Skip to content

the most embarrassing night of my life

Working title: the dangers of Facebook, online dating, stranger danger and gross stupidity

The (now defunct) Chameleons remain one of my favourite bands but were responsible for the most embarrassing night of my life.

After the band reformed, I went to their London gigs and occasionally frequented the (now defunct) Wishville forums for discussion about the band, concert reviews, banter about football, discovering new bands - all the usual stuff we did before Twitter and Last.fm came along.

In November 2002. The Chameleons played a single date in London before a German tour. As I had struck up a friendship with a like minded individual on Wishville (liked footy, liked The Chameleons, liked a laugh) and exchanged messages with him, we arranged to meet up for a drink in Camden before going on to the gig.

Mark Burgess is a City fan, so he'd arranged the gig deliberately to clash with United playing Bayer Leverkeusen in the Champions League so I'd hoped to see most of the game before going to the venue.

Anyway, we exchanged mobile phone numbers, exchanged descriptions and arranged to meet in an Irish pub (public bar) that was showing the football. I didn't tell my Mummy in case she was worried about me meeting a strange man I'd recently met on the Interweb.

Inevitably, something screwed up on the night mainly because we are blokes. I can't recall precisely what happened but someone had a flat battery, lost their phone or told their Mummy so I arrived at this hostelry and furtively tried to identify this gentleman from a (Wedding) photo he'd shown me.

To cut a long story short, I couldn't find him and he couldn't find me. Worse, the footy wasn't been shown in the Irish pub or rather, I think Arsenal was being shown instead of United, so I went elsewhere to watch the game.

After a few beers and United taking a 2-0 lead, I made my way to Dingwalls. Now, there was no way I was going to make contact with my 'Internet acquaintance' in a packed venue so I was quite prepared to enjoy the support (Brian Glancy), soak up the pre-match atmosphere, drinking overpriced lager while watching the technicians twiddle buttons on amps, place guitars on stands and say 'One Two - One Two' into microphones while waiting for The Chamleons to take the stage.

Unfortunately, as always, alcohol intervened and as I watched Glancy performing, I happened to see a young lady who was also a regular on Wishville. This young lady spent every spare minute and every spare quid on watching bands and had traipsed around Germany and the States following The Chameleons on tour.

Unfortunately, I only knew 'Cath' by reputation and only recognised her by virtue of her distinctive dyed red hair. While I enjoyed her superb gig reviews, we'd never communicated directly so I didn't know her and she certainly didn't know me.

I should have just left it well alone but for some reason I didn't and I approached a complete stranger (a female one at that) and memorably opened with: 'Hi Cath. Do you know where Joe is ?'

Cath Aubergine (for that was her rather unusual name) broke off her conversation with her mate, turned to me and replied: 'Sorry - what ? Joe who ? Who are you ?'. There may have been the odd expletive thrown in for good measure.

'Joe - I arranged to meet him here but....'

Blank stare. Her mate is also now looking at me with a similar blank stare. 27.4 seconds left before the 6'2" boyfriend returns from the bar with their drinks.

'Look - you know. Joe - Mr. Moto. Have you seen him ?'

'Oh Mister Moto - why didn't you say ? But what's your name ?'

'Andy.'

'Sorry - did you say 'Andy' ?' Another piercing, blank, suspicious stare. Times two.

'Look. I'm RomanTotaleXVII on the forums but my real name's Andy, alright'. Christ - the embarrassment levels were now excruciating as we were having to shout this conversation above the noise of Bryan Glancy's set.

'Oh so you're RomanTotaleXVII but hang on - you're not RomanTotaleXVII any more. You are now...'

'Yeah, yeah I know. I'm now FieryJack.'

'Yeah - you're the guy who names himself after The Fall characters. Well why didn't you just say so ?'

And so it came to pass - Cath Aubergine led me to the bar area and introduced me to Mr. Moto (aka Joe Donellan)

'Hey Joe - I've got someone who wants to meet you. Here he is - RomanTotaleXVII'.

