Congratulations to our soon to be new Federal CTO

It’s not official yet but word is out that Obama will nominate Aneesh Chopra as our first federal CTO.    Tim O’Reilly wrote a good post about him which I would encourage you to read, as much for O’Reilly’s insights as for the comments to the post.

While I left a comment on O’Reilly’s post, I wanted to post it here, slightly expanded.  This role is critical for the future of the US, not just for the vision it must provide but also for the excitement it must build for technology itself.   If the US is to partner with other countries to drive innovation we must have someone who is able to excite corporate leaders and politicians by creating and executing on a vision for the future that drives growth across the board.  This CTO must also avoid being perceived as isolationist as it will be critical for the US to truly partner with other countries.  Through partnerships we can drive innovation on environment technologies, space exploration, financial systems, etc..

 Clearly, the choice of Federal CTO was not going to please everyone.  However, Tim O’Reilly says it mostly right when he says “We couldn’t do better”.  I would modify it only slightly to say “We couldn’t do better at this point in time”.

- 

• Chopra, as an insider with some clear vision will be able to engage and excite those internal to the government and many of the outsiders.  He will have work to do, building bridges, but as someone familiar with the political arena he is prepared.  Someone from the private sector would struggle in this regard and likely lessen the belief that this role is needed.
•  Chopra appears to be a capable partner for the CIO.  His vision and his actions around security are not as critical as people are making it out to be.  The CIO is in charge for driving these policies, not the CTO.  Furthermore, the CIO will be the one, working jointly with Chopra, to streamline, I hope, processes like payroll, IT governance, etc..
• I am pleased that Chopra is not someone who appears to fall in love with shiny new technologies.  He is someone who has demonstrated an ability to recognize a problem, and solve it with technology (not the other way around).

However, it will be important for him to become the unifying force between government and private enterprise.  I hope to see him embrace the private sector by:

• Partnering in setting the national technology strategy.  Setting up technology councils with a mix of corporate and government visionaries will be key.
• Bringing domestic and international corporations into the fold to deliver on the vision.  Again, we must partner both domestically and internationally to succeed in today’s world.

If this partnering is done correctly it will also act to give CTOs from outside the traditional government career path deeper insights into what it will take to be successful as the Federal CTO.  Who knows, one day Corporate America may get their wish.

Aneesh, good luck in the new role.

John

http://twitter.com

Thanks to Oprah, Twitter has crossed the chasm

I have read countless posts about how foolish it was that Oprah gave Ashton Kutcher the title of King of Twitter.  The most recent post that I read was on searchenginewatch.com where the author was thoroughly upset.  While I agree with some of what I’ve read I think that many of the posts that I have read really miss the important aspects of what is happening.

• Twitter has officially Crossed the Chasm .  I might be exaggerating slightly, but once Oprah defines something as worthy of her time, people jump on board.
• Ashton is King?  Maybe of his household, but not of Twitter.  However, does it really matter who is crowned King?  It doesn’t matter if it’s Kutcher, Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, or even me.  Who cares?  What matters is that people are talking about the platform.

While I agree that the race to 1 million followers is foolish, it has done a good job of raising awareness of twitter and of social media in a very large way.

Yes, others have paved the way for the current crop of celebrities.  You can’t knock, however, the impact that this stunt might have.  Short-term you will see a large influx of new users coming to the platform.  This new awareness could enable the platform to begin to reach it’s potential as a social media marketing platform, the one thing that I feel gives Twitter a chance of becoming a profitable business.

What do you think?  Will it further the cause of social media?

John
John on Twitter

Do we need a Chief Social Media Officer?

Absolutely not.  I was reading a good post about this topic (see the article here).  The writer is very good, very insightful, and always worth reading.  However, her post left me feeling that too many people are losing sight of the fact that social media is simply another tool in our communication tool belts.   As I wrote as part of my comment on her blog:

“Social media is simply another set of tools that can be utilized as part of your overall corporate strategy. They enable a richer two-way communication than some of the older approaches (like direct mail, e-mail blast, etc..) but do not warrant another seat at the table any more than newer software technologies like Ajax do. I haven’t yet heard a suggestion for a Chief AJAX Officer and hope I never do.
“

Coporations are in place to deliver value to stakeholders and customers.  The overall mission of most corporations is to drive profit by increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

C-level executives, as part of the leadership team, bring their respective views to the table with a goal of ensuring the corporation is best able to make the right decision.  As representatives of major functions in the corporation they are viewed as being best suited for this role. 

