Essential Reading for IT Leaders: Part Two

Following up on part one in our series on essential reading for IT leaders (that is, CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors, etc.), today we offer you 10 more titles to complement your existing technical chops. The theme of this group of titles is largely the same as before: IT leaders need to move beyond being strictly technologists, and develop a much deeper, more intuitive and more strategic focus on the strategy of the business. And while other people are asking Do you see CIOs becoming extinct? we argue that a CIO or CTO or IT Director who understands technology and strategy, and who can "bridge the gap" between the world of "the business" and the technology world, will always be an incredibly valuable asset and will have a role in any modern organization.

Here then, are 10 more titles to add to your reading list:

1. The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers by C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy - If anyone can challenge Michael Porter's status as "the King of modern business strategy" then it's probably C.K. Prahalad. Prahalad is one of the greatest business thinkers to have ever lived, and this book was a masterpiece by a master. In The Future of Competition the authors develop the idea of co-creation which is a model of interaction with customers in which the customer is cast as an equal partner, rather than merely a passive recipient. The key idea is that maximum value is created by a mutual development process in which the firm and the customer work together to create personalized, unique solutions. In a world where even the most technologically sophisticated products are at risk of being commoditized, co-creation stands out as a way to step around that risk, deliver maximum value, and maintain deep customer engagement.
2. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen - A landmark book, The Innovator's Dilemma explores the reasons why firms innovate, but fail to gain a return on those innovations. The key idea here is that fear of cannibalizing an existing, legacy, business prevents firms for investing in, and promoting, innovative products, even while their competitors are moving past them. Understanding the ideas here is essential for executive leadership in any company which depends on continuous innovation for growth.
3. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor - The followup to The Innovators Dilemma this title explores how firms can become producers of disruptive innovations, and adopt strategies to achieve disruptive growth through successful innovation.
4. Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future by Patricial Seybold - Outside Innovation is an excellent and in-depth analysis of how to work together with customers to develop innovative offerings. The ideas presented in this book overlap to some extent with those of The Future of Competition and the two titles complement each other well. Seybold's book is more "hands on", so to speak, with plenty of real world examples of what she calls "outside innovation", where the work by Prahalad and Ramaswamy is a little more academic.
5. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey Moore - This may be the most famous marketing book ever, at least in high-tech circles, and rightly so. Moore illustrates how the Technology Adoption Lifecycle is not a continuous curve, as it had generally been presented in the past. His analysis of the gap or "chasm" between segments of the curve represents an insight that changed high-tech marketing forever. If your firm has to deal with the challenge of introducing new, technologically innovative products to the market, you owe it to yourself to read Crossing The Chasm and put Moore's ideas into practice.
6. Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth and Scott D. Anthony - a followup to The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution, this title deals with predicting change within industries. Here Christensen and his colleagues provide a model for how to spot the signals of impending industry change, anticipate the outcomes of competitive engagements, and asses how a firm's strategy will affect it's future success (or lack thereof).
7. The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - Here, Norton and Kaplan lay out the fundamental ideas of the Balanced Scorecard which has become one of the most widely adopted performance management frameworks in business, and has evolved into a strategy execution process. The value of the Balanced Scorecard approach is its ability to help firms articulate their strategy in actionable terms, and to generate a concrete roadmap to implementing that strategy.
8. The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - The successor to The Balanced Scorecard this is a further exploration of the ideas of Kaplan and Norton. Here they lay out five specific steps which are required to truly align strategy with operational implementation: 1) translate the strategy into operational terms, 2) align the organization to the strategy, 3) make strategy everyone's everyday job, 4) make strategy a continual process, and 5) mobilize change through strong, effective leadership.
9. Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - Strategy Maps continues to dive deeper into the mechanisms of creating real alignment between a firms strategy and it's people, processes, systems and and information technology. Here the authors present powerful new tool - the Strategy Map - for documenting and managing the strategic intent of the firm, and mapping that strategy to tactical objectives.
10. The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - Our final Kaplan & Norton recommendation of the day, The Execution Premium provides firms with the know-how needed to generate an effective strategy, plan the tactical implementation and execution of the strategy, and - perhaps most importantly - test and refine the strategy.

