Earlier this year I spoke at a conference in Madrid where Ventana research unveiled research that showed, amongst other things, that companies that rely heavily on spreadsheets take several days longer to close their financial books each month than those that do not.  This makes sense.  Excel is the analyst tool of choice, but its very ease of use presents issues.  It is not easy to document well, and when I was at Shell we had a whole team providing spreadsheet auditing and design services.  For some of the very complex financial or other models that end up being developed it turns out to be very difficult to make sense of a model when someone moves on.  In the IT world we are used to dealing with support issues and at least in theory have plenty of experience with documentation standards and debugging tools.  As we all know, even in mature systems the documentation can be a nightmare, but imagine how much worse it is in Excel when you are asked to take over a thousand line Excel spreadsheet where all the cell formulae use the default grid references e.g. “=Sum(c3:c27)”.  Instead you can use the facilities in Excel to assign meangingful names to cells e.g. this would become something like “=Sum(expenses)”, which is a lot easier to figure out, but how many peopel do this?   Indeed when audits of spreadsheet models were carried out then errors were frequently found, which is worrying given the kinds of decisions being taken that rely on these models. An article this week explains how eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) offers the prospect of some relief since it defines tags which are independent of cell location. By separating the definition of the data from its cell-specific information it becomes easier to keep track of things, and easier to combine worksheets from multiple sources.  Whilst this is a welcome development I suspect that there is a long, uphill climb involved since the problem comes down to people rather than technology.  It took a long hard struggle to get programmers to (sometimes) document things properly, and I cannot see most finance or other end-users really caring enough.  It is always quicker to use things like cell references rather than proper names, for example, and so it will always be tempting to do so and not worry too much that your pretty model is almost incomprehensible to anyone else.  

It will be interesting to see whether regulators take a firmer view of things over time, since in my experience the quality of spreadsheet models is distinctly patchy.  Insisting on proper audits of spreadsheets used for serious purposes (e.g. statutory accounts, investment decisions) would be a start.  I suspect that most companies have little idea of just what a can of worms they are relying on for the numbers on which they make their decisions. 

On the 13th and 14th of September there was a business intelligence forum in London run by a fairly new organisation called “Obis Omni” (no, I don’t know what it means either). I was a speaker at the event, which was quite well attended given that it is a rather new conference.  The customer attendees seemed to be what one was billed i.e. people really involved in BI projects (some events seem to struggle to keep focus), and the conference seemed generally very successful based on the conversations that I had with assorted attendees.  

What was rather endearing and a little scary was the sheer efficiency of the conference administration. The event ran very tightly to time, and there seemed to be armies of helpers to guide you around, all rather disturbingly fitted out with communication devices in their ears just like those of Agent Smith in the Matrix. Indeed the only criticism would be that they were a little over-enthusiastic at times.  After my talk I was speaking to a delegate in the corridor, when one of the Agent Smith types came up, interrupted oiur conversation and said “you are due to attend session X now Ms Jones, please come along”.  This wasn’t the speaker who was late you understand, just a delegate.  God forbid that an unauthorised corridor conversation should take place during session time.  The delegate looked as stunned as I was and was led meekly away to her session without putting up a fight. 

I can never see this kind of thing catching on in Italy or Spain.  At the ETRE conference the tragically mistitled “organisers” struggle to keep sessions within half a day of schedule, and generally mooch around in a resigned if amiable state of chaos.  Here an eerie calm was the order of the day (come to think of it, I never did see that delegate again…)

The pre-conference administration and exhibit set up was as spookily efficient as everything else, with briefings just after dawn for exhibtors and, it has to be said, nicely set out booths with careful traffic flow.  I even had a new experience of having my slides lightly censored.  My crime was using a (fully credited) Bloor slide to show an overview of the market, and a chart which listed several relational databases in one of the bullets.  Apparently this violated rule 438 subparagraph (c) in the conference rulebook about vendor promotion.  Well, I have nothing to do with Oracle, IBM etc, and just put them in a list as examples, so I am a little hazy as to how exactly this was ”promotion” (DB2 is a database, shock horror), but the offending slides were duly excised from the presentation, and probably ceremonially burnt as well.  I actually think it is quite admirable that they would go through the slides and try to ensure there were no blatant vendor sales pitches, but this did seem just a tad over-zealous.

