Infor, A Company in Transition
I just returned from New Orleans last evening after attending Infor’s user conference Inforum (disclosure: Infor paid my travel expenses to the event, and is an IDC client). On the flight back I was thinking about what I saw, and what I’ve learned about Infor from my last several interactions with them, and wanted to […]
Infor and ‘No Fugly Software’: Design as a competitive weapon
Located in a prominent position on the wall of Infor’s New York headquarters, is a large graphic that says, “No Fugly Software.” It is a summary statement of the company’s ongoing effort to define a unique cultural identity that links design to improved outcomes and experiences for customers. Infor is a sleeping giant among enterprise […]
The Employee ‘User Experience’ Needs an Upgrade
Think about the overall employee “user experience” that HR managers have a hand in defining and creating: It starts, logically, with the building and the office space. Then there’s the company culture — and all of the variables that go into that — that HR helps shape as part of the employee experience. For many […]
Salesforce Startup Lesson #1: How are products built by Oracle, SAP or Salesforce different?
One of the questions often asked by venture investors and entrepreneurs alike is – how does product strategy work at a company like Salesforce? How is it different from Oracle? How does Salesforce thinking about products fundamentally different than how SAP or Oracle approach it? To me it comes down to the way the three […]
Why CX (Customer Experience) will remain a tough sell
CX, Customer Experience, is all the rage these days. Got an old CRM (customer relationship management) product? Re-brand it CX and watch sales skyrocket! Or, so, that’s what software vendors would like to see happen. Methinks, it will be a tough sell – here’s why. CX attempts to be more true to the ‘customer’ focus […]
Event Report: Day 1 At Oracle Open World 2013: The Quest For Innovation #oow13
Past Oracle Open Worlds Have Disappointed Customers and Partners Let’s be frank. The past five years at Oracle Open World have disappointed even the faithful. The over emphasis on hardware marketing and revisionist history on cloud adoption bored audiences. The $1M paid advertorial keynotes had people walking out on the presenters 15 minutes into the […]
ITization of Consumers
There continues to be a lot of discussion of the trend that’s sometimes called consumerization of IT. I wrote about it here, and to summarize that post, I think the trend is really about two things, changing expectations and the source of tech innovation. That’s may be an oversimplification, but I think it at least […]
Monday’s Musings: Understand The Four Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption
Pace of Innovation Exceeds Ability To Consume Rapid innovation, flexible deployment options, and easy consumption models create favorable conditions for the proliferation of disruptive technology. In fact, convergence in the five pillars of enterprise disruption (i.e. social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications), has led to new innovations and opportunities to apply disruptive technologies […]
IBM Software: Truth, Beauty and BPM
“This is some of the most beautiful enterprise software that’s ever been released. When you talk about information management at scale, then beauty matters. Consistency matters.” Phil Gilbert, IBM senior vice president, describing Business Process Manager 7.5 at Impact 2012. When I wrote up IBM’s Impact business and technology conference last year I noted that […]
Quality is Part of the UX Too
Just had a back and forth with @dahowlett on Twitter about Dropbox’s recent breach of security. For about 4 hours passwords didn’t matter to Dropbox–you could type in whatever you wanted and access anyone’s data. Dennis went on a pretty good rampage about it, and I have a hard time blaming him. Yes, accidents happen, […]