And there you have it... 10 title that IT leaders should familiarize themselves with, in order to be better equipped to analyze technological decisions, and evaluate technological capabilities, in terms of the strategies they support or enable. Armed with this kind of knowledge, IT leaders can prepare to move away from being thought of as specialists in only technology, and begin to become recognized and valued business strategists in their own right.

10 Essential Reads For CIOs, CTOs and IT Managers

Over the past 10 years or so, IT has found itself under fire from many quarters. "Thought Leaders" like Nicholas Carr write about how IT Doesn't Matter (we'll revisit that in a future blog post) and other pundits openly ask Is The CIO Dead?

The truth, of course, is that this is mostly hyperbole, but with an element of truth hidden underneath. And that element of truth is that IT does matter and CIOs are important... to the extent that the add value to the business. This means that IT leaders: CIOs, CTOs, and Directors of IT must move beyond a single-minded focus on technology, and begin to take a broader view of the organization, and they must understand how information technology provides capabilities that support and enable business strategy. And in order to truly have a "seat at the table" alongside the CEO, CFO and other traditionally respected positions within the organization, IT leaders must become trusted partners who routinely demonstrate the ability to add essential strategic insights to the conversation. To this end, I posit that CIOs and their ilk should set down the latest Hadoop book, close the Cassandra and Mesos tabs in their browsers, cancel the meeting with the sales guy from Microsoft, lock the door, and sit down and focus on business strategy and how technological capabilities can create new strategic opportunities for the organization, and support existing strategic initiatives.

As part of the "Re-education of the IT Leader", there are a handful of foundational works on business strategy, and a few titles on the intersection of strategy and technology, that I recommend to all technology leaders who want to gain more influence and relevance within their organization, and who want to contribute to the strategic direction of the firms where they work. At least a passing familiarity with the following works will greatly expand your ability to see things from the perspective of the CEO and to begin to think strategically.

So, with no further ado, here are 10 essential reads for CIOs, CTOs, Directors of IT and other IT leaders:

1. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors - Michael Porter's seminal title, this book basically created the modern field of strategic analysis. Porter's Five Forces model, laid out in this book, is one of the most well known and frequently encountered techniques for analyzing a firm's position within its industry and for thinking about strategic initiatives. If you can only read one book on business strategy, go to the source and read this one. Yes, it's somewhat academic and can be a bit dry and terse at times, but it's worth the effort. Your CEO, or the consultants your CEO hires, will be talking in terms of the vocabulary defined in this book.
2. Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach - this is an excellent follow-up to the first Michael Porter book, as it builds on Porterian strategic analysis and presents a methodology for using that analysis to generate new strategic initiatives, which will be supported by technological capabilities, and then building a case for those capabilities, in terms of the impact on the business. Adopting an approach like this is how a CIO can move from being seen as filling a strictly tactical or operational role, into being seen as an influential strategist in his/her own right. Note that we have written extensively on the Capability Cases approach here, and you may find that useful reading as well. See: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three in our series on Capability Cases.
3. Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations - If you want to understand and talk about possible sweeping changes to the very DNA of your organization... new business structures that are better equipped for competing in the 21st century - like "Sense and Respond" management - then this book is for you. The authors present a theory of a fundamentally different way of structuring organizations, which result in a much more responsive and agile organization which is much better suited to compete and survive in an era of hyper-competition.
4. Business @ The Speed of Thought - Bill Gates wrote this back in the late 1990's and it's as relevant today as it was then. In this book, Gates presents a vision for what he called the "Digital Nervous System". As an analogy to the human autonomic nervous system, the "Digital Nervous System" represents the way in which a firm's IT system enable the flow of signals and information within the "body" of the firm, allowing coordinated decision making and agile manoeuvring. And despite the decade plus which has passed since this title appeared, most firms still do not truly use their IT systems in this way, to the present day. For more information on achieving this goal, see our article: Digital Nervous System.
5. Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company - the title really says it all. In a hypercompetitive era like the one we operate in now, it is more important than ever to be able to detect changes in your environment and react to them appropriately. Consuming massive amounts of data, applying automated analytics and extracting meaningful insights, are tasks where IT is absolutely essential. In this regard, IT can serve to provide a sort of "radar sensing" capability to the organization, which allows it to "see through the fog" and avoid danger. This title is a deep dive into the importance of, and techniques for, discovering these "weak signals" and surfacing them for your enterprise.
6. Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy - if you don't have time to read all of Michael Porter's works first-hand, this is a great "Cliffs Notes" review of his thinking and techniques. Written by one of Michael's students and collaborators, this book provides a solid overview of Porterian strategic analysis, without being quite as dry and terse as the original source material. Reading this is still not truly a substitute for reading Porter himself, but it's a good start, and is definitely better than not studying the subject at all.
7. Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance - another seminal work by Michael Porter, this builds on and expands the ideas present in his first title. As before, this is essential reading for anyone who seeks to be a knowledgeable business strategist.
8. On Competition - The third and final Michael Porter book in this list, it finishes fleshing out the overall field of Porterian strategic analysis. As with his other works, it is somewhat academic and isn't exactly leisure reading, but the payoff is more than worth the effort.
9. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - a lot of people bandy the word "strategy" around, and a lot has been written on the topic. This work by Richard Rumelt dives into what "strategy" actually is, and helps explain what is and isn't actually strategy, and helps you to distinguish between good strategy and bad strategy. This is a great complement to all the Michael Porter stuff previously listed.
10. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers - written by Alexander Osterwalder, this book is often recommended to founders of startups, but it has application inside any business... especially one which feels besieged and under fire from all directions, and which is desperately trying to find new ways to compete in an increasingly competitive environment. Competition isn't solely based on your products! You can also compete by altering your business model, and that is the essential discussion in this book: What is a "business model" and how to you create a new one? And how do you know if the new one is good? Read this book and you'll have some very powerful arrows in your quiver, in terms of presenting new strategic models for your enterprise.

