thingamy

Gamification?

One recent buzzword that I hear a lot is "gamification". Especially gamification of utterly boring Enterprise Software and consumer experiences in commercial transactions. A heroic attempt to solve one of life's mysteries; why work sometimes drifts towards boring and in particular why ESW tend to be so unimaginative.

On the surface it looks like nothing but a positive thing to do, who can protest the use of words like "game" or "fun"? It might even throw a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic like myself off the scent, a scent of potentially fallacious assumptions. But heretics have warning bells ringing when something sounds that good.

What triggers my scepticism is the "verbification" of the noun indicating that you take something existing, without challenging the assumptions nor changing the underlying, then simply... eh... gamify it. If the underlying part is not good enough, adding, combining or tweaking really seldom works well, history is full of examples from clunky flying cars to walking machines with wheels (Segway anyone?).

I even get this image of the Louis XV court at Versailles - infrequent bathing and worse, all doused by perfume in a feeble effort to cover the lack of some basic concepts. Sorry for that image, could not resist.

The purpose of "Gamification" seems to be to cover up some manual and tedious process in an effort to make it more "fun" (that word makes me double suspicious). I see it being applied as a fix-all in business settings for one single purpose; get the user to use what he's supposed to use without having to flog him. A classic manager and now IT vendor quandary. 

But what about checking the original assumptions and see if not the tedious and manual part could be removed instead of being hidden under a new "fun" layer? Try the soap before the perfume so to speak?

 The better solution

Games could give an answer, no doubt, but the question is; what to learn from games, what works and what is the core? Then apply the core learning to Enterprise Software instead of adding a flimsy layer on top.

Disregarding puzzle games for a moment; games are often about a narrative, a story, with characters to know and conflicts that shall be solved, and it must allow decisions and meaningful choices, still with uncertain outcomes that spurs reactions and results moving the story forward another notch in unexpected directions. Note the word "direction" there.

In short, story dwelling instead of story telling; play the game, live the life, immerse oneself in a sequence of partly self directed activities with a meaning (aka process, or indeed work).

Sounds like simulation does it not? Sounds like a real work process stripped of the boring stuff does it not? And indeed it is, both.

But simulation of real life processes, which equals an opportunity to run those, requires a "process engine" that can deliver any sequence of activities and punt back the resulting reactive activities. Manual wiki'ish dashboardy, send-mail-from-Word, or browse and select from long to-do lists does not cut it. Look instead to any multiplayer game on the net and that is precisely what you find at the back end; a pure process engine.

That's what most Enterprise Software for Barely Repeatable Processes lacks, they're mostly manual, no underlying process engine, no instantness. Rebuild the BRP ESW on top of a real process engine, take away that tedious, boring and repetitive manual flow-work, automate the flow-work and let the user focus on what's happening, what to do now at this precise moment, manipulate the process in the quest for solved issues and done work, in short focus on the work story.

That would create real world stories, that would be living the life story, that would be the most effective work modus, and that would be the ultimate game. 

SAPPHIRE Now - huge surprise, good stuff and a couple of important issues

I have to admit I went to Orlando and this year's SAPPHIRE Now with lower than normal expectations.

Boy was I surprised, and in a good way.

Overall I found a turbocharged and far, far nimbler SAP. To the extent agile that our freshly printed meeting agendas sometimes had the executive descriptions wrong. New units, new responsibilities, new groups emerging on the fly - like the day before. I promptly gave up understanding the intricacies of their hierarchies and went with the flow and what people actually were up to.

It even seemed to me that the people had the same attitude, the "heck let's do this and bugger the old structure" confidence. And for sure, Vishal Sikka, Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott all displayed an assured poise I haven't seen before among SAP top executives. All well supported by a fun loving, iPad toting Professor Plattner roaming the halls.

[Cartoon by the ever great Hugh "Gapingvoid" MacLeod of course]

I am the archetypical sceptic, but on the grand scale my hope for SAP long term got a huge boost. And I still like them a lot.