Anyway, enough teasing.  I would much rather that an event ran with military efficiency than collapsed in a shambolic heap, so congratulations to the organisers for arranging such a slick conference.  If only they could be persuaded to take over the British railway system….

I’m sure you have received by now many plausible looking emails from assorted banks, many of which you do not have an account with, saying something like: “we need to update some information due to a possible security breach: please click here and give us your details so we can suck all the money out of your account you dimwit”.  Sometimes the phrasing is a little different, especially at the end, but you get the general idea.  I must admit the first time I saw one of these I thought for several seconds before hitting the delete key, but now they are ten a penny and we all ignore them in the same way we ignore unsolicited emails saying “I love you; please click on this attachment to find out more, sucker”.

With this in mind I have been wondering when the next enterprising criminal would raise the bar on phishing emails of this type and manage to construct something original and plausible, tempting yet authoritative.  E-criminals and the authorities are a little like cheetahs and gazelles, locked in a never-ending battle of wits, so what is the next turn of speed that phishing can offer?

I am pleased to declare that it was not the email I just received, purportedly from “Citibank”.  The first clue was the title was “Citibank Account Informations” (sic).  Banks have their flaws, but they usually manage to master basic spelling in the title of their communications - “informations”?  The next clue that this could possibly be less than legitimate was that instead of taking the minimal trouble of copying something like a Citibank logo from their web page, which let’s face it takes about five seconds, these jokers managed no logo and an email entirely with a yellow background, rather than the Citibank corporate blue and white.

The text itself declares that “Citibank account is about to expire”.  Not quite English either, but also guys: expire?  Bank accounts may do many things, have terms and conditions changed, interest rates updated etc, but one thing that they never, ever do is expire.  I can just see the bank advertising campaign for one of these now: “open an account with us, give us your money, but don’t wait too long before accessing it as it will expire; sorry”.  Even if they said it really quickly as they do at the end of radio adverts I think this would be hard to pull off.  

The email concludes with two lines of text which contain a further two grammatical errors and a couple of capital letters used incorrectly.

Whatever happened to criminal ingenuity?  It makes me positively misty eyed about Nigerian 419 scam letters, where at least you don’t expect the English to be perfect.  Maybe they have started to outsource these scam emails but are having teething troubles with quality control?

I came across a really inspired blog the other day which I would highly recommend that you read.  The Cranky Product Manager is written by an anonymous American product manager at a software company.  There are several fine aspects to the blog, not least of which is that it is well written (let’s face it, too many blogs out there look like they were written by a dyslexic 12 year old).  However the best aspect is that her anonymity enables her to be delightfully rude about many aspects of the merry go round that is the software industry.  Her blog “Streetwalkers in Disguise” is a delightful example of this.

Those who have worked for some time in the software industry will have many a wry smile at the trials and tribulations of the Cranky PM, whose writing clearly reflects the very realities of product management, rather than some ultra-spun anodyne story that is so often fed to eager journalists as an “insider” story but is just clever PR.  

As someone who wades through more blogs than I care to admit to, I wish more blogs were like this one.

Another attempt at reforming the US patent system is rumbling its way through the US legislature.  One sensible reform is to make patent claims valid only from the date the application is filed, unlikely the current lunacy (unique to the US) which makes it valid from whenever the inventor claims he or she invented it (good luck verifying that).

More controversially, the draft senate bill looks at restricting the value of compensation that can be claimed in case of infringement to the “novel and non obvious” value of a product, rather than its overall value.  This will irritate genuine patent holders and ambulance chasing patent attorneys alike, while cheering up technology firms that violate patents.  A good overview of the legislation can be found on Wikipedia.

It seems to me that tinkering around at the edges of the system is rather like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.  The US patent office needs more root and branch reform to restore its reputation following a series of fiascos in recent years.  In my limited personal experience of the US patent office the system seemed very slow (eight years to get our patent) and we dealt with with patent assessors that seemed barely able to communicate at all, never mind bringing relevant knowledge or perspective.  We got there in the end, but it was an agonising process, and a lot more painful than the UK patent equivalent (which was not exactly a racy process either at five years before being granted).

Given how important intellectual property is, it would seem important to improve the standard of patent reviewers and improve the process itself to avoid some of the crazy patents that have been granted in recent years.  The new legislation does nothing to address this core issue.