There are, of course, more than ten titles that I might recommend to a CIO, CTO or Director of IT (or to anyone in business for that matter). And while this list gets at some real essentials, it is by no means comprehensive. Please share your own suggestions, comments and observations in the comments on this post. And maybe we'll do a "part two" of this later, with more suggestions, and including some of your own recommendations.

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If you've read this far, please visit us at Fogbeam Labs and/or follow us on Twitter.

Why The Kiera Wilmot Situation Is Bad For America

In case you missed the recent news, a 16 year old Florida high-school student named Kiera Wilmot was expelled from school and charged with felony counts of "possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds" and "discharging a destructive device" for conducting a harmless science experiment which resulted in a small explosion... which injured no one and caused no harm.

Predictably, the story has sparked a firestorm of controversy. Add in that fact that the student in question is female and black, and the story has quickly morphed into one focusing on the possible racist and/or sexist influences involved. And yes, there likely are overtones of both sexism and racism influencing the public officials involved in this story. But I think focusing on that is missing a much larger issue, and one that represents bad news for all hackers, makers, DIY'ers, amateur scientists... and for America as a whole. There are serious economic consequences to the kind of narrow-minded, overly risk-averse, brain-dead thinking which leads to a story like this.

Simply put, our society seems to be moving towards an overly protective, overly risk-averse, parochial mindset, where we are all encouraged to accept blind conformity to "authority" in the name of "safety". Students are arrested for harmless experiments, at a time when business leaders around the country are screaming for improvements in STEM education, at a time when our country is facing a continuing severe economic crisis, and a time when we may or may not be balanced on the precipice of a "manufacturing renaissance" which could bring jobs to the unemployed, and bolster the economy across the board. But what message are we sending to innovators, especially young ones, when incidents like this happen? And what about the damage done by people granted "authority" over others, as so well demonstrated in the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiments?

