Extend the Principles of Agile to Deliver Maximum Business Value.

            The Agile movement has already helped thousands of IT organizations develop applications at light speed. But to maximize Agile’s impact on the business, you have to push its principles further throughout the enterprise until Agile delivery becomes continuous delivery, and continuous delivery leads to true business agility. The four stages that lead from Agile development to the agile enterprise can revolutionize the way business value reaches customers’ hands.

Stage 1: Agile development

Agile initially emerged as a collection of software development practices in which solutions evolve incrementally through the collaboration of self-organizing teams. Because early adoption grew out of grassroots, developer-led initiatives, Agile matured first within the developer space. It manifested in practices designed to shorten the feedback loop and uncover problems earlier in the cycle so they could be addressed sooner. It made coders fast and flexible.

Stage 2: Agile delivery

In many IT shops that had been organized in traditional functional silos, testers initially stood on the sidelines and wondered what Agile meant for them. The effect was a pseudo-Agile process in which code was developed in iterations but then tossed over the wall for QA teams to test the same way they always had.

The IT organizations that have had the best results with Agile have torn down the silos between development and QA to create truly cross-functional teams. To allow testers to keep up with the accelerated development pace and not sacrifice quality for velocity, they have revamped their approach to incorporate more robust test automation that can be run on a near-continuous basis. They have also adopted advanced techniques, such as service level (API) testing and exploratory testing to mitigate risk as early as possible.

Many organizations adopting Agile today are at this level. But as Agile adoption continues to expand and leaders see the value it can bring to delivery, momentum is gathering to break down the next level of organizational silos.
Four stages to an agile enterprise

Stage 3: Continuous delivery

Agile delivery teams have made great strides, but what is the point of rapidly building new features if those features just sit and wait to be released? To capitalize on the advances in delivery and better translate them into business value, it’s time to extend Agile development principles to deployment.

Continuous delivery, which is enabled by the DevOps movement, extends the Agile mind-set to incorporate IT operations. It focuses on what is ultimately important—shorter cycles for actually putting functionality in the hands of users. It relies not only on better collaboration between the two disciplines, but on comprehensive automation of the build, test and deployment process, so that—at the extreme level—every code change that passes automated functional, performance and security testing could be immediately deployed into production. This level of integration and collaboration between delivery and operations allows releases to be driven by business need rather than operational constraints.

Blurring the lines between development and operations isn’t easy, but it is critical. According to Forrester Research, some traditional process models can “encourage handoffs and demarcation of responsibility and ownership rather than collaboration, teaming, and shared goals. This may lead each party to think that the other is trying to pull a fast one, leading to confrontational situations and heavy reliance on paperwork and formal documentation. By sharing process and building a cross-functional team inclusive of operations, IT organizations can remove the disconnects.”1

The best way to start moving toward continuous delivery is to begin embracing DevOps principles. Include operations staff in demo meetings and planning sessions, share assets (test, build and deployment) and automate as much as possible. Examine KPIs and incentives to ensure alignment across the two functions. You’ll know you’re making progress when you see overall cycle times, from idea inception to released functionality, decrease dramatically.

Stage 4: Business agility

Although few organizations have achieved this stage, it’s what all are aiming for. True business agility happens when the entire organization can continuously analyze results and adapt accordingly.

Here’s how it happens: Deploying smaller increments more frequently not only puts features into the hands of the users at a much faster rate, but it also facilitates a steady stream of user feedback. User feedback lets you apply the Agile concept of “inspect and adapt” at the business level. It provides timely insight into shifting user preferences and helps you make precise course corrections and more informed decisions.

Business agility requires more than just IT. 

Achieving true agility will require a cultural shift within your organization before you can fully take advantage of the opportunity it presents. Business stakeholders must be empowered to make decisions quickly without legacy processes—such as annual budgeting—standing in their way. Other functions, such as sales, marketing and customer support, also play vital roles and need to be tied in effectively.

If you’re already operating at Stage 3, it’s time to look ahead. Start by asking yourself these questions:

Which of your core business applications could benefit or gain differentiation from constant user feedback?
What non-IT areas of your organization would need to be better integrated to get full, end-to-end agility?
What legacy processes might need to be revisited and transformed?

When you start to achieve more of the business objectives that drove your projects in the first place—increased revenue, faster ROI, improved customer satisfaction—you’ll know you’re approaching true business agility.

Why You Should Take this Social Enterprise Seriously

Salesforce Presents New Social Enterprise with Chatter, Mobility and Data

Organizations should take this social enterprise seriously, and especially those that see social media as essential to their future and Salesforce as well

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) CEO Marc Benioff unveiled the latest evolution of the company’s strategy and supporting technology for cloud computing and mobile technologies.

Its aim is to enable businesses to engage with customers and prospects via social media channels – what Salesforce calls the “social enterprise” – and empower employee and customer social networks to operate individually and together. Note I did not mention CRM, which doesn’t have a role in this platform for basic interactions with prospects and customers and is accompanied by a large ecosystem of partners that provide dedicated marketing and contact center applications. As summarized in its announcement, Salesforce’s strategy is clearly different from that of others in the applications market, including Oracle and SAP, which have products for the cloud computing environment and have made strides into integrating collaboration and social media capabilities into their applications.

Salesforce.com’s social enterprise is a big step forward from the strategy it talked about at last year’s Dreamforce, and is now focused helping companies build social profiles of employees and customers that can managed and augmented with information about the individuals from other social networks. The company’s partners are also working on such capabilities. For example, software from Reachable can present the relationships among individuals in a social graph. This week Roambi introduced analytic and mobile integration with Salesforce Chatter, which is another advance in what my colleague David Menninger calls the consumerization of collaborative BI.

Salesforce says significant technological improvements in the coming Winter 2012 release and later will make Chatter a true social business tool with many methods to chat, share, approve and otherwise enable the collaborative process. Another addition slated for Chatter is the ability to include presence information in the chat the way most instant messaging networks do today in a feature the company calls Chatter Now.

Users will be able to embed and share video, graphics and other kinds of files. Users who have too much traffic in their feeds will be able to filter content based on keywords. Chatter Approvals will be able to handle prompted interactions. With Chatter Customer Groups users will be able to invite and interact with customers or external people in private discussion groups. Those looking to build custom enhancements to the software can employ the Chatter API using REST and streaming that can be embedded with Chatter to interact with applications. Last year iWay Software demonstrated third-party integration to take any systems event and publish it into a Chatter feed.

Surprisingly, iWay, which is an Information Builders company, was not at Dreamforce this year, but it has paved the way for enterprise notifications in Salesforce’s social enterprise efforts. Salesforce also is targeting organizations using Microsoft SharePoint; they will be able to use Chatter instead of Microsoft’s messenger technology. Salesforce with Chatter Connect will be able to integrate its feeds with other environments to make a more seamless social and collaborative environment.

The expanded capabilities for Chatter, and Salesforce’s enhanced profiles of customers and prospects, will be integrated with the Service Cloud in an application called Chatter Service to help improve customer interactions for contact centers. Chatter Service will also be able to integrate into Facebook. This could create a new class of customer self-service for organizations that want to move their initial interactions into social media, and move questions and comments into more formalized customer service channels for resolution.

To address the full needs of a contact center though beyond social media will create other applications for which Salesforce has plenty of partners exhibiting including Contactual, inContact, Interactive Intelligence, Five9 and LiveOps. Salesforce showed how it can add value to the Sales Cloud with its advances in Chatter, but we do not expect to see a more integrated set of methods till 2012. Until then you can use Chatter by itself to interact with your sales team and the new versions will now be a good reason to evaluate them for what they call social sales. If you are looking to address the broader set of sales activities and processes beyond SFA, Salesforce has plenty of partners that should be considered if you care about efficiency and achieving sales quotas and targets.

Salesforce.com’s social enterprise direction will require simpler access to applications from smartphones and tablets. The company has created an engine to transform its applications to operate in an HTML5 environment so they can be utilized on smartphones and tablets from Apple, Android devices, RIM hardware and Microsoft’s, too. Salesforce calls this its Touch approach and will release it sometime in the future. You can sign up to be notified when that happens with Salesforce’s Touch. This will be a significant new option for anyone operating in the Salesforce.com environment.

