Coté

Tech & Work WorldNo CommentBig news for the company I work in this week. Sadly for my desires to write about and link to interesting stories on it, I have to take a pass. It’s bad form for employees to comment on any of this stuff; and since I worked at Dell on strategy and M&A for software and cloud, it’s double a bad idea. There’s a lot of good write-ups out there, enjoy them.

Tech & Work WorldI was at Spiceworld, briefly, last week. This is Spiceworks’ big user, annual conference in Austin; they have one in London as well. I’ve followed Spiceworks for many years (from RedMonk to 451 Research) and have always liked their IT management approach: their business model is to be the Facebook of IT by giving away the systems management software for free and then selling access to the users to advertisers, vendors, and others.

As software eats the world, this kind of mismatch between “fail fast” and “must be perfect on day one” will happen constantly. NHS Health Apps Library full of data-spaffing apps, claims studies

Healthcare Shift to the Cloud Quickens

“We’ve come to understand that productivity software is always evolving, and it’s our responsibility to bring the customer along a journey of constant improvement as opposed to dropping major releases every few years.” Two points: That stance is fun: we need to put in new features, and we need to educate users about them. This is a tricky position: users don’t know what they want (when they want to stay the same).

Exclusive: Citrix in last-ditch attempt to sell itself - sources

Working at home, with a family, is a challenge, as this nice overview piece at The Register goes over. You think you’re trading all those interruptions from co-workers talking about the sportsball or just complaining about the daily grind, but you’re actually trading in for a different set of co-workers, your family. And their requests for your attention are harder to stonewall than chatty cube-mates. And then there’s the whole “out of site, out of mind” effect with management at work.

“Last year [2014], about 40% of all the orders generated on homedepot.com actually finished in one of our orange box stores. Customers find it incredibly convenient to be able to pick up a product when they wanted to. They didn’t have to worry about whether or not it was on their doorstep. And so that is a great opportunity not only to sell more product, but to drive traffic to our stores, sell them additional product when they come in and pick that product up.

I followed up my recent column on DevOps ROI with a podcast on the topic. Back from the podcasting dead, I called up Ed who is actually a real, live “finance person” to walk through what ROI is and how you’d calculate it for something like DevOps. As ever with Ed, it’s a great conversations. Check out the episode listing over on the Pivotal blog for full show notes and the feed to subscribe to if you want more from my Pivotal Conversations podcast.

10th State of Agile Survey