I contend that this Kiera Wilmot story, and similar stories, will have (or have had) a "chilling effect" on all the hackers, makers, DIY'ers, amateur scientists and hobbyists around the country, who are working to educate themselves, create new things, and provide the basis for a future generation of technologically savvy, well-educated, innovative citizenry which our nation needs. And this is at the worst possible time... the DIY movement, or "maker movement", whatever you want to call it, has been flourishing for a few years now. Hackerspaces are popping up all over, individuals are buying (or better yet, building) their own 3D printers, CNC milling machines, robots of various sorts, and are learning and creating and making at blinding pace. Heck, even Radio Shack have re-embraced the DIY crowd - which they had abandoned decades ago - and now sell Arduino microcontrollers and an expanded selection of discrete components and electronic kits.

So, just at the time when young people may be starting, ever so slowly, to embrace technological exploration, science, electronics, robotics, etc., we throw a cold glass of water in their faces, by demonstrating that "doing science on your own will mean going to jail for the smallest mistake". And what does it say to the people holed up at their local hackerspace, working on DIY fusion research, or high-voltage electronics experimenting, or anything else with even a slight "danger factor"? Are people going to be less likely to experiment and participate in shaping the future, when the threat of going to jail for a harmless mistake is lingering in the air?

Sadly, this is not a new story. People have been lamenting, for example, the restrictions on components found in chemistry sets for years... But it's a big jump from restricting access to components needed to run an experiment, to putting someone in jail for simply running an experiment in which no one was harmed and nothing was damaged. Let me re-iterate that last bit... despite the "explosion" no one was harmed and no property was damaged. And yet, this young lady is still being charged with felonies and will be tried as an adult. A spokesperson for the school district said:

We urge our parents to convey to their kids that there are consequences to their actions,

This is wrong... there are (or should be) consequences for the outcomes of actions. An action which causes no harm or injury, should *not* have any punishment associated with it. Otherwise we will have to ask "what are the consequences of brain-dead educational policies that dampen curiosity, discourage learning and experimentation and turn kids away from science"? Personally, I don't think we want to experience those consequences.

Prolog? I'm Going To Learn Prolog??

Note: If you think you've seen this post before, you're probably right. This was originally written and posted on the OLD "OpenQabal" weblog. For those who don't remember, OpenQabal was Phil's personal project centered on Open Source Social Networking back in the mid 2000's. Not much ever came of it, but some of the ideas live on in Quoddy and other parts of the Fogcutter suite. It's time to delete that old weblog, but this one post seemed worth preserving and moving here. Most of these links are probably still good, but some might be dead.

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Sometime ago I blogged about the availability of some great resources for learning Prolog. At the time, the available materials I'd found were:

• Artificial Intelligence through Prolog
• Introduction to Prolog for Mathematicians.
• Building Expert Systems in Prolog

Now, thanks to programming.reddit.com, I've found a couple of additional references on Prolog, which are also freely available online.

Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example
and
Logic, Programming and Prolog
and
Prolog Programming: A First Course

Edit (05-08-2013): A helpful Hacker News commentator has pointed out another good title for inclusion in this post:

• Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis - Digital Edition

Luckily there are also a number of high quality implementations of Prolog available, including GNU Prolog, SWI Prolog and Ciao Prolog.

Now to find some time to dig in...

Edit (03-30-2009): Apropos, this link just appeared at the top of programming.reddit.com. Good stuff.

Edit (05-04-2013): For anybody who doesn't get the reference in the title of this post:

Capability Cases Part Three - Sample Capability Case: Technology Radar

In Part One and Part Two of this series, we explored the idea of a "Capability Case" and argued that this approach will be essential for firms who want to align IT with business strategy in the future. In this installment, we’ll look at the *process* of creating a capability case in more detail, and we’ll look at a sample of what the result of that process might look like.

Specifically, this Capability Case, which we call "Technology Radar" is an example of a Capability Case which a software vendor (like Fogbeam Labs!) might develop to use as an exploratory tool to for helping customers understand their solutions. In this example, the case uses a fictional (we hope!) firm as the subject, and is, by it’s nature, a little more generic than a Capability Case which is "cut from whole cloth" by a firm running through the process from scratch.

In either case, developing a Capability Case begins with an analysis of the business and its current status, the forces and trends affecting the business, and the desired results. Porter’s Five Forces analysis is the gold standard of strategic analysis tools, and a firm will usually choose to engage this model to start the process.

