Brandon Werner

If you don’t read Susan Cramm’s articles at HBR, you should. It has great stuff that deals with the intersection of technology and business in brutally honest fashion. Cramm has been both a CIO and CFO, so she’s seen it from both sides and gives a honest and direct point of view from the business space. This particular podcast from the Harvard Business Review talks about these frustrations in general terms. We should figure out how perhaps our behavior and processes can lead to this frustration (I can think of a few)

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/cramm/2008/06/8-things-we-hate-about-it.html

Overview:

1. IT Limits Managers’ Authority You bring in 10% of the company’s revenue but can’t authorize a $100,000 project if it requires IT. Furthermore, IT’s bureaucratic governance process rivals the tax code in complexity and inhibits rather than promotes innovation.
2. They’re Missing Adult Supervision The CIO is impressive, but totally unavailable. So the next best option is your IT “relationship manager" who’s a few clicks down the evolutionary scale and doesn’t have the breadth of expertise to truly act as a trusted IT advisor to senior business executives.
3. They’re Financial Extortionists When was the last time there wasn’t some emergency in IT (e.g. Y2K, SOX, HIPAA) that requires a zillion dollars? Compound this with the lack of visibility into how IT spends non-project dollars and it makes you want to become a technology vendor to cash in on the booty.
4. Their Projects Never End In-process projects are always 90% done. "Completed" projects don’t have agreed to functionality, and the team that promises to deliver missing functionality in future phases are always mysteriously missing-in-action.
5. The Help Desk is Helpless When glitches emerge, you are become a technology pauper, going door-to-door begging for help while functional specialists defend the reliability of their piece of the byzantine infrastructure.
6. They Let Outsourcers Run Amok You know that outsourcing wasn’t really IT’s idea, but you blame them when you’re trying to communicate with external “service” providers that lack even a basic understanding of your business. It’s like trying to teach calculus to a 4 year old.
7. IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks It’s not good when you learn about social networking from your 12-year old at home while IT is still trying to cope with email. Then, when you try to brainstorm with IT about how to apply new technology, you get paternalistic responses akin to the look that parents give their children when they play dress up.
8. IT Never Has Good News No matter how much you spend and how hard you work, you never have anything to celebrate and little to look forward to as the promise of technology seems perpetually beyond your reach.

What do you think of this list? Is it out of line or hit uncomfortably close to home?

There are few people in our lives that we can be happy for without some jealousy. Sure whenever we shake the hand of the guy on our team promoted, slap hands with a player who bested us or applauded the top grade getter in our class back in school we always smile thinly, but deep down inside is that human tendency to speckle it with regret we are not in their place. I have to admit often times, being very competitive, I’ve felt that emotion. Only in places where we are not in direct competition or could care less about the outcome can we at once be both happy and congratulatory with honesty. I imagine someone winning a pie eating contest would qualify.

However there is a third scenario, one in which you see someone succeed where you have not and genuinely enjoy their success and can only hope for more, not only because they deserve it but because you care for them. This is called admiration, and I have it for my friend Mark Spencer, who was just picked as one of Inc’s Top 30 Entreprenuers under 30.

Sure, we were both entrepreneurs, and talked about dishonest employees, growth and other perils of business, but he has become one of the most highly visible entrepreneurs in the Open Source business model. He has been featured in Forbes, Inc.com and many other places as his business, Asterisk, has grown to become the premiere solution for telephony in both small businesses and, increasingly, large corporations. Everyone who deploys it saves massive amounts of money, gains control over their network, and wrestles their infrastructure away from the licensing whims of the AT&Ts and Avayas of the world.

His story fits the mold of a successful entrepreneur; one that never dismisses opportunity, even if it doesn’t fit with your previous business plan. In college he started a Linux support company and needed a cheap (read:free) telephony solution for his cash strapped start-up at his house. What is an open source entrepreneur to do? Why, write your own solution of course!