One of the key pushes by Salesforce is database.com, which is designed to securely store organizations’ data in the cloud; it can be used by applications running on the company’s force.com platform for cloud apps as well as new social enterprise offerings that will come out in 2012. Our upcoming research in business data in the cloud will unveil more challenges and opportunity for improvement to support technology like database.com. This offering makes it easy to provision a database and get started. Its pricing and capabilities suggest that database.com is a transactional centralized data service. It’s not clear whether it will be useful for business analytics, which our research finds to be a major need in organizations today.

Business analytics has not been one of Salesforce strengths which its customers can attest which is why the portfolio of partners providing these capabilities is quite significant. Many of them also depend on their own database technology for analytics that operates in the cloud. If database.com is not able to support the analytics needs within the database its potential and impact to its customers could be hindered.

The challenge with database.com is that if you are trying to do automated data integration efficiently, including migration, synchronization or replication across clouds of data under applications or to the enterprise, you will need a separate product, and while Salesforce has many partners, none are part of the announcement or listed on the database.com website. As David Menninger has pointed out, integrating information from diverse clouds of applications requires work. Our newly completed research in Business Data in the Cloud will enumerate those challenges. If you are looking for help in dealing with integration in cloud and enterprise, consider Dell Boomi, Informatica, Pervasive and SnapLogic, with its dedicated data integration technologies.

Salesforce.com makes the social enterprise interesting, and it is taking the lead in advancing these kinds of interactions, especially with business-to-consumer companies, which need the most help in dealing with social media. Its ecosystem of partners and the ability to integrate with consumer social media give Salesforce an early advantage in the market.

If you are looking for new core applications in marketing, sales and customer service, you will need to invest in the partners to make this happen. It’s not easy to determine how to get the full value in your Salesforce.com investments, but it is worth the effort. If you are in sales or customer service departments or are trying to get a great mobile strategy, come and let us know as we can definitely help get what you need today. Organizations should take this social enterprise seriously, and especially those that see social media as essential to their future and Salesforce as well.


Kinect Turns Any Surface Into a Touch Screen

              Researchers combine a Kinect sensor with a pico projector to expand the possibilities for interactive screens.

A new prototype can transform a notebook into a notebook computer, a wall into an interactive display, and the palm of your hand into a smart phone display. In fact, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University say their new shoulder-mounted device, called OmniTouch, can turn any nearby surface into an ad hoc interactive touch screen.

Hands-on "screen": A proof-of-concept system allows smart phones to use virtually any surface as a touch-based interactive display.


OmniTouch works by bringing together a miniature projector and an infrared depth camera, similar to the kind used in Microsoft's Kinect game console, to create a shoulder-worn system designed to interface with mobile devices such as smart phones, says co-inventor Chris Harrison, a postgraduate researcher at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Pittsburgh and a former intern at Microsoft Research. Instead of relying on screens, buttons, or keys, the system monitors the user's environment for any available surfaces and projects an interactive display onto one or more of them.

OmniTouch does this automatically, using the depth information provided by the camera to build a 3-D model of the environment, says Harrison. The camera acquires depth information about the scene by emitting a patterned beam of infrared light and using the reflections to calculate where surfaces are in the room. This eliminates the need for external calibration markers. The system rebuilds the model dynamically as the user or the surface moves—for example, the position of a hand or the angle or orientation of a book—so the size, shape, and position of these projections match those of the improvised display surfaces, he says. OmniTouch "figures out what's in front you and fits everything on to it."

The system also monitors the environment for anything cylindrical and roughly finger-sized to work out when the user is interacting with it, again using depth information to determine when a finger or fingers make contact with a surface. This lets users interact with arbitrary surfaces just as they would a touch screen, says Harrison. Similarly, objects and icons on the ad hoc "screens" can be swiped and pinched to scroll and zoom, much like on a traditional touch screen. In one demonstration art application, for example, OmniTouch used a nearby wall or table as a canvas and the palm of the user's hand as the color palette.


The shoulder-mounted setup is completely impractical, admits Hrvoje Benko, a researcher in Natural Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, who also worked on the project, along with colleague Andrew Wilson. "But it's not where you mount it that counts," he says. "The core motivation was to push this idea of turning any available surface into an interactive surface." All the components used in OmniTouch are off the shelf and shrinking all the time. "So I don't think we're so far from it being made into a pendant or attached to glasses," says Benko.

Duncan Brumby, a researcher at the University College London Interaction Center, in England, calls OmniTouch a fun and novel form of interaction. The screen sizes of mobile devices can be limiting, he says. "There's a growing interest in this area of having ubiquitous, intangible displays embedded in the environment," he says. And although new generations of smart phones tend to have increasingly higher-quality displays, Brumby reckons users would be willing to put up with lower-quality projected images, given the right applications.

Precisely which applications is hard to predict, says Harrison. "It's an enabling technology, just like touch screens. Touch screens themselves aren't that exciting," he says—it's what you do with them. But the team has built several sample applications; one allows users to virtually annotate a physical document, and another incorporates hand gestures to allow OmniTouch to infer whether the information being displayed should be made public or kept private.

"Using surfaces like this is not novel," says Pranav Mistry a researcher at MIT's Media Labs. Indeed, two years ago, Mistry demonstrated a system called SixthSense, which projected displays from a pendant onto nearby surfaces. In the original version, Mistry used markers to detect the user's fingers, but he says that since then, he has also been using a depth camera. "The novelty here [with OmniTouch] is the technology," he says. "The new thing is the accuracy and making it more robust."

Indeed, the OmniTouch team tested the system on 12 subjects to see how it compared with traditional touch screens. Presenting their findings this week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Santa Barbara, the team showed it was possible to display incredibly small buttons, just 16.2 millimeters in size, before users had trouble clicking on them. With a traditional touch screen, the lower limit is typically around 15 millimeters, says Harrison.

Reorganize Your Past, Online

A Web service developed by Microsoft Research lets people curate their own personal history.

Microsoft researchers are set to launch Project Greenwich, a website that helps users assemble and chronologically organize content about a person, event, or any other subject. The site, to launch in beta on October 31, allows users to archive uploaded items, such as photos and scans of objects, alongside links to existing Web content around a horizontal timeline marked with dates. Different timelines can be combined and displayed on the same page or merged.

Project Greenwich users attach images, maps, and other visual content, plus accompanying text, to relevant dates on their timelines. Each entry, which a viewer can click to see in full, is illustrated with thumbnail pictures in chronological order to show it in the context of other entries, and potentially alongside other timelines.

"We are interested in the creative act of reflecting on the past," says Richard Banks, lead designer on the project. "Actually sitting down and spending time creatively thinking about the past by making a photo album or a timeline is very different to existing online content being ordered chronologically."

The website was provisionally called Timelines by its developers at Microsoft Research Cambridge, in England. This was hastily changed due to the similarity to Facebook's new Timeline feature, which allows users to scroll chronologically through pictures, updates, and event listings related to their lives or those of their friends. Facebook's format uses indicators such as the numbers of comments that content has attracted to automatically highlight key events. Users can also manually choose what should be included and left out.


Banks, who is a principal interaction designer in the Computer Mediated Living group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, was partly inspired by a suitcase of around 200 photographs left by his grandfather Ken Cook, who flew bombers over Germany during World War II, on his death in 2006. As an example of what can be done using Project Greenwich, he has created representations of his grandfather's life merged with historical content on the Web about the war and the British Royal Air Force. "The ability to merge different timelines about, say, people and events creates interesting contrasts between authoritative and personal versions of events," adds Banks.

For several years, Banks has been studying how the increasing digitization of our lives affects how we deal with the past, remember the dead, and create memorabilia. Project Greenwich builds on previous projects developed by the Computer Mediated Living group. One, called Family Archive, was an interactive tabletop touch screen with an integrated camera. It was designed to allow family members to organize their digital memorabilia alongside scans of physical artifacts. Banks also previously developed a prototype called Timecard, a digital photo frame with an interface that allowed users to create timelines about the people or events featured in the displayed images.


The beta launch will allow the team to gather data on how people think about time and reconstruct the past, what elements they choose to include, and the ways they contrast personal and existing content. This information will shape its ultimate form and potentially also inform the way other future Microsoft products are designed. Project Greenwich may ultimately become a commercial Microsoft website, or it could be integrated into new versions of existing products or entirely new products. This will be decided later, partly based on the response to the beta launch. Banks expects to include new features in later versions, such as the ability to print timelines created on the site; to embed them in documents, such as blogs or homework; and to allow for multiple individuals to contribute to the same entry.