Now to the first disclaimer; SAP graciously paid for my trip and lodging and the ever efficient Mike Prosceno and Stacey Fish had it all in their able hands making our stay a great pleasure. Not to forget the ever helpful and good friends at SAP like Marilyn Pratt, Ann Rosenberg and many, many more.

My second disclaimer is that I'm creating software that I once declared was "not meant to compete with SAP, rather to make SAP irrelevant" - which now has grown to become a "development and run time platform" to allow the likes of SAP to make their old technology and concepts irrelevant instead. This obviously adds quite a bit of tint to the glasses I'm wearing, so read accordingly. But notably; our interests are aligned overall.

From that point of view, certain news made me happy, even if the results are not yet in:

Jim Hagemann Snabe clearly stated that their "old stack" would be challenged and that they will work with partners to create a future stack. This is a very radical shift, only six months ago any new idea or concept was seen through the filter of "how can this be added to our existing stack?".

That "on demand" is a clear and important part of the overall strategy is another issue that pleases me. And it's more important to SAP I think than merely new deployment mechanisms, it will touch the whole organisation and speed up the shift towards new stacks as well. Now we're talking about products beyond the suite; Business by Design, definitely an extremely promising product but still born by the old beast. The will to see "on demand" as something more than extensions and add-ons could be gleaned from new (and generous?) funding made available as well as separate organisational groups, all good in my view.

With "on demand", even for stodgy Enterprises, things change by force of nature: Transparency and speed are the new factors - long term, waterfall and cards-close-to-chest is dead, costly products devised by committees is a non-starter. SAP is now entering, for a part of their portfolio, the world of Google and others where new products are picked up, thrown at the wall - if it sticks fine, if not, redo and rethink or try another. Of course with more solidness than what Google and others might get away with, SAP still has a brand and mission critical type of use to look after.

An interesting aspect of that is that the notion of "success" changes as well: If a four-years-in-the-making product from SAP of yore fell flat on the face it would be an unmitigated disaster and taint the brand, hence cards-close-to-chest. In the world of try early, fail fast nobody bothers and it's seen as brawny - and innovative in fact. So SAP, please stop defending new products in that area, listen, retry and go about life with your head held high. (Could point to a certain recent product that is well executed, nice looking but has many puzzled as to what it is - name withheld but for those in know; it had three names so far..;)

Now they will need more than a new attitude and agile organisations, they will certainly need new and different technologies if they are to "throw a bi-weekly product or two" onto the market to see if they stick. (Here my own interest comes into play, our platform is built for that of course. If they say they are "Real" real time I will say we are "Agile" agile).

Despite all the new and great I found there are still a couple of issues I would raise again, now with a much higher hope they will actually do something about these (both definitely seen through my tinted glasses):


1. Still no reaction to a huge potential market and opportunity they're missing out on.

Two and a half years ago I wrote a post after attending their "Influencer's Summit" in Boston: "SAP missing the biggest opportunity ever". As most of my readers know it's about the ERP vs BRP market.

Now, 30 months later the BRP (Barely Repeatable Process) market is as big (twice that of ERP (Easily Repeatable Process)) and still utterly virgin as to lack of process based IT support while having a huge upside value-wise for the customer (2/3rd of resources spent in BRP is on manually driving the process and not on value creation). And of course the ERP market is as well covered, very competitive, utterly mature and even more incremental value-wise for the customer.

SAP has killed the old sacred cow of all-growth-from-incremental-add-ons, and they want to double their (stated goal) addressable market: Hence they will need to find a new and virgin market involving existing customers and know-how - and here it is, named BRP.

The first signs that SAP is slowly eying the BRP market can be seen in the launch of products like Streamwork. Too bad though that their first stab do not have process as the core (still only DIY manual process) - dear SAP, please make note of the P in BRP!