Posted 10 March 2010 † Andy C § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Multiple OBIEE Environments

For any large OBIEE project the normal set-up would involve having a development machine, a test machine, Production machines and some form of disaster recovery. These normally need to be on separate physical machines, mainly for access rights reason and of course the DR machines need to be in a separate building (hopefully in a separate city!)

Did you know that you can have multiple OBIEE environments, but without buying new boxes?

Why do I need multiple Environments?

I am not suggesting that development and Production are on the same box, but there are situations that demand environments, such as:

Multiple Projects - The success of many a good OBIEE project will often lead to other departments in the organisation wanting in on the action. Rather than build a whole new development, UAT and Production box you can just add more services to the existing one.

Clustering - although you often cluster for performance, you should also cluster for availability. The normal process is cluster over two or more boxes, but you can also cluster on the same box across users.

Development Cycles – Sometimes you need to create and test a version of your config (rpd /webcat) for a particular release, but carry on developing for the next release. This calls for multiple development environments.

Integration Testing - You can create your repository, but will it work in UAT and production, particularly if they have SSO and your dev environment does not? I prefer to have a pre-UAT environment in place for Developer testing, or internal testing teams to use.

Sandbox - The last thing you want is for all developers to use the same master development repository to implement new models or methods. Get the developer to work on their own copy, or new one, in a separate area to prove that it works.

Worldwide Development – I am not a big fan of MUD. It will work in certain situations, but you normally find that someone hogs the lock on the master repository. The main issue is new business models. One way around this is to have a master repository and have developers around the world use a copy to build their sections, then merge in their changes when they are tested.

Production Support – In a controlled environment the developers do not have access to production (I normally set the production rpd to read only just in case!)

Demo Site – To help your users understand what is possible you can install the sample sites and give all your potential users access.

Training Site – To support training you often need to build a separate environment. You may not want the hassle of whole box to do this on.

How Do I Create Multiple OBIEE Environments?

Linux

On a Linux box you can install multiple environments into individul user accounts. There is no need to use vitualisation.

When you install a new OBIEE into a separate user you need to make sure that OC4J is not running. Other than that it is a normal simple installation.

After install you have to update all the ports in the system, making sure that you have the correct settings for BI Server, Presentation server, Javahost and graph server. The most important thing is to make sure you do not create spaghetti! Keep a central document on the environments and all their ports.

You can then update the cluster settings as normal, and put the webcat into a shared area for clustering.

We have created a script that does a silent installation and updates all the ports numbers.

Windows

Now there’s another story! My advice is stick to Unix or Linux for now. In theory you can create multiple services to run but I havn’t tried it yet. The simple solution would be to use virtualisation.

If you give it a go let me know how you get on.

Posted 10 March 2010 † Adrian Ward § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Hotsos 2010 – Congratulations, Marco!

You managed to capture a couple of minutes of my presentation when there was a picture on the screen!


Posted 09 March 2010 † Doug Burns § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Fourface Exposes New Interface Paradigms

Thanks to a tweet from the @foursquare team and a post from TechCrunch, I have a new app for checking in to foursquare, Fourface.

Yeah, I know foursquare and location generally have been getting a lot of ink here and other place. Get used to it though because heading into SXSW later this week, location is expected to be all the rage.

Before you move on, this post isn’t really about foursquare. It’s about interface paradigms.

Fourface uses foursquare’s API and OAuth to present functional data visualizations. By functional, I mean you can use them to checkin to venues, not just browse data. Although, like any good visualization, Fourface does an elegant job modeling the checking data, and is reminiscent of Digg Labs, one of my favorite data pr0n sites.

This is interesting to me because normally data visualizations can’t be used to create the data they model. So really these are new interfaces based on visualizations.

For example, here is the foursquare iPhone app’s checkin screen, or rather a leaked image of how it will look in their upcoming redesigned version.

