Pastor Ayo Dada (aka Uncle Shafe!)

 Pastor Ayo Dada son of Pastor Philip Dada, Senior brother of my Aunty Titi, Junior brother of Baba Ijo Sola Dada, Rev. Olu Dada and Mommy Akure,

My father was one of the greatest men I ever knew but you were my other role model.  From as far as I can remember I wanted to be like you. You were smart, vibrant, hard working, ambitious and most of all you were a great dancer.  I wanted to be all of these things when I grow up, I wanted to be like you heck I wanted to have a beautiful girlfriend like you had and marry a woman as fun, loving and giving as Aunty Iyabo. I’m still trying to be a great dancer like you I need more work there. J

My first plane ride was because of you, I got to see Zaria and experience the cold harmattan weather of the north, drank fura and maishanu.

You loved me before I knew to love you. You told me stories about the selfless sacrifices my dad made for you and the rest of his siblings. Your story about pretending to be a haunted spirit and scaring a village from their water source was the best!! J

When Popsie passed away you showed us the love and respect that you had for the man and honored him in your relationship with us.

Shafe!!! That’s my mother calling, a name we all adopted. You will never be forgotten. Adieu! And welcome, Heaven is about to be entertained with some good music and dancing! Go ahead Uncle Shafe show them how it’s done.

May your soul rest in peace! I am proud to have known you and to call you Uncle Shafe!!

Your nephew

Kayode

Agile Release Planning

Agile release planning helps team to answer the following questions about their project:

• What can customers expect?
• About when will they get it?
• And how much will it cost?

Done well it is useful tool for teams to define release themes/goals/objectives and explore early release opportunities so that they can get customer feedback and/or potentially earlier return on investments. It is also a great opportunity to do some team building especially with a distributed team. When I facilitate this event I typically include some fun team games I learnt from Simon McPherson(@SIMONMACPHERS0N and http://gamessimonplays.com/).

 

This post reflects useful tips I've gathered from facilitating these events with small (< 8) and large teams (> 50) across multiple industries (Software, Healthcare, Telecoms and Finance). It also reflects the wisdom I got from co-facilitating this event with many great individuals:

 

Plan for the Release Planning Event

• Identify a facilitator (Scrum Master or Agile Coach) for the event
• Have a Product Vision, High level goals and Objectives
• Ensure the product backlog is prioritized and relatively stable
• Check that the Team velocity is relatively stable (after 3 - 4 Iterations or so)
• Understand the key drivers for your project i.e. Trade-off matrix
• Note key event and their dates they may impact your project

 

Invite the right People

• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Team Members
• Domain Experts
• Architects
• Others (anyone that can help ensure your plan is a good one)

Have an Agenda for the meeting

• Establish working agreement for the event
• Product Owner presents product vision and roadmap
• Product Owner presents the project’s trade-off matrix
• Product Owner presents the prioritized product backlog
• Team asks questions to understand user stories
• Team estimates user stories at a high level (Affinity Estimating or similar technique)
• Team should split User Stories that are too large to complete within an Iteration or add new discovered ones
• Determine your MVPs/MMFs/MMFSs (Story mapping is a good technique to lay out what story set is needed to deliver value)
• Team reviews key dates, milestones and Sprint calendar
• Team discusses dependencies
• Team discusses plan risks and/or issues
• Team finalizes release plan showing what will be worked on in each Sprint and future release candidates
• Record any key decisions, assumptions, dependencies, risks and/or issues
• Team commits to Release Plan
• Product Owner communicates plan to Stakeholders/Management
• Meeting Retrospective

 Watch out for these

• Product Owner not the decision maker for your project? It will be difficult to negotiate your trade-off matrix, accetance criteria, MVPs if your PO isn't making the decisions.
• Diving into too much detail and complex design discussions: Save yourself! You will have at least two more opportunities to review each product backlog item before the team works on it (1) Backlog Grooming meeting and (2) Sprint Planning meeting

Communicate your plan to Management/Stakeholders

Your communication should include:

• Release plan: What are your deliverying and by when. Include Release candidates (MVPs)  you've identified.
• Key assumptions: State any assumptions your are making in coming up with your plan
• Dependencies list: Resolve dependencies before the team pulls stories into their Sprint backlog.
• Risks and issues: Note mitigation strategies and any adjustments to release plan

Don't let it get Stale 

• Review/Track/Update your release plan at the begining of every Sprint. The plan is only useful if you keep it updated and make adjustments based on new information from executing your Sprints

 Reference

1. Version One’s Agile Checklist.

 

Agile Will Fail Because . . .

I was at the Agile 2013 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, in August and had the opportunity to participate in the Scrum Alliance-sponsored Coaches Clinic. Two of the volunteers at the clinic, Dhaval Panchal (www.dhavalpanchal.com/) and Michael Vizdos (www.VizdosEnterprises.com), put up a poster board with a simple statement: "Agile will fail at my company because . . ." Dhaval had created similar board at the Scrum Alliance Global Gathering in Atlanta (2012) as a way to provide a venting box for conference attendees and to raise awareness about topics that can be addressed at the Coaches Clinic.

