Online group calendars - Getting there

When my better half has ideas for a particular day to go out (movies, opera, dinner, etc.), she is typically not aware of any travel plans of her road warrior husband. That's why I looked into synching my Outlook calendar with something online. The Calendars.net is ok for sharing a calendar across a group, but I would have needed to re-enter my Outlook appointments, so this was not an option. The Yahoo and the new Google calendaring offerings are quite a bit more advanced.

The Yahoo option required a quick installation of some Intellisync software that allows to connect (import, export, sync) all sorts of calendars (e.g. Outlook, Palm, Pocket PC, Lotus) with the online calendar at Yahoo. To test it, I opted to export a few of the past weeks. The program picks up all Outlook entries without a glitch and plugs them into the online Yahoo calendar. I authorized my wife's Yahoo account to view the calendar and that's it. So far so good, but the calendar user experience at Yahoo is rather cumbersome, however. I'm used to see a calendar in a matrix, a column per weekday and hourly slots on the vertical axis. Not possible in Yahoo. It's simply one long list of entries and not very intuitive. All entries have the same size, overlaps are not shown, which requires extensive reading to figure out appointments. Very uncool.

The Google experience is somewhat the opposite. The Ajax wizards (hey, Carl!) did an excellent job with their user interface, it behaves almost like a fat client, including drag-and-drop capabilities, and overlaps are shown, well, overlapping. Cool. The different views are more what I'd expect. But, this is still a beta version, which I learned when I tried to load my Outlook calendar into Google. For one, I have to export a CSV file from Outlook and upload it to the Google calendar, which isn't very convenient. However, the bigger problem is that Google doesn't like my CSV file and refuses to parse it. It helps to know the product manager behind Google calendar, and according to him, it has to do with date formats. In Germany, we separate dates with periods (29.4.2006), but Google expects slashes (29/4/2006). I guess, the international Google community still has to wait a few days, as the word from Mountain View is "We'll have it fixed next week." Happy to be beta tester.

None of the online calendars picked up the so called labels from Outlook. That's how I color-coded all the entries, which makes using the calendar so much easier. All travel is blue, calls are yellow, meetings are red, and so on. Shouldn't be difficult for Yahoo and Google to add that feature. However, what tops my wish list is an automatic synchronization. I'd like to have a little agent running in the Windows taskbar that runs a scheduled sync between Outlook and some Web service at Yahoo or Google, so I don't have to remember synchronizing.

So who wins? I have to say, Yahoo, because it just works. However, once the Google folks fixed the export/import issue, I'll rather choose them because of the better UI.

Vendors, please tell me what you really do

As an industry analyst, I am on the receiving end of many requests for briefings, as noted before. While I can understand that PR folks often don't really understand what their vendor clients' business is all about, it's sometimes surprising what kind of language vendors themselves are using when describing their product or service or simpy to get attention. I will start to post excerpts pulled from some of the more off-center briefing requests (obviously anonymized), so you see what I mean. The errors in grammar were kept in place :-)

Company Profile: Established in 1996, XYZ is an energetic and dynamic company with an ethos that encapsulates honesty, flexibility, commitment, urgency and transparency. Over the years, XYZ has partnered with it’s customers across the globe and provided them with tools and techniques to conquer four business challenges, namely, Reducing Time to Market, Reducing Overall Cost, Increasing Productivity and Improving Quality. We employ more than 100 technology consultants and have offices in Malta and the UK. XYZ has delivered a number of projects for the likes of AAA, BBB and CCC amongst others. XYZ has worked closely with DDD and has now been appointed as one of their preferred suppliers.

Bingo. So what do they do again? That's where I already stopped reading....

Travelling in style

Now that I call a nice cabin. At the recent Airline Interior Expo in my home town, Airbus, Boeing and their friends were showing the new designs of aircraft cabins, seats, entertainment devices, and so on. I can't wait until the first planes will be equipped like that. With close to 400k miles in the air per year, I would certaily appreciate a little more comfort as it was shown at the show.

I hope the designers won't forget one crucial thing: a regular power outlet at every seat. I don't mind 110V or 220V, but please for US or European plugs. Not those crappy cigarette lighter thingies that require another adapter. An adapter that I need to buy for over $100 even when flying United or American business class. What kinda service is that? In any case, seems like WLAN will be standard equipment, and hopefully, the Connexion folks can make the connexion a little more stable.

