November 24th, 2008
SAP: Pushing against the economy
SAP’s Co-CEO, Leo Apotheker, hosted a panel discussion this past Friday afternoon, exploring reasons to maintain IT investment during difficult economic times.
The well-rounded panel included:
- Leo Apotheker Co-CEO of SAP
- Naomi Wyatt, secretary of administration for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and an SAP large public sector customer
- Partha Biswas, CIO of Joerns Healthcare, and an SAP customer representing the SMB market
- Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School professor who coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″
- Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Office from AMR Research, who moderated the event
On the strategic side, the panel argued that technology buyers should use IT to innovate and create differentiation, especially during a difficult economy. To this point, Leo said:
Companies struggling with top line revenue must create efficiency, using technology to change processes, and then innovate.
Andrew added, “SAP builds and offers ‘process factories’ for a living. It provides the infrastructure for good ideas that you can employ, and then innovate on top of that.”
Both SAP customers emphasized their implementations went smoothly, as Larry Dignan reported:
SAP’s customers on the panel all had success stories to tell, but the general theme was that they were able to implement quickly. That’s a big message if you’re going to get folks to invest in a recession.
From an economic perspective, SAP presented specific reasons companies should invest in the software maker’s technology and products:
November 3rd, 2008
Salesforce.com ‘gets’ enterprise blogging
Salesforce.com’s annual conference, called Dreamforce, started on a great note for bloggers. Recognizing the growing importance of bloggers in the media ecosystem, the company positioned a blogger VIP section immediately in front of the stage.
If you’re interested in enterprise software blogging, this is positive news indeed. Fellow Enterprise Irregular, Vinnie Mirchandani, agrees.
CEO Marc Benioff, begin his introductory speech in pure messianic style:
October 21st, 2008
Denial: The secret IT killer
Denial is the single most important cause of failed IT projects. Ignoring obvious signs of impending failure, team stakeholders in denial pretend their world is great. These poor souls mindlessly race over the cliff of failure, not realizing the terrible fate awaiting their troubled project.
ZDNet colleague, Dennis Howlett, eloquently caught the essence of denial in a comment on SAP’s SDN blog network:
[T]hings never go wrong half way though. They go wrong well before the point of failure.
September 22nd, 2008
Oracle collaborates with Beehive
From bumble bee-shaped chocolates to signs placed through the conference hall, Oracle is showcasing its Beehive collaboration platform at OpenWorld.
Oracle’s collaboration vision underscores the growing importance of enterprise 2.0-style communication products. By highlighting Beehive prominently in president Charles Phillip’s keynote, the company adds fuel to the legitimacy of bottom-up, peer-to-peer social networking.
The Beehive white paper offers this product overview:
Oracle Beehive is Oracle’s integrated and secure software platform for Enterprise Collaboration. It is a collaborative environment built on a unique model that combines the various communication and coordination services into a comprehensive platform. With Oracle Beehive, organizations learn from their past efforts, share new insights effectively and build a knowledge-based competitive advantage….
Beehive brings the most common collaborative capabilities including time & task management, email, discussions, IM/Presence into an integrated platform.
It’s fascinating to see how concepts behind consumer-oriented applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, are being adapted to the corporate environment. Because Beehive’s features and function aren’t new, the central theme involves pulling the pieces together into an enterprise-friendly wrapper.
Beehive isn’t the only example of Oracle enterprise applications using ideas inspired by consumer online services. Senior Vice President of Oracle CRM, Anthony Lye, demonstrated social CRM applications that owed a great debt to consumer services such as Flickr. Anthony acknowledged this point in his excellent presentation.
Oracle isn’t alone in recognizing that styles of interaction developed in consumer tools can be used in the enterprise. An enterprise-class, group instant messaging project, called ESME, emerged from SAP’s online community. Although ESME’s scope and features are narrowly focused, Twitter’s influence on ESME’s fundamental design is clear. ESME is open source, unlike the Oracle’s products.
Several observers at the conference that I spoke with were ho-hum about Beehive. Paul Greenberg, noted CRM expert and author, commented the Beehive demo wasn’t presented well:
Although Beehive may have advanced features, the demo didn’t show anything we haven’t seen over the last 4-5 years.”