I wish I had thought of this at the time: It would have been interesting to have had a board opposite this one with the statement "Agile is succeeding at my company because . . ."

Anyway, about 50 people scribbled on the board, and I took pictures and transcribed the scribbles, hoping to get ideas for blogs and articles. Well, I have one for you now, telling the story of what the scribbles revealed to me. The groupings of items fell into the following categories (the complete list is below):

• Lack of awareness/No need for change
• Lack of support/Desire to change
• Agile is misunderstood/Ability to change

What struck me was how this aligns with the Prosci^® ADKAR^® model (http://www.prosci.com/adkar-model/overview-3/):

• Awareness of the need for change
• Desire to participate and support the change
• Knowledge of how to change
• Ability to implement required skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement to sustain the change

Using the ADKAR model, you can see that the Knowledge of how to change did not come up in the poster board notes. This is as expected, giving the volume of information, training, conferences, and consulting companies out there preaching Agile values and offering to help people acquire the necessary knowledge of how to change.

No notes made it into in the Reinforcement category. It's not clear whether this means Agile fails before companies get to reinforce its values, or that when Agile values are reinforced there is a greater chance that it will be successful.

Transcription of the notes from Agile 2013, Nashville, Tennessee:
Lack of awareness/No need for change

• We think we are "Agile."
• We have not explained the why.
• What we do already works!?
• We only fund capital projects.
• It does not support secure software (ISO 2700 or Code Analyzers).
• Because my customer prefers Waterfall.
• We are different. Just like everyone else who has done it.
• We can't show the value.
• No buy-in from the business.

Lack of support/Desire to change

• We don't want it badly enough.
• They don't want to change and no Lean leadership.
• Clashes with current (complex) business model.
• Jim.
• Insufficient support from leadership.
• Because the CEO manages with fear and intimidation.
• Strong and growing PMO. The traditional structure is being instituted.
• Duplicitous product owners (ScrumMasters).
• We lose trust in each other.
• Because of our culture.
• My leadership team no longer believes in it.
• They think it is only a development methodology.
• Only focused on changes in development teams; not looking at whole value stream (product ideation and management).
• Our egos are bigger and more important than the company goals.
• Of me.
• Because I'm writing on this wall and I think it will so it will.
• My manager has to assign work to the team.
• Adoption is done because of convenience not because of conviction.
• The company wears "Agile" as a label and yet does nothing to remove the bureaucracy and obstacles team face daily while trying to implement change.
• They won't change ("They?" Maybe this is contributing to the problem).

Agile is misunderstood/Ability to change

• Not everyone on our team understands it.
• The concept of being dedicated to one task (story) at a time is not supported!
• Because Agile is a state of being, not doing. Agile is grossly misunderstood. SADLY!
• It is counterintuitive & hard to practice.
• Because failure is good for learning.
• Too many silos with their own goals that aren't the customer's goals.
• Different parts of the biz use different types of Agile.
• Too much focus on the mechanics of the process, not enough on the motivation/passion behind it.
• Because Agile is not the goal. Agile is simply a means to an end.
• Re-org will set us back to the beginning again and again.

My overall read from the notes is this: It is not enough to simply espouse the wonders of Agile, it is not enough that we educate people on Agile practices, it is not enough to quibble over which Agile flavor is best for you. If you don't treat Agile adoption as an organizational-change management challenge, and manage it as such, there is a good chance that it will fail.

Cloud Computing Google World View Notes

Presenter:
Mike Repass, Product Manager (reminder: Product Managers at Google are technical folks and not marketing folks like other companies, his words not mine, ex-MSFT dude).
You can follow him on http://twitter.com/mdrcode/

Websites:
http://appengine.google.com/
http://code.google.com/appengine/

Highlights
- Cloud computing based platform is in the managed platforms (non-machine) space, more on this later.
- Free Trial for ever.
- Buddy Poke ( http://www.buddypoke.com/ ) and www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions are examples of site using it
- Billing and Quota just released (This pay as you go is the secret source of cloud computing in my opinion )
- Support only for Python runtime 2.5 modified no other language is supported
- Uses same Google infrastructure
- Data export tool available in case you don’t like the service and want to take your stuff somewhere else (remember: Google does no evil!)
- Approach is very Developer centric, which is great! No assemblies required

Lowlights
- No IDE for Development, SDK + Documentation can be downloaded from the site. Last company that did this almost lost the runtime war somewhat at least, Java SDK released with no IDE back in the day. Everyday Developers (not hardcore, command line switching guys/gals love IDE, it’s a productivity issue.
- Support for only one language
- No message queuing support, so your website cannot do transactions, at least none that is meaningful
- No support for large files, this is on the roadmap though, there is a limit to the size of document you can upload.

Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Early March I attended a presentation on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), it was the second in a series of presentations on cloud computing put together by the washing technology industry association. The first event in the series provided an overview of cloud computing, while subsequent events focused on vendor specific take/implementations.

AWS combines various aspects of cloud computing, the EC2 service is largely a virtual environment, S3 provides storage while Cloud Front, SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service are web services that have been used by Amazon for its own internal development now made available to outside developers. Mechanical Turk, is an interesting addition to the AWS suite, provides people in the cloud that can get pretty much any tasks completed for you from research restaurants in your area, to development (coding). According to Andy Jassy (VP, Web Services), there are about four hundred thousand developers using AWS today and the presentation included customer evidence from two companies leveraging AWS and on-premises deployment. I don’t recall the break-down of the figure though and I wonder if Mechanical Turks coders are part of this number.

Also interesting is a comment by Andy that only about 20% of computing resources deployed by companies is utilized, not sure where this number came from but I can understand the low utilization figures considering the fact that most capacity planning exercise basically consider the maximum load expected plus a growth rate factor in determining what resource needs to be provided to accomplish the desired performance metric. This maximum load however may only ever be reached a few times during the day but the resources have to be available throughout the day since computing resource could not be acquired on-demand for this peak period. Hence the value of cloud computing, pay for only what you use.

With the ability to pay per use (this is the gem on cloud computing) AWS offers potential huge saving when compared to the on-premises model. In addition, it offers the ability to scale as necessary by simply requesting more resource as your application’s user base grows. In addition, a number of vendors e.g. IBM now allow customer to take existing license and use it in the cloud or purchase per usage licenses for their products in the cloud. EC2 now offers Windows on a pay per use basis.

Tood Fasullo of SmartSheet (S3/CloudFront/MT) and Mike Harrington of Picnik (EC2) both discussed their use of AWS. They both combine AWS with on-premises/hosted deployments.

There were no real surprises at this event mainly because I’ve followed AWS development since Wall Street dogged Jeff Bezos for spending too much money on it.

MLK Day 2009 Thoughts

Today is MLK day, I spent it catching up on my African American history, overdosing on the Inauguration broadcasts, the rhetoric on the significance of the inauguration of the first Black President and something about what Michelle Obama will wear to inaugural balls. In all of these, I kept searching for why is this really significant to blacks in America, why do blacks talk about this inauguration as the realization of the dream? Why does the rest of the world care about an historic moment in America? The latter question is somewhat easier to answer (I said somewhat), "I have a dream" is a well recognized phrase across the world as is its author and I want to believe that for years the world watched to see if the dream will ever be realized in America and by electing the first black president the dream is fulfilled and the American dream lives on.

The former question was a little harder to crack. Understanding segregation and recognizing racism is tough if you haven't lived through. Yes I have seen the pictures and I've spoken to enough black people who have told me the stories of the time, eventually my answer came from the following text in Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in response to a statement issued by the Alabama Clergymen.

"When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; ..... when your first name becomes "nigger", your middle name becomes "boy" .......... when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

It's true the signs have come down, the N-word became politically incorrect (unless of course you are black then it’s ok) and Lyndon Johnson signed The Voting Rights Acts but that degenerating sense of “nobodiness” lingered on for the most part until November 4th, 2008.

On January 20th, 2009 blacks in America will undoubtedly be celebrating the historic event of the inauguration of the first black president with a reassured sense of being somebody.

Happy MLK Day!!!

The Longest Night

One Easter Sunday, the Alaska Ranger—a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor—went down in the Bering Sea, 6,000 feet deep and thirty-two degrees cold. Forty-seven people were on board, and nearly half of them would spend hours floating alone in the darkness, in water so frigid it can kill a man in minutes. Forty-two of them would be rescued. Here’s how http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7619

I was drawn to Sean Flynn's incredible story of rescue in the Bering Sea partly because my company shares an office building with a fishing company and the Alaska Ranger is owned by a fishing company based in Seattle. Sean Flynn did a great job in this article, I was reading the story on a plane ride back to Seattle but Sean's style put me smack in the middle of the action, I felt the cold and darkness experienced by the survivors and the adrenaline rush experienced by the coast guard.

I'm a firm believer that if you enable smart people by providing clear goals and guidelines they will accomplish exceptional results and this story exemplified that. The decisions made by the coast guard personnels on the scene were sometimes against standard procedure but these decisions were critical in increasing the odds of survival of the distressed crewmen. There is definitely a place for not following the rule if you understand the ultimately objective which in this case was to save life.

Since the last time .....

Its' been a quite while since the last time I blogged and it's not because I didn't have anything to talk about. In fact, I had too many things I wanted to write, just could find the time because I was preoccupied with, well, life.

John McCain convinced me that the economy was fundamentally sound so I slept easy. Then I couldn't sleep for days, not because the economy happened and there was total meltdown on wall street, but because John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential candidate, I thought GWB was clueless but SP made GWB look like a genius.

Then the 2008 presidential election campaign happened, a guy better known for electing GWB and crafting some of the most divisive political campaigns I've ever experienced was among those predicting that Barack Hussein Obama (a Muslim, socialist/communist terrorist non-us citizen) would win the Presidential elections and become the First African American President of the United States of America. Why BHO is classified as African American rather than "half-cast" is a separate topic for discussion, but Black folks will certainly take it for all of what it is worth since by law BHO isn't White anyways.

