I like that he doesn’t just point out flaws but explains the problems succinctly and offers alternative approaches. Everyone developing Web copy for an enterprise software vendor oughta read the post.

I went out walking deep in the woods (well not so deep, the air was filled with oxygen, nitrogen, and the like). I noticed a cluster of trees, the kind plum full of white flowers sure to die within a week. the cluster formed a circular shape so I wandered in. I’d been pensive over the course of the last couple weeks, wondering what helmsmen like Ballmer or Hurd, with their companies’ respective acquisitions, would mean after everyone wiped their brains of the PR and punditry. (All around the base of the trees, grew thick clusters of critomaeyar flowers.)

I first remember hearing the term “thought leadership” at a conference on enterprise portal software in the mid nineties. The presenters were made to walk the stage along ridiculous lines that formed invisible 90 degree angles. Walk left 20 paces, turn right, face your audience, step forward to the mic, exude cocaine-induced enthusiasm, today you shall be a thought leader about… portals!

What is a thought leader? Tech analyst firms tout them. When they say something about your company, you know it will appear in your next press release. Who are these thought leaders? Who are the followers? What’s it all mean? Consider the species, we’ve got at least three types of thought leader (TL) in the tech sphere.

1. The Business Cred TL (startup that might stand a chance, established behemoth that found audacious ways to trumpet a staid direction)
2. The Annointed TL (a well-referenced analyst, pundit, developer, community participant, etc.)
3. The Purchased Mouthpiece TL (aka: poseur with a backing)

All get classified as thought leaders, but are they actually thinkers? I’d argue the first two types stand a slim chance but most likely they just did a good job manipulating their media image (or they have magic charisma powder). Found list of thought leaders, if you’d like to follow along.

Regarding #1, my Microsoft and HP examples at the beginning of this post work nicely. Microsoft makes press announcing its Ellison-style purchasing craziness… “we’re coming for you Yahoo!” but they don’t really mean it. Now we’ve got a lot of debate about Yahoo’s viability and who did the right or wrong thing. Microsoft gets some press for its lack of Web strategy, which also garners plenty of apologists reassuring the masses that Microsoft gets it, or if it doesn’t, it will on its third offer for Yahoo. And hey, chances are that someone someday, can look in the rearview mirror and be able to construct a convincing story about how forward-looking and wily that Mr. Ballmer was. HP? Nobody really knows what they’re up to now that they don’t spy on their execs anymore. When everyone told EDS to buy foreign outsourcers, it shied away. Mr. Hurd got EDS and didn’t do what the pundits said EDS should either. Now that’s wacky! He’s a thought leader! Stuck to the guns that no one else would aim. The home choice, easier for spying, err keeping one’s own house in order.

Leaders are involved here, but there’s nothing particularly innovative taking place or being expressed. The context just sounds exciting because a lot of people copy the topics for their blogs. It’s socially-manipulated marketing buzz through a phenomenon of “popularity is commonality is repetition of the same old thing.”

Regarding #2, self-styled public tech-talkers (sometimes called pundits in our modern era) write what it takes to get someone else to call them innovative. After obtaining a critical mass of references to their innovative “thinking,” someone will call these tech-talkers, thought leaders. That’s the natural evolution. That’s their goal, and that’s their ticket aboard the ship. The annointed get people talking. Unfortunately, in most cases people called thought leaders don’t manage to eak out anything of real substance. The popularity of their thoughts (or at least what is revealed of those thoughts) stands on a wave of existing phenomena that are pretty well-recognized.

It may be argued that identifying and illuminating some sense and bright connections to our society or business or whatever concerning those existing phenomena is the key to the thought leadership activity, and I tend to agree, but it’s got to be done with sagacious verve. Unfortunately, typical thought leaders of the #2 species expose few fresh insights, opting to regurgitate popular blog regurgitations of popular peers. This is the dumb side the new Web-enabled social community. These thought leaders do not actually speak. Anyway, this species usually leads toward popular techmoney because if those of species #2 can pull it off, they’ve got a marketing base to make advertising collateral sound hip-ly insightful and pass it off as authentic thinking, perhaps even valuable. And that can be used to make a living, which leads me to…