If they took BRP seriously, with a P; not only would they have their doubling (actually they could triple it) of the addressable market, they would also be the dominating first mover. But of course it requires some challenging of old assumptions and a dab of new technologies, but they know where to find me (sorry, see my second disclaimer above), BRP is our forte.

So I'm going to repeat it: Do it, and do it now.


2. A missing ingredient in their grand (and otherwise good) In Memory DBMS strategy.

First out I must say there is nothing to dislike about in-memory and columnar DBMS, I liked that since Shai Agassi's days and the term "accelerator", partly coloured by the fact that our DB always was in-memory.

My issue is that their focus is merely on the BMS part of the DBMS; the way they handle the data. They forgot something: The first letter, I always like to start with the first part, the underlying part as that often leads to better solutions - the D in this case.

Nobody challenged the D, or rather "what is the data, why is it in the form it is?". Which inevitably would lead to the architecture of the main applications where such is set and the data is created.

If they had asked me I would have said the following: The format of data today is a model by itself based on old technologies and is not a direct model of reality, specifically, I have these two issues to raise:

a) No split of representation and presentation is bad:

This made sense when you had a correspondent at the battle of Bulge that used pen and paper to represent the ongoing in the same format that it was going to be used for presentation later.

That is the principle of forms and documents and most of the business objects in ABAP: Each data object often representing many real world objects in one go; a letter representing you, your house, the bank, it's office building, the account and so forth. And you know what the complexity brings: Last time you moved, how many letters did you have to send to update you address change? One single object representing your house, then related to you as another singular object, you then related to the bank account and so forth. Change the relationship between you and your old house to the new house once and all is fine.

Split representation and presentation and the data volume falls dramatically, combine the singular objects at will when you need presentation and not only do you get a huge boost to reporting depth and ease but the overall complexity shrinks dramatically.

b) Multiple indirect representations - should be direct representation:

A result of double entry book keeping, a never challenged 515 year old paper based technology.

A widget in today's system is indirectly represented by a multitude of invoices, shipping papers, reports etc. A singular direct representation of objects that is timestamped using relations can deliver the accounting reports with far higher reporting depth, far less objects and no reconciliation issues.

A system holding 200 objects each indirectly represented by 20 objects would be 40,000 times more complex than a system as described above (our stuff is like that).

Then a speed increase of 10,000 as claimed by the in-memory becomes small potatoes.

I am not saying this is attainable overnight, quite the opposite, it would need a long term transformation of the underlying models before it spills over into the DBMS. The In Memory DBMS path is good, but I'm saying that it could have been so much better if SAP had spent (or will start spending) time to challenge the D part of the DBMS.

All in all a most enjoyable SAPPHIRE Now, with much to applaud and lots of reasons why my last few quibbles will soon be addressed I'm sure. Thanks again to SAP for putting up with me!

Bonus point: If anybody was sceptical about iPad being a potential enterprise tool; a day or two at SAPPHIRE would have killed that scepticism. Professor Plattner used it in the keynote demo, enterprise suits of all ages could be seen toting only iPads instead of laptops (perhaps first chance to get away from Dells/HPs with Windows on?) and all trade booths raffled out iPads to anybody showing any interest in their wares. Except Microsoft of course, who raffled out a Zune... and the only guy who signed up for that won it I think... :)

E 2.0 - not joining the debate, but...

Being 'diplomatic' I'm not going to step into the debate featuring Dennis, Susan, Nenshad and others... but I've been waiting and waiting for one benefit to be touted, an important but unplanned benefit (the only one?) I've seen in practice myself:

Years ago I was chairman-and-investor-in-residence at a electronic games company. Starting in 1995 it gained about 50 new employees every year, doing games on Nintendo and Sega platforms, later Sony and online - all developed by a great gang of mostly boys with an average age of 20. No kidding, our first Xmas party started with a 'parents day'.

As the industry expanded and the kids became slightly older and experienced we had the usual groups gelling in some corner tinkering with business plans behind our backs, then jumping ship and starting a competitor.