Image from TechCrunch

Makes sense to you right? Probably because it follows paradigms you’ve seen in the past.

By contrast, here is one of the Fourface checkin screens, called arcs.

Image from Fourface

Fourface uses your location to build the visualization. In this case, arcs lists the five venues closest to you ordered as layered circles with the venue at the center being the closest. To checkin, you touch and hold the venue, or load more to get a new set of arcs.

Three of the four visualizations offered by Fourface allow you to checkin to foursquare using similar models. The fourth shows a heat map-like grid of venue checkins (current and historical).

Fourface also uses audible cues to help you, which I’m not in love with, but make it a bit easier to get over the usability changes.

So, who cares, right?

Even if you’re not into foursquare, this is an interesting study in UI because it removes all the usual trappings, e.g. buttons, labels, selection widgets, form fields, and substitutes a visually attractive, moving visualization that also happens to be functional.

I’m not saying I’ll be using Fourface exclusively to checkin; frankly, I’ll probably mess with it for a bit then forget about it, like many apps I download.

Still, the next time Rich and I have an interface to build and want to do something cool, I’ll remember Fourface, and maybe we’ll try something similar.

What do you think? Would an interesting interface make your favorite app more enjoyable, or would it just force you to relearn functions?

This is bordering on the simplicity and stupidityarguments, so I’ll leave the rest for comments.

Find them and leave one.Possibly Related Posts:

Posted 09 March 2010 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

What has Toyota actually proven here?

Interesting article in the Chicago Tribune today: "Toyota rebuts claims of SIU professor: In webcast, consulting firm re-creates electronic glitch in other vehicle brands".

First, David Gilbert demonstrates to Congress a way to cause sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles.

Then Toyota countered his demonstration as follows: "Using similar methodology, engineers at Toyota's facility on Monday duplicated the results on camera in seven other vehicles, including a Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord and Ford Fusion. Officials said the results, though not maligning other manufacturers, show that the methodology was essentially flawed."

Gee, I don't know. It seems like you could just as legitimately conclude that the problems experienced by Toyota owners could well be showing up in other vehicles.

I must admit that as a programmer, it scares me to think that my safety (and the safety of my family members) when driving is so dependent on software.
Posted 09 March 2010 † StevenFeuerstein § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Hotsos 2010 – My Presentation

I really don't know how to blog about this because every time I feel I'm honestly self-critical, everyone thinks I'm close to suicide or something. I like to think I notice both the good and the bad but am probably more likely to speak openly about the bad. If you ask me it's a Scottish thing about not getting above yourself or blowing your own trumpet too loudly. Or maybe it's just that the only way you can improve is by noticing the bad stuff and fixing it? Someone once said to me "You can't be an insecure overachiever without first being insecure" ;-) and they aren't Scottish, so I shouldn't generalise. Updated later - it was Cary Millsap who came up with this line. I loved it when he mentioned it a few months ago and still do.

In this case I'll try to be even-handed and finish with the positives!

Negatives

The whole point of this presentation is that it's about 50 minutes of demonstrations and about 10 of slides. For the first 30 minutes, the demonstrations would not work. If you think that's a success, there's something the matter with you and you should probably never give any presentations!

This is the killer. In retrospect I know what the problem was and have fixed it previously with the help of others but did not do the same on the new laptop! As I moved in and out of wireless range, the lack of a network connection at the Windows end completely threw VMWare and my demos. But, believe me, when your demos have been working for a couple of weeks, you don't have long until your presentation and they stop working intermittently, it's difficult to be cool and analytical. I was so distracted by other things that might go wrong, I missed one and, having missed it, I wasn't cool enough to recognise the symptoms. Fortunately, an old Hotsos friend in the room came up with the goods in the form of a little Sprint wireless box that got me hooked up. I kissed him, but there were no tongues involved.