Regarding #3, a cousin to species #2, often with interspecies naughtiness–this group either trades the reputation it hastily built as a #2 (at which point it usually ceases outputting anything truly insightful) or more likely it gets paid to manufacture a reputation, which it uses as a soapbox. Yes, this species gets paid by your favourite tech-co, its thoughts a direct extension of the tech-co’s business goals (some advice on how to get them aboard). They’re skilled in presentation. And you know, this profession is really taking off, nowadays you can take classes to learn how to become a thought leader (note the page features Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO, thought leadering away as she explains how to make a paper airplane fly for over 27 seconds–EDGY!). Gartner provides the textbooks. Must be a need for this course considering the statistic I cited at the beginning of this post, showing this year’s 14% drop.

Few people apply critical thinking to the mass of ideas, opinions, expositions, etc. Web-fungi. They don’t differentiate valuable insight or creative, applied thinking in published content. Not that the Web and related technologies are to blame, simply the ease in which everyone gets a chance to publish (and this is positive) means there is a lot of content repeated on a mass scale and masquerading as insight. The masquerade lulls people toward a complacency–be critical of that path. Many thought leaders are happy to applaud one another. I’ll pat your thoughts if you pat mine, just so long as we don’t have to have an actual conversation, as actual critical thinkers would be capable, nocompany and nobody would pay for that nonsense.

And that’s where the influx of thought leaders has caused the percentage drop. Tech thought leaders are not leading at all. They’re following their own self-styled popular culture of pronouncements doused with edgy lingo, which rests on a bed of dollars. Labeling someone a thought leader exposes one’s own intellectual laziness. Thinking, real thinking, is an activity that must be gripped intimately. Nowadays, the labeled thought leader is most commonly an instance cut from some greater mass phenomenon for the sake of allowing the larger digerati a chance to uniformly point their fingers, aim their keyboards, and otherwise particpate in the glorious light of following. One thought leader following another.

While walking in the woods, I noticed those critomaeyar flowers tended to grow, radiating out in lines. You could clearly see that a few would start growing near the base of a tree, taking advantage of its bold protection. After all, the tree had already taken this direction for growth and it’s hard to fault most trees for their long-term growth strategies. When the wind blew, bits of critomaeyar pollen floated into the air, swirling toward some lascivious destination or other. Those critomaeyar lines sure began to puzzle, so many of them grew in lines behind one another. One would hope the tree didn’t overshadow their exposure to sunlight.

P.S. to amateur code-breakers! I’ve embedded a number of letters in this post. If you’re able to identify them, follow them in the correct sequence and you’ll find that they spell out an ultra-special, self-referencing, recursive message.

A few analyst firms recently got gobbled up. Notably, Yankee Group bought Trendsmedia, which produces (among other things) research on broadband and wifi, err wimax emerging doodling. The other one I note is the Harte-Hanks hug of Aberdeen Group. The new group, HHAG, is being reported as a good method for the company to deliver leads to its clients. In the press release, Gary Skidmore (HH VP) says of Aberdeen

“The results of Aberdeen’s intelligence – fact-based reports on current marketplace experiences and trends – are used to generate qualified leads by its clients, and we believe this intelligence will assist our clients significantly in their own marketing efforts.”

So this is supposed to correspond well with HH’s Ci tech database, which it describes as

“Unlike general marketing database and list companies, we focus exclusively on profiling the largest opportunities and most important decision makers in the technology marketplace.”

It does sound like quite the synthesis and though not connected, analysts, rumour has it, have departed. But then analysis tends to do that–break things apart.

But ‘lo with the bow near capacity, SSA saw more to gather just beyond a tall, golden gate. Before she could pass she met a greater collector with a bigger bouquet and was immediately plucked herself, to be  arranged in the Infor fold (next to cousins Systems Unionis and Autumn Extensity).

Was anything still missing? Perhaps some Sage? With this wild mixture, florist Infor must hope against allergic reactions.

“Our focus at ProClarity is to give organizations a simple, powerful and adaptable interface to insight, expanding on the power of the Microsoft business intelligence platform.”

