Phil Simon's Blog, page 104

On Rush and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Hell has frozen over: Rush has been nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Opinions on the band have varied for decades and this announcement won’t change a thing. The word polarized is pretty apropos.

Now some clown at the LA Times is calling the band’s music mediocre.

Yeah, and Michael Jordan was a mediocre basketball player. Roger Federer is a mediocre tennis player.

As musicians, even all but the most vitriolic Rush detractors concede that each is incredibly skilled at his craft. There’s absolutely nothing mediocre about this band. Nothing.

Now, I’m nothing close to a musician, but listen to those who make a living playing and creating music. Members of Dream Theater, Metallica, Foo Fighers, Red Hot Chilipeppers, and scores of other highly successful and respected bands all cite Rush as huge influences. Would a band that produces mediocre music engender such respect among its peers–and musicains who grew up watching the band?

The Bottom Line

Rush fans don’t care what critics, the R&R HOF, or the general public think. Nothing that anyone writes or says will change the minds minds of fans, many of whom have been following Canadas finest for decades.

Decades.

Will Rush get in? My answer: Who cares?

Rush doesn’t. Most fans don’t. We will still love the band sans the imprimatur of some committee in Cleveland.

The State of the Cloud

In my second book, The Next Wave of Technologies (originally published in early 2010), I wrote about the difficulties that many organizations face as they attempt to move away from antiquated technologies, applications, systems, and mind-sets. Long story short: Change is hard.

Life Inside the Enterprise

The challenges related to deploying new technologies often has very little to do with the new technologies themselves for one simple reason: Technology does not exist in a vacuum. This is doubly true inside the enterprise. Cultural, political, and financial factors plague many organizations, even those that recognize the need to evolve. The mentality here can be described as “Ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.”

Without question, this mind-set has permeated many a C-suite over the years. However, tipping points do take place. In their book Jumping the Curve, Nicholas Imparato and Oren Harari write, “A primary lesson of history is that periodically, and often at the most inconvenient times, society needs to make a sharp break with old habits and deliberately learn new ways of behaving.”

You could write a book about that statement.

Now, one could hardly fault many CIOs for not immediately jumping into “the cloud.” The economy wasn’t great four years ago–and still isn’t today. Plus, early definitions of that amorphous term tended to engender confusion among senior executives, exacerbated in many cases by overeager industry analysts determined to put their own stamps on the term.

And then there were the early cloud blunders and dismissals, especially among existing powers-that-be. Microsoft nearly “killed the cloud” with T-Mobile in 2009. Earlier that same year, SAP faced a lawsuit in California stemming from a highly public system failure of its new cloud offering, a topic covered on this site more than three years ago. And let’s not forget Oracle, a company whose high-flying and bombastic CEO, Larry Ellison, mocked the cloud and companies flocking to it. (Of course, he’s singing a different tune now.)

This type of naysaying was understandable, since each company had a vested interest to maintain the status quo–i.e., to sell traditional on-premise hardware.

Only fairly recently did each of these massive enterprise software vendors get cloud religion, and not without a fair amount of kicking and screaming. At some point, things tipped. Cloud successes started to outnumber their failures. Perceived benefits began to outweigh their costs. Many CIOs started to hear more and more about the cloud. In fact, many were already and unknowingly using the cloud as consumers (read: Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Apple). Perhaps emboldened by nimble, cloud-native startups, more mid-sized and large organizations turned to the cloud.

So, where are we today?

Simon Says

The cloud is here to stay. To be sure, still quite a few organizations haven’t embraced it. Again, this is expected. There are always laggards with any new technology, particularly one as disruptive as cloud computing.

So, we’re out of the first inning but this game has a ways to go. Case in point: IBM is double down on the cloud. The company recently announced plans to deepen its commitment to cloud computing and expand its ecosystem.

If you think that cloud computing is going away, think again. We’re just getting started.

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This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Why Big Data is Like Porn

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. [Emphasis added.]

—Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.

The above quote comes from perhaps the most famous of all U.S. Supreme Court cases. The line “I’ll know it when I see it” has stood the test of time. What’s more, those seven words illustrate a number of things, not the least of which is the difficulty that even really smart people have in defining ostensibly simple terms.

Fast forward 48 years and many learned folks are having the same issue with respect to Big Data. Just what the heck is it, anyway?