With only 30 minutes left, there was very little I could show and it completely ruined the whole flow of the presentation, which I'd worked so hard to get right and which I know can be terrific, because I've done similar presentations before and had been looking forward to doing the best version yet. People took the time to come and see it, I let them down and I'm sorry about that. Nobody is likely to change my view on that.

This presentation is a big deal to me, never mind anyone else. I work hard on these things, try to cover all the angles, take time off work and all because I like teaching people new stuff. When I take a week off to attend a conference, but also to present, it's a bit of a blow when your one shot fails. If you're not passionate about your presentations (and I somehow doubt anyone isn't) again, you shouldn't be presenting.

Positives

Sh*t happens when you get involved with computers. Yes, folks, I know that, but that's also why you play around with demos for a long time to minimise the possibility that it will!

This might not sound like a positive and it's dangerously close to sounding like an excuse, but the fact is that I've had 2 out of 3 presentations go very wrong recently. One of the consistent factors in this is that I switched to VMWare because I had to to run 11gR2 on Windows. It's not the same as blaming VMWare to say that I've been having to deal with stuff I haven't for a long time. When everyone was talking about VMWare as the way to go for presentations, I remember thinking 'I don't know, just seems like more moving parts that might break to me.' and I kept reading blog posts about demos being broken and then fixed just in time, all of which were on some virtualisation platform or other, but didn't have the confidence to say something. All I know is, say what you like about Windows, but I've hardly ever had a problem in multiple 2-day course teaches of performance and OEM stuff! Still, it's down to me to get on top of what are some simple issues.

Listen, I know I can present. No false modesty round here. So, to wrap this up on a positive note, I'm well aware that there are few of the people who I see present who could have managed to get through that first half hour, make people laugh, keep thinking about the problem and manage to get a short demo of Swingbench into the bargain. I think I also managed to salvage something out of the last half of the presentation without completely collapsing into a heap. Sure, I was a bit brain-addled by then, but I would have liked to have seen how others might have coped ;-) Frankly, I kept waiting for the room to empty (I've seen it happen) but the vast majority stuck around to the end. Maybe they were sadists! LOL

I am not and will never manage to be happy with that presentation but lessons have been learned, it's just a presentation and there'll be lots of others. I know that.

Postive Solution 1 - If anyone wants to try to grab me while I'm at the conference, I'll show you the screens and demos. They're very cool ;-)

Positive Solution 2 - I think Alex Gorbachev might try to arrange for me to repeat the presentation properly as a webinar. I've already done this at my current customer site once (on the 10g stuff) and it went reasonably well. I'd also ... get this ... asked Marco to video it for me yesterday with his snazzy mini-setup because I thought I might post a few bits online if they were particularly good so those that can't make it to conferences could get a taste of it. Actually, it appeals to my cold, self-deprecating sense of humour to post some of it online soon. I promise I won't make it too self-flaggelating though!

P.S. For Paul Vallee. Paul it is not all good :-)
Posted 09 March 2010 † Doug Burns § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Thoughts on Change Data Capture

In little over a month I will be in Las Vegas speaking at Collaborate 10. There is a lot of BI / DW talks this year and for the first time with BIWA Training Days branding. Rittman Mead will be there at the conference giving talks on each of the conference days. If you are at the conference (or even just on vacation there) then come and say ‘Hi’ to Stewart, Venkat, Mark and myself.

My talk will be about Realtime Data Warehousing – it is an overview of reasons, techniques and pitfalls, but I do cover a lot of material in that hour. Of course, Change Data Capture (CDC) will be a major part of the talk; Oracle has so many options here including their recently acquired GoldenGate product set. As always, the slides will be here on the Rittman Mead site soon after I speak.

My colleague, Stewart Bryson has also had some recent thoughts about change data capture over on the TDWI group at LinkedIn.com (group membership needed); he was quite preceptive (and on the money, in my opinion) with his comment “I would hesitate to let technical limitations dictate user requirements. In today’s BI/DW market, there are very few technical limitations that cannot be solved one way or another.”