Note how ProClarity’s PR person, who probably authored the official “quotation“, began it with the words “our focus.” My guess is that they try to do that kind of thing all the time. I figured I’d just go back and browse through some old press releases to see what Eye could find. (I also enjoy the idea of buying myself an interface to insight. Mein Gott, this company could put the entire psychiatric community out of work (also, would that interface constitute wetware?)

So here are my findings, from the beginning of the year ’till now.

1. 12 January PR on the company’s Understanding conference includes a “quote” by the company’s Otey, saying “I look forward to sharing my insight on Microsoft SQL Server 2005’s new features as they relate to the enterprise.” One down, plus we get insight and understanding from the same grey gook.

2. 16 January PR on the company’s retail acorns, which goes a little something like this

“The Retail Profitability Analysis solution… utilizes ProClarity Analytics 6 as a simple, powerful and adaptable interface to the Microsoft BI platform, providing retail organizations with valuable insight into operational performance…”

There it is, insight!

3. 18 January PR on customer 8el, buying ProClarity–will they get the insight interface? Let’s see… (note the ellipses in my comment, this is me taking a couple minutes to read the PR, it’s exciting because you can imagine this in real time)

“CallWatch Interactive, leveraging ProClarity software, will further empower 8el customers to make better informed, faster decisions through unprecedented access and visibility of call data combined with powerful reporting functionality.”

They got the visibility buzzword and “insight” appears as part of the company’s standard tagline. I won’t repeat that part–you can click the link to the press release if you want to find it.

4. 8 February PR on a non-recalcitrant endeavor taken with KalSoft to get into Pakistan and other MEA regions. Here, Ali Khan, of KalSoft gets to mention insight, “ProClarity offers a variety of excellent analytic tools for the Microsoft BI platform that allow users to glean valuable insight into corporate data”.

5. 8 February PR finally, we’re up-to-the-current-date, and I know this can’t be that exciting, we get decomposition tree visualizations and a Perspective View add-on.

Well there it is. I checked every press release from the beginning of the year, and they’ve all got something to do with vision or insight. It’s not surprising Microsoft bought them, the company talks about its goings-on with MS in every press release it issues. And anyway, you might argue that visibility is exactly what BI tools ought to be talking about. I wonder, will it run on Vista? Maybe that’s too far off on the horizon to answer.

“Corporate governance” has become a watchword for public companies worldwide. Laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and BASEL II have been enacted to help restore investor confidence in financial information reported by public companies.

Peregrine should know, after all, it was only a few years ago that its top execs flew the coop in a in a swoop of guilt. Yes, the SEC brought charges of fraud on the company. The San Diego Reader published an interesting story at the time. It covered how a Peregrine VP scoured the moneytrees for nests holding a few firm eggs that could potentially resell the company’s products and then hatched a scheme to count a phoney buy-in of the Peregrine mother nest as actual sales to customers. When it all backfired and the eggs turned rotten, Peregrine bought ‘em up and called it an “acquisition cost.” Ah well, such is business–though not everyone agrees. Now considering the above claim Peregrine makes, (we may want to excuse its history as presumably, like a human being, it has by now shed its old cells and could be all new and perhaps quite honest) it’s a joy to see the company quickly changing flight paths and pulling SOX into an ITAM realm. It continues by saying:

From IT’s perspective, achieving compliance requires implementing strong general controls, such as change management and IT asset management.

IT department, only YOU can prevent C-level theft. No no, it would be taking things too far to convey such a strong message about SOX compliance in relation to the tools that enable it or the people responsible for those tools. But the point’s not bad… ITAM has its place, just like all the other enterprise apps citing their profound effectiveness toward complying with Sarbanes-Oxley.

In other news, HP announced the completion of its acquisition of Peregrine. While the public forgets how Peregrine used to treat its purchases (certainly HP wouldn’t practice that kind of stunt), this will help set HP (via Peregrine Service Center/Asset Center, etc.) to better compete with CA’s Unicenter IT asset management apps.

“The Internet is making it easier than ever for consumers to research companies’ products and services and take their business to different companies when their expectations are not met, according to a recent study released today by Accenture.”

