Enterprise hits and misses - August 25
- Summary:
- Jon's cheeky weekly review of which enterprise software articles hit (or didnít) on diginomica & beyond - for the week ending August 24, 2014.
A cheeky weekly review of which articles hit (or didn’t) on diginomica and beyond.
This is a Jon-on-the-road edition, live from the Acumatica Partner Summit 2014 in Denver.
diginomica hit: Digital transformation goes beyond customer experience by Phil Wainewright
quotage: 'As a snapshot of current practice (far too premature to label these paltry efforts as best practice) this is a useful document. But it’s chock full of ‘facepalm’ moments that reveal how primitive the state of digital transformation remains in most enterprises.'
myPOV: Phil Wainewright vents spleen in a measured day, but he still vents. In this case, Phil critiqued the results of a survey from the Altimeter Group on the state of digital transformation in 2014, authored by principal analyst Brian Solis. Phil parses the troubling finding that 42 percent of those customers surveyed 'have not officially researched the digital customer journey but have updated digital touch points.' `Yikes.
Phil called attention to a shortcoming in the survey - limiting the focus to customer transformation - only one aspect of digital transformation. Functional silos are not the right way to move forward with digital. As for those companies lagging, Phil has a word of advice: get going: 'If you don’t have the vision to move ahead — if you insist on waiting for evidence before you make a move — then you lose.'
As to how the heck you get there, fret not, faithful reader, Phil plans follow up pieces. He already riffed on a fresh Apigee report in Digital transformation goes beyond mobile to the API layer.
Diginomica pick: My awesome Facebook promotional failure by Den Howlett
myPOV: I knew Den was up to something when very sketchy individuals with no connection to #ensw started liking our page at all times of the day or night. Check out what he learned the hard way and, in another weekend follow-on, why we may be the latest Facebook click fraud dupes. For more context, you may also want to dig into my prior piece, Facebook for enterprise content - can you break through?
Customer use cases:
- The intrepid Jessica Twentyman strikes again with Channel 4′s predictive analysis helps tune viewers into journeys of discovery.
- Derek also caught caught up with Starbucks's EMEA IT Director Robert Teagle over what, else - coffee.
Vendor coverage: Stuart filed on Salesforce.com's milestone $5 billion run rate and Wall Street's lukewarm response in Salesforce.com breaks the $5bn run rate as Benioff builds a five legged stool (we'll have to wait until Dreamforce to find out the last leg boosting that mighty stool - rest assured Stuart is on the case). Meantime Den filed a digibyte (our short form 'quick wack' format) on HP's surprisingly upbeat FY14 Q3 numbers (though HP's not out of the re-invention dog shed - when was the last time you printed anything?).
He also examined Intuit's thorny cloud transformation by the numbers. Derek formally welcomed Infor as a premier partner and dished the backstory on Infor's support of diginomica, dating back to the early going when all we had was a funky name and a determination to take our collective experience and make a much bigger dent.
Don't miss
- Guest blogger Martin offers a timely rumination on the workplace in Are you your ‘proper job’ in the future of work?
- Den'sFriday Roast on the absurdities of the enterprise software conference season is also a 'how to get it right instead of mucking it up' guide for those who dare.
- Derek's missive, The reputation of the UK civil service is in the balance – despite digital progress has relevance for any organization looking to stay free of the legal blame game and other unpleasant aspects of massive IT fail.
Best of the rest
Not picking one piece for special accolades this week, but here's some standouts:- While the Twitterati (including yours truly) had a blast with the news that ex-SAP Board Member and Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka will be keynoting at Oracle Open World, The Times of India detailed Sikka's five point plan for Infosys. Get yer popcorn ready.
- Chris Kanaracus scored the coveted enterprise reporter trifecta, filing stories on Microsoft (Ballmer's board exit), Oracle (Larry Ellison's non-retirement, 70 years and no signs of slow down), and SAP (vows on simplified pricing finally coming to fruition - now to see what customers think).
- A reality check on the cloud product du jour, Docker, comes by way of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in What Docker does right and what it doesn't do right... yet, focused on Docker founder Solomon Hykes' LinuxCon keynote. Note: one thing Docker has done right is garner gobs of favorable industry press coverage. I'm expecting a piece on Docker's role fighting Ebola any day now.
