SaaSkatoon: All Things SaaS!» Delivered Innovation News

Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent

topalovich — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:52:38 +0000

Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent

Mr. Gruber makes a number of good points in this post regarding the general tendency in IT to try to commoditize talent within the software development space. While we at Delivered Innovation employ a “factory approach” to development, our philosophy regards the standardization of the delivery process itself, and not the application of tacit knowledge to the process of creating value, as the ultimate candidate for standardization. Glenn is spot on in his assessment that many firms within the outsourcing world try and apply a factory model for the purpose of reducing development expertise to the least common denominator, and this comes at the expense of quality design…and ultimately of quality output. DI has been brought on to a number of large “cleanup” projects in the Force.com space this year to untangle messes created by these so-called software factories where developers are routinely referred to as “bodies” (as in, “We’re behind schedule, so let’s throw a few more bodies at this”), and in every case the customer ended up spending significantly more on the project using resources that may have cost less on a per-hour basis, but ended up costing more in the long run due to the watered-down skill levels and lack of insight into the big picture design and architecture.

Three key points:

…under the traditional outsourcing model success (i.e. margins) is achieved by trying to break any task down into its most basic components so that those activities can be completed by the most junior and cheapest resources.

Tools and methodologies are more like guiderails to reduce mistakes and help less-seasoned developers accomplish more advanced tasks, but don’t necessarily guarantee well written, high-performance software.

Architecting, designing, building and testing products that are tied to revenue, that require high levels of performance, scalability and resiliency is not a task to be done by lowest-common-denominator individuals.

Tom Davenport: Are You Getting the Information You Need When You Need It?

topalovich — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:00:56 +0000

Tom Davenport: Are You Getting the Information You Need When You Need It?

Delivered Innovation has been doing a lot of work in the area of incorporating analytics into the systems and business processes that we design for the Force.com platform, so Mr. Davenport’s insights into how organizations consume and process information are interesting. The first question of this recent post is indicative of a common issue we see in organizations: “How fast do you really need your information?” While the mantra may be, “More, more, more,” it’s important to take a step back and really think through how we need to be prioritizing our data streams in this age of information bombardment.

Five key points:

There are many reasons why information comes slowly and inflexibly. Some involve valid business reasons…others are less defensible, including technologies that don’t allow for rapid information access and display.

Not surprisingly, the state of the economy (as well as whether the company is experiencing a crisis or not) is a major determining factor in organizations’ information needs.

…survey respondents across industries clearly stated that some types of information are required more quickly than others. In terms of what information executives currently receive, the fastest to arrive (combining real time and daily frequencies) are sales and news on competitors and customers. The slowest to arrive (i.e., the information is received annually or quarterly) are employee satisfaction, market share, customer satisfaction, and planning scenarios or simulations.

In terms of the information that survey respondents wanted (as opposed to what they currently receive), the categories desired at the highest frequency are competitor news, sales, and news about customers. The information types needed least fast are market share, employee satisfaction, planning simulations or scenarios, and employee productivity and performance.

These results suggest that it is not desirable — even if it were feasible — to make all information available in real time.

Twitter…I finally got it…and now I don’t get it

topalovich — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:47:56 +0000

You will see a direct correlation between the decline in Delivered Innovation’s blog posting frequency and our participation in conversations on social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook…and it isn’t intentional. We knew that despite our reluctance to jump into the social media fray, it would happen sooner or later. But now that it has, it seems like our already frantic pace of processing information has increased by an order of magnitude. And that has changed our entire approach to communicating.

