Enterprise hits and misses - digital gets traction and the future of work is... the blockchain?
- Summary:
- In this edition: digital and open source gets put to the test and the future of work is... the blockchain? Plus: a brave new AI world and whiffs with extra vinegar.
diginomica hit: Digital and open source gets traction - William Hill use case by Derek du Preez
quotage: "One of the few customer interviews I’ve done this year where I’ve actually thought that the company truly understands what digital means. So many just operate in the same old way, but call it ‘cloud’ and ‘big data.' That’s not digital. It’s the same old thing given a new name. William Hill’s model isn’t easy, but I bet it delivers better results for the customer."
myPOV: Here at diginomica, we've spent the bulk of 2015 galavanting to trade shows in locations exotic and abysmal, searching for use cases that prove out the promise of digital - or its downside. For every hundred times "digital" was bullhorned from the keynote stage, how many times did it stick to the wall? Not so many. Fitting, then, as 2015 winds down, Derek uncovers a use case that shows a customer doin' the digital work.
During his chat with William Hill CTO Finbarr Joy, Derek got the lowdown on why Williams Hill is turning to digital and open source. Gist: Joy's team is using Apache open source and cloud to build/iterate products quickly, using customer data to personalize product offerings. That's a far cry from a "one throat to choke" vendor-managed approach of yesteryear.The quote that jumped out at me? A "one vendor" approach might have worked for Williams Hill, but as Derek says, "that model didn't solve problems for the customer." (!)
The ability to make changes in real-time based on customer response is potent. But Joy didn't mince words about the work still ahead. Example: "our procurement guys are not even in the conversation now". But the context about stepping back from cookie-cutter vendor solutions is instructive, eh? Bonus: Derek filed another nifty use case, Lotus F1 COO races from intuitive design to machine learning with Microsoft.
diginomica six: my completely subjective top six stories on diginomica this week- Collaboration is the secret of success in digital transformation - Phil pulled of a rare feat: the concise "think piece." Nutshell? Phil is seeing "connected applications" as drivers of digital collaboration. He now believes collaboration is central to digital change. But he's had a rethink: it's not just about platforms, it's about culture/skills/mindsets.
- Stuart on digital media: content triumphs, TV advertising struggles - In a two-for-one, Stuart examines the good news/bad news of the battle for attention. The good: Netflix, which knows a thing or two about attention-through-content, drops knowledge (Netflix’ Chief Content Officer on driving digital disruption differentiators). Stuart's right: Netflix is a genuine disruptor, though I'd argue that low cost/value, user experience and original content fused together are the advantages. But as Stuart reports, all is not well - global TV advertising rates are taking the hit (Digital deflation knocks TV advertising from its perch). For now, ad spending remains high, but the ad channels are diversifying.
- Frequent app updates: a cloud debate that matters - You might not think that the frequency of SaaS software updates justifies an article, but think again. Turns out it's an important debate that gets to the heart of cloudy FUD. Brian frames it up in Frequent app updates – an evolving cloud mindset. Brian
grumpilypoints out, falling out of cloud updates can lead to a stifling new form of technical debt. - Rocketship changes HR to reach underprivileged students, Shinola still has the stuff - two use cases round out the picks: Phil shares how Rocketship turned to Fairsail HR to move a spreadsheet approach to talent (Fairsail runs on the Salesforce platform). Meantime, use case goddess Jessica has another for you, and I'll spare you the Shinola jokes, as they aren't joking about e-commerce: Live chat helps e-commerce customers understand ‘stuff’ from Shinola.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style - Fresh off a busy day with Workday, Den filed Workday Tech Summit 2015 – fighting talk as CEO thanks Oracle. Den focuses on the financial side, and Workday's ambitions to build a new HR/financial data platform, with the upcoming Workday Planning in the midst of it. As Den points out, this is about moving beyond the system of record HR/FI, into a mission-critical data center to support business decisions. That should keep Workday busy in 2016. Phil filed a take on Workday's comparatively restricted ecosystem, Has Workday ceded the cloud platform to Salesforce and Microsoft?
