For the past six days I have been locked in an ever-more-involving review of my research by my peers.  This is a piece of work that involved an assessment of software. My position was challenged because it seemed inconsistent with other research I had already published.  Another and another and another analyst entered the fray.

We examined my data, and created spreadsheets testing the inputs. We looked at the assumptions I had made.  It turned out that the research was on target, but the perception that it would create could potentially be  incorrectly applied by our clients. We debated different approaches until finally we found a way to depict the assessment in the way that lent itself best to practical application by our clients. 

The point is: it was not debate-for-the-sake-of-debate: it was a critical assessment that went beyond just getting the facts right and into how our clients could make informed decisions. And it was exciting, fact-based, rigorous and collegial and opened up new avenues of research. It was analysts taking on the role of advocates for our clients. It is a passion you see in all great companies, and one I see around here at Gartner every day.

Eventually we may work out these festering septics with some more elegant, effective antiseptics, but until then, let’s watch each other’s backs. And give each other the benefit of a doubt. When in doubt, don’t spout.

Enough for an alliterative and Onomonopoetical Friday. Here is to kindness.

Instead of the birds and bees it was the wolves and the sociopaths, and future university recruiters and corporations reviewing their resumes. The basic discussion was: “What’s better, a picture of a garden hose in your mouth with beer pouring down a funnel, or you tending a garden in Guatemala in an impoverished village with a sweet comment about how you are tutoring for free during the mosquito-infested summer?”

“But dad, I’ve never been to Guatemala!”

“So what? Are you going to put it on your college application or resume? No. But it creates a great impression!”

And so they embarked on viewing their profiles as ways of shaping how they would want an anonymous lurker (employer, recruiter…) to perceive them.

OK, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. It is pretty basic that we are fools to think that the musings, personal data paths, postings, transactions and connections that we perform as a part of any activity passing through a social network will be captured, aggragated, and shared with people and organizations we don’t want to share with. And as business owners and government officials and university officers, we’d better think about this.

And yet there are so many Pollyannas who don’t believe data is shared without our permission. Welcome to the world of the HTTP referrer header, ladies and gentleman. And just wait until your customers and non-customers ask for your internet Bill of Rights (First discussed, I think – but correct me please - in 2007 by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington). What might be in it?
 We, the customer, control the elements in our profile, and no one else. • We get to delete any and all of our social and personal data. • We decide if you can track our movements. • We get to decide who has access to them.

That’s just the beginning. Until then, we’d all better get to thinking about where we expect the issue of surreptitious data gathering to go. Your customers are watching.

Brand drugs and off-brand drugs prescribed and accepted or not accepted, but the patient never understanding upfront why, payments and co-payments and partial payments and rejections of coverage because of improper ‘coding’ from physicians. Physicians who have given up and accept no insurance. Adverse drug interactions because no one is keeping score. Photocopies, letters, faxes, emails, trips to the Bursar, phone calls, over and over and over again. Could someone have invented the bizarre tangle of disconnected forms and processes and procedures that is the healthcare system?

And they call this the United States? Not of healthcare. In healthcare it doesn’t deserve credit as a Confederacy either. Could be why folks are shouting in Town Meetings.

But the idea of SaaS and the market for SaaS-built applications keeps going through my mind. Who has been wildly successful? How many sales force automation companies have gone public and succeeded? One? How many in the Customer Service area? One? How about in the ERP/CRM area? One?  Most have not succeeded, and even the few that have may have enriched the holders of the original founder shares, but that’s about it. Yes there is an exception, and it likely proves the rule.

And what about end users? Has SaaS from SaaS-only vendors revolutionized their business? Has it helped them avoid shelfware? There is not much data out there that can be independently verified by an external auditor that can say one way of the other. That is good in that people need advice on how to get the SaaS purchase decision right. But it isn’t good if you are trying to build a five year applications strategy and you are a large enterprise.

Guess this means I’m back from vacation. That was fun and this is fun, and done right, hopefully your software decisions will be too.

I’ve been experiencing that a lot while moving into a new home and area. The simplest act of changing telephone numbers has unleashed a barrage of telemarketers because my 31 days of waiting for the National Do Not Call Registry hasn’t kicked in. I have telemarketers asking me who I am. I am polite and say, “umm, you called me: who am I?” And then they ask, “Do you have an account with AmeriCredit?” To which I ask, “What’s an AmeriCredit?” This plays out for newspaper subscriptions, oil heating, carpentry services, insurance brokers. When you ask them to get me out of their dialer systems they say things like, “I cannot stop it sir, it’s out of my control.” And when I ask suggested an easy fix to a problem on the website at the cable provider, the woman became perplexed and anxious, repeating over and over another time that she was just the service agent for new installations. Not billing, not website, not tech support, not, not, not.

Just when you thought the knowledge worker title really meant something, you realize that most tasks that most workers do are still extremely siloed. Spans of responsibility are narrow. Integrative processes are still a far off dream. Independent decision making and action-taking is still an aspiration, while consumers experience the perspiration.

