Blueprint scores again with the next installment of its Gary the Snowman series. See the fully video card here.

I had a note from a break-out session I led at defrag a few months ago that read "database is back".  It was by far the biggest take away from the two-day conference for me.  While a significant infrastructure has developed around simplifying and virtualizing pretty much every aspect of the technology stack, the common denominator to all NextGenWeb, Web 2.0, social networking, aspiring platform companies is the database.  And while the other elements of the technology stack are getting all of the fanfare the very unsexy database that back-ends all of this great new stuff is the real hero.  After all, many of the companies in the categories I mention above are really just fancy front-ends to a large.  This presents problems for companies that are developing new services since there are very few options for lightweight databases and essentially no options for virtualizing these databases (at least nothing very robust and scalable).  For the most part they’re stuck handling the set-up, implementation and maintenance of this technology themselves.  The result is greater cost, more headaches and an inability to quickly scale if their business is successful.

The post I intended to write after the conference was going to point this out and push for a forward thinking company to come up with a solution.  Procrastinate for a few weeks and that’s just what happens (minus the original blog post).  Amazon today is releasing a limited beta of SimpleDB – a cloud based database to compliment its S2 and EC2 offerings.  From the Amazon site: "This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud."  The addition of SimpleDB makes the Amazon stack an unbelievably compelling value.

This is great news for web companies looking to buy all of their infrastructure by the drink and move infrastructure costs from upfront CapEx to more manageable operational expense.  Not to mention the added ability to quickly scale up or down depending on success.  Sure – eventually when they’re successful many companies will find it cheaper (and operational expedient) to manage their own infrastructure.  Eventually . . .

See also:

TechCrunch article on the announcement

GigaOm’s take

Andy Blackstone had a great comment to my post yesterday on Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article about explicit behavior (in the case of the article, doctors using checklists). I’ve edited the comment slightly for clarity.

An important concept in the article is that the checklists are not aimed at a specific condition but at an overall process in the ICU. One of the objections I often encounter in my consulting practice is “my business is different” – I’d contend that at the process level that’s most often not true. The resistance to adopting these checklists often comes from doctors that think the “art of medicine” is being threatened by the regimen of the checklist. In my practice, I see sales managers and salespeople with the same objection. In fact, as the article states, it is the reduction of the routine aspects of the process to the rigors of the checklists that enables the art to emerge. Finally, I was struck by the feeling of the doctors in the ICU that there was just no time available in the midst of their chaotic day to deal with checklists – a reaction I’ve seen in lots of business managers as well. This is a major barrier to implementing any new business process. The success of checklists in the ICU in not only reducing accidents, deaths, and costs, but in making the doctors time efficient, can be seen as new business processes are implemented as well.

It’s the perfect lead in to some thoughts about what’s wrong with many sales organizations – a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while). Sales, in my experience, is significantly more scientific than people typically give it credit for. And because people (sales professionals, CEOs, boards) don’t always see sales that way, they let slide behavior that is counterproductive to the overall goals of the organization (i.e., to sell more and – importantly – to sell with increasing efficiency and predictability). Specifically, the lack of a detailed and well documented process for sales results in:

• Salespeople wasting huge amounts of time on deals that are hopeless, because there’s no enforced checklist that keeps them from continuing to pursue opportunities where essential events aren’t being checked off
• Sales cycles that languish while salespeople have “good meetings” instead of checking off the next task on the sales process checklist
• Executive management, sales management, and BOD members searching for the magician that will improve the “black magic” sales situation instead of incorporating and enforcing process that ensures success independent of superstar performance
• Turnover in the sales organization but without improved performance
• A lack of predictability in sales performance (lumpy and generally random sales results)
• A stagnant pipeline – sales people can’t handle as many deals as they should be because they’re spending too much time on deals they shouldn’t be working on and the deals themselves take longer than they should because they’re not actually being pushed through a real process
• “Fuzzy” pipeline reviews (where every deal has a story associated with it, but where the basic questions of where the deal stands are never really answered)

   