Then Nov. 4th 2008 night happened. Work closed early (smart move by CEO!!!) so I went home to watch the election returns announced. Armed with my electoral college map (I simply stole Karl C. Rove's), my TVs tuned to CNN, MSNBC and FOX, my sister-in-law running results and making my predictions on the path the victory for BHO, the whole episode ended rather abruply. After two elections with hanging chad and other craziness in Florida, I was ready for a very long night. But then it didn't happen, it was over, BHO was President-Elect. To be honest I was partially disappointed that night, the good comeback that McCain promised me did not happen!!!. The day after I suddenly found that I had so much free time I didn't know what to do with myself. I had completely forgotten that the economy was still headed for recession.

Then the economy happened again and I finally realized the 2008 Presidential election was simply my distraction from the economy. I was a 2008 election junkie, my days (sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh yes even at work I was pouring over those damn polls ) were mostly consumed by them damn polls and analysts on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and any website that feed my election junkie head. I even had my own poll of polls and some of the things I was spewing will definitely make my parents proud :)

Then reality knocked (or rather slammed upon us), business climate became tougher and then it was back to dealing with business.

Managing with Heart

"Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal" - Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

Is that IP worth Protecting?

I attempted to watch the movie Hancock before its theater release. I say attempted because I was doing this online at one of the bootleg movie distribution sites, it wasn't exactly the entertaining experience I'd hoped for. The movie was distributed in three separate streams/downloads and the quality was very poor, but I got the gist of the movie and decided after watching the first stream that I should probably go see it at the theater.


The experience got me thinking though, why don't movies theaters release a low quality, multiple stream versions of the movies before release? Would the movie do better or worse at the box office as a result? Isn't this low quality version similar to giving away free samples of your product or content? If they are concerned about their brand why not just support the bootleg sites? My guess is that the main blocking issue is protecting the copyright.


These thoughts/questions led me to other question closer home; why don't we publish our product documentation online on the company's website? I asked a few folks here at work and the response I got was we didn't post the documentation to protect our intellectual property (IP) and maintain our competitive advantage. Does this really give us a competitive advantage or is the IP captured in our product documentation after the product is released really worth protecting? My personal opinion is that we stand to gain more from sharing the documentations than we stand to gain by not sharing. I believe it gives potential customers an opportunity to evaluate the product and be more prepared to ask questions based on an understanding of the literature. It is also a great complement to our scripted demo which covers the products only at a very high level and showcasing the features we consider most appealing.


In any case, it looks like the product documentation will make it online with the next revision of the company's website. I might even get luck and talk people into release portions of our source code as well. Doing that might encourage some rogue Developer to build SharePoint integration application using our source code as the foundation and we might be able to charge him/her good bucks if/when they get stuck ...... who knows.

Controlled or Valuable? That is the question

I got the following feedback on an article I'm writing for KMWorld (which arose out of my The Long Tail Of Enterprise Content Posts) and thought it was interesting enough to share the feedback and my response to it:



Comment:

Ok, there is something bothering me about the word “Value” all content within an organization is valuable, that is the point of SharePoint, our connectors and search working together. Is the left axis really value or “Controlled”.



My Response:

I agree that organizations have typically “Controlled” ( the 80/20 rule I mentioned) content in the enterprise to varying degrees, the question is how what is controlled is determined. It is in answering the question of what to control and how the long tail theory applies to content in the enterprise that I’ve used the content’s value which can be determined through computation e.g. risk analysis. We are also in agreement that all content within an organization is valuable, however I believe the relative value of content differs ( i.e. some more valuable than others) hence the tail of the curve, although it tends to zero it never touches the zero value line (i.e. the x-axis).

Content to control, in my opinion, is determined by the value of that content to the enterprise e.g. if regulation requires that the content be placed under control and there is a penalty for non compliance, then the relative value of the content is higher than content not subject to the regulation. Other factors as I indicated in the article can also be used to determine the value of a piece of content and hence if it should be controlled or not.

If, as you are suggesting, you graph the decision made after the content’s value is determined i.e. what goes into the Advanced ECM systems (typically the controlled content in the enterprise) versus what does not (typically the less controlled content in SharePoint and other non Advanced ECM repositories), you will not have curve let alone a long tail. You will end up with a bar graph or pie chart of categories of controlled content which does not lend itself to analyzing The Long Tail theory and it’s applicability to enterprise content.

Heaven Sent?

I like the song Heaven Sent by Keyshia Cole so much that I wanted to know the lyrics. Since this is the year 2008 I searched the internet for it, found it and in the confines of my bedroom belt out the lyrics to the song. Interestingly though, it brought back memories of the times before the internet, the days before CDs, DVD, MP3 etc.

Back in the day, my whole family would congregate around a tape recorder (yes I'm that young!) trying to decipher the lyrics of our favorite song. There usually was an operator, a scribe and the rest of us listening. Those where the good old days when we would simply wear out the tape from several Play, Stop, Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward sequence or worse still have the tape jammed and delicately remove it from the tape recorder's head. Deciphering the lyrics to songs was certainly a family activity we all participated in and probably enjoyed with each of us listening intently to the song till we completely build out the lyrics to the song and then on to the next song, till we completely an album (sometimes) - I think we did this for Lionel Richie's Can't Slow Down album.

