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Today I leave aside Excel, BI and other technicalities; I feel like talking about interactions on the internet.
Did you ever notice how, on the web, everyone is so kind? Comment on a blog you'll be acknowledged. Retweet a link and many will politely say thank you.

On the web I came in contact and interacted with people who, in person, I'd never even try to speak to, like Gary Vainerchuck, Robert Scooble, Seth Godin or Claudia Imhoff. They all spent some time discussing with me about different issues on social media or by e-mail.

This is exactly the point, why people, who are usually overworked, who are somehow a star in their field, can be so friendly through the Internet? Why do they bother?

I think I have a good, albeit not exhaustive, reply to this question.

The Internet lowers the physical barrier. All the nonverbal part is left aside and the naked content is exposed. One can immediately realize who's talking to from many nonverbal signals, from the context and the behavior. The communication tone is set from there and, sometimes, there's no communication at all.
On the internet, on the contrary, only content matters. I'm replied or not depending on the level of the insight I put into my communication. I'm replied or not depending on the quality of what I have to say. In real life, I may have an essential point, but my voice is lost into the crowd.

So, if you think that I wrote some quality content, let me know your opinion!

I recently learnt that the famous Excel Blogger Chandoo has a new initiative. He set up an Excel School.
http://chandoo.org/wp/excel-school/
This guy is an Excel MVP but his style is what makes the difference. He's light, simple clear and to the point.
If I needed some Excel training, chandoo.org is a place I'd consider.

I'm not affiliated with Chandoo.org, this is simply my opinion, based on what I read on the site.

I break the Business analysis for BI consultants series for a post that has been inspired by a discussion on the well known Joel on Software forum. This post is a slightly developed version of my reply to the thread titled: Why you should unlearn your MBA

The thread starts recalling a David Heineimeier Hansson speech at Stanford University. Being the father of Ruby on Rails and 37 Signals, DHH makes a point in telling that what you learn from a business school is no use in creating a startup, at least a technology startup. Actually, it may be harmful; so it is better to unlearn it.

Along these lines, Guy Kawasaki, the famous venture capitalist and internet marketer, gives a speech on how only the real world experience can give the ability to manage; so attending a management school is of no utility .

I know that DHH and GK are well respected and I would normally listen carefully to their opinions. Those two guys really built something and they deserve a lot of respect when talking about technology business. Actually I see their points and I admit that there's an internal logic.

BUT,

in my opinion, this thing that getting an MBA is useless is a bad mistake. Better, all that chatter about you not using what you learn or that you can't learn things on books is plainly

BULLSHIT

I explain why.

1) Culture is not a tool, culture sharpens you perception of the world, culture creates a better you. So do not ask if a notion can be applied to your job or not, just learn it for the time you'll use it to understand a deeper layer of truth.

2) The amount of logical and abstract thinking required to fully grasp some of the ideas you'll learn at school is so high to improve your applied thought. I'm an aerospace engineer, I'm happy of having studied the turbulent boundary layer; it does not have anything to do with my current job, but it helps me in being better at it. I do not regret a minute of the days and nights spent on strange mathematics because it gave me the ability to extract the meaningful data from a pile of rubble.

3) It's not true that an MBA is useless in a small IT consulting firm, because the best way to relate with business line managers is talking the same language. The raw material of their decisions is often something explained at school. I talked extensively about it here.

4) It's not true that an MBA is useless in a small software shop either, because, if you target the B2B market, only the consultancy large vision gives you the exact feeling of how a software should be made. I started a company doing a piece of software that I wish I had in my projects.

5) If you are successful, your company will not stay small forever. If you do not necessarily need an MBA to run a small shop, that kind of knowledge becomes more and more important as your company grows. Financials, control or investments are not subjects where common sense provides a guidance good enough.

I could go on telling war stories about the damage ignorant entrepreneurs cause to companies, but I think this post is already long enough. So, if you chose not to get an MBA, make sure you'll learn the same things another way, but never stop learning about business!

As I promised quite a long time ago, I make a list of the Business Intelligence sites I regularly read.
I'm not always on the topics being discussed, but I learnt a lot for sure from them. I'll never thank enough those people who share their knowledge online. This is by no mean a complete or a popularity based list, and is grounded only in my personal taste.

BeyeNETWORK is the battleship of BI sites. Many of the most famous BI stars write here or their blog is hosted here or is aggregated here. Bill Inmon, Jill Dyche, Claudia Imhof and many others. Articles cover BI at 360 from high level philosophy discussion to low level implementation, from market news to change management in BI projects.
Being a rather cynical guy, the one defect I find that it is a little biased toward large, enterprise-size analysis.

TDWI is just an inch back from the previous site. It is not a totally informational site as it provides education and consulting, and it is better enjoyed with membership.

If I could, I'd marry this girl: Inside The Biz by Jill Dyche is one of the most insightful sites I have ever came across. She deals with a variety of topics, not all BI related but each and every article is worth reading.

For those who can read French, Le Grand BI is an immense enjoyment. Their prominent feature is a cynical and disillusioned approach to all the hype and buzzwords that sometimes blind us. I often refer to them to have a second opinion.

As I work for a large part in Microsoft ecosystem I use and like the Microsoft Resource Center . What's outstanding here is that you are taken by hand and brought to the highest level seamlessly by a host of written and filmed footage. Donald Farmer articles are a must read for all those who work with MS products.

Last but not least Oz-Analytics provides an always interesting point of view. Starting from other articles or real life experience, I've never read a trivial point of view from this guy.

As you can easily notice I leave out all those bloggers who deal mainly with the technical side of the job. Actually there are a lot of them worth reading, some fundamentals. This a good topic for another post, I'd say.

Enjoy.

Like many others, I regularly read a number of blogs. Reading, for me, is a way to relax after a tough mental effort like coding or a stressful consulting day. I even can't sleep if I do not read something. The written word is the only way to take my mind on a safe path before sleeping. No use to say I want to learn something from reading. Blogs are the main information source on the Internet. In my opinion the blog format is perfectly suited to the Internet use; it must not be as coherent as a book, it is shorter and it may have a touch of personal diary which closes the gap between the author and the reader.

I want to start with Startup and Software Entrepreneurship

Too easy to tell, but this is the place where I learnt that founding a successful MicroISV was possible is Joel On Software http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Joel Spolsky has been the forerunner of software entrepreneurship blogging. He told the story of his company on-line, giving out some top quality content along the road. Some posts on software development are now classics and should be part of every developer's background. On the site some interesting forums are accessible; their vitality has decreased since when they require registration but a lot of high quality feedback can be accessed by posting there.

The other blog where every post is worth reading twice is A Smart Bear, from Jason Cohen http://blog.asmartbear.com/

Jason, a former software entrepreneur, has the incredible ability to always find something not trivial to say. I've never read something coming from him that wasn't absolutely insightful or eye-opener. A must read for each and every small software entrepreneur.