The use of social media tools should be something each of these executives are aware of, but we do not need one person at the table repesenting these tools any more than we need a CAO (Chief Agile Officer) or CFITO (Chief Fitness Officer).  While each of these jobs represent a set of tools and processes that will make the company better we need executives that focus on business strategy not business tools.

What do you think?

John

Are you ready to release the product?

Checkpoints at key milestones are always important, but never more so than at the end of a project release. The Swimfish team is nearing completion of our Milestone Tracking Matrix product.  The product, which enables users to coordinate their deals efficiently and completely, from due diligence to distribution tracking, to discovering new opportunities, has a complex back-end that is tightly integrated with underlying CRM systems.

For this review meeting it’s critical to have the business owners (Product Manager in our case) as well as the leads for support, development, QA, and documentation in the room.  Here is a summary of some of our checklist items:

• Make sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of what new functionality is being included in the release.  You should not be surprising anyone at this point.
• Review the status of any remaining open bugs.  Do you have any issues remaining?  What is the risk level with fixing, or not fixing, the remaining items?
• Ensure we all understand the status of key pieces of documentation.  In our case this includes release notes, end-user help, and server administration guides.  Are they completed?  Who has reviewed them?
• What is our customer notification plan?  Our software runs in our SAAS environment and on-premise.  Ensure your plan delivers the right message to each audience.

These were some of the key points we covered today.  How does this compare to your end of release meetings?

John
On Twitter at JohnFMoore

Gain 10,000 followers on Twitter in 10 days. Here’s how

Why on earth did you decide to read this blog post?  There are already way too many people promising to deliver on foolish claims and we do not need someone else doing it, even if it is me.

• Why do you want so many followers? 
• Do you have something truly original to say?
• Are you prepared to engage in two way communication with your new community?

If you just want followers for the sake of followers I would encourage you to find a remote location in the world where people have not yet seen ipods.  Wow them with your superpowers and you’ll be all set for decades. If you do want to follow/unfollow me on Twitter, you can find me here. I have an ipod and I know how to use it.

Finally, if you like this, please use this as part of your standard response to all of those who are constantly pitching to help you with this topic.  Simply respond with:  “Read this: http://bit.ly/1i9hL #nosilverbullet” .

John

Rotting sharks and project survival

Hákarl.  It’s rotted, or fermented, shark meat that is popular in Iceland.  While I spent time with my family this weekend a cousin of mine was watching a TV show about unusual foods.  The host travels all over the world, eating items that most of us would consider less than appetizing.

During one of his trips the host took a trip to Iceland to sample the highly treasured Hákarl.  What I love about the early Icelandic people who chose to eat this fish is that the fish is extremely poisonous.  If you eat it when fresh it can cause major bleeding and other wondrous side-effects.  Still, these early, hardy people, did not give up.  They found that by letting it ferment outdoors for a period of 4 – 6 weeks, or longer, that the fish was quite edible and even tasty.  Of course, you need to ignore the heavy ammonia-like smell that the fish releases, but after that it’s not bad.

If we could only bring this determination with us during our day to day work-lives we would see far fewer failed projects.  For example:

• In the early stages of a new project you will often be overly optimistic about what can be completed.  In fact, I’ve often seen project teams take on too much work, nearly destroying the project and their personal health in the process.  If the project is beginning to hemorrhage, step back and take a close look at what you’ve bitten off.
• Remember your requirements and do not get blinded by the shiny new features that you want to build.  Yes, the shark may look appetizing fresh out of the water, but your goal is to eat AND survive.  With your projects, remember the goal and don’t get lost in the weeds of how you thought you would deliver the project.
• Projects are hard, sometimes you could even say they stink.  Again, focus on the prize and deliver on the requirements. 

Okay, I might have gone too far with this one theme, but I had fun and I hope it gave you something to think about.

John

Sales goals and your CRM system

I was reading an article on CRM Daily about 2009 Sales needing a 2009 CRM system.    They performed a survey of more than 1700 companies worldwide and noted these two important items:

• Less than 59% of the sales reps made their sales targets in 2008.
• 95% of the companies expected to beat last years revenue targets.