Given the output of the "Five Forces" analysis, and a survey of significant trends affecting the firm and its industry, the firm leadership should begin to design a strategic direction to address these forces and trends. It is only then that the firm should begin to look at technological capabilities and start building the bridge from strategy to concrete capabilities. This however, is exactly where the CIO, CTO, Director of R&D, and other technology experts must be directly engaged with the highest levels of firm leadership, so they can articulate what capabilities exist (or could be developed or acquired) which could support the strategic direction and desired outcomes.

Candidate capabilities may be drawn from a catalog of pre-existing capabilities which exist within the firm, or they may be created from scratch and proposed for development. Vendors may also provide lists of potential capabilities which they can provide through their products. In the end, a proposed Capability Case may feature a mix of existing capabilities, ones which will be developed from scratch, and ones which will be purchased from 3rd party suppliers. Once a list of capabilities for the proposed Capability Case have been developed, a "solution story" is generated, which puts the use of the capabilities, and their mapping to the strategic objectives, into a narrative form.

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Name

Technology Radar

Intent

Identify technological developments - which may present either a threat to the enterprise, or a groundbreaking new opportunity - as early as possible.

Description

New technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace. Worldwide, private enterprises, academic researchers, and open-source hackers are all constantly pushing the envelope, developing new approaches and tools. Some of these advancements may represent a huge threat to your organization, perhaps by enabling a competitor to cannibalize your existing business model with a much less expensive alternative. Others may represent an opportunity to break new ground with products, product features, or services that can represent sizable new revenue streams. It is advantageous to identify these advances as soon as possible, in order to outmaneuver the competition and take maximum advantage of new developments.

As Downes and Mui point out in their book Unleashing the Killer App, this kind of awareness requires a technology radar consisting of a fat pipeline, a sensitive radar screen and sophisticated intelligence.

Forces & Trends: (American Textile Manufacturing)

Porter’s Five Forces

Threat of New Entrants - there are low barriers to entry for manufacturing many textile products. Capital to build or purchase a mill, knitting machines, looms and other equipment is the largest barrier. For technical textiles, intellectual capital is also a potential barrier. More specialized products are harder for new entrants to duplicate.

Threat of Substitutes - many textile product are substitutable for others. Polyester, for example, is gaining ground in my applications formerly served by natural fibers. This is less of a problem for specialized materials and advanced technical textiles.

Bargaining Power of Customers - Moderate to high, especially for commodity products such as denim. Smaller mills are especially prone to being “bargained down” by customers working in concert with each other.

Bargaining Power of Suppliers - Moderate, especially for raw materials like cotton whiche are widely available from multiple suppliers.

Competitive Rivalry - Intense. This industry has relatively high fixed costs, especially for labor. This subjects American manufacturers to intense competition from imports from low-wage countries like China, Malaysia, or Korea.

Industry Trends

Customer co-creation - Textile firms are working more closely with their customers, doing joint R&D, to develop new products. Using computer based collaboration, companies are becoming more value-added partners with customers, and co-creating value through developing innovative products together.

New Fiber Development - There is a trend towards the development of bio-based products, including fibers made from raw materials like corn, wheat and beets. These new fibers are being used to create a variety of high-performance textile products with unique properties.

Military Fabrics - The Pentagon is a significant purchaser of textile products and military applications are a steadily growing niche. The military is constantly seeking textiles which perform better in extreme climates, are less bulky, and are lighter in weight. There is a significant opportunity to introduce new, specialized products catering to military applications.

Medical Textiles - Demand for specialized technical textiles is growing, especially for products which can help prevent infections during surgical procedures.

Nanotechnology - Research in the area of nanotechnology is advancing at a rapid pace, and innovations in this area enable a wide range of new, specialized, high-performance textile products. Universities are creating significant breakthroughs, but commercialization of this research is lagging.

Summary

Given these forces and trends, MegaCorp come to the conclusion that a primary strategic objective is to start introducing more innovative and specialized textile products, which are more difficult to copy, have no other suppliers, and are not subject to the same pricing pressure from imports as more commoditized textiles.