Not what the 'leadership' wanted of course, but pretty inevitable. The kids soon learned to encrypt the business plans as well, so the fun of reading plans and mails left behind on hard drives was withdrawn. Annoying.

Suddenly something happened, we did not know what, but whatever it was it stopped the wave of desertions.

Could it be the new menu in the cafeteria? Could it be that we suddenly became better at communicating? No theory clicked and management (me included) remained as clueless as we should be.

Until one day.

This being the quintessential geek work place, reeking of popcorn and with employees sleeping on the floor after a good night of downloading stuff, they had just made good use of the servers and network and created a flurry of internal 'newsgroups', the predecessor of todays forums. Of course the management was the last to find out, but we did not care.

Suddenly the group dynamics changed. When networking was solely physical classic group dynamics ruled, groups formed in a corner of the corridor, and face to face disagreements had to be handled and a common purpose quickly built. Usually along the lines of 'management sucks, we're smarter' and 'lets split and do it on our own'. And surely enough every desertion group came from the same physical location of the office.

With the company-wide network something else happened, visiting the office next door was replaced with online socialising. And while Peter found Andy in full agreement with his views one day it did not take long before they found disagreement helped by full transparency and input from 100 opinionated co-workers. The full throttle dynamics killed the slower dynamics of yesteryear and any tendency to group forming was followed by instant and efficient group splintering.

It was the exact same effect the E 2.0 advocates predict will flatten the hierarchy that splintered the employee group building. 'Split and control' is an old adage, and here they had organised it themselves. Excellent we said.

And the management lived happily ever after. ;)

Go to market by Extreme Business Planning

Don't know if this is an effort to make own behaviour plausible, but so what...

When entering a market the GAMP (Generally Accepted Marketing Practices) has to be right, as in getting certain stuff right:

• Target market
• Price
• Packaging
• Channel
• Story
• And the rest of it

But one forgets, there are two ways to enter a market:

A. By GAMP

1. Spend days and weeks in the boardroom trying to outguess your potential customers as to who, how, what and when they will use your product.
2. Set the choices in stone, get the channel onboard, set the message and story, price it and colour your product.
3. Go.

Result? Binary. Uncontrolled and rigid outcome. But fast. Success or crash and burn in the fast lane.

B. By EBP (Extreme Business Planning)

1. Keep everything open with two exceptions; build your product so it can be changed and tweaked easily, ditto for your organisation and cash burn.
2. Go.
3. Let the potential customers decide who, how, what and when. Adjust accordingly.

Result? Analogue. Controlled and continuous movement. But slower. Slow and deliberate right hand lane driving.

Think I like B. better. Doable? But of course as long as you question the assumptions you do not know you're making.

Bonus question: Which method would the time-constrained VC board members push for?

Stick your neck out and get what you deserve

If you break rules and do new and utterly different things, then some people are "challenged" and offer their best put-downs. Mostly nicely cloaked as "friendly advice" of course, not always meant to be negative, but still with a whiff of deep-rooted human fear.

And believe me, I've heard a few. I may even be construed as a masochist as I am really fond of the blunt ones, less so with the circumstantial argumentative. Mind you, I do listen - sometimes it sharpens the focus, and sometimes stuff is revisited and comes out better for it!

Here are a few favourites offered at different stages of Thingamy's development:

Theoretical phase, code still spotty: "Bollocks!"

First offered by a British gentleman (not so sure about the gentleman bit though). Of course he was in big-company-marketing, a profession where I seldom meet much understanding. What could I say but break into a wide grin? Let's put it like this: The message did not spur any rewriting of code... :)

Development phase, stuff starting to work: "Not believable!"

Another big-company chap. Another hard-to-counter message. But it's my all-time favourite as it says it all: The idea is too good to be true! Which leaves me with a simple task; do it and prove it's doable. That's a mundane task, hard and interesting, but nevertheless just another task.

