Category Archives: Technology

Thank You Brian! Building Apps IS Wrong!

In a recent post over on Software & Services Safari, Mr. Brian Sommer tells us that Building Apps is Wrong! and, as far as the doctor is concerned, he couldn’t be more right!

According to Brian:

      Software application development has been going on for decades. In the old world of software, applications took a (usually accounting) business event and then validated, stored and reported it. These were internal usage utilities that dealt with internal data. That’s the wrong perspective to have today. Businesses don’t want apps – they need ‘capabilities’. Moreover, they need capabilities that serve different kinds of information to different kinds of smart devices to mobile, interconnected workers.

And, as Brian points out, not only do interconnected workers that want to access information whenever and wherever they are, they want one user interface no matter how many solutions are serving up information on their device.

This means that a Desktop App, an iOS App, an Android App, a Windows App, each customized to the browser or platform, is not the way to go. When you customize to the platform, you tend to drift away from the current UI to the new UI until you have a hodge-podge of interfaces across a dozen platforms. Unless you want to develop your own extensions to the default development libraries on each platform, and alter your UI to be observant of the limitations of each library, you need to focus on a platform-independent delivery method (such as mobile-compatible HTML 5) and focus on what the user really wants — a slick, information-rich, user experience, and not a solution exclusively oriented around the data and the capabilities of the platform.

After all, as Brian points out, what the user really wants is:

  • Context to enrich and complete transactions, customer interactions, etc.
  • Information served up at point of need
  • Information designed to answer the worker’s or customer’s needs
  • Information beyond transactional data
  • A solution that makes the most of data, voice and video

and not flash. If they want HD graphics, they’ll fire up a HD game.

Nothing for Nothing

After reading this recent article over on Chief Executive on how 66% of CEOs Plan to Freeze or Downsize Workforce Size which also pointed out how the majority of CEOs expect capital expenditures to remain flat, as per Chief Executive’s monthly survey of CEOs’ perception of overall business conditions (that garnered 247 responses), I can’t help but think of No Sale, No Store by the Arrogant Worms:

…
This week!
This week only!
We pay the GST!
We pay the PST!
We pay for delivery!
We pay for everything!
How do we do it?
How do we offer these fabulous deals?
Volume!
We got the most!
The best!
The worst!
We've got it all!
We’ve got everything!
Except one thing...
What’s that?
We've got no store!
No products!
So come on down!
This week!
…
Every week!
Every year!
No money down!
No payment ever!
That’s nothing for nothing!

Simply put, no new investments into new technology to increase productivity to give current staff time to create new products and services and no new staff to create new products and services creates an innovation free company. An innovation free company has nothing to offer. And you get nothing for nothing. It’s a lose-lose all the way around (as new technologies sit on the shelf and talent sits on the couch.) There’s no sale, as there’s no store.

The Cloud is Full of Sweet Fluffy Dreams

If you want to win favour with the doctor, this is a good way to start. Over in the recent edition of the SIG newsletter, Kent Parker, COO of Ariba, wrote an article on how the Cloud represents a more scalable, efficient way to do business on a global basis because it requires no software, hardware or resources to deploy and time to value is near immediate. However, he noted that these rewards can only be reaped if the organizations providing these networked community capabilities transform in ways that enable them to deliver products and services that meet a completely new set of business challenges and customer needs. Otherwise, the benefit of the Cloud will remain nothing more than sweet, fluffy dreams.

In the article, Kent presented six new rules that companies need to follow if they are to transform in a way that will enable them to deliver the products and services that are required in today’s knowledge-based network economy. The first four were quite obvious:

  • break down application silos
    the goal is to connect all of your applications and let data flow through the lifecycle
  • make innovation a constant
    customers expect improvements on a rapid timeline
  • focus on quality
    because, simply put, no one wants cr@p
  • stay agile
    or you will be outmaneuvered by your competition

However, the last two were not and keys to success in today’s economy:

  • overhaul customer support
    In an always-on community, customers demand immediate, proactive response to their issues, particularly as they impact business commerce continuity. But if you’ve outsourced most of the function of internal IT to an external provider, then you need to make sure the provider is not only offering the service level guarantees, but that it has the competency to provide the necessary support. In the IT world, system restoration sometime between 8 am and 5 pm on the next business day is NOT acceptable.
  • redefine customer relationships
    Go-live is the beginning, not the end, of a customer relationship. In a network-driven cloud community, customers and other participants require more continuous, ongoing assistance with enabling and institutionalizing business commerce capabilities. A company that offers a cloud-based solution has to be willing to continuously work and support the customer on that solution. Or the customer will go elsewhere.

It’s Time for a Digital Strategy Audit

And it should be part of your annual planning process. Why do you need a digital strategy audit? Here are five compelling reasons from a recent Chief Executive article that presented what it thought were 11 Reasons Why It’s Time for a Digital Strategy Audit.

  • Digital Mistakes are for the World to See
    Most companies’ topline digital strategies are transparent to an experienced analyst, and readily available for analysis and scrutiny. As a result, mistakes are impossible to conceal and any attempt to do so will cause a media pile-on that makes the torch-bearning lynch mobs of old look like a Sunday picnic.
  • Digital is Cross-Function
    Even a simple e-mail marketing campaign involves sales, marketing, operations, and IT. Only supply chain is as far reaching, and if the digital supply chain strategy doesn’t complement the physical supply chain strategy, you have a disaster waiting to happen.
  • Numbers Tell a Story
    An organization’s spending on R&D tells a lot about its viability in the long term. Plus, digital strategy performance benchmarks can identify competitor strategies and threats and allow a company to make a proactive, rather than a reactive, response.
  • Digital Investments are Probably Higher Than You Think
    And probably generating less of a return than you think. In some enterprises, digital investments account for 5% of operating costs and 20% of marketing spend, and run in the eight digits in Fortunate 1000 companies. But without a coherent strategy, the returns in digital investments are often dismal to none. Consider the emerging mobile market with average click through rates on ads of 0.1%, for example.
  • Digital Affects Everything
    As the article says, no industry is unaffected by digital trends. But, few companies have formal, well-defined digital strategies that articulate the vision and govern investments and behavior. Typically, it’s an afterthought and pushed down to IT to figure out. But if IT is only a support organization in the company …

And, more importantly, unless you do a digital audit:

  • You Still Don’t Know How Unprepared You Are for the Digital Age
    Unless you are an IT company, chances are your infrastructure doesn’t have the scalablity, reliability, falut-tolerance, and, more importantly, the security to go all-out with a digital strategy. If even the Sony Playstation Network can be hacked and taken down for a week, and Sony has a very strong IT division operating a very large on-line service, how long do you think it would take a hacker or organized underground hacking group to your network down if you got in their cross-hairs. Assuming you could even scale up to support a superbowl size response. Online service leaders have experienced network overloads for years. AOL in its heyday had scalability problems and had to offer customers refunds to keep them in late 1996, Toys “R” Us was hit with a class action lawsuit in 2000 for taking orders for Christmas it could not deliver, Nintendo could not keep up with Wii orders in 2006 and Sony could not keep up with Playstation 3 orders in 2006, and the Playstation Network has hacked earlier this year.

Before you launch a digital initiative, you need to make sure that IT is ready to support it, and if you are selling something, that the supply chain is ready to supply any expected spikes in demand. Forget the meaningful opportunities for cost-savings, new revenue channels, and/or competitor vulnerabilities the Chief Executive author promotes. Chances are that you’re not even ready for that.