Enterprise hits and misses - Sears goes on layaway and chatbots file lawsuits
- Summary:
- In this streamlined, “Jon feels the road burn” version of hits and misses, he picks the event coverage that matters, the best of the enterprise web, and, as always – your weekly whiffs.
- 'Where America Shops' isn't Sears - US retail's biggest omni-channel casualty to date - Stuart puts the Sears bankruptcy in context, and even manages to say something
sarcastically begrudginglymodestly nice about a certain U.S. politician. As for Sears, blaming Amazon is too simplistic: "While it’s tempting to chalk this up as just another retail victim of Amazonian voracity, Sears has to take a lot of the blame for its own troubles. There’s been a singular lack of investment in data and analytics to understand the customer, for example." A happier retail story comes via Jess' latest use case: AO.com looks to AWS for brighter approach to Black Friday preparations. - PwC says its Digital Accelerators will future-proof the workplace - here's why - If you ask me, "future-proofing" an entire workforce is a
grandiose absurdridiculously ambitious goal, but it's hard not to like PwC's comprehensive approach to digital skilling. Barb has the story. - Deloitte survey on strategic risk management offers important recommendations - Kurt takes a break from Chinese chip sabotage analysis to delve into a substantial report from Deloitte (no, that's not an oxymoron in this case). Cybersecurity risk is one aspect of strategic risk Kurt bears down on. Kurt's got a key point on turning risk around: "In future research, I would like to see how such risks can be turned into business opportunities. The most successful enterprises don’t just seek to mitigate risk and minimize the damage, but pull a jujitsu move and use threats, whether from digital transformation, cloud services, cyber attacks or cultural stagnation to turn the tables on competitors."
Vendor analysis, diginomica style - the event season rolls on
Den primed the pump for SAP TechEd Barcelona this week:
- SAP Q3 FY2018 - cloud momentum continues, ups guidance - Overall a good earnings vibe, but Den's probe of the numbers raises questions he will no doubt pursue in Barcelona, to everyone's mutual delight.
- DSAG and SAP on more or less the same page? Tell me it ain't so. When DSAG likes what SAP is seeing, it's almost more newsworthy than when they don't.
Phil's been at Twilio's user event in San Francisco this week, where the staying power of email was on full display:
- Twilio's $2 billion for SendGrid says that email's not dead - Phil analyzes a surprise move on the eve of the event.
- 5 compelling reasons we'll use email for decades yet - SendGrid CEO - I'm anti-email from a productivity standpoint, but I never vowed we'd stamp the inbox out. "We need somewhere we can receive and store messages that have to be kept" - obvious? Perhaps. But hard to argue with nonetheless.
Meanwhile, my three-event-week in San Fran yielded fresh use cases, and a CEO sit down on the future of analytics:
- How Nasdaq uses Zoom to liberate their meeting rooms and change their collaboration game
- How Heroku built its self-service analytics future on the Looker platform
- Why do we need a new analytics platform? Looker's CEO shares six keys to modern analytics
Finally, Chris wrapped up his Shanghai bender with Huawei Connect 2018 - the smart police are coming.
Jon's grab bag - I thought Jerry was taking the p@ss joking when he posted Who needs lawyers? DoNotPay lets you ‘sue anyone’ free via a chatbot. But that's the real deal. Whether it helps the marginalized or creates another chaotic wave of legal nuisance remains to be seen.
Closing upbeat, Martin has a super cool/important use case, Global Emancipation Network tackles human trafficking crisis with Splunk. Preventing human trafficking is one big data use case I can absolutely support, though the overall trafficking stats are alarming for those of us who like to think we are living in modernity.
Best of the rest
My top six picks from a strong week in the enterprise blogosphere:- Customer 360, Dreamforce 2018, The Langoliers, and a Wish – Esteban Kolsky gets the nod for the most
esoteric defiantly goofyintriguing post title of the week. Bonus: the content is interesting also. His goal?Pay tribute to Stephen King's Langoliersexplain why Salesforce's C360 push could actually work this time, and why data needs a platform for futures pending, not a warehouse for futures past. - Impressions on SAP CX Live, SAP during a walk on Calle de Vendedor - No place better to update on your "customer-facing corporate pivot" than Barcelona, and no one better than Paul Greenberg to weigh the progress: "Also, I was told that they (Salesforce) would be invited into the Open Data Initiative. Please do. That is a more judicious way to do things." Agreed.
- The Battle for the Home – Ben Thompson gets into the Facebook vs Google vs Amazon vs Apple pursuit of the so-called smart home, and the obstacles each will face (including privacy).
- Things I'd Like To See Go Away - Distrust by Default - Gartner's Hank Barnes is right: universal distrust (cynicism, I'd call it) can be debilitating for customer-vendor relationships. He sees a middle ground: trust but verify.
- 2018 Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts And Market Estimates - Louis Columbus pulled lots of juicy stats for this one: "80% of enterprises are both running apps on or experimenting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their preferred cloud platform." Put down your Xbox - Azure isn't too far behind at 67 percent.
- Internet-era ways of working – Colleague Derek du Preez turned me to this productivity keeper from Tom Loosemore. I like this one: "Think critically about what you build, what you extend and what you buy (but remember, you can’t outsource risk)."
Whiffs
Always tough to narrow to four whiffs amidst the PR flotsam and miscellaneous buffoonery, but that's my job this week. How'z about some road burn specials:I feel for these folk from the heart of my bottom. #CXsux #ryanairfail https://t.co/yVhaFO4hFw
— ???•? ? (@dahowlett) October 16, 2018
and, a dogs-with-jobs special:
Doggy Bag: Beagle Intercepts Roast Pig at Atlanta Airport https://t.co/igrPyGzhh7
"A passenger traveling from Ecuador was relieved of leftovers when an intrepid beagle found a roasted pig’s head in baggage at the world’s busiest airport."
- gotta love dogs-with-jobs
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 16, 2018
Ran into a small pricing snafu on Amazon this week:
Thought it might be nice to have my fave coughdrops around as we head into winter season, but I'm having second thoughts. I'm willing to pay a bit above market, but... six figures was a tad higher than I was planning. #amazonpricingfail pic.twitter.com/p3rSEFKJK5
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 15, 2018
Twitter had some funny things to say on this one. Cue Jonathan Becher:
ahhhh good point. Also if I am efficient and use all the lozenges, the cost per lozenge DOES go down signficantly...
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 15, 2018
Finally, it's all about the blockchain hypewagon for this PR exercise in world-class qualifying remarks:
From a PR pitch: "New York State is considering legislation that will create a committee devoted to studying blockchain with the intent to eventually use the tech for managing official documents."
-> when I say blockchain is still in the POC phase, this is what I mean
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 16, 2018
Then again when I read the kind of over-the-top skewering as in The Big Blockchain Lie, I find myself rooting for a few of these POCs to actually reach the light of day. We're going to need a hype committee to get to the bottom of this one...
If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.