• Productivity, Getting Things Done and Mixed messages

     

    I received an auto email response from a friend just the other day. Said friend’s response went thus;

    Thankyou for your email. I read my emails daily at 8,11 and 3pm. If your email requires urgent attention please phone me on XXXXXXX

    I had a chuckle when I received it. It seemed a typical reaction from the “personal efficiency brigade”. Late last year I was at an event where David Allen, the father of “Getting Things Done”, (and the person that has made a fortune out of it) was presenting. I posted after the sessions saying;

    Getting things done. (and a thought – isn’t spending time talking about having to get things done a little oxymoronic – kind of like fighting for peace?)

    David Allen, founder of the Getting Things Done methodology spoke and described his process for Getting Things Done. I’ve never been a huge fan of these sorts of programs – I figure you’re either a good time manager or you aren’t. Although that’s easy for me to say – I find multi tasking pretty easy (no matter what my wife says!)

    Pretty much I’m from the school of thought that contends that the “4 hour workweek”, “Getting Things Done”, “Sort Your Life in 12 Easy Steps” brigade are little more than snake-oil merchants selling the literary equivalent of the abflexer, eternal youth capsules or, for that matter, the social media consultant; people who sell an unsuspecting customer the hope and dream of a solution to all their problems in a few easy steps.

    But getting back to the auto-response. The sender (a fine chap it must be said) is not only a major email user but also a fan of micro blogging who tweets with reckless abandon. I sent out something of a rhetorical question asking whether it wasn’t a non-sense to only check emails three times a day while still routinely using Twitter. Most respondents agreed with my perspective – to avoid checking email but to continue monitoring the fire-hose that is Twitter, seems a little counter-intuitive.

    Or not?

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  • Pastel My Business Online – Review

     

    Accounting 2.0 at CloudAve In an ongoing series of reviews and analysis pieces, CloudAve will be taking a deep look into accounting software for the new world. See the other posts at this tag Introduction & Background SoftlinePastel is…

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  • Doing Well By Doing Good, Atlassian Ramps up Philanthropy (Again)

     
    Image representing Atlassian as depicted in Cr...

    Image via CrunchBase

    Earlier this year Atlassian successfully achieved its objective of raising $100000 for Room to Read, an organization that builds schools, libraries in rural communities in Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Laos, Zambia. They offered a Five licenses for $5 campaign for their products, with all proceeds going to the charity.

    Philanthropy isn’t a one off for Atlassian however, as Zoli mentioned back in April, on so many levels they’re a business with a conscience.

    Anyway, this is a big week for Atlassian, on Wednesday they launched the new look Jira, a major upgrade which includes the ability to include OpenSocial gadgets within the application – a move that Atlassian is very excited about, enabling the ability for interoperability to occur between enterprise and consumer systems. Lots more information on Atlassian’s use of OpenSocial can be found here.

    Anyway, back to the topic of the post: Philanthropy and how it can be beneficial to an organization. Seeing the success of their April initiative, Atlassian have decided to relaunch their philanthropic deal, and extend it. In what is now a permanent move, organizations can obtain 10 user licenses for $10 for the following Atlassian products; Jira, Confluence, GreenHopper, Bamboo. FishEye and Crowd. Let me reiterate, this is an indefinite promotion, selling fully supported and fully function product with all proceeds going to charity.

    I spoke with Jay Simons, VP of Marketing at Atlassian about the move. He reiterated the fact that Atlassian has a social conscience and that they’re more comfortable with a program like this than just embarking on a freemium strategy. He also concurred with my view that it’s far smarter than freemium for a couple of reasons;

    • Customers get used to paying for the software and therefore don’t apply the “free equals of no value” stigma to it
    • Customers feel good knowing their license feeds are going to a good cause

    He explained the move by saying that this program “exposes small business that might not have known about them to Atlassian products, with the expectation that at least some of those customers will continue to use the products as they grow beyond 10 users”.

    This strategy seems to work – Jay sent me some data showing the uptake they’d had since launching the program;

    atlasstable

    $44000 in a little over a day is a pretty good response in anyone’s book.

    Here at CloudAve we have a real affinity for Atlassian. Despite them being Australian (I’m from New Zealand and we tend to have a “friendly” rivalry with our trans-Tasman cousins) they’re a inspiration organization and we fully support this initiative. In fact last time Krish and Zoli bought a bunch of Confluence and Jira licenses in order to get Atlassian over the 100k mark. They’ve been planning to give them away, just never got around it… and althought $10 is an incrediable deal, free is free – so if you’d like a free 5-person Confluence or Jira licence, let us know in the comments below, or via the contact form.  

    Finally watch Room to Read CEO John Wood’s presentation @  the Atlassian Summit earlier this year:

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  • United Nations Embraces OpenSource and Agile… Not!

     

    I read the other day that the United Nations is currently embarking on a project with the aim of overhauling its ERP systems. This project apparently has a USD300 million budget and according to the tender document;

    presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to equip the organization with twenty-first century techniques, tools, training and technology

    The UN is currently running around 1400 different information systems that tell a sorry tale of inefficiency including;

    • up to 40 full-time employees used to process interoffice and interagency vouchers
    • Most duty stations, and many organizational units within duty stations, contain their own stand-alone finance, human resources, supply chain, central support services and information technology areas

    So it seems the project is a logical way to drive some efficiency gains while also opening up the United Nations to collaborative and productivity tools that are currently unavailable to them. But I can’t help but think it’s looking at this the wrong way – some functional aspects of the project include;

    • $76 million for “2597 work months” of system build and implementation services.
    • $14 million for travel, which presumes 1285 trips will be taken by “ERP team members, subject-matter experts and corporate consultants” at an average air ticket cost of $6000. Each trip will also get $202 for “terminal expenses” and $5000 for 20 days worth of per diems, for a total cost of about $11,000 per trip.
    • $1.8 million for office furnishings to support 234 workers, including 80 core staff, 66 subject matter experts, eight consultants and 80 system integrators, or about $7700 per person.
    • $6.7 million for office rental, based on an annual rate of $14,300 per person
    • $564,200 for long distance telephone calls, teleconferencing and videoconferencing
    • $18 million for hiring “limited replacements” for subject matter experts involved in the project
    • $16 million for software licences and maintenance fees

    So some thought from me on how to do more for less…

    • Ditch the travel – most of these sorts of trips are mere Junkets (and given the budget figures, business class junkets at that). Hire consultants that can work remotely with a need for high frequency face to face sessions
    • Ditch the “long distance telephone calls” – use Skype or another service to avoid large costs. Invest in a collaborative platform that allows for IM, voice, document sharing across large groups of users
    • Ditch software licenses – build on top of OpenSource tools and technology – sure there may be some customization costs but it avoids the noose of license fees and upgrade paths
    • Ditch the office rental – contract people that can hot desk, remote work work from somewhere other than the high rent United Nations locations
    • “Subject matter experts”? ditch that – there are a bunch of people who, for an organization liek the United Nations, would happily give some time and skill. Crowdsource the bulk of this work – faster, cheaper and generally better
    • “System build”? – Nope – use off the shelf OpenSource frameworks and customize to suit the use case

    I reckon an agile approach, the use of OpenSource, a modern approach towards workplace management and a move away from UN bloat could see this project completed for a third of the budgeted cost, with greater extensibility and faster than otherwise.

    Cool – anyone else want to join in submitting a proposal to the UN? An opportunity to leverage the collective wisdom of the Enterprise 2.0 community to drive some better outcomes for the global community – or something 😉

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  • Wolf Frameworks – Another Contender for the PaaS Crown

     

    The other day I was given a briefing by Sunny Ghosh from Wolf Frameworks. Founded in 2006, WOLF is a 100% browser (Ajax, XML and .NET) based standards compliant, PaaS that is targeting users who need to create mashable…

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  • One of my Favorite Web Apps – Thanks TripIt

     
    Image representing TripIt as depicted in Crunc...

    Image via CrunchBase

    Despite being an evangelist for all things in the cloud, I’m actually a little reticent when trying out the latest web app. I find that my schedule is so busy that the time taken to learn an application tends to greatly outweigh any benefits that application can deliver. There are exceptions though…

    TripIt is an online service that helps people organize all their travel plans—flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, cruises—no matter where they booked. To get started, travelers just forward their travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. TripIt processes these emails and automatically creates a master itinerary with travel plans, daily weather, local maps, restaurant reservations, city guides and more. With TripIt, travelers can print, access and share their travel plans online, from a mobile device or even in their personal calendar.

    It’s one of those services that is crazily simple, yet crazily useful. I travel both domestically and internationally a reasonable amount – this travel generally includes a bunch of flights, various hotel stays and the like. I’m also a bit of a fitness fan and I always like to know probably weather conditions for wherever I’m going to make the all important “gym or outside” decisions and the luggage requirements that stem from that.

    TripIt really is the greatest thing in the world for what I do… I simply book my travel, hotels and other events and forward the confirmation emails onto TripIt. Nearly instantaneously, and in a lovely show of automagicalism, my personal calendar reflects all of my booking and I can click on individual event to see additional information (weather, sights to see, restaurants etc etc).

