Ready for Web 3.0?

Over at FastCompany is a good read on what Amazon’s Chief Scientist, Andreas Weigend, sees on how customers engage with organizations online.  We have moved past Web 2.0 and are now in Web 3.0 land.  According to Andreas:

• Web 1.0 – eBusiness – Getting businesses online
• Web 2.0 - MeBusiness – Focusing on the consumer
• Web 3.0 – WeBusiness – Moving business to a community focus

His point is that your customers are already entering in mounds of data that’s more valuable than any survey.  Companies need to be able to start taking advantage of that now.

However, I’m not sure if companies are able to be proactive because there isn’t a whole lot going on in semantic analytics or social media business intelligence.  These systems need built, people need trained and leaders need to see the value and have a vision for it.  That’s going to take some time.

Flipping over to Google for a few seconds after that FastCompany article brought up this nice prediction on the Web-Point-Ohs trajectory.  Nice visualization.

Where the Web-Point-Ohs are taking us - Information and Social Connectivity Online (Source: Radar Networks)

The question is how quickly can companies react to start taking advantage of this river of untapped information?  Or will business intelligence tools, solutions and adoption be a lagging indicator on the trend line?

The 20 Most Popular Programming Languages

Any kid has the chance to succeed at school in their teen years, but it becomes a whole lot easier if you’re not worried about getting shoved into lockers, being picked on or having your lunch money pilfered.  Being accepted and getting in with a good crowd takes a huge amount of pressure.  It opens new doors, exposes exciting new possibilities, gives you support and helps get you through the tough times.  Every kid wants to be liked, respected and feel safe.

Picking the right programming language has many similarities.  It’s a popularity contest.

When it comes to choosing the programming language your team, projects, organization and clients will be depending on to deliver solutions today, and the building blocks for the years to come, you want to makes sure the community is there to support you.  Usually when people think of the community, they think of blogs, wiki, source code repositories, forums and language specific sites.  And that’s important.

What’s also important is the pool of people that actually program in the language.  This is the potential pool of candidates you’ll be pulling from when you grow or have churn.  It also indicates its use in real-world solutions.  The amount of training available for it will also be a key data point.  Any programmer worth their salt needs to be able to dig through the web and self-train themselves as they grow.  But live training is the best way to get programmers over the wall to that next level.

And you will want to make sure that there are enough vendor options out there that can provide solutions and services on your programming platform.  These will be the folks you call in to fill critical needs and those you work closely with.

So what programming languages are most “popular”?  Tiobe Software has been measuring the popularity of programming languages since 2001 and they put out a monthly index.  This month’s rankings look like this…

Tiobe Index for June 2010

The information provided is a good data point.  If you are looking at changing direction with your current language, or you’re starting from scratch, this is a good place to go if you have a couple options you are investigating.

However, having said all that, this index is a data point and it’s probably not the strongest one you will use.  You need to choose the right language for the job at hand as well as the direction you’re going.  There are plenty of other, stronger, points to keep in mind:

• The type of programming you’re doing
• The kind of solutions your client’s need
• How you expect to staff your team
• Platform and skill sets that are prevalent in your organization
• The skill sets, background, dynamics and programming mindset of your team
• The organization’s culture
• The organization’s standard operating procedures
• Existing vendor/project pipelines
• Long-term strategy for the organization, department and, therefore, team

So if you go through the above bullet points and choose a language that’s not in the top 5, or even the top 10, you will still be in good shape if you’ve done your due diligence.

Why Is It So Hard To Measure ROI?

When asking questions about what the Return on Investment (ROI) is for a project, regardless of whether it’s software development or data warehousing/business intelligence, people start to fidget.  The same folks who are passionate about the initiative, spent weeks on the requirements and are willing to fight a cage match to get their project to the top of the priority queue are suddenly at a loss for words when asked what the return is to the organization if this work gets done.

Some of the quotes I’ve heard to the question “What’s the ROI on this project/initiative once the solution is rolled out?”:

“There is no ROI”

“…and even if people can do their jobs faster we’re still paying them so it’s not like we’re saving the company money.”

“I don’t think we can put a dollar figure on it.  We just need to do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Unless it’s something you can sell, it’s too hard to measure ROI on technology projects.”

Quite frankly, it is rare to find a technology project that has the ROI clearly stated that is measurable, believable and agreed upon.

However, there is no hesitation at marshaling a small army of very expensive resources, along with the infrastructure to support the effort, and lock them away on a project for three months or six months or longer.  Total costs for an initiative go well beyond a project time line, and it isn’t hard to crest the $1M mark in Total Cost of Ownership within a year or two even on seemingly small projects.  That’s one heck of an opportunity cost.

