News, Views & Reviews on Digital Process Automation, BPM, Performance Management & IT industry trends
The IT industry and its dynamics – market, resources, markets, demand, and so on.
When the gunshot is fired at the start of the Olympic final of a 100m dash, 8 world-class sprinters on the block will leap towards their dream of Olympic glory. All 8 equally skilled, each one equally trained, equally driven, all of them with the same hunger to win. Each one committed to chasing (pardon the poor pun) their life’s single purpose and calling, and each one, to be sure, aspiring to be chased from the moment that gunshot goes…
When you are an enterprise spending top dollar on software products, you like to be assured that you are betting on products that satisfy a fairly logical and predictable check-list that assess the vendors products on maturity, stability, cost effectiveness, ability to deliver to the need and so on. For decades these have really been at the core of buyer expectations that software vendors have tried to talk to. And in a sense, most vendors have traditionally also built and…
I’ve just returned from a rather adventurous and eventful trip involving two important dots on Gartner’s magic quadrant for BPM. One is a tech behemoth interested in almost everything related to IT, and the other, a vendor that has a laser focus on BPM. The first dot is of course IBM and the other dot, allegedly the ‘best one’ on the quadrant, Appian. I am talking, of course, about IBM IMPACT at Las Vegas and AppianWorld at Washington D.C. Although…
You might find this funny, and maybe even somewhat disjointed in logic, but the IT industry after all these years, is now going through its teen years and it appears to have all the makings of ‘teenage’ as we know it. Even if 2014 is only its second year, the anxiety, the tension is all very visible. Cloud, Mobile, Social, internet-of-things, – look at it anyway you like, there is a writing on the wall that the extent of change…
Craig Reid posted a great write-up about customer on-boarding this week that I think is a good read covering some of the usual issues plaguing the old customer on-boarding process. I am repeatedly surprised when I learn about how badly organizations – fairly large ones at that – handle customer on-boarding. If on-boarding is as important as it might seem, judging from the vehemence with which they agree it is, how come it turned out such a mess? Craig lists…
Even as the enterprise IT landscape evolved over the past decades, markets, economy, and technology forces have affected key considerations that dominate and influence annual IT budgets. The nature and the unique mix of these forces, in any given year, have correspondingly triggered a rather unique set of influencers shaping IT budgets. We saw the wave of ‘seamless’ enterprise thinking; then the idea of an extended enterprise arose. Next was data-intelligence, followed by compliance, and then there was E2.0….
When, during a vendor presentation, the PowerPoint section separator mentions ‘Key Case Studies’ or something like that, you do one of the following – Lean forward in your chair and listen intently to see parallels to your own situation Yawn involuntarily. Or voluntarily, depending on who is running the slides. Interrupt at the 23rd second after the title of the next slide has been read, to ask – “did you use agile or waterfall?” and then drift into a rewarding…
When a good friend and I exchanged a few tweets back and forth the other day, it began like the usual exchange of views over news items that the #bpm timeline throws up once in a frequent while. But the ‘twonversation’ with my twitter counterpart – a venerable thinker in technology, particularly BPM – got me thinking and reinforced what I have always thought about the skills that really make a real good BPM Consultant. My friend had created…
…that’s right. I don’t belong here. In fact, what the hell am I doing here? Before you jump to the wrong conclusions, those aren’t my words. You’ll know whose words they are in just a minute. But before that, I want to spend a moment to talk about something that seems to be (but probably is not) a new problem. A problem that is giving more and more program managers and project managers sudden attacks of sleeplessness and acute cases…
One of the pet peeves for the fanatical BPM believers among us has been the gap between what outcomes of BPM initiatives could be if done right, versus what it seems to be on the ground. We (the fanatics, that is) have been looking at that gap and discussing and debating why BPM benefits seem so elusive, why customers find it so challenging to do all the right things in order to ensure great benefits and so on. But…
One of my friends thinks ‘Sales’ is about talking. Another friend I follow on Twitter thinks it is about ‘convincing’ the customer. I wince every time I hear someone characterize an engaging, fluent, fast talking, bloke as ‘sales material’. Sales, as you might agree, is really not any of that. Definitely not. Unless you sell snake oil or some hair cream that promises magical appearance of hair overnight on sprawling bald patches on the head. Glib talk, ‘convincing’, pushiness…none…
When we are at the receiving end of poor customer service, it unfailingly ticks us off. Being champions of process only makes it a little more painful because even while we go through a first-hand experience of poor customer service –- be it over the phone or a counter –- we are also immediately able to see beneath the surface and understand why things are likely going wrong. Now, on a theoretical plane, you might think that this ability…
It has been a boring pattern for all of Mankind’s history that was ever recorded. Or, for that matter, not recorded. And you’d surely have noticed it yourself if you are from a big family and/or have a large circle of friends from different age-groups. For as far back as I can remember, proud new parents have made it their core mission to make me believe how particularly smart their kid, that little joy-bundle was and how he displayed…
Last week, while I was in London on work, I had to stand around for over an hour outside a client’s office building, in the cursed cold weather, waiting for my colleague to show up. I could only enter the office with him as he was the one with access to the building and authority to sign me in. This kind of a situation isn’t always a very pleasant experience. Especially if it was a first-thing-in-the-morning meeting, and more…
One of the recurring themes in product demos in the recent past is that all too familiar spiel about being “technology for business”. To be sure, this T for B angle is a really good thing and all that. But it’s a problem when vendors lay that out freely and happily without having a product that genuinely lives up to that spiel. And what’s worse, when they notice that you don’t display any skepticism and that your eyebrows didn’t…