Knowledge IS Power, Vote Yes on I 1240

Here in Washington State we have the unique opportunity to vote for charter schools (I-1240) on November 6th.  Those of us that think education reform is needed, see this as a once in a decade opportunity to improve the education options available to the students that need it the most -- the ones on the less advantaged side of the education divide.

Here are the main data points:

1. Charter schools are public schools open to everyone -- if more people apply than can be accommodated, students are picked by lottery.  In the 41 states that already have charter schools there are 600,000 students on waiting lists and 2 million students enrolled.
2. Charter schools are funded just like public schools (by the student enrolled) -- so this initiative will not increase the cost of education in Washington State.
3. Charter schools have the same academic requirements as public schools -- but have the ability to have longer school days, different curriculum, and make other decisions associated with the operations of their schools.  The teachers also must be certified -- just like in public schools.
4. Charter schools in other states deliver very good results -- opponents often state that charter schools fail too.  Any time there are thousands of organizations -- some will perform poorly.  But since charter schools have to attract students (customers) and cannot compel them to attend (like regular public schools) --so failing charter schools do close down -- and that is a good thing.  Also, it is important to note that most charter schools serve low income students.  If even if charter schools only deliver results equal to all public schools, but are serving the disadvantaged students, it is a dramatic improvement.  If you divide all students by economic background into four groups, the lowest group graduates 6% from high school, and the top group graduates 89%. (see correction below)
5. Charter schools are not run for profit or by religeous organizations -- only qualified not for profit, non religeous organizations can run charter schools.  In some cases, existing public schools can become charter schools

So, please join me in voting for Initiative 1240 on November 6.

If you want to read more, here is a great site:  YesOn1240

Also, here is a site that covers the charter school movement nationally: Charter School Resource Center

And here is the site of KIPP schools, an amazing example of what we could have.

Here is my review of Work Hard, Be Nice, the book about the founding of KIPP.  If you are tired of being depressed about the quality of education in Washington State -- you should really read this book.

LATER:  Correction.  I did a bit more research on these numbers.  Turns out they are about Bachelor's Degree attainment by age 24.  Either way, the education divide is getting worse -- much worse.  Here is a link to the study.

Have a Good Time

In 1975 Paul Simon released the song "Have A Good Time" on the Still Crazy After All These Years album.  For the last six months or so I find myself singing this tune in my head surprisingly often -- definitely more than any other song.  Not sure what that means, but upon closer examination I particularly like the theme presented in the song that my happiness is my own responsibly, and not to believe everything you read in the paper ("they are just out to capture my dime").

I don't always think about that last verse, but is is quite good too.  I wonder what Paul Simon thinks about those words now, as we are all having a good time and thinking that we are entitled to our standard of living here in the USA.  

Have A Good Time

Yesterday, it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line
I should be depressed
My life’s a mess
But I’m having a good time

I’ve been loving and loving
And loving
I’m exhausted from loving so well
I should go to bed
But a voice in my head
Says “Ah, What the hell”

Have a good time
Have a good time
Have a good time
Have a good time

Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland
But I think it’s all overdone
Exaggerating this, exaggerating that
They don’t have no fun

I don’t believe what I read in the papers
They’re just out to capture my dime
I ain’t worrying
And I ain’t scurrying
I’m having a good time

Have a good time
Have a good time
Have a good time
Have a good time

Maybe I’m laughing my way to disaster
Maybe my race has been run
Maybe I’m blind
To the fate of mankind
But what can be done?

So God bless the goods we was given
And God bless the U. S. of A.
And God bless the standard of livin’
Let’s keep it that way
And we’ll all have a good time

Have a good time
Have a good time
Have a good time
Have a good time

© 1975 Words and Music by Paul Simon

Here is a link to Paul Simon's web site.

Get Results by Adjusting and Learning and Never Giving Up

This is the first in a series of posts resulting from work we have been doing at CSG to better understand why our clients value our services.  Sure it sounds like self promotion -- it is!  Either way, we have found this bit of introspection quite interesting and we hope you do too.