It is a big day for me today, as I have decided to move from Kalido to pursue other interests. Kalido has come a long way since I encountered some original generic modeling research at Shell in 1996 that I could see had massive potential to provide Shell with integrated information from across the world throughout business change. After success at Shell with the software, I set up a business unit to commercialize Kalido, resulting in Kalido being set up as an independent company in 2001, and, with the backing of major venture capitalists, subsequently spun off from Shell in 2003. By this time it was clear that the next phase of growth for the company was to become successful in the US market, the largest in the world, and as I am based in the UK, I handed over the reins of CEO, and assumed the role of customer champion, company spokesperson and chief strategist. There has been no shortage of projects to work on, and I have thoroughly enjoyed continuing to raise the public profile of Kalido, but now that a new CEO – Bill Hewitt - has come on board to take the company to its next level of growth, I felt it was the right time for me to move on. Bill Hewitt has exactly the right background in enterprise software to take the company to the great commercial success that it deserves.

I have immensely enjoyed building Kalido up from an idea to a company with tremendous potential, and I look forward to seeing its continuing success. It has been an exhilarating experience for me, above all because I have had the privilege of working with a group of highly talented and committed individuals. It has been an immense pleasure to see so many examples of real business benefit in customer projects that have deployed Kalido in over 100 countries. The success that the company has enjoyed so far has been based on a passion for customer success and the high quality of its people, and is something I am extremely proud to have been associated with.

I intend to initially do some independent consulting and do a little writing. This blog, of course, will live on!

For some time I have been involved with an EU project that wrapped up last week in Brussels. With the unpromising name Sun&Sup it tried to identify the issues that hold back hi-tech start-ups in Europe, and to make recommendations that could improve the current situation. The project invited periodic input from selected hi-tech start-up companies across the EU (along with various service providers to start-ups) and I represented the UK on this project.

Make no mistake that there is a problem: once you get beyond SAP, Business Objects and Sage you will be hard pressed to name a large European software company. Israel has done a better job than the combined resources of Europe, with companies like Check Point Software, Amdocs, Mercury Interactive and many others. Israel has the second highest ranking for VC investment, and even in absolute terms has the second highest number of start-ups after the USA, yet it has a population of just over 6 million. There are many reasons for Europe’s hi-tech malaise, and few easy answers. The Sun&Sup project tried to deliver some very low-key, pragmatic services in pilot form, such as a self-help network of companies wishing to expand across borders, an expert system to help companies assess their business plans, a mentoring program to provide non-executive directors for start-ups, amongst others. Its most ambitious recommendation was to lobby to replicate the US system in government procurement, which sets aside USD 100 billion of government spending for small companies. European government procurement favour large companies: 50% of economic activity in Europe is from SMEs, yet only 30% of government spending is with SMEs. Of course opening up more government business to SMEs would not be a panacea, but it would help, as the successful federal Small Business Act has demonstrated for many years.

The highlight of the wrap-up session of the project in Brussels was to hear the French Trade minister Christine Lagarde making an eloquent case for the need for change in public procurement. It was indeed refreshing to an Anglo-Saxon ear to hear a small business initiative being championed by a French minister. Ms Lagarde was an extremely impressive speaker, yet clearly faced entrenched opposition from the Commission and indeed from several member countries in trying to open up public procurement. Indeed, from the way that several of the modest Sun&Sup initiatives ended up being buried or transferred to other EU projects, it seemed clear that the lack of high-tech competitiveness in Europe is something that will remain the subject of much hand-wringing for a long time to come.

Those who are getting on a bit (like me) may recall John Cleese’s character in the 1986 movie Clockwise, who was obsessed with punctuality. I am less neurotic, but what does distress me is when conference organizers let their schedule slip due to speaker overruns. I speak regulalrly at conferences, and this is a recurring problem. At a conference in Madrid a few weeks ago they managed to be well over an hour behind schedule by the time they resumed the afternoon session, while the otherwise very useful ETRE conferences are famed for their “flexible” schedule. At a large conference this is beyond just irritating, as you scramble to find speaker tracks in different rooms, all of which may be running to varying degrees behind schedule and starting to overlap.

This poor timekeeping is depressingly normal at conferences, which makes it all the nicer when you see how it should be done. I spoke yesterday at the IDC Business Performance Conference in London, which had an ambitious looking 14 speakers and two panels squeezed into a single day. If this was ETRE they would have barely been halfway through by dinner time, yet the IDC line-up ran almost precisely to time throughout the day. It was achieved by the simple device of having a clock in front of speaker podium ticking away a countdown, so making it speakers very visibly aware of the time they had left. I recall a similar device when I spoke at a Citigroup conference in New York a couple of years ago, which also ran like clockwork.

