Determination - the 99-1 rule

I spent New Year's Eve "underground" - in my crawl space. I resurfaced 2 hours ago, wet, muddy, stinky, tired, but happy. I spent a good part of the day building a water trap to keep out the sewer stench that has been haunting our house (and entire town) for years now. With the severe snow and frost of the past weeks in NL, all plumbers were busy fixing leaking roofs and broken pipes so I was left on my own

A crawl space is the most neglected part of the house. Mine is two feet high, and a few inches lower where the concrete beams support the floor. Filled with pipes, plumbing, wires and cables, with stones, bricks and splintered concrete half hidden in the muddy soil, it isn't a place to throw a party - certainly not if you're suffering from arachnophobia

Without the need to think, people stop doing so

Today I tweeted about yet another Pat Robertson remark that redefined the meaning of stupidity:

Snow Is God’s Way of Punishing Americans Who Were Planning to Drive to Do Something Gay

Gay not meaning jolly there of course, but homosexual.
It is comments like these that defy my -and others'- utter sense of imagination. I have lived a year in the US as an exchange student, even "did my time" graduating from High School, so have had my fair share of errrr, let's say, North-American culture and customs, but that doesn't keep me from being absolutely astonished every now and then - like now

The False Promise of "Adopt now, and all will adapt"

It's the most widespread lie across IT. Translated from seller to buyer, it says: just buy our stuff, it's great, pretty soon everyone will have it and then you'll have the advantage over all the others

It's how hypes made it in, trends, useful stuff too, but also ERP and CRM trying to take the entire pie in stead of just pieces, resulting in a considerable amount of which they couldn't eat themselves. Monolithic applications like SAP, Oracle and all the other attempts to one-size-fits-all: if applied to dynamic business processes they'll only slow you down - if not now, it'll only be a matter of time

Old meets new world: enterprise UX

A few days ago, I got a message from Derek Singleton of Software Advice telling me about a survey they're conducting: Ten Consumer Web UI Themes We’d Like to See in Business Applications is what it is called
Software Advice apparently is a company offering free advice for software buyers, and although I don't have any experience with them I think they'll give the Gartners, Forresters and McKinsey's of this world a well-needed kick-in-the-chin

Not particularly agreeing with that title, I'd rather call it "Which Consumer functionality would you use at Work"? as it's not about Web UI, but about User eXperience.
The survey gives a nice and elaborate description of 10 user interface methods, some of which I didn't know, and I wonder who knows them all. It is a one-choice-two-click survey, so you'll be done quickly with that part

The real cause of Global Warming: the Vatican

After a short Twitter conversation with the -usually- formidable, cheeky and clever Ben Kunz, I started to read some of the links he sent me, looking for references, sources, and anything else that could tell me more about the origin of data

I am not a gullible person. I have been an IT consultant since last century and recognise content-free suggestimative BS when I see it. I trust all people as well as their motives, but know that no one of the face of this earth can ever be fully objective

Integration: your place or mine? Adopt vs adapt

Adopt versus adapt is the central theme in Integration. For the last 15 years, it's been the central question in my working life: who will adopt, and who will have to adapt? It is the most important question, as doing business is not only about mutual understanding and partnerships, but also about flattering "kings, princes and other royalties" and paying respect to the powers in place - politics, indeed.

Trouble always is, whoever is leading in business, expects to be leading in IT too - which leads to painfully ugly IT solutions every now and then

Microsoft and Cloud - they just don't get it, do they?

On Twitter, Jon Reed pointed me to a Microsoft commercial for Cloud. I checked it out, but low and behold: the above picture is what I got

I'd like to draw attention to the fine print there:

To view this video, download the free Microsoft Silverlight plug-in (install Microsoft Silverlight)

Presentation and content hardly ever go along

[Image by Digital Surgeons, full-size image here]

After the publication of Digital Surgeons' Facebook versus Twitter infographic this week, it got quickly republished everywhere, and ReTweeted. Currently, the words "facebook twitter infographic" still get 4.2 tweets per minute

Pretty huge hey? GigaOm, TheNextWeb and ZDNet are a few of those who republished the nice and shiny graphic- apparently called infographic these days

2010-2020: The Great Divide

A Great Divide is what I see for the coming decade. Not a hydrological divide of the Americas, but an IT-divide of the business.
Pretty much a follow-up from my one year-old Cloud and Social: the tectonic plates of IT 2.0, this post will show the great challenge Business and IT need to face together to make it through the coming decade: overcoming the explosion of forces that will rip up the foundations of every business: IT as we know it

Twitter, just show us the algorithm - please?

After all the various stories about the hashtag #wikileaks not appearing as a Twitter trending topic, and whether that was plain Twitter censorship, some magical (and not quantified nor explained) algorithm or the hand of God, I decided to take some measurements myself

Basis for that is Twuniverse, a collection of services that operate directly on top of the Twitter API [disclosure: Twuniverse is one of my subsidiaries]

Enterprise 1.0 - The Dysfunctional Family?

I compared the enterprise to a dysfunctional family a little while ago. As it turns out, there are many, many similarities. Let's see how far I get on this post without writing a book in stead of a post?

(S)R in (S)CRM is for Record

After a conversation on CRM versus SCRM with Sameer Patel, Jon Husband And Rawn Shah, Rawn posted a fine piece on "Building Social Collaboration Into CRM With Customers And Within The Organization"

Too occupied with other matters at the time (and since), I promised him to read it later and comment - and this is my comment as it, again, is one of those fine blog posts resulting from a naturally flowing, seemingly casual conversation on Twitter that provokes so many thoughts and words that a comment would take more than just a few words

Social shifts the focus from Presales to Aftersales

Another one of those great Twitter moments: a thought came to mind during a conversation

@KRCraft Let me put it this way: Marketing 1.0 is dead, just like CustServ 1.0 - better invest in Custserv 2.0 than Marketing 2.0! #custserv

I'm equally unsure whether Marketing 1.0 ever was alive, as to whether it's been officially declared dead now - regardless of the fact whether that can be attributed to any kind of Social Thingy (...)
Loosely defining Marketing 1.0 here as targeting select groups of customers in order to shattergun them with ads via all kinds of channels such as (direct) mail, (public) commercials and advertisements