When customers want a product roadmap, do this instead
Product roadmaps suck. There, I said it. <exhales> OK, let’s explain that. Roadmaps that are real, living documents representing what you will deliver…are awesome. But that may not be the case for you; it wasn’t for me. Instead, a product roadmap was at its core a sales document for a prospect call. A lot of effort, with […]
Decision flow for customer feature requests
If you manage a product or service in the business-to-business (B2B) market, customer requests for features will be a regular part of your work. Requests come in through the sales team, service reps, and senior management, as well as directly from customers themselves. It’s a disruptive insertion of new items for your agenda. That disruption […]

5+ garages to service your car? Sure
[Image by Expressive]
After a very lively conversation with Holger Müller I decided on “posting it up” – Twitter is fine for conversations but sometimes the 140-char limit just doesn’t cut it.
We discussed Integration, within enterprises. Along th…

B2B Social Networking | What’s In a Name?
The term “social media” clouds our thinking about social networking with advertising concepts. In particular, when it comes to B2B social networking, the term “B2B social media” misses the mark entirely.

REST definition and its place within Enterprise Integration
In a previous post I explained why REST is useless when it comes to Enterprise Integration. Even though at the very beginning I explicitly stated that Roy Fielding wrote his dissertation entirely in the context of Web and that REST has absolutely no business benefits whatsoever with regards to Enterprise Integration I got surprised to […]

Simple Service Enterprise – part 6
In my latest post, I recapped on the previous posts and started to take Integration from a business point of view. I’ll continue to do that here, and try to mix in technical details without it getting too confusing. Wish me luck! Here’s the conversation again: Hey Tom! What did the Red Sox do last […]

The New B2B Buyer | 6 Rules of Engagement eBook
B2B buyer behavior has evolved in adaptation to the Internet. A new B2B buyer species has arisen that is more connected, more impatient, more elusive, more impulsive, and more informed than its pre-millennium ancestors. Just as the new B2B buyer has evolved in adaptation to the Internet, B2B sales and marketing professionals must adapt their strategies and tactics to the expectations of the new B2B buyer for online independence and instant gratification.

Simple Service Enterprise – part 5
In my first post on SSE I explained why and how I want, and can achieve, and have achieved, an Enterprise Integration paradigm that will give you a device-agnostic, platform-agnostic, tool-agnostic architecture that will free you from being crushed by the two tectonic plates in IT at the moment: diversity in devices, platforms and tools on the […]

Simple Service Enterprise – part 4
Today we’ll take a REST from REST and I’ll touch upon one of the issues I ran into today: the two types of data there are. REST assured however that at least a few of the next posts will be about yesterday’s topic, as it has led to fierce debates here and there over the […]

Simple Service Enterprise – part 3
My previous post showed the fundamentals of information interchange: exposing business functionality, currently encapsulated in the back-end, to the outside world via services. These services are a one-to-one translation to back-end functions, which are one-to-one translations to business process steps themselves: the smallest level of business transaction. I also showed that the How of exposing […]

Simple Service Enterprise – part 2
Yesterday’s post was about Simple Service Enterprise, and showed the basics: to keep up with the growing diversity inside and outside your enterprise for getting the same functionality on different devices and platforms, you need an Integration layer (the red in the middle). Can’t argue with that, point-to-point integration is a neat quick and dirty […]

Simple Service Enterprise – part 1
I plead for a Simple Service Enterprise. One that is ruled by Business, not IT. One that is interoperable with any other business, customer or consumer, regardless of the platforms they operate on. Regardless of the vendors that dominate those platforms. Regardless of the programming languages used on those platforms. Regardless of the devices used. […]

SAP gets the Future of Integration
OK, I’ll admit it: this title is heavily (heavenly?) influenced by the previous Easter weekend – yet has no relation to it whatsoever. Or has it? Let’s skip the usual introduction, here is the message from Vishal Sikka that absolutely thrilled me @MartijnLinssen @steinermatt we do.The Gateway. It will simply be services in HANA.Also PI, […]

B2B Startup Marketing | Blog Your Way to Leads
B2B startup marketing is tough. It used to be that you could polish off a high level message and a slide deck and let the salesperson handle it from there. Today, online marketing is the primary driver of revenue at the typical B2B startup. The new breed of B2B buyer expects your online content to […]

tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its
Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it – as usual I’d say. “In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr […]