October 9th, 2009

Twitter suspends security researcher's account as a threat

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:13 am

Categories: CRM, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Customer Service, Twitter Inc., Product Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Security, Marketing, Enterprise Software, Software, Michael Krigsman

Twitter erroneously suspended, and subsequently restored, a prominent researcher’s account two months after he tweeted a security warning intended to inform his audience about an imminent threat.

Aside from poor security handling, this situation offers a case study example of immature customer service and suggests problems with the organization’s corporate culture.

Mikko H. Hyppönen, Chief Research Officer at well-known computer security and anti-virus firm F-Secure, discovered that Twitter unexpectedly banned his account without warning. Here’s a screen capture (that I edited for clarity) from Mikko’s blog:

When Mikko complained, Twitter restored his account with this minimal explanation:

I’ve unsuspended your acct.
You were suspended for using the malware URL rnyspeceDOTcom in DMs.
Be careful!
We scan evrythng for malware.

Apparently, this tweet got Mikko intro trouble:

I asked Mikko to share his thoughts on what happened:

Obviously, I was quite surprised about the whole incident. As I’ve worked with Twitter previously regarding Twitter worms and such, I really didn’t expect this. In addition, I wasn’t expecting them to ban me because of a tweet that was actually warning users to stay away from a phishing site. I think their process leaves a lot to be desired.

Twitter did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

THE PROJECT FAILURES ANALYSIS

There are several problematic aspects regarding Twitter’s handling of this matter:

1. Twitter waited two months to suspend Mikko’s account after he sent the “illegal” tweet. A two-month delay responding to perceived security threats does little to protect users.
2. This case has extreme irony because Mikko’s tweet attempted to warn followers away from a major security threat. In addition, his tweet included spaces in the middle of the address, making it non-clickable for readers.
3. For the coup de grâce, the company’s explanation is rude, blames the user, and does not even apologize. In addition, Twitter did not restore any of Mikko’s followers or the people he followed.

One might expect a small, poorly funded startup to exhibit these problems, but that’s not Twitter’s situation. According to Bloomberg, the company is valued at $1 billion, having raised $150 million.

Cute logos and web page illustrations are no substitute for genuine customer service values. If the company doesn’t improve customer service attitudes, its reputation may one day descend to the level of cable and telephone companies: hated utility services that we tolerate until a replacement comes along.

October 8th, 2009

Workday, SaaS, and failure: 'A matter of trust'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:00 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Project failures, Project success, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Vendor relationships

Tags: Customer, Workday, Outage, Naomi Bloom, Andrew McCarthy, Manjit, Manufacturing, Michael Krigsman

Software as a service (SaaS) vendor, Workday, which sells human resources applications, recently had a 15-hour outage, during which time its system was unavailable to customers. In an unusual twist, this post is about success and not failure.

Background. The story begins when I heard about the outage through an anonymous source. To learn more, I sent out this Twitter message:

Naomi Bloom, a top HR technology and service delivery expert, responded:

Following Naomi’s suggestion, I checked Workday’s blog for details:

[T]he network attached storage (NAS) device that stores operating system files for our production servers detected a corrupted node within a backup RAID array. Rather than simply log the error, which is what it is supposed to do, the NAS took itself off-line. It is ironic that the redundant backup to a system with built-in redundancy caused the failure.

This type of error should not have caused the array to go offline, but it did. The most important result is that our failover plans worked as expected. Within hours, all customers were live in our secondary datacenter with all their data intact.

Workday gets in touch. Two days later, Workday’s Communications Director, Andrew McCarthy, sent me an unsolicited invitation to discuss the outage, even though I previously never had contact with the company.

The note caught me off-guard because it’s the first and only time a vendor has reached out to me proactively following a failure. I’ve written almost 750 blog posts related to IT failure, and Andrew’s invitation is unique in my experience. Here’s the full text of that email:

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October 7th, 2009

CRM failure: A virtual town hall discussion and podcast

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 3:49 pm

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Cultural issues, End-user impact, IT issues, Podcast, Training

Tags: Podcast, CRM, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Advertising & Promotion, Sales Strategy, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing, Sales, Michael Krigsman

Today’s IT failures town hall discussion brought together CRM analysts, sales experts, and IT practitioners to discuss why CRM projects do not achieve planned results and how to improve these projects. Click the player at the top of this post to listen.

I was joined for this event by CRM industry guru, Mike Muhney. Beginning with the co-invention of ACT! Mike has been recognized as a global visionary and powerful speaker on the subject of effective business relationships. He has publicly spoken to over 150,000 people worldwide on improving the way they do business, and he has often been interviewed and written about in numerous global publications on the topics of entrepreneurship, market creation, penetration and leadership, global expansion, and motivational speaking.

The conversation focused closely on the role of ensuring buy-in on the part of sales people when deploying CRM systems. Since many CRM implementations suffer from poor adoption, understanding sales person needs is a primary consideration for success.

Even though the group discussed CRM project failure, the focus was clearly on business, rather than IT, issues. While IT may be a problem, it pales in comparison to making sure users want to engage a new CRM system.

Listen to the podcast by clicking the player at the top of this post to hear recommendations and insightful analysis from this highly experienced group. If you are interested in any aspect of successful CRM, this podcast is for you.

September 15th, 2009

'How I tweeted my way out of spinal surgery'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:00 am

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Collective intelligence, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, Financial impact, IT issues, Politics, Project failures

Tags: Patient, Hospital, Twitter Inc., Health Care, Surgery, Sarah Cortes, Packer Hospital, Transparency, Healthcare, E-mail

The post describes a failure that is significant in light of the ongoing national debate surrounding health care reform and economics. Beyond health care, the role of social networking makes this failure a valuable case study for the enterprise.