Many of these companies will be disappointed in 2009 as they will fail to take the steps necessary to change the status quo.  The article notes you need to get more from your CRM but does not go into enough detail. Here are my recommendations:

• Before you dig into the CRM make sure you have the right sales team.  A good CRM system will not save bad sales people, fix that first.
• Review the processes your CRM system is supporting.  If your processes are not optimized than the best CRM system will not help, at least not enough.
  • Identify where the weakpoints are from lead generation through deal closing through support.  Fix the processes.
• If your processes are solid make sure you do not have an education issue.  If you do, fix it.
• Assuming your processes and education are solid, now:
  • Are you automatically capturing leads from your web site?  If not, ensure you implement changes to automatically create leads in your CRM system based upon processes you already have setup on your site.  Too many companies still have these leads sent in e-mails resulting in slow responses or worse, lost leads.
  • Does your CRM system automate the process of determining the quality of your leads?  Help your inside sales team more efficiently determine who to contact first.
  • Ensure your CRM system enables you to measure, automatically, the number of leads coming in each week.  The marketing team needs to have a target for this and you need to make sure you’re on target.
  • Ensure your CRM system enables you to measure the age of the leads in your system based upon predefined quality scales.  Ensure your hottest leads are not waiting for follow-up as time you waste enables the competition to get your potential customers.
  • How do you estimate the potential revenue from a lead? Setup your CRM system to guide sales people in setting these estimates.
  • Use reminders and alerts for sales managers and your outside sales team to keep them focused on moving leads through the sales funnel.
  • Use mobile access to your CRM system to ensure that your road warriors are entering information into the CRM system as soon as they leave customer meetings.
  • Make sure you have easy access to track who is not using the CRM system as desired.  You need these people to use the system to maximize the power of your team.  If they are not willing to use it as needed, find someone who will.
  • As deals come in, make sure your CRM system is set to easily transition deals from the sales team to your account managers and support teams.  If you’ve won the business, don’t lose it here.
  • If you’ve lost a deal make sure your CRM system points out where in the process it was lost, who was working the deal, why it was lost.  There will be patterns, you just have to look for them.
    • If you’re losing a large number of deals at a specific stage, find out why.  As an example, you may not have the right marketing or technical materials, such as whitepapers or customer referrals.

What else should you be doing?  Sales targets are always going up, what are you doing to ensure you hit them?

John

Are you about to invest in Mobile Enterprise product development? You need to develop on the web first, here’s why

This has recently been a topic that I have been discussing with a lot of different people. In general, people tend to disagree with me until we talk it out.  Their argument is that the performance and the functionality available on each device is superior to what you can create with a web application. They are right on this front, but are still wrong in choosing to develop device-specific solutions first.

Here is why you MUST develop your mobile application as a web-based solution prior to considering device-specific alternatives.

• In the past, you could count on the majority of your mobile users (generally the sales team) to be utilizing Blackberry phones only. While there are incompatibilities between versions, for the most-part a Blackberry application for a lower version will work for higher versions(again, for the most part).  However, if you look at a recent article from Fast Company you will see that times have changed.  The data is for the United State only and will vary elsewhere. However, take a look at the numbers:
  • Nearly 50% of the users have iPhones with the remaining 50% fragmented between versions of the Blackberry, Palm, Samsung, etc.. I agree that many Enterprises reflect differing percentages, but the iPhone is gaining market share, you cannot count on selling mobile solutions that only target the Blackberry.
  • The data is also clear about the fact that Palm and Windows Mobile solutions are losing market share.  They are good platforms but users are choosing other devices.
• Engineers are expensive.  I know, I am one and I manage a team of engineers. With finite budgets you must maximize your investment to achieve the greatest revenues possible. Development of a web-based mobile solution will enable you to deliver an application that will work across the majority of devices used within the Enterprise today. There are small differences (don’t use JavaScript, for example, as it’s only available on the iphone and is limited there) but these differences will not prevent you from building a great solution.
• It is much easier to up-sell customers with web-based applications. You do not have to convince them to go back to your web site, buy, and download. They already go to your site to use the application and there is nothing to download. If they buy a new feature, it’s there, no hassle.

There are countless other benefits as well, ranging from control over sensitive data to detailed logging that you can use to determine which features are being used, and which are not, so that you can determine where you should continue investing your resources.

Now, I know I’ve convinced you, so now what? You will probably reach a point where you want to extend your application’s capabilities and need to deliver a device-specific solution. You need to carefully consider your current user base, of course, but be careful not to overlook where they are going. I’m currently using a Motorola Q with Windows Mobile. I love it and it solves all of my problems. When my contract comes up later this year, logic would dictate that I would  either remain with the current phone or purchase a new Windows Mobile device. It works, I like it. Guess what, I’m going to buy an iPhone and I know I’m not alone.

