Business System Builder

In trying to be vigilant about where our business is going, there are many indicators to keep an eye on. I look to some of the big consutling firms to provide me information, and Accenture is a great firm to watch to see what’s happening in the global economy as they are truly dependent on the ebb and flow of global commerce. Their results are posted here: http://tinyurl.com/4df2xn. As I look at what they’re doing, I love to see how they’re leveraging their global delivery model to get through the current crisis. Couple of lessons learned…

• Focus to succeed. What they talk about on their guidance call with analysts is to focus their offerings within their vertical industry groups. Something we’ve been focused on is addressing how we most effectively address our client’s most difficult problems around communication, collaboration, and workflow in the context of their customers and employees. While that seems broad, being a Microsoft-centric firm helps us really focus on the core technology that enables all those things: SharePoint. So our key question becomes: ‘What are our client’s biggest problems that SharePoint and Office-related technology can solve?’
• Keep costs down. One thing that I’ve always respected about Accenture is that they are aggressive about keeping their costs down. From my comparative experience at Cap and EY before that, I have seen at the corporate level how aggressive Accenture is at managing costs from these earnings calls. When I was at Trendium I saw first hand how the Accenture guys in Atlanta, DC, and Toronto managed their engagements and their franchise. We probably got more exposure to this when we worked with a large Accenture team on a Cogent engagement. Observations: It’s great to see the ’speed of the leader, speed of the team’ concept at work. Keeping costs down and debt low keeps us nimble from a competitive standpoint and lets us be aggressive when we look at contracting options with our clients. (One of the greatest things about our firm is that we can be as creative as our clients are willing to be to get a deal done. I’ve never realized the power of that kind of flexibility until I had that power.)

Accenture’s not a perfect firm. They’re certainly the 800 pound gorilla in our industry. But they offer great insights into how resilient the economy is and how dependent firms are on technology consulting firms in this web2.0 age.

Love for someone to pick apart my observations!

I was skeptical of Microsoft offering online services. Back in April, My buddy Andrew brought the online services offering to my attention at an IAMCP board meeting, and his fear of the offering caused me to dig in. With some help from my friends at Microsoft, I got connected to the hosting community folks, and I’m now representing these services as if they are my own. Wow.

Anyway. I’m a believer. I’ve provisioned myself a full blown business, and I’m loving it. There are stated limitations to the platform, such as you can’t do custom web parts, but there’s definitely enough capabilities there to make it worthwhile for businesses to start to look into this. Heck, for the price, we’re considering it just for the Exchange piece.

Org Design is such a mystical business skill. We can put as much science and analytics behind it, but so much that comes down to the ‘black magic’ of corporate culture, which, as i see it, is essentially a ’speed of the leader, speed of the team’ issue.

Mootee has a great post about the social nature of organizations and how a social reality is constructed through the organizations we create/live in. http://tinyurl.com/6yzyq4.

I love noodling about how organizations can be more effectively deisgned. We’re dealing with lots of these issues in end user adoption of SharePoint portals. We’ve designed a whole offering to account for the problems we’ve seen surface. I’ll link to it once we get our service on the web site.

Zach Gemignani has a great list of the four C’s for effective alerts — context, cogency, communication, control. http://tinyurl.com/5mz3j5.
So many charts and alerts are crap. this is a great list.

Check out Michael Greth’s great list: http://tinyurl.com/6do9jh.

Some fun data…

This blog post is old: http://tinyurl.com/25e5fs. But, given this week’s Business Week article on social media (http://tinyurl.com/25e5fs), I think it’s even more relevant as a framework for firms to think about how they incorporate all this social media and collaborative ’stuff’ into a profitable venture.

For those of us exhausted at the overhead involved in creating project plans in MS Project, here’s a way to manage data in Excel and get snappy visualization of that data. http://tinyurl.com/469zfk.

Microsoft continues to build its SharePoint asset with an acquisition of FAST.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20080109-705086-email.html

Gates is the ultimate role model for intellectual curiosity. We should be so lucky to have half his passion and energy to continue lifelong learning. Check it out and post comments: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7142073.stm