After the recent (and spicy!) event from the SAP UK/Ireland user group, it was a good time for SAP to make its HANA case. Steve Lucas did just that in Frankfurt at the HANA Forum. Derek was there to take it in, and published a nuanced analysis in SAP’s Steve Lucas on why HANA beats Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and AWS.
My quick take: SAP HANA can be more than a real-time back office, but it's up to SAP to show how to use HANA (and apps) for customer-facing results in 2016. That's a big 'ol part of the business case debate. Derek captured the pros and cons of this well in his companion use case, Kaeser Compressors says the value of S/4 HANA can’t be put into a business case.
NetSuite never leaves the year quietly (God bless 'em) - Martin's got the latest news analysis in NetSuite’s OneWorld goes centurion (As Martin says, NetSuite has announced it "can serve the business management needs of global enterprises in over 100 countries with the latest set of upgrades to OneWorld". He explains why it's a significant step. Maxwell wraps our vendor coverage with some HPE analysis, HPE turns the page on catalog approach to cloud services. Will HP's "slightly uneasy" approach to cloud change under HPE?
Jon's grab bag - Stuart's been tracking Yahoo's travails so you don't have to - his latest marks another low point in Marissa Meyer's tenure (Reverse and retreat – Yahoo! spins a new direction, but to where?). Making sense of the digital noise was a theme this week. Barb hit the marketing side in Digital distraction disorder – a problem for consumers, a bigger problem for marketers.
Janine took an HR slant in HR and opening up to social media. sharing HR Tech keynote highlights on harnessing social for internal HR. Yep, it's the pitfalls/promise of transparency. Den wraps my picks with a vintage Howlett think piece, Is the Uberization of business a done deal?
Best of the rest
Learn how to program robots - they are learning your job already by several humansquotage: "Learning ROS will allow you to do all kinds of cool stuff with more than 80 robotic platforms. You can choose from the capable, affordable TurtleBot, one of the many sophisticated humanoid robots that competed in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or even NASA's Robonaut, currently undergoing testing on the International Space Station." Greg Nichols, CEO Open Source Robotics Foundation
myPOV: Robots are doing everything but writing articles about robots. It's shaping up as a robotic 2016, with the launch of OpenAI, a non-profit with a massive $1 billion in funding and the backing of a Silicon Valley investor cocktail party, including the likes of Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman. Musk, who is not exactly an AI optimist, hopes that the non-profit structure will aid in the pursuit of the good aspects of how AI could evolve, NOT the Skynet part. They see an uncertain AI future and are keen to influence it.
Endless reports about AI and the future of work have bombarded us this year. If you can stomach one more, The End of Work? by Ji Shisan is worth a look. Shisan is no alarmist: most of the job disruption data he cites is five to ten years out from now. But his point that we need to reckon with is that the next generation of AI coming out now are learning machines. That expands the scope of the jobs AI could supplant, moving from task completion to broader scenarios.
The quoted Greg Nichols wants us to get ahead of that curve, via robotics programming. As he writes in a guest ZDNet post, there is plenty of opportunity to learn the Robotics Operating System that powers numerous robotics platforms (Know how to program robots? CEO says now's a great time to learn). This fits well into my future prediction that eventually we'll all either be fixing robots, designing robots, managing robots or fighting robots. Designing might be the best choice of the four...