Penelope Trunk is a compulsive blogger who writes about herself on The Brazen Careerist http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

She has the awesome ability to draw general conclusions and useful lessons from her personal history. Someway, she manages to be in the middle of something that has a meaning for you. She changes job, and you learn what you should do to get a new job. She's interviewed on TV, and you learn how to manage press releases etc. My wife reads her blog, just to learn about her life; I read her blog to learn about business life. Amazing! Sometimes we even talk about her at dinner!

My friend Peldi Guillizzoni runs his company blog, Balsamiq, telling the story of the business as it progresses http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/

Peldi is amazing, he was able to create a small multinational company (with just 2 employees!) out from his application Mockups. He often blogs about releases and bug fixes but, when he talks about entrepreneurship, he really deserves attention. I learnt from him how the Internet works today.

The last outstanding blogger I want to mention in this post is Eric Sink http://www.ericsink.com/

He's a software company founder with a very clear vision of what the business of software should be. Lately he blogged a lot about source control systems, but older posts on software product marketing are true classics. If you are a bit geeky or you come from a technical area, Eric's blog will effortlessly introduce you to those unknown realms.

In the next post, I'll talk about the Business Intelligence blogs that I regularly follow.

Some software entrepreneurs, when asked, say that their market is whoever buys the box. Some have a clue about who their customers are, but they really do not know well. Some others have a razor sharp knowledge of their market and carefully drive their application development: they know their market positioning. Market positioning is not something that happens, it is a choice that should drive your development efforts. So, it is worth knowing something about. In this post I will even resist the urge to explain where Viney@rd is positioned within the market, so keep reading safely.

First, what is market positioning? The best way to understand it is to think to the market as the shelves of a library. Each shelf covers a topic or an author. The books in the front rows are more accessible than those in the back rows. The books on the higher shelves are more difficult to reach than those at eye level. People looking for a book will locate the appropriate shelf, then they'll likely grab a book on the front row. If the shelf is located 3 meters high, chances are they'll renounce getting it, unless they exactly need that book or a book from the top shelf.

Some people will pass by and casually spot an interesting title and they'll get it. Some others will require a specific book and will browse through the entire library to find it.

The key point, anyway, is that a book (that is, a piece of software) can stay on one shelf. There's nothing like a "matrix oriented shelf".

So, let's start from the last point. Some of you will say that some package is good at doing two or more things. Penthao, for example, contains ETL, reporting, ad hoc query etc. Open Office is good at doing word processing, spreadsheets, database etc. Wrong, Penthao lies among the Business Intelligence suites with Business Objects, Microstrategy, Cognos etc etc; the one thing it does is organizing the process of consuming business information. Open Office is an office automation suite, it organizes the way an information worker relates with knowledge and fellow workers. Even if, technically, a piece of software does more than one task, it will be perceived by the market to fit into a single category. This happens because people define things by comparing them, so anything is something else with some differences (my wife is used to say that a rabbit is cat with long ears and a short tail, but my wife is graduated in social sciences, not biology …).

The library of software, anyway, is organized in two large rooms, the consumer and the business markets. These are very very broad distinctions. Some find difficult to draw a clear line among the two but I use a definition that appear to be sensible, at least to me. A consumer software addresses the problem of an individual or her family, a business software addresses the problem of a business entity, no matter how small it is. The consumer market has looser requirements (if a video game crashes, nobody is hurt and no money is lost …) with low unit costs, usually low unit margins and high volume. The business market is more varied, ranges from few bucks invoicing softwares for professionals to multimillion, high end, enterprise management systems. Often it has higher margins and must comply to much more compelling standards.

First choice: will you build your software for consumer or for business market?

From now on I will cover only the business money because a) it is the one I really know b) it is where the real money is. In my opinion it is the place where even a small or a micro company can prosper because it requires volumes much lower than those of the consumer, Userscape, SmartBear, Balsamiqor FogCreek are living examples of this.

So you enter the business room and you will soon realize that the vast majority of the books is in English. There are few shelves of books in foreign languages and few books which are present in the library in more than one language. It's no use to say that the vast majority of the readers picks books in English. Translation: Microsoft Windows rules. All the other OSes have their role in the market but they occupy a niche. This is not going to change in the near future. I know that I'll be flamed for this, but it's a fact of life. So, the operating system is not really a choice, while being multi platform is a plus, not building for Windows imposes heavy self limitations.

The actual choice though, is related to what is called "ecosystem", that is, the complex of business software and architectural building blocks that revolve around one of the big players. The ecosystems worth considering are:
Microsoft (AX/Nav - SharePoint - Office - SQL Server - .NET)
Oracle (Oracle Apps/One world - The Database - Hyperion - chunks of Linux)
SAP (The ERP - Netweaver - Business Objects)
There are also minor ecosystems which feature a less comprehensive coverage of the business world like:
IBM (websphere - db2/Informix - iSeries and X worlds)
Open Source (a blob of technologies revolving around Java and the LAMP stack) and few others.
To be complete, I must say that there are technologies which span through all of these ecosystems (like Adobe, the MS Office application or the rising Google) but are rather specific and not really relevant at the moment of this writing, despite all the hype which surrounds them.

The ecosystems imply that, in a business environment, an ecosystem tend to dominate the others; that is, the "best of breed" approach is always less and less popular because it requires interfaces among systems, which imply costs and complexity.

The ecosystems are not perfectly equivalent despite the marketing claims, so you have to pick carefully because your choice will focus you toward the referring market. Even the most general applications have a bias toward it. For example, if you build a LAMP stack based application for meeting rooms management, you may feel to be completely independent. In a business environment, anyway, you'll be asked first to interface your data with the local ERP HR module to have evidence on the employees data of the meeting usage, then with MS Outlook to coordinate reservations with meeting invitations, then with the accounting module to automatically post meeting costs etc. At the end, the market will ask you to have your PHP created screens inside the ERP, and you'll find yourself locked within an ecosystem, even if you did not mean to. The more the app you are creating is complex and the less it can be easily ported to other environments, the more you'll be compelled to chose a reference ecosystem.

Second Choice: which ecosystem do you pick?

So far you have chosen a shelves row in the library, now you have to find a position to place your book. Of course, the books on the front rows are spotted much easily and chances are that they will be the most read. Nobody picks that dusty gray book in the back row, unless she needs exactly that one.

That is, your software may address a wide range of requirements, standing together the other players on the market, or it can focus on a specific niche with specific requirements, becoming known only to niche players. From a business perspective, both solutions are viable and can lead to a sustainable cruise speed. What you have to do, anyway, is rather different. In the first case you'll need to tie, more or less, the other players in most of the features and to be outstanding in the feature which differentiates you. In the second case you need to concentrate on your niche and to adhere closely to your (potential) customers requests. The mindset, the competency, even the people you need are different.

Third Choice: do your software addresses to a niche audience or to the broader public?

The books on the higher shelves are, of course out of reach of many, none the less few people still read them. Even if your software is addressed to a niche audience, chances are that there are going to be different price ranges. You have to chose the tier in which your software will lay. Obviously, the low market tier will target lower unitary margins and higher volumes, the hi-end market will feature few sales to few key customers. As explained before, you need to work differently to address the two segments. Be aware that there is a point not obvious about this. At lower ends you usually end up talking about features, at higher level what matters most are the concepts inherently embedded within the software; that is, how the business processes are influenced by the use of the software (no matter if there is auto completion for fields or not).

