November 1st, 2009

Amplifying 'weak signals' for IT success

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 3:29 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Collective intelligence, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0, Governance, IT issues, Project strategy, Risk, Tools

Tags: Technique, Information Technology, Organization, Asuret, Productivity, Michael Krigsman

Every seasoned executive knows that gaining detailed and accurate information about his or her organization’s activities is a challenging and ongoing struggle. Disconnects between operational data and management decision-making lead to inefficiency, waste, and ultimately to extreme failures of the type described in this blog.

Usually, some members of an organization do possess accurate early warning information regarding potential problems. However, as we have seen in situations ranging from Enron to financial industry practices that kicked off the current recession, surfacing that information can be difficult.

I asked top auditing services analyst and former BearingPoint managing director, Francine McKenna, to place this issue in context. Francine told me:

It’s a classic problem rooted in human nature. Information in large, complex, and geographically dispersed organizations tends to become diluted and distorted as it flows up the chain. Even worse, some individuals redesign information flowing through their hands based on personal goals and objectives.

The best organizations recognize this state of affairs and create standardized policies, procedures, and governance monitoring activities to overcome it. Despite these efforts, however, the problem remains a very real challenge.

Detecting and amplifying “weak signals.” Techniques that reveal hidden vulnerabilities are a valuable weapon in the fight against project failure.

My recent post, Learning from the weak signals of failure, discussed the importance of methods that detect and amplify these weak signals:

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September 10th, 2009

News video: Twitter and social networking identity theft

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:20 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Risk, Tools

Tags: Twitter Inc., Video, Identity Theft, Social Networking, Security, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Michael Krigsman

Popular culture seems obsessed with Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites. As popularity of these sites increases, so do the risks of identity theft.

Boston’s FOX television news asked me to participate in a segment explaining how end-users can lower risks associated with social networking. Here’s the video:

Do you think social networking identity theft is a serious issue, or is the media over-blowing the whole thing?

June 2nd, 2009

IBM: IT failure and social media disaster

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:26 am

Categories: CIO issues, Devil's Triangle, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, Government projects, IT issues, Project failures, Tools, Uncategorized

Tags: Consultant, Information Technology, Social Media, Customer, Twitter, IBM DB2, IBM Corp., Lois, Michael Krigsman

IBM’s recent DB2 fiasco in the Philippines is a textbook case of Devil’s Triangle relationships causing conflict between a technology provider, third-party consultants, and a customer.

• Related: IBM’s Devil’s Triangle: An enterprise software soap opera

Although the situation is interesting, I never expected it to bubble over onto Twitter, demonstrating poor social media practice in addition to vendor/consultant arrogance.

The Twitter connection began when I tweeted a general request seeking an expert to explain technical aspects of DB2. IBM’s customer, a Philippine government agency, raised questions about DB2’s suitability to task, making the technical aspect relevant:

A consultant with DB2 expertise re-tweeted my request. So far, so good:

An IBM DB2 executive responded with the implication my request was somehow wrong, unethical, or not straightforward. Yes, the tactic definitely caught my attention:

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May 5th, 2009

CA releases packaged services for project portfolio management

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:58 am

Categories: CIO issues, IT issues, Project portfolio management, Tools, Uncategorized

Tags: On-demand, Project Portfolio Management, Computer Associates International Inc., Best Practices Edition, IT Governance Edition, Project Management, Tools & Techniques, Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, It Operations

As part of a broad strategy to deliver on-demand project portfolio management (PPM) applications, CA announced two new “productized” implementation service offerings.

In a discussion with Carl Landers, VP Marketing for CA Clarity PPM, and Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist, the company said the on-demand product is “100 percent feature-complete” with respect to its on-premise counterpart.

Here’s a screen capture of the Clarity browser-based product; click the image to see a larger version:

The Essentials edition is suited to organizations with little experience or maturity in managing a portfolio of projects. Folks in this category need a low-risk, relatively uncomplicated way to learn about and adopt PPM. Essentials implementations last five days and cost $15,000.

The Best Practices Edition adds functionality, along with complexity, to the Essentials version. This middle tier is best for organizations that already possess some experience with formal project management processes. CA implements the Best Practices edition in 30 days with a fixed-price of $75,000.

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February 16th, 2009

Yes, Twitter is still dangerous

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 8:49 am

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Politics, Risk, Security and privacy, Tools

Tags: Twitter, Security, Michael Krigsman

Twitter’s power to broadcast confidential information unobtrusively remains a genuine security risk to government and private sector organizations. For example, CBS News reports that a Congressman disclosed confidential information on Twitter during a secret trip to Iraq:

Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan), a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, caused what some have argued was a major lapse in security last week when he used the micro-blogging site Twitter to post real-time updates about a secret congressional envoy into Iraq.

Congressional Quarterly reports the Pentagon is reviewing policy following the Pete Hoekstra situation:

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February 10th, 2009

Preventing dashboard lust

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:25 am

Categories: CIO issues, IT issues, Salesforce.com, Tools

Tags: Dashboard, JP Seabury, Michael Krigsman

Many IT projects place too much emphasis on tools and technology rather than meeting user needs. When ROI and business case take a backseat to blind technology love, problems are bound to arise. Excessive dashboard lust offers a concrete example of this common situation.

JP Seabury’s Force Monkey blog describes what happened in his company after downloading Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Dashboard Pack 1.0. Although these comments refer specifically to Salesforce, the issue is not vendor specific:

Soon after [downloading the tool],…[m]anagers and executives looked forward to their daily, weekly and/or monthly Dashboard emails, and talked animatedly about them in the halls or at company meetings.

Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was, but the monster was there, elusive. The users asked for more dashboards, more pretty graphs, charts, tables, and I appeased them. Today, we have more than 50 different dashboards and hundreds of reports feeding those dashboards. It’s an absolute glut of information. And this monster I created now has a name: Data Admiration.

They come to the CRM tool, very excited about the volumes of data and information captured in our Salesforce Dashboards. They drink deep from the kool-aid. But none of these dashboards seem to drive any real change in the organization.

One commenter to that blog post put JP’s dashboard numbers into context:

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January 31st, 2009

Google search suffers outage

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:01 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, Google, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Tools

Tags: Google Inc., Google Search, Cloud Computing, Michael Krigsman

For a period of time today, searches on Google incorrectly reported every Internet site as being unavailable due to the presence of malware.

Here’s a screen capture of a Google search for ZDNet:

And here’s what happens when you try to click the ZDNet link:

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January 26th, 2009

Why I love Windows 7, hate Linux, and think the Mac is lame

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 8:03 am

Categories: End-user impact, IT issues, Microsoft, Tools

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows 7, ThingsMacintosh, Support Infrastructure, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, UNIX, Open Source, Software

I’ve been involved with Windows, Linux, and Macs since the early days. After more than 20 years wandering the operating system landscape with hopes and dreams, I’ve finally settled on a platform with no regrets: Windows 7.

Early versions of Windows, which was released in 1985, were virtually useless. It took Microsoft until 1992, with the release of Windows 3.1, to set Windows on its present trajectory toward operating system greatness.

This screen capture shows the first version of Windows:

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September 24th, 2008

Oracle innovates with Social CRM

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 1:45 pm

Categories: CIO issues, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Oracle, Tools, openworld08

Tags: Oracle Corp., BEA Beehive, CRM, Social CRM, Denis, Java Development Tools, Enterprise Software, Social Networking, Development Tools, Software Development

Oracle’s innovative Social CRM product joins social networking with true enterprise features such as reliability, security management, and scalability. Given the different skill sets and perspectives required to build consumer and enterprise software, Oracle’s ability to combine both into a single package is a significant achievement.

Social CRM narrows the gap between users hungry for sophisticated, easy to use software and IT departments charged with maintaining centralized governance and control. Importantly, the product isn’t just a toy or whiz-bang demo; it solves real world business problems based on deep insight into contemporary CRM work flow requirements.

The following diagram shows Social CRM’s overall architecture. On the user side, the applications reflect a typical sales cycle; the product handles IT issues by connecting back into enterprise data and the corporate managed infrastructure:

Here’s a screen capture showing the Sales Prospector module, which tries to predict future sales based on various data sources:

More interesting than features and functions is just how thoroughly the product design team understands social networking applications from an end-user perspective. The designers obviously use and enjoy social tools themselves.

The following slide presents the “social” vision behind Social CRM:

The product’s depth arises from strength in three areas:

• Strong CRM business case and workflow
• Excellent social networking features and capabilities
• Deep enterprise IT integration

The product is appealing precisely because it handles all three areas well. I asked Beagle Research Group’s Managing Principal, Denis Pombriant, for his take on Social CRM:

Social CRM is important because it’s the first time a vendor has consolidated multiple, social-oriented CRM modules into a single product line. In addition, Oracle is taming the wild beast called social networking and harnessing it to serve a business purpose.

Denis’ view is not all sweetness and light, however:

On the other hand, it’s a version one product just being rolled out. I expect we’ll see refinements and enhancements based on market feedback. It reminds me of that old joke, “What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean.” The answer: “A good start.”

Paul Greenberg, noted CRM expert and guru, expressed surprise that enormous Oracle is capable of producing innovative, end-user CRM software:

Several years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined seeing this kind of thing from Oracle.

Buzzing Beehive. A few days ago, I wrote that Beehive, Oracle’s new enterprise collaboration product, would legitimize Enterprise 2.0 inside large organizations:

Oracle’s collaboration vision underscores the growing importance of enterprise 2.0-style communication products. By highlighting Beehive prominently in president Charles Phillip’s keynote, the company adds fuel to the legitimacy of bottom-up, peer-to-peer social networking.

Social CRM achieves a level of polish and completeness only hinted at by Beehive, even though online services such as Flickr and Twitter obviously inspired both products. While Beehive seems to have lost its way, currently appearing as little more than an Outlook plug-in, Social CRM is tight, focused, and on-message.

According to Oracle’s Vice President of Product Management for Social CRM, Tara Roberts, her group has been working with Beehive to implement a Social CRM application that exposes Beehive Spaces.

In conversation with members of the Social CRM team (shown at right), it was obvious this group loves what they’re doing. I see true passion reflected in the software.

Too often, enterprise software seems little more than boring, lifeless screens cooked up by corporate drones. Social CRM is a happy exception to that sad rule.

• Related: Social CRM: Interview with Oracle SVP Anthony Lye [podcast]

[Photo credit: Michael Krigsman (taken with a Blackberry Curve and cleaned up a bit in an image editor). Slides provided by Tara Roberts.]

September 22nd, 2008

Oracle collaborates with Beehive

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 3:23 pm

Categories: CIO issues, IT issues, Oracle, Tools, openworld08

Tags: Oracle Corp., BEA Beehive, ESME, Java Development Tools, Enterprise Software, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Software, Michael Krigsman

From bumble bee-shaped chocolates to signs placed through the conference hall, Oracle is showcasing its Beehive collaboration platform at OpenWorld.

Oracle’s collaboration vision underscores the growing importance of enterprise 2.0-style communication products. By highlighting Beehive prominently in president Charles Phillip’s keynote, the company adds fuel to the legitimacy of bottom-up, peer-to-peer social networking.

The Beehive white paper offers this product overview:

Oracle Beehive is Oracle’s integrated and secure software platform for Enterprise Collaboration. It is a collaborative environment built on a unique model that combines the various communication and coordination services into a comprehensive platform. With Oracle Beehive, organizations learn from their past efforts, share new insights effectively and build a knowledge-based competitive advantage….

Beehive brings the most common collaborative capabilities including time & task management, email, discussions, IM/Presence into an integrated platform.

It’s fascinating to see how concepts behind consumer-oriented applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, are being adapted to the corporate environment. Because Beehive’s features and function aren’t new, the central theme involves pulling the pieces together into an enterprise-friendly wrapper.

Beehive isn’t the only example of Oracle enterprise applications using ideas inspired by consumer online services. Senior Vice President of Oracle CRM, Anthony Lye, demonstrated social CRM applications that owed a great debt to consumer services such as Flickr. Anthony acknowledged this point in his excellent presentation.

Oracle isn’t alone in recognizing that styles of interaction developed in consumer tools can be used in the enterprise. An enterprise-class, group instant messaging project, called ESME, emerged from SAP’s online community. Although ESME’s scope and features are narrowly focused, Twitter’s influence on ESME’s fundamental design is clear. ESME is open source, unlike the Oracle’s products.

Several observers at the conference that I spoke with were ho-hum about Beehive. Paul Greenberg, noted CRM expert and author, commented the Beehive demo wasn’t presented well:

Although Beehive may have advanced features, the demo didn’t show anything we haven’t seen over the last 4-5 years.”

Paul has an open mind about the possibilities for Beehive, but he was concerned that the demo didn’t help users understand why the product is truly unique and innovative.

In contrast to my view that Beehive offers an interesting glimpse of the future, Dennis Howlett thinks it’s primarily a move against Microsoft:

Much more will be written about Beehive over the coming days but I suspect this is really a shot across the Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange.

One thing is clear: the age of user-to-user, cross-organization collaboration has arrived. In the long run, that’s a great thing for both individual users and the enterprise.

Given the important role of poor communication in IT failures, tools that lower barriers between colleagues, especially across multiple organizations, are always welcome.

[Image via Paul Doherty.]