Credits: Photo by Boeing.

bitblue@flickr

This is just a simple pointer to my creative side. I mean, being an analyst and talking nerdy, techie, and geeky stuff all day is fun, but I guess the other half of the brain shouldn't get neglected. I've been shooting photos for as long as I can remember, even did the darkroom thing for a while, but with digital photography, everything is so much more convenient. I have started to post photo sets on flickr for a while. If you have a flickr account, maybe you'll leave me a comment over there.

PR versus CEO

It looks like I'm not the only one getting regularly annoyed by clueless PR people. In a really entertaining article for the Chief Executive e-zine, a certain Bill Holstein writes about The six things CEOs don’t understand about PR people. Many of the points certainly resonate with me, particularly if I simply replace the word journalist with analyst. Of the mentioned gripes, my favorite is this one:

No. 4: PR people don’t really understand your business. If they did, they wouldn’t be PR people.

I admit that's a little harsh, but since there aren't any particular skills required to open your own PR outfit (to say it in Jerry Seinfeld's words: "All you need is a face.") there certainly are quite a number of black sheep out there.

I'm not hiring

Huh? I admit that there is lots of work sitting here on my desk, but I don't remember advertising that I'm looking for additional help. Hopefully, the reason for the German Arbeitsamt (the federal employment office) to visit my blog was pure coincidence and they are not planning to send me job applicants. Back to work .... :-)

I'm not really typing this

Speech recognition has come a long way. I mean, I have tried to talk to my computer for decades, with various degrees of success. Somehow, those chips are just not listening! I started in the early days of ViaVoice, VoiceType, and similar tools, but only recently I've come to a mutual understanding (no pun intended) with my computer. About 10 years ago, I remember endless training sessions with some of the old software packages, where I needed hours to read through Mark Twain essays, to finally get to a comprehension rate of about 85%. It was truly painful. A couple of days ago, I ordered a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, to give speech-recognition another try. When the package came I installed the software right away and within about 10 to 15 minutes I was "typing" (that is, speaking) e-mails, blog postings, and any other document with a stunningly low error rate. The total training time was only about five minutes, for each of the two trained profiles, German and English. Way cool.

I wonder how long it will take until some business application vendors start to offer a speech recognition interface. Consider (literally!) asking your computer to "show me all DVD sales in the first quarter 2006 sorted by label grouped by store" or "show me the last 10 orders of Johnny Smith and highlight any backorders" and instead of navigating an OLAP cube's dimensions, the software instantly shows you the result. Wouldn't that be convenient? BI vendors out there, talk to me!

Show me your Quadrant and I show you mine

In a recent Intelligent Enterprise article, author David Stodder, no less than editorial director and editor-in-chief, takes on the Magic Quadrant, and the Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant in particular. As one of the co-authors of the same, I thought, why not do a little analysis. Hey, that's what I do for a living.

Perhaps that's what makes it amusing to see how hooked vendors and some customers are on Gartner's Magic Quadrants for BI and performance management, just two of the hundreds of reports the IT research and analysis giant produces.

True, although I wouldn't use the word amusing to describe the reaction, particularly demonstrated by the vendor community. User organizations are much smarter than vendors may think. For them, it's one data point and typically not the ultimate deal maker (or breaker).

Gartner analysts converse, ruminate and then plot the vendors into one of four sectors

That's a pretty simplistic description, but yeah... something like that. And for those that have attended my "MQ power session" at the BI summit in London in February, you now know how we come up with the positions of each vendor: That's where the ball dropped.

"We measure the distance between our dots down to the millimeter," one BI vendor marketing chief tells me, describing how they evaluate their success against competitors.

That is actually pretty pathetic. There is more to life than dots on a chart. And I have never heard of any potential buyer making the case for one vendor over another because of a few millimeters further towards "Northeast." That would be silly. So vendors should equally not get hung up on this. In any case, Betsy and Lee, my two colleagues quoted in the article, got it exactly right.

So, which vendors are in the upper-right Leaders sector — the only section that seems to matter?