Accenture says that after surveying over 1,000 US consumers regarding customer loyalty. It turns out that 61 percent are disloyal because, with the Internet giving them access to information about competition, it’s easier to change service providers, another 50 percent are disloyal because the Internet lets them purchase on-line. So I may be stretching the “disloyal” factor a bit, but Accenture’s news is rather confusing–it refers, seemingly interchangeably, to both “service providers” and “companies” but Accenture doesn’t say what constitutes a service provider. While it might (with some qualifications) be possible to say every service provider is a company, not every company is a service provider. In what sense is this customer loyalty? Are they talking about Internet service providers? Or do they mean some more general sense of the word?

Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop their Woody fellow from generalizing on how “it’s more important than ever that companies get their customer relationships right…” He continues to mention a ripple effect from customers sharing their experiences with others and then, voila, the supporting stats

“…63 percent of respondents said they would complain directly to a company about a service or product problem, an even greater number (68 percent) said they would tell family and friends about their negative experiences with those companies…”

How does the Internet play into this? Accenture doesn’t tell us. The news release simply offers a few correlating points, and none stand up to a clear causal relationship. In the end Accenture talks about service providers again, even though the subtitle for the release is “Internet Challenges Companies to Re-think Customer Relationships,”

Shall we see how easy it is for Accenture to lose clients, err I mean service obtainers (I guess they’re who get services from providers) to a competitor? Here they are.

1. TIBCO “enables real-time business”
2. “…Portals are being seen as the linchpin or face of SOA, helping customers become more nimble and responsive through the timely personalized delivery of relevant information assets.”

1) Is now “real-time?” What about time aside from now? It could be a bit of dinger had I found any “forward-looking” statements in the press release. Anyway, there may be another software company or two enabling real time business–I wouldn’t rush into this one right away, at least not until TIBCO answers some fundamental philosophical questions about time. I hope they’re not substantivalists or we might hit upon their “intellectual property” issues.

2) With now in real-time, why does one need to become more nimble? If I implement a PortalBuilder system, I too want the power of now I don’t want nimble, which would imply something not quite now but able to respond pretty fast (I guess, relative to your frame of reference). That is, if it happens now at least one moment (and who’s counting) will pass before I get nimble and respond. Maybe before I was nimble it took more than a moment, but in any case it’s not the identical now anymore is it? If it’s a different now is it still real-time? And can TIBCO still claim the power?

This coming from a company who at the top of its press release states “Portal Solution Provides Cost-Effective Means for Unlocking Potential of Trapped “Siloed” Assets; Fuels Adoption of SOA” Hold on! Let’s review. In business, isn’t time an asset? Time always costs money, the more time required to do something the more dough lost. However, TIBCO provides the power of now. TIBCO makes you more nimble. But in TIBCO making you more nimble, it implies another now (and another and another). So which now is it, TIBCO? Damn these siloes of nows! In paying to get a real-time business, which unlocks my trapped asset siloes, the power of now just keeps making new ones.

3. Lastly, portals as the face of SOA? Now that is some good rebranding of the 90s portal story. Old marketing reinvented by new buzz. Mark this moment.

Kicks from the name? As usual, mergers give their marketing lots of space to really confuse everyone. After all, it’s one of the more telling points about how the future of the merged business will turn out. In this case, we went from GNX and WWRE into a GNU-like recursive genesis (name only, you Adam smashers) now known as Agentrics. What’s it mean? It means “AGENT for Retail Information and Collaborative Solutions.” Why they chose to capitalize AGENT I do not know as the recursion doesn’t go that far.

The new Agentrics logo looks like a mutation of something familiar but not for those familiar with the old GNX or WWRE logos. I can’t quite pin down the dots, but they seem to be the standard-bearer for confusing merged companies (recall the Sun-Netscape alliance that gave us iPlanet).

Or maybe they were inspired by Agilent, after all that was a big name deal too and it certainly didn’t hurt to get their “ag, ag, ag” sounds involved.

what about another “ag” sounding company, and this one’s even got its own PLM solution.

Finally see, where we are?

According to the GNX press release

Among the immediate priorities of Agentrics is the consolidation and rationalization of the software and technology platforms from GNX and WWRE, which will result in a cost advantage to the new company.