Much like the term cloud computing, you can search in vain for days for “the right” definition of Big Data. I’d argue that such a definition doesn’t exist. Who can say with absolute certainty that one definition of the term is objectively better than another?

What Big Data is Not

Much like obscenity or pornography, perhaps Big Data is actually best defined against its inverse–i.e., that which it is not. In that vein, I love this definition from The Register:

Big Data is any data that doesn’t fit well into tables and that generally responds poorly to manipulation by SQL.

[T]he most important feature of Big Data is its structure, with different classes of big data having very different structures.

With that definition, we can start to look at examples. A Twitter feed is Big Data; the census isn’t. Images, graphical traces, Call Detail Records (CDRs) from telecoms companies, web logs, social data, RFID output can all be Big Data. Lists of your employees, customers, products are not.

Is this a bit techie for most folks? Sure and, while instructive, it’s hardly perfect. I’m sure that someone, somewhere out there has created a spreadsheet, database table, or flat file that contains the following fields:

Twitter handle
Time of tweet
Date of tweet
Actual tweet
Hashtags

As a general rule, though, these traditional data management tools aren’t enough to truly harness the power of Big Data. Microsoft Excel, Access, and even traditional relational databases just don’t cut it.

Simon Says: Big Data is a Mind-Set

While we’re on the subject of tools, Big Data is about so much more than merely buying, downloading, and/or deploying a new tool. Yes, Big Data requires new tools like Hadoop. You’re not going to get sentiment analysis out of SELECT statements.

More important, though, Big Data necessitates new mind-set. Regardless of your own personal definition of the term, don’t make the mistake of assuming that heretofore methods and applications are sufficient. They’re not.

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This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Platforms, Disruption, and Television

Originally published on HuffingtonPost. Click here to see the original article.

If there’s any industry ripe for disruption, it’s television. Cable TV companies have long help near-monopolies in local markets, often angering customers with fees and a general lack of choice. It’s no coincidence that more and more people are looking at ditching their TVs altogether for less expensive and more flexible options.

Enter BrightContext, a startup with big plans to disrupt television. By embracing platform thinking, Big Data, social media, and cloud computing, the company is poised to shake things up.

I recently sat down with my friend, co-founder John Funge, to talk about the industry, his exciting new company, and the future of television.

You’ve thrown yourself headlong into the real-time Internet space. Why?

We are living through a unique convergence of technological and market shifts. On the technical side, cloud computing in combination with new data storage technologies is enabling massive-scale applications that just a few years ago would have been thought prohibitively expensive – if not impossible.

From a user perspective, pervasive network connectivity, smartphones and tablets have untethered computing from desks.  At the same time, services such as Twitter are training users to expect real-time information to be pushed to them. These trends are fundamentally shifting user expectations.

So end user expectations for real-time features are increasing at just the same moment that back-end technology innovations are making large-scale, real-time interactivity possible. The opportunity is huge.

So, how does BrightContext fit into this new world?

Before BrightContext, my business partner and I built a company, Pickle.com. Scripps Networks–the folks that own Foodnetwork.com, HGTV.com, and a few other cable networks–ultimately acquired Pickle.

While at Pickle, our team managed the social and UGC platforms across Scripps’ properties.  So we had this amazing opportunity to work at the intersection of social media and television as things like Facebook and YouTube were becoming mainstream – all from the perspective of inside a major TV company.  Having spent years working in this context and thinking about the future of television, it took only a few minutes after the iPad was first released for us to realize that one of the major uses of the iPad was as a “coffee table computer” — and that it offered an amazing channel to provide experiences and content complementary to the linear programming.

We quickly realized a perfect storm of trends was colliding, buoyed by the iPad. These trends were going to quickly enable rapid innovation with respect to interactive television.  As we continued to drill into different social TV app ideas and use cases, we realized at the center of most all of them is this hard real-time data challenge. Specifically, how do you enable the potentially millions of people watching a TV broadcast to talk back and interact with each other in real-time?  It’s a hard technical problem that until now hasn’t really had a good solution.  That’s the genesis of the BrightContext platform.

As we got further into the problem, we realized that we were solving something much broader than just social TV.  Rather, we were solving a basic problem that applies to real-time applications in general.  It’s still very early in the development of the real-time Internet. As real-time interactivity in apps becomes mainstream, the demands for tools to process real-time data and power instant data communications within apps will grow immensely.

What does this mean to me as a user?