---

Reason #1:  We Get Results

We work side by side with our clients to design marketing campaigns that work and then put our money on the line when we carry them out.  Sure, everyone says that – but we are different in three distinct ways:

We Adjust, Adjust, and Adjust Some More

Sales and marketing are inexact sciences and particularly in the technology industry exist in an ever changing environment.   Only rarely do things go according to the plan.  We measure everything and adjust – sometimes every day.  We have 15 years of campaigns to benchmark against – so we know before anyone else if things are in need of adjustments. 

Even the campaign that worked beautifully last quarter may not work this quarter.  We go in with our eyes open and stay flexible.

The next time you hear: “We executed perfectly, but the plan was never going to work.”  I suggest you look at what adjustments were made.

We Listen and Learn

Customers and partners often give the feedback we need to deliver results.  It is critical to listen to them and learn faster than anyone else. 

We Never Give Up

Marketing budgets are not bottomless and we are always thinking of the burn rate as it compares to measurable results.  In this environment it is easier to think of the campaigns to cut than the new campaigns to try.  No one ever increased sales by reducing sales and marketing investment however.  We keep trying and of course – never give up!

So if you are looking for an experienced partner to help you achieve increased revenues through your channel partner programs – switch to CSG.

Amazon Could Crush Apple in Maps, and Maybe Google Too

The biz is all cranked up over the Apple vs Google Maps thing that came from the latest release of Apple's mobile operating system, IOS 6.  See this article in the NY Times.

In the background however, Amazon has been building its own maps capability.  In July of this year Amazon bought mapping company UpNext and I think Amazon could come from behind to leapfrog Apple and maybe even catch up to Google.

Impossible?  After all, the reason that Apple has rushed its mapping solution to market before it is ready is because Apple needs user data to improve the service.  

Amazon just happens to have a close relationship, a codependent relationship some would say, with delivery companyies like UPS and FedEx.  UPS has 250,000 drivers!  It would not surprise me if there are 500,000 drivers worldwide driving all day, every day, delivering stuff -- much of which is from Amazon.  This year Google announced it has driven 5 million miles collecting mapping data.    If Amazon got its 500,000 drivers to collect map data -- that would be only 10 miles for each driver.  It would take more time to install the collection equipment than it would to surpass all of Google's collections efforts so far.  Call it a week to install the stuff and by the end of the first day, Amazon would have 10x the data that Google has collected.  

Not only that, but professional drivers in every market in the whole world could return much higher quality data than users could.

Could be cool.

Apple is Just Another Tech Company

This year for my birthday I bought myself a MacBook Air (11 in).  It is a cool machine, but the best thing I got out of it was an increased appreciation for the quality of Microsoft's Windows operating system.  Two months later and I find myself reaching for my old Win 7 machine most of the time.  

I suppose I like the Mac best when I am not using it.  It is beautiful, light, and technically, its best feature is the speed at which it stops and starts.  When I am done, I just close it.  When I want to use it -- I just open it.  My Windows machines have never been able to do that.  If I close my Windows machine without completely shutting down, it fights with itself while in my briefcase until it runs out of battery.  Then when I go to open it -- no juice left.  Not only that, but then I boot to the black screen that asks if I want to repair my machine.  Anyone who has ever gotten sucked into that option knows it is like heading out on a trip from Seattle to New York and deciding to stop by Moscow on the way.  Definately not the fastest route to productivily using the machine.

One of the new features on the Mac that I was looking forward to was the thunderbolt to HDMI connection for an external monitor.  It works, but in typical Apple style, they have decided a few too many things for me.  For instance, if I expand an app to full screen on the external monitor, it banks out the laptop monitor.  What on earth are they thinking?  In fact, I have yet to find an app that expands to full screen in the way that I would want.  Pages just blacks out the left and right of the screen and the doc is small in the middle.  Crazy!

The final blow is the speed of Chrome.  Google's Chrome browser screams on my windows machine but crawls on the Mac.  It is so slow that I have to think that Apple is somehow throwing sand in its gears -- just to get back at the competition.  I do find myself using Safari more often as a result, but it is the biggest reason I don't reach for the machine at all.

Most people are not crazy enough to use two or three machines at a time - so I suspect that my side by side comparison is not typical.  Even novices will notice how slow Chrome runs though.

So I have concluded that Apple, like all of the other tech companies, is using its moment in the sun to cast the biggest possible shadow on its competitors.  Could it be that they realize that they do not have the vison that Steve brought to the company and they have decided to hang on as tight as possible to the lead they have?  Boy would that be sad.

After all of this, Time Magazine will probably name Apple the "person" of the year -- which will further seal its fate.

My Biggest Summer Vacation Cost Was Bandwidth

We have an old tug boat and every year we take it to Canada for vacation.  We go to a somewhat remote area where there are not many opportunities to spend money.  So we bring fuel, food, and most of the other items we need with us.

Despite this, we do find ways to spend money at a small local grocery store.  We buy fresh produce, fishing licenses, bait, and hamburgers at the hamburger stand.  In the three weeks of our trip this year, we spent up to a few hundred dollars on each of these categories.

None of them compare to our spending on bandwidth however.  While in Canada we roam onto the Rogers network and our international data plan from Verizon delivers data bandwidth at a price of $25 for each 100 MB.  A movie download from iTunes is usually about 1.7 GB -- so at Verizon's price it would cost $425 -- so movies are not on the approved list!  Audiobooks are about 300 MB or $75 -- so no audiobooks either.  A song on iTunes is 10 MB -- so if you buy a song you pay iTunes $.99 and Rogers/Verizon $2.50.

I am sure many of you think this is a one off thing, but I bet many people found themselves in my position this summer.  The MiFi is awesome, but it you take it to a foreign country - watch out!  Now that we just expect to have data access all of the time we have forgotten that bandwidth costs money.  All it takes is one of these experiences and you start to think about how much bandwidth metering by the mobile carriers could dampen eCommerce.  

In the end we paid $1,150 for bandwidth over 3 weeks, or about $55 per day.  Some of this came from one computer that had automatic updates turned on and downloaded 500 MB of windows updates before I turned it off.  Yow!  Windows update cost me $125!  

Make It Foundational

This is the final post in a series that started with Big Pain Equals Big Gain that outlined how HP (and surely other companies) is in the position to capitalize on the changes it is going through, and that the technology industry is facing.  Since then we have outlined how to Make it Unbelievably Easy, setting a New Transparency Standard, and putting HP at the Center of the Ecosystem, will contribute to a new competitive advantage for HP.  In this post we address how all of this effort can Be Foundational.  Change is hard work and we want this change to stick.  Here are four cornerstone elements of a plan to do just that:

Remember

In this the age of big data, we have the ability to capture and keep every interaction and every transaction with every partner.  This information can be used in the aggregate to inform decisions about policy -- but that is just the start.  Pattern matching and other analysis techniques can help identify the power partners of the future.  From the partner’s perspective, a large company that speaks in one voice is not only a pleasant surprise, but the obvious choice for the next transaction.  So the cornerstone of the foundation is to capture and retain all information about a partner.

Share

Jeff Bezos challenged everyone in Amazon.com to expose their internal services as APIs to the rest of the company, and be prepared to do so to the outside world too.  This mandate changed the culture at Amazon.com and the same can be said for any other company.  Building on the first cornerstone of capturing and retaining all information, a functional API will ensure that the data gets used.  Data that gets used - lives.  So the second cornerstone is to share with defined APIs.

Relate

The value of information is dramatically enhanced when related to other information.  Viewing sales volume in the context of a promotion deadline is much more valuable than the sum of the sales transactions.  The relationship between captured data is almost as valuable as the underlying data.

Federate

No one can own all of the data.  The desire to build a system that displaces other systems is incredible and has driven the launch of many all encompassing systems.  The fourth cornerstone goes the other direction and federates data management -- therefore contributing to the health and success of many systems. 

The beauty of this approach is that it can just be started one day.  It does not require an outsized investment before any of the benefits can be realized.  By adopting these cornerstones, a partner program can be completely re-imagined -- while underway -- and the benefits expand each day moving forward.

Speaker Summary: John Henry Brown

Defense attorney John Henry Brown spoke at Emerald City Rotary today.  He did a great job of compressing an incredible career into 25 minutes.  Ranging from his decision (while in jail) to become an attorney, to defending Ted Bundy at the age of 29, to his current project representing Sgt. Bales, he certainly has a great many stories to tell.