Desired Business Results: (MegaCorp, Inc.)

• Better awareness of technological advances which are significant to the organization.
• Ability to gain early mover advantage over competitors, and market differentiation, by incorporating advances in materials science sooner.
• Ability to preempt low-priced imports by introducing more specialized and innovative products.
• Lower risk of being one-upped by the competition with a significant technical advancement.
• More rapid, and greater overall, return on R&D investments.

Typical Use Scenarios and Guidance

A technology radar is established to pull in information from many disparate sources: RSS feeds, Twitter streams, email lists, and user submitted links to websites, documents and articles. Collaborative filtering through collective intelligence is used to filter the lower value submissions, while ensuring the relevant information gains visibility.

Employees throughout the organization view the radar, through the “emerging technologies” channel and take advantage of the information.

In some cases this may represent a “bottom up” scenario, such as an engineer finding an interesting new library which enables a feature the engineer likes... he quickly knocks out a prototype, shows it to senior management, and it is eventually adopted into a product release. In another case, this may be a “top down” scenario, where a senior leader discovers a new technology, and issues a mandate that R&D investigate its applicability to their product.

Capabilities

The process of identifying a solution for this situation discovered the necessity of the following technological capabilities:

• C1. Collaborative Filtering
• C2. Content Aggregation
• C3. External Application Integration
• C4. Personalized Information Stream
• C5. Real-time Alerting
• C6. Social Information Sharing
• C7. Trending Topics / Hot Items
• C8. OpenSearch Integration?

Solution Story

At MegaCorp, a North Carolina based manufacturer of advanced technical textiles, leaders are constantly jousting with rival HyperCorp, each striving to steal market share from the other. Recently, HyperCorp has released several innovative new products, with properties that MegaCorp had not considered possible, and were not able to deliver in their own products. After the most recent release, MegaCorp leaders dug in and discovered that HyperCorp had integrated advanced technology developed by researchers at Miskatonic University. "Why," asked MegaCorp CEO Howard Phillips, "did we not know about this sooner? This is actually a better fit for our product.. if we had done this first, we could have taken a huge chunk of HyperCorp’s market share, instead of letting them jump out in front of us!"

In order to address this lack of awareness of emerging technologies, MegaCorp decide to implement a Technology Radar. An "emerging technologies" channel is created (Capability C2), where every member of the organization can submit links to documents, articles and documents (Capability C6) that touch on technologies related to MegaCorp’s industry, along with relevant news-feeds and data streams from external content repositories (Capability C3). Users throughout the organization vote, tag and comment on each submission, allowing the collective intelligence of the organization (Capability C1)to filter the less important items, while pushing the key ones to the top. Product Managers and executives begin to make browsing the latest ‘top items’ (Capability C7) on the channel a routine habit... and some users configure the system to send them a dynamic alert via instant messaging when an entry reaches a certain score (Capability C5) while other users choose to filter entries by keyword or topic (Capability C4).

A few months later, the Flozzit Product Manager receives such an instant message - the link is to a paper published by researchers at Arkham University, detailing the development of a breakthrough in nanotechnology which solves a problem that MegaCorp engineers have been struggling with. MegaCorp quickly contact the AU technology transfer office, negotiate to license the new technology and begin integrating the new approach. They also manage to recruit two of the students from AU who worked on the project to join their own internal R&D department.

Using the new technology, MegaCorp are able to release their "Flozzit" material with properties which clearly outclass the closest equivalent material from HyperCorp,which had been steadily eroding market-share away from MegaCorp until now.

CEO Phillips talks to his managers and explains why he’s happy with developments - "If we hadn’t rolled that new stuff out when we did, HyperCorp would have been able to put a dagger into our heart. Now we’ve shown them, and the market, that they aren’t always the ones on the forefront of technical advancements. And the two new guys we hired from Arkham are already hard at work on some stuff that’s going to blow everybody away."

Vintage

Mature Commercialization

Challenges

• Corporate culture which fosters a “Not Invented Here” syndrome.
• Lack of incentives for participation in the system.
• Lack of belief in the utility of the system.
• Lack of participation in the system by executives and other decision makers.