Other standouts
- Workday Tech Summit and SAP HANA survey results from ASUG- One perk of hits and misses is mashing up vendors who wouldn't want to appear in the same summary. But that's how we roll here, with Holger Mueller serving up his Workday take (Progress Report - Workday Tech Summit - Good Progress, More Insights, Less Concerns), and Thomas Wailgum of ASUGnews.com with his review of ASUG's second annual SAP HANA survey (gist: increased HANA adoption juxtaposed with continued need for beefier business cases). In case I don't do a year-end edition, I'm giving Holger Mueller the "rubber fumes" award for his tarmac bravery. Maybe he didn't hit the most shows, but he had most (mostly) coherent event reports. As for ASUGnews.com, they've been slicing and dicing their SAP coverage for the year - including SAP's clever CRM play - so check it out.
- The future of work is... the blockchain? - We've seen the future of work disrupted by the robots, but by the blockchain? David Terrar says, "Why yes!" and makes a first pass in Future of Work – a Blockchain primer. How could this change business/work? Terrar says: think destruction of intermediaries. Then there is a big ass new report on the future of work, Designing a New Operating System for Work, I"m gonna riff on this Tuesday, so that's all you're gettin' from me now.
- Influence Scales. Control Does Not - Another good 'un from one of the best "big analyst firm" blogs over the course of 2015, courtesy Gartner's Hank Barnes. This one efficiently summarizes Barnes' main themes. One that stood out to me: to win in the "networks of trust" economy, there must be a perceived value exchange, or what Barnes calls "shared value: everyone in the chain must derive value at a personal level."
Honorable mention
The Exploding Infrastructure Automation Stack and Its Ecosystem - packed with resources.
'Get in the Van' and Other Tips for Getting Meaningful Customer Feedback - stay scrappy people!
Reprise: A Great Miracle Happened Here! - An inimitable mixture of personal/holiday reflections and scorching HR takes.
No phone, no problem: NSA will target the cloud instead - sometimes cynicism is much-deserved.
Whiffs
So we have a landmark/controversial climate change agreement in to chew on. Back at the ranch in the U.S., a North Carolina town blocks a solar farm because it would "suck up all the energy from the sun." Not sure how an idiocracy can solve global energy problems - do let me know... Oh, and did you hear Donald Trump wants Bill Gates to "close that Internet up?"
Speaking of idiocracy, Comcast's CEO has justified data caps, saying "the more bits you use, the more you pay." Sounds fair - except it doesn't apply to Comcast's cable TV model. I should pay for only the channels I watch, right? Nope. Because that doesn't work for Comcast. "Ethical business" by Comcast - now showing on channel 24. Don't worry - you have that channel, it comes bundled in your monthly cable nut.
ZDNet continues its shoddy SAP HANA reporting with SAP dismisses HANA security concerns, acknowledges need for better S/4 messaging. This piece sources a past shitty shoddy ZDNet article, a sensationalist piece of poop an Alaskan Husky would be proud to call their own (I skewered that one here).
First off, there are NO SAP HANA security "concerns" - by that I mean the security "concerns" ZDNet references were essentially created by ZDNet. The HANA issues cited were already addressed via patches by the time ZDNet initially reported them. Granted, Onapsis' own blog post could have made the existence of patches for the security issues they uncovered much clearer - something I brought up with them when I visited them in Boston. I asked Onapsis in person if HANA was any less secure than other SAP databases they put to the test - they said no. SAP's own responsible disclosure chief acknowledged to me that SAP's products are constantly being updated based on discovered vulnerabilities - both by themselves and "white hat" third parties - so in that sense, security "concerns" are always present at SAP - and damn well should be at every software vendor.
It's a shame. ZDNet could have done a terrific job encouraging SAP customers to apply the available patches, without sensationally implying their systems were exposed to "full takeovers" without a fix. Alternately, ZDNet could be using its resources to further investigate the security of HANA and other in-memory and/or NoSQL databases. Or they could have looked into why SAP wastes so much money on a video "show" as tone deaf as "The Spin." But they took the bunny slippers route, sourcing only their own initial flawed report based on a misreading of Onapsis' position. That's a smelly whiff from a media outlet that can - and regularly does - much better.
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.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Loser and winner - Loser and Winner © ispstock - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Workday and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.