The internet is definitely Heaven Sent, it saved me hours of trying to do this, especially since I would have done it alone - see we are all grown now, live in different countries and don't have much spare time - plus tape recorders are pretty much extint now. My simply search also gave me a bunch of information on the artist. It however won't replace the memories of a time I shared with my siblings. Anyone up for a tape recorder reunion?

The Long Tail Debate

Anita Elberse's recent piece Should You Invest in the Long Tail?, Harvard Business Review July-August 2008 has stirred up a debate among long-tail enthusiasts and critics. Prof. Elberse's academic work on the Long tail is great for the Long Tail theory. With such academic challenges of the Long Tail theory, Chris Anderson - who coined the term/theory - gets a good chance to defend the theory giving the new context and data presented by challengers. It is through such challenges that the theory gets refined and the boundaries of the theory's applicability defined.

Prof. Elberse's research validated the Long Tail theory and reveals additional patterns about consumption in the long tail: (1) the long-tail is long but extremely flat and (2) light users have a disproportionately strong preference for the more popular offerings. Her definition of what constitutes the "head" (and hence the tail) of the power curve is certainly a point of contention/difference between the Long tail theory and her analysis. She defines the head as the top 10% of titles in her data set while Chris considers the head as akin to the amount of content that can be shelved at the largest wal-mart store. I believe his definition is a better base-line especially when considering how the internet is lowering distribution cost and the fact that this is probably the theoretical limit of a brick and mortal store.

In her advice to producers and retailers she offers nothing new in the way of strategy implication/formulation which I was looking forward to. Overall it was a good piece and I'm only surprised at the level of criticism especially since she didn't invalidate the Long Tail but rather offered some new data to support it as well as tease out some additional conclusions.

Product Roadmaping

Kids do not try this at home without the supervision of a responsible adult. Why, you ask? You won't have to take responsibility for getting it all wrong.


I presented the product roadmap to the management team today. I won't tell you if I was booed and kicked out of the room or fired for my crazy ideas but I figured at best I should share my experience with anyone who cares to read my blog. I wouldn't recommend my approach only because I figured there has got to be a better way to doing this than flying solo and blindfolded. It would have been great to have a research team pouring over customer survey data, industry analyst banter etc but as my luck goes none was available so I had to distill whatever information I could find internally and on the internet and make the best of it.

We had commissioned Forrester to do some work for us on an unrelated project a couple of months ago so I had data from that exercise which was quite helpful. Although I'm sure innovation technology purist will tell you these analysts can't provide good data on new and groundbreaking technology but I needed a place to start and that was the most recent data I had so I went with it. In addition, I read my hearts out, AIIM website and magazine, CIO Insight, KM World etc. It at least gave me an idea of where the industry is likely to go and also because I know our customers are reading those magazines as well (nothing wrong with getting on the same page with your customers). Then the fun part was condensing all that to product features and a timeline to deliver innovative solutions which address the problems no one else has been able to solve for your customers and make lots of money!!

My final slide deck consisted of the following titles:

>Industry Trends and Competition
Quick summary of what is going on in the industry and what product attributes your competitions are touting to your customers.

>What do customers want?
What business problem have your customers told you they want to solve? I like to have customers explain what they need accomplished instead of the rundown of features that they sometimes give. I believe this will help you focus on the product attributes that will be of value to them.

>Things to Keep In Mind
Since I made some assumptions, this slide was essentially my disclaimer slide as well as what I plan to do to edge against any failed assumptions. At least you can always point to this if you are ever acused of not getting it right.

>Project Vision
Every product should have one.

>Key Scenarios
The customer scenarios will are going to address with the features planned for release

>Product Roadmap
Your project timeline including project goals

It will certainly take months to deliver on what was outlined in the roadmap and many more months after to find out if customers respond to the products with their pocket books.

Books I've read lately and will recommend

The Euro Cup finals is on right now, howver it is half time now so I figure I'll kick off this post before the game resumes. A friend asked me to recommend business books to read, he's the JD type and works for an Insurance company, so I'm guessing he wants to know what other people read and I'm probably the closest person to other people that he can come up with ( he's entire family and friends are JDs ). Anyway here is my list:

Business Strategy/Excecution
- Innovator's Delimma (C. Christensen)
- Innovator's Solution (C. Christensen)
- Crossing the Chasm ( G.A. Moore)
- Information Rules (C. Shapiro, H.R. Varian)
- Seeing What's Next (C. Christensen et al)
- Blue Ocean Stategy ( W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)
- Competitve Strategy ( M.E. Porter)
- Freakenomics ( S. D. Levitt, S. J. Dubner)
- The Long Tail (C. Anderson)
- Enterprise Architecture as a Strategy (J. W. Ross, P. Weill, D. Robertson)
- Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (R. Charan, L. Bossidy )

Leadership
- Leadership and Self Deception (Arbinger Institute)

Finance
- Financial Intelligence (Karen Berman, Joe Knight, and John Case)
- Ahead of the Curve ( J.H. Ellis)

Software Development
- Microsoft Secrets (M. A. Cusumano, R. W. Selby)
- Agile Project Managemet with Scrum (K. Schwaber)
- Agile Estimating and Planning (Mike Cohn)
- Applied User Stories ( Mike Cohn)
- Software Project Survical Guide ( Steve McConnell)
- ShipIt! (J. Richardson, W. Gwaltney Jr.)