Applicable Technologies

• Neddick Enterprise from Fogbeam Labs
• Other corporate knowledge repositories (blog servers, forums software, document management systems, HR management systems, etc.)
• Existing Data Warehouses / Databases / Knowledgebases
• External information sources (web pages, databases, etc.

Integration Mechanism

RSS feeds, HTTP, OpenSearch

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If you found this interesting, please follow us on Twitter or visit our homepage at Fogbeam.com

The Truth About Fogbeam Labs

Inspired by a recent blog post from the folks at PMRobot - titled "The Truth about PMRobot" - I was motivated to write something in a similar vein. I was particularly struck by what PMRobot said here:

I recently watched an excellent talk by Jason Cohen from the Business of Software conference in 2011. He talks about the importance and value of being honest about your product's strengths and weaknesses. I’m putting this into practice by being brutally honest about our product in conversation with people I meet.

and

My experience is that people find honesty refreshing, even disarming. By being upfront about your shortcomings, you give them a reason to trust your claims about your strengths. Honesty, also makes you more human and relatable. It makes you the kind of people others want to see succeed. It opens you up for receiving honest feedback, which is essentially to any lean startup.”

When I read this, my immediate reaction was to think (and post to Hacker News) something like:

Love it, love it to death! There is so much truth in this article, on both a meta level and the obvious level. In fact, you have inspired me to write a similar post for Fogbeam Labs.

I sometimes feel torn when writing about us, on our blog, our website, etc... trying to choose between "generic corporate voice" where we try to sound like a typical "big company" and something more "down to earth, folksy and honest". And, truth be told, I think I sometimes default to "generic big company" because it's actually easier in some perverse sense. Figuring out how to write simply, directly, and honestly, while preserving the underlying message and not sending a different message, is - IMO - a non-trivial thing.

We want potential customers to know that we're a small company (2 people at the moment), that our products are unfinished, immature and buggy, and that we can't provide some of the things that IBM or Oracle can. But we also don't want them to think that we're a bunch of rubes who don't know what we're doing, or to think that we'll do anything less than bend over backwards to provide the best possible support to those who take a chance on us at this early stage. We also want people to know that we genuinely believe that we have what will be the best product offerings in our space, as things mature and we finish fleshing things out.

So what is the truth about Fogbeam Labs? Well, quite simply that we are an early stage, bootstrapped startup, self-funded so far, and comprised of two people. We were three people, but one co-founder had some really difficult issues going on in his personal life and chose to step down. And the truth is that our products are buggy, immature and unfinished. And the truth is that we don’t have the resources of an IBM or an Oracle or a Microsoft, to promote, support, build and enhance our products. And the truth is truth is that not everyone is a potential customer for us right now. Running as a lean startup, we are focused on conserving cash and minimizing overhead as much as possible, so we are focusing on serving customers in North Carolina first and foremost, then other Southeast states (VA, GA, TN and SC in particular) to minimize travel cost, and to allow us to be as responsive as possible to our customers. Simply put, we are small, so we can provide better service to a company in NC than we can to a company in Seattle, WA or in London, England.

We are also mainly interested in a certain type of customer. Because our products are buggy, immature and incomplete, but will - as we flesh out our vision for them - eventually be leading edge and offer some real competitive advantage to our users, we are looking for customers who fit the mold of what Steve Blank calls Earlyvangelists. An Earlyvangelist is aggressivly seeking to be on the cutting edge, and is looking for technology as a means to a competitive advantage. Earlyvangelists will work with unproven startups, pay money for unfinished products, and provide feedback and input that helps the startup flesh the product out into it’s finished form. They will also evangelize for the startup (assuming they deliver on their promises) and promote them to their peers.

So why should a company take a chance on Fogbeam Labs and our products? Simply, because we believe we have a broader, more comprehensive vision of how certain types of software products, coupled with new approaches to management and organizational structure, can allow a firm to develop a real, meaningful competitive advantage. And we believe that, in the hypercompetitive times we live in, many firms need what we are offering.

We also believe, very strongly, that proprietary software is a dead-end, and that enterprises have begun a slow, but steady transition to favoring Open Source Software, developed in an open and collaborative fashion, and released under a liberal license.