- Silicon Valley's haves/have-nots problems took on a new dimension with Shareholders sue Steve Jobs’ estate, Apple board members over wage fixing cartel (see Den's Friday Roast from last week, Silicon Valley's despicable wage cartel, for Den's position (which you may be able to guess from the title).
- The debate over social network superiority continues in Twitter vs. Facebook as a news source: Ferguson shows the downsides of an algorithmic filter. The big part of this story is how algorithms and filters change our view of stories or even if we see them at all. I smell a blog post.
- If you're up for a deep dive on a topic of merit (meaning: you can't skim this one, and it will cost you a long coffee break), check out Steve Denning's From CEO 'Takers' To CEO 'Makers': The Great Transformation.
Honorable mention: Kind of a wonk title, but UpperEdge's Eleven IT Enabled Transformation Leadership Agenda Items was a nice leadership piece. Computers reshaping global job market, for better and worse touched a nerve, but that was nothing compared to this devastating video I viewed via Phil Fersht, Not worried about robots taking your job? This may change your mind… And Bob Warfield nabs the enterprise blog post title of the week with the entertaining Most Marketing Advice Tells Us How to Market to Marketers.
Whiffs
I was going to skewer this tissue-light 'Battle of the SaaS vendors' blog post, if I can call it that, but now the pop-ups from the site seem to prevent reading. Blech. But that does bring me to another media fail - Time Inc. Rates Writers on How "Beneficial" They Are to Advertisers. As in: 'Writers who may have high assessments for their writing ability, which is their job, were in fact terminated based on the fact the company believed their stories did not 'produce content that is beneficial to advertiser relationships.' No commentary needed.
Anyhow, back to robots. After reading so many innovation blowhards insisting robots won't take our jobs but spawn them, it was refreshing to see such a well-argued case for the rise of robots as a threat to human employment. Even more disconcerting, the music for the video was written by a robot composer, which the majority of humans couldn't tell from music penned by humans.
Look, I welcome a world where robots get me paid somehow, and hey, the utopian ideal of the robots freeing us up from having to work at all has an undeniable appeal, and not just for slackers but for those who yearn to focus on what matters, rather than the minutia of white collar workaday. But the video makes a potent comparison with the decline of jobs for horses - and it wasn't the horses' fault. Horses were still just as capable as ever. Reskilling a horse sounds ludicrous, but robots-create-jobs defenders make a similar argument.
Will it be different for humans? Maybe. But the idea that the same thing couldn't happen to us is naive. I used to think the robot apocalypse was Terminator-style machine wars. Now mass unemployment is another scenario for screenwriters to sensationalize, that is - whenever they are done with Resident Evil 7.
Officially off-topic
Speaking of terminated, nobody is paying attention during your company's conference calls. And maybe not during interviews, if these weird interviews are any indication (I liked the one where the Amazon manager spread out some (potato?) chips on the interviewee's resume during lunch). Though as one of my Twitter followers pointed out, if true, that's not a good look for Amazon.
Granted, the article wasn't much to speak of, but article title of the week had a clear winner in Australia’s Premier Male Stripping Troupe Fight Off Gun Wielding Meth Head (the guys are ok). Though Cryopreservation: ‘I freeze people to cheat death’ came on strong end of week.
I'm not willing to qualify freezing people's brains out of fear of death as innovation, but how about this college student who spent his summer building a solar lens with hardware supplies that can clean 99.9% of pathogens in a liter of water in about an hour? Suddenly my summer doesn't seem very productive after all, thanks a lot dude. I could use a pep talk, maybe from this awesome little league coach who huddled his players after a tough loss.
That's a wrap for this week. TV: I remain baffled by critics' darling Masters of Sex. Decent but ponderous - I like Ray Donovan better and that's damning with faint praise indeed. I gave The Outlander a shot - no comment. But - if you have patience for ambiguity, Rectify is worth the effort. Glad I stuck it out.
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, Beach vacation © lily - all from Fotolia.com.
Disclosure: Salesforce.com and Infor are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.