Start-up
- Bootstrap ( K. L. Hess )
- The Art Of The Start (Guy Kawasaki)

I'll add more titles in the future.

Happy Reading Bro!!!!!

Taming Off-line Content

In my posts on the long tail of enterprise content it appears I neglected to address the issue of content stored on the desktop, flash drives and other storage devices (off-line content) of employees. Although it is difficult to assess the value of these content, I believe that, for the most part, these content simply extend the long tail to the right of the curve. The challenge with this situation is still the same as for any content in the long tail: how does the organization ensure that content that meets its criteria for risk (or other value attribute) is placed under control of the designated systems. However, content stored on an employee's chosen device, outside of the control of the enterprise content management system, presents an additional challenge for discovery, retention and destruction. Locating this content when the time comes to take action, such as destruction, can be a problem. Think about a document that an employee as copied to their flash drive for "safe-keeping", if the organization is required to retain this document for 3 years, how does the organization ensure that all copies of the document including the one taken off-line is destroyed at the end of the retention period?. The organization can certainly define policies for document handling and also block port access to prevent external storage devices from been attached to company issued computers etc. It may also consider blocking e-mail with attachments and locking down computer hard disk so nothing can be stored on it (good luck with that one!).


Gaining Control: Self-Containing/Describing Content

So far organizations have managed to get a good handle on content sent as e-mail attachments (at least somewhat), however there does not appear to be an easy answer for off-line content without doing something so drastic that any productivity gain an organization had anticipated is largely eroded. The more I think about this issue the more I'm convinced that the silver bullet (if there was ever such a thing) is to have content that can tell you everything about itself. Content that can carry around with it more just its metadata (e.g. author, department, type, age etc) but also information such as: (1) its access control list; (2) the application that was used to create it (not just the mime type or document extension); (3) what business processes it participates in; (4) what organization owns it and (4) what organizations are allows to read it etc. These metadata must be persisted with the content and readable by any operating system and/or application software.

The implementation of this concept will require cooperation by leading vendors in both application and operating system software and standards organizations. Existing technologies such as XML, DRM contain aspects of what is required to implement this concept but portability of DRM solutions today remains an issue for various reasons. WinFS, a technology from Microsoft (MSFT) has some of the critical operating system support needed for this, it has however had its own share of problems. XML is really not self-describing especially because to consume a piece of XML you must first understand its structure and the relationship between the elements to get any meaning out of it.

In any case, while we wait around for the industry to provide the necessary infrastructure support for true self-describing content, organizations can either reward employees for not taking content off-line or punish employees who do so. I'm not advocating either approach to solving the problem, just a suggestion.

What will Microsoft do next? Future of ECM Software Industry

The nature of competition in the ECM industry is changing, the disruption of the industry by SharePoint is well under way. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is really the first version of the SharePoint technology that you can even begin to consider as an ECM product/solution/platform and I expect Microsoft will use the same evolution strategy it has used to successfully compete in other areas to compete in the ECM software market by offering a controlled migration up the ECM software technology trajectory.

Advanced Functionalities
I expect Microsoft will continue to improve SharePoint and move it up the ECM software technology trajectories. It expected to offer improved Business Process Management (BPM) and Compliance features will provide potential beachheads it will use to advance upstream. In addition, it will continue to provide Application Programming Interface (API) support so third-parties can develop/integrate off-the- shelf and custom workflow packages for specific industry verticals. With respect to compliance functionalities, it is expected to provide deeper integration between its records management features (which still needs improvement) and Microsoft Office Outlook application/Microsoft Exchange Server. Most knowledge workers spend a significant amount of time working in Microsoft Office Outlook compared to any other desktop product, this integration will put Microsoft right at the hub of the content transaction flow, a critical point to enforcing retention policies.


Visual Studio Integration, Training and Certification
With its unsurpassed experience with Developer tools, it is expected to provide deeper integration into Visual Studio and .NET platform for developers. This integration will include tools and platform technologies to support authoring on its ECM platform, which will, amongst other things, lower the skills required to create complex work flows. In addition, it will offer training and certification programs for developers and administrators which has the net effect of reducing the total cost of ownership of SharePoint technologies.


Microsoft Office SharePoint Server versions
As Microsoft moves SharePoint technologies up the technology trajectories with Advance functionalities, it is expected to maintain its low-end products to prevent low-end market disruption by another vendor. It already offers a free version that ships with the Windows Operating System - Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) - and will probably offer a Professional version for Departments and an Enterprise version for Corporations. SharePoint in the future which will allow organizations to integrate and manage all of its SharePoint deployments. These versions will not only satisfy the needs at the different levels of the organizations, it will also include functionalities for corporations to deploy enterprise-wide policies that can be applied to all MOSS deployments such as the central content repository for all content regardless of which sharepoint version is used to store the content.

Will incumbents pull pushes? It is hard to tell, if the way they have responded to the threat of SharePoint todate is anything to go by, the following lessons learned from the effects of networks and positive feedback in railroad gauges summarize what I expect:

"Those left with the less popular technology will find a way to cut their losses, either by employing adapters or by writing off existing assets and joining the bandwagon"

I don't expect EMC, to put up a strong challenge as MOSS becomes dominant in the Enterprise. At the core of its business is really information storage and regardless who wins, as long as the content is stored on EMC devices, EMC will be a happy camper. IBM will certain give a good fight but again, IBM has demonstrated that it will sell anything the customer wants as long as it can make service dollars from such deals. I expect both to continue to invest in sustaining technologies such as Adapter to MOSS or move their products to serve niche markets. Their value network and cost structure will make it extremely difficult for them to launch any meaningful defense against a competitor such as Microsoft. But then, this is the technology industry afterall and there is nothing to say that these companies won't happen on their own disruptive technology or some yet to be named startup won't disrupt the industry.

100 Million SharePoint Users

In this post, I continue my rant on the disruptive nature of SharePoint. Well before Microsoft’s entrance into the ECM software market, the incumbents (market leaders: Documentum and FileNet ) had abandoned customers in the low-end tiers of the market, who did not need all the bells and whistles provided by the Advanced ECM capabilities in their solution offering. Their strategy focused on moving up the technology trajectory by developing features that will sustain their position and protect their market share in the ECM software market. By targeting these non-consumers of Advanced ECM solutions, Microsoft was able to established a beach head in the ECM software market with the launch of SharePoint in 2001. I doubt that the incumbents initially perceived SharePoint as a threat to their businesses, especially because SharePoint 2001 was positioned as a Collabotion/Portal solution and it's ECM capabilities where rarely touted/non-existing.

Borrowing from the principles of the disruptive innovation, I will speculate on the factors that may have also contributed to the incumbent's initial/continued reaction to Microsoft's entrance:

• SharePoint was simpler, cheaper and lower performing product and therefore did not threaten the revenues from the customers served by the incumbents;
• A lower price point/margin product such as SharePoint was not going to provide the next growth opportunities required to justify their stock price to Wall Street;
• The most influential/profitable customers wanted an Advanced ECM functionality.

Simpler, Cheaper and Lower Performance
The first versions of the SharePoint Technologies: SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2001 and SharePoint Team Services (STS) provided very basic document management functionality. STS was a free version of the SharePoint technology which shipped with Windows 2000 server. An administrator could easily enable it (SPS or STS) for a team’s use without additional software or cost. SPS was targeted at departmental use, the document library feature it provided was limited in functionality and the workflow support had to be removed in the next version. It sold for about $50/cal and less than $5000.00 per server license. It lacked support for enterprise deployment and management features. Its main customers were departments or small businesses who needed a simple system for collaboration and document storage. It had a simple interface and was easy to install. It was more widely deployed as an Enterprise Portal solution and an Enterprise Search solution than an ECM solution.

SPS 2003 was only marginally better than the first release of the product. It addressed some of the issues and bugs that prevented the deployment of SPS 2001, but provided no new major functionality. It still lacked critical features to support enterprise wide deployment and use. However, SPS 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, the successor to STS 2001, were widely deployed at the departmental levels largely because they were more stable and provided the basic feature set needed for a departmental collaboration and document management. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (2007) can be considered Microsoft’s ECM version 1.0, again its simpler, easy to use feature set made it appealing to the masses. It now has support for server farm and significant improvements were made to support enterprise wide deployment, management and scalability.

Despite these improvements in functionalities, SharePoint does not directly threaten the core businesses of the incumbents. Incumbents see the rapid growth in the adoption of SharePoint as an opportunity to integrate its department level document management capability with their Advanced ECM capabilities. Their strategy is to position their platform as the central repository for all content in the enterprise even when the content begins life in SharePoint. This is a win-win scenario for them with SharePoint occupying the departmental tier and their Advanced ECM platform occupying the enterprise tier of the ECM market.

Lower Price/Margin Product
Customers at the lower-tier of the ECM software market are price sensitive, therefore they are willing to accept a good enough feature set at a reasonable price. The incumbent's value network of distributors, solution providers and sales associate will find it hard to justify any investment in a low-end product. Profit at the lower-end, lower price point tier will have to come from volume sell which the incumbent’s value network and cost structure is not equipped to do. It is also doubtful that the internal process, used by incumbents to justify investment and select projects would have approved the developing of a product with such low margins compared to the high margins enjoyed by their current product offerings.

On the contrary, Microsoft’s resource allocation framework, project approval process and value network can support a product at the price point that MOSS 2007 is offered. Microsoft's Sales Professionals and Solution Providers have developed a good process for making profit at the price points through volume sale and services. In addition, it appears that Microsoft’s internal process supports funding for disruption technologies as long as they show growth and profit potential.

