notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

If I hear lovecat one more time, I’ll reach for my AK

Love is the killer app is the most annoying book I’ve read this book, and there were many. Its author, Tim Sanders, has deserved this rant largely because of his habit of prefixing many words with “biz” (such as bizcontacts, bizworld, etc.) without merit - their meaning is clear enough without it (reminds me of that horrendous “2.0″ suffix we’ve been seeing for way too long, too - I am dreading the “3.0″).

I tell you, to erase the experience of this book I’ve had to load Amarok with Tupac tracks. It’s this bad.

First of all, the book recycles arguments well known since Dale Carnegie’s book on making friends or whatever. I wonder if our collective memory is so shallow. All the good stuff you need to behave like a decent human being in a business environment (and everywhere else) can be found in the Bible.

Second, the Big Thought lies in gathering ideas in books, then being the unsolicited Know-It-All and quote them to our friends and expect a meaningful return on attention. It works when used sparingly and with caution. Mentioning a new book 3 times a week will just make you look like either an aspiring book critic or someone who can’t produce an original thought.

Third, the chapter on exchanging business cards. Yeah.

I don’t have a fourth, since I couldn’t bear the thought of never being able to justify the remaining hour I would have spent on finishing it.

HOWEVER…

It pays to read the highlights for a reminder that boundaries between our work and personal lives are becoming blurred. That it makes sense to nurture relationships and create value whenever possible, even without an immediate compensation, because those things will help our relationships and those will, in time, yield value to us.

It was written in 2002, so it feels a bit outdated already (it mentions Siebel as a vendor of SFA … come again?) (no word on blogs, etc.). I would argue that its title is the most valuable thing about it, and that it should be rewritten from scratch and consider not the relationships we have in our workplace but the relationships between companies (their representatives - sales reps, service reps) and customers and how the technocratic worldview (pragmatic value exchange) doesn’t work anymore because we’re seeking experiences, and those go far beyond exchanging cash for a product. And those involve emotions, though love is perhaps too strong.

But that would be a theme for another book. Pity the title has already been used.

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December 14, 2007 | Filed Under Rants | Leave a Comment 

The Coolness Factor

Firing up your office laptop, logging into SAP and screaming WOW: no, this doesn’t happen. Enterprise software is boring, and quite frankly I cannot understand where does the whole bunch of Enterprise Irregulars find the temerity to tell Scoble he was wrong to wonder, Why enterprise software isn’t sexy , and say he doesn’t get it. There is nothing to get, folks: enterprise software is boring, boring, boring, 99 percent of the time, and no, it doesn’t have to be; methinks Workday looks pretty cool (judging from the demos), and so does Salesforce.

And you know what? It’s not a coincidence I’ve picked up these two. SaaS is a disruptor in many ways, and one of them is getting rid of the internal IT and all its silly policies, long implementation times, and the inevitable hordes of consultants. It has to appeal to users.

But I digress. Enterprise Software is so horribly soulless and user-unfriendly due to a number of reasons:

  1. Purchasing decisions are made by paper-pushers. End users are usually not involved as they are “represented” by a somebody who hasn’t been at the frontline for a long time, won’t be using the software, and therefore doesn’t really know what it should do and how.
  2. Internal IT - too much work, too little appreciation = not much motivation. Group them with a “team” of hastily assembled junior Superheroes from Accenture, and boy, you’ve got no time for sexy; you are happy if the code compiles and does just barely enough so that you can move on to the next release.
  3. There is never enough time and money do to things right. Enterprises have a huge number of priorities they need to juggle, and making their employees happy isn’t nearly as important as making them productive (as if these two weren’t interconnected), and by productive the suits usually mean an insane screen with lots of grids and forms generated from database tables (100+ attributes to handle), so that the poor schmuck doesn’t have to navigate anywhere, he’s got everything “at his fingertips”, and he does and they bleed at the end of the day, but who cares.

Here I stumbled onto the answer: the Enterprise doesn’t usually look at its employees with the same CRM-fueled passion as it does at its customers. They are, after all, a column in the Expenses section. So why bother? They cannot switch to a competitor’s application should they dislike what they’ve been served. Damn, they can seldom change their desktop background; the cubicle slavery doesn’t allow for neither software choice nor simple self-expression.

I believe this is changing; SaaS is playing a huge role in it, and so are all the gadgets we buy that free our mind and scratch many itches. As we move from the purely utilitarian to the beautiful (compare the first CD players with PS3), the workplace is going to change, too, and so is enterprise software. In its own clumsy, passive-aggresive, uninspiring way.

PS For a sober look at the subject, read Jason Fried’s post on Why Enterprise Software Sucks.

PS II: I concur with Nicholas Carr:

By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Give Scoble credit. He’s asking the right question, in his own strange way.

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December 10, 2007 | Filed Under CRM, Rants, Software delivery | Leave a Comment