On Consultants
I’m currently going through the process of unwinding a team of consultants who I have had working on a project since the beginning of last year. This project, an enterprise wide application...
View ArticleMicrosoft Technical Support
I used to run a Technical Support organization for a mid-sized software company. Working in Support can at times be a thankless job. You make all of the margin but someone else spends it. The...
View ArticleThe True Cost of Software Maintenance
Software is expensive. Enterprise software even more so. The licenses themselves? Sure – they are expensive. But where you can really get into trouble is in the annual maintenance you pay on your...
View ArticleUpsize Minnesota
Running a business magazine has always been a risky proposition, even more so these days (witness the recent death of Red Herring, and other magazines coming in with 50 pages that used to carry 250),...
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The Next Big Thing
photo credit: hypertypos If you read my previous article you can imagine that our investment club has been having more than a few discussions on what will be The Next Big Thing that will return the...
View ArticleCube Life Letters
Pud has posted some pretty funny internal memos this week: Visual demonstration of a CLM(Career Limiting Move) Don’t even bother reading through this entire memo, you’ll get the drift after the first...
View ArticleExecutive Adoption
Critical to the success of any internal IT project is Executive Sponsorship. But there is another equally important concept and that is Executive Adoption. If you have been part of any failed or...
View ArticleHome Depot Self Check-Out
My local Home Depot recently added some self check-out lines, which are a very welcome addition for me. I shop there quite a bit (two different trips just today) and for those times I just need a few...
View ArticleSales Compensation
In the May 2003 issue of Inc. Magazine, Norm Brodsky writes in The Sales Commission Dilemma: Over the course of 25 years in business, I’ve developed my own system for handling sales compensation. I’ve...
View ArticleTelecom Vendors Suck
I was the Director of IT for a smallish ($30-40 Million) software company from 1999-2001. During that time I learned to literally hate the various telecom providers I got to deal with, be it local,...
View ArticleSelling to the CIO
If you sell technology products or services chances are you have been taught to sell to the business unit leaders instead of the IT(Information Technology) leadership such as the CIO or CTO. The...
View ArticleOracle’s win/win ploy
This morning Oracle shocked Wall Street by announcing it intends to launch an unsolicited $5.1 billion tender offer of rival PeopleSoft. The announcement comes on the heels of a similarly surprising...
View ArticleCity Planning and CRM
I’ve often described my approach to building CRM systems as akin to building Rome rather than Brasilia. Rome is beautiful, revered, respected and something that was built up over the centuries to suit...
View ArticleAd Revenue
I received an interesting email today asking me to quote how much I would charge to include an advertising link on my site. This was not a spam, it was a real attempt by a real person representing a...
View ArticleConference Tips
I’m in LA for the Gartner CRM Fall Summit. It is the first Gartner conference I’ve been to and I’ve been pretty impressed with how they have run it. I’ve attended, worked and spoken at similar...
View ArticleIT Leadership
We are looking for a CIO at work. Hopefully he/she has already managed the Secrets to Managing Techies. A good refresher for anyone managing within IT. I’m sure she will start with a governance model...
View ArticleSalesforce.com Eyes Siebel
Last Week I mentioned that Siebel had purchased UpShot and that I thought this was actually good news for Salesforce.com. No surprise here, but sf.com is featuring this news rather prominently on their...
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Amazon Search Needs Work
Everyone else is commenting on Amazon’s new Search Inside the Book feature so I guess I’ll throw my hat in the ring too. First of all, it’s an incredibly ambitious project. And one that I can see will...
View ArticleWhether you like it or not
This turkey really has legs is an article from Fast Company on a small family owned business selling smoked turkeys, mostly over the holidays. This article has inspired me to buy one. But therein lies...
View ArticleCRM CEOs
I’m in San Diego this week for Oracle Appsworld and today was the day (well yesterday now I guess) Larry Ellison did his keynote. This was the first time I have had an opportunity to see him speak and...
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