"There is no Silver Bullet"

I find myself uttering that phrase a lot lately. Maybe it's because business hasn't quite rebounded, despite modest improvements over last year. But everyone seems to want an easy fix -- especially in technology, where boom times are simply expected, and often not earned.

Pipeline is the lifeblood of any sales organization, and Jeff Ogden hits the nail on the head in his recent blog entry on SandHill.com

I don't know Jeff, but three cheers for sanity.

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...But to become the best, you need to make a BIG commitment. You need to invest serious sweat and patience in the foundation of demand generation:

• Value proposition development—Specific business outcomes that result from the use of your products and services
  
  
• Ideal customer profiles—Who are the best prospective customers for us?
  
  
• Buyer personas—What makes them tick? What do they really care about? Where do they turn for information? (See Personas are critical, Mr./Ms. CEO for more)
  
  
• Problem to Solution story-telling—How can we tell a story about their problems and keep their attention as we show them how to solve their problems? As Ardath Albee said, "We need to answer theWhat's In It For Them? question." You also need to leverage Catch Factors to get attention and use Cliff-Hangers to hold attention (editor's note: Credit Ardath for these terms) (See How to Use Great Story-Telling for Lead Nurturing as well as Ardath's great book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale for more.)
  
  
• Great Content mapped to Buyer variables—Content that is brief, interesting and
  • Right format
  • Right person
  • Right time

Only by really working hard on understanding buyers, their issues, their problems, etc. will you have the insights to craft a world-class demand generation program. Don't short cut this process. Nothing in life is easy.

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Coming off IBM's IOD conference, I've been trying to figure out how to position the breadth of the platform so that our partners (ISVs, SaaS companies, BPOs or consulting firms) can build product strategy around the next wave of analytic applications. The potential value of these applications is a hot topic, but how can we capitalize on it? While the breadth of the IBM platform is unmatched, it's tough to figure out where to start.

So, here we go. Use the Analytic Applications Quadrant below in your product strategy sessions, with your investors, or even your clients. And, of course, work with your IBM team to define and build your solutions across these different domains. Leave a comment, or shoot me an email with your thoughts...

X-Axis: Customer Awareness

The x axis of customer awareness is an indication of how much your customers have heard about these particular solutions. It's largely a factor of industry trends and marketing, media coverage, and focus by major technology providers, including IBM.

Y-Axis: Market Expectation

The y axis of market expectation measures the expectation that your solution(s) include the analytics categories. It's generally an indication of the maturity and adoption of the category in the enterprise.

The categorical representation breaks down as follows:

Core Functionality

Solutions that are generally expected to be delivered as part of your solution. They represent technologies that are generally pervasive in the enterprise across most, if not all, domains and industries.

While there may be business models that monetize solutions in this category, we believe the majority of solutions will be incorporated "out-of-the-box" in business software with no additional line item cost or surcharge.

Thought Leadership

These solutions generally have maturity in specific domains or industries, but have the potential to be applied more broadly. Customer awareness may be limited outside specific business units, but there are identified applications that improve business processes or user experience.

A common example is scenario planning. While planning using advanced technologies has been standard practice in Finance for many years, there are many identified applications for the technology outside financial processes that improve business decisions.

The business potential of these application is mixed. It may be a small component of an application or business process. In some cases, it may represent a potential up charge or micro application that can be sold.

Point Solutions

These analytic technologies satisfy specific use cases or industries. They haven't proven to have general applicability, but can be critical for certain business processes. As a result, these solutions can generally be sold to solve a specific problem.

A common example would be operational monitoring in a call center application measuring call volumes and wait times.

Strategic Differentiation

The next wave of widely deployed analytic applications will likely include these technologies, and they will give your products and your firm measurable ROI. While these solutions have substantial media attention and marketing from leading technology companies, their practical implementations are still small in number at the enterprise level -- they represent substantial opportunity for your company to build high margin businesses.

Need...More...Oxygen!

Oxygen is unquestionably my favorite element on the periodic chart. It's easy to remember, has great marketing appeal for all sorts of products (hey to Oxy-Clean), and is an important part of water, my favorite compound. So when someone tells me to go without it for my own good, I tend to be a little skeptical.

But that's exactly what happened today. After a really tough swim workout (okay, most swim workouts are tough for me, but today's was especially hard), our coach has the great idea to finish practice with "no-breathers." For you land-lovers, no-breathers are drills where you swim laps without breathing. You know, straining your muscles and organs, simultaneously depriving them of air. The guy in the lane with me thinks this is a great idea, but I'm pretty sure he's half fish.

Coach encourages us by saying "these will get easier the more you do" -- which I think is like saying "hitting yourself in the head with a hammer will hurt less once you crack your skull." But on about the 3rd lap, that's exactly what happened.

After 2 laps of flailing to the point of passing out, I figured out the secret: stop trying so hard. The goal remained the same, of course, to swim across the pool without a breath. But taking my standard brute-force approach to swimming didn't work. It required more finesse, more technique, and a slower pace. In doing so, I got more distance out of the oxygen I took in.

In a way, this is exactly what many of us face every day. Companies everywhere have cut staff. As managers and leaders, we're asked to produce the same results with less resources. Our employers aren't just asking us to do no-breathers, they're expecting it.

And while our natural response to this is to work harder, push harder, and power our way through it, it's not necessarily a path to success. To get to the other side, we have to do things differently, use our talents and minds in new ways, and achieve more with less. Just applying more effort isn't enough.

The moral of the story? The next time your boss, shareholders, board of directors, or employees ask more of you, just hold your breath until you turn blue. That'll show 'em.