One of points I will make in my Realtime DW talk, and perhaps I need a few more slides to do it justice, is the need to profile the change you capture on the source system. Often there is a lot of “noise” that looks like change but you have no real interest in it at the data warehouse. Not all systems are “well behaved”; I have seen systems that always update a record even if nothing has changed and even systems that update each column as separate statement with its own commit.  Of course, even systems that don’t have those vices can still have columns that have no DW significance being updated and see those changes being filtered out on the data warehouse after we had already done a lot of work (processing, network bandwidth and the like) to get the data there.

The more I do this kind of work I feel there is a need to switch CDC on on the live source for a while and see the typical patten of change that occurs in a day, week, period whatever and then make decisions on how to handle this defensively downstream. Do we need to exclude certain columns that are just “noise”? What will be the impact of multiple, rapidly-occurring commits on how we handle SCD-2 dimensions? Of course we can predict what will see and come up with a proposed solution but the real source often has a few surprises up its sleeve – once a customer gave me a sequence of order statuses that an order passed through in its life-cycle except that on the actual source system the order sequence was not the same as their documentation and that would impact our reporting.

Posted 09 March 2010 † Peter Scott § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Hotsos 2010 – Day 2 – The conference begins

A 3:30 start, which gave me lots of time to work on my demos and by breakfast time at 7:30, I felt in a reasonable place (but not quite done yet) and headed down to eat ... wait for it ... some fruit! Then again, I'd eaten so little the previous day that I had to eat something.

First up was Gary Goodman opening the event and introducing Tom Kyte's keynote with :-

a) A video of Tom and Hotsos regular Patty, Disco Dancing to mark tomorrow night's Disco theme. Personally, I thought it was hilarious and I hope it gets posted online somewhere. I'm not sure everyone found it as funny, but it did the trick for me.

b) A gift of a custom set of poker chips because I believe Tom's a player (of poker, that is). Tom's keynote was about (looks for title in notes and can't find it) the mistakes we make *because* of our experience and our assumptions. It was thoroughly entertaining and kicked off with a quiz for four volunteer participants who had to answer 12 apparently simple questions very quickly. They were trick questions, of course ;-) Rather than me taking voluminous notes, I'm hoping that Tom might post the questions on his blog (hint, hint) even though they were meant to be answered quickly based on verbal questioning.

Oh, and I couldn't believe it when my phone started ringing, for someone who's normally exceptionally careful about that stuff. I had it on silent last night, missed a text from Alex G and so had taken it off silent. Clown! (In retrospect, this should have been a warning sign.)

There were tons of great examples of where clever people have gone spectacularly wrong through over-confidence. We're often wrong when we answer quickly based on our prior experience because things change. I suspect I sometimes frustrate colleagues by not giving the snappy answers they expect, but I know that Oracle stuff is often not as obvious as it seems at first sight. There was even a sighting of Martin Widlake's "Making Things Better Makes Things Worse"  but no name-check, Martin, so you're only *almost* famous ;-)

I particularly enjoyed the video I hadn't seen of Richard Feynmann talking about the uncomfortable state of confusion and feeling stupid. (With hindsight, why did I not see the warning signs ...)

Then I skipped two sessions I was looking forward to but, as I've said before, I need to take care of my own presenting business before I can enjoy and learn from other people's presentations. However, I bumped into a friend after Richard Foote's session and he thought it was amazing. My friends first trip to Hotsos is going well.

Sitting in my room, I was really happy with how the demos were looking, raring to go and went to iron my shirt. Damn, the iron wasn't working and I really didn't have time to wait for another to show up. No problem, though, because I always carry a special shirt that *really* doesn't need ironing - just hang it up in the bathroom with the shower on. (Another warning sign, though?)

