Smartsheet and collaboration
I took a briefing with Smartsheet yesterday. It’s a type of collaboration software but it operates in a more textual way than the social media based tools on the market like Facebook or its business counterpart, Chatter from Salesforce.com.
What’s immediately striking about the product is its spreadsheet metaphor. Everyone connected with the product will happily tell you that Smartsheet is not a replacement for Excel or Lotus but in one way it does make a bid to replace these spreadsheet stalwarts, mostly in the manner of use that no one ever intended.
Almost from the beginning of the PC era, spreadsheets were seen as a way to prototype or even deploy a small application. It made sense too. The thousands of “applications” developed in spreadsheets from sales forecasting and compensation to list management use the row and column metaphor adequately. But virtually every spreadsheet eventually suffers from the same problem that hastens its demise. Spreadsheets have no database behind them and once a cell is changed, that’s it. There is no history to analyze.
But by adding file management capabilities and by intelligently supplying a long list of template applications, Smartsheet manages to get past the common spreadsheet limitations and make itself very useful. File management is what gives Smartsheet its collaboration capability. Within the tool users can develop project management solutions including Gantt charts, perform simple workflow and much more.
Smartsheet is a SaaS tool and it integrates with Google Apps and some CRM. This is not a collaboration tool a la Chatter with its corporate stream of consciousness metaphor. But Chatter seeks to do some of the same things the Smartsheet does to assign work and develop workflow. The two look to be compatible, not conflicting. Smartsheet may be a good choice for any company still using spreadsheets to track and manage data and people in situations where they would never consider application development.
Adult supervision takes a powder
“Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed.” So wrote Eric Schmidt CEO of Google, one of the most successful digital economy companies ever, in a Tweet today. When he was brought in by the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin to run things in 2001, Schmidt acquired that moniker in part because the founders were so young.
As has been typical in Internet related industries youth and a new way of looking at things has often been enough to launch iconic brands and mind-boggling wealth. Google may have been the poster child for youthful innovation but the industry is full of people from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg who fit the mold.
So now what? Co-founder Page becomes CEO as well as president of products while co-founder Brin remains president of technology. The company is clobbering its numbers and despite a challenge from Facebook and continues to print money for its shareholders.
I do not understand why the shakeup occurred. According to Google this change will make communication channels cleaner but it’s hard to see how from outside. The trio appears to still be friends but perhaps a decade at the helm has sated Schmidt. Or possibly the two still youthful co-founders have a second act. But if that were the case, it is hard to believe they could not have acted from their previous positions as mere presidents. We may just have to watch as this company continues to evolve.
IT’s crumbling paradigm
Computerworld UK posts an interesting story by Antony Savvas today about some recently disclosed research from SAP’s EMEA group. According to nearly five hundred respondents, IT departments are not spending enough on innovation. Business innovation, that is, of the kind that makes your company more competitive.
According to data quoted in the article “a third of the companies said their current IT strategy is too focused on ‘keeping the lights on.’” Well this is interesting but hardly surprising, in fact the number seems rather low — only about half what I’ve seen in other reports about U.S. companies.
The usual suspects get dragged in for blame including the economy — forty eight percent said the uncertain economic climate was holding them back. This is a good report and a decent article and I don’t mean to be critical of them but I do take exception with the corporate IT departments that have let this situation fester for many years.
It should be no surprise that the lion’s share of any IT budget these days goes to the quotidian demands of operations. IT had its flowering many decades ago when there was nothing and every department had to be automated, desktops needed to be populated and websites needed to be built. Now that those systems are here, they have to be maintained and the only innovation is happening around the edges in areas like security, and rightly so.
But if innovation is on the agenda, and it certainly ought to be, then we can’t look at the budget and say there’s no room and we can’t legitimately say that IT should be getting a bigger slice of the corporate pie. That’s every department leader’s solution, give me more! But there are limits.
If IT innovation is down — and it needs to be resurgent to enable organizations to fulfill their missions of providing an acceptable return for all those widows and orphans out there — then innovation has to begin with how IT spends its money. (Long sentence, I know.)
Actually, the beginning has been with us for about a decade in the form of cloud computing and all the monikers that precede it. It involves nothing more complex than taking the sunk cost out of the data center and making it an expense. The funny thing about an expense is that you can chop it off if it doesn’t deliver value but that’s a rarely understood concept in an environment where you buy everything and try to make it work.
Old guard purists will tell you that cloud computing still isn’t ready for prime time, that it isn’t secure, that it doesn’t allow us to do the really hard things or whatever. Maybe. All I know is that my credit card information has been stolen from more than one corporate data center but never from a cloud based system.
