thingamy

Horizontal to vertical

Brad Feld has a post today about NewsGator supplying a solution to the UK Health Service (Orkney).

Brad graciously offers an alternative view that I shall add to my constant yakking about Extreme Business Planning and the wasteful (stupid?) tendency to sit in a closed room to decide "who will use our product for what". An exercise with approximately nil probability of success.

He's talking about "broad horizontal technologies" that can be applied to many different "vertical markets". But Brad adds something important:

"Now, a traditional enterprise sales (or marketing) executive could say “of course you want to target health care organizations – that’s one of the biggest verticals around, after finance, insurance, manufacturing, government, … ” (you get the idea.) However, in advance of real customers, all the startup is doing is guessing at what people are going to do with the horizontal technology. Imagine going to a typical health care organization and saying “would you like to buy some enterprise RSS.” Not very effective.

I hate spending bucks early in the life of a company (and market) to try to create vertical market demand. However, there comes a time when it becomes obvious you have enough customers in a market segment that you can start to get vertical with your selling efforts while continuing to extend your “horizontal platform technology” into new and exciting areas"

Hear, hear!

I can "see" how the "broad horizontal technology" is left spreading slowly over the horizontal plane until it finds cracks of specific needs, the verticals where it can freely flow into. Cheaper, better, efficient, unobtrusive, smart as methods goes.

Thingamy is definitely broad in enterprise and organisational terms, now to pour it slowly onto the horizontal surface so it can find the obvious vertical cracks! Just have to uncork it...

The meek will inherit the markets

Yesterday International Herald Tribune ran an article called "Consumer voices speak loudly online" about how Cadbury Schweppes brought back a discontinued candy bar thanks to about 17,000 fans gathered at Facebook.

Excellent, my thoughts went - "big business actually listening to their consumers, hooray, welcome to reality, good for them!"

But not so, here's how the situation was portrayed in the same article - "Increasingly, companies are monitoring blogs and online discussion groups to help them decide their brand marketing strategies."

Duh.

The day "monitor" has been replaced with "listen" I will know that a blinding flash of the obvious has hit the top brass (and the journalists)!

Let's hope they survive until then, as the listener will inherit the market...

Workday - Thingamy differences

This is purely a thingamy related post...

Yesterday Workday launched their next "module" and much has been written about it like here and here.

[UPDATE: More excellent insights on Workday here and here.]

Half a year ago I had the pleasure of discussing the different approach thingamy is taking compared with Workday's (demo, beer and some e-mail exchanges with folks from Workday :)). Since then I have not had the pleasure of studying it directly so my musings are based on some guesswork and second hand information. Nevertheless, as we both should be able to "do the same" to a certain degree I would venture a quick take on the differences:

Accounting

Here I think we're quite similar in the sense that "accounting is not real", merely a mapping "from behind" using accounting or other rules, calculate and display using raw data captured in the work processes.
Albeit methinks that our pure singular object oriented architecture (see below) will leave this part much more flexible in our system.

Tags

I note that Workday are using "worktags" as a knowledge enhancing tool for certain objects.
Thingamy first of all allows tags and metatags for any use including a "live" tag navigation tool that can be used for any list of objects in any event or report.
In addition we see tags as sometimes too generic so other knowledge-enhancers for the objects are used - owner, place, links, class inheritance, objects as properties and other.

Event or Object oriented

Now, here I see a major difference - Workday is (like any other process system) event (or transaction) driven. The age old method stemming from the days that documenting an event was the only way to capture data but that leads to many objects (order sheets, invoices, reports etc) representing one real world object.

Thingamy uses the fact that the flows can be IT delivered thus allowing singular data-objects representing singular real-objects to be punted around then having the objects capture everything that happens to it. A bit like the car on an assembly line - the car arriving at my workstation delivers the work-order (no doubt what I'm to do), it has all the information (no doors, add doors).
That leads to drastically reduced complexity when structuring a process, as well as when representing reality as the usual documents (like molecules) can be built from singular objects (like atoms).

In addition it seems Workday still is using RDBMS - an indication that no true OO thinking exists throughout. We're using a "Persistent CL Object DBMS" letting the objects be saved untouched, they be objects describing the underlying system itself or objects of the business.

User-friendliness

Hehe, just now I'm afraid Workday wins hands down!

Even for the future, user-friendliness will be tough on our part as it is more of a platform, and actually having to build your "Business Model" will never get easy nor user friendly.
But the flip side is that we can offer a real kick in the butt to rethink the processes and "how things are done" for the ones open to such unpleasant activities (kick in butt).

Market segmentation

Workday is following the usual "size segmentation" - target is mid-sized companies etc. with a normal sales approach.

Thingamy drops that segmentation and seeks the rather radical and free-thinking individuals in any size organisation. After all it's the users that adopts and drives forward (see next point). This seems to leave more room for pull, i.e. users come to us.

Market entry point

Workday is clearly a "solution", a fully fledged model of business as is, thus a direct implementation for a specific use and thus pitting it in direct competition with the big ones.

Thingamy is more of a platform in which you build your own model. In that you do not have to attack the ERP functions at all, you can start with something simple and concrete, a business practice or barely repeatable process as it were. And then, if you feel for it, expand from there as all processes are linked with all others in an organisation after all.
And with an API we can live and work with even the big ones.
Thus it can enter where there are issues but no real flow oriented solution for such as the barely repeatable processes currently supported by e-mail, business rules on a sheet of paper, wikis and so forth.

I'm kind of leaning onto history where other "platform" oriented systems like spreadsheets, Lotus Notes, social software and so forth often is used initially for something real simple (even banal things like a guest list to a wedding), then with experience those have expanded even into the corporate world for much more complex tasks.

But we'll see when I know more, I may definitely stand corrected on some of the above at that point!