Over time, we see websites and mobile just becoming more and more “live.”   You’ll get notified instantly of changes in status or updates.  Imagine sort of the way that Twitter works, but pervasively throughout everything.  Basically, data subscribe and push will become as prominent as the request-respond approach that has dominated the Internet for the last two decades.

Another very interesting thing is what will happen around live audience engagement.  When you’re in a stadium or concert hall, you’re very aware of the other people in the audience.  However, when you’re online or watching from home, you’re not.  That’s going to change.  Increasingly, you’ll be aware of the other people looking at the same thing at the same time.  For example,  people don’t realize when they settle down on their sofa to watch TV  just how many other people are doing the same thing at the same time.  Reruns of programs – not to mention major events like the Olympics – can draw literally 50 or more stadiums worth of people all watching the same thing at the same time.  When you imagine letting all those people start to interact it’s exciting.  The same thing goes for websites.  Most people don’t realize that most major websites have a stadium of people browsing them at the same time.  What’s going to happen is that there’s going to be an increasing awareness of the live activity going on among other audience members – whether online or TV.  Users will directly interact with each other in gamified, fun ways other that will dramatically enhance the user experience.

From the perspective of business users this will mean that anywhere there is fast-moving data in an organization there will be an increasing emphasis on deriving instantaneous insight and reacting more quickly.  For example, if an ad campaign isn’t performing well, it will be addressed right away.  If a product on a store shelf stocks out, the inventory will be replenished faster.  Or better, the stock-out won’t ever happen. If a student is taking longer to solve certain types of problems, teachers will intervene sooner with more customized reinforcement. The list goes on and on.  You can see how real-time technology will enable a whole mind-shift about speed-to-insight and responsiveness.

Looking a bit further out, as more and more devices like your power meter will be connected to the Internet, there will be a geometric increase in the amount of real-time “status” information available to us. One of the big challenges will be to filter and sift through all this data and make valuable use of it.

The shift will be big and has the potential to touch almost every website and app.

You recently selected to present at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Event. What makes BrightContext disruptive?

The BrightContext platform is quite disruptive. First, we’re radically lowering the barriers to entry to a specialized technology that to date has been the purview of only places like the CIA, Twitter, and big Wall Street banks.  Our easy-to-use API, web-based tools, and cloud model will open up a whole new opportunity landscape to developers.

Second, in addition to re-writing the economics of an existing technology market, the BrightContext platform is enabling whole new categories of apps. For example, a few years ago, it would have been thought virtually impossible to let the entire TV audience for an NFL game predict the next play, play-by-play throughout the game using their smartphones or ipads.  With BrightContext, that’s relatively easy.

And finally, we’re empowering other disrupters.  Sort of disruption squared.  By democratizing an expensive, specialized technology – we’re enabling millions of developers worldwide to build innovative real-time apps.

Where do you see the market in five years?

Over the next five years we will see the next chapter of growth of the Internet, mobile, and social media technologies.  As I described above, real-time will be one of the defining trends over this period. Users will expect information to be contextually relevant, timely, and pushed to them instantly. We sometimes call it the “Twitterification” of the Internet – keeping in mind, of course, that Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

Should Training be Role- or Process-Based?

A reader of Why New Systems Fail asked me the following question via my site:

Hello Phil,

I am about to start in the PMO for a multi-site manufacturing organization. We are a very large player in the medical diagnostics sector doing a SAP implementation. I read Why New Systems Fail on the plane back from the US to Germany last weekend. Most impressive I must say and something I will be immediately recommending within our larger organization. You hit the nail on the head in almost all areas.

I have one burning question which I felt was not covered in much detail. It concerns whether user training should be (or should “best” be) either process-based or role-based.

From what I gather from my predecessor, the first release of the program went the process-based approach. That is to say that they trained the users along the whole process e.g. everything in SAP Materials Management (MM) that one could want to know. Afterwards the complaint (lesson learned) was that the user knew very well about the end-to-end processes and how one lever affects many other things in ERP systems. The users felt however that they did not know enough to do their specific jobs and thus struggled for some time.

In the second release (just after going live), the program did role-based training–i.e., very specific screen-by-screen training (and well documented) but very specific to everyone’s role and job. Again people were not happy with these either because they felt they knew their own bit but not much about how they got their data or how it gets processed further by other functions. They were missing the overview which the release 1 people had but did not always appreciate! Catch 22!

