Enterprise hits & misses - September 23
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky end-of-weekly on which enterprise software articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica & beyond - for the week ending September 20, 2013.
A cheeky weekly wrap on which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond.
This is a quick hit 'Jon on the road' edition, live from San Diego.
diginomica hit: Oracle OpenWorld coverage by 'the team.'
quotage: 'With HANA firmly in his sights – although never explicitly mentioned – Ellison unveiled a new in-memory option for Oracle’s 12c database that delivers delivers “ungodly” performance improvements.' - Stuart Lauchlan
myPOV: With Oracle OpenWorld just kicking off, the diginomica team has your coverage of the happenings, with some strong words and, we hope, some nuance. Stuart Lauchlan and Kenny MacIver on on the ground in San Francisco and will have more coverage as the week progresses.
Den kicked things off with his Oracle OpenWorld 2013 preview. He predicts 'The big talking point will likely be Oracle’s positioning of its in-memory technology,' with a side dish of cloud talk. Den also touches on why the once-ubiquitous Fusion has not received as much keynote emphasis of late and why. Stuart's first piece from the show, Oracle OpenWorld: Ellison’s ungodly speed trip reports on Larry Ellison's keynote, raising the warning flag that vendors have to be wary of when touting processing speed for its own sake - a pitfall Oracle will need to step away from to have a successful week.
Talking about in-memory in terms business users can relate to is not an easy undertaking. Stuart's keynote verdict: 'All told it was a keynote address heavy on technical and product specifications, but perhaps too light on business outcomes and application.' We'll see what the rest of the week holds.
diginomica pick: Social CRM rethought - five part series by guest contributor Paul Greenbergquotage: 'Stop treating [social] as a savior of anything. Social channels, like all channels, are just dumb channels. Just as all software is dumb – meaning, human beings determine how much or little value they are going to get from them by deciding what they are going to do with them.'
myPOV: If you missed Paul's five part series reframing the CRM conversation, grab a jumbo cup of coffee and dig in. Paul starts in part one by deconstructing 'social' (all CRM is now social, he argues). Part two digs into the 'customer experience' hype and off we go. By the time we get to part five, we have the payoff - Paul's updated/new definition of CRM.
As Paul himself admits, the definition itself is a tad on the dry side. But the concepts behind them are anything but dry. I have a soft spot for ambitious pieces that advance conversations. I think Paul has succeeded in doing that here - based on the social response, readers agreed. That doesn't mean that CRM practitioners have it easy going forward.
Look, I've long been a closet CRM curmodgeon. Back in the 90s, I wrote about 'extending the enterprise' because even then it was glaringly obvious that ERP systems were failing companies and their customers by not allowing for the kinds of external-facing collaboration that makes for better customer experiences. So much money was spent capturing data that was never properly used.
Today, the tech is so much better but I'm not sure the customer experience is. In rare instances, yes. Though the best customer experience I had in a long time was simply a manager in an airport restaurant stopping by to ask me about my meal. I almost fell out of my chair, which doesn't speak well to how rare these kinds of moments still are.
To Paul's credit he doesn't shy away from those predicaments, nor does he present our overrated ability to whine about bad customer service on social channels as some kind of substitute for real influence. One thing I would have liked to see more discussion of: the potential and tradeoffs of real-time personalization.
How much data is needed, and where do you cross the line between appealing ('I see you are interested in baseball, would you like to tickets to tonight's game while you are town') versus privacy-invading creepiness. Personalization can be intimate in the right or wrong ways and that's a conversation worth having as companies like Facebook push the monetization envelope with personalized advertising content that blurs lines. Thanks to Paul for contributing one of the finest pieces on diginomica to date.
Best of the rest
I'm up against it on time this week, about to head down to emcee the keynote for (SAP) Controlling 2013, so I'm going to give you the quick run down this time. In no particular order, the strongest posts I read this week:Ray Wang's Oracle OpenWorld day 1 review - brutally frank intro hooked me in.
- Another strong blogging week for Holger Mueller, including this Workday Update 20 review.
- Lora Cecere shows why she's my favorite supply chain management blogger with a review of the SCM talent gap.
- Michael Doane strikes again with perhaps the most intriguing title of the week, The End of Magical Measures: The Long & Overdue Rise of Numeracy in the World of SAP.
- Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady with the best PaaS post I have seen in a while, Are PaaS and Configuration Management on a Collision Course and Four Other PaaS Questions.
- Luke Marson continues his hot streak with a major update to his monster (free) guide, SAP and SuccessFactors: an Overview.
- Why You're Not Making Sales, by Justin Jackson. Strong talk on why so many pitches fail, with advice on how to focus on solving customer problems rather than showing off gee-whizz tech for its own sake.
- What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong, by Ben Thompson. Very good read, a bit of a deconstruction of Christensen's teachings on disruption using Apple, a company Christensen has long critiqued, as a way to parse his thinking.
Officially off-topic
I'm skipping 'whiffs' for the simple reason that nothing in the enterprise media space really bugged me this week, aside from a careless/barely accurate article title and some comparatively mild hyperbole. I'm sure the irritants (and the section) will return soon. Travel headaches are on the mind, so the FAA inching closer to relaxing in-flight electronics rules is welcome. Nokia gets the social-media-savvy nod with a record-breaking tweet mocking Apple's apparent imitation/riff on Nokia's phone design.
Yes, there are some caveats, but it's still amazing that telecomm pioneer Lars Magnus Ericsson had a working car phone 103 years ago. Fast forward a century, and the email inbox is the frontier of epic struggles for productivity - Vijay Vijaysankar dishes on his zero inbox practice (I left a comment noting my variation).
Heading further off topic, Stephen King tells BBC why he still hates Stanley Kubrick's brilliant adaption of The Shining some 33 years later. King's reasoning actually makes sense - but doesn't offer an explanation for King's own mediocre six hour TV version he wrote the teleplay for. Except perhaps that great storytelling is much more than unimaginative regurgitation of the source material.
Oh, and don't cast the lead from a threadbare comedy like Wings in a dramatic role where he is supposed to appear remotely scary to viewers. Finally, even as a Red Sox fan I loved that Metallica played Enter Sandman live for Yankee Mariono Rivera's last save appearance at Yankee Stadium. Rivera = mastery and class. A combo we can always use.
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most of these articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. “myPOV” 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, Businessman Choosing Success or Failure Road © Creativa
- all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: Oracle and SAP are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.