The problem falls squarely on the shoulders of Twitter…I mean me. When I was first turned onto the concept of Twitter by a friend that I consider to be an even earlier adopter of technology than myself, I thought it was the most asinine idea I had heard of, even after having lived in San Francisco and hearing some outrageous pitches during the dot com bust. But then a funny thing happened…our sales and ops director Ed came onboard, we starting working on our obligatory “social media strategy,” and we both got sucked into the Twitter stream. And even though we’re not exactly the next Robert Scobel when it comes to Tweet frequency, I have noticed that using Twitter has forced me to embrace brevity – something that had been a sort of Achilles’ Heel of mine in the past – and as an unintended consequence, has limited my attention span to the point where writing a blog post seemed like it was the equivalent of writing a 400-page novel. Just a bizarre feeling…it makes me wonder how the real time stream is changing our brains, our social behavior, and the English language.

What are your thoughts? Has Twitter limited our attention span? How quickly does information lose value in our real-time reality? Will patterns emerge in the stream that architects like myself can recognize and apply to business challenges? It’s all fascinating.

Mike

PivotLink CEO Quentin Gallivan on SaaS Business Analytics and Cloud Computing

edward — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:15:17 +0000

Edward Schlicksup of Delivered Innovation recently caught up with Quentin Gallivan, CEO of PivotLink, the leading provider of SaaS business intelligence solutions. PivotLink’s approach to business intelligence is a paradigm-shifting model within the BI industry. By combining advanced technologies like in-memory analytics, columnar data storage, cloud computing, a SaaS delivery model and unique methodologies, PivotLink helps organizations gain greater insight into the massive volumes of data increasingly at their disposal – in a highly secure manner.

Give me a little background on PivotLink – how and when did the company form?

Ching Wan founded PivotLink in 1999 after a decade long career as a BI practice lead at Cambridge Technology Partners. Ching founded PivotLink on a simple powerful idea: it should be easy for business users to securely analyze any data, any way they want and share their insights with colleagues and partners, wherever they are.

Myself and Ching Wan, along with a fast growing team have established PivotLink as one of the most innovative and trusted SaaS BI services for accessing, analyzing and sharing business insight.

When and how did you first become aware of The Cloud?

After eight years as the EVP of Sales for VeriSign, which grew from $30M to over $1.5B over an eight year period, I left VeriSign in 2005 to become the CEO of Postini, the leading Cloud/SaaS-based email security company. Postini grew to over 30,000 customers, 10 million users and we sold Postini to Google in September of 2007. After that I joined PivotLink, because I believe the BI industry is ripe for transformation to the next generation Cloud/SaaS model.

What do you envision to be your most popular product in 2010?

PivotLink’s award winning SaaS BI platform serves over 15,000 users across industries to support departmental and enterprise-wide business intelligence needs; i.e. analysis, reporting, dashboards, and collaboration. We recently upgraded the platform’s dashboard capabilities with enhanced drag-and-drop functionality, drill down capabilities and an enhanced UI.

We also launched a new family of products for Sales, Marketing, and HR that provides dynamic, on-demand solutions that enable business users to actively monitor, analyze and report at every level across the business. Fully integrated into the PivotLink platform, it will include everything users need to go from data to decisions in minutes or days instead of weeks or months.

What are the most common obstacles to bringing a company onto The Cloud?

Integrating data from multiple resources, ensuring data quality, security and gaining end user acceptance of the new BI delivery mechanism. Setting up data feeds from on-premise sources into a cloud-based solution is not an impossible obstacle (in fact it is becoming increasingly automated) but it does require thoughtful planning, the involvement of IT and assuring customers that their data will be secure. And they want to know that they can get their data back if the service were to be terminated (which we of course do).

Secondly, end users were not previously involved in the BI development/deployment process until the tool appeared on their desktop. Now they have the opportunity to be involved in the process, define what data sources they need and get them more quickly than ever before. Being able to administer BI in a self-service manner takes some getting used to. Because we are schema-less (and the market to date is trained up/expects to do analytics in a cube) business users need to wrap their heads around a more flexible model of analysis.

What are the most common reservations companies have about The Cloud? How do you address those?