2010: Resolutions

Resolutions can be hard to keep, so I took a look back at my resolutions from 2009, and realize that I actually did okay.

Now, for 2010:

• Correspond to connect: based on a fantastic post by Steve Rubel, I'll be upping my correspondence: particularly the one-to-many correspondence here. I had thought of a writing resolution, but Steve makes it sound so much more 21st century!
• Innovate: Chris O'Brien's blog post on the innovation bias at Sequoia was both funny and sad. While I know that attitude isn't universal in the industry, I fully admit I did my best innovating before age 30. Why that trend has declined in the past several years is probably the subject of another post. If I can prove Sequoia wrong in 2010, at least in my own mind, I'll gain a small slice of personal satisfaction.
• Discipline: Be exact about my training regimen, diet, finances, and work. Focus, and refocus, to get the most out of every minute of the day. Time is precious.
• Improve Every Day: Take a second, a minute, or an hour to make life a little better for at least one person every day. Because, everything else aside, that's what's really important. Right?

With that, I wish you all success in all of your goals, big and small, in 2010.

JMF

I really like a subtle feature of Tableau 5 that should greatly enhance the dashboard viewing experience.  

While navigating a date range may seem simple, it's not.  Dates are an example of how a single universal dimension needs to be sliced many different ways, depending on the context  and data set.  The simplicity of the dialogue in the example viz is what makes the dashboard powerful -- the viewer is presented categorized options for slicing in just a few clicks.

Good stuff.

Query Studio 8.4

The often overlooked Query Studio has been a simple little query tool that hasn't seen much visible change in the last few years. While new studios for Query continue to pop-up (Express Author, PowerPlay Studio, CAFE), Query Studio chugs along as a handy product to quickly build lists and crosstabs. Cognos developers have always replied on Query Studio as a way to verify Framework Manager models -- it's fast and reliable, and seeing the data immediately rather than having to execute is great.

As with every Cognos 8 release, there's not much new to report with Query Studio. Still, a few nuggets have come out of 8.4:

• Filter Usability: Query Studio users rejoice! You can now type in values when filtering a dimension. This means you can easily copy and paste from a list you may keep handy in Excel or a note. This long awaited feature has arrived. And there's more -- you can also now add a filter without adding a column to the query -- just right click on the data item.

• Lineage: Lineage is a new feature in all 8.4 Studios that traces the metadata through the package and datasources. It's really handy when testing a multi-layered model, and is a great advancement in Cognos 8.4. It's there, as you would expect, in Query Studio 8.4.

• Performance: Like all studios, performance has been improved each release. 8.4 is really snappy on my demo data sets, both relational and dimensional.

I've been digging into Cognos 8.4, so I'll recount some of my findings here, and in a bit more detail on my IBM blog.  If you're really interested beyond what you see, please feel free to drop me an email.

Report Studio Positioning

Report Studio was released as  the Cognos production report authoring tool with ReportNet in 2003 .  Report Studio, though, has evolved into a more robust power user tool that can be used by financial analysts, operations, or any line-of-business user who has a good sense for data and design.

Since it's web-based, Report Studio takes end user deployment complications out of play.  That is, of course, except for that annoying IE requirement (more on that later).  While that's not particularly important in my work, it is extremely important, and valuable, for rolling out the tool to a broad user community.  Unlike programming-based report writers, many professionals can benefit from reporting and analysis through Report Studio.

I think Report Studio, when implemented with a few value-added templates and customizations, can be used by the majority of end-users who would otherwise use Cognos query and analysis studios.  It also can, and will, be useful for IT professionals to create reports that are distributed to the masses via the web, email, or filesystem.  Its combination of rich functionality and author productivity is truly unique in the market.

For true "production" reporting, it's still good practice to move complex logic to ETL processing, or the database itself.   While possible, its not a practical tool for replacing reports built in structured programming languages (COBOL, SQR, etc.) that produce massive volumes of static content, such as billing statements or other structured forms.

With that said, on to some deeper thoughts about 8.4...

8.4: What I Like

I'm happy to report there's a lot of good in 8.4.  This isn't an exhaustive list of new features, just the ones I found particularly valuable in my work:

• Microcharts: Three cheers for microcharts!  As an ardent follower of design techniques by Stephen Few, I've found microcharts to be an excellent implementation of dashboard content.  I've already gleefully used micro-column and line charts in my development.  Microcharts are excellent for a variety of decision support, including trending by category and win/loss.  Maximum information in minimum real-estate.
• Conditional Formatting:  This was overhauled in 8.3, but it deserves mention for the interface, which is vastly improved over the conditional variable approach.  The usability of the metrics-style range is fantastic, as is the interface to quickly set the most important properties in a condition.  The whole experience is improved, and saves the author significant time.
• Master/Detail:  This also was improved in earlier releases, but it's easier, and more intuitive, than ever to create master/detail reports.  Master/detail reports are also snappier, which is important, since they a primary feature needed to build more complex logic into Cognos reports.
• Performance:  Report Studio really performs well, even on an underpowered laptop or virtual machine.  Since the interface isn't truly WYSIWYG, the improvements running reports to refine formatting is another great time saver for the author.
• Singletons:  While introduced in 8.3, they seem to perform better in 8.4.  Use them often to highlight certain results that warrant immediate attention in a strategic piece of screen real estate.
• Cognos Mashup Services:  For OEM partners only, CMS is an important enabler of reports to third party applications.  Really important, and really cool.  

Report Studio: Where it Should Go... 

I have a number of ideas, including Express Author, Usability, and Openess.  Questions?  Comments?  Bring 'em!