I'm very superstitious about using any new kit for the first time, so I was still nervous about a couple of things with the demos

1) Performance, because I know I'd run them all weekend and have a new powerful laptop (more on that another time), but the demos are designed to hammer the machine. So I thought I'd disable everything I didn't need running.

2) Driving the projector because I'd never driven one with the new laptop. I arranged to check that my laptop would drive the projector ok. It seemed to, but one of the demos was behaving strangely. No time to investigate because Dan Norris needed the podium, so I decanted to Alex's Battle Against Any Guess presentation because we'd been discussing it, I know he was concerned about how it would go and wanted to show a little moral support.

In the event, he needn't have worried. Personally, I find his Russian accent all but impenetrable, particularly after we've had a few beers and are both shouting at each other, but I'm sure the feeling's mutual! But the fact that he had the room rolling about with laughter at regular intervals meant it had gone very well! I hope he still does plenty of technical presentations with lots of demos, but he proved he can do something a little more conceptual and message-driven. Better still, I'd been frantically trying to get my demos working at the back of the hall by re-enabling services I'd disabled and they started to work :-) I turned round to Cary Millsap who was hiding their too and dramatically mimed wiping the sweat away from my brow. Time to head back into the other room and watch the tail-end of Dan Norris' Database Machine presentation. I didn't see nearly enough and was completely pre-occupied by what was to come, so will need to catch up on the slides later.

Some interesting Q & A at the end which were slightly less interesting for me because my demos started playing up again! So, a room full of people, I'm rebooting my laptop, nothing is working and then, bang, it's time!

Whilst my presentation was originally part of this post, my review is so long-winded and personal, I've moved it to another post that people can choose to skip over! That way it doesn't detract from the good presentations I saw yesterday, such as Kevin Closson's "Ten Years After Y2K And We Still "Party Like It's 1999"".

Excellent, as always, and packed full of information, it also sort of tied up the way the day opened, albeit in a very different tone and style that things change. Kevin has the perspective of having been in the industry a long time, so he's seen the past, but also being able to see where we are now and where we're going, so he concentrated on a few of his pet subjects that I'm pretty sure you'll see cropping up on his blog in the near future but, to give you a taster, he talked about the merits of SMT on Nehalem EP chips for different workloads, which is something we'd been talking about at the opening reception. I'm pretty sure I can't disable it on my laptop to give it a try, but I might have a word with him about it anyway. He talked about Flash, Direct-attached storage, NFS, virtualisation and all that good stuff as always but because I missed the first 10 min for a much-needed break and couldn't read the slides because I forgot my glasses, I'm going to have to try to hit on him for a copy of his slides later! Oh, and I was wondering why the presentation was well attended but not packed. I'd forgotten Tom Kyte was speaking next door. I was happy with my choice.

I did have one more presentation scheduled, to see the first of Kerry Osborne's but I was pretty low at this stage and sleep deprivation was kicking in, so I headed back to my room to catch up with some blogging and tweeting (thanks for the support) and then it was time for dinner with the Oak Table crew. Very nice it was, too, hats off to Marco and Carol for choosing that place, the company of all and for Carol's consistently top-notch organisation and geek-ferrying. Nice big lump of beautiful steak, some chips and a beer. That's more like it! A few more drinks back at the bar but I made my excuses and left at 11:30 despite some vain attempts at hypnotising me into staying! ;-)

Oh, but the weather was still rubbish all day :-(

Regardless of everything that happened yesterday, I now have 3 days of no responsibility and can just learn, socialise, eat and perhaps sleep a bit more. I woke up at 3:30 again this morning, but turned over and managed another 2 hours. Bliss!
Posted 08 March 2010 † Doug Burns § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Hotsos 2010 – Day 1.79 – Friends show up

Hard at work preparing for my presentation yesterday until it got nearer to 5pm and people started coming in on their flights. First up was Kevin Closson, who looked a somewhat sad sight (by his usual standards), clutching a bag from a PC store containing what he hoped would be the crucial bit of software that would help him solve his over-written MBR. I waited for him in the bar and discovered Mark Bobac had Ubuntu Live on a USB stick. I suppose I could have gone and told Kevin, but I knew he'd be down imminently ;-)