It is no wonder that he finds himself in the media as often as he does because he talks in easy to remember quotes that have a lasting resonance.  Anyone interesting in cultivating a public image should take note of that tactic. Accordingly, I think the best way to relate the content of his presentation is in those quotes:

• What I do is service work. (Rotary International reference)
• The only reason to be a lawyer is to help people.
• People come together when they need to come together. (9/11 reference)
• Ted Bundy had no concept that we are all connected. (Like all sociopaths)
• My father says we need people that stand between people and power.
• I think everyone should get locked up for no reason. (As a lesson in the value of our constitution)
• A liberal is a police officer that has been charged with a crime.
• I was infused by my father with the concept that you should always give more than you take.

Speaking of quotes, John Henry Brown then relayed his favorite quote that he attributed to Thomas Jefferson:  “Once you give up some freedom for more security...soon you will have neither.”  I tried to fact check that one and the closest I could get was this quote:

"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security." which I believe is attributed to Benjamin Franklin.  Good point either way.

Here is more on John Henry Brown in a recent article by Seattle Met magazine.

Don't Get Jacked Around

I just got a call from "Steve Wilson" from OS Advisor wanting remote access to my computer.  These scams are common, in case you are wondering how to tell, here is the page with tips from Microsoft.  Luckily it is one of the top results when you search for "OS Advisor Scam".

The crazy thing about this is how brazen the attempt was: Steve said his company was authorized my Microsoft and that the "Mother Server" for Windows had received a message from my computer.  Recently, On the Media did a piece on the Nigerian Prince scams -- and why they are still around.  

The design of the scam is to only draw in the most gullible people.  If you are willing to believe that there is a "Mother Server" or a Nigerian Prince -- you will probably be willing to do the other stuff they want -- like send ten thousand dollars or turn over access to your computer and your credit cards.

What a crazy world we live in.  Sure makes getting the real marketing message through the noise a lot harder.

Center of the Ecosystem

Vertically integrated technology companies like Apple and Oracle have established themselves in the center of the the consumer and enterprise ecosystems by building proprietary systems with just about every feature contributing to customer lock in.  The strategy has clearly worked for them, so far.  Getting new customers is going to get more and more difficult for them as the world moves away from lock in and the competition does something other than push customers away by throwing up ill conceived and poorly executed competing products or services.  

In this context a diverse and horizontally oriented technology firm will have a once in a decade opportunity to establish itself in the center of the new world -- not unlike the way IBM did in the ‘90s.  In fact, we can learn a lot from Lou Gerstner's playbook from nearly 20 years ago.  Here are the three partner relationship management things a company could do to establish itself at the center of the technology world of the next decade:

Embrace Open

The difference between open-ness and open source are more nuanced than can be described in this post.  One similaritiy however serves our purposes.  In an open system everyone is welcome.  Everyone.  Some companies can do this and others just cannot get their brains around it.   Companies that are insecure about the value they deliver -- build walls and moats. Companies that are good at what they do are the ones that can let everyone in.  

Love Engineering Great Products

A company with an engineering pedigree and that is full of talented people that love building great products has what it takes to be open.  Such a product focus injects confidence into the decision making about being open.  

Deliver Value Every Day

The irony of the lock-in strategy is that its is a cancer that eats the host from the inside out.  IBM has shown us that the discipline of being open inspires everyone in the company to deliver value every day. 

A company that works to immobilize its customers with contracts and proprietary and non transportable systems sends a message to customers -- but more damaging is the message it sends to the people inside the company.  Soon the company is hiring more lawyers than engineers.  And that cannot end well.

Make it Transparent

This is the third in a series of posts about how big new thinking could transform the way computer hardware, software and services are sold.  Here is the first post that serves as an overview, and here is the second post that dives into the details.

In this post I will outline what the transparency idea, and offer some specific suggestions of action to take.  But first, why transparency is important.  