Customer Demand
Business Process Management (BPM), Records Management and Compliance issues dominated the ECM industry for years. The customers targeted by the incumbents already had an ECM system with advanced capabilities and therefore the performance attributes they desire from their ECM software shifted to these areas. It is only natural and logical that the market leaders spend their R & D dollars to satisfy these needs, thus investing in sustaining technologies to maintain their market positions. The market size for these sustaining technologies can be readily determined and computing a rate of return above the company’s hurdle rate is a much easier exercise. Additionally, the customers – a key holder of resources (money) needed – are not asking for a simpler and lower performing product, for which they have no use. These customers now demand that SharePoint work with their Advanced ECM systems and naturally the market leaders are investing in sustaining technologies by building adaptors to integrate SharePoint with their platforms.

100 million users can't be wrong, ok 100 million user licenses can't be wrong, SharePoint has certainly crossed the chasm. A search for "Microsoft + SharePoint" returns almost 4 million hits, a similar search for "EMC + Documentum" and "IBM + FileNet" returns 352,000 and 544,000 hits respectively. Microsoft now has a SharePoint Only Conference which is well attended and the incumbents are not left out of the frenzy, they now have SharePoint sessions at their respective conferences which are sold out. Amazon.com has over 1200 titles on SharePoint. Disruptive innovations create opportunities in their value chain and SharePoint has certainly created it's share of opportunities for Microsoft Solution Providers and ISV partners. Vorsite Corporation, my employer, is a beneficial of the opportunity created by SharePoint's rapid adoption.

Is SharePoint a Disruptive Technology?

First, a brief history/overview/introduction, with the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, Microsoft (MSFT) delivered a product which provides some of the enterprise content management features already available through the leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors, but at a fraction of the price. SharePoint was first released in 2001 as SharePoint Portal Server and targeted at the Enterprise Portal and Collaborative software market. MOSS 2007 however, positions Microsoft to directly compete with the leading providers of ECM software.

AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Industry Association, defines ECM as the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow for the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists. An ECM software system typically has the following components: (1) Document Management, (2) Digital Asset Management, (3) Document Imaging, (4) Business Process Management/Workflow, (5) Record Management and (6) Collaboration.

The ECM software market is currently estimated at about $14b with revenues expect to reach $67b by the year 2010. The leading providers of software in the industry are FileNet (an IBM company) and EMC Corporation (EMC), with market shares of 22% and 13% respectively. Both became major ECM vendors through acquisitions. EMC, the leader in information storage, acquired Documentum, the leader in enterprise content management software, in October of 2003, in a move designed to strengthen its Information Lifecycle Management strategy, for $1.7b. The acquisition gave EMC access to technology which manages enterprise content that can be stored on EMC’s storage devices. In a similar move three years later, IBM acquired FileNet to advance its On Demand strategy. The acquisition of FileNet according to IBM will make it the clear industry leader in the growing Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. On July 26, 2007 MSFT reported that its Office SharePoint Server business unit generated almost $1b in revenue for the fiscal year. This announcement, which is an unprecedented move by Microsoft as it does not generally comment on revenues for individual products, is a clear indication that SharePoint has crossed the chasm to the mainstream of ECM software. It is no longer a technology for the innovator and early adopter types, but is now a stable mainstream ECM software product for the early majority to consider.

The Disruptive Innovation Theory by Clayton M. Christensen, points to situations in which new organizations can use relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to create growth and triump over powerful incumbents. The theory holds that existing companies have a high probability of beating entrant attackers when the contest is about sustaining innovations. But establised companies almost always lose to attackers armed with disruptive innovations. SharePoint is a relatively simple, convenient, low-cost ECM platform that has brought 100million non-consumers into the ECM world. ECM purist will argue that SharePoint is not a "real" ECM platform/solution or that it is not an "Enterprise" Content Management solution. This is certainly true especially when SharePoint functionalities today are lined up against the ECM definition provided by AIIM. However this is the nature of a disruptive technology.

Enterprise Content LT: Getting a Handle on it

Given the challenges of the LT of enterprise content, organizations are probably tempted to manage the long tail by controlling its spread. This is a losing proposition at best, organizations need to put in place an content management strategy with the following components (1) Content repository Agnostic; (2) Make all content available available (3) Help Employees find the available content in the organization and (4) Multi-product solution.

Content repository agnostic solutions are harder to come by chiefly because each vendor tool stores data using proprietary formats. In addition these applications are tightly coupled to a chosen repository. One way to work around this issue is to invest in adaptors to help connect the different systems in use.

Making all content available and helping employees find the content can be achieved by deploying a search solution along with a taxonomy/folksonomy solution. These should allow access to the disparate data/content repositories in the organization from a single search user interface.

Employee content management needs may vary by various dimensions (functional grouping, department, tasks etc); therefore a short-list of enterprise content management tools to be used and supported in the organization should be provided for employees to choose from based on their needs. Adaptors may be needed to ensure that content can be accessed across these systems.