Paul has an open mind about the possibilities for Beehive, but he was concerned that the demo didn’t help users understand why the product is truly unique and innovative.
In contrast to my view that Beehive offers an interesting glimpse of the future, Dennis Howlett thinks it’s primarily a move against Microsoft:
Much more will be written about Beehive over the coming days but I suspect this is really a shot across the Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange.
One thing is clear: the age of user-to-user, cross-organization collaboration has arrived. In the long run, that’s a great thing for both individual users and the enterprise.
Given the important role of poor communication in IT failures, tools that lower barriers between colleagues, especially across multiple organizations, are always welcome.
[Image via Paul Doherty.]
September 16th, 2008
J.Crew: Failed upgrade hits financial performance
Clothing retailer, J.Crew, reported weaker than expected second-quarter earnings due to severe problems following a website and call center upgrade. The fiasco caused cost the company $3 million in addition to lost sales and dissatisfied customers.
The company’s 10-Q SEC filing describes what happened:
During the second quarter of fiscal 2008 we implemented certain Direct channel systems upgrades which impacted our ability to capture, process, ship and service customer orders. As a result, our Direct sales growth rate was lower than recent quarterly trends. We expect the impact of the systems upgrades to continue into the second half of fiscal 2008.
In plain English, J.Crew couldn’t process orders or ship clothing to customers after deploying a website upgrade. Ouch, that one hurt.
James Scully, company CFO, provided details during an earnings call (transcription from Seeking Alpha):
In order to properly support our multi-channel, multi-brand strategy, we were required to make some significant investments in the direct business. These includes the following: a new platform for our website to allow for multiple brands, enhanced functionality, and increased growth capacity; a new order management system to improve the overall customer experience in our call center and drive future efficiencies; and a new direct warehouse management system to support our multi-branch strategy. On the weekend of June 28th, after taking our website down for 24 hours, we cut over to the new systems. Over the next several weeks, we experienced issues related to the site performance, order fulfillment, and call center performance….
The merchandise margin deterioration resulted from unplanned customer accommodations related to the direct system initiatives in the form of free and upgraded shipping, increased markdown activity as a result of our inability to transfer store markdowns to the direct channel, and increased freight expenses as a result of transferring inventory between stores combined with an overall increase in freight transportation costs….
In other words, the company screwed up customer orders. The J.Crew Aficionada blog described it this way:
As some of us have experienced first hand, many orders have been short-shipped or canceled due to lack of inventory (despite showing as “in stock” online). I really do hope that J.Crew can sort out the inventory issues this weekend to show in-stock items only on their website.
In a visceral demonstration of customer impact, one poor guy documented his J.Crew experience, which included being charged $9,208.50 for shipping three shirts. Here’s the receipt, along with a photo showing the baby-sized shirt J.Crew sent him by mistake:
THE PROJECT FAILURES ANALYSIS
There’s something special about companies that deploy mission-critical, customer facing systems without sufficient testing. Although we can only speculate why this happened, CFO Scully acknowledged the screw-up:
[We should have been] more conservative in our internal planning in terms of the potential disruption related to the direct business, which would have led us to be more conservative in setting expectations externally with our customers and our other constituents.
In fairness, once management understood the enormity of the situation, the company did take steps to satisfy customers, including offering discounts and other incentives. In the earnings call, J.Crew CEO, Millard Drexel, focused on not alienating customers:
[T]he risk was having a little more inventory but for us, more importantly, we wanted to make up to any customers and we didn’t want to just piss off more people.
Discussing this situation, we can’t ignore the recent ERP failure at jeans retailer Levi Strauss. In that case, Levi’s reported a 98% drop in net income when implementation problems prevented the company from shipping product to retailers.
My take. The post-mortem analysis should focus on a key question: did management or the project team drive this failure?
In one scenario, management forced a premature rollout despite warnings from the project team, which knew the system wasn’t ready. We all know cases where management pressured a software team to ship code before it was ready, despite protests and warnings from developers — such moments are pure Dilbert but nonetheless happen all the time.
I asked Retail Systems Research managing partner and former retail industry CIO, Paula Rosenblum, for her thoughts on the issue of rollouts in the retail industry:
Sometimes a rollout is dictated by the desire to get it done before a busy season, which typically become quiet times for IT. You want to get a system live and de-bugged before any critical season. I think this is what happened here.