It was also a brilliant experience to bump into Paul Matuszyk again, who I worked with briefly 4 years ago at Sky. This is his first conference, largely inspired by a set of Symposium 2006 notes I gave him and my encouragement so it was a) great to see him again and b) pleasing when I saw him coming out of Richard Foote's presentation, blown away by how good it was. I think he's already decided it was a good decision ;-)

Then it was the usual suspects, the usual drinking and some chat with KC, who always has smart stuff to say. In amongst that, I liked him pointing out that my new iCore 7 laptop is probably what they used to euphemistically call a 'Portable' computer. He's not wrong there ;-)

Not too late to bed and really looking forward to the first day of the conference and my presentation.
Posted 08 March 2010 † Doug Burns § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Is Simple Viable In Enterprise Land?

The tradeoff between simplicity and features has been around for ages, but it was hotly debated on the web by two of the most forward thinking software luminaries: Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky.  Their back and forth debate hit a crescendo last year around the time I attended the wonderful Business of Software conference put on by Spolsky.

The general notion is that the 37 Signals crew sees simple designs as not only better for users, but better for the product as well.  Doing less means less code, less bugs, less training and among other things, a more focused clear experience.  They advocate having a real point of view about your application and driving it from your own compass.  Customers can ask for things, and they may get em, but not just because they asked and the tie goes to 37 Signals.

There is a lot to like in this model and I have always been a huge 37 Signals fan.  Through their blog and book, I have learned many new things and validated some things I already figured out.  No doubt they have helped countless others as well.  Incidentally, the same can be said of Joel and his books.  These are smart, experienced people.

Joel and his product FogBugz would of course agree that simple is better.  The issue arises when customers actually want something you don’t provide and they have options.  See in the world of no competition life is easy.  If you are the only car maker and you don’t have cupholders, big deal.  People still need a car and you are the only game in town.  Life is substantially different if you are an email provider who doesn’t allow attachments.  You can be sure your customers are heading elsewhere.

But wait, adding attachments means another icon or label.   More code.  Perhaps a bit of training and potential confusion over how the feature works.  Over time the storage of big files may me performance hit or storage issues (for you or the customer).  What about maximum file sizes?  You have to document that limitation and probably have some code to check and provide error messages.  Should pricing change in this model?  Hmm, this gets complex fast.  Again, simple is so smart because software is so hard.

As you can see the rubber meets the road when you have two things: (1) unmet needs and (2) viable alternatives.  Where there is profit, competition soon shows up.  Whether you like it or not you are being compared.  Even if it doesn’t matter to you, it matters to them.  How do you decide what is a fair price to pay for a bar of soap or a burrito?   You compare.

The trick is to be aware of competition, but not to let it drive you.  I have written on this in the past.  There are always alternatives (sometimes custom coded) and there are always features asked for that you don’t have.

IHMO you cannot ignore either missing features or competition in enterprise software.  However, this does not mean you need to add every feature asked for or copy your competition.  There are better ways, but first, let’s look at the big three drivers of scope issues in big business software: (1) Analysts, (2) Complexity and (3) Stakeholders.

(1) Analysts are paid to add more, ever complex/advanced features to their latest must have list.  Customers read this and ask vendors if they do it.  Vendors need to be positioned well in the latest magic grapefruit so they build away.

(2) This stuff is just complex.  Approvals, workflow, audit trails, internationalization, integration, and more make it tough.  Dealing with all these situations causes complexity.

(3) Very rarely is there one “buyer”.  The “stakeholders”.  Many times cross functional with different ideas on features and priorities.  The less people involved, the easier the decision making, but it just isn’t reality most of the times.  It is why you have countless sales books written about this exact topic.