High performing sales organizations have real rigor in their process and religiously enforce that rigor from qualifying leads, to initial contacts, to how they move a prospect through their pipeline to an extremely detailed “closing” list that guides an organization through the final stages of each close. They use this rigor to determine which leads to follow up on, what prospects are real, and what steps remain to a sale for each and every potential customer. They quickly put prospects onto a hold list when they don’t meet specific near-term buying criteria and they generally have a good view of what’s possible at the end of each quarter because they know exactly what steps remain for each prospective customer, who needs to sign off on what, and how they will (or will not) be able to make that happen in a timely fashion. Pipeline reviews are focused around where a prospect is in the sales process and are crisp reviews of each account (a few minutes is more than enough time to cover an account at a high level – spending more time than that is either wasting time or a sign that the “story” is covering up the lack of real progress or understanding of that account). Every sales person (not to mention the VP and CEO) can take you through the stages of an account, the “[insert company name] way of selling”, and the closing process. In short, the entire company is on the same page around what it takes to turn a prospect into a customer.

All of this isn’t to suggest that sales as a discipline and sales people as practitioners of that discipline don’t possess skills that range far beyond the ability to check items off a list. To the contrary, skilled sales people are extremely nuanced in their ability to understand the buying patterns of their prospects, navigate the internal landscapes of customers and, of course, effectively convey the value proposition of the product they are selling. But sales people are human and – like doctors in an ICU – benefit from the rigor and oversight that is provided by process.

Thanks to Andy for sharing his thoughts on this subject with me in both his comment and in email (which I borrowed from liberally in writing this post). Head to his site to see more about the sales process work he does at Blackstone Associates.

For a fun diversion take a look at Cracked.com‘s list of “The 10 Most Terrifyingly Inspirational 80’s Songs“. Don’t know that Danger Zone or You’re the Best (Joe Esposito?!?) would be on my personal list. And how can you possibly leave out Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is (which, in a true highlight of my life, I was able to see performed live by Foreigner about 5 feet from the stage at a conference I was attending)? For that matter, how can Wanted (Dead or Alive)] not be at the top of the list – it blows the rest of the group away without a doubt!

Of course there will be disagreements about this sort of thing (why else put out a top 10 list?) – but the trip down memory lane is a fun one.

Be sure to read the article itself – it’s hilarious: “There are two kinds of people in this world: People who love Journey ironically and people who love Journey genuinely.” or my personal favorite: [Wanted (Dead or Alive)] was written in that small window of the ’80s when a blue collar steelworker from New Jersey with a terminal case of hockey hair could write songs about being a cowboy and be taken seriously.”

Enjoy!

My partner and friend Heidi Roizen has just gone public with her new venture. No – it’s not another tech start-up.  It’s Skinny Songs – a collection of music that she wrote and produced as a soundtrack to inspire those trying to lose weight.  Its part country, part rock, all attitude and extremely catchy (there are sample tracks on the site linked to above – my personal favorite is I think I’ll go to Saks).

Heidi joked that she’s going to have to start wearing all black with lots of bling and air-kissing her friends now that she’s a media mogul.  In all seriousness, however, I’ve watched how hard Heidi has worked on this project over the summer and through the fall.  It’s clearly more than a business for her.  Like all great entrepreneurs she has extraordinary passion for what she’s doing – it’s been great to watch!

For more on the SkinnySongs story check out this Forbes article that describes how the project came about.

Someone asked me today if I use IM any more – the answer is a resounding NO. Make that NO WAY. I used to think that IM was useful for short conversations but have completely changed my view on it and dropped using it altogether about 18 months ago. Here are some of my reasons for jumping off the bandwagon:

• As the number of connected devices I use increases, it became harder to keep my ‘status’ up to date. At any given moment I have at least one laptop online (sometimes two), my office tower and a mobile device. With my IM client on each of these, 1) it always looked like I was online somewhere and 2) I seemed to be locked into some kind of display algorithm where conversations would apparently be randomly rotated from device to another.
• I like the phone. Like many people, I was using IM to replace just picking up the phone and having a quick conversation. For something that should be done by text, I prefer email (see below) and for a real conversation I prefer talking live. IM was the unhappy medium between the two which turned out to be unsatisfying for either.
• I don’t need yet another interruption. While I freely admit that I’m an easy target to interrupt, IM is a little too in my face.
  
• There are plenty of other ways to get my attention quickly. If I’m on IM, I’m on email. If I’m on IM, I can be reached directly through Twitter. Plus there’s always the phone, or Skype if you insist on something that has a little more technology appeal.
  

