September 2003 Archives

I belong to a number of networking sites and have for a while. First I joined Ryze and even went to some of their functions. Then I tried Linked In, but I have not put much effort into it. My latest find is eliyon networking which boasts: Eliyon automatically and continuously grows its base of 15,758,276 people profiles from corporate and personal websites, government filings, press releases and other sources. It is hugely expensive to subscribe, like $10K.

Today Fortune.com posted an article that explores all these various sites and discusses a new breed of networking applications designed for business: "...new companies like Contact Network, Socialtext, and Spoke Software are generating revenues by selling social-networking software to corporations". I recently had lunch with my colleague Cesar Brea who is the new CEO of Contact Network Corporation. He gave me an impressive demo of the product and it clearly demonstrates it's value immediately.

Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle offers a very detailed explanation, with screen shots, of how to record analog LPs onto digital media. I have a large record collection that I have not listened to in years. I want to sell it, but I can't part with such great music. I have to find a way to convert it! I am going to look a little harder for other options, but this one, although labor intensive, sounds good.

A conversation with Tim Sanders, Yahoo’s Chief Solutions Officer postulates a new disease that is physically and mentally debilitating. He defines it as: "NEDS is an acronym for new economy depression syndrome. It’s a mental state that a result of a combination of information overload and frequent interruption resulting in and erosion of personal close relationships. The symptoms are anxiety, fatigue, stress and lower productivity and irritability in a team environment."

Intesting, my coworkers and I used to laugh when we did conference calls or webcasts because we would prefer to meet online, even in the office, rather then physically get together, because we could multitask: listen and do emails, etc. at the same time. In this environment, we all must increase our "bandwidth" so that we can input and output much more quickly with minimum processing time. I'm glad this condition has a name!

I read Editor: Myself on occasion. Yesterday, Hossein Derakhshan, publsihed a good list of English language weblogs written by Iranian's around the world. It is worth exploring, good writing and points of view.

Online Event: What Does It Take to Be a Social Entreprenueur? Sponsored by Ashoka and the Schwab Founation, Monday, September 22 - Sunday, October 5. Using a software platform for discussiondeveloped by the Skoll Foundation

The discussion is described as: What makes a social entrepreneur tick? What support do they need? How can we encourage more to step forward? Join leaders in the field to discuss the latest developments among social entrepreneurs and the challenges and opportunities we face. Kicking off the event is Professor Muhammad Yunus, a social entrepreneur responsible for the global microcredit movement.

My experience with both the organization participating in the event is that they are innovative at building at motivating a community of people to make change happen. I find their use technology and the way they reach out to a community of social entrepreneurs a valuable lesson in building and animating a community.

Dave Pollard has summarized an article on how HP competed against IBM and EDS for a very large P&G contract. The original article was in Fast Company. While HP is an extraordinarily large company, so it is probably unfair to say they one against the big guys, the advice provided is good advice for those of us that don't have the kind of extraordinary resouces of these giant companies.

Here is the advice summarized by Dave, with a few of his own additionsThis month's Fast Company has an article on how HP stole the outsourcing contract for P&G's technology systems and data centres away from favoured EDS and IBM. The article pinpoints five tactics that made the difference:

Don't hide your weakness - Be up front about them and defuse them before your competitors can exploit them. Then play up your strengths.
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse - The biggest advantage many large corporations have over smaller competitors is the practice they've had presenting to sometimes intimidating executives, and their ability to learn from their mistakes. Every interaction with the customer is a potential learning experience.
Bring out the big guns - Introduce your very top people to the customer, even if you can only do so sparingly. And credentialize yourself further with kudos and referrals from other well-known customers and associates.
Think like your customer - Understand what they're looking for in a synergistic relationship with a business partner, not just a supplier.
Show that you want the deal - When two or more proposals are equally attractive, the one from the hungrier 'we try harder' bidder usually wins.

These tactics are useful advice for any small enterprise trying to go head-to-head with much larger competitors. Here are a few more from my own experience:

Carve out a niche - Every large competitor has competency gaps that can be exploited. Find a small area where you are uniquely qualified, and focus sales efforts on that niche market.
Don't bite off too much - Be selective in the customers and markets you pursue. There is less competition for mid-size customers than the giant ones, and lower expectations and risks as well.
Relationships almost always trump expertise - Your network is everything. Success is a direct function of the amount of time you invest in relationships with the right customers at the highest possible level. If you're local and the big guys are not, emphasize that and exploit it to increase 'face time' with the customer.
Get to the top decision maker - I wrote about this in a previous article.
Ask for the work - This seems obvious, but it's amazing how rarely it's done. At worst, you'll be told that they're still evaluating other suppliers. At best, you'll get the assignment on the spot. And you'll have a better understanding of exactly where you stand.

Vist my ebay "About me" page. So I have been posting to this weblog less. Take a look at what I am selling. Mostly cameras and records right now. I am amazed at my eclectic taste. "The Last Poets"; Holly and Joey: "I've got you babe" Pharoah Sanders, Utimate Spinach, etc. I will keep you up to date on how it goes.

Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog has a good post on Social Software and the issue of trust. Apparently negotiations can proceed more smoothly if enabled by collaboration software.