Now the 3rd release site comes to me on my first week on the job wanting the same process training as release 1! The problem is that because we have quite decent change control discipline (a good thing) and that the 3rd release goes live in Feb 2013 there is really no time or budget to redo all the training again to process based because the scope for release 3 training is currently the same as 2.

In my heart I have to believe that my predecessors probably went to both extremes in each release (for the best of intentions) and that really a hybrid approach would have been maybe more effective. At the same time I know very well that you can never please all the people and sometimes none of the people. I am certain this stalemate is going to cause me problems and would like to know how very experienced consultants handle such a situation.

Of course we can use the heavy hand approach and simply deny the change. I can see this being a major hurdle, especially during Christmas.

Any tips on how to handle such a situation?

Regards,

David

Simon Says

I know a thing or two about training, having taught more than 100 classes in an organizational setting in my career. Training is never perfect; something is always lacking. The question on these types of projects is typically: Was the training really so bad, so ineffective that people wouldn’t be able to do their jobs once the application went live? If the answer is truly yes, then kudos for the attendees for calling this out. Going live without sufficient knowledge of how applications work is a recipe for disaster.

However, I have rarely found training to be all that bad, especially if the following hold true:

The training environment was functioning properly (sometimes not a given). An unstable training application will almost always lead to a choppy class–and disaffected employees.
Attendees were able to leave their day jobs at their desk during the class
The class was taught by a respectable consultant/system integrator

Was this the case? If the answers here are yes, then I wonder if the issues here were actually culture and change management–not training.

Training is often the scapegoat for all sorts of personal, resource, and political factors vitiating projects like these. Jane doesn’t like the new system and has her mind back at her office. John took calls and answered emails during the class.

Now, to answer your question more directly. There’s a reason that I don’t address it in the book. Ideally, there’s no distinction between role- and process-based training. I would sure hope that the CIO here isn’t running payroll and the head of HR is handling key procurement and accounting processes. Organizations ought to align their roles and processes. If there’s a big disconnect here, then I’m not surprised that there are major training issues–and problems well beyond any individual class.

Schedulding Made Easy

I’m a huge fan of Tungle.me because I just can’t stand exchanging seven emails to schedule a meeting. Bugs me. Turns out that Tungle’s going away effective December 2, 2012. What to do?

Check out Doodle.com. It operates much like Tungle.me and even has polling. It’s free but you can upgrade for premium features. I’m a big fan.

For more of these tips, check out the New Small App for iOS, currently free.

Keynote: Management in the Age of the Platform

My 56-minute keynote and Q&A from the Columbus, OH OCLC event in September of this year is now up. I talk about the management philosophies of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. I also discuss the similarities between Instagram and YouTube, Microsoft’s purchase of Yammer, and a whole host of other topics.

Post #500: In Defense of the Big Idea

In a world where I feel so small

I can’t stop thinking big.

–Neil Peart, Rush, “Caravan”

Note: This is the 500th post on my site. Golf applause.

As a writer and netizen, I think about the demise of big ideas quite a bit. These days, we consume content as quickly as possible. 140 characters. Texts. Alerts. 30-second YouTube videos. Shorter books or, better yet, summaries of shorter books.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this type of content. I consume and even generate a great deal of this type of tactical material myself. I get it. We’re busy. Really busy. We just don’t have the time to spend on longer works.

But there’s a downside to culture that generally embraces “less is more.”

Often lost in all of this is the big idea, the in-depth work that many people consider inaccessible. Far too many of us don’t give the big idea a chance. The prevalence of the “long is bad” mind-set results in people systematically ignoring quality works just because they’re, well, too long. I’m talking about many 17-minute songs. The TV show that doesn’t resolve everything in 22 or 45 minutes, like Breaking Bad. A movie like Memento that you have to watch several times to even begin to understand it. The 600-page book that, in fact, needs to be that long because of its ambitious scope.

On Big-Idea Books

At a high level, there several types of business books–not counting biographies and company profiles. First, there are books that offer a series of tactical tips that further some specific aim: speaking better, using social media effectively, cleaning your house, or whatever. Many books do this. They tend to have titles or subtitles with numbers in them–e.g., 100 Ways to Do This or The Five-Step Program to Do That.

And this is fine.