I wonder what that means for the old GNX PLM customers? I’ll be curious to see how they tend ProductVine’s growth. After all, Eric Reiss, who is a member of Agentrics’ board had this to say “Agentrics is in a privileged position to leverage their unique insights into our business requirements and deliver high value-added solutions across the retail supply chain. ” Maybe they’ll priveledge us with some of those insights.

Our mission is to honor God and serve people by helping businesses achieve excellence.

I believe that is the first time I’ve seen God in a company’s mission statement. I struggle to understand how helping businesses achieve excellence, honour’s God. Of course I’m assuming SouthWare is referring to the Christian God. Seems likely based on the company’s Alabama headquarters–where I’m under the impression the various forms of Christianity are the most predominant religions.

My commentary here has no bearing on whether SouthWare provides a good system or not, nor whether its business practices are good (their site certainly tells everyone how dedicated they are over and over). It’s just the God part I’m picking at. Perhaps they’re able to offer a better service level agreement in the event of Acts of God?

SouthWare flaunts its portability to many platforms, kudos on that, a God-fearing but platform-agnostic application. Or is it? Although SouthWare claims support for a variety of Unixes, Linux, etc. it didn’t list any BSD distribution, I assume the BSD daemon wasn’t the greatest turn-on. On the other hand, they’re supporting SCO Unix, which is just about the same as serving the devil.

CA wants to put some focus back in its enterprise services management products. It’s introducing a slew of new solutions for dashboards, things to help service delivery, and make IT “magical” to the enterprise, with very very litle downtime. Hocus pocusy stuff, they think.

CEO John Swainson flips his flippers while plunging into the icy waters of customerland. He commented on CA’s nastyman past but wants all to know, employees (those that weren’t laid off in the Spring) have swapped their wifebeater uniforms for something friendlier. Granted, they can’t afford much more than a t-shirt, what with the expensive new excutives the company was forced to indulge, who must consider naming rights for major sporting stadiums–maybe branding things Unicenter Arena, with a CA teletubby-esque mascot (teletubbies seem friendly). No wait, execs, Swainson believes he’d be called “sleazy” for a move like that, come up with something else.

In Mark Harrington’s Newsday article, we get a Swainson quote:

Swainson said he’s been rewarded by a “buzz” that’s returning to the company and “seeing the excitement of the people as they realize we’re coming out of it.”

About time, don’t you hate coming off a good high?

“We all talk about how great Linux is”

That’s exactly it, with Agassi it’s just talk. Not an actual investment of effort, know-how, or even belief in any realized strengths. A key thing that always betrays corporate poseurs when they try to make their companies sound like they’re on to something good with open source strategies but don’t actually have any open source strategies (much less participate in its success or the energetic movement it fuels) is that they switch the topic to open standards. Open standards are the curent enterprise IT vendor’s euphemism for “we’re sitting on our thumbs” which is a rather dangerous posture for companies that rely on their employees’ typing ability to produce a little bread-and-butter. The article notes that

SAP is a supporter of open standards and of building innovation on top of a platform, but wants to limit the openness to added services…. The core SAP application will remain closed, but allow outside developers to interact with it through open standards.

Sitting behind this un-initiative is Agassi’s insight

“Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society…And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP.”

I’d like to ask Agassi to define the existance of IP and how he can invest in it. What makes us an IP-based society, Agassi? In a society based on IP, one might think a crucial point to fostering its vitality (as I suppose investment would desire) would be the greater generation and spread of intellectual substance. Yet the typical notion of “protecting IP,” among those that make such statements, is to not just limit access to IP, but rather control access to IP via a company (if the company is lucky, it gets itself a few hastily written laws passed to back it up).

It’s a well known phenomenon among those that labour with intellectual substances (if I may generalize to a quasi-equal level of fuzz, that Agassi does) that a lack of sharing these ideas rarely helps generate new ideas, so what exactly could you be protecting IP from, Agassi? As a final note, is this old-fashioned posture you’re committing SAP to, really the one that is going to magically let it access the long tail you lust after? Enjoy your daydreams, my friend, but make sure you protect ‘em real well. The rest of the world is a bit ill after having to listen to them.