So what if you take a stand?  You listen to these ideas and politely state “we view payables or opportunity management or recruiting a bit differently”.  “We know what is best”.  “We understand your idea and see that you might think it is important, but we don’t think it fits with our perspective”.  “We like our product as it is and we are the experts.”

You can imagine how that would go with the sales team, or the analyst relations crew, or your own management.  Why?  Because saying “no” is the death of the sale. The secret is to make sure that saying “yes” isn’t the death of the product experience.

The reason this fascinates me is that I see both sides of the argument as valid having built and run an internal social network for a number of years and having run product teams in the past.  If you go ultra simple you inevitably limit your own business.  If you go for the checkbox approach you get a very difficult to use product that looks good on an RFP.

Additionally, you end up creating a place for small competition who does one thing really well to come in.  Incidentally, pride comes in as well.  No one is proud of a product they have to apologize for – this has to be avoided as well.

Like most things in life, black and white views are great for marketing, but nothing is ever that simple.  Here is where I ended up (doesn’t mean it is right, just my latest thought).

1. Cut Corners (cases): Make a feature work hard to be in a release.  It should be something customers really need and something you agree with as a product manager.  I have seen way too many things in products because someone, somewhere said something.  This cannot happen.  Any chance of simple ends with that type of process.  This is your first gate.

2. Think holistically. Once something makes it into scope you now need to think about both design of the feature and impact on the system (most ignore this part).  The real issue with new features is when it messes up something else.  You have to look at the whole product and be willing to change things dramatically if need be.  Otherwise you’ll have a confusing house of cards.  Done right, a new feature may even add simplicity if it replaces something that was not quite right beforehand.  Look for these opportunities.

3. Focus on Goals not Features. Users love to provide feedback in terms of features.  The key is to listen to the intent. The problem. What are they trying to do?  Users are not the best people to design your feature, you are.  They are however very important and you need to listen.  So listen, but when you understand the need see how you can best meet it.  It may be they nailed it, but there may also be a more appropriate answer.  Done well, this solves the sales issue.  Being a product manager does not mean you are collecting requests unvetted.

4. SKU v Over Bloat. I favor new skus over a bigger single product.  More features leads to more code that is harder to move and difficult to market.  Try explaining to a friend the features of outlook or excel.  Now explain the key features of a to do list or twitter.  Different conversations.

The art is finding the natural break points.  The joints.  When you do, make sure they work well together.  I like point solutions that naturally fit.  I think it is a model that scales both in simplicity and sales.  Incidentally, the iphone app model so popular now is playing this game.

The tough thing is that there are some really successful products (like Outlook) which do a ton of stuff.  Wouldn’t we all like to fail like that?  Then we look at Twitter and think how simple it is and how well they have done.  But I think pointing to these high water marks is less than helpful.  Correlation is not causation.  Microsoft wins for a lot of reasons and maybe those reasons just overpower the feature bloat via brute force.  In fact MSFT has recognized their challenges here with their UI revamp recently in Office.  And Twitter works, but in that “buying cycle” there is no rfp, no analyst, no stakeholders – just you.  You like it, use it.  If tomorrow you hate it, stop using it.  Life behind the firewall is just not that idyllic.

In the end, I find both arguments have valid points.  Simple is smart for a lot of reasons and should be seen as a design goal.  Making sales easy is also the right answer or else you won’t have much of a future.  Being able to say “yes” to customers is a wonderful feeling, but there is a balance here that should not be ignored over a certain dogma.  The art is in the middle and it is why being a product manager is so fun.

Enterprise software can stand for something.  It can have an appropriately simple and elegant user experience.  It can in fact have users who delight in its use and it can be explained clearly to the target users.  Too often we give ourselves a free pass in these areas and this is the biggest challenge – our own standards and a sense that good enough is definitely not good enough should be our guide.

PaulPossibly Related Posts:

Posted 08 March 2010 † Paul § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °