Lustratus LiteBytes

Archive for September, 2008

I was reminded how easy it is to get marketing completely wrong today when I saw (on UK television) an advertisement for New York Bagels.

Bagels are not as heavily embedded in the UK psyche as in the US, I admit. Brits think of them as something you see people eating on US cop shows and sitcoms, often in New York. So what did the marketing company do? It spent the entire time showing the British market how delicious bagels could be … and then finished with a picture of three packs of New York bagels.

The point here is that the advertising company had missed its mark. Yes, there was a need to educate the British audience, but we know so little about bagels that it seems the advert is for ‘bagels’ as opposed to a particular brand name. When it refers to New York bagels, I and many Brits like me thought that that was the name of the food – like you might say Scottish salmon. My reaction was to pop down to my local store and by ITS OWN brand of bagels – the advert said ‘eat bagels’, not ‘buy New York bagels’. I guess in the US the advertisement or should I say commercial would work OK because the audience would be very familiar with bagels and realize the New York Bagel is a brand name.

So the marketing failed at one of the first hurdles – it had not attuned the message for the target audience.

In the software world, marketing is often extremely poor. I have always thought the main reason is that software companies have often grown around a particular technology, run by technology people, and to these people it is completely obvious why someone should buy its products – because they are technically wonderful! However, the same general marketing principles apply – you must know your target audiences, understand your key value proposition and how you are positioned in the software firmament and what your competition are up to. But a short look at marketing for virtually any software offering will quickly show this is rarely the case!

Lustratus uses its REPAMA Strategic Marketing analysis tools with clients to look at how products are being marketed, and the results can be quite eye-opening…so in order to increase awareness of this topic and further understanding, Lustratus has started a new blog to discuss issues around software marketing and its effectiveness. While this will be of obvious interest to software marketeers, I recommend it to buyers of software too – it is always useful to see how potential suppliers are tuning their messages and what markets they are really interested in.

Steve

I was reading a blog post from my good friend John Schmidt, Chairman of the Integration Consortium…

…and now with a day job at Informatica, about trying to get funding for integration initiatives (in his case he was focusing on funding for an integration competency centre, a personal hot button), and I was very taken with John’s view of using an ‘internal free market’ approach to getting funding approved.

John points out that while 70% of IT budgets are non-discretionary, just keeping everything running, most companies have at least some budget for investment, but that the problem is the investment portfolio is spread across many different parts of the business, greatly reducing any individual department budget to the point that walking in asking someone for $1M of their own budget is going to be a serious impact to that budget holder. But John advises a creative approach:

So why not look at the portfolio of internal projects in an enterprise as a “market”. Why not apply some of the concepts that have proven so successful in the free market economy to the internal operations of an organization. Since everyone needs integration, if you could simply get a good understanding of the demand in the internal market, you could build a business around it.

This made me think of the Lustratus report I wrote recently on justifying integration investment in an economic downturn, by putting a laser-beam focus on ROI. Adding John’s internal market approach seems to provide another dimension to the ROI focus I was recommending. In other words, while the ROI paper looks at how to justify operational budget investment for SOA, the same problem that John describes may rear its head, and it may be impossible to find someone to slice their own investment budget even though the business case is strong. But by combining the ROI focus with an internal market business case, success is much more likely. Effectively, the running costs can then be covered by a small chargeback to each project to reflect the improved productivity they will all experience, or whatever other gain each department saw as part if its internal market needs.

Steve

Now and then on this blog I have my ritual little moan about data – how it seems that SOA people just want to talk applications, and no-one cares about the data (apart from the USER of course!).

So I was delighted to see that the Integration Consortium is holding a webinar one week today (September 18th) specifically on data considerations for SOA. It should be a good session – I know John Schmidt (one of the speakers) well, and the experience he has built up from Best Buy, Wells Fargo and BofA should have given him lots of good insights into this important subject.

Steve

While the number of SOA success stories grow, there are a lot of companies that are finding SOA a struggle.

As often happens when something gets heavily hyped, managers are almost embarrassed to admit that they are having trouble. But the truth is that for many, getting outside help may be the best way forward and end up giving great returns.

There seem to be three common SOA ‘failure’ scenarios.

• This SOA-based project is blowing its schedule/budget/SLAs
• We are diligently implementing SOA, but we just aren’t getting the returns we expected
• Everybody agreed SOA was a great idea, but now nothing is actually happening

It is easy to feel that these scenarios must reflect badly on management or technical efforts, since other companies seem to have succeeded with no problems. But in fact, it is perfectly natural to find SOA difficult. In essence, SOA is REALLY different – it is a different way of working, the tools are different, programming is different, design is different…..and so on. However, an important corollary of the success of SOA in other companies is that there is a growing pool of knowledge around SOA procedures and best practices. Already, there are some professional services organizations that have embraced all this accumulated knowledge and developed service offerings specifically designed to unblock the SOA logjam – getting projects moving again, finding why the SOA strategy is not delivering, and clearing up any organizational or procedural blockages.

Companies should not feel bad about asking for help. It really can be worth it, even if there is an initial investment hit. And fortunately, once IT and business professionals get the hang of SOA, they wont need the outside help, so the cost hit does not have to be an ongoing one. The key is to make sure companies choose the right partner. This is a subject that is discussed more in a recent Lustratus Report, “A little help goes a long way”, that can be downloaded for free from the Lustratus web store.

Steve