The second type–and the one that I vastly prefer–is those books that start with a big idea or theory that explains an important trend and doesn’t tell readers precisely what to do. These books don’t necessarily lay out specific steps for the readers. Chris Anderson’s books, Free and The Long Tail, do this exceptionally well. So do Malcolm Gladwell’s texts. While I wouldn’t presume to compare myself to them as writers, big ideas were at the core of my last two books.

I would rather fail with a big idea than succeed with a small one. Rush did the same thing in 1976 and it worked out pretty well for the band.

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Wait by Frank Partnoy

I’ve been told more than a few times that I’m not the world’s most patient man. My default mind-set tends to lean towards action over inertia.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not convinced that that’s entirely bad, but I know that I can and should probably contemplate certain things a bit more than I do. Maybe I should let system 2 occasionally dominate system 1.

Against this backdrop, I recently read Wait (affiliate link) by Frank Partnoy and I’m glad that I did. In an era of constant information and connectivity, the pressure to act, do to something, never seems to end. While books like Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (affiliate link) espouse the virtues of immediate action and trusting your instinct, this book asks important questions like, “What are the benefits of not acting?”

Use a wide variety of interesting case studies that include sports, the military, etc., Partnoy makes a compelling that we shouldn’t just do something; we should stand there. I enjoyed how the author weaved in real-world examples with academic research.

This is easily one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read this year. I heartily recommend reading it. It has made a significant impact on me and I want to read more from this author.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy from the publisher, Public Affairs.

Inc. Article #15: The Case for Premium Web Hosting

My 15th Inc. Magazine article is now live. Here it is.

It never ceases to amaze me: I’ll go to a networking event or mixer and meet a fellow small business owner. We’ll exchange cards. When I look at his or her business card, a shocking percentage of the time, there is no company website.

Why? I can only assume that that company lacks a proper website. Hopefully, it goes without saying that, along with maintaining a dated and poorly designed websites, this is a huge mistake.

But even companies with proper websites often make what can be a huge blunder: They opt for Web hosting companies that charge $5 per month for shared or basic service. There’s a gaggle of low-cost providers out there and perhaps you’re familiar with some of them. In fact, you might even use GoDaddy. If you had, you may well have been one of the thousands of customers affected by its recent outage.

Now there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with skimping on Web hosting, but I advise all of my small business clients against it. In fact, I argue that they should strongly consider paying more for premium Web hosting. I went this route about a year ago for my own sites and have only one regret: that I didn’t do it sooner.

The Benefits

I’m unabashed in my belief that managed hosting platforms like WP Engine are worth their weight in gold. At a high level, they offer more features and they cause far fewer headaches.

First, let’s talk about the benefits. Many premium services offer staging areas, incredibly valuable tools that give customers the ability to test a website prior to making it live to the world. Routine back-ups act as de facto restore points and allow customers to quickly undo mistakes–as opposed to requiring you to manually reverse bad code or spend hours trying to find out what broke.

But forget for a minute these additional bells and whistles. Many business owners will take a clean, fast, and simple site over a feature-laden, slow, and messy site any day of the week and twice on Sunday. What good is a new feature if it takes forever to load or it crashes the site? What if my site goes down weekly and takes a long time to restore?

Managed hosting can offer the best of both worlds. At a high level, it makes enterprise-quality hosting affordable for small- to medium-sized businesses. Austin Gunter, the director of community and content at WP Engine, explained it to me like this:

Think of managed hosting as a bit like NetJets, the world leader in private aviation. NetJets’ customers can fly in private jets with all related amenities at a relatively affordable price. Like managed hosting, NetJets is certainly a bit more expensive than the low-cost alternative. However, in both case, you get what you pay for.

Gunter is certainly right about the parallels between commercial airlines and shared hosting. Both are generally slim on features because of their price.

Brass tacks: No hosting company can guarantee that your site will be issue-free. The question facing companies of all size isn’t “Will your site experience a problem?” Rather, the question is, “What will your hosting company do when your site experiences an outage or other problem?”

It’s been my experience that premium hosting companies offer vastly superior support relative to their low-cost brethren. I’ve also saved a great deal of time and money because I no longer face throttling issues and know that I am not solely responsible for security. My hosting company has my back because, quite simply, I’m paying them to be there for me.

Simon Says

Much like everything else in life and in business, you get what you pay for. Consider WP Engine or WebSynthesis as viable (if more expensive) Web hosting companies.

What say you?

Click here to read the article on Inc.