Partners that are involved in a conversation are engaged and productive.  Transparently exposing some of the machinery inside your partner organization will create that conversation.  Here are three specific things that create transparency:

Share Reporting

Often times the reports exist, but for one reason or another are not shared with partners.  Even my residential power company now shows me how my power consumption compares to my consumption last year and the aggregated consumption data of my peers.  Expectations about better reporting are going up fast due to these consumer experiences -- and a good partner program must keep pace with progress.

Allow Multiple Access Points

Social media has trained everyone to engage in a web of communications.  The tools exist today to employ social media tactics that allow for a criss cross and free flowing exchange with partners -- that still have consistent messages and institutional memory.

Admit Mistakes

Everybody makes them.  Everybody knows it.  Labeling a bug as a feature just drains away credibility too fast.  A simple post that says what the intention was, what was learned, and what is next will go a long way towards long term successful partnerships.

Those against transparency claim it looks unprofessional, or say it is a good thing to start next year after we get our act together.  Transparency starts as a way of thinking and then becomes operational as team members and partners experience the benefits.  Unless it starts today, it will always be something to do another day.

Lance Wants The Money

Lance knows he did it and so does everyone else.  Nike knows it and they are sticking with Lance, and Oakley and Budweiser too.  Good thing I switched to Coors this summer.

Now I have been known to go over the speed limit.  When my kids say: “Daaad!” I say that it is best not to get caught speeding, but I do it anyway.  When I do get caught however, I pay the ticket.  I don’t put my fingers in my ears and say “LALALALALA”, skip my court date and then say I wasn’t speeding.  It is true that everyone else was doing it too and I was just stupid enough to get caught.  But speeding I was.

Lance Armstrong won 7 Tour de France titles because he was better at doping than everyone else that was doping -- of which there were many people I’m sure.  He is not a great athlete, he is a great doper.  

I would guess that Lance is trying to hang on to prize money and endorsement money that he won by breaking the rules and weaseling out of it better than the other guys.  I hope that in the end the lawyers drain him dry.  Maybe then the sponsors will bail too.   If Lance was really going to LiveStrong - he would give back the titles and the money and do what he can to inspire the next generation to seek victory on the training track instead of in the lab.

Any advertiser that chooses to stand by Lance now should have its head examined.

The NY Times Lays Out the Facts.

Ad Age reporting the Nike, Oakley, and Anheuser-Busch stick with Lance.

The Wall Street Journal wants Lance to get out of the grey.

Best Quote:  

He could have chosen to go to arbitration, which would have meant that witnesses could testify against him in a hearing possibly open to the public. Instead, he chose to bow out of the process.

in the NY Times.

Make it Unbelievably Easy

Many industries are going through revolutions where new entrants are completely changing the market.  What Amazon.com is doing to bookstores and Google is doing to newspapers is just the beginning.  The companies turning markets upside down are do so by not knowing how it has always been or how it is supposed to be.  In our business almost every maker of computer hardware of software makes it stunningly complicated to be a channel partner.  Partners are made to jump through hoops of every conceivable size and shape, achieve certifications, prove sales history, get customer testimonials, maintain a staff of salespeople or engineers, and on and on.  And as soon as a partner has run the gauntlet with one manufacturer, the trials start all over with another one.  Each of these relationships are at least as complicated as that with a bank.  And to be a successful technology service provider and selling partner to the manufacturers of the technology, more than a dozen and sometimes several dozen of these channel partner relationships must be maintained.  There may not be any other industry that makes it this hard to get the parts and pieces it needs to be successful.  Can you imagine if a restaurant had to maintain 20 or 30 complex and fragile business relationships -- just to get the ingredients needed for its recipes?  

All of this market friction points to a big opportunity for a new entrant to really make a big leap forward -- just by making things unbelievably easy.  Here are some ideas that just might achieve that end:

Be One Company

All big companies have quarreling departments and the makers of computer hardware and software are no exception.  Apple Computer presents a single face to its customers and that one thing should not be underestimated.  Lesson number one therefore is to Be One Company.  After all, a new entrant will certainly be one company.

Take Advantage

A great deal of the component parts needed for partner relationship management already exist in the marketplace.  From LinkedIn profile information to already achieved partnerships with other industry participants, partners are forever re-doing work that they have already done.  Most large technology manufacturers force their partners to use their proprietary system when all of the information is already being maintained elsewhere.  To be the unbelievably easy partner program to work with, take full advantage of the other systems available.  It would be a great partner experience to link to profile information and automatically graed access to those that had certifications from the competition.

Ask What You Can Do for Your Partner

Mapping programs offer up more than one route to a desired destination.  Engaging with partners can be achieved by designing a program and getting partners to conform, or alternatively, by asking partners and building to their specification.  Either way the outcome is increased sales, in fact the latter probably delivers better results.  So don’t ask what the partner has done for you, but what you can do for your partner.

The conditions in the technology industry channel partner ecosystem are such that change will come.  The question is, who is going to make it happen?

Big Pain Equals Big Gain

Everyone in our solar system knows about the pain going on at HP.  I would not be surprised if even a few extra terrestrials know about HP’s roller coaster ride of CEOs, acquisitions, write downs, re-orgs, lay offs, and other painful stuff.

The tendency of course is to write off a company with this much trouble.  Why work for, work with, sell to, sell with, or even write blog posts about a company that seems to put its business plan in the blender before deciding what to do each morning?  

Well, because with this much pain there is enormous opportunity for gain.  In the fifteen years we have been helping big technology companies market through their partners we have been involved in many conversations with HP.  Most of those conversations have included a significant thread about how HP does things and about how there was no chance the way HP did things was ever going to change.  

Well, things are changing now!

On every measure except market capitalization, where even Facebook has a bigger valuation, HPQ is pretty big.  Seventy three years of history, over one hundred billion dollars in revenue, and 350,000 employees.  Add to this HP’s tens of thousands of business partners that sell their hardware, software, and services all over the world and I would not be surprised if the HP ecosystem was more than a million people strong.

No matter what experts say about the rapid pace of change inside technology companies, every company in every industry avoids change and HP and the technology industry are not immune.  Right now, the move to the cloud and BYOD is moving the pieces around the technology industry chess board and presenting a once in a decade opportunity to companies willing to change big.

So all of the planets are lined up and HP is Jupiter.  

If I were HP, this is what I would want to do with my influence:

• Make it UNBELIEVABLY EASY to work with HP
• Set a new TRANSPARENCY standard
• Establish HP in the CENTER of the ecosystem
• Make each change FOUNDATIONAL

Clearly these measures build on each other.  Each will have an impact on its own.  With a little luck the compound impact could change the whole industry.

Speaker Summary: Camile McDormand

Today at Emerald City Rotary we had a terrific speaker from the Soros Foundation, Camile McDormand.  

The Soros Foundation is the work of George Soros, the legendary immigrant from Hungary that became a titan on Wall Street.  Famous and now rich for his work in currency trading, Soros was blamed in many south east asian nations as the cause of the 1997 currency crash, also known as the 'Asian Contagion'.  

It is particularly ironic therefore that the Soros Foundation has such a soft spot for Burma/Myanmar where Ms. McDormand has been spending the past few years working with refugees on the Burma - Thai border.  These refugees number in the hundreds of thousands, many of which have been living in the confines of camps for decades.  Truly a problem that I am grateful someone with the resources and resolve of the Soros Foundation is worried about.

Camile McDormand gave us a great overview of the history of the problem, with particular attention to the time starting with the attempted revolution in 1988 and the military government's brutal suppression.  Since 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi has been one of world's the most well known political prisoners, under house arrest until earlier this year when she was elected into the lower house of parlament.  We were delighted to learn from Ms. McDormand that more progress has been made in this embattled country in the last year than in the prior 50.

The Soros Foundation has been working hard to bring aid to the refugees, but also to assist in the education of a new generation of leaders for the country.  Recognizing that the local education system was not teaching critical thinking skills, the Soros Foundation is working to provide educational opportunities for Burmese citizens -- outside of the country. 

According to Forbes, Since 1979 the Soros Foundation has contributed 8.5 billion dollars to causes such as this. 

The Value of Self Organizing Strategies

Getting everyone to work together in a large organization is nearly impossible.  I propose it is actually impossible when approached by brute force.  Making employees work together is about as fun as making a two year old eat his Gerber plumbs.  

Self organizing entities do somehow work together with seemingly little effort.  Think of the large flocks of birds or large schools of fish as the fly or swim together.  There is no time for top down orchestration -- it just works.  There is an invisible feedback loop that reinforces certain behavior that causes the actors to act together, all without a single email or meeting.

Here are a few basic principals to try when thinking about using self organization to your advantage: 

1. Keep it Simple - and reinforce:  Yes, one of the oldest maxims when it comes to marketing and advertising.  A simple clearly communicated message is essential.  All messages must reinforce a theme.
2. Listen hard for feedback:  Feedback is everywhere and to be effective leading a fragmented organization listening is tied for first as the most important part of the formula.  This means not over-reacting to outliers too.
3. Many small adjustments:  The theme here is constancy; constant communication, contstant feedback, and constant adjustments.  These are not gigantic launches with canyons of silence between them.  
4. Let the "stick" take care of itself:  So many programs are tied down by rules and their enforcement.  Not only do these establish barriers between top performers and their goals, but they take valuable resources away from communicating, listening, and adjusting.  Left alone, the outliers will take care of themselves.

When coordinating marketing activities across large organizations, particularly those like our clients that also involve tens of thousands of partners that are in fact outside of the company, some of this self organizing stuff is helpful to think about. 

Big Data in Big Companies

We work with big technology companies.  If there is anyone that is really doing Big Data, I would think it would be big technology companies.  After all, they believe in technology, have plenty of computing horsepower, and have people that have the necessary skills to do it.  

The reality is quite the opposite however.  Most of the time we are working to overcome very simple problems like duplicates or obviously incorrect entries.  The real data industry came up with ways to deal with these problems decades ago.  Nevertheless, our clients have such low confidence in their data that they often retain us to start over.

Here are a few of the things we see preventing big companies from truly using Big Data:

1. Legal Departments:  The legal department does not play to win, they play to not lose.  They would much rather prevent the collection of data than otherwise.  After all, a company that has not collected any data does not have to worry about losing data in a breach and then getting sued. 
2. Poor Planning:  Good data handling takes time and effort.  Data initiatives invariably take longer than a quarter to implement, and longer than that to produce returns.  Almost all companies are looking to hit the number this quarter.  
3. Internal Competition:  Competition between departments can cause them to hoard data (at best) or go underground with their data (at worst), creating silos of data that is riddled with duplicates and innacuracies.
4. Turnover:  The people in charge of these data initiatives have their eyes on bigger and more important (more visible) jobs -- so they change often.  The person taking over the job is just as uninterested in long term data health, so the problems go unaddressed.

As with many promising technologies, Big Data's biggest challenge is not in the technology but in the way people work together inside companies.  There are enormous gains to be made by the companies that realize what can be done with these new tools and organize themselves in such a way to take advantage of it.

My Version of Big Data

There is an article in the NY Times today about big data by Steve Lohr.  It has all of the parts of a newspaper article including a headline, quotes from experts, references to other articles... butI have read it twice and I can't find any actual description of what big data is.  And the headline says it is "How Big Data Became So Big".

Yes, everyone is into Big Data these days and it is getting bigger every day -- but what is it?

Wikipedia says:  "a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage,[4] search, sharing, analysis,[5] and visualization."

No so very helpful.  Aren't definitions not supposed to reference themselves? Yes indeed, big data is, well big data.

Network World quotes AWS:  "Any amount of data that's too big to be handled by one computer."

...Brother!

Here is my definition: Big Data is the complete set of all information associated with a topic or subject.

Here is why I think this is interesting:  the data world is a completely different place when you have all of the information.  When I say ALL I mean every single thing you have ever purchased at a grocery store, every single trade on the stock market, every single temperature reading at a weather station... you know:  ALL.

Until very recently, it has not been possible to put all of the data into one database and analyze it, so we have always sampled data.  Sampled is like polling.  A small amount of data is captured and then broad generalizations are made.  In some cases the broad generalizations turn out to be somewhat accurate.  People who buy butter also buy bread.  

People buying butter is completely different than when you are going to next buy butter.  And that is why big data is a big deal.

We know that 100,000 cars per day drive over the HWY 520 bridge, but that does not say when you are going to drive over it next.

The thing that I find so amazing about the article in today's paper is that the reference to artificial intelligence really waters down the whole movement.  It sounds like these awesome computer scientists have figure out how to take data sets that used to be too big to analyze and have figured out how to generalize things about them.  Why would you ever want to do that?  The benefit in building a space ship is in the going to space, not in building a better space ride at the park!  We already generalize -- by polling.

Here are a few cool things I think could happen with big data:

1. My personal dataset:  An ever growing database of everything I do, that I can analyze however I want.  All of my friends, activities, purchases, pictures, work output, healthcare, even my emotions... all in a format that I can use to figure things out.  I could figure out what activities lead me to do healthy things.  Sounds goofy I know, but my happiness could be mapped against the things I did or the stuff I bought.  Who knows what I could learn.
2. My next hire:  What if LinkedIn could give me a list of the top 10 people I should hire.  Not people that matched job descriptions I posted, but analyze all of my employees, my competition, and all of the millions of people in LinkedIn -- and help me target the people that will change my business the most.
3. My next vacation:  Take all of my travel history, every book I have read, my business travel schedule, my kids interests (their books and experiences), and put that all together and give me a top ten list of places to go and maybe even which of my friends to invite.

Here are a few not so cool things that could happen with big data:

1. My insurance gets cancelled right before I get diagnosed with something terrible.
2. I get audited every year by a fully automated IRS.
3. Telemarketers figure out what to say to keep me on the phone longer.

All up, I am a believer in big data -- no matter how everyone else defines it --  and I think it is going to be a great next ten years.  

Some Things Never Change (NBC for example)

The 1976 Olympics was my first.  in ’72 we lived overseas and did not have a TV, and ’68 -- I just don’t remember.  But ’76, that was awesome.  I watched everything I could and found it absolutely mesmerizing.

This year, I have watched a few hours.  Mostly with the sound off and while reading something else.  If a cool looking event, swimming has the highest cool factor for me, happened to be on when I looked up, I would turn on the sound and watch.  I don’t think I watched a single commercial.  I am not sure if this makes me one of the 20 to 35 million nightly viewers on NBC or not.  

I was busy during the NBC’s airing of the opening ceremony, so I missed it.  I spend half an hour or so looking for video of the opening ceremony and could not find it.  I suspect that just like the movie people, NBC wanted to make sure it was not available for some reason.  I did hear about Tunnel Bear, a web site that would enable me to watch the coverage by the BBC, or any other country.  It went on my list of things to check out, but now the Olympics is almost over and I have not done it and probably wont.

Recently a friend said that she just did not find it all that compelling to watch NBC’s coverage either.  She was also not interested enough in the games to find other ways to watch it.  She just opted out of the olympics this year.

Two individual opinions does not a survey make, but I suspect that there are some other people that have also drifted away from the Olympics.  Our media consumption habits ave changed and NBC has not changed much.

In fact, it seems that one of the things that has not changed since 1972 -- or even before that -- is the way that NBC thinks about its audience.  If you are interested in this kind of thing, check out Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine.  He is on a crusade to change NBC -- good luck with that Jeff.

Still No Reason for Wall Street to Change

I suppose I should not be surprised that five years into the financial crisis that nothing has really changed in the way that the financial markets work.  Either way it is disappointing that our economic system, arguably the most adaptable, has not adapted.  The explanation: no change will come until it is really needed (forced on us).

Yesterday, Andrew Ross Sorkin posted this piece on why individual investors are fleeing equities.  I should say still fleeing, because individual investors have been leaving the market this entire time.  Here is a post I wrote on the subject in May 2010.

My thought then was that Goldman Sachs and the other market manipulators would eventually want real regulation because they would need it to get customers to come back.  Imagine if we had as little confidence in the FAA as we do in the SEC -- Amtrack might have a viable business!

It now seems like such a polylanna-ish thought that we would ever be able to overcome the influence of Goldman Sachs and the other insiders.  

Our real "problem" is that the rest of the world is in worse shape than we are, and everyone wants to park their cash in the US.  So in the end we only have to be less corrupt than the alternatives to avoid making changes.