piece of low-hanging editorial fruit onto the pages of diginomica. Oh well - air your disdain for our lack of DRaaS-related buzzwords and acronyms below.
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments. Over to you, Clive.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.