Mobility Matters: Delivering Needed Information at the Right Time

           Demand for BI as a means to get maximum value from information has never been higher as businesses increasingly compete in real time and require integrated information from across the enterprise. An old saw says BI gets "the right information to the right people at the right time." It's really time to add "via the right medium" to that mix.

Automating business decisions is one path to BI maturity. Triggering actions automatically, based on changes in corporate data, can arise beneficially from a solid understanding of how decisions are made today.

But we also know that many decisions are multifaceted, and a knowledge worker's analysis will continue to be a part of effective business intelligence.


Effective analysis is getting more complicated for knowledge workers. The more involved aspects require understanding what is happening and combining that with summarized historical data to build a set of possible actions. These decision "analytics" are the basis of competitive advantage for organizations today. Once calculated, they are put to effective use, utilizing the best medium available for real-time delivery.

Like water, information and analytics must flow through the path of least resistance, utilizing the deployment option that turns the information into valuable business action most quickly.
BI Deployment Option History

The accepted paradigm of effective business intelligence must change. Once, BI was exclusively made of reports built by IT from overnight-batch-loaded data warehouses, which replicated a single or small set of source systems. Those reports were deployed to the personal computers of end users in what now seems, in hindsight, a very heavy-handed and resource- intensive process.

Delivering a report to a user's personal computer on a regular basis is nowhere near the pinnacle of BI achievement. Shops still operating with this mentality are leaving tremendous value on the table.

Today the norm for BI involves "zero footprint" Web-based delivery of reports. This improvement allows information to reach many more users. A parallel development is that, while the detailed transactional data is necessary to be accessible on a drill-through basis, it is the rapid availability of summary level information that activates the process.

The majority of users have become more accustomed to a targeted presentation layer. Dashboards represent an advanced form of information delivery, second only to operational BI as a mature approach to disseminating information. Acting on dashboards that already have a certain amount of knowledge worker intelligence built in moves the organization to real-time competitiveness.

When you add mobility to the picture, notifications take on a whole new utility. Notifications can be sent to mobile devices when the dashboard data changes - or, rather, changes in a way that is meaningful to the knowledge worker. Mobile applications provide useful notifications and remove email as an extra step in the process.

Notifications, combined with the ability to immediately access the information wherever the knowledge worker is, provide many advantages over a dashboard, which requires Web browser technologies.


Business Mobility

If the past several years have brought a sea change in social culture, it is clearly in the use of mobile devices. What was once a phone for verbal communication has become a favored medium for email, Web access, music, podcasts, photos and information about weather, dining and travel. This has all happened in a short period of time and the trend will surely continue.

As case studies attest, mobile devices and tablet computers are highly useful business tools. The flexibility that they offer to knowledge workers no longer tied to a physical location is now seen to be as necessary in business. Achieving real-time business mobility helps information flow like water through the path of least resistance. It facilitates less hunting and gathering on the part of the information consumer by delivering summarized information, supported by detail by BI systems.

The biggest business factor driving the need for mobility is the real-time nature of new business needs. Out-of-stock conditions, customer complaints and fraud are not optimally solved with reporting. In order to address these issues, information cannot be out of date. Fortunes can be gained and lost by suboptimal business decision timing. Data warehouses built with a personal computer usage layer create a distinct challenge to the optimal timing of decisions.

The preferred timing of intelligence gathering is during the immediate occurrence of a trigger event. Business is becoming a world where the players are always plugged in, and expect and need to make immediate decisions. Therefore, business units - and the systems they utilize for real-time decision-making - need high quality, high performing, corporately arbitrated information in real-time.

For competitive parity, it is imperative that the information management function not only responds to business needs, but also brings solutions to the table in real-time and ensures that they are visibly exposed for decision-makers.

Real-time information delivered to an abandoned desktop or to the Web that inherently involves multiple steps for the user to derive value does not exploit the potential of available on-time information. Businesspeople need easy access to accurate information delivered to them at any time or place. The answer is mobile BI, utilizing the mobile device as the data access layer.

Getting the Most out of Business Analytics

             The expanding managerial movement to adopt analytics is being spurred by the needs for improved organizational performance and a sharpened competitive edge. Now that the benefits of applying analytics for insights and better decisions are being accepted, the next question is: How should an organization get the maximum yield and benefits from business analytics?

Carlson’s Law: Bottom-Up versus Top-Down Ideas

A trend with applying analytics is a demonstration of “Carlson’s Law,” posited by Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International in Silicon Valley. It states that: “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone, and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

A generally accepted way to drive the adoption of analytics is with executive team sponsorship and formally establishing a competency center for analytics. Unfortunately, the conditions are not always right for these. Executives are often distracted with fire-fighting or office politics. And creating a competency center requires foresight and willpower from executives, which can be a limiting factor.


I am a believer in Carlson’s Law because I have observed it in the adoption of enterprise performance management methodologies. These methodologies include strategy maps, balanced scorecards, customer profitability analysis, risk management, and driver-based rolling financial budgets and forecasts. Passionate middle-management champions drive change involving analytics more often compared to executives. Why? Middle managers ask themselves, “How long do we want to perpetuate gaining understanding and making decisions the way we do now – with little or no analytical insight or hypothesis testing?”
Pursuing Unachievable Accomplishments

Leadership does not only exist at the top of the organizational chart. Leadership can be present in individuals below the C-suite positions. This is possible because a key dimension of leadership is the art of getting a group of people to accomplish something that each individual could not do alone. Leadership does not require formal authority and command-and-control behavior.

There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of books and articles about leadership, yet some highly respected people believe there is a shortage of leadership. For example, in “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca describes with anger the sad state of leadership in the U.S. today.

My simple model of leadership has three components:

Care: Followers believe that leaders care about them and their organization.
Trust and hope: Followers believe that supporting a leader will improve things.
Mission: Followers want leaders to answer the question “Where do we want to go?” so that they can help answer “How will we get there?”

Executive leaders must communicate the third component; however, middle-manager champions can exhibit the first two.
Analysts Can be Leaders

Experienced analysts realize that applying analytics is not like searching for a diamond in a coal mine or flogging data until it confesses the truth. Instead, they first speculate that two or more things are related, or that some underlying behavior is driving a pattern to be seen in various data. They apply business analytics more to confirm a hypothesis than to randomly explore. This requires easy and flexible access to data, the ability to manipulate the data, and software to support the process. This is a form of leadership.

Leaders require moral, not physical, courage. An example of physical courage is rescuing someone from a fire. That is noble, but is not leadership. Moral courage is almost the opposite of a rescue. It is doing something not immediately highly valued and potentially perceived as sticking your nose in other’s business. Ultimately it is seen as a helpful contribution to organizational performance improvement.

There are hundreds of examples of applying analytics. One is to identify the most attractive types of customers to retain, grow, win back or acquire. Others involve risk management, warranty claim analysis, credit scoring, demand forecasting, clinical drug trials, insurance claims analysis, distribution route optimization, fraud detection, and retail markdown and assortment planning. The list is endless.

The investigation and discovery of what will align an organization’s actions with the executive team’s strategy for execution will not come from a CEO with a bullhorn or a whip. Better insights and their resulting decisions will come from analytical competency. Analysts can demonstrate leadership with the passion and desire to solve problems and discern answers – the power to know.

Prioritizing Your IT Concerns

              Results of a recent survey reveal six areas of priority for CIOs and their organizations: information security and privacy, virtualization and cloud computing, social media integration, data classification and management, regulatory compliance, and vendor management.


Protiviti, a global consulting firm, identified top areas of concern for IT leaders — 7 percent of respondents represented the insurance industry — based on competencies they cited as most in need of improvement in its “Information Technology Capabilities and Needs Survey.”

More than 200 IT professionals — including CIOs, CTOs, chief security officers and IT VPs, directors and managers — were asked to assess their skills and professional development priorities through questions covering three major categories: technical knowledge, process capabilities and organizational capabilities. After analyzing the responses, Protiviti concluded that virtualization and social media integration clearly stand out as the top areas in need of improvement in terms of technical knowledge. And related competencies such as cloud computing and social media security are also top “Need to Improve” areas for IT departments.


Specific concerns identified in the report include:

Some firms have vague or out-of-date social media policies in place that are unenforceable if inappropriate activity occurs.
The volume and pace of regulatory change has been significant in recent years, and there are a number of regulatory issues that require IT involvement, including Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, Solvency II and PCI-DSS. "IT must be an active part of compliance management, which typically involves developing, implementing or integrating tools and platforms to achieve active compliance and risk management," said Kurt Underwood, managing director and head of Protiviti's IT consulting practice.

For every law and regulatory requirement, the company must also ask: What portion of my data does this affect? How do I classify and manage this data in accordance with the law? It also is important to note that, as a byproduct of the proliferation of new and emerging technologies, there are rapidly growing volumes of data being generated daily. By ranking, managing and classifying this data as a top "Need to Improve" competency, respondents may be saying they and their organizations are having difficulty understanding the increasingly complex regulatory landscape and how to comply with various new laws.

With more and more organizations transitioning to virtualized solutions as well as applications and activities in the cloud, external service-level agreements (SLAs) with an array of third-party vendors and other providers are a key concern for IT executives. Similarly, determining a sound strategy and approach for outsourcing and off shoring are another critical area of focus, particularly given that many companies continue to seek innovative ways to save costs. However, many of these organizations lack clarity or direction about how to accomplish this effectively while continuing to deliver a high level of service and maintain compliance with company policies, applicable laws and regulations.

Because data breaches are costly and affect not just operations but also brand reputation, information security is another top priority for IT executives. Key considerations for leaders to consider are: How robust are our information security measures? Is our organization in compliance with industry standards for security and privacy as well as applicable laws and regulations, and do we have efficient systems and processes for tracking compliance?

Google’s mobile revenue? Depends how you do the math.

            Google wowed Wall Street with the revelation that its mobile business is generating revenue at a run rate of over $2.5 billion.

Not bad for a business that’s still in its infancy, and which was operating at a $1 billion run rate at this time last year.

Of course, a run rate is not the same as revenue that’s been booked – it’s simply a way of extrapolating what a full year’s worth of revenue will be, assuming the current rate of revenue holds steady.

So what is Google’s actual mobile revenue right now?

Many Wall Street analysts estimated on Friday that Google generated $625 million in mobile revenue in the recently-ended quarter -– a not unreasonable assumption, given that four quarters’ worth of $625 million totals $2.5 billion. (And since Google said the run rate was more than $2.5 billion, perhaps $626 million for the quarter would be an even more reasonable estimate).

Not so fast, says BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.

There’s no guarantee that Google based its run rate on a full quarter’s worth of revenue.

They could have taken mobile revenue from the last month and multiplied it by 12, said Gillis. They could even have used their best single day of mobile revenue and multiplied by 365, he noted.

As a result, Gillis estimates that Google’s mobile revenue in Q3 was probably closer to $500 million or $550 million.

“We have no idea what that number really is,” he said.

The application delivery trifecta: Agile, composite and cloud

          Modern delivery initiatives are changing the creation of enterprise apps. But without proper orchestration, these initiatives can pull the enterprise in opposing directions. 

Three delivery trends are reorienting the way enterprise IT management leaders bring applications to market: Agile development, composite applications1 and cloud computing. These trends share a single, primary aim, and it isn’t just cost reduction. The chief objective of these initiatives is better, faster outcomes. All three seek to strip the latencies from traditional delivery and provide results that are more aligned with, and more responsive to, the business.
If your enterprise is like most, you’re probably pursuing all three. But are you doing so in concert? Pursued together, these trends present certain harmonies that significantly magnify their benefits.
  • Composite and cloud development prize the durability of services, ensuring that components perform well while remaining secure and resilient. Because both cloud and composite facilitate the exposure of services and subcomponents for use by other applications, their shared priority is for components to remain trustworthy in a variety of different contexts.
  • Agile and composite align in their aim for modularity. They resist large and change-resistant monoliths—whether in terms of project plans or application architectures—in favor of discrete, bounded units that can be built, tested and delivered to production quickly.
  • Agile and cloud overlap in the aim of responsiveness to change. Agile projects are designed to anticipate rather than resist change and to be able to pivot accordingly. The “always on” aspect of the cloud can facilitate this aim by reducing or eliminating the time to provision application environments, a key source of latency and inter-departmental squabbles.
But problems arise when these initiatives are pursued in silos, as independent strategies. This tendency means that instead of harmony, the risks in each trend begin to amplify the risks of the others. As one example, Agile software development’s focus on velocity can come to antagonize the thoughtful architectural planning that good composite applications require. In pursuit of speed, developers may code in an ad hoc manner ("cowboy coding"), which leads to a proliferation of redundant or poor-quality composite services.

The magic of the trifecta 

 

World-class delivery organizations harness the collective promise of Agile, composite and cloud development by seeing each in the context of the other. These organizations maximize the shared opportunities and minimize what could otherwise become hostilities among the initiatives. In this way, each initiative amplifies the value of the others.
Consider some examples of how these harmonies might be achieved:
  • Harmony between composite and cloud: In this case, enterprise technical policy lays out standards for reusable services so that any new service is suitable for either internal use or the public cloud. In this way, standards for security and resilience would be included alongside performance—achieving the durability that both cloud and composite applications require of their services to ensure service trust and adoption.
  • Harmony between Agile and composite: At the same time, the organization might define certain principles to guide how coarse- or fine-grained a composite service should be, ensuring that developers aren’t unnecessarily bogged down in architectural debates or tempted by shortcuts. In this way, Agile software development teams can produce composite services that meet the requirements for enterprise reuse, without a return to endless planning sessions.
  • Harmony between composite and cloud: Given the interdependencies in building composite applications, where key services or systems are frequently either under development or available only at certain times, the organizations might seek to virtualize these dependencies—by finding alternate services already available in the cloud, or by investing in service virtualization software that mimics the behaviors of dependent application services.

Putting it all together

There’s little question that these three trends have improved the way we build and deliver apps. But the real value is in using all three together as part of the same strategic aim: to deliver better applications faster.

Innovation or maintenance: The right choice to save your business

              Innovation and simplification have become the mantra of high-performing enterprises, yet maintenance and administration costs consume the bulk of most organizations’ IT budgets, hampering innovation and increasing risk. Here’s how IT leaders can get out of the maintenance-spending trap.

On average, a typical IT organization’s spending on maintenance and administration is likely to consume at least 70 percent of its annual budget, but higher percentages are increasingly common. While the percentage itself is not that important, the result is. According to a recent survey, only 34 percent of global CIOs think they have achieved anything close to their innovation potential.1 The root cause? It’s likely that, with flat or reduced budgets, IT leaders’ innovation projects have been forced to make do with the scraps left over after they’re done keeping the lights on.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. In January 2011, InformationWeek’s Global CIO Top 10 CIO Issues for 2011 noted failure to address the 80/20 spending trap as No. 2 on CIOs’ priority list.
Total IT Budget as Percentage of Revenue loading



Fortunately, some companies have proven that it is possible to drive better innovation performance and “flip the mix” between maintenance and innovation. In 2006, the HP IT team sent shockwaves through the industry by announcing that HP would embark on an ambitious project to transform IT with the goal of delivering improved innovation while delivering increased quality and dramatically lower cost as a percentage of revenue.

HP has applied the experience gained as part of its own transformation to help others achieve similar performance, with the Flemish government and Italian Ministry of Education among the ranks of HP customers that have significantly reduced their maintenance costs while delivering game-changing innovation.

“Doing nothing” is not an option

HP realized that maintenance costs were growing but, to maintain competitiveness, IT’s budget could not. Without an IT transformation to address the maintenance imbalance, innovation would grind to a halt.

The drive to innovate is not limited to technology leaders like HP; it’s an imperative for any enterprise that needs to perform better, one that can translate to the top and bottom line. For example, if your only competitors are organizations with IT maintenance costs of 80 percent to 90 percent, then shifting your own ratio even a little can create significant competitive advantage. However you should also consider that startups or companies in emerging markets often jump immediately to modern IT solutions such as converged infrastructure, cloud and SaaS, bypassing ownership and systems-building altogether. What happens as these emerging players, with near-zero maintenance costs, become your competitors?

And it’s not just the private sector that’s under pressure to rethink IT delivery. The U.S. federal government also recognizes the imperative to cut maintenance costs. In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, departing U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra remarked that “you would get laughed out of the room” if you went to your board and asked for millions of dollars to build out systems like email, finance and a data center for web site hosting. And yet, he said, that’s essentially what the U.S. government, like many companies, is doing.

Running the business of IT

Making true shifts in spending requires a new mindset in IT.

William Dupley, chief solutions manager in HP Canada’s Office of the CTO, likens this moment in IT to the state of the auto industry in the 1980s, when Japanese management techniques shook up American manufacturing. Out of that painful episode came an improved approach to quality management that IT leaders would do well to adopt.

“The three key strategies that need to be applied to IT are Six Sigma, Lean and Theory of Constraints,” Dupley says. These eliminate defects or flaws, non-value-add work and bottlenecks, respectively.

HP accomplished its reduction in maintenance costs by building an integrated system management architecture and data warehouse. HP IT analyzed labor and eliminated root causes (many of them due to old systems), just as if IT were a manufacturing process. Over three years, HP IT eliminated 75 percent of its application portfolio and standardized much of the rest. The team modernized data centers, infrastructure and system management technologies, and made extensive use of automation. The result: HP was able to bring its IT spending from about 4 percent of revenue down to less than 2 percent.2 By 2008, 70 percent of HP IT employees’ time was being spent on new development, with just 30 percent going to IT support.3

Visibility first

Effectively leading such far-reaching changes requires visibility across all IT resources and assets. Without an understanding of how all the interconnected parts work on one another, it’s likely that you’ll end up pulling levers without knowing what the outcome will be, jeopardizing not just IT’s transformation, but the day-to-day operations of your enterprise.

The key to a successful change-acceleration program is understanding where you are currently—your maturity level, the business challenges ahead—and then using that holistic understanding to move toward your enterprise’ goals. (Start by taking HP’s CIO assessment.)

“The real issue,” says Piet Loubser, senior director responsible for HP’s IT Performance Suite, “is the ability of CIOs to understand all the influences and drivers on their entire organization.”

Instead of pursuing an arbitrary benchmark, Loubser counsels IT leaders to focus on understanding the interconnected nature of IT and the business they’re in. “The problem with chasing ‘best-in-class’ is that it may not be the right number for your company at this point in time,” Loubser says. “And without the tools to measure and test it, you don’t know if it’s working.”

The important thing is to understand where value is derived. Says Dupley, “If you’ve got old applications that are critical to your business, that took years to create and are difficult to duplicate, you may have no choice but to have higher maintenance costs.”
Finding your best-in-class spending mix

Visibility into the ramifications of change lets you start adjusting your spending mix. “Best-in-class” typically varies by industry, but HP’s research has found that average maintenance and administration spending is roughly twice that of best-in-class. So how do you move your spending closer to best-in-class?

Start measuring: Remembering that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” look for line of sight into everything that affects your business. Start looking at KPIs within four broad buckets: business value created by IT, customer satisfaction, operational excellence and future orientation. HP created the HP Executive Scorecard and Financial Planning and Analysis solutions to give IT leaders an integrated perspective on the overall performance and efficiency of their organizations. (Watch this video to see how it works.)

Set targets: Armed with fact-based actuals and benchmarks, identify bottlenecks or poor performing areas and set targets to drive improvements. Says Loubser, “HP is able to control maintenance spend because we’re continually monitoring our own performance against those of our peers and competitors.”

Compare to where you want to be: Work with strategic advisors to assess relevant best-in-class metrics for your market conditions and the steps you’ll take to get there. Discuss your efforts with a community of peers.

You get what you inspect, not what you expect

Once you have a holistic understanding of all the drivers within your organization, you can use scorecard metrics to effect change.

The most critical aspect, Dupley says, is that “IT must move to a model using metrics to influence the future.” He adds, “You want to build a metrics system to create behavior, not just to report.”

With reporting systems such as an executive scorecard in place, IT leaders can combine lagging metrics (the past) with leading metrics (the future) to build insight that helps them make informed decisions sooner. Dupley counsels senior execs (VP and above) to use leading metrics to manage a year out.

Unleashing innovation

Combine a quality management mindset with visibility and measurement tools and you unleash tremendous potential for innovation within your organization.

For instance, HP customer Delta reduced applications testing times by 52 percent and allowed its testers to devote 90 percent of their time to business innovation instead of verifying legacy applications. Seagate found it more cost-effective to transition its internal email system to a third-party cloud, protecting outsourcing ROI as well as enforcing cloud service SLAs by using an application performance management system from HP. Another of HP’s customers, a Canadian university, transitioned 32 legacy email systems to the cloud, freeing up related staff.

By significantly reducing maintenance and administration costs, these and other IT organizations make IT transformation more than just a technology initiative—it’s a business strategy.

F8 2011: News From Facebook's Huge Event

               Facebook announces sweeping changes at F8, their annual developers conference. Here's a review of all the new features and changes that they've introduced.



To start things off on a happy a note, comedian Andy Samberg gave his best impersonation of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.







Andy Samberg impersonates Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2011




New Profile Design

The revamped profile now called 'Timeline' looks different with a new focus on photos and events. The user can choose what activities they'd like to share in their continuous stream, highlighting moments from his or her life, starting from the present day, moving back chronologically to the first day he or she was on on Facebook and before.


Introducing Facebook Timeline - #F8 2011



       The timeline now functions as a personal online scrapbook, with the most important photos and text that users have shared on Facebook over the years. It is Facebook's attempt at growing from an online hangout to a homestead, where people express their real selves and merge their online and offline lives. The timeline can go back to include years before Facebook even existed, so users can pretty much add photos and events from the day they were born.

P.S ~ Timeline won't be available to users for "a few weeks," so savor that old profile while you still can (or start to get excited for the new one!).

Read more about the new Facebook at their official blog,
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150289612087131

A Revamp of How You Interact And Share

Interacting with the content posted on Facebook: In addition to "Liking" videos, articles and posts about what your friends enjoy, you can now take part in these activities with your friends in real-time. These changes are made possible through Facebook's Open Graph platform

F8: FOR DEVELOPERS AND ENTREPRENEURS





  
A New Class of Social Apps on Facebook: Apps That Share Automatically




      
          Facebook is partnering up with a whole bunch of websites, mostly those that previously had fb plugins, and app-makers, to bring content that can be shared and consumed on the Facebook platform. Notable app genres include music apps like Spotify and Rhapsody, streaming video apps for Netflix and Hulu and news apps for the New York Times, Washington Post. Facebook's "new class of social apps" can post updates to your Timeline automatically. Apps no longer have to ask for permission to post content to Facebook over and over again. Instead, a new Facebook permissions screen explains exactly what type of stories will be shared the first time you give an app permission to post to your Facebook. Once completed, it will no longer have to ask for permission 

New Layout For Updates Posted 

       The Timeline is wider than the old profile and displays content in two columns. Posts appear in a continuous stream in chronological order, from top (most recent) to bottom (oldest). The layout is very visual and emphasizes large pictures and important events.

Videos With Friends

The Open Graph brings deeper video integration to the Facebook platform. For example, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explained at f8 (and in a subsequent blog post) that users will be able to watch movies together--right from Facebook--with the Netflix movie streaming in a separate window. Though Hastings noted that this concurrent watching isn't allowed in the United States, he said that a bill is currently in Congress to legalize it. Other streaming sites like Hulu, YouTube, Daily Motion, VEVO and more will all allow for concurrent watching with Facebook friends.

Yearly, Monthly Navigation

The Timeline will feature a navigation panel along the right side of the page. This list of years, which can expand to display months, allows users to quickly jump to a spot in their timeline and view their posts from that moment in time. You can also manually scroll up and down through the timeline to search activity by month and year.

Introducing Music Discovery

Facebook now helps users discover new music. As part of its larger entertainment initiative, Facebook will launch a music dashboard, which will display music-specific notifications and updates, and also show which songs are currently popular within one's network of friends. 

Facebook has a New Friend: Spotify, The Soundtrack to your Social Life. 






Other music partners include Rhapsody, turntable, Songza, mixcloud, Slacker Radio, Rdio, Deezer, Mog, tunein, iHeartRadio, earbits and Soundcloud.


Stories Inside Facebook

When a friend posts a news article or story that they've enjoyed, you can read it within Facebook. A few of the participating publications include: Digg, Fipboard, Gawker, The Washington Post, USA Today and others.

Many apps will be available starting today, though you can expect the new Timeline profile in about "a few weeks," according to an official Facebook blog,
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150289612087131

Coverage of Mark Zuckerberg Presenting at F8 2011








If you have a large network on Yahoo profiles here's some extra developments that you can look forward to

As read on Technorati

..........Yahoo will announce a relaunch of Yahoo Profiles and their “all in” integration with Facebook Connect, including on the Yahoo home page. We’ve all known deep integration with Facebook was coming, but until now it wasn’t clear exactly how deeply Yahoo would go.

Read More at, http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/06/yahoo-goes-all-in-with-facebook-here-are-the-screenshots/

If you are slightly skeptical of all the new changes, additions and developments here's a slightly critical take by Bianca Lambert of The Huffington Post,

........' What do you make of the changes? Are these new apps creepy or convenient? Are you excited about the new information you'll discover, or worried about what might come to light? . '...........

Read more at,   Facebook's 'New Class Of Social Apps' Could Be Big Business For Site, Big Burden For Users

                     I personally believe that these new developments will greatly empower users in many ways, along with giving the Social Network and its millions of profiles a more personal touch. Ultimately it all depends on how, why and for what reasons they may or may not be receptive to some of the new features. Unlike most other technology companies the greatest challenge and test for a Social Network or a Social Network based business is off course the emotional appeal that it has with its users. We live in a Knowledge based Society where information can be both advantageous and refreshing. Adding that bigger dimension to staying in touch is what I believe facebook might just accomplish with this before the end of 2011. Most people should be quick to catch up with all the new stuff that they will now have access to based on how well the developers at Facebook and their partner sites have implemented and presented these features. Apart from the transitioning process another key factor off course is the ease of use and being able to turn off or disable certain features. ( Something that Facebook has done well every time it introduced something new).

 P.S ~ I think I'm really going to enjoy being able to do so much more with facebook. Reaching out to 800 million users at once is a noteworthy achievement that will go down in history, perhaps a small indication of all the possibilities that the future has in store . Keep up the good work guys. Best Wishes and KUDOS to You ALL :)

~Posted by Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Speeding Up Your Prototyping Process

              Engineers who get too hung up on perfecting a prototype often lose sight of the bigger picture and waste precious development time. Here are a few ways you can speed up your prototyping process to get your invention or product to market faster.


One of the most famous stories of prototyping done quickly, cheaply and spot-on came from the inventor of the cyclone vacuum. In 1978, James Dyson ripped apart a conventional vacuum and attached his own cyclonic filter using cardboard and duct tape. The crude model was a far cry from today's Dyson robotic cleaning machines that appear to be straight out of Michael Bay's effects department, but his experiment worked: Dyson proved the cyclone technology would function on a small-scale household product, and the first-ever bagless vacuum was born.

What Dyson didn't do was spend a long time making his prototype look pretty or incorporating all the functions he wanted in the final product. His quick, resourceful prototype let him zero in on his main feature and improve the design from there.

Engineers who get too hung up on perfecting a prototype often lose sight of the bigger picture and waste precious development time. Here are a few ways you can speed up your prototyping process to get your invention or product to market faster.

Speed Up Your Prototyping: Be Resourceful

The Dyson example illustrates the first key lesson of prototyping: Even if you're trying to engineer the most complex, mass-produced machine, that doesn't mean you have to start with a fully functioning materials lab.

Many designers mock up a website or new app on paper before they even put any functionality to it, says Alan Nguyen, an entrepreneur, former CEO of the Yan Group, a Web-mobile-TV music channel platform.

"Just start building it," he says. "You can start with paper cutout."

With the prototype, you're usually just trying to show off one element of the product, whether it's the design or a specific function, so there's no need to fret about constructing every part of it out of consumer-grade material or technology.

"You need someone to learn how to Photoshop basically," Nguyen says. "You don't need Flash or to actually code interactions."

Many successful entrepreneurs decide to do this kind of in-house mock-up to save money and time instead of hiring an outside firm, he says.

Bill Lucas, director of curriculum at the Luma Institute, which is based in Pittsburgh and focuses on educating innovators on human-centered design, says he encourages entrepreneurs to rifle through the junk drawer to find materials to round out a prototype. One group working on a project cut Tylenol tabs in half to represent buttons; another working in a conference room turned coffee cups upside down and used them as knobs.

"That kind of clever resourcefulness we find just absolute delights in the people we put through these learning experience," he says.



Speed Up Your Prototyping: Don't let Perfection Get in the Way

Don DeGraff's company, From Patent to Profit, which helps fast-track product development, advocates a very specific approach to quick and cheap prototyping. The company, which lists Kleen Kanteen among its success stories, tells inventors to create only a very crude prototype—out of balsa wood or other basic materials—that conveys the purpose and potential of the idea. Then, they make a video showing it off, put it online behind a password-protected site and begin showing it to potential investors or manufacturers.

"If they show interest, then and only then do you start spending money on the actual prototype," he says. "Now all of a sudden you've got an unbiased company or person looking at your process. And you've spent minimal dollars getting it out."

This not only helps inventors save money but also make sure they're appealing to the right parties.

"They're going to get the visual very quick if it's something they're interested in," he says.

Experts say the quest for perfection or focusing too much on details is something that often trips up engineers and entrepreneurs in the early stages of development. They spend too much time trying to make it look neat instead of focusing on showing off its features.

"It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it conveys the idea of the full concept its getting out, it's fine," Nguyen says. "Sometimes paper is better. You don't want someone to basically judge it because one is prettier than the other."

Startup adviser Amir Khella says you need to think more like a hacker and less like a coder in these situations. Hackers know how to put things together quickly, test them, and solve problems. This way you focus more on validating the idea of the product instead of worrying about fixing bugs in the CSS code or other meticulous details.

That's the premise behind his latest venture, Keynotopia, which lets users design quick and easy interfaces and interactive mockups for web, mobile and desktop apps without touching a line of code. Khella followed his own advice: he launched the site in three hours with a $47.50 budget, and got his first paying customer within 10 minutes.



How to Speed Your Prototyping Process: Focus on the Variables

That also means you need to be not afraid to fail, sometimes over and over again. Good prototypes should focus on highlighting specific features of a product—the cyclone suction power in the vacuum, for example. You want to show people specifically how your product will vary or improve on what already exists.

You don't want to be spending time fleshing out every feature of the product, Lucas says.

"Don't go broad and deep," he says. If you do, "for all intents and purposes, you're making the whole thing build out."

Khella says he recommends inventors create three to five quick prototypes at a time to figure out which one is best, which makes you a more objective judge of the product.

"In my experience that's the difference between success and failure," Khella says. Too often, he says, he gets e-mails from app developers and engineers asking things like "How can I prototype with live data?"

"That shows maybe the person is getting lost in the details already," he says. "It kind of takes the experimenter's mindset instead of the perfectionist's."




How to Speed Your Prototyping Process: Know your Tools

The biggest boon to at-home inventors in recent years has been the availability of affordable, easy to use 3-D printers. The machines from companies such as MakerBot allow users to draft objects using 3-D software and print their own small objects at home, from small machine parts to full-sized gadgets.

"The first thing to do is to make sure you're working in the world of 3-D modeling," says Bradley A. Cleveland, president and CEO of Proto Labs. "If you can imagine any kind of crazy geometry, you can print it on a machine."

Proto Labs specializes in CNC machined and injection-molded parts for functional prototyping and custom one-off projects. If you're going that route with your prototype to see how it actually functions—instead of pasting together coffee cups, for example—it's important to educate yourself on the resources available before you start building.

"You really have to be careful to understand your production needs before you're done with the prototyping phase," Cleveland says. "A little bit of time spent up front spent education yourself on the prototyping processes can save you some big headaches."
- By Tim Donnelly.

Preparing to Launch Your Start-up?

                Preparing to launch your start-up means more than simply making sure you have a viable product and potential customers. Here are five tips on how to prepare yourself to be a founder.

John Bradberry was fascinated by the idea of how someone may prepare to start a company. Bradberry, himself an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, has worked for two decades as a consultant to small business owners, and he found himself attracted to the story of one of his clients, Decision One Mortgage founder JC Faulkner. “I wanted to understand why it worked so well, how did he bring the pieces of the puzzle together, and how does that apply to start-ups of other types,” Bradberry says.

For answers, he went first to academic research on the subject, and then thought back on his own experience as an entrepreneur. “One of the concepts that crystallized for me was readiness,” Bradberry says.

In his book 6 Secrets of Startup Success, Bradberry puts forward five steps that he says will help a person prepare to start a company. While laying the foundation for a successful company means making sure that one has a marketable product or service that will reach paying customers, founders who have already achieved some measure of success say that a dose of personal preparation may help a founder weather the early stages.

Here are Bradberry’s five steps, along with words of advice from entrepreneurs who have learned the value of personal preparation.

Step 1: Clarify your reasons and your goals.

Property management company Renter’s Warehouse has been the most successful of Brenton Hayden’s start-ups, but his failed companies have come with their lessons, too. Hayden, who calls himself “a great salesman,” was working at Kellogg’s until he was laid off eight years ago. After someone tipped him off to the money to be made in real estate, Hayden found a job working for someone else in the industry. He lasted about six months. “I realized I could do most of this on my own,” Hayden says.

He launched Renter’s Warehouse in 2006. Since then, he has launched a number of other companies, none of which has met the same degree of success. After his tax accountant suggested that starting another company may help him qualify for deductions, Hayden started a limousine company in 2008. “In short order I became the number one most booked limousine company in Minnesota,” Hayden says. And though Hayden says his limousines were the nicest in the Minnesota area, his company stalled. Hayden wasn’t losing money, but he wasn’t supporting the company, either; his attention was elsewhere. He broke even every year, running his limousine services at below-market rates. Other limo companies in the area tried to keep up, but since they were in business to make money, they couldn’t beat his rates. “I am pretty much sure that I am responsible for the total collapse of the limousine business in Minnesota,” he says. Hayden sold the company on New Year’s Eve of 2010.

“Really do your research,” Hayden advises any entrepreneur, whether they are starting their first company or their fifth. Don’t rely on a great idea, he says. “I call great ideas the death of your company and your personal finances. Often if you’re starting up they’re both going down the drain.”




Step 2: Understand your entrepreneurial personality.

Southwestern Missouri isn’t the first place most people would think to start a company selling spices. Yet that is exactly what Jeff Brinkhoff chose to do, building the company out of his father’s milk barn with $25,000 in cash. “It was a one man operation until I found somebody to help me package the first few orders,” Brinkhoff says. Nine years later and with $6.3 million in revenue, his company—Red Monkey Foods—is No. 465 on Inc.’s list of the fastest growing privately-held companies.

As for how he managed to build his company from its beginnings in a town of 800, Brinkhoff says that it was “a matter of tenacity.”

The most important quality any entrepreneur can have, Brinkhoff says, is the determination not to fail. “The first thing when you look at the bottom line when you go into this is you have to think one thing and one thing only, and that’s ‘I will not fail,’” Brinkhoff says. “And you have to be careful that it is not ‘I will not fail’ while you’re going down the wrong path.”



Step 3: Map your skills and experience.

Bryan Janeczko worked at Morgan Stanley before founding NuKitchen, a start-up he sold to Nutrisystem two years ago. Now Janeczko has a new venture, an online start-up incubator called Wicked Start. Understanding one’s own experience is critical in the early stages of starting up, he says.

“Many entrepreneurs I speak with have great ideas and even a great plan, but 99 percent of them have no practical industry-related experience,” he says. Like many entrepreneurs, figuring out what he did not know almost cost him his business. Janeczko said he was health conscious before founding NuKitchen, an online diet service, but he didn’t have any experience in food service. “That nearly put us out of business after losing $500,000 over the course of one year,” he says. “The solution is to either moonlight part-time, volunteer, or—better yet—take a paid role in as senior a position as possible in a business that most resembles your business model. At minimum, bring on a co-founder with the experience to help you.”


Step 4: Leverage your relationships and resources.

When Bradberry advises entrepreneurs to leverage their relationships and resources, he means that they should contact all sorts of qualified people in business who can help them make connections and network and make all sorts of other judicious business moves that will nudge them toward profitability. And then there's A.W. Pickel III, who chose to leverage the relationships of his young children and the resources provided by a professional skeptic who was expert at downing a six-pack.

Pickel was 36 years old, an employee at a savings and loan bank, and married with four children when, after working a late night preparing files that he says probably netted the bank about $15,000, his boss chastised him for leaving the light on in the executive washroom. Pickel decided he had endured enough.

When starting a company, “get counsel from different sources,” Pickel says.

For Pickel, that meant sitting his four children around the kitchen table and asking them for suggestions for his new company’s name. “Their name was Pickel’s Mortgage,” Pickel says. “That didn’t fly.” And if wisdom can come from the mouth of babies, why shouldn’t everyone have an ounce of truth to dispense? Pickel felt he needed to get some advice from someone who would tell him the truth, who would not be uncomfortable telling him his idea was a disaster. “I don’t wear my religion on my sleeve, but I do go to Church,” Pickel says. “One of the guys I had gotten to know was a guy named Joe Gray. He’s one of the least religious guys I know.” Because of that, Pickel says, he felt that he could trust Gray to be skeptical. “I knew he would shoot straight,” Pickel says.


Step 5: Position yourself for high performance.

Founders have to be ready to deal with whatever challenge may arise, Bradberry says, because—no matter how well-prepared the founder is—his or her company will almost certainly take an unexpected turn. “I find that often the biggest and most healthy businesses look very different from what the founders first envisioned,” Bradberry says. “They responded to what the market was telling them and it was something they could execute on.”

To be ready for whatever challenge or opportunity may arise, founders should try to keep their personal lives in order. If one is like Pickel, that may mean finding time to retreat from the world. “My wife says I am wildly entrepreneurial on the outside, but that I’ve cautiously thought through all the options on the inside,” Pickel says. He sets aside time in the early mornings to contemplate the day ahead. “What I do is in my mind I go out a year or two years, and then I examine those consequences. You can’t think when everybody else is yelling at you. You have to do it when no one else is around.”

Upgrade to the iPhone 5 ???

             In the world of tech, Internet rumors often turn into cold hard facts—sometimes overnight. With Apple, a company that never pre-announces products, gossip about the iPhone 5 coming this month (or next) have persisted for some time.

Most experts agree: all signs point to an imminent release. The companies that make iPhone accessories have hinted at a new device, and the timing makes sense for a pre-holiday release of the next wonderphone that will surely astound.

So what is a business to do? According to Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney, the answer is the same as always: Be prepared. Your business should be nimble enough to handle the upgrade smoothly, and that usually means assessing the need of employees (e.g., do they need a touchscreen phone or one intended for messaging?), and re-visiting contract arrangements with wireless providers.

Another important step: IT should be ready to handle any new security and management challenges with the device, which often means using a tool like MobileIron that can track new devices deployed in your organization.

Dulaney also had one more piece of advice: don’t buy an iPhone 4. The current version will be discounted or discontinued when the new model comes out.

iPhone 5 Features
Of course, deciding whether to upgrade is the hardest step of all. That’s where rumors can help you evaluate the forthcoming device, instead of making an impulse decision for employees once the iPhone does start shipping.

Rob Walch hosts a popular podcast called Today in iOS, so he has heard most of the rumors. He explained some of the new advancements.

The first one has to do with the camera. The iPhone 4 has a 5-megapixel camera, and it’s not bad. There aren’t as many features for adjusting white balance and other settings like you’ll find on an Android phone. Walch says the iPhone 5 will likely sport an 8-megapixel camera. He says iOS 5, the operating system that will run on the iPhone 5, has new features for a camera, including quick access buttons.

Another important spec: The iPhone 5 will likely use the same A5 processor in the iPad 2. That means it will run faster for just about every function, and it’s even possible that Apple will include some of the ground-breaking apps that now work on the iPad 2, including GarageBand and a movie-editing tool. Walch says the iPhone 5 will probably have 1GB of RAM instead of the 512MB on the iPhone 4. With more RAM, the iPhone 5 will handle more robust apps and run faster.

Walch says other features will include support for both GSM and CDMA networks, which means U.S. users could bring the iPhone overseas and still expect it to work. And, there might be an HDMI port that lets you connect up to an HDTV.

Small Business Prep
Crystal Kendrick, the president of the marketing firm, The Voice of Your Customer, says her company is considering an iPhone 5 upgrade. They are slowly transitioning to an Apple platform anyway, moving to Mac laptops and desktops and purchasing the iPad 2 for employees.

“The most compelling iPhone 5 features are the upgraded camera, faster processing system, and hot spot options [for sharing a 3G connection], and compatibility with our office products,” she says. “Having a single manufacturer reduces the cost of training, repairs, upgrades, accessories and communications plans.”

One way that Kendrick is preparing her company for the iPhone 5 is to eliminate existing Wi-Fi networks as a cost saving measure and because they will be superfluous when they start using the built-in iPhone hotspot features.

She says another important business strategy for her company is relying on “grandfather” clauses where she can keep using existing contracts for voice and data on phones, even after they upgrade to a new model.