Well, I don't mean to repeat myself, but it sure seems as if the leaders quadrant is the only one that matters to the author. If only the vendors from the leaders quadrant would really matter, then we could just as well get rid of the other three quadrants altogether, publish a list of the three "leading" vendors to pick from and be done. Would that provide any value to anyone? Certainly not. Well, maybe except the three vendors on the list.

Millimeter highs and lows aside, there were few surprises.

Not sure what David Stodder's point here is. He should well know that this market does not change over night, with "Joe Blogg's BI company" coming out of left field and taking over the market.

Perhaps expecting tomatoes, the analysts devoted almost as much time assuaging the disappointment of those positioned in the other three sectors. They offered a pep talk to vendors they thought would "move up" next time. They also let newer players like Kalido know they still must "overcome the challenge" of helping the Gartner analysts figure out where to fit them in the Quadrants.

What David calls a pep talk is funnily enough the first reaction by the vendors in pretty much every review call. BTW, we get lots of (verbal) tomatoes all the time. Not getting hit is the trick, and it's done by having a substantiated argument for each and every ranking criteria. It's also called "doing the homework."

Some vendors (and Kalido being one example) have product offerings that don't fit the quadrant's market definition well. It's often even the vendors themselves struggling with positioning their company in any one market. So it's not surprising that vendors want to be on the quadrant (for higher visibility) and want to be off the quadrant (because of an unpopular position) at the same time.

In choosing products, it can make the most sense to go with established vendors, a mode Gartner's Quadrants tend to reinforce.

Yes, it can make sense, but not every time and the decision making is certainly not "reinforced." To make that point clear, I created a rather unscientific version of A3Q - "Andy's Advanced Automobile Quadrant" - using the same quadrant definitions.
Does this quadrant answer the question which car to buy? If every potential car buyer would base the decision solely on positions on a graphic, we'd all be driving the same car. The fact that we are not, shows that there are vendors for different requirements, budgets, use cases, etc. The same applies for every software market, such as Business Intelligence platforms.

Disclaimer for car manufacturers: The above graphic is my personal opinion, created in about 5 minutes and there is no data whatsoever behind it.

Getting off newsletters

Analysts are information junkies, among other things (I've recently been branded an air-miles junkie, because I live in airplanes). That's why I typically tell a vendor's AR, PR, or marketing department to put me on a distribution list for the company or analyst newsletter, so I stay informed about what's happening with new sales, new hires, new products, alliances, awards, patents, etc. The condition is, of course, that I do actually cover that vendor.

The major players in any one market interact with analysts regularly anyway. However, the smaller vendors often rely on one-way communication through pumping out newsletter emails through their respective PR agency. This is fine as long is I'm able to unsubscribe from the newsletter, which could happen if there were just too many emails coming, the coverage changes, or I just want to reduce the daily infoclutter hitting my inbox every day. One convenient way I noticed for getting off a distribution list is via Roving's SafeUnsubscribe feature. One click, and you're off the list. When I saw that this has been already available for a few years, I was wondering why those email centrifuges in the PR community are not considering that option, as it would most certainly make a much more professional impression. Then again, does the centrifuge care where the stuff that's flying off really lands?

"Consider this NDA!" (No Dumb Analyst)

Lots of talk suddenly going on about non-disclosure agreements, being signed or not, broken, ignored, rejected, whatever. And although there is mostly a mutual understanding that an NDA must be binding until it expires, for whom it applies, what the NDA covers, and so on, there is still a large gray zone about how NDAs are handled in daily life.

Non-disclosure agreements are an important contract between the provider of information and the receiver of that information, in my context, typically an IT vendor and an analyst. The use of NDAs, however, is often more than sloppy. I find myself in the middle of briefings, when I'm suddenly told in a side-comment "... and because we're under NDA here..." I really don't like those surprises and I typically reject that comment right there. An NDA must be agreed upon upfront in all instances, as it is very inappropriate to rattle on for an hour and finish with "oh, btw, everything we said, you can't use."