The Virtual Negotiation Table in Southern Asia/New York/Helsinki: Groove was used less than eight weeks ago to broker peace in a nation in southern Asia. During the mid-80's, tension between the majority and the separatists on this island nation erupted into full blown ethnic war, with 10's of thousands of people losing their lives. Leveraged by some very bright folks from the Nobel Peace Laureate, and with the wisdom and guidance of James A. at Groove, a set of "Peace Tools" was developed and deployed to assist in a new round of peace negotiations. "

In an earlier post Michael Helfrich writes about THE POWER OF EVENT SWARMS: We had a lot of success with the use of Groove during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Robert, Josh, and Phil on the Groove Humanitarian Team worked nights and weekends in support of DoD, State Department, USAID, and NGO activities as these organizations worked to avert a major humanitarian crisis in Iraq.

I've been intrigued for some time about technology frameworks, as well as the political/cultural aspects, for facilitating small unit swarming as organizations attack opportunities, tasks, and threats. While small-unit swarming often focuses on the rapid, ad-hoc formation of affinity groups, the discussion usually ends there. Call it "task swarming" if you will.

During Iraqi Freedom, elements of the U.S. government and various NGO's used Groove for Humanitarian Rapid Assessment. After we were done breaking things in an Iraqi city, these folks would come in and assess what was needed to help the people in the city. This was a classic example of task swarming where more than 100 people people from 30 organizations came together within 48 hours and went to work. We saw it many times during the conflict as groups worked to coordinate medical logistics and other humanitarian tasks. Groove worked flawlessly.

Jim Ericson, Line56 writes that companies are shifting their IT spending priorities.

"...saving money requires spending money, the next top choice appears to be business application integration for the purpose of aligning processes and workflows within companies in efficiency drives that hopefully can pay for themselves.

Against the mired backdrop of flattish budgets, integration spending outstrips overall IT spending growth in almost every survey. Aberdeen's 2003 forecast finds application developer tools and enterprise application integration (EAI) spending sandwiched above and below security as top infrastructure priorities for this year. "

Later in the article he says: "Companies have been warming to looser and more selective integration using the Web or other protocols to unify existing applications and also deliver functionality to the personalized desktops of partners and employees. That's where the infrastructure and application vendors have mainly built their footprint and where price pressure has hit the EAI vendors. Further, the idea of assembling relevant bits of applications used in a business process into composite applications has found growing appeal. While such connections might go sight unseen, in enterprise portals this becomes the human-facing side of integration, something every company would like to see more event driven."

This article gives a great deal of insight into how companies are setting their investment agendas.

Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley writes an article each day on the global economic situation. Yesterday the article was titled Traction, Multipliers, and Leakages, about how the US economy is leaking jobs, especially in highly skilled areas like IT to India, with manufacturing going primarily to China. Mr. Roach calls this a policy induced recovery, not an actual economic recovery, and suggests that it may not continue. The article includes very good analysis to support his position.

Michael J. Karels has written an interesting article on open source and how it is commercialized. Commercialization and truely open source software is getting to be quite a gray area, as is explained:

The use of open source software has become increasingly popular in production environments, as well as in research and software development. One obvious attraction is the low cost of acquisition. Commercial software has a higher initial cost, though it usually has advantages such as support and training. A number of business models designed by users and vendors combine open source and commercial software; they use open source as much as possible, adding commercial software as needed. They may use open source software as a central component of a product or service, but use other components to add value, which can then induce customers to pay for the offering (obviously, it is hard to compete with free software on price).

After a brief overview of the salient differences between open source and commercial software, this article will describe several basic business models in today's marketplace to highlight ways that value is added to open source software and services. For the most part, I will discuss only complete software systems sufficient for some useful purpose, such as network servers, which include an operating system and its associated components, any applications needed for the system's purpose, and necessary local configuration information. Many of the same principles apply to components such as applications and other software packages

I am very interested in outsourcing It services to firms in India. I think it provides huge cost advantages and the service providors, in my opinion, are very capable of handling the increased volume from US companies. The following paragraphs were pulled from a summary of a Forrester report that forecast the growth of this segment.

"Forrester found that while most of the executives it surveyed reported their companies didn't spend much on BPO in 2002, 52 percent said they were considering outsourcing and planned to spend at least $1 million on BPO in 2004. They cited human resources, customer resources, customer service procurement and accounting as the most likely processes for outsourcing.

The largest segment in the BPO market will be simple bulk transactions, Forrester said, predicting the segment will grow to $58 billion in 2008. This segment includes simple tasks like credit card or stock trade processing, and Forrester said the segment is the simplest for vendors to master. The firm added that ACS, Fidelity Investments, State Street and Unisys will likely dominate the market.

The second largest segment will be broad shared services, representing $57 billion by 2008, Forrester said. This segment includes finance and administration, indirect procurement and human resources. Noting the segment requires more understanding by employees than simple bulk transactions, Forrester predicted that ACS and Mellon HR Solutions will expand into the HR side of the segment, while big IT systems integrators will battle over finance and accounting.

High-volume vertical processes will represent a significantly smaller segment, at $6 billion in 2008, Forrester said. The firm predicted that vertical processes, including policy administration, claims and loan process applications, will remain a small piece of the segment. It also suggested that offshore IT providers and large U.S. outsourcers, including the likes of Accenture and CSC, will battle for turf in the segment.

The smallest segment will be niche vertical applications, which Forrester predicted would reach $5 billion in 2006, though it also suggested the segment would surge forward after customers become comfortable with outsourcing these tasks, reaching $24 billion in 2008. Niche vertical applications include complex processes like environmental data reporting and chemical process control monitoring, which Forrester said requires deep specialization. The firm pointed to Ingenero and RMSI as among the small BPO vendors that specialize in the area. " Internet News.com