Another, equally plausible, scenario is the implementation team itself didn’t recognize poorly-tested flaws that could not withstand the rigors of going live. Sadly, the annals of project failure are filled with stories about project teams that didn’t pay sufficient attention to testing and data integration before going live.
Paula points out that management accepted full blame in this case:
It sounds more like that which they bought (and I’m assuming they did not build, but bought) was less mature than they thought it was. But if you read carefully, they’re not saying they were too aggressive in implementation times, nor are they saying they should have allowed more time for implementation. Management is saying they should have planned their sales numbers less aggressively to accommodate problems that could (and did) occur. That’s fascinating really. Management is falling on its sword and actually not blaming IT at all.
[Via Steven M. Bellovin in Risks Digest. Image source: J.Crew Customer blog.]
September 11th, 2008
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales on wiki success and failure [podcast]
Jimmy Wales, best known as founder of Wikipedia, met with a small group of bloggers and industry analysts at SAP’s TechEd conference, which is being held this week in Las Vegas. During the 45-minute discussion, Jimmy spoke at length about the conditions that drive success or failure in wiki deployments.
Maintaining unity of vision and purpose is a key ingredient in successful wiki projects, according to Jimmy; if the content is interesting and focused, the wiki will likely succeed. In addition, support is also necessary:
Day-to-day handholding and customer support of young wikis is important. People need to learn the wiki way of thinking and doing things.
Conversely, a key contributor to wiki implementation failure is insufficient critical mass; wikis are a network phenomenon and require community to succeed. Given this, Jimmy said wiki organizers must make even casual users comfortable participating. He also believes it’s important to ask why wikis fail:
The design philosophy of a wiki should include lowering barriers to entry to help gain critical mass. Make it easy for newcomers. One way to kill a wiki is to make it seem like you need to be important before you can contribute.
Many wikis fail because founder is a jerk; others fail because owner is too soft and the jerks take over.
Importantly, Jimmy talked about the relevance of corporate culture on the success of wiki deployments. I asked whether wikis could therefore indicate an organization’s corporate culture, which Jimmy discussed at 24:30 in the podcast.
Notes on the podcast. The discussion was attended by 10 or 12 participants. Mark Yolton, Senior Vice President of the SAP Community Network, introduced Jimmy Wales. If you’re interested in Jimmy’s views on wikis in an enterprise context, you’ll enjoy this conversation!
[The interview was organized by SAP’s blogger relations program, in which I participate. Image via Wikipedia.]
September 9th, 2008
Why I liked SAP’s TechEd Community Day
Community Day kicked off SAP’s TechEd conference, which brings 6000 developers to Las Vegas in a software development love fest. The one-day program, which is somewhat like a SAP-centric unconference, was attended by 300 participants drawn from SAP’s online community.
As the conference kick-off, SAP uses Community Day to help participants form new relationships, and deepen existing connections, prior to TechEd’s official start. I would characterize the overall tone of this event as being warm and collaborative.
SAP did a great job using Community Day to humanize both itself and TechEd. Perhaps because I’m a project failures blogger used to seeing many negative situations, the positive Community Day message resonated.
I asked Craig Cmehill, a SAP evangelist, about the company’s online community, where most of the day’s attendees are active participants:
The communities promote innovation and education around Netweaver and other SAP technologies. Today, there are almost 1.4 million registered participants.
It’s difficult to maintain a sense of intimacy with such a large group. Craig explained how SAP encourages members to participate and remain engaged:
I spend 90 percent of my time talking to the community. There’s an open door policy among the evangelists; our focus is communicating to users and maintaining relationships. This ongoing investment does reap results.
One the most interesting initiatives to emerge from the SAP online community is a an enterprise-capable, open source instant messaging project called Enterprise Social Messaging Environment (ESME). The product, pronounced “Ezz Mee” by its friends, is a Twitter-like platform designed for large-scale deployment across corporate networks.
ESME arose spontaneously as a collaborative initiative among online colleagues. However, as participants demonstrate both initial success and ongoing commitment, the project has gained focus and a widening support base. Community Day represents ESME’s coming out party.
