SAPped...

SAP was ordered to pay over a billion dollars in damages to Oracle in CA, US. SAP admitted that the firm's subsidiary illegally downloaded Oracle's software. At the same time, SAP estimated the magnitude of damages to be ~40m. However, the jury awarded 1.3bn as damages to Oracle for copyright infringement.

I bet SAP feels a bit SAPped !

consultants and recommendations

Dilbert had a neatly outlined strip on recommendations. A software is recommended against and still gets installed causing it to be a DoA! You can check the strip here.

After checking out the strip, a few questions that linger reader's mind are :

1. How to make persuasive recommendations?
2. How to prevent political agendas from derailing your recommendations?
3. Do recommendations become negotiations? If yes, how do we negotiate?
   

Recommendations can become negotiations depending on the situation (the ones who get recommended, the ones who recommend, the political agendas of different stakeholders, etc). Consultants in advisory capacity always face such situations where the recommendations can become negotiations.

Consulting is an art and not a science. As Dr. Young taught us the psychology of audience decision making in his course on Consulting and Conflict Resolution, I recall a few of the prime points are as follows:

• Insist on using objective criteria. For instance, in case of software architecture negotiations, a good method to use is ATAM or Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method
• Focus on interests and not positions. Use data to back your interest - it could be industry reports from authoritative sources such as Gartner, Forrester, etc
  
• Like it or not, negotiation is a fact of life
• In negotiations, neither be too hard nor be too soft - use principled negotiation to get what you entitle and be good to people as well
  
• Separate people from the problem
• Invent options for mutual gains
• Use BATNA for folks who are more powerful
  
• Use negotiation jujitsu for difficult folks with dirty tricks

All of the above points are important and they work if practiced the right way. I have experienced it and recommend it to every reader of this blog.

Happy Consulting !

which version of google are you on?

Fred Luddy, the CEO of Service-now.com, mentioned this phrase at the NYC Executive briefing as he was trying to emphasize the importance of flexibility in SaaS implementation for Service Management tools. I was invited for the event by VP, Strategy at the company, who is a good acquaintance of mine.

Truly enough, Google's version is not known to anyone. It is irrelevant for the front user as long as all his data in various dimensions is stored for future retrieval and analysis by back-end data storage.

My close encounter and the dialogues with Fred revealed me his persona of an architect, a researcher, a scientist - being dominant over his persona as a CEO. He was former chief software architect at Peregrine, which got bought over by HP.

Surprisingly enough, service-now.com has been able to come up with an on-premise deployment for clients who may be wary of data residing on service providers servers in a SaaS model. For instance, the event had a leading global investment bank indicating how they plan to rip off their older software of Peregrine for IT Asset Management and install service-now.com's suite.

Imagine the impact of this new paradigm - This nature of an on-premise deployment can help allay government's fears and make them a potential client for such services.

ITIL v3 talks about cost distribution of small proportion of fixed costs and large proportion of variable costs in order to make internal IT services' offerings competitive and flexible (to scale up and down based on business needs). Service-now's SaaS implementation ensures just that.

I see this company as a rising star. The product is awesome - way beyond what some of their competitors have to offer. The team is great. Finally, the timing is right - as US market starts ITIL adoption and we are reaching a point of inflexion for the same.