‘Nuff said…

You know your software has problems when you have to offer a tool like the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit. The WSPBTK, like its name suggests, stops Windows Update from automatically installing new service packs (and presumably entering into the endless Vista shut-down cycle in the process). Brilliant!

Hat tip to Ross for the pointer.

Atul Gawande has an outstanding article in this week’s New Yorker entitled “The Checklist” (full article available) that describes how explicitly defining the steps in complex processes (and then following those steps religiously) significantly reduces errors in certain intensive care procedures. Creating explicit checklists of steps for common ICU procedures resulted in far fewer infections and other complications and an unbelievable amount of money and time saved (not to mention the number of deaths averted). It’s truly mind boggling and a great example of Occam’s Paradox, which I wrote about a few years ago on this blog (for those of you who don’t want to link through, Occam’s Paradox is the idea that while the “challenges we face in life and business [may often be] complex – the solution to those challenges generally are not”). It’s a reminder that in many cases making behavior explicit rather than relying on memory, intuition or guess work ultimately saves time and results in greater accuracy. As the article point out, airplane pilots figured this out a long time ago. Doctors are apparently just waking up to the idea. Perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about it.

Facebook trying to co-opt the web into Facebook highlights for me how backwards the social networking world is today. I’m a fan of the platform idea, but the more I think about this, the more I come to the conclusion that the world already has the greatest platform yet developed at its fingertips – the Web itself. I understand why Facebook is trying to enable the reporting of external content all over their site but what would really be great is if rather than trying to port the net into my social network, my social network extended onto the net. When I’m in Facebook, I don’t really care that much if Brad just bought Book A or if Chris just purchased movie tickets. When I really care is when I’m on Amazon looking for my next read or when I’m at Fandango about to buy tickets to see a film. More generally, when I hit a site, I’d love to know who else I know who has been there, where they surfed to afterwards and what other related sites I should be checking out based on the behavior of my network. When I’m on a blog, I’d love to see who I know who has left comments, how they’ve rated the content and if I’m reading something written by someone that’s a few degrees of separation from someone I know. I’d like all of my networks (my contacts, my LinkedIn connections, my Facebook friends, etc.) to be a part of this extension of the web and for it to inform and enhance my surfing.

Adaptive Blue is starting to cover some of this with their Blue Organizer. So is me.dium with social browsing and SocialThing with its network of networks. Now we just need to bring it all together. . .

The great thing about having a bunch of widgets on my blog is that every time my site slows down I have my choice of people to blame. Shame on me for having so many widgets, I guess, but really – there has to be a better way of managing this.

From start to finish, the experience of inserting a widget on my blog is unsatisfying. I have to configure each separately (so it’s hard to make them consistent in look and feel); I have to manually insert the javascript on my blog; to change attributes or location of the widget I have to mess around with the code again or have to go back to the site where I created the widget in the first place; I can’t create a library of widgets and turn them on and off at will; and my widgets are constantly breaking something on my site (apologies for those using my Lijit search last week, which I managed to inadvertently disable when I was moving a few things around on my sidebars). And because I use advanced templates in Typepad everything that’s designed to make at least some of this easier doesn’t work.

On top of all of this, since pages load sequentially, if I have a slow widget or two everything comes to a crawl (and when I say “if”, I mean “when . . . daily”). This isn’t how the world should work. How about someone developing a CDN for widgets? I’m imaging a widget distribution system that manages the calls back to the widget creators, cashes the appropriate material, allows for better compatibility across browsers and platforms and manages the page loading in a more intelligent fashion (ideally all of my content should load first, then the internal links such as my recent posts, and lastly, all the other stuff I’ve littered the page with – although I understand that what I’m describing won’t be able to do this entirely). This same system could also handle the creation of widgets, streamline how I turn them on or off, how I move them around my site and when they are displayed (i.e., I could rotate them if I wanted to or vary their display based on post topic or blog category). This system would be the single place that my blog called back to in order to render all third party content. If a widget wasn’t loading properly, they could just skip it and move on to the next one without holding up the loading process. They’d also be in a better position to architect a network more suitable for this type of content distribution (since most widgets are created to extend content where the widget creator isn’t particularly focused on their distribution network once their content is in place).

We’ve been talking about variants of this in the Boulder tech crowd for months – let’s get on it!