Here’s to a US Independence Day for the IT managers, customer service reps, tech support experts and everyone else trying there best to serve the enterprise, and serve the customer, only to be stymied by senior management too focused on sweating out profit while the customer walks away or cringes.

Where has all of our IT investment in data mining, analytics, forecasting, and measurement gotten us? Did it help your company anticipate trouble? Has it cushioned you adaquately from current conditions? Is morale higher in your workforce now than before the massive IT investments? Do employees have more leisure time?

Is it time that you broke out your Thorstein Veblen work, “The Theory of the Leisure Class” and gave it a re-read? In a vibrant service economy, more and more people made more and more money not based on their labor, but on their ability to extract money without producing anything whatsoever – by creating instruments to ‘leverage’ in the form of derivatives and loans and swaps and esoteric funds and buyouts: things you can’t eat, or build with, or wear, or travel in, or manufacture with. And many of them made billions taking their slice of the fictional wealth and profits that they conjured.

And how, exactly, did IT track, identify, perceive, illustrate, communicate, or work to prevent rotten loans and false premises about future growth and profit and shaky forecasts? Or predict that tour faith in the systems that created the profit and wealth was quixotic? What we are now reading are all of the post-mortems where the pundits decompose the steps leading to the crash and unemployment and systemic piling of new debt. Timing is everything, eh? Maybe we all get to enjoy a period of humility within which we acknowledge the narrow scope of how technology helps us understand the most-likely future. It has been a great force in streamlining and standardizing and optimizing processes, but IT is still a long way from acting as an accurate predictive tool guiding business leaders away from turbulent waters.

Maybe we will see a new generation of tools that look at business pattern sensitivity and give all of us the warning beacons that keep us off of the rocks.

Most of the major vendors who grab the attention of CIOs are serving up commodity functionality while renovating the technology stack. From a CRM process perspective, they have fallen far behind what businesses and their customers expect. The good news is that there are terrific innovations going on a companies such as Telstra, the Australian telecom provider, Dell Computer, Unilever, and Kraft Foods. They are not waiting for their application stack provider to point the way.

And here is the interesting thing: in about 85% of cases, the innovation springs from the line of business, and not from core IT at all. Core IT did not come up with the idea, sanction the project, or fund it. The new technologies and applications are easy to source and easy to deploy and easy to use. They are cool, yet so far lack process design capabilities and are outside of the business process. The next step is for the innovators in customer service, marketing, logistics, and sales to make sure what they are doing is consistent with the business as a whole, and for IT to gain a facility with the new tools out there. Right now it is like the US Gold Rush in the mid 1800s: some people will benefit, while others will come up empty.

As I look around businesses today, I see the equivalent of the rugged individualist. Every line of business is unique, everyone has there own separate objectives and measurements. There is suspicion of what the other team is doing, and little cohesive sense of common values. What I discern in the visionary companies that we chance upon every so often is just that sense of common values. No whining and no finger pointing and no waiting for someone else to bail you out. Instead there are common principles, a clear sense of what it takes to excel in the market and what drives value in the eyes of the customer.

There are standout companies today that operate on the principle that listening to the customer and examining that against the business’ ability to meet the needs of the customer at a profit is the only way to go. The beauty of their approach extends all the way back to how they interact with software or service providers. They are able to list the key triggers of customer loyalty and ask the vendor: how can you contribute to our achievement of this goal at a fair pricepoint? Will you share in the risk? If not, why not? You say you understand our objectives. You say your solution meets and exceeds our needs, so why not put some of your own equity at risk?

I am seeing leading vendors take on more risk, but the really smart ones are only doing so if their customer has a grounded set of principles and measurements that demonstrate a winning approach to the market. In a challenging economy, the best companies are pulling out all of the stops and demonstrating the value of their offerings. The last thing they are doing is complaining about how unfair the situation is.

Yet what we are seeing is that the CIO might not be the right place for innovation around customer processes. I’m not going to give you our survey results, but I will say that in speaking with end user organizations in customer service, web strategies, and in marketing department – on the one hand – and comparing that to what solution providers are telling us about who is signing the checks these days, and a picture emerges: IT is not the leader, but the supporter or the inhibitor. And I am not talking about 50% on way and 50% another way. Instead, over 90% of people sponsoring innovative projects around CRM are not in IT, but in a line of business.

Part of the reason IT is lagging in improving customer processes instead of leading is that IT has to live within the CapEx budget and has little discretionary money to spend. The other is that performance metrics in IT are not based on improvement to the customer experience. Who, in a similar position, would step out and drive projects for which there is downside but little upside?

The prognosis: sales, service, and marketing managers reporting to chief customer officers (whatever they are called) will continue to push innovation, while IT will play the role of follower and support. The best companies are bringing together both sides of the house, as customer process improvement powered by IT but driven by the business is proving to be a successful formula.