The conference was a case study in competent organization, with good pre-event arrangements, an audio run-through for each speaker on site, and speaker evaluation forms (some conferences don’t even bother with this). The attendees actually bore a distinct resemblance to those promised, both in quality and number; recently some conference organizers seem have had all the integrity of estate agents when quoting expected numbers. The day itself featured some interesting case studies (Glaxo, Royal Bank of Scotland, Royal Sun Alliance, Comet) and a line-up of other speakers who mostly managed to avoid shamelessly plugging their own products and services (mostly). Even the lunch time buffet was edible.

In terms of memorable points, it seems that the worlds of structured and unstructured data are as far part as ever based on the case studies, whatever vendor hype says to the contrary. Data volumes in general continue to rise, while the advent of RFID presents new opportunities and challenges for BI vendors. RFID generates an avalanche of raw data, and a presenter working with early projects in this area reckoned that vendors were completely unable to take advantage of RFID so far. Common themes of successful projects were around the need for active business sponsorship and involvement in projects, the need for data governance and stewardship and for iterative approaches giving incremental and early results. Specific technologies were mostly (refreshingly) in the background in most of the speeches, though the gentleman from Lucent seemed not to have got the memo to sponsor speakers about not delivering direct sales pitches. With Steve Gallagher from Accenture reckoning that BI skills were getting hard to find, even in Bangalore, it would suggest that performance management is moving up the business agenda.

Well done to Nick White of IDC for steering the day through so successfully. If only all conferences ran like this.

I write this column using some software called Blogger, which is fairly simple to use but is rather limited in some ways, so I am probably going to switch to a more flexible blog editor soon. However one cause of constant entertainment is the Blogger spell check function, which almost makes the thing worthwhile. My typing is erratic at best, so I frequently encounter the Blogger spell checker. At first I found its eccentric suggestions annoying, or even inept, but now I find that they have a certain charm of their own. It takes me back to the early days of word processing, when spell checkers were crude, and their alternative suggestions for one’s typographical errors were sometimes wildly inappropriate. Blogger’s spell checker recalls that era, as it presents sometimes surreal suggestions for what to a human eye is a pretty easy mistake to spot. For example, if you misspell:

“management” as “managemnet”

then you are presented with two alternatives. Its best guess is “mincemeat”, which is somehow appropriate in a couple of cases of managers I can recall, but not really a very likely error. Its only other attempt is “mankind”. This is not an isolated case. If you write about federated databases then it is endearing to see the typo:

“federaion” have the two alternatives: “bedroom” or “veteran”

proposed by the beastie. “Bedroom”? I would love to understand the algorithm that came up with that one. I was also impressed by:

“peformance”

Instead of the pretty obvious “performance” it rather sweetly suggests “peppermints”.

However my favorite is that if you type “Blogger” as a phrase then not only does it not recognize it. The term “blog” also sadly is a complete mystery to it, which might seem an omission given that it is intended as a spell checker for, er, blogs, or perhaps “blocs” as the spell checker so helpfully proposes. For “blogger”then it suggests the wonderfully ironic:

“blocker”

How true, how true. I would be interested to hear of your worst spell check horror, or indeed of a spell checker whose ineptness rival Blogger’s. Any offers?

Joshua Greenbaum writes a thoughtful piece on the clash of the “new media” (blogs, wikis etc) with the mainstream media. He correctly concludes that revolutions rarely go in the directions that are originally intended, and he comes down on the side of the mainstream media camp, who he predicts will subsume the newer media. I agree with his analysis. It is exciting to see new content appearing in blogs on many subjects, but if you actually want to know whether something is true you’d be advised to look at the BBC or CNN. It is positive that the barriers to entry to creating content have dropped away, but media brands will be critical in ensuring reliable, truthful content, as distinct from individuals just spouting off on their latest hobbyhorses.

In fact very few industries have been really demolished by the internet. I heard that there are 10% less people working as travel agents than a few years ago, but there aren’t too many others that spring to mind. Even that despised breed, realtors (estate agents in the UK) who essentially just control privileged information, are still very much in business. If the internet couldn’t displace them, what chance does it have with journalists?