Philip Chang, a partner at the PR firm Carbon in Chicago, had an interesting point to make about why his company plans to jump on the iPhone 5 bandwagon. The main draw has to do with the apps. Businesses are constantly evolving in how they communicate with new apps like LiquidSpace and GroupMe, which often appear first on the iPhone. Chang says, the iPhone 5 will just encourage new app development, and not being able to use these apps will cause problems in communicate between his team and with their customers.

“Nothing else on the market enables its users to share and create content as effectively or easily as the iPhone,” he says. “It gets the most attention from developers when it comes to rolling out a new communications tool.”

Chang is also interested in the faster processing, and the better camera capability (especially for recording high-def video clips).

Upgrade Plan
As Dulaney noted, businesses of any size need to have a plan in place for phone upgrades—the strategy of random upgrades for select employees usually does not work. It’s better to decide now who will get the upgrade, how much that will cost, how the company will support the devices, and to be ready for security issues.

Walch even goes a step further. Even though Apple has not released any details, the rumor mill is churning at full speed. He says it is best to work out the actual approvals for the new device, using iPhone 4 pricing of about $300 per phone. That way, your company can be ready to make the purchase at launch instead of waiting for the approvals—and possibly not being able to get one until 2012.

There’s always a sense of excitement with a new product launch. With Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO, all eyes will be on the new device to see if it lives up to expectations. The experts suggest being ready for something special.

Zuckerberg Converts His 5+ Million Facebook Fans into Subscribers

             Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated more than 5 million subscribers, thanks to a simple trick.

On Wednesday, Facebook rolled out a Subscribe button. It allows a user to follow anybody’s public updates, regardless of whether they’re Facebook friends. This one-way subscription model is like following somebody on Twitter or adding somebody to a Google+ Circle.

While some users are worried about the privacy implications of the the opt-in feature, many are using it to subscribe to other users, particularly Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, the Facebook CEO is amassing subscribers at a breakneck pace.

Since Wednesday morning, Zuckerberg has acquired more than 5 million subscribers, and that number is rising by the minute. The count is rising so quickly that the site can’t even properly display his total subscriber count (check out the screenshot to see what we mean).


There’s a caveat to this, though. Five million people didn’t suddenly decide to start subscribing to the Facebook CEO’s feed. Instead, Zuckerberg converted fans of his old Facebook Page into subscribers of his personal page. A cached version of Zuckerberg’s fan page shows that he had 5,203,153 fans just before he made the switch. That’s around the same amount of people now subscribed to his account.

We believe that number will continue to rise as Facebook migrates the rest of Zuckerberg’s fans to his personal account and new people start subscribing to him. The social network has been converting many fan pages into subscribers in the past day and plans to launch a do-it-yourself conversion tool in the next few weeks.

Now we have to ask: Is Zuckerberg the most-followed person on Facebook? Let us know in the comments if you find anybody else who comes close to Zuck’s numbers.

Rise of the Cloud Continues

              New Ventana research has confirmed that organizations are moving to the cloud now and will accelerate the pace of doing so in the near future. At least 20 percent of five different line-of-business functions use cloud-based applications, and within 12 months, at least 40 percent of eight of nine functions will.



Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research with the co-sponsorship of Information Management to assess levels of maturity, trends and best practices in organizations’ use of business data in the cloud. The research analyzed information from 141 qualified IT personnel responsible for managing cloud data.

Ventana found an increasing number of cloud-based applications in use. Nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of those using cloud-based applications have five or more deployed today, and 32 percent expect to have that many within a year.



For most organizations (65 percent) the most common pattern of data movement is between on-premises applications, but now as many must combine cloud-based data and on-premises data as need to combine on-premises data sources (both 86 percent). The research found that over the next two years cloud-based applications will grow faster than on-premises applications. Overall, organizations’ largest gap between needs and capabilities not yet addressed is in moving cloud data on-premises.

“A little bit of regressing is going on. We knew that with on-premise processes data quality and governance processes need to be followed,” says David Menninger, VP and research director for analytics, business intelligence and information management at Ventana. “With respect to cloud, these issues are resurfacing, and some are forgetting of the lessons of the past.”

All basic information management functions need to be addressed in the cloud, says Menninger. In this study, only 15 percent have completed a data quality initiative, only 5 percent a master data management initiative, and only 13 percent a data governance initiative for cloud data.

Menniger notes that only about one-fifth (21 percent) of organizations fully trust cloud-based data; more than twice as many (46 percent) fully trust data from on-premises applications. He suggests that putting automation tools in place and educating within the organization as well as getting processes established will help address cloud data trust issues.

Additionally, Ventana recommends that IT should find a way to collaborate with line of business. “We found when IT and line of business work together, the line-of-business groups are more satisfied,” says Menniger.

AGILITY IS WHAT THE FUTURE IS MADE OF: How Agile is Your Organization?

              There is a new (well, maybe not that new) methodology being used in IT to develop applications called “agile.”


Agile promises to deliver usable applications quicker and exactly the way the users need them. It has been around for more than 15 years and now seems to be gaining acceptance as a valid approach to IT development.

I learned about agile years ago, and there was something about it that I liked immediately: When business users needed something changed in a project, the developer made the changes. No muss, no fuss; the change got made, and without a lot of time or effort spent documenting the change request, getting multiple approvals, and revising the project timeline. It all might sound like a recipe for catastrophe, but agile has its own set of rules and processes to keep things under control. Without the bureaucracy, IT projects under agile are completed quicker and with higher satisfaction ratings from both the business users and the IT team.


The question I’ve worked on for a while is this: “Why can’t whole agile organizations operate in an agile way?” When a process or operating rule sits in the way of getting stuff done, shouldn’t it be as easy as just changing the process? Do we really need to touch base with multiple areas for input and get their approvals and sign-offs? And is it really the end of the world if a changed procedure needs to be changed again because something was overlooked or doesn’t work?

There are, of course, processes that fall outside the realm of what can be changed in an agile way. For example, controls under the Sarbanes-Oxley domain must be vetted and documented appropriately, and processes with the potential to negatively impact customers must be implemented with great care. Outside those types of things, plenty of processes can be changed easily and do not jeopardize the organization — such as the requirement that a supervisor sign off on an insignificant task, like making copies in a copy center.

Maybe it’s time for organizations to look for ways to implement agile, both for IT projects and as an overall operating style. The benefits could be significant for a company that accomplishes more processes faster. And satisfaction would be greater.

How to Choose the Right Web Server

              Running a business online means that your business needs to have an effective website, but often overlooked by businesses is the importance of the Web server. The Web server that houses your website is as important as the look and feel of your website. So how do you choose a web host, and do you need more than just a host?

Consult With Your Developer
Before you decide which hosting service to use, I recommend discussing the details and functionality of your website. Understanding how your website will be developed and how supportive your development firm is will help you decide what hosting firm to use. If you already have a website, discuss with your developer the traffic and bandwidth to understand what you may need for growth. Once you are educated on the type of structure that will be used to build your website or needed to grow your website, you can research the firms recommended by your developer as well as hosts you may already have in mind. You may need to graduate from a shared hosting service, which leads us to looking inward.

Look at Your Business Needs
How much support do you think you will need from your hosting company? If you're creating the website yourself or hiring a temporary contractor for the project, you may want to look at a host that provides more service support. Every hosting company has a support department, but what they consider support may differ from what you have in mind. If you're a solopreneur, you may want a firm that can help install applications. This is a task often performed by outside developers, but some hosting companies will provide this level of support -- for a price.

Uptime of your website is something most hosting firms market, but what about backups? Backups are not only needed when a site goes down, but also when someone makes an error. I can't begin to tell you how many people have accidentally renamed or overwritten a file and needed a backup restored. How quick is your host to respond to your needs? Response time can have a huge impact on any business and this is something to consider when reviewing your host. But response time and resolution time are two different things. Be sure to explore both. Don't get caught up in the marketing message; understand how firms escalate tickets and solve problems.

How Many Sites Do You Have?
It is not uncommon for marketing purposes to have more than one website. If you have more than one website, do you want a separate hosting account per site or a VPS? Virtual private servers can be a great solution to control the management of many websites, and will give you or your developer a root-level connection to handle installing Web services. VPS environments also you provide you with a hybrid of shared and dedicated applications, and, depending on the provider, a different level of support and resources.

Your website location matters both in terms of supporting you as a business owner and delivering a fast experience for your customers. Make sure to choose a quality solution that fits both objectives.