My take. Readers of this blog know I talk endlessly about failure, organizational dysfunction, and just plain lack of common sense. For me, seeing people from different organizations working together cooperatively, donating their time and energy to projects in which they believe, is a real breath of fresh air.
Healthy collaboration and stakeholder participation are keys to preventing failed IT projects. Organizations that foster supportive networks of cooperative activity are more likely to achieve successful IT execution than those that don’t.
SAP’s Community Day, with ESME as its symbolic poster child, reminds us of that important lesson.
[Disclosure: I am attending TechEd as SAP’s guest under the auspices of the company’s blogger-relations group.]
August 26th, 2008
Failed government IT: ‘The mother of all databases’
The “IT system used to identify terrorist threats that has been crippled by technical flaws,” according to a memo from the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology. The failed system is part of a “central US government repository of data on international terrorist identities…described by Vice Admiral (Ret.) John Scott Redd as ‘the mother of all databases.’”
This enormous database, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), is operated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to support the “government’s various terrorist screening systems or watchlists.”
My take. I was initially skeptical of the allegations described in the House “Inspector General memo” because it raises highly technical issues in a political context. However, my impression changed substantially after studying the more detailed “Subcommittee memo,” which exhaustively documents the investigative sources forming the basis for the allegations.
Given the careful documentation, I believe the memos accurately portray current project status. While I have no opinion regarding specific descriptions of misappropriation of funds, the project management and contractor oversight flaws certainly ring true. From a technical perspective, the allegations are sufficiently detailed to appear rooted in fact.
The official NCTC response, described at the end of this post, offers little reassurance to those concerned about government waste on IT projects. Apparently, even the nation’s most substantial national security projects are subject to failure and allegations of malfeasance.
This isn’t the first government IT failure and certainly won’t be the last.
INSPECTOR GENERAL MEMO
The House Committee on Science and Technology impact memo, written to the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (ODNI) Inspector General, frames the issue:
The Subcommittee has learned that the TIDE database is suffering from serious, long-standing technical problems. The Subcommittee has also learned that a critical NCTC initiative, named “Railhead,” which is intended to replace TIDE with enhanced capabilities has suffered from severe technical troubles, poor contractor management and weak government oversight. As a result, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, delivery schedules have slipped, contractor employees have been laid off in order to restrain escalating costs, and the NCTC is now scrambling either to fix the technical troubles or possibly to abandon the program altogether. The end result is a current IT system used to identify terrorist threats that has been crippled by technical flaws and a new system that if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today.
—
Some Railhead insiders allege that a significant portion of the estimated $500 million dollars spent on Railhead has been inappropriately used to renovate a building of one of the prime contractors, The Boeing Company, into a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) in Herndon, Virginia. These individuals have also questioned the technical solutions endorsed by the government to replace the current TIDE database, the qualifications of some of the Boeing subcontractors and potential conflicts-of-interest between the program director of another key Railhead contractor, SRI International, and the government’s Railhead program manager because of their alleged close personal ties. In short, documents obtained by the Subcommittee suggest that, despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Railhead and years of development, the government has little to show for its efforts.
—
Like many of these programs, the flaws and failures on Railhead have been exacerbated by weak government oversight, poor contractor management and lack of contractor accountability for the program’s performance. Turfbattles among contractors, particularly between the design team and development team, have hampered the sharing of critical technical data that has impaired the success of the Railhead program. In addition, one list of Railhead staff from January 2008 identifies a virtual army of 814 private contract employees from dozens of companies involved in Railhead and only 48 government officials keeping tabs on this mammoth and critically important national security program. In fact, an estimated one dozen government slots on Railhead have been vacant for more than one year. A combination of these management problems and technical troubles seems to have doomed the Railhead program to failure.
SUBCOMMITTEE MEMO
The Inspector General memo was based on worked performed by the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. The more specific technical memo adds depth and detail to the allegations:
Among the largest and most expensive programs currently being funded by the ODNI is a program at the National Counterterrorism Center to improve and replace its current information technology systems, including the TIDE database, in order to enhance information sharing among federal agencies and improve access to counterterrorism intelligence data collected from more than 30 separate government networks that feed data into NCTC.