Some vendors do briefings with a slide deck that has a big NDA stamp or "XYZ Confidential" wording on every slide, regardless of whether the content is public information or not. For example, am I supposed to not use a public company's revenue figures, that I can pull from NYSE or NASDAQ, because some product marketing person put a silly disclaimer on a presentation? Clearly not. If in fact a presentation contains private information at the time of the briefing, I also need to know how long the embargo lasts. Some NDAs don't have any timeline attached, which legally means they are valid forever. In a situation of a pre-announcement briefing, that would clearly make no sense.

And then there are vendors that go NDA-crazy. They even extend the NDA to their own customers, demanding that the customer can not talk about anything related to the product and service provided by the vendor. Not surprisingly, those vendors don't want to talk to analysts either, unless every briefing is completely under NDA. This, of course, is complete nonsense. If anything I am told as an analyst can not be used in any client interaction whatsoever, that NDA-briefing is a big waste of time for everybody, and as such I will always decline those briefings. If a vendor does not want to tell me what I need, then it's clearly their decision and I respect that. An analyst will always get the required details from other sources (including from people that may even be breaking NDAs without knowing), so it's in a vendor's best interest to keep an open communications line, so the analyst isn't forced to obtain second-hand information.

Journalism from Hell

Don't get me wrong: I do like journalists and enjoy talking to them. In fact, sometimes I get fresh new ideas when getting interviewed by a member of the press. OK, every once in a while, I get quoted wrongly or out of context, and it ticks me off, but I can't complain. Most press folks I deal with are very professional and they know the drill.

However, I sometimes can't help it but wonder what I'm reading. As an analyst, it comes with the job to read a lot (daily newspapers, trade press, online articles, etc.) and some members of the press are writing things that are so unbelievably wrong or blatantly obvious or just silly. And because there are often references to an individual analyst or an analyst firm, I'm curious to understand whether the quote is actually coherent with the analyst's thinking, a simple misunderstanding, or the journalist's own product. A few examples here (some of them transcribed from German) that caught my attention and were kept on my desk...

• According to a study by XYZ Consulting, organizations that extend their SAP system with own developments that are only little used later on, are wasting money.
  
  Well, duh. If the analysts came up with that kind of logic, congratulations! If this is coming from the journalist, I would have expected a little more substance, too.
  
  
• Do not forget: The data warehouse has been and continues to be the place with the best data quality.
  
  Actually, that's not true. Ideally, we would hope that a data warehouse contains good (meaning consistent, accurate, complete, up-to-date, non-duplicate, etc) data, because that's where the decision support tools (reporting, query, analysis, scorecarding, data mining, etc) get their information from. Fact of the matter is, however, that most data warehouses contain tons of garbage, because they are not maintained well.
  
  
• To deploy a service-oriented architecture, organizations must have a data integration platform in any case.
  
  Whoa. There are certainly benefits of a data integration platform in a lot of contexts, but it's surely not a "must have" requirement for SOA.
  
  
• Java and Dotnet displace SQL
  
  Yeah, right. What is this guy smoking?
  
  
• Q: What do you recommend to organizations that plan to consolidate the data warehouse environment? A: They should look at tools for data migration.
  
  Oh boy. That's a little myopic, as companies typically don't simply move data from one warehouse to another. If anything, the modeling, transformation, loading are aspects that need to be changed. Plus, all the BI tools that sit on top of the data warehouse need to be considered.
  

Maybe these are all cases where the journalist didn't get a signoff from the analyst before publishing, because those questionable quotes may have been found. Or worse, this is what people believe and I hope that readers in those user organizations are a little sceptical sometimes.

Been there...

Just found a cool reference on a friend's site where road warriors (like analysts seem to be) can track their world travel. That way, instead of using pins in a world map on the wall, I just enter the countries that I visited and it generates a "world according to Andy's life itinerary." Well, still a lot of places to go, judging by the white space...



You can create your own visited country map or write about it on the open travel guide.

And then you can drill into some countries or continents... so it looks like that the heartland US still has a few states for me to visit, although 38 states isn't half bad.



In Europe, it seems like I covered most of it, interestingly the areas of recent political conflict are left out (and I don't mean that little white pixel representing Andorra). Next on the list of places I've never been to: Croatia. Follow along in my photographic memory.



Surprisingly, of all countries, only the UK is broken down into England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. I wonder why.