His software, Asterisk, is the open source solution for telephony, and his company Digium sells and manages hardware that runs his open source product. Of course, you don’t have to use their hardware, and a recent article at O’Reilly even talked about how you can use Asterisk to turn a $60 Linksys router in to a $600 telephony machine. In all of this Mark has stayed true to himself and his company, and with a character that is both disarming and geniune.

As I left being an entrepreneur in late 2005, and his work taking him to Europe and the West coast, often times in the same week, we haven’t had time to enjoy each other’s company as much as I would like. There was even a time a few months ago when he purposely took the longer flight to have a two hour lay over in Cincinnati so we could hang out. Sadly, because of work commitments, I had to ditch him. So, my Java peeps, help me make it up to him and support Open Source businesses at the same time!

Vote for him at Inc.com by going here. You may also catch his profile on Inc.com as one of their top 30 under 30 group.

When I started my previous business, The Planning Studio Inc., in 2002 we went with Salesforce.com. We were a young start-up with three employees and at the time the flexibility of Salesforce.com was amazing. It was instantly available, was quick to set up, and gave us added features every quarter (part of the promise of software as a service, no upgrade fees) that instantly helped our business grow. We spent hours customizing the portal to our workflow, our custom fields, and our goals. I am an enterprise developing, UNIX using, Oracle database normalizing IT guy.. so I knew it was all just forms and database commits, but it was done well and we didn’t have to maintain it.

Also, at the time I was in the Windows XP world and the integration with Outlook (we had yet to have an Exchange server) was also amazing. It was about $300.00 a month (in one year contracts) for three people, but that was more than ok for the forecasting, sales targets and management of our very vital contact data all in one place. The customer self-service, integrated with our website, was also very productivity enhancing as it allowed our clients to submit tickets and track progress online without a phone call to support.

Then it started happening around 2004… The Quarter releases started offering new products.. but when they were released, there was no tabs added to our account. The thing that got our attention most was “Products”. It was the ability to assign products and pricebooks for services and then publish those pricebooks online and more importantly to attach those products to prospects so you knew not just some fuzzy “predicted revenue” about a prospect but how much the contract would really be worth and how it related to what services and what services were selling.. all wrapped up in to forecasts for all to view. It was amazing! But it didn’t show up…

I called.

Turns out, that was now a “new” feature we had to add to our contract for $100.00 per employee! per month. It was then we started to get worried. More features rolled out, contracts (ability to track contract terms and automatically send out expiration notices to clients), supportForce.com, ect. Each new release was more money if we wanted the functionality. We knew their game, and we wanted out. Our entire business was in their web portal, and we needed to get it out.

Except, we couldn’t.

Ever since 2003 I had this “export” option in my admin menu that made me feel comfort and control. If I ever needed to move my business away from Salesforce.com, say to a SAP or other Oracle product that could scale higher and offer more features, I could do so. The data was mine after all, right? Turns out, that was only for Professional subscribers, and weekly backup only for Enterprise Customers. What’s worse, the export is comma delimited format, with no meta-data or export to ACT! or SAP or anything useable. Oh, migrating the information from those applications was one click. The other way, not so easy. We stayed with them.

So, having had that experience, I decided to look at oh-so-non Web 2.0 products like SAP and on the lower end (but cheaper) Filemaker Pro. For most, you can be forgiven thinking Filemaker Pro is a Microsoft Access clone. You would be wrong. You also would be acting very unfairly. In a world where people build entire enterprise applications on MySQL, Filemaker Pro is one of the most powerful mid-size business database available, with complex scripting, form development, JDBC, and complete web application exporting. Using Salesforce.com as a template, I built an entire clone with those expensive “extras” in one week, accessable to everyone no matter if they are on Windows or Apple. Granted, it’s not scalable beyond the Server Edition, but if you are growing to the point of needing Oracle licenses you outgrew both Filemaker Pro and Salesforce.com.

Our workflow is back, no monthly fee.

Lesson? In the world of “web 2.0″, never forget to ask the biggest question when uploading your photos, importing your contact information or spending hours getting your online apps “just right”. Will all that work go to waste? Who owns your data?