Creepy or Cool?

Latitude is a free program from Google that lives on your smart phone and tracks your location via GPS or cell phone tower triangulation.  You can accept “friends” and then display your location to them (and them to you).  You have the ability to give them the most accurate location, city only, a manually entered spot, or no location at all. 

Recently, Google has taken this one step further and now you have the option of saving your constantly updated history and displaying it on a dashboard.  You can track where you have been, how far you have traveled, and where you most often go.  According to Google, this data is available only to you, can be deleted, and is not used for advertising to you.

The tech guy in me says, “Cool!”, but the man raised in an age where electronic monitoring was reserved for criminals on probation says, “Creepy.”  I can see where this would be interesting and maybe even useful, but as we all know, any information put on the internet is inherently insecure.  No server is 100% safe and no transmission is totally proof from intercept.  On a more mundane level, what happens when the NSA, CIA, or some other three letter agency shows up on Google’s doorstep with an order to surrender the records?

I’m really undecided.  Part of me is excited about seeing patterns in my life and maybe making my routines more efficient, but another part is horrified.  Opinions?  What do you think?  Are you going to do it?  Sound off and let me know, please.

CRM and Sushi

There are few foods I love more than fresh, well made, well presented, sushi.  The huge variety available gives me a dish that can satisfy nearly any food craving.  Nicely prepared, the colors and textures delight the eye.  Fresh and cold, it’s healthy and tasty.

On the other hand, there are few things worse than two day old, uninspired, half melted sushi, lumped on a dirty buffet line.  Not only is it unappetizing, but it can be down right dangerous.

CRM systems are analogous to sushi. 

I love CRM.  There, I said it.  Teaching a new salesperson the ins and outs of Salesforce or installing a fresh instance of SugarCRM make me giddy.  Yeah, I’m a freak!  :-) 

Just like sushi however, a CRM system that isn’t well prepared, is not going to delight your end users.  If the page layouts aren’t well thought out, if the work flows retard rather than accelerate the sales cycle, people will shun your system just like I do a poorly prepared rainbow roll.  Make sure your projects don’t just work, but they work gracefully.  Your users will thank you and come back for seconds.

Even worse than poor presentation, if your CRM is stale, people will notice it.  Not so fresh fish stinks and will likely land you in the toilet stall.  A CRM system that hasn’t evolved with changing business needs also stinks and can have just as dire consequences for your company.  Make sure that you do at least a yearly business needs check of the entire system.  Biannually is better. 

Keep the sushi fresh, attractive, and well made, and your belly will thank you.  Keep your system updated, well crafted, and usable, and your users will do likewise.

Fail Safe; Fail Deadly

Lawnmowers, subway trains, electric pallet jacks, and nuclear power plants all have something in common with a well designed CRM system; what is it?  They are designed with fail safe technology.

The picture above is an example of a simple, electro-magnetic fail safe device.  So long as the operator keeps her foot pressed on the red switch, the circuit is energized.  Lift her foot off, the circuit goes dead and the subway train stops.  Why is this important?  What if the train operator fainted or for some crazy reason, left the cab?  We certainly don’t want the passengers hurtling down the track, do we?

Similarly, when you build a CRM system, keep the worst case in mind.  For example, if there is an approval process for opportunities coming from your partners, what happens if your operator “faints”—that is, fails to take action?  Some people will suggest that after a certain time, the opportunity should be automatically approved.  This is a fail deadly setup and must be avoided. 

What does fail deadly mean?  It means the “dead hand” of the operator takes a final action.  An example is a nuclear missile that has to have a do not launch code fed to it every so often.  If it doesn’t receive the code, the missile will fire with no further intervention.  The purpose is to destroy the enemy if their first strike has knocked out the command structure and no one is able to trigger revenge.

Ethics aside, that might make sense for vengeance, but do you really want or need potentially harmful actions to be taken by your system?  What if it is an undesirable, large, opportunity is  approved?  What if something else contrary to the best interests of your company happens, simply because a salesman forgot to do his job in a timely fashion?

A CRM tool must always either wait for a human command—even if it never comes—or if takes action, it must fail safely.  No approval in 14 days?  Deny the opportunity.  Better to have to redo it than to try and undo the legal ramifications of it failing deadly.

Keep this principle in mind as you design GUI’s, rules, and actions.  Always anticipate a “dead” operator and make sure your CRM train doesn’t crash into the station!

I Steal From My Company

 I have no idea if anyone is still around to read these words, since I have not updated this blog for a month or more—an eternity in internet time.  My life has been consumed by a weeklong company sales kickoff, huge changes to the system I work on, rollout of new features, and a variety of other things all demanding my attention like a monkey with a stick of dynamite and blasting cap.  Now though, I’ve decided to start stealing from my company. 

There’s a Dilbert comic that ran ages ago and in it, one of the characters says to another, “Saying, ‘I have a personal life,’ is just another way of saying, ‘I steal from the company.’”  Do you get it now?  I’m not going for pens, paper clips, laptops, or even that great stash of coffee creamer.  I’m going for the big time; I want a personal life.

Think about it for minute.  Most of what we do is important, but little of it is really, truly, mission critical.  Sure, some things are, but the great majority is just background.  Even of the things that are mission critical, just how critical is your company’s mission?  Does human life depend on what you do?  If not, relax.  Shoot, even it does, relax!  You’re no good to anyone, if you a quivering, burned out, pile of frayed nerves.
That’s all for now.  Expect the technical stuff to resume soon.  Hope someone is still out there.

-Paul