The Naked Chief Blog

If you are a CIO or a CEO then there is a very serious question that you must answer this year. Will you be an analytically or a collaboratively-driven organisation? The answer to that simple question will not only frame the future employee desktop and next generation business application strategies for your organisation, but will also dictate the competitive achievements of your company during the next economic cycle.  

Sometimes the problem with being as big as IBM is simply that. At some point there are simply not enough marketing messages to go around. Back in October last year at the Information on Demand event in Las Vegas IBM's execs would have had us believe that next generation business applications will unequivocally be BI led with some analytics thrown in to boot. This was an obvious retort to a similar line of messaging from Larry Ellison at Open World earlier in the year.

Now today at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando we are being asked by other IBM execs to accept that Lotus Notes (the enterprise collaborative suite-platform) is the window to the corporate soul (the entry point for corporate information platform). Now while it is a compelling argument, in all seriousness what is the story and how must a CIO or CEO choose?

I read some great books over the Christmas break. One was a longitudinal study on the characteristics of a breakthrough company (and why Gartner was not considered one by the author), and the other was on competing in business through the use of analytics.

Regardless of the titles and topics, both focused heavily on the importance of understanding customers. No rocket science there but that's the fascinating thing about customer service. Attention to the little things pays big returns. Of course the opposite is also true.

I attended the Christmas drinks for the Queensland chapter of ISACA last week as a guest of CA. As long term sponsors of the ACT Brumbies Spuer 14 team they managed to engage head coach Andy Friend to drop into Brisbane as the guest speaker.

Of all the speakers I have heard this year - ranging from Dan Ackroyd to Malcolm Galdwell to John Farnham and Peter Beattie - Andy was by far the most inspirational. By the end of his 20 minutes, if he had of asked me to pull on a jersey and stand between Jonah Lomu and the Irish Club buffet in the next room I would have done it.  

As I recounted 3 years ago in an entry called One Year On, our start-up phase was based on a 4-year plan which ends in a few weeks time. It was at that stage that the plan was to sit down and evaluate our options regarding the company and whether or not to push on. While we wished ourselves every success I am also sure that we could not have foreseen all that lay ahead when in 2005 I begged of my wife to give me four years to screw up, threw in the towel at Forrester and called my old friend Sam Higgins with a bold plan. So how are we going and where to?

Well we have gone about our first four years rather quietly. Our location in Queensland away from the central activity of the other firms has been a tremendous success factor for us. Not only have we established a remarkable beach-head with significant milestones like the 5-year commercialisation arrangement struck with the Queensland government earlier this year, but I heard rather quietly on the grapevine this week that our annuity business has probably just surpassed that of Forrester's in Australia. Regardless of Forrester's performance in the region, that is a mark of success for us given the respect we hold for that company (well known in these parts to be our last place of employment).

Within Australia Longhaus now have clients across Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and South Australia, as well as in the United States, Singapore and New Zealand. Approximately half our web traffic comes from outside Australia which is also a testament to the honey pot we continue to build for geo-targeted tech research and analysis within the region. More and more companies that want to know what impact global technology is having on Australia are now making Longhaus a part of that discovery and decision process.

The World Computer Congress (WCC), in one year's time, will provide a boost in the arm for the Australian and near-shore ICT market. Last week I was asked to fill the position of Deputy Chairman, International Program Committee, which yesterday I accepted.

The role includes responsibility for coordinating the right commercial content into the right streams of the conference to marry the objectives of the academic content provided through the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).  In short, oversight into making the congress content relevant for the marketplace.