—
Documentation obtained by the Subcommittee points to a host of technical problems on Railhead, potential contractor mismanagement, contractor disputes, agency turf battles, poor government oversight and schedule delays that have hindered and hampered legitimate information sharing efforts on the program, have resulted in the potential waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and placed the government’s key counterterrorism information sharing initiative in jeopardy of failing.
—
But technical problems on the current TIDE database appear to be hindering those efforts, and its successor –Railhead — is on the verge of collapse.
The original TIDE database, built by Lockheed Martin, replaced the Department of State’s TIPOFF database, designed and built by The Analysis Corporation, in the wake of the 9.11 terrorist attacks to automate the terrorist watch list. The TIDE database was built in Oracle as a relational database management system (RDBMS). This original database, however, suffers from basic design, management and maintenance ‘ inefficiencies and problems. For instance, only about 60% of the data, including names and addresses, mentioned in CIA cables provided to NCTC are actually extracted from these messages and placed into the TIDE database.
The TIDE database has evolved overtime as both contractors and government employees have attempted to expand and enhance the database to improve their own use of the system. But none of them appear to have taken into account the overall design or engineering architecture of the entire system. As a result, there are now dozens of tables or categories for identical fields of information making the ability to search or locate key data inefficient, ineffective and more time consuming and difficult than necessary.
In addition, the TIDE database relies on Structured Query Language (SQL), a cumbersome computer code that must utilize complicated sentence structures to query the tables, rows and columns that encompass the TIDE database. Without proper documentation on whether a table contains information on names, addresses, vehicles, license plates or an individual’s nationality, for instance, analysts have no valid mechanism to conduct a search of these “undocumented” tables.
Without a detailed index of the data stored in each table in TIDE, the SQL search engine is blindfolded, unable to locate or identify undocumented data. The current TIDE database is composed of data fields that are presented in 463 separate tables, 295 of which are undocumented, according to one internal Railhead document. As a result, critical terrorist intelligence in the TIDE system may not be searched at all. “Existing TIDE data model is complex, undocumented, and brittle,” the document notes, “which poses significant risk to RLSI [Railhead Lead System Integrator] data migration and modeling.”
GOVERNMENT RESPONSE
The NCTC provided a vague and general response to the allegations, saying the conclusions are:
[I]nconsistent with the facts. The letter implies that there exists a risk to our nation’s security related to the implementation of NCTC’s information technology program, commonly known as Railhead. There has been no degradation in the capability to access, manage and share terrorist information during the life of the Railhead program.
Railhead is a multiple contract venue to support the operations and maintenance of existing IT systems; it replaces and builds new functions for the Center. Fundamentally, it is a series of technology (primarily software) upgrades implemented between now and 2012, rather than all at once to improve mission capabilities for many systems.
[Via an unnamed reader who referred me to the Ars Technica story; I’m always grateful for reader submissions of failed IT projects. Anonymous submissions are welcome. Requests for interview to both the ODNI and the Subcommittee were not returned.]
August 15th, 2008
Implementation complexity enables higher software prices
According to an interesting post in CIO Magazine, recent price increases by both SAP and Oracle were made possible by implementation complexity and the difficulty of replacing existing systems.
CIO explains:
[O]ne of the complaints customers have about these products is the huge implementation costs of putting them in. Said a different way, they’re so complex that very few companies can afford to take on the cost of getting them installed and working. Consequently, reducing prices on the software probably wouldn’t grow the customer base, because most companies can’t afford the total cost of owning them.
In other words, enterprise software customers believe they have few choices and therefore willingly pay whatever vendors ask. For their part, software suppliers are aware of this dynamic and take full advantage of their incumbent position.
It’s a one-sided perspective but compelling nonetheless.
[Image via Univ. of Warwick]
August 14th, 2008
SAP: Transparent SME ‘deep dive’
Following it’s Business Objects Influencer Summit, SAP held a small and medium enterprise “deep dive” event for bloggers, analysts, and press. Both SAP’s strategy and the company’s openness were impressive.