Alpha, first working business models: "Too naive, the world is much more complex!"

Last offered by a fast-talking full-to-the-brim with business "truths" big company fellow, from one of my big "competitors". Think I would assign this to the "I do not like what I hear, have no clue how to attack it, let's stick to some cluster bombing out of nowhere" type of arguments.
If you check this out you'll see that with a bit of calculation the current systems architecture can be argued to be a few hundred times more complex than need be. Another good reaction in my view; competition preferring to stick to the old is always excellent!

Demo and test phase: "It's not intuitive enough, and it needs to be prettier!"

But of course. This is only half-a-put down as it is mostly true. The intuition argument is dangerous for software though; I've seen MS users migrating to Mac complaining over lack of intuitive UIs, as well as the Mac guy getting stuck when using MS interfaces. Basically I would argue that "what I'm used to equals intuitive".
And don't start me on pretty. Seen this year's yellow-lime-avocado-green-grey that adorns dresses in all high-end ladies shop windows in Rue d'Antibes in Cannes? Seen kids on Facebook apps trying to establish "who's prettiest"? I love some web sites and all their prettiness just as I love whipped cream. But if I'm to hang around in the same interface all day I'd rather go for anything similar to white paper, with lots of easily digested proteins and carbos as the main theme.

Beta and pre-pilots: "People do not want any changes!"

But of course. Doing a demo one day, one chap (actually being impressed) offered "wow, that workflow is so natural. Almost too natural, it's going to be a problem to implement as the users are used to their messy and quirky ways!". And that is truly reality, no doubt about that.
As another example of that reality I'd suggest you take a look at Adobe's LiveCycle ES product. Not a word on data reuse, data models, knowledge capture, nor anything else than the focus on forms-and-documents goodness and how fantastic it is to shuffle that stuff around electronically!
It's like dismissing the car in the beginning of last century, putting all your R&D funds into developing of a Mechanical Horse - "because people are used to horses, so let's make a real efficient one!"

More to come I'm sure. If the jabs stops I know I'm in trouble!

FAS 157

I see that some bankers under pressure are pointing their finger at the newly introduced "mark-to-market" US accounting rule while muttering "that's the culprit!"

On the surface a sensible rule one would think, but some are sceptical as the markets are never quite effective. And now is such a time.
The new instruments we had so much fun with a year ago, the ones with long and trust-inducing names, are currently rather toxic so the market value is often zero while the banks think they're worth something. Thus no buyers, and no sellers. And of course valuations set by the non-buyers resulting in huge paper losses that might be virtual.

I think it's all kind-of-funny. If you create a financial instrument named "High grade structured credit enhanced leverage fund" and cannot really explain what it is, how can you expect a market to understand and price it? If the market is in an ebullient mood and goes "hey, gimme another vodka martini, I need the spirit to go with the purchase!", then of course anything goes. But on sombre days of sparkling water only, well...

Maybe the FAS 157 will remind the financial alchemists and product designers that their products have to be understood by a market even when market sentiment is closer to panic mode. Hey, the product even has to be understood by themselves! That would not be so bad, now would it?

Like products where I actually could calculate my return even if I did not sell it.

I am sure you've seen this many times before, one of my favourites and quite FAS 157 relevant:

at last

Seems it has dawned upon the VCs that yet another social network might not be the thing.

And when two "Facebook widget applications" (heh, a category by itself) startups are valued at substantially more than Bear Stearns, well, how can you avoid being hit by a blinding flash of the obvious: Something is not quite right.

Still, the reason for the VCs getting cold feet seems to me to be for the wrong reasons. Mind you a good reason but not what I would see as the major reason.

The argument is that there is a consumer fatigue out there, how many times are we to recreate our social networks for another new and shiny place? How many places are we to go, how many apps and browser windows do we have to refresh to hear the same messages from the same friends? I'm a victim of the fatigue for sure.

