When It Rains, …

A colleague had written a piece about disaster recovery and business continuity – motivated not by the horrors that exploded over the television last night after an 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered  a tsunami, but by unexpectedly heavy rain and snow in the northeast. Should he hold off publishing it, he asked, so as not to be seen as exploiting the disaster?

The answer is no. I’ve written about and tried to address disaster recovery many times in my career, and yet it can never be addressed too often. Sure, a leaking roof isn’t a problem in nice weather, but we all know, sort of, that that’s when the leak should be fixed. But that’s also when the trees, vegetables and flowers need to be fed and mulched, when a coat of new paint can be applied to make the house more inviting to visitors, when the old wiring can be updated to handle all the new toys – er, productivity tools.

Ensuring business continuity has never been easier. Broadband connectivity to the cloud is close to being a given, and storage has never been so inexpensive. If your business information management strategy includes the duplication of at least strategic information in a different but easily accessible location and if key employees know where to go and how to proceed if they can’t get to their normal workplaces, a catastrophic event cannot destroy your business.  

What hasn’t changed is that business continuity requires planning, and the first step is purely volitional. Now – when the sun is shining, when there are no floods, or earthquakes, or tsunamis – is the time to address what a disaster would do to your business.

Regards,

Alan Kay – VP Research Management

Forecast: Sunshine, With Clouds

The sun is shining and the birds are singing here in the Bay Area; in other climes, they aren’t. In recent years, I’m pleased to report, I’ve been spared having to deal with weather challenges in getting to the office. That’s in part because snow, sleet and hail aren’t a normal part of our weather here, but also in part because our physical office is a less important part of our operations than has ever been the case, so I can more often do my work from home.

The role of offices and physical proximity has been on my mind as we contemplate the possibility of relocating our home base. But it also comes up increasingly often in our research – into the customer experience as electronic commerce channels multiply, into workforce performance as employees increasingly work other than from a central office, into the growing migration of enterprise software deployment from a buy-and-install model to one based on rental via – forgive me – “the cloud.”

As a business professional, I value the opportunity to walk into the next office to try out an idea or chat face-to-face about a client. And it’s nice to be able to go out to lunch with colleagues and mix business and casual conversation. As a consumer, I value the buying experience when it involves not a commodity but something the particular qualities of which matter to me – the feel of a keyboard, the fit of a shirt, the taste of an apple.

But it’s clear the mix that today works for me – and I expect for an increasing number of you – has more non-physical interactions in it than ever was the case before. Certainly that’s what our research is finding.

And the implications of that for whether to move our office? Well, on those days when I do pick up my brief case and make the trip, I want there to be other colleagues there as well. And I want that trip from home to office to be an easy one, since I have as an alternative not going.

Oh, yes: And the options for lunch need to be pretty damn good.

All of which means the infrastructure of an effectively competing business today needs to be robust, and substantially Web-based, and far more flexible than ever before.

Make sense?

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook and  LinkedIn.

Regards,

Alan Kay – VP Research Management

A friend of ours

A friend of ours, Doug Henschen, showed up in my inbox last week in a new guise. Doug for years edited the TechWeb (and before that CMP) publication Intelligent Enterprise, and in my opinion did a great job of distilling all that was important in BI and the enterprise use of information for competitive advantage.

But he isn’t editing IE anymore. Now he’s producing the InformationWeek Enterprise Software Newsletter, which means that the world of business technology publishing has experienced yet another contraction.

Now, it may be my bias showing; we here think that companies faced with the challenge of improving their competitiveness and performance really ought to check in with us. But I understand the value of having access to information about and opinions on business technology easily and at no cost – I should, having been a business and technology magazine editor for years myself.

But the business model for business magazine publishing, like the business model for “publications” in general (the quote marks are because the act of publishing has evolved to have a new meaning when the medium is HTML-based), is broken. There always was a disjunction between the editorial side of the house with its principled approach and the sales-oriented business side that earned the money to pay the bills and reward the owners. Journalism is expensive, and advertising dollars have fled elsewhere. So newspapers are dying, or consolidating, or leaving newsprint behind. And companies seeking to reach the eyeballs of potential customers are hunting about wildly, much as Tom Kuhn said would occur when a crisis undercut the conceptual framework of a paradigm.

And so technology publishing is contracting. Or fragmenting. Delivering news no longer works as a mission, so the weeklies are, as actual weeklies, gone. The technology publishing powerhouses – Ziff-Davis, IDG, CMP – are no more. What remain are niche “titles” – function-focused, vertically focused, mission-defined.

As a result, the burden is being shifted to the reader. And this makes it relevant to repeat a caution being heard often these days: Do not be content to read just material that reinforces what you already know. Seek out a breadth of information and a diversity of opinions, and always ask for the evidence, the data that supports assertions.

Put slightly differently, my recommendation is that you choose information channels shaped – edited, I once would have said, but packaged is today the more accurate term – by journalists, by professionals who understand how to pursue, assemble and vet information. Which is to say, seek out folks like Doug Henschen.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook and  LinkedIn.

Regards,

Alan Kay – VP Research Management