Have I convinced you? Do you see other benefits of building a web-based mobile solution first? Do you have reasons why you should build a device-specific solution first?

John
Follow me on Twitter

I didn’t have time to follow that process

As I sat with my team for our post-mortem I heard someone state that they didn’t follow the agreed upon process because things became too hectic.  Now, this person is great.  They are one of the hardest working people I know and they are a critical part of the team.  However, this answer is never acceptable, never.

Processes are put in place to stream-line our jobs while ensuring that the job is done right.  However, if you have people that are not following the established processes, you need to find out why.  Here are some things you should be asking:

• What reasons are people giving you for not following the process?
  • Do not jump to conclusions.  Have a conversation and listen to the concerns people are raising.
• Is it one person avoiding the process or multiple?
  • If it’s one person determine if this is a poor performing employee or just someone stuck with a poor performing process.
• Is the process still valuable? 
  • Sometimes processes remain simply because they have always been there.  Just as Tevye had to ultimately turn his back on many traditions that were outdated (Fiddler on the Roof), you may be in the same position.
• Do people understand the process?
  • Good processes that are not well understood quickly become bad processes.  Do you regularly train new hires on your processes?  If necessary, do you regularly run refresher courses for your teams?
• Is the process optimized for the world you live in now?
  • If the process is valuable, and it is well understood, it may just need updating for the world we live in today.  When I worked at Lotus in the early 90s we had staff on hand to type in hand-written bug reports.  Bug tracking was a good thing, having someone spend hours entering hand-written bug reports would not be valuable, however.  Ensure your processes take advantage of modern tools and behaviors.

John

The unofficial Twitter roadmap for a social marketing delivery platform, don’t pass it on

I do not work for Twitter and I have no insights into their plans. However, when Twitter grows up I want it to be a true social marketing delivery platform. My passion for Twitter, and the fact that it is a tool that enables unique, self-created, social experiences is known.

However, the fact that Twitter is able to work in such a flexible manner is both a blessing and a curse. It is being utilized as everything from a marketing platform to a way for school kids to chat. It does an acceptable job satisfying some of the basic needs but it does not fully deliver on anything, not yet.

Here is the roadmap I want Twitter to follow to ultimate become my social marketing delivery platform. It’s not complete as I do have another job to do, but should give folks something to think about.

Six Months

• Twitter is still too unreliable to be a platform that enterprises, or even SMB users, can count on. The last couple of days have seen more slow periods, and complete outages, than are acceptable over the course of several months. Make the platform scalable. It is not easy but it is critical.
• Provide a first round of smart search. While I am unsure of the backend, use Lucene/Solr to get high-performance search that can answer questions like this:
  • Show me everyone that has mentioned my product in the last 24 hours.
  • Show me only those users, in the American Northeast, who have indicated that they are looking for products similar to what I sell?
  • Show me the % of my tweets that are actually read by a user. Tricky as there is no real definition of “read” yet. Ultimately I need to be able to tell how the results I get with Twitter compare to other marketing means such as bulk e-mails.

Twelve Months

• Enable me to easily group my followers into distribution groups based upon the information Twitter knows about them. For example, I want to slice and dice groups by geography, sex, and interest specified in their BIO.
• I like where Tweetdeck has gone with the Facebook integration, give me that out of the box and more. I want to be able to send Tweets directly to e-mail (I’ve had to copy/paste tweets several times already), to IM, and to e-mail and voice mail.
• Yes, voice mail, I want some simple Text to Speech for those users that are in their cars who do not have the time to read on the go.

Eighteen Months

• Auto-translate of Tweets to the end-users language. Yes, it will not be perfect but the power of Twitter is the ease of communication. Powerful, two way communication. Let me distribute and work with people in ways they are used to.
• Provide me with richer analytic capabilities. Please show me, geographically, every place that my Tweets were delivered. As users launch links in my Tweets, make it possible for me to tie that back to the initial distributor, providing detailed and summary data.

I do think Twitter will have to provide some basic CRM capabilities for all of this to fly. Ideally this would be done through rich interface that lets it work with multiple CRM systems, but time will tell.

What do you think? Is this where you want  Twitter to go?

John