I also know that when technology paradigms shift they first get wobbly. When a new technology shows up and runs circles around the old paradigm the early adopters get the message. But old paradigms topple and mainstream adopters move only when a paradigm’s economic underpinnings crumble. If you can’t afford to innovate in IT, the paradigm must be crumbling.
Tablets, CRM and more
Tablet vendors at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas had a coming out party. Driven by the wild success of the iPad, they introduced something like eighty — that’s 8-0h my goodness — tablet PCs to the world. Now, by itself that’s significant, especially for CRM, and something hard to miss even if you’re a proverbial blind horse. But let’s not stop there; to understand the significance for CRM we can analyze more information.
For instance, it was widely reported last year that for the first time social media out-competed email for our attention. Add to that the growing importance of video as a content medium and you can start to see a trend emerge.
One thing I conclude immediately is that we’re increasingly mobile, hence the need for a form factor that is easy enough to carry and big enough to do things with. But with this we are also becoming a bit more passive in our technology use. Passive? With all these devices and movement? Perhaps. And with social media’s impact picking up the volume of transmissions will likewise and the demand for better quality interactions will follow.
Tablets, or at least the iPad, which so many vendors are trying to emulate, were developed as receiving devices, things used to surf the Internet and increasingly that means watching video content. Granted you can use an array of screen-based and hardware oriented keyboards, but the primary use of these devices is to slurp information from the Web. There was a report last week, surfaced by my friends at The Enterprise Irregulars, that Apple was removing the only button from the iPad for a future revision of the device. That’s a direction keyboard enthusiasts should monitor. TV is a passive medium and it would appear that our computing is becoming more TV-like.
I’ve spoken to a variety of marketing people recently about video and its surging importance to CRM and I’ve written about it here. The sense of these marketers is nearly universal that tablets are fine for watching videos and that means corporate videos.
Graphics packages — Harvard Graphics and PowerPoint — were thought by many to be the killer applications for the laptop because sales people could take them anywhere and deliver a more or less standard pitch.
Video will certainly become the killer application of the tablet and that will place more responsibility on the marketing group. Video eliminates much of the need for a presenter and makes the viewer responsible not only for attention but for presenting as well.
Thor Johnson tells me that business-to-business marketing is still by many accounts a PR and brochure business. But increasingly tools from Eloqua, Marketo and others are turning marketing from art to science. As marketers generate and analyze more customer data they become more astutely aware of real needs and they will have plenty of incentive to meet those needs through advanced communications, e.g. video.
Already companies like BrainShark are delivering to market the infrastructure required to develop high quality videos that play anywhere — from the smallest screens to the most advanced tablets as well as desktops.
The increased use of video will multiply the amount of data we push around the Web daily and drive demand for bigger networks with fatter pipes (or tubes if you are a member of the U.S. Senate). And just as tools like PowerPoint gave everyone the ability to develop presentations, we must expect that before long we will all become experts at developing and delivering live or recorded full motion video.
But increasing mobility might not pan out exactly the way many people see it. The presumption now is that mobility means more face time and that’s probably right though we’ll certainly need to pick our spots more carefully as the cost of transport rises. In such an environment mobility might become synonymous with remoteness, as in working at some locations not associated with your corporation.
The transportation issue, which I have bored you with before, could become a serious drain on the economy. It’s simple math, but if a gallon of regular goes from two-fifty to five bucks, your cost of transportation just took a sharp rise. Transportation comes out of the SG&A (sales, general and administrative) line and eats into your margin like a worm through an apple. At that point your choices all look iffy. You could drive something smaller to your customer appointment but the cost of switching is not small. Regardless, you can’t do much about the fuel economy of the jet that takes you to another city. The alternative of not going is only supportable if there is a credible alternative.
At that point, the benefits of mobile and video technology that right now look like a leap in efficiency that will flow directly to the bottom line, will become fixes that help you maintain your position, to tread water. Economists have a term for this, it’s called consuming the dividend. You could save the benefit, which is what happens when it really does hit the bottom line. Or you could plow the benefit back into the business and that’s what I see happening with video and mobile technologies. That’s why it’s so important to get on this bandwagon. Eighty new tablet introductions is more than a straw in the wind.
This blog’s not half bad
The Beagle Blog again received high honors from ForecastingClouds. For 2010 ForecastingClouds ranked us just behind the estimable verbometer and uber blogger, Mr. Paul Greenberg. We blush at the citation and cannot repeat those words ourselves but you can find all of them as well as some very good analysis of some other estimable blogs here.
Life is good. We thank you ForecastingClouds and all of our many readers for this honor.