    TripIt is a free service, in-part monetized by selling advertising to vendors who (forlornly in my case) hope that a showing next to an itinerary will cause me to change my plans and eat at the hideously expensive restaurant down in SoMA, San Francisco.

    TripIt just launched a new, updated look. According to their press release they;

    We added big share, print and edit buttons to the itinerary. Share your trips with friends and on social networks with one click. Plus, easy access to calendar sync and other handy tools.

    The new “People” section shows you which of your TripIt connections will be close to you on your trip. It’s a great way to set up meetings, connect with friends and colleagues, and much more! Add connections to make the most of who’s close.

    None of which makes the slightest bit of different to my particular use-case and none of which changes the bottom line fact that TripIt is free and that I have never and probably will never click (or even see for that matter) one of the ads they serve up to me.

    But I still hope they solve the monetization conundrum – TripIt is altogether too good to lose.

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  • The Web May Not Equal the Cloud But Does Anyone Care?

     

    Over on the salesforce.com blog, Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at salesforce posted in light of the recent problems suffered by Gmail users. Coffee points out correctly that Gmail did not, in fact, go down. Rather users of the web application were unable to access their accounts. As Coffe said;

    Gmail did not go down. If you were using an IMAP client such as an iPhone, or if you prefer the simplicity and diversity of using a POP interface, Gmail remained accessible by either of those means. People who assessed the risks of even an occasional interruption of access to cloud-based mail, and found those risks unacceptable, have always had — and will continue to have — many options for providing as much redundancy as they need for as much as they’re willing to spend.

    The thrust of what Coffee said then is that the client used to access a cloud capability is only a skin. The capability itself is cloud computing – regardless of how that capability is delivered to, and consumed by, the customer.

    While on a literal level what Coffee says is correct, I have to say that it feels like he’s missed the point. Of the millions of Gmail users affected by the recent problems, I’d guess that only a very small proportion actually understand the distinction between Gmail being down and merely the Gmail web app being inaccessible.

    Coffee makes the point that it’s over two years since salesforce crossed the point where more than half of their workload is driven by API requests rather than direct access of the website. This may be the case but similarly most users seeing inaccessibility of a salesforce data-driven application would be hard pressed to determine exactly what the issue – salesforce itself, the API or the third party application.

    Coffee eventually swings around to what is the bottom line when discussion cloud computing. He contends;

    Can you make on-premise solutions arbitrarily reliable? Well, you can always spend more money. Must you give up that freedom of choice in the cloud? Emphatically not — but in the long run, any given level of information security and operational assurance will inevitably wind up costing less in the cloud.

    All of this bought to mind something that Vinnie Marchandani bought up recently when he contended that “the best UI is no UI”. Vinnie was riffing on a post by James Governor who was discussing the major portal re-skinning projects taken on by some of the big corporate in an attempt to “make existing enterprise applications and their portal front ends less painful for users” – In his long and compelling post, Governor call for a greater degree of “plasticity”. As he says;

    Web 2.0 is more about information than presentation, and the social aspects of information sharing at that – and that’s where plasticity is required.

    And of course he’s right – who cares about the presentation… it’s all about the information… kind of…

    Which swings us back to the start of this post… yes it is true that users have no real understanding, or indeed care greatly to where the data they are utilizing  is stored or manipulated but, notwithstanding this fact, any time that data is unavailable, all vendors in the chain pay the price. And that’s a paradox that looks to continue for a long while yet…

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  • Software+Services…. Intuit Bets that Desktop Software Ain’t Dead Yet

     

    Considering CloudAve’s core thesis is the move to cloud computing, and given this authors penchant for cloud applications, one would have thought any development in the desktop software space would be dismissed. The truth is somewhat different however. I’m…

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  • Coda2go and Salesforce – Oh the Irony

     

    There is some poetic irony in the news today as the originator of the SaaS acronym, salesforce.com, announces an investment in one of the copybook examples of moving from on-premises to SaaS, Coda2go. (More on Coda here). Here we see a marriage between salesforce – the king of the on-demand world, and Coda, a traditional vendor with a 30 year pedigree that has successfully switched to SaaS – it’s a meeting of two worlds – both in terms of technology, but also geographically – Coda is owned by Dutch company Unit 4 Agresso while salesforce is firmly entrenched stateside.

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  • SaaS and Coffee – They’re Both All About Granularity

     

    It seems fitting for a morning post to include coffee themes – no doubt many are reading this post with a brew in hand, and in that spirit I’ll admit that I’m writing it with a supreme C4 Coffee…

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