Customers often have reservations that you can’t do BI in the cloud because they have so much trouble doing BI on-premise. Given the complexity of data involved with a BI implementation, it seems that SaaS BI is too good to be true. We have 15,000+ users on PivotLink who use our tools everyday to make BI more integral to their jobs. A significant percentage of our customers serve as references during the selling cycle. The voice of our customers goes a long way to inspire others users to join the SaaS BI revolution.

Secondly, security. When customers realize their data is going to be moving into another environment the security flag comes up. PivotLink takes data security very seriously and has the same rigorous security controls that financial institutions and publicly traded organizations go through. Our SAS 70 Type II certification typically appeases any security concerns companies have about doing business with us.

What does SAS 70 Type II Certification really mean for your customers?

SAS 70 Type II certification demonstrates our total commitment to constant improvement and delivering value to our customers. To date, PivotLink is the only SaaS BI service that is SAS 70 Type II certified. With more than 15,000 users worldwide, it’s absolutely essential for our customers to trust PivotLink’s ability to unequivocally protect their data. Completing the audit provides further validation and assurance to our customers.

Note: To learn more about PivotLink’s SAS 70 certification process and accomplishments go to http://www.pivotlink.com/sas-70

When companies approach PivotLink, do they even know exactly what they’re looking to find? Do they often find an answer to a question they didn’t know they had asked?

The SaaS BI market is evolving, but people still think it is “too good to be true” so we do a lot education in our sales cycle right now, plus our website is populated with valuable educational resources.

Companies don’t always know that they are looking for a SaaS BI technology solution per se, but they do know they suffer from issues like 1) it takes too long to get data and reports delivered to the business for effective decision making, 2) IT is backlogged with requests from the business to make changes to existing DWs and 3) both IT and the business struggle to keep pace with the dynamics of business today and the tsunami of information that floods into the business on a daily basis. When companies approach us, they are driven by the desire to cost effectively automate a lot of the reporting and analytics that suck up a lot of precious IT resources and don’t want to commit a massive capital expenditure to solve the problem.

What are some of the product features that PivotLink is most proud of?

We are proud of our in-memory columnar storage, schema-less analytical engine (our secret sauce!). We are also proud of our ability to securely handle large volumes of data and sources across large volumes of users (with various levels of skill). Beyond that we are passionate about the user experience and recently released some exceptional user interface innovations, which you can experience in our dashboards.

What types of business analytics did companies find difficult to access prior to PivotLink’s SaaS BI?

Before PivotLink, the types of analytics that requires combining data sources and reporting across large volumes of data were a serious challenge. The other kind of analytics that seemed elusive were analytics on historical changes to transactions i.e. order transactions in ERP and pipeline changes in Salesforce.com.

Do you find that you still have to sell the concept of “The Cloud” or is cloud computing reaching critical mass in your markets?

The cloud is well understood amongst the BI aware crowd. SaaS BI continues to steadily gain adoption in the BI marketplace thanks in large part to the speed with which it delivers an ROI. While adoption has not yet reached critical mass status, we are hopeful that it will continue to flourish as more and more companies realize its benefits.

What product or feature will do the most to increase The Cloud’s public visibility this year?

We think it will be the ability to share insights dynamically between colleagues inside and outside the organization and use that to inform decision-making. Insight as a service (IaaS) is the new BI Greenfield.

Salesforce ERD: Visio VSD Diagram of Spring ’10 Service Cloud Support Objects

deliveredinnovation — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:38:30 +0000

Delivered Innovation has noticed a number of requests for entity relationship diagrams (ERD) for standard Salesforce objects within the Force.com developer community, and we have started a program to create these ERD documents in Visio / VSD format. The first ERD document that we are publishing is for the Spring ‘10 Service Cloud. Subsequent documents will be published for Sales Objects, Task and Event Objects, Process Objects, and other objects within the Salesforce CRM and Force.com environments.

Please download and provide us with your feedback.

Visio Diagram by Delivered Innovation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.