Thinkervine

A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display.

While he was there another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, ”I’ll have that monkey please”. The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop, and took out a monkey. He fit a collar and leash and handed it to the customer, saying, ”That’ll be $5000”. The customer paid and walked out with his monkey.

Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said, ”That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did he cost SO much?” The shopkeeper answered, ”Ah, that monkey can program in ‘C’ very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money.”

The tourist looked at the monkey in another cage. ”That one’s even more expensive – $10,000! What does he do?” ”Oh, that one’s a C++ monkey; he can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java. All the really useful stuff,” said the shopkeeper.

The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of his own. The price tag around his neck read $50,000. He gasped to the shopkeeper, ”That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does he do?” The shopkeeper shrugged and said, ”Well, to tell you the truth, I haven’t actually seen him do anything, but he says he’s a SAP consultant.”

During the last few months, on a recurrent fashion basis, there has been a topic surfacing every now and then as it hurts our business: planned downtimes.

This said, all global companies, working round the clock, with a presence on all continents, all working on a single global system/infrastructure will face the same problem.

So how do you manage the planned maintenances which, obviously, will impact the daily activities of your workmates, as they do not understand why, in 2010, you still have to stop the systems to carry a maintenance.

Even today, IT/IS is seen as a cost center, barely, as a profit center. In this case, this becomes even more true as it impacts the productivity of the enterprise. Still you need to ensure the consistency of your systems, of your data, do some housekeeping in order to ensure proper performance and sometimes you’ll even have to apply some patches.

So, in the complex landscape that are so typical to the SAP world, how would you manage a proper lifecycle management of your applications and infrastructure without disturbing the business ?

1. Communication

People are able to organize their activities around a downtime, provided they know when it will happen, with enough lead time. A month in advance would be barely enough to allow the proper organization of everyone around the globe. You have to take into account that this might not just affect your colleagues but also all your business partners (customers and suppliers).

You should look forward to publishing a quarterly/yearly calendar with all major activities. Make it online, accessible to everyone so anyone, who has doubts about the planning, can refer to it.

You may also use some marketing and explain how the major operations (e.g: upgrades, support packages) will benefit to their activities.

During the maintenance, you may provide a status to the users to let them know which applications are available. Social Media has great tools for that (blogs, micro-blogging, status pages).

And in order to avoid anyone forgetting there’s a downtime next week, do not hesitate to send a friendly reminder a month and/or a week before.

For all your communications, you will need to target the right audience and have your direct network transmit the information to their teams.

2. Process

Efficient management of planned maintenances is barely a question of technology. Of course it helps, and we will discuss it later, but it only comes as a support.

In order to enhance your maintenances and minimize their length, have a detailed plan of the activities, ensuring that all the dependencies are fulfilled, and that the required skills are available.

After the downtime, review the activities and draft your lessons learned: What should be avoided next time. Use this in your plans for the future.

Periodically, review the last months maintenances. Review the planning and see what can be improved: bundling the activities differently, testing more carefully some items in the test environments before applying them into your production. Among the tasks that have been planned, see which could be planned online with limited impact on the systems/users.

Make sure you manage core and sensitive components differently from the others. While a longer downtime of your intranet might be acceptable, it would harldy be the case of your ERP system. In order to manage this, for each task and system you need to define the criticity and the priority. You will end up building a matrix defining what should be done first and what can be postponed.

Define a rollback plan. Worst thing is to be taken aback. For each task, make sure you identify the risks and your rollback plan. The latter should be planned the same way you would do for any other task (priority, duration, dependencies, resources).

3. Technology

Technology can help you lots in limiting the impact of your maintenance on your business, and you should leverage it.

High availability will be one of your toys to pet. Make use of it. You have invested lots for your DRP plan. But HA can help you otherwise. If you need to carry a maintenance on your hardware for example, you might just switch to your mirror infrastructure and bring the applications back there while you’re working on your primary site.

This is also a good opportunity to test your HA infrastructure and potentially your DRP process.

Virtualization has matured over the years and is now able to provide a high degree of flexibility.It creates a greater abstraction between the different layers. Adaptive computing lets you rebalance your resources between components. As a preparation task for your maintenance, you might look forward making temporary changes in your configuration to avoid a complete disruption of the service. Keep in mind that these changes (and reverting them) need to be supported by a detailed documentation.

Monitoring: Planned downtimes are great but they need to be supported by a rationale which will help you define which activities need to be planned. A proactive monitoring of your systems should allow you not only to get the proper alerts but also to identify the trends and thus identify the key actions that need to be undertaken.

Planned maintenance could easily shift from a pure technical topic into a political one whenever it has an impact on the business. IT, in its state of art, is designed to service the business. Thus, make use of creativity and fine analysis in order to provide the best of breed service to your customers.

I have been away for quite a while. Mainly due to major changes in my life.

New job, moving to a new country and a whole lot of things to manage. But as I settled and am back to more stable situation, Thinkervine deserves some more attention, especially in regards to my all new coming projects.

I am starting a new challenge with diving into Android development. Although I have been doing development for nearly 17 years, I have never really put my hands into mobile development, but playing with some J2ME apps a few years back.

Smartphones is growing market. I have highlighted this in a previous post. To the question “Should the Enterprise go Mobile?”, the answer is clearly Yes. Smartphones have deeply penetrated the consumer market and are now empowering mobility in the enterprise. We have seen various applications for all audiences popping up into the stores.

SDKs  and tools are now available and usable by the average programmer, Google even released the App Inventor for Android, which should let you build apps without lining up a single line of code. The fallback is that many applications are of poor design.

During my new journey as an Android developer, I will take you through different  stages of the application design, build and release management. I will try to mix the discovery of a new platform with the experience gained through several years, languages and platforms to come up with an introductory lecture on mobile/Android development.

This will also serve to build an application that will be presented on this blog in a few months as it matures and first screens can be shown.

Join me in my journey as I am eagerly waiting for your feedback and contributions.

You may live well in creativity, just like Mickey Mouse in the imaginary. But you’ll only find the true accomplishment once creativity turns into productivity.

Thoughts ?

Branding seeks to increase the customer’s perceived value on your product or services. Marketing campaigns through all different channels (above the line, below or through the line) have always relied on mainly two factors to increase the embrace of the product they advertise: Creating value then let the word-of-mouth game start. And it is well known to all marketers that a satisfied customer earns you 3 others and a dissatisfied one makes you lose 10 more.

Technology has known a disruptive evolution. And a disruptive technology means opportunity and risk. With the appearance of the web platforms and social networks, these rules still apply, though the impact is multiplied by thousands. This is mainly due to the new exposition and virality through which news spread across the web. An upset blogger can, in hours, easily destroy the reputation of your brand or product and force you into a crisis cell to manage this issue. You may well remember the “Failure” Google Bombing against president Bush or the Dave Caroll case with United Airlines. And thing is, word-of-mouth doesn’t remain within the inner friends circle, but as stated Universal McCann, behaviors have evolved, and people started to believe strangers.

To avoid these kind of marketing disasters, it is highly advised to have a proper management of your brand online, at the core of your marketing and PR strategy, and to maintain a reputation in adequation with the standards you’re looking forward off the Internet.

So you’re going to ask: How do I manage my brand online ?

Managing an e-reputation can go from basic operations to a very complex strategy. Whichever the level at which you choose to engage your brand management, there are three points that you will need to address:

• Monitoring
• Engaging the conversation
• Optimizing your web presence

The first step is to monitor your brand and your products, evaluate the perception on the web, what people have to say about it. This search should not be limited to search engines results but to blogs, social networks, video websites, social bookmarking websites, local search sites and forums.

During the monitoring process, you will probably come across dissatisfied customers and customers requiring information on the company or specific products. It is highly advised to engage the conversation, provide additional information. If you encounter a negative review, take the time to understand the reviewer’s point of view, apologize and ask for details on which aspects lead the customer to have an unpleasant experience, ensure that the issue will be addressed. Sometimes, this might lead to the reviewer softening his critic. But at no time should you engage an argument with the customer.

On the other side, you should avoid any posting of a false review or “ad”-comment. Should anyone find out, and usually people do, your brand will lose any credible voice it has gained through your efforts.

You should also think about optimizing your presence. Rather than having a reactive action in order to bury the negative reviews, assert a good positioning of your brand in every media channel you can have a presence in. These channels are pretty much the same as the ones you will be monitoring. You should define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in order to define whether your brand is gaining in popularity or whether it is diving in the abyss. Having an optimized web presence is structuring factor in gaining loyal consumers.

Identify loyal evangelists, these are your best success channel. One single post by one single person might propel you into the top 10 trends, be it positive or negative. Today Consumer Generated Contents have a major influence on sales and e-commerce. Identify who these people are, what’s their (hi)story with your brand and products, find your allies and create a network. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) said: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”. To enhance this experience, you may engage your faithful customers into a community and have them help you build your brand’s image, just the way Lego did with Universe or Starbucks with My Starbucks Idea. The authentic passion for the brand allows you to generate a higher and closer customer engagement, to the point of involving them into your product creation (eg: Pepsi Cans design).

Let your employees be your voice, not just executives. Your employees engagement could be a major ally to your brand. Define employees communication/social media strategy, allow them to share their thoughts on the company and the products. People are willing to follow their postings to get an internal insight on the brand.

On another hand, it is as much important to track the competition and keep up 5 moves ahead to avoid the checkmate.

Brand management is not just about PR, unlike what most companies think. It takes a proactive action from marketing with an alignment with the company’s global strategy. PR should be seen as a vessel to carry out the message.

Thinkervine is glad to offer to those who wish Google Wave invites.

By now, these have been rolled out to pretty much most of you, but if some still don’t have one, feel free to leave a comment to request one (make sure to input your Gmail account in the e-mail field).

26 invites are available.

If you don’t know what Google Wave is, check out the videos below:

SAP Research developed an application, named Gravity, leveraging the Google Wave collaboration capabilities for Business Process Management, check the demo here:

No need to deny it. We have all gone mobile. We are addicted to our small devices and we are constantly carrying them with us and checking them permanently. Smartphones, notebooks, netbooks, mobiles. We have quite few usages for them, going from the standard e-mail to m-commerce.

With the advent of mobile Internet and the maturity of devices to provide an enhanced user experience onto the mobile web, the rate of adoption of smartphone, amongst other mobile devices has highly increased.

Gartner released the figures of smartphones market shares on Q1 2009 and it says it all:

Through this growth, a very important market is emerging for mobile applications. The growth of the App Store (nearly 100,000 applications and over 2 Billion downloads) and the Android Store (approx. 10,000 apps) are good sign for it. So why wouldn’t business applications benefit from this trend ?

Although, most would think mobile applications are more valuable in a B2C business model, M-Apps might bring a great value to the enterprise through several channels:

• Increase productivity : users would be able to interact with the systems at any time. They might leverage lose time to do expanses or validate workflow items.
• Gain real-time access to enterprise information : In a customer facing situation, your representative is able to access the CRM application and get an up-to-date profile of the customer his is visiting.
• Workforce automation : If your company has a mobile workforce (sales, agents), mobile applications allow them a better autonomy and proactivity by providing them real-time access to the applications. Sales representatives in malls are able to report their sales in real-time, which would allow marketing to take real time decisions and apply a special sale for a specific product to attract more customers.

Making a business application available to mobile users isn’t likely to approach playing with a magic wand. It should go through a set of considerations before starting the project.

Selecting the appropriate candidate

Not every application is a good candidate to go mobile. This should go through a thoughtful selection process. At first, you should define all the criterias that make an application eligible to this port, for example regular access by mobile population, online and offline access, ability to simplify screens and processes and adapt them to the mobile usage, real-time access to information, ease of porting, customer accessible application, criticity, value to the enterprise etc…

As part of your mobile strategy, you should think of first going live with a pilot before diving into a larger roll-out. For example, you’d first make it available to a small set of population (sales or IT) before giving access to the rest of users.

Usability

Mobile devices, whether they are smartphones or netbooks have low and different resolution screens. They also have a variety of access methods: either through a pointer, a touch screen or some kind of pad. Your application should be adaptable and able to run of these various platforms, in a easy flowing way. A high focus should be put in the usability and ensure that users are able to interact easily with the application without having to forever scroll or suffer from cropped texts. You’d also think about light screens where you’d privilege a low number of inputs and buttons to avoid confusion.

On the other side, you should ensure that the used technologies are widespread enough to run on most platforms unless you build different applications for the main platforms. If the mobile version of your application is not web based, you might want to consider to provide offline access. For example, a user might want to record his time entries while in a train (with no Internet access). The next morning, while at the office, he would be able to sync/push the recorded information to your HR application.

Security

You should define the security policies pertaining to your mobile application. If the devices are not members of the enterprise network and not using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection, this means they should be accessible through the Internet, hence the systems are potentially exposed to external threats. You should also deal with losableness and theft cases. In this case, strangers might get an access to the enterprise data through the lost device. Your policies should include processes to quickly react and disallow the access for this particular device/user until the account has been secured.

Mobile applications will play a good part in the future of the extended enterprise. As people tend to gain in mobility and technologies gain maturity in being reliable platforms, a real value should be leveraged by taking advantage of transporting the enterprise in one’s briefcase.

Most business application consultants and experts have a high emphasis in one aspect of the solution (say finance, controlling, HR, CRM), sometimes, they even go to higher focus (marketing campaigns within the CRM) but very few of them would know what happens in the next phase of the process. They usually work in a blackbox mode knowing the input they’re getting from previous phase, how to process it before serving it to the next phase.

This has worked pretty well due to the widely spread practices in the implementation of processes within monolithic solutions. These processes were also mostly fixed as companies rarely looked forward constant process innovation to keep up with the pace of competitivity. But today, the world’s changing. Processes are being executed across the solution boundaries and even across the company’s boundaries, they may be re-engineered at several phases to match the company’s strategy on the market.

If we take the computer manufacturing industry, the usual process would be “Manufacture the equipment -> ship to dealers -> Select the equipment (customer) -> Pay (customer)“. DELL has drastically changed this process, which earned them a highly competitive advantage at several levels. The process has been changed to “Select the equipment -> Pay -> Manufacture the equipment -> Ship to customer“. At this point, DELL has improved at least on two main points: exit the dealers, reducing the number of  intermediates and they don’t need fully manufactured stocked equipment. Basically computers are stocked in warehouses in a pre-assembled state. Assembling might even be transfered (outsourced) to Supply Chain providers. At this point, they’re having a direct contact with the customer, tightening the relationship, and they’re increasing their profitability (fixed costs reduction).

For solution experts, this has a major impact on the way they usually implement the process. They need to have a complete understanding of the impacts of the re-engineering on their blueprint. How they shift from a data receiver from process step 3 to a data source for step 2.

For this purpose, the experts will require to have a broader knowledge of what they are implementing, how’s their part is being integrated within a wider scope, what happens in every phase and then they should shift into a full understanding of the process end-to-end.

So if you wonder how you can update your skills ? What you should look at ?

I say, forget modules and go end-to-end process: Order to Cash or Procure to Pay. With today’s technology and solution maturity, processes tend to have tighter integration between them. They are not just merely tables and transactions, but there’s a real logic flow orchestrating each step of the process.

Coupled with the Business Process Experts/Champions/Owners, the consultants will seek into bringing a higher value to their customer/company by optimizing the execution of the process at every step with a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the impacts of each action and decision.

In an SOA approach, the isomorphism between the process and the services will lead  to create fine grained components which are then assembled altogether into composite applications. This leads to a tighter integration of components (logical point of view) as a service might as well execute operations in a project and finance systems.

While there might still be confusion among SAP practitioners on the ability to go from a modular perspective to the end-to-end perspective, this change will be driven by the market evolution and the solution architecture anyways. The idea is that rather than being an expert on 10 FI processes while you usually implement 4 of them. The skills evolution roadmap would guide you through the different stages of your process implementation within the other modules/solutions, hence fully leveraging your training and expertise on all areas.

This full fledged knowledge of the process will also provide a new empowerment that will allow experts to drive the innovation to reflect the business requirements or even anticipate them,  as this is where the real value lies.

With the advent of Web 2.0, web applications, thin applications and Software as a Service have lead to a fast development of Rich Internet Applications, in particular the user interface (UI) and usability. Whether they are based on AJAX, Flex or Silverlight, they all have a common purpose: provide an improved user experience through a thin client, at least comparable to fat client’s if no better.

Along the years, many software providers looked forward porting their current business applications to web based platforms, mainly for easing the maintenance, avoiding client deployment. These platforms, mainly based on J2EE technologies, were mostly made of static display, although the content was generated dynamically. On the usability level, users have gone from bad to worse. We all know business software has never been sexy. In addition to that, people now had to deal with constant refresh of pages for every action, increased wait-time while data was submitted to the server, as HTTP is not an optimized protocol for transactional applications.

On the other side, developers had to deal with issues like supporting several platforms (combination of browser/OS), new security aspects on uncontrolled layers, harder user acceptance.

The transition from fat client to thin client has merely been a mess for most software vendors. Reason ? This transition has been mainly technical and product managers have forgotten the main brick: the users.

Any change must under-go a global user acceptance. Especially when it comes to business software, that’s something people will use constantly on a daily basis for their work, you need to make sure to have a wide adoption and make it mainstream. For this purpose, the change must be user-centric.

RIA have the advantage of being naturally user focused. They tend to improve the user experience, allowing a more interactive approach with the web application, unlike HTML.

To the users, RIA comes with its own set of benefits:

• Increase productivity
• Enable an engaging, interactive user experience without page reloads or refreshes
• Provide real-time data management
• Allow users to interactively visualize and manipulate complex data more effectively and easily (drill-down, drag and drop…)
• Assisted inputs (interactive search, predictive typing…)
• Optimized screen layout (reduction of complexity)
• Keep pace with the users expectations. The UI for their business software are now aligned with those of their daily personal apps (E-Mail, Social Networks, Document sharing…)

On the other side, by creating a custom rich front-end, developers can  have a better enablement of the process centric aspect of the application. This becomes even more important when the process goes above a simple application boundaries to be executed onto several platforms.  Screen flows can be designed and organized according to the business process requirements while providing a uniform UI for all the process steps. Screens can be drastically reduced by automating the values of some fields and make them transparent to the users.

With RIA, companies are now able to address most of the users current issues with business software which are mainly:

• It is very complex
• It looks like crap

Through rewrapping their main processes into RIA, companies might increase their user productivity through this mix of process centric (screen flow) and user centric (usability) interface. Some software vendors now tend to understand that and are extending their frameworks to support new technologies that would allow them to enable this into their portals and mashups  (SAP has introduced the support of AJAX and Flash islands).

But just above the technical aspects of the technology, the complete product/project management chain must be educated on the value of these new user interfaces.