Technology consultant and blogger, Sarah Cortes, went by ambulance to Robert Packer Hospital, a facility located in rural Pennsylvania, after she suffered a serious spinal fracture. The story takes an unusual turn because Cortes says Twitter helped her escape from the clutches of hospital staff whom, she claims, tried to intimidate and coerce her into accepting unnecessary spinal surgery.

On her blog, Cortes writes that Packer, “tried numerous maneuvers over 48 hours to hold me there against my will.” She continues [bullet formatting added]:

[The] tactics included:

• Threats that my insurance would not pay any expenses if I did not accept their treatment. My bill was already in the many thousands of dollars, they informed me.
• Intimidation that if I did not stop resisting their treatment I could be paralyzed
• Impeding my communication with Boston doctors by needlessly limiting my phone access. Thank God for Twitter and iphones.

Cortes believes Packer wanted to perform the surgery to help boost its accreditation statistics. From Cortes’ blog:

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August 19th, 2009

Social CRM: Shifting power and rapid burn

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:51 pm

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, End-user impact, Failure 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Customer, CRM, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Advertising & Promotion, Leadership, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing, Management, Michael Krigsman

The vague terms “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Social CRM” express a collaboration-centric view of business and work relationships that de-emphasizes traditional command and control boundaries in favor of engaging community.

Inside the enterprise, this philosophy promises the opportunity for workers to pool and share knowledge in exciting new ways, using technologies such as blogs and wikis. Similarly, Web-based software such as YouTube and Twitter let consumers band together, sometimes quite unexpectedly, to form massive, ad hoc influence groups.

These changes hold profound implications for the expression of IT-related problems, which become something quite different from the project-related failure we’ve come to know and love (or hate).

ACKNOWLEDGING CUSTOMER POWER

The mere fact of customers sharing information amongst themselves is nothing new, but the Web lets positive or negative viral consumer crusades arise faster than ever before.

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April 8th, 2009

IT failures town hall: Risks of survival [podcast]

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:08 pm

Categories: CIO issues, End-user impact, Governance, IT issues, Podcast, Project management

Tags: Podcast, Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Michael Krigsman

For this installment of the IT failures town hall discussion series, I spoke about failures during these challenging economic times with independent industry analyst Jonathan Yarmis.

As you can see from the slide presentation below, Jonathan and I covered a range of failure-related issues affected by the economy. Although our perspectives are different, which comes across as good-natured debate in the podcast, we agreed on several points:

• Economic tensions have exacerbated built-in conflicts and organizational agendas to the detriment of running successful IT projects.
• IT has an uphill battle fighting low cost, easy-to-deploy solutions brought in by end users. The IT / business divide remains a significant issue, but wise IT departments will make strong efforts to reach across the fence.
• While cloud computing solutions do not offer an IT failure panacea, reduced implementation scope combined with outsourced infrastructure can reduce some failure rates.
• Many organizations make expedient short-term decisions that will come back to cause problems later. Although it’s hard to consider medium- or long-term consequences in today’s tough environment, avoiding this critical issue will eventually make things worse.
• Fear militates against project success. We discussed this important issue toward the end of the conversation and it’s mentioned as a concluding point on slide 13.

Click the slide presentation below to follow along as you listen to the recording:

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February 27th, 2009

IT failures roundup: Banks around the world!

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 5:26 am

Categories: Availability and reliability, End-user impact, News roundup

Tags: Software, Bank, Information Technology, Debit Card, Online Banking, UBS AG, Australian IT, Banking, Financial Services, Personal Finance

Failures seem to come in waves, and today it’s banking. Think your bank’s systems are perfect? Don’t be so sure.

“System error” at UBS Japan causes erroneous $31 billion trade. From Finextra:

Swiss bank UBS has confirmed that a “system error” was responsible for the entry of an erroneous trade for three trillion yen at the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

UBS told the Bloomberg newswire that its Japanese unit mistakenly ordered $30.9 billion of Capcom Co. convertible bonds, 100,000 times more than it intended, because of an internal system error.

Allied Irish Bank incorrectly pulls cash from customer accounts. Again, Finextra has the story:

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February 23rd, 2009

Forrester CRM analyst discusses IT failure [podcast]

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:22 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, Devil's Triangle, End-user impact, IT issues, Interview, Podcast, Research and statistics, Vendor relationships

Tags: Information Technology, Failure, CRM, Forrester Research Inc., Natalie, System Integrator, Podcasts, Strategy, Internet, Management

Strong executive leadership and organizational transformation are essential determinants of successful IT projects. Any IT initiative that does not properly address these strategic points is doomed to fail.

I spoke with Forrester CRM, customer experience, and call center analyst, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, to explore these issues. Click the podcast player, located at the top of this post, to hear our engaging conversation.

Natalie’s 2008 report, Customer Service: A Keystone Of Your Corporate Revenue Strategy, includes an important timeline listing historical research regarding the impact of corporate culture and executive accountability on project failures.

The timeline graphic, which Natalie and I discuss in the podcast, is shown below. It strikingly demonstrates how little progress we’ve made in improving basic conditions needed to achieve successful projects.

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February 11th, 2009

IT failures roundup: software bugs everywhere

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:42 am

Categories: End-user impact, News roundup, Project failures

Tags: Software, Information Technology, Flash Memory, Tools & Techniques, Management, Michael Krigsman

Software permeates even the most seemingly low-tech aspects of our lives. As we know, wherever software is deployed, bugs are sure to follow. Here’s a small sampling of recent software glitches from around the world.

Although none of these failures is earth-shattering, they all inconvenienced “victims.” I find the breadth and variety of these glitches absolutely amazing.

Seattle parking meters. Seatlepi.com reports that even parking meters can suffer software failures:

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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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