SME portfolio strategy. Jeff Stiles, SAP’s Senior Vice President for SAP SME Solution Marketing, articulated a coherent product offering that segments the market along several dimensions:
- Customer size
- Business and organizational complexity
- Growth rate and trajectory
- IT infrastructure capability
- Preference for on-premise vs. software as a service (SaaS) solutions
In a follow-up email, Jeff commented:
The other thing that should be considered is how an organization competes (do they need to deeply customize the solution to fit their unique needs?)
SAP’s offering to the SME market consists of the following:
Business One: SAP’s product for “small businesses that have outgrown their accounting only applications.” Appropriate customers will generally be under 100 employees with 30 users.
Business byDesign: SaaS offering for “fast-growing midsize companies, with limited software & systems, that don’t want to build a large IT backbone.” While the target market for byDesign appears to overlap Business One and All-in-One, the hosted aspect is one strong point of differentiation.
All-in-One: Aimed at “mid-size companies looking for a solution that meets their demanding industry requirements and helps grow and scale the business.” This product can handle much of the business complexity addressed by SAP’s large enterprise suite, but is designed for smaller companies.
The following graphic summarizes these points (adapted from an SAP-supplied slide):
The clarity and quality of SAP’s SME strategy has come a long way over the past several years. As Dennis Howlett commented on Business One:
My past experience with BusinessOne is of a solution that was relatively stagnant in the market, of less than competitive functionality and suffering from performance issues. That was two years ago. Today, the product is improved from every angle. Performance has been beefed up significantly, quality has improved but most important, smart VARs have figured the current iteration provides a genuinely viable alternative to Microsoft products.
Implementation innovations. From a project failures perspective, I want to highlight the SAP Best Practices component of All-in-One. Rooted in work started in the mid-1990s by SAP’s Simplification Group, SAP Best Practices advances the implementation state of the art.
Here’s SAP’s slide on this topic:
In my view, productizing knowledge represents one of the best opportunities for reducing software implementation time and expense. On a directly related note, I also believe that packaged services will ultimately form the basis for all but the most complex implementation consulting efforts across the enterprise software industry.
Software vendors and consultants can improve implementation efficiency through standardized implementation road maps, structured pre-configuration analysis, and consistent information sharing from pre-sales through go-live. However, given the organizational complexity around selling and deploying enterprise software, combined with technical configuration challenges, achieving these goals has been elusive.
It’s worth mentioning that some third-party consultants and system integrators resist implementation efficiency because it reduces billable hours. Although many consultants hate failure, I believe third-party billing churn continues to be consulting’s dirty little secret.
Although I haven’t spoken with SAP customers about specific Best Practices-based implementations, both concept and presentation pass the smell test. [Disclosure: For many years, starting in 1996, my company was deeply involved in developing the first generations of SAP’s rapid implementation tools. I have no such relationship with SAP at present.]
What’s missing. While SAP’s small and medium enterprise positioning has become crisper over time, several points remain confusing:
- The positioning still needs additional focus and clarification. For example, overlaps between byDesign and and the other products need further definition. In addition, the line between All-in-One and the larger Business Suite product remains somewhat fuzzy.
- SAP’s statement of long-term commitment to byDesign needs reinforcement. Changes in byDesign’s product release strategy, combined with the company’s historical large enterprise focus, could make potential customers skittish about adopting this offering. If SAP is serious about byDesign, it must put a definite stake in the ground and make clear its intention to remain solidly behind this product for the long haul.
Transparency and openness. The SME deep dive raises the bar on communications by enterprise software vendors. Led by Jeff Stiles, SAP executives, partners, and customers accepted challenging questions from the small audience (30 people). To his credit, Jeff allowed the full-day schedule to drift based on audience interest in particular topics. While many of the questions were tough and analytical, the answers were straightforward and reflected confidence in the offerings.
SAP blogging. Many of the day’s most insightful questions came from Enterprise Irregulars attending as guests of SAP’s blogger outreach initiative: Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, Brian Sommer, Sandy Kemsley, and myself. Run by SAP’s Mike Prosceno and Stacey Fish, the program offers bloggers unprecedented access to SAP senior executives and information. With this program, SAP sets the enterprise software standard in providing transparency to bloggers.
Note to other enterprise software companies: transparency is a sign of confidence and demonstrates you have nothing to hide. Let’s see you step up and meet the openness challenge.
Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures. Click here to discuss this post with him on Twitter.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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