Finally, because we are not just “in it for the money”. At Fogbeam, our Mission and Core Values statement is not just a bit of glossy rhetoric or a marketing gimmick. It defines why we are here and how we do business. And we believe we are advocating a better way of doing business than many (if not all) of the traditional, big proprietary software vendors.

So, if you are looking for an Enterprise Social Network, an Enterprise Search engine and a novel Information Discovery platform which can provide the plumbing for improved knowledge management, knowledge transfer, innovation and productivity in your enterprise, give us a call.

Whether we wind up doing a deal or not, you know you’ll get one thing from us at a minimum: the truth.

I'm Tired Of These Armchair Entrepreneurs. Your Opinion Means Bugger-all To Me.

Every where you turn lately, there seems to be someone who’s more than happy to dispense advice on how to be an entrepreneur, or - more to the point - dispense their opinion on who, exactly is or is not a “real” entrepreneur. Somehow, without ever having met you, and without knowing anything about you, your partners, your company, your customers, your market, your products, your competition, your funding, your complements, or any-fucking-thing else relevant, these people “know” how committed you are, how likely you are to succeed, when you should quit your dayjob, and everything else.

On the one hand you have people telling you that if you haven’t quit your dayjob yet, then you aren’t a “real entrepreneur”. Then you have people telling you that “older founders” aren’t as “committed” as younger ones. Next have people with fancy schmancy titles, like “VP of Entrepreneurship” at places like the Kauffman Foundation issuing decrees from on high, like:

“Unless there are real consequences for failure—until you’ve personally guaranteed a line of credit and tried to sell your product to an actual human being,” says Ruhe, “you won’t have the motivation needed to build a business that matters” -- Thom Ruhe, VP of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation

Now, I don't know who Thom Ruhe is, and I don't really care. But what I know is that this armchair quarterback with his fancy title, working for some foundation somewhere, knows bloody fucking bugger-all about my motivation, or lack thereof. You want to talk to me about motivation, dude? Quit your job at the Kauffman Foundation and come work with us. We offer no pay, no benefits (not even free coffee), long hours, sleepless nights, stress beyond belief, non-stop fear of failure, and an equity stake that could make you really wealthy if we succeed. Would you be motivated to take that swap, in order to gain the satisfaction of doing your own thing, the freedom of not having a "boss" and the sense of accomplishment that goes into building something? No? Well, guess what... we are. So unless you want to take me up on my offer, don't fucking talk to me about motivation.

Even from local organizations like CED, nominally dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship in NC, you get them telling you that “you can’t take advantage of our mentoring service yet, because you’re too early stage.” Wait, what? If we weren’t early stage, we probably wouldn’t be looking for bleeding mentors! Isn’t the idea for mentors to help, well, mentor, people with less experience, to help them avoid the obvious mistakes, and to shorten their learning curve? It just never stops...

And of course there are always plenty of people at any startup oriented networking event you attend, who are happy to criticize you, tell you that you need to “pivot”, or point out that you will be competing against $BIGCO and should therefore not bother. Again, without any specific knowledge of your startup, they somehow know all this stuff.

You know what I think? I think if all of these people are so bleeding brilliant, or prescient, they need to start a startup of their own, or head down to the local convenient store and pick up a handful of lottery tickets... or maybe head to the horse track. Because, honestly, I’m tired of hearing your opinions. Advice and constructive criticism are cool, especially when they are rooted in some actual meaningful context or experience, and when you actually know us, our team, our products, etc. Ultimately, the only opinions I care about are mine, my co-founder’s, and the people we’re selling to - along with a very select subset of people who have *demonstrated* to us that they have something constructive to add.

We are here on a mission and we have a company to build. So unless your advice is somehow directly contributing to advancing our cause, I really don't care what you think. Whether it’s the handful of local mentors / advisors we consult, or a few “net celebrities” like Paul Graham or Steve Blank, we listen to these people, because they offer actionable, useful, constructive advice and information. The rest of you can bugger off, and settle back into your armchairs to do some more Monday Morning quarterbacking.

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