Fourth Choice: does your software addresses the low, the mid or the high tier of the market?

So, simply writing down the four questions and answering them clearly in one or two sentences may well help you decide where to go with your software.

Did you do this kind of analysis before starting up your company? Do you have any experience on this kind of planning? Let me know.

When I'm working on Viney@rd I spend quite a large amount of time surfing the web, checking blogs on Twitter and Facebook. I try to connect with people who could be interested to Viney@rd, of course. Seen from the outside this activity appear to be a waste of time.

My wife once observed me and drew this conclusion. Actually, once, I agreed with her. It was a way to pause in the intervals between tasks. I theorize that people have a fixed efficiency, and there is a limited amount of time to be spent "in the zone", before giving up to something not requiring the same concentration level.

Working in this way, I slowly realized that I started finding some small nuggets here and there. It might be photos, a news fragment or a blog post, all of them worthy somehow. The Internet is a powerful knowledge aggregator and exploring the topic suggested by the accidental finding is often very very easy.
So I learnt of things I didn't know about, like truffles restaurants in New York or Win 7 vulnerabilities. This is called Serendipity, but this term often refers to science discoveries. My serendipity is small an intimate, and makes me a little better, one bit a time.

If you feel like yelling at me because I do not talk about Spreadsheet Automation and BI, do not do it here; download and setup Viney@rd and use the "Complain" feature :o)!

Take Care

In a previous post, I already talked about a BI vendor I came across in my "other" job as a BI consultant. Maybe one day I'll disclose the name but now I can't, thus I'm using the fake name "Sally".

Their product has strength and weaknesses, but overall is a good choice, in my opinion, for managerial accounting. Actually, the decision to support Sally has been taken at a level higher than mine so I have to comply.
To consolidate this new partnership, I spent a couple of days with Sally people, got a bit of training and invested few other days experimenting, in the view of a project we'll start in the coming days.

I focused on the technical side but, en passant, I was sitting in the same room of a briefing with the sales and marketing people.

Then I saw The Slide.

The title said "Commercial strengths and guidelines".
The points were:

1. Do not talk to the IT, they'll easily spot our weaknesses (namely, we are non standard in many areas)
2. Talk with other managers, they'll appreciate our beautiful clickable charts
3. Tell the managers it is so simple to manage that it does not require IT involvement
4. With Sally you get instant customer lock-in, very few know it thoroughly so switching suppliers is very hard.
5. It is complex enough to always require a consultant intervention for every small change, so you can sell more man -hours.

I'm old enough to know that these kind of things happen in the jungle out there, but I keep thinking that this attitude is the root of the evil. What astonished me was such an open display of ethically questionable points and many people in the room actually appreciated them!
Later, I cautiously probed one of their marketing people and she was not concerned at all.

In my opinion, this attitude should be totally rejected because:

• It is ethically questionable; I'm here to solve problems and provide value to customers, not to "grab them by testicles", as a salesman said.
• It is terribly short sighted. Drawbacks will emerge, someday, and long term value from the customer will be lost.
• It expresses a supreme contempt for the customers, who are treated like kids.
• It turns what actually are weak points to "artificial" strengths.

At this point I should draw a final conclusion. I do not have any, Please express your opinion and share with us some similar experiences.

Enjoy

Since when I started working on StraySoft, my life has changed. Should I stop this adventure now because alien abducted me to Mars, I'd bring in space with me a lot of new experiences.

First, I do not watch TV any more. TV is an incredible time waster, I realized I used to turn it on only because it relieved me from thinking. We believe that, sometimes, we need to stop thinking and let our brain rest. I think this is a fake. As long as you think to something you're passionate about, you do not need any mental rest. TV is a poor surrogate for using your brain in a pleasant and productive way.
Actually I pick carefully what I want to see (mainly journalism and sports) and I skip the so called "entertainment" flowing out of the screen. Far from being tired, my brain has never been in a better shape.

I learnt to use my time much more efficiently. StraySoft requires from one to four extra work hours a day, and 10/12 hours on weekends, hence I have to reserve time for my wife and other "routine" tasks. Since when I begun with StraySoft, the quality of the time I spend with my wife has increased substantially. We no longer sleep together on the couch in front of the TV set but we actually talk, or we do something, or we go somewhere together. She is not completely comfortable with the situation but yet very supportive, and she does not dislike the "fast track".

I learnt a lot on entrepreneurship. I've always been a salaried worker but, being a consultant I have rather deep knowledge of the process that make a company work. Nonetheless I realized that entrepreneurship is different. The glasses you wear are of a different color, and the angles you discover are otherwise hidden. It's much more catching. Much more fun.
Along the way I met a lot of people who enriched me in a way I thought it could never be possible. They are so different from the people I was used to hang around, their common background is "it can be done!" instead of "is there a way to f*** the others?".

I keep my consulting job totally separate from this effort, but my performance dramatically improved; I'm more focused, fast learning and assertive. I hope I won't get promoted because I have no time to steal from StraySoft!

It appears that someone is starting to think that I'm a rockstar or sort of :o)

Ajay Ohri from DecisionStats interviewed me about the company and BI in general.
Thank you Ajay for giving me voice!

Please find the interview here

I've been interviewed on BI and Viney@rd by Michael Johnson, who run a really interesting blog.
Thank you Mike for giving me voice!
Please find the interview here

Visit Mike's site at http://www.bigattichouse.com/

I just came across a BI app vendor that shall remain nameless. In the last weeks I had the occasion to evaluate in depth their product. Like many others it has strengths and weaknesses and a few outstanding points.
Among the others, it features a scripting language that can be used to make custom drawings, graphs and forms. The setback is that the language has no commonalities with any other scripting language and is rather obscure. Anyway, for the project I was working on, overall, this product could be a good choice.

Browsing documentation I noticed that there was no reference to the scripting commands used to draw all those beautifully looking forms, with nicely rounded buttons and combos to make selections and spawn graphs everywhere. So I contacted the authors to ask for documentation. With my total surprise, I discovered that the vendor does not disclose those commands and their documentation to third parties. I had quite a long argument with one of the managers, till he reluctantly admitted that, offering themselves professional services and consultancy, they wanted to maintain a "competitive advantage" over their external developers and partners

In my opinion this is unethical and plainly stupid! It is hardly mentioned but the first element in a vendor-partner or vendor-user relationship is trust.
I must trust the vendor that every reasonable effort to create a stable and usable product is made.
I must trust the vendor that whatever issue should arise, any reasonable effort to solve it is made.
I must trust the vendor that there's always going to be a smooth and voluntary transition to version +1 (a world famous player broke this rule few years ago, risking a lot!).
I must trust the vendor I'll be told about any feature and technicality I need to do my job and make successful projects.
If all these conditions are met, then I can evaluate the product and actually use it.

I'm going to comply to these rules as much as I can; it is a commitment I feel unavoidable. In the next few months I'll make the partner program available and partners will receive the maximum assistance possible for a small fee. I want that those who believe in me and in my product will be successful with their job. No more, no less. I will never refuse to share all the knowledge required to do a project.

Just for the records, the only thing I got from that vendor was a sample application to use as inspiration. Better than nothing.

What's your opinion? Do you have similar stories to share? Let me know! Your comments are welcome!

Those who know me personally will be surprised that, in the back of my brain, sometimes a thought passes by :o).

 

Now that the release 1.0 is approaching I'm frantically working on the new website, as the old one is really inadequate. Working on the site, I reviewed all the scripts from beginning and I realized one thing: communicating business intelligence is extremely hard.

 

Viney@rd (did you notice the creative part of the new name?) is a product aimed to partially fill a gap in the BI market, the segment of midrange Excel based BI applications. This gap is there because some players were acquired by enterprise level producers and others went out of business.
The segment is scarcely guarded not only for the "Excel" part but even for the "midrange".
Players consolidation had the side effect of creating few large, elephant sized, suites which are unfit for the midrange market. I'm not a capitalist shooter, this is perfectly natural from their perspective; being a large organization makes naturally think to large organizations. That's where the big money is, after all.
Some of these big players even question that a midrange market is possible. My experience tells that there is a lot of room there. Small or medium companies can run very complex businesses. Complex businesses are inherently sensitive to small variations. There must be a process in place to detect those variations.
If I should tell what the main feature of midrange market is, I'd say that the focus is not on the technical side (there are few technical challenges there) but on the process side. A good application for this market should feature the maximum freedom for the users to pursue and idea (I hope Viney@rd will do).

 

If you are still with me, it should be clear what the target is but how can I communicate with it?

 

There are two kind of people who infer on midrange market: end users and consultants.

 

The latter is the easier group to communicate with. Freelance consultants and small consulting firms usually know their business very well. They are fully capable of understanding my techno-speak and evaluate directly if Viney@rd is of interest.
I'm not neglecting them, I'll set up a partner program within the end of the year.

 

End users, on the contrary, are an entirely different matter. I think that the archetypical Viney@rd user will be the comptroller or the sales analyst; they may not be named in this way but these are the most Excel intensive functions in the company.

 

First: how can explain them the benefits of having a central data repository for their data if they are not used to BI? Every script I could come up with resembles those miracle knives ads, and I do not want to sound like a television sale. So I adopted a schema "if this is your problem, this is how you can solve it", but it produces rather long scripts and I'm afraid I'll lose them before the end.
If there is someone out there who can point me to a resource on the topic, I'll appreciate it.
Actually I produced an Unique Selling Proposition that sounds like this: "Connect your Scattered Spreadsheet Data into a Single Environment, and Do it Yourself!". I like it but does not outline clearly a benefit.

 

Second: how can I reach them? My company will be a totally web based company till I'll be able to afford a true commercial structure. I was almost unable to find a forum or a blog where controllers discuss about their job. It appears that extremely relevant business topics like management accounting, costing systems, customer profitability analysis, penetration coefficients etc. are not discussed on the Internet. This is rather unbelievable, so I suspect I'm making a big mistake somewhere.

 

I have the ambition to popularize business intelligence as far as it's practical, but I realized it's a tough job. OK, if it were easy, it would not be fun. Drop me a line on the subject, if you can.

 

This is a Steve Jobs' speech. No matter what your think of him, listen to him, and have your kids listen to him. Enjoy

I've been asked about the name of my company. I know, it does sound outdated and not so cool. I also conducted a small private poll among my native English speaking friends. The replies ranged from “rather anonymous” to “it sucks” .

 

So actually I apparently broke all those good marketing naming rules.

 

None the less I did not change the name in the past and I’m not going to change it now, when the commercial release is coming close. I already own the domain and that name is written in a few documents and contracts and changing it would be a pain the a§§. So I will stick with it until I have clear evidence that this name is pulling me back.

 

But I did not answer the question: where did the name came from?

 

We must go back a year or so. The idea of creating a company dates back to many years but the actual work begun about one year ago.

 

By that time I, also relocated to a new house in the country, in the outskirts of a small village west of Milan. For the first time in many years I saw animals again: hares, frogs, herons and storks were hanging around in the rice fields. Among the others a mother cat with three kittens came to live in the abandoned garden on the other side of the road. My wife and I felt natural pouring milk to them, and the natural distrust of the animals slowly went away. One morning, going to work, I heard a tiny meow. One of the kittens was alone in the garden. We never knew were the mother cat went with the other two. The little kitten came to live with us and become Ted the cat, a marvelous big fallow cat. I named the company after this story.

 

So what’s the business lesson we can draw from this story. Well I’d say there is no lesson. Thank you for your time

The most technical of you will be already familiar with the Microsoft Azure Platform. For those who never heard about it, I simply say that is the new Internet ("the cloud") resident architecture, still in Beta.

Here you can find a really enlightening video about SQL Services that provide data sync and sharing through the cloud.

What I would draw your attention on, though, is not the technology itself, but the case studies used to demo it. They always deal with user generated content that requires to be shared and reworked. This, IMHO, is really going to be the key issue to the next generation of business systems.

Maybe, just maybe, we are spotting the first cracks on the walls of corporate systems cathedrals. What do you think about.?

Photo courtesy mangpages

The title will probably let you think that I’m following like a lemming the current buzz on green technologies. While I’m seriously concerned about the future of our planet, the environment I’m referring to is your company environment.

 

Usually a business intelligence initiative is a huge project.

It requires a large amount of abstract thinking and thorough interviews to define a sound architecture.

It requires a wide range of professional skills to develop the technical infrastructure.

It requires the involvement of many corporate levels to make it work and spread.

Even when the road of small incremental releases is taken, there are plenty of them in quite a long period.

The technical effort behind the project often appears disproportioned to the rest of the company, notably including the upper management. Seen from the brass, the task of collecting few relevant numbers appears to be trivial, unless there has been a specific experience in the subject. The overall BI initiative may well appear like building a castle in the backyard.

 

The impact on IT systems may be even more shocking. Often the company IT department is primarily concerned about transactional systems operations. That’s natural because of their inherent critical nature to the business.

The BI technical requirements are then seen as a pain. New servers, new users, new unfamiliar pieces of software invade the server rooms. Worst, they appear to colonize each area of the company, sucking data from and providing nobody knows exactly what (“Why can’t I run a report on my transactional database?”). Data stewardship initiatives start touching tables that were left untouched for years, thus becoming a "company mantra". Suddenly separate systems become inadequate as they cannot match each other data in some obscure analysis.

The resulting information earthquake contributes to making the BI guys look like elephants in the glass shop.

 

Thus, the price paid for implementing a pervasive BI system may be high; disproportionately high from some perspectives.

So, I’m asking myself whether there is an alternative to this approach.

The answer is yes.

 

Where BI is yet to be introduced, often data are equally available. They take the form of printouts, text files, pdfs or Excel. They are inherently incoherent and fragmented. The users merge and integrate them manually, and the main tool for doing this is Excel.