But what about the good old "how to earn money" - slow, fast or no growth in users - in my view kind of the most important aspect.

And they're all based on advertising, albeit with creative tweaks to exactly how, all touted as completely new and promising. Still the same source, internet advertising.

There are a few numbers around for the grand total spend on internet advertising world wide - I've seen 20 Bn $ up to 37 Bn. But whichever way you see it, it's a sum where you simply can deduct 70%, as that's what Google takes. Rest to be shared among all the Facebooks, Myspaces, Twitters, and... and 300 Mill $ valued Facebook apps.

Come on dear VCs, what about a bit of simple arithmetics? This simply does not add up.

sea, sailing and selling

22 years ago I met Lars for the first time. He's big, solid and Swedish - and if you've ever read Pippi Longstocking he would definitely remind you of (a young version of) Pippi's father, the seafarer and cannibal king. Although I don't think neither Ephraim nor Lars were into cannibalism.

Pippi's father, eh, Lars, left, owner hanging from boom like a monkey on the right, assorted deckhands in the middle

Lars and his at that time girlfriend, Robbie, were hired as crew on my boat, a Swan 59, build number 8 (current Thingamy build is 2.2.12 I think...) a white beauty named "Sassy" built up north in Finland (my third Swan no less).

For three years Lars ran the boat with deft professionalism and Robbie ruled the galley while Lars' nephew Lennart inhabited the forepeak and oiled winches when he was not making the best piña colada ever (a dash of bananas I think it was).

Antigua race week, 21 cases of Heineken consumed on first race day, owner sitting in shade

We even had our "own" chauffeur in English Harbour in Antigua, Jim, who normally ran one of the taxis. His son was a member of the local soccer team where Lars and Lennart joined in during the winter charter season. Myself I was limited to sponsoring the team uniform, numbered garments that were collected after each game to avoid too much wear and tear during the rest of the week.

Our team in baby blue sponsored team suits

Good times indeed. But every phase in life has an end so in 1988 I sold the yacht and Lars and I opened a yacht brokerage in Antibes, the yacht centre in Europe, and the world for that matter.

BCR Yachts

Since then Lars has run and built that business with the same diligence and professionalism as he ran the boat - I was merely the passenger and intermittent supporter as before. [The Fenderkicker blog is here by the way.]

One year ago time was ripe for yet another change as Lars moved on to New Zealand (his wife is Kiwi) but still keeping a keen eye on the operations up here.

And with that we felt an increased interest in our business among potential acquirers. Not only has the business been profitable for almost twenty years, it has a very good reputation and extremely capable people while being one of the few, if not the only mid sized yacht broker in this area not yet gobbled up by the big operators. In other word a perfect target.

The combination of having an interesting asset on our hands, a decision to move on and a need to shore up my wine budget (already under undue pressure from thingamy development) simply made us open the doors.

So now we're in multiple discussions, and if none of the current crop pans out we'll allow others to enter the fringe - we're sellers now. Just mail me if you want to enter the yacht business... ;)

A very good time it has been, but life goes on, and our co-workers deserve owners/partners with a more forward-looking yacht focus as I have shifted my focus ever so slightly to less salty business areas.

benchmark UIs

Swivel chairs (seen as conductive to creative thinking) with icon filled touch-screens perfectly placed for right hand users to run a whole country (well, almost).

Science fiction? Not at all, a working (but never completely finished) system built in 1971-73 in Chile by a burly and exuberant British consultant.

Enjoy the 35 year old UIs:

More about this remarkable story here and here.

(Hat tip to Oleg Liber!)

Header update

Finding that most of my posts are related in one way or the other to thingamy, a more appropriate banner would be the right thing to have.

Heck, "business, software and management" is all what thingamy is about anyway, so thus the new banner. Not to forget "Forthcoming"; thingamy has been forthcoming a long time now - perhaps dumping the name will make it appear? :)

A banner created by the ever creative Mr MacLeod of Gapingvoid fame!