Tim Bray of Antractica, an information visualisation software, has a two-part series on “the information landscape out there in the real world. Part 1 surveys the Business Intelligence landscape (it’s bad). In Part 2, the question is: how to get people to try new technology in tough times?” [via Rahul Dave]
Collecting vs Using: The bottom line: every company out there is collecting oceans of data on every aspect of their business. Nobody ever got fired for deciding to retain the records or generate a report…But investors aren’t handing out rewards for collecting a lot of data. It’s just meaningless mountains of vacuous bits unless you’re getting some good use out of it; and if what I’m seeing is the norm, a lot of people aren’t.
Sales Process: No matter which side of the fence you’re on, the software sales process is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Furthermore, while we all acknowledge the hangover from Y2K and the bubble, we can’t all give up doing capital acquisitions, much and all as we’d like to…But I think that even when the good times return, we’ll never again see the days where people would write six-figure purchase orders for technology without having had their hands on it and really REALLY convinced themselves that it’s going to get the job done.
The second part has a discussion on the multi-part process Antractica is using to selling. Some good ideas which we can apply. A point which Tim makes: “For us at Antarctica, we find out if the customer really has a problem they care about, because writing even a small cheque, these days, is a very effective filter.”