Users are unaware of the potential of a properly designed and regularly updated datamart, so they perceive their work as the only way to gain data awareness. While doing so, they implicitly perform data quality (“Humm, this order is a dummy one, let’s cut it off from the total”) and rounding. Equally they enforce data consistency making assumptions on how to calculate measures according to specific needs.

So, while a large effort is spent on generating spreadsheets, the result is inherently aligned with business needs. This is what should be saved from this manual process, as the corresponding engineered process is often hard to implement.

Thus, maybe, the best thing we can do to ease information workers' workload and start spreading the BI verb, is simplify their daily job.

First, we should find a way to automate data collection from the systems. Not much can be done better than current Excel or MS Office wizards do, on this front. Many transactional systems generate MS Office compatible files.

Then we should provide a way to save the data extracted to a central repository, in order not to have them diluted on numberless files. Unlike traditional systems, the user himself should be able to define the data structure and change it whenever he needs to.

Then the user should be provided the capacity to perform transformations on data. While the Excel sheet is still the best place to do the job, some automation may be welcomed. Transformation results should be saved to the repository too.

Last, data should be queried from the repository without any technical knowledge and placed inside users spreadsheets with no formatting constraints.

 

This kind of BI speaks a language much closer to the user, so can gain active support more quickly. It is a concrete effort to ease the user workload without working indefinitely on baroque technical architectures.

Being much simpler, it is implemented quickly, lowering the project risk for the customer.

It uses tools already familiar to the user (Excel was used as an example, but whatever else from the stack is appropriate) with obvious benefits, letting the user concentrate on what matters most, the data analysis.

 

I do not think that this approach can displace traditional BI, as it has many intrinsic limits, but it has a niche for sure in the corporate world.

No use to say, I designed Vineyard to do just this.

 

Any comment is highly appreciated.

Just a short note to thank Peldi Guillizzoni from Balsamic Studios.

Thank you for the great startup business advice.
Thank you for the insightful market analysis.
Thank you for having shown us what can be done.

And...

thank you for the striking knowledge of what a Japanese restaurant can be.

All the best.

Recently I’ve been hooked up in an Alpha.1 version of Vineyard, but that’s not what I want to blog about now.

Tim O'Reilly recently blogged about the ethics of entrepreneurship. Maybe you should go there and read it before going on. Work On Stuff That Matters

The main point is that the entrepreneur should work on something that matters more than money. Entrepreneurial activity should aim to a better world or, at least, at creating value for someone and making money while doing it.

When I read that I realized that it could not be truer. It’s an intrinsically right idea, perceived even at emotional level. So, I thought, what’s in for me? What am I working on? Why am I working at all? As I already explained, I’m working on Vineyard to earn a better living, to set myself free of company b.s. and to reach autonomy.
These are all self centred points.

I must admit that I was starting to think that I made a mistake. OK, my product is surely of help for a wide range of businesses but is it enough to make it work? Maybe the project is flawed from the roots. I confess that I mumbled about this issue for days.

I kept mumbling till when, in the shower (that’s still the best place to think...) I realized that, indeed, there’s something I do care more than money that I’m working on. Software like Vineyard may help people to understand better their business and can save a lot of headaches. I’m working for those people; I try to improve their working lives. This is the main point.
As a consultant I often see the pressure on the information worker for providing business data. I see people struggling to combine and clean data from disparate sources in always shortest timelines. Those people deserve help and respect. They do not need a further IT mammoth project but something handy enough to make their work easier and funnier. Vineyard probably gives its best when used as a companion to preserve the hard collected and cleaned data. There’s nothing more rewarding then a smile from someone who just discovered that your system saves her weekend.

OK, I’m working on stuff that matters too.

Here is a preview of how the MasterBook will look like in Alpha.1.

Previous version was very ugly. It was basically a bunch of commands, here we provide some information about what's inside the system and latest changes.

I do not disclose now other features but I'm focusing on making the user interface much more usable then before.

Stay Tuned

In this post we’ll follow Ted and Susan prepare a cash flow statement as the first J&B Computers assessment.

“Ouch!”
Susan slapped a ten inches high pile of documents on the desk. Ted had already opened his laptop and opened an empty Excel schema.
“Ted, are you sure this is what Joe and Bill need?”
“Yes Susan, trust me, this is a fundamental statement for understanding what’s going on. We’ll compile an operating cash flow that is slightly different from the one prepared by your accountant.”

“What’s wrong with that?”
(download Ted’s cash flow Excel 2003)

“It is OK for the most part, but is aimed more at financial analysis from investors. What is needed to manage the company has a different focus. First, you need to know and you have to forecast critical months, when cash flows more outward than inward. Second, the accounting cash flow usually does not have an operational breakdown that is required to take decisions. By the way, just a question: do Joe and Bill usually ask separate stats?”
“Hum, yes if you mean separate stats about the HW and SW business.”
“OK, so let’s break down the gross margin for the two lines. You call them so, lines, right?”
“Hum, no we do not name them.”
“Well, let’s call them lines. The first thing I need to know is the cash balance at the first of January. Just sum all the bank balances and the cash. This should be in your bank papers.”
Susan browsed the pile and found it; Ted took note on Excel.
“Now let’s focus on sales. We need the balance for each month from January to July, as we are in August. I do not want invoices, unless they are paid in the same month I want actual payments.”
Susan opened the accounting software.
“I have different revenue accounts for Joe an Bill, and a separate account for BostonHT, our main customer. For Bill and the BostonHT it’s easy, invoices are paid at the end of month. For Joe, well we have different payment terms, even because of the leasings.”
“We could browse the bank statement, maybe”
Susan looked half-hearted.
“It will take a while, there are dozens…”
“None the less is mandatory”, said Ted cutting the protest short.
They took a good hour to figure out all the payments. After, getting SW data directly from the ledger accounts seemed a breeze. Adding few occasional revenues, at the end they completed the first section of the cash flow statement.

“It’s a nice stream of money, is it?” Said Susan
“Yes it is; let’s talk about future. We should include the already acquired revenues.”
“Well, we have a few orders…”
“No contracts with regular payments?”
“Oh yes, we have the BostonHT contract and a couple of others.”
They calculated the revenues for the coming months.
“Quite low, is see.”
“Yes, but at the end of the month there are always much more orders.”

“Now let’s move to the cash outflow related to direct costs.”
“Aren’t you mixing different concepts here?”
“Yes I am, this is a rather unorthodox cash flow, but it has meaning for management. For example, you can use it to make simulations for future months with a minimum of breakdown.
Anyway, we must include a few things on this section. First the cost of goods sold. In this case it’s the hardware purchases for resale. I imagine is a bit complex to trace it.”
“Yes, but we can, provided that we know most of the suppliers”
“Second we have to get labour costs related to HW and SW. Given your organization, I’d just sum up the payroll for the people who work for Bill and for Joe respectively.”
“And my wage?”
“It is not going in here. Your labour is not directly related to the sales. Then we should add expenses related to employees’ travel and lodging and HW freight, if you do not charge customers for transportation.”
It took a good hour to collect all the data, but for midday section two was filled.
Ted was satisfied.

“We start noticing a few things. You had a horrible first quarter I see.”
“Well, the sales where low but nothing to be concerned about. January is always the worst month.”
“You should be concerned instead, because in two month you burnt all your cash reserves. We still have to add operating expenses, investments and debt and things may only get worse.
Then I see that the HW is hardly profitable. It pays for itself only when there is a high margin sale. Otherwise they are always heading down.”
“I knew they had problems, but…”
“This is the cash flow; this is money flowing directly from one line to the other. There is no accrual here, just cash.”

They went out for lunch. Later, after having relaxed a bit, they were back at Susan’s desk.
“Now let’s focus on operating expenses. These are expenses like phone, rent insurance etc. You should have a ledger account for each one of them or, at least, you should be able to extract them from your accounting system.”
They worked on the accounting software for a while, till they filled the third section, including some sound forecasts for the months to come.
“The EBITDA is terrible for the first quarter.”
“What EBITDA means?”
“Earnings, Before Income Taxation, Depreciation and Amortization. In this case we are not preparing a balance sheet, so we do not deal with Amortization and Depreciation.”

Then, they went through investments.
“Usually, for a company like yours I split capital expenditures from other investments, like training or development time for products.”
It came out that they already planned some training, new shelves and trolleys for the warehouse and a new server farm for the subsidiary.
“What’s left is debt. Let’s simply enter the amount paid for refunding debts”
“This is easy.” Said Susan

At the end, Ted had a clear picture.
“You had two terrible months, which forced you to revert to the bank asking for fresh money. Your debt was remarkably low but almost doubled to face the financial crisis. These are the bad news. The good news is that you recovered quickly and by now you are back to black but you will have to bear the burden of the increased debt.
The other news is that the HW line does not pay for itself. We should go deeper to understand why.
Anyway, the company overall outlook appears to be balanced. I find positive that the operating expenses are such a low percentage of the revenues. The cash flow tied to fixed costs is about 62K$ a month, not too high, considering your later months”
“Would you mail me a copy of that?”
“Sure.”

Read the key points to prepare a cash flow statement

New Year resolutions are about what to change, but what about do you want to stay the same? I try to compile a short list of what I like in my life now and I wish not to change in the future.

My family and my wife. They’re so helpful and supportive that I could not do without them. I would not be the same person at all without them.

My current boss. When StraySoft will take off I’ll leave my current job, but I want to keep in touch with my current boss. He’s probably the best chief a man can have and I know I am one of the few lucky men who can say so.

My friends. I do not see them often (see previous post) but they always keep an eye on me and lend a helping hand whenever I need. All summed up, I was given much more than I gave.

My curiosity. I’m a passionately curious person, that’s why I study so much. I always try to understand the mechanics of the world surrounding me.

My new small village. I live near Milan, in the north of Italy, in a small village lost in the middle of rice fields and aspen trees. I love this land and I wish it to stay the same. I relocated two years ago and it was one of the best choices I could make.

I think this is enough. I have a dream of changing my and someone else’s life, but I really cannot complain about what I have. At the end of the day I’m a lucky man.

As usual, when the year approaches the end, it’s time to look backward and try getting relevant lessons from what has been before. Actually, I always try to, but is nice to write them down at the end of the year.

I will not let anyone stop me anymore. Building a startup is tough job. I’m spending almost all my free time on it. My wife, though supportive, suffers from that. It happens to find “do no do that” advisors that hit me from time to time. I do not want to listen to them anymore! At the end of the road there’s a golden pot with a better life in it. I simply must run fast enough to get there and do not let them stop me, even for a short time.

I do want to live a healthier life. I must lose weight, eat better and start jogging again. If I want to be successful, I also must be able to be fit. I will fix few progressive targets about that.

Do not let time wasters get on me. I often receive invitations for weekend or Sundays BBQs etc. These are terrible time wasters; an entire weekend far from Vineyard does a lot of damage to the project. I’m lucky to have friends and relatives who enjoy my company, but they do not realize that I’m doing something really engaging. If I refuse, they get offended. It’s hard to achieve a balance. From now on I must explain clearly that I appreciate the invitation but I’m in the middle of something huge.

Be more organized. I tend to be very organized in few key areas (those related to job and money) and an anarchist elsewhere. This year I was stuck in a few embarrassing situations thanks to my stochastic organization (including an accident involving used pants and a maid…). I must try hard improve my behaviour.

I realize I have only four resolutions, but very comprehensive. I’m taking about changing my life here. This aligns well with my principal goal, that is, making StraySoft profitable and getting a new and better life through it.

Now that the Vineyard preview version is out, I devoted the last weeks to test promoting the product. I know well that I should have done it before, but I really did not have the time to write code and marketing at the same time.

The graph below shows Visits and Unique Visitors for http://www.straysoft.com. I just started promoting it in December, so previous traffic is, for the most part, the underlying noise deriving from my own visits and search engines robots.

The traffic is almost all derived from being present on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com). It is fairly proportional to the number of tweets linking to the site. The spike is due to a post I originated on Joel On Software business of software forum. That forum is excellent and very crowded. It may generate quite a deal of traffic but it is a bit out of Vineyard target, so, probably, the traffic coming from it is not very useful.

On twitter I probed here and there. I started with personal tweets, than I switched to informational linking to third party articles and to posts on my blog.

Now that I’m connected with a few people who deal with business intelligence, I’m asking them to point someone who could be interested to the Vineyard download. I always ask them what I could do in return.

Next I’ll try to follow people in the entrepreneurs and small business Twitter user groups to connect with them and see if I can drive someone to download the preview.

Ideally a first attainable goal may be to go steadily over level 100 Unique Visitors a day; just figure out how to do that. Comments and suggestions are welcomed

Advocates of free and deregulated market always supported the idea of the level field.
Each player starts at the same mark. The best go on; the others lag and possibly disappear. What is a level field in the Internet digital world?

A level field means access to the resources required to develop the business. Connectivity is the fundamental prerequisite for a business to be online; it is THE resource for the Internet.
Even today there’s discrimination on

Photo courtesy boliston by flickr

Introducing a content based traffic prioritization just introduces a new commercial dimension, which carriers can take advantage of. Carriers focus will shift from maximizing the bandwidth provided to maximizing the revenues by careful segmentation of the existing bandwidth, slowing the effort to improve the overall network performance and reach. Carriers’ bottom line may improve, but consequences may be unhealthy for the entire system.

 First, the same service provided by two companies will compete on network performance too, that is, the small and less rich of the two is inherently disadvantaged.
Second, competitions shifts from doing better, that is providing more value to the public, to pushing back the others, that is to provide the public with value leftovers.
All of these two lead to a less competitive market, maybe not monopoly but oligopoly for sure.

In a deeper detail, something else may occur.
In a mature market, some services suffer from commoditization. What was once difficult now is easy. Those who provide the commoditized service should focus on productivity and service as a key element to grow. If not, something strange and useless could happen.
Screws; they are a real commodity. Let us imagine that, someday, a number of screw makers sign an agreement with the largest screw buyers to reserve all the ultra high stress stainless extra strong production to them, for a premium price. The buyers will be the only to produce anything, their competitors will struggle, fire people and possibly disappear, the public has less choice and the world becomes a worst place.

Until someone else starts producing ultra high stress stainless extra strong screws and sells them openly. Competition regains strength and the market evolves again toward a more balanced situation. In the meanwhile, the earthquake has produced heavy casualties for a reason that was plainly wrong from the beginning.

If the Net Neutrality will be heavily violated, someone will start providing a neutral service, sooner or later; maybe with means other than the cable. The efforts to squeeze too much money from commodities and to push back the competitors are doomed to failure.
That’s the desert in between that should be the cause of a deep concern for all of us.

The Internet flattened the world; net neutrality violation would bend it again.

I just reached 100 followers on twitter. First, I wish to thank them all for their attention.
Secondly, it took less than a month, and very little effort, to reach this level.

I'm not hiding that I see Twitter as a medium to drive traffic to my site and to do marketing in general. For, I spent the last month probing here and there, doing this and that just to see what was coming out. It's too early to say something on the commercial side, but I connected with many people involved in Business Intelligence. Their tweets brought me to a few, very interesting ideas (one will translate in a Vineyard feature for sure, maybe in the beta version). I even hope that my tweets brought something interesting to them.

I hope to keep exchanging information and ideas in the future. Stay tuned.

What would you find under the Christmas Tree for your Business Intelligence?
Leave a comment...

Documenting the software usually is no fun. In these days I'm writing the Vineyard User Manual. Here follows what happened to me to write, with pride and personal fulfillment, at the end.

Vineyard is a rare piece of Software.

 We, at Straysoft, envisioned an application that could maximize the value of what our customers already own, the MS Office Suite. Instead of compelling users to adhere to new philosophy, new conventions and different usage styles, we provided the tools to complement their natural information workflow.

 Vineyard strives to reconcile the unparalleled flexibility and freedom provided by Excel with the ability to retrieve and analyze sure and up to date information. Many other BI tools enforce a single version of truth by limiting the user ability to edit data; we believe that users are neither kids nor liars and they must be respected. In fact, users, not IT, should command the information analysis process.

 With Vineyard you’ll be able to:

•  Be in charge of your own data, if you wish, or having your IT department load them for you as easily as possible.  
• Design your own structures creating a business model that adheres to your business mental schema, without bending to IT related constraints. Change it freely when required to accommodate new requirements or business evolution.
• Manage your system entirely within Excel, in a simple and intuitive manner.
  Many software claim to be simple and intuitive; we do not hide the necessity to understand few Vineyard key concepts to be productive but, after that, it works straightforwardly.
• Transform automatically your data to make real life business calculations.
• Analyze your data within an Excel worksheet much like you do now without technicalities. Do not learn a different way of organizing data but focus on business issues.
• Have Vineyard feed your data one cell a time in order to update even the most complex worksheets without disrupting formats.

We hope you’ll appreciate our efforts to privilege what is most important for us, you.

Augusto Albeghi

Founder

 Ted’s parked his SUV in inside J&B inner court. Even from the outside it was clear that the company was not very tidy. Wrapping remnants were stacked against the little shed outer wall. He got to the small reception where a pretty girl was talking to the phone behind a messy desk.

 “I’m Ted, I’m here to meet…” 
 Ted looked a small note. 
“.. I’m here for Ms. Susan”. 
“Oh, welcome to J&B computers. We were waiting for you” said cheerily the receptionist. 
“Please, would you wait here a minute. I call Susan.”

 

 Ted looked critically around him. J&B was a large, rectangular, open space. The reception was right in the middle.

 To the left there was the development sector, Bill’s kingdom. Few young boys worked behind their computers. They concentrated on the monitors, ignoring the rest of the world. Documents and books of all kind covered most of the horizontal surface available. The only privacy was provided by few bookshelves that separated the desks. The farthest desk was clearly Bill’s, but he was out at the moment.

 To the right there was Joe’s domain. A couple of people in business suits were talking on the phone; they were clearly the sales force. Another couple of young people faced some long desks, covered with a wide variety of computer boxes. Ted was unable to identify most of them.

 On the back of the two open spaces, four shelves rows formed a warehouse. An operator was packing strange things in large cardboxes.

 Ted noticed the glass walled office in a corner when the woman came out. She was a smiling, dark haired young lady. She came straight to Ted.

Photo Courtesy Kimberly

 “Welcome to J&B computers, Sir. I was told by Joe about your vist.” 
“Thank you. I’m Ted, you should be Susan” 
“Yes I am, please follow me in my office. We’ll be more comfortable” 
Once Ted was sitting at the desk with a creamed java mug in his hand, they both started talking about business. 
“Joe and Bill asked me to fully cooperate with you. It’s ok for me, of course, but I did not quite catch what kind mission is yours...” said Susan. 
“Hum… they asked me to review figures, just to provide them a clearer business picture. I’m a consultant and I deal mainly with small and medium businesses.” 
Susan seemed a little puzzled. 
“Actually I keep all the books as neat as I can. We already run through periodic reviews with our accountant.” 
“Oh, no, I’m not talking about those reviews. Those are formal reviews required by accounting principles. Those are meant to avoid tax frauds, wrong balances and the like. I’m talking more about checking indicators that can tell something about the business health status.” 
“Oh, our health is good. Our revenue grew steadily over the years, and is still growing even in these difficult times.” 
“This is a common mistake. Revenues are only a thin slice of the whole picture. Actually, a business lives or dies of margins, which are the balance between the cash flowing in and the cash flowing out. For example, do you have a cash flow statement like this?” Ted handed Susan an Excel Printout.

 “Actually we have a cash flow statement that our accountant prepares for us…” 
“Not that one, one like this.” 
“Actually, no, we do not have.”
“This is the fundamental report to have. Nothing can kill your company as efficiently as a cash crisis. This report can help you foresee whether a crisis is coming or not.
Note that all the rows are split in two, your actual figures and your forecasted figures. In future months, the split is between sure flows and other forecasted flows.”
“I never thought about that.” Susan shook her head. 
“It is rather common to focus on the past as accounting deals with past events. Here you are focusing on the future.” 
“How can I get those figures? I should classify my General Ledger Accounts…” 
“Yes, your GL tells a lot, but, for the future, you must be aware of the current sales contracts and pending orders, both active and passive.” 
“Ted, I do not know a thing about our sales contracts.” 
“OK, let’s try to correct this.”

 The Joe&Bill Computers llc is rather typical in its development. Their business is still small but they handle complex projects and deal with a large number of customers.

 It is also based on two very different kinds of business; Bill works after  job orders, at fixed price or on time basis. Joe sells items, including setup activity.

 They need to answer rather complex questions but those often go unanswered. The single main issue is the lack of a consistent mechanism to collect the fundamental data. Once available, these allow setting up the basic analysis to assess the overall business quality of J&B Computers.

 In the next post we’ll see Ted and Susan prepare a simple cash flow forecast statement.

 

 

I was just watching a Rugby Union match, Wales vs Canada.

For those of you who are not familiar with Rugby Union, Wales is an order of magnitude stronger than Canada. It’a much more expert and talented team. It should be like shooting fishes in a barrel for Wales.

None the less, it took Wales an entire half to top the opponents.
Why?
Because Canadians, for an entire half were able to aggressively pressure the Welsh team. To an expert the gap between the two was clear since the beginning, but pressure and choking defence made the Welsh drift away from their game plan and make a lot of rather stupid mistakes.

This should teach us that, whatever is the opponent, there’s always chance to overcome it. Even the strongest has a weak spot to exploit. If you keep pressing, probably whatever you are doing will turn in you favour. Just keep pushing.

I’m starting StraySoft as a side job. I’m a BI consultant and I work for an important Italian Firm. I can not mention it now because I kept this project secret among my co-workers. They are all sensible people but the risk of misjudgement is always present.

Photo Courtesy joshuahoffmanphoto

 My gut feeling would be to leave my job and jump with both feet in this adventure, but I can not as I’m low on my bank account in this period. So I’m devoting all my spare time to Vineyard, with the idea to leave my day job as soon as practical (if everything works according to the plan, ‘practical’ means few months from now.)

 In the last months I developed few little tricks to deal with tiredness and a little of procrastinating syndrome that I’d like to share with you.

 I decided to do, everyday, something that could take me closer to the target. Sometimes I’m home well after 9 in the evening. There’s no way to start coding, I’d fell asleep even before opening the editor. So I polish the web site a bit, I tweak a couple of phrases on the brochure etc. Even these small operations give me an unparalleled sense of freedom. The sense that I’m doing something business related NOT because I was told BUT because I want to do it and, in an intellectual sense, I rejoice!

 Procrastination is something subtle, on the contrary. Sometimes I discover myself surfing the web or arsing about with a comic book. I do not even know how I abandoned a productive job. In those moments I ask myself the question “Is this relevant for my target? Is this relevant at all?” Suddenly I realize how pointless what I’m doing is, so I switch to something useful.

 So, in the last months, my Startup is starting to take a definite shape. I hope you will enjoy it too.

 

 

 

 

  OK, my idea is to build a bi tool revolving around Excel and other MS Office components.

 I’ve been often requested, in my consulting career, for a close Excel integration with the BI environment. This is no surprise: it’s ubiquitous and unparalleled both for versatility and feature richness. But what really tells apart Excel from other BI tools is the ability to address a single cell against the record set based approach. That is, everybody can manually make the data look like they should be in his mind.

 Every information worker would be more than pleased of enjoying their data inside Excel.

 This is not a great idea indeed. Many of you probably think the same and do not write it down on the internet. The most experienced among you know very well how the big Business Intelligence players integrate Excel within their platforms. As I said above, I do not want to fight with the big guys.

 In my experience there is a large share of small and medium companies that are left on Excel alone and those may benefit from a lightweight tool to be used in conjunction with Excel. That is, the need for a consistent data analysis does not depend on the company size but it depends on the business complexity.

 We’ll cover this point by an example, that in my intention, will accompany us through the application development.

 Think of a small technology company; let’s call her “Joe&Bill Computers llc”. It was started by two friends about 10 years ago as a computer shop in a small town named Townland, in the US state of Flalgassipi.

 Joe was more hardware type of person, with strong relational skills. Slowly, he managed to become the official hw supplier for the local businesses. He hired a young boy who started assembling industrial grade PCs. Slowly, Joe’s reached out and set up a stable business relation with quite a large number of firms. Now he works with a team of seven, two of them salesmen and two system engineers. They operate on about 200 customers, providing hardware and an always increasing share of services.

 Bill looked more like a computer geek. He begun developing web sites for some customer acquired by Joe. He improved his technical skills and soon hooked up a few medium companies, to develop web sites and intranets for. He hired too, and now leads a team of five developers who master various technologies. They work for small medium firms for projects ranging from few days to few man months.

 A couple of years ago Joe and Bill have become the main IT contractors for a medium company which threw at them thousands of consulting days and bought hundreds of K$ of hardware. Unluckily, the customer’s headquarter is 2000 miles away on the east coast, so they opened a small subsidiary in the customer’s town, hiring a couple of local developers and a secretary (more a “do it all” indeed) for administrative tasks.

 Few months ago, Joe and Bill realized that they were unable to devote to the administrative tasks the care they deserved. But what is worst is that they no longer know all the sort of business details that once allowed them to take almost intuitively the right decision. Joe is too busy selling and Bill must take care of all the projects of the new mammoth customer. Even getting the right figures is becoming increasingly difficult. The administrative secretary handles the paperwork but simply has not the right profile to set up a continuous and coherent control process.

 So, Joe and Bill reverted to Ted, an old friend of them. Now he is an accountant and a management consultant with a bias toward the information technology. They briefed Ted about their problem and he promised to walk in and try to sort out something.

 In the following posts I'm going to illustrate Ted’s job for his friends’ company. Please be understanding, it takes a long effort to write a blog post like this and StraySoft is almost a one man show!

 

 

 

 

 

.

It took a long time but, when we see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s time to look to the route behind my back.

My name is Augusto.A., Stray Cat for my Internet friends, and I’m the founder of this startup. From now on, I’ll try to discuss with you the adventure I’m living now.

I imagine I should start describing my deeper motivation.
Well, they’re not any special.
I see the middle class, to which I belong, becoming poorer and poorer.
I see my wife spending her best days working long hours because, in our society, a single paycheck, albeit in the middle segment, is no longer enough to provide a family with a decent lifestyle.
I see my parents becoming older and older, and soon they’ll need a dedicated, and expensive, assistance.
I see people climbing the social ladder thanks to political affiliation or plain luck. I devoted most of my best efforts to my employers, obtaining, at best only few nice words.

But what I can not stand any longer that uninformed managers take lame decisions over my head, affecting my future and my life.

This is why I decided to pursue autonomy.

 

Photo courtesy:  dierken

 

 The next point is what to do.
I’m a Business Intelligence consultant, I worked for various firms, mainly international. In my career I was lucky enough to meet many good teachers, and now I imagine I have a respectable experience. What I do not want to do is doing by myself the same job I do now , without being backed by the structure a consulting company may provide. This would mean getting the worst and discarding the best. I do not want to hunt for BI customers against the big guys. I’d loose. BI requires such a wide competence range that a single individual can not offer the full service. I do from database administration to managerial consulting and whatever in the middle, but there is a limit to what I can be an expert into.

More, and most important, I do hate kissing butts and making friends just to get the contract. I really can’t stand those soapy salesmen that sell whatever they can to executives barely aware of what they’re buying. I do not want to compete against those people. My strong wish is to forget of their existence.

All this leaves a single option, a product based company. There is a long (as long it could be) tradition of small, product oriented, I.T. companies. Probably you’ll know a few. All the big product companies started small, they started from an Idea, with a capital I. Luckily, I come across one of those ideas. An Idea just to simple to be thoroughly explored by the big guys in the market out there. The idea is …..

(to be continued)