I am a firm believer that anything worth doing is worth measuring, but often it’s not.  What’s worse is that the success of most projects is measured as the combination of three things:

1. Was it completed?
2. Was it on time?
3. Was it within budget.

While those are important measures, they really don’t matter if the organization sees no value from the investment.

I’m not sure if there’s just one major hurdle that everyone has problems clearing when it comes to ROI or if it’s different for everyone.  These are some of the mental barriers I’ve seen in people :

• Some have a hard time with dollars and cents- they just don’t think that way.
• Math scares them and all they can think about is how much they hated figuring out the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and Net Present Value (NPV) problems for their Finance course in college
• People are overly cautious and don’t want to over promise
• The value that their department, or functional area, provides to the company is not very clear
• They assume it’s the cost of doing business so no ROI needs to be computed
• No revenue will be generated from the work and that’s all they think ROI is
• There was never a need to define and argue initiative ROI so they really don’t know how

What I always find fascinating is that, even though ROI is rarely given and most people claim it’s too hard (if not impossible), everyone knows what the ROI is for a project.   They just don’t know they know.  All you need to do is help them uncover it.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”  – Michelangelo

In subsequent posts I’ll share with you the chisels that I use.

Gartner’s Business Intelligence Outlook for 2010

Some of the big takeaways from GeoJan’s highlights of the Gartner’s predictions for BI in 2010:

• Compound growth rate for BI platforms through 2013 will be 6.3%.
• Momentum grows in the shift from a central core of report authors to empowering users to analyze the data themselves to get the answers they really need.
• SAP and IBM (Cognos) customers are loosing patience. Attributed to these companies still being in the midst of the transition pains that come from acquisition.
• All those Challengers in the BI space were Visionaries the year before and that’s good.  Their innovation is driving better product development choices from the Leaders of the quadrant.
• The goal to consolidate to one enterprise BI platform is still a talking point at a lot of organizations.  The difficult economy and the need for better, faster competitive intelligence open the doors for the pure-play vendors to slip into the same organizations where the megavendors have setup shop.
• (Reading between the lines)  A growing challenge will be how to manage all the intelligence evolving on the network shares and desktops with the growth of these light-weight, pure-play BI tools.

Below is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence.  Are you seeing these trends taking shape where you are?

Source: GeoJan

Let Your Team Amaze You

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”    -Albert Einstein

Take a look at your development team(s).  Do you see a bunch of acronyms or are you blown away by their creativity? When you ask for a solution to a problem do you get one answer, or four possible solutions?  Do they ever walk to your desk out of the blue to bounce a brand new idea off of you?  Do they have pet projects and did they come up with those themselves?

There are lots and lots of people who can write code, draw up a project plan, fix a bug or create a data model.  But you don’t want a manila team.  Big thinkers energize everyone they come into contact with.  Even if many of those ideas are half-baked and unrealistic, these are the kind of people you want on the team.  Because sooner or later they’re going to hit onto something big.  And that’s one more big idea than those that develop-by-the-numbers.

Thinking of it another way, if you were planning a big event, a gathering of some of the most important people in your life, and you had the choice to hire a short order cook or a chef to work it which would you choose?

Creative types deliver better solutions.  Encourage it, cultivate it and shape it.  Then stand back and watch your team amaze you.

The #1 Reason BI Isn’t Getting To That Next Level

The quality is bad.

Interesting quote by John Thompson of Kognito:

‘[Executives] are saying, “Are you certain that syndicated sales data and marketing data from last year is high quality data I can use to make decisions?” They’re still asking about that.’

When talking about the quality of any system there’s two parts to it:  real quality and perceived quality.   The prior are things you can eyeball, create QA/QC test plans around, foot to baselines, regression test and hand off to your development team to fix.  This type of quality is what most technology teams focus on.

Perception, however, is more powerful, influential and much-much-less scientific.   If someone doesn’t believe in the quality of your data, or your team, then it really doesn’t matter if the data is correct or not.  Often the perception is well warranted at some point.  However, once the real quality is corrected, that perception lingers.  What needs rebuilt at this point is your reputation and that doesn’t happen in a day.

You need to work harder at changing your image, and it needs to be at the top of the list.  If people don’t have faith in the quality of what you and your team do then you’re not going to be able to move forward with the things you really want to do and the business really needs.

Quality is job #1.  Nail that before moving onto the more innovative initiatives.  It’s your dial tone.