For example my home base is technology. Our head of finance caused a problem on our core finance system on Friday at 6pm and my default reaction was – despite not having used that system in 6 months – to dive in and fix it. Rather than lever other people or some support process.

So I will fittingly start by discussing the technology dimension.

Technology

I was sat in a booth in Orlando at SAP’s business-focused conference last week, and the comments made by one my friends was really interesting. They were bemoaning the difficulties they were having, getting their management to implement SAP’s in-memory technology, SAP HANA.

The language used was interesting: “my management do not get the benefit” was the essence of it. It was late so I responded slightly too bluntly: “is it because you have not articulated the benefits to them?”. I probably could have put it better but the semantics are there: technology is an enabler for making People’s lives easier through Process change. To invest in tech, we have to convince people of the benefits of this.

People

I also spent some time with Lars Daalgard, CEO of Success Factors and current head of SAP’s Cloud division. Lars is essentially a salesman and you can see this in the bromance between him and SAP’s charismatic co-CEO, Bill McDermott.

And a few weeks ago he commented that “everyone is in sales”. This caused some community backlash because technologists don’t like that idea, but I happen to agree with him. It is just a matter of how you explain this to people, and Lars did that poorly.

But however you look at it, there is some truth in it – see my example above. When you believe in something and want someone to send money, you need to explain the value to people and process. That – in Lars’ viewpoint – is sales.

Process

The third person I spent some time with lately is Kate Daly, who runs a Change Management consultancy and is advising one of my customers on their HR change programme. And I bring her up because she came up with a very interesting observation for which she deserves credit.

20 years ago, HR departments ran processes for companies. Well two processes, hiring and firing. They transformed over the last 20 years from process droids into strategic advisors. My head of HR, Cheryl, is one of my most trusted advisors and drives business change, currently on career development of our most senior consultants. And they want to be called Human Capital Management to signify this. Good for them!

The IT revolution

Currently, the IT department of most large organisations does what HR did 20 years ago. It runs a process, keeping business processes up and running. There is often a “IT and Business” or “us and them” divide.

We believe that those IT people who figure out how to bring strategic change to their organisations will be the kingmakers of the industry and will afford success. And I for one am focussing on building a team of IT consultants who are focused on challenging and changing I our customers’ businesses.

And yes, I do believe that everyone is in sales but you can’t sell that to them by saying that. From my conversation with Lars, I think he gets this nuance.

In front is someone I know that works for BA, who has been given an upgrade to business class. The plane is packed and somehow I feel jilted that BA look after their own employees rather than rewarding their frequent flyers.

I fly a lot with British Airways. Somewhere in the region of 250k miles a year. Mostly economy with a mix of premium economy, business and the occasional first class ticket, depending on who is paying.

By contrast I fly much less with US Airways, though enough to be a frequent flyer. And they treat me curiously well. For instance on a trip to Costa Rica some months back, both myself and my partner got complimentary first class tickets both ways – including a 6’6″ flat bed. In fact I’ve had some sort of upgrade on over half of the US Airways flights i have flown this year.

Because I fly a lot, I get some problems. This is more or less expected and these problems in the last year have included:

• Destroyed luggage
• Theft from my luggage
• Items left in planes never returned to me
• Crashed planes causing serious delays
• Being downgraded
• Flights booked on the wrong dates by agents who refused to change them

What shocks me, and continues to shock me is threefold:

First, I know that BA have a policy of trying to retain their top customers. I’ve been told on multiple occasions that I am such a customer. However the behaviour that they display is in complete conflict with this.

Second, much of the time there are spare seats in a cabin ahead. What is the opportunity risk of upgrading your loyal customers to reward them for their loyalty? I buy the best cabin I can afford and by not upgrading me, BA will not make me contemplate paying more.

Lastly, when there is a problem, there is no worse resolver group than BA Customer Relations. I have contacted them multiple times, filled in surveys and complaints. And never, have they ever offered me compensation, good will, or anything else. They just ignore it.

By contrast I have had equivalent problems with US Airways and Qantas, and both airlines have been helpful and offered me something for my inconvenience.

So I have resolved to do something today. I am going to post this blog and then fill out one last customer survey. BA, you have one last opportunity to do something about it and I am expecting a big gesture. Otherwise, you have lost me, and everyone I have influence over, as a customer for life.

There it is, I have thrown down the gauntlet. On the 1st June, I will post an update, either way. We shall see if BA is capable of engaging its customers.

There’s no denying that the new iPad is impressive: the retina display on its own makes the new iPad much more impressive than any competitive product. However after a week or so I soon realised that it would be very difficult to justify an upgrade from the old iPad to the new.

And then three weeks ago I broke my hand. It is an interesting experience to break a hand because whilst it is not especially painful and doesn’t require extensive surgery in my case and it doesn’t really appear all that bad it’s actually really a terrible inconvenience. I cannot for instance write. Orl type. Things like opening doors cooking and carrying: things that you take for granted, become very difficult.

I read about the new dictation feature on Apple’s new iPad and decided that this might be a very good reason to purchase one. I’ve seen people you Siri on the iPhone 4S and thought that Apple’s voice system seemed to be very well advanced. And such dictation system could at least in theory make my life a lot more bearable whilst I was only able to type with my left hand.

This blog is my first real attempt at using Apple dictation and I’ve got to say that I’m really in two minds about it. If you’re in a quiet environment, you speak clearly, slowly and you avoid complicated expressions don’t actually works remarkably well. The trouble is that that’s not really how the human mind works. At least not mine anyhow.

And what’s more you have to tap the dictate button to start and then tap the dictate button again to finish. And when you do you have to have a Wi-Fi connection available otherwise it doesn’t work at all. And sometimes it just refuses to understand what you have to say. To add to all this you feel like a bit of a wally sat there clearly enunciating at an iPad.

In the ends to write this blog on the way that I hadn’t also required in reasonable degree of editing. For instance the dictate feature doesn’t really understand grammar and therefore won’t interject things like commas and full stops where you might imagine they would need to be. You might think that I’m being unfair that what apple is done is way beyond the quality of dictation of what others have managed.

And to some degree this is true because what’s really clever about dictate is that it works in any app where the Apple keyboard is required. It’s very useful when creating a note for the shopping or doing a search or any other time when using a keyboard is just a Little inconvenient.

But has it served as a replacement to being able for me to type? Have I been able to create content at a time when otherwise I would not have been able to do anything? Has it made the new iPad really worthwhile purchase? I’m really not so sure although the more I speak two it, the better the quality of dictation becomes.

However, in the end, I believe that the power of Apple’s dictation system really comes into it so when it’s offered an Apple TV or some such format. Because that is a time when using a keyboard or complicated remote system isn’t really very inconvenient and talking into a small remote or small iPod or something similar would really improve the quality of viewing experience.

Have you extensively used Apples iPod would you recommend a purchase? Let me know.

But for large environments, HANA hardware is huge. Let’s take a typical 8TB IBM HANA appliance (remember you get great compression so this is equivalent to 40TB of Oracle).  But still you need 16x512GB IBM nodes, each of which has a 4U server and 4U storage node. That’s a massive 128U or 4 32U server racks. You need to locate, power and cool this much equipment:

You can buy 1TB EX5 nodes now from IBM but they are really just 2 512GB nodes stitched together with a special connection, so it is not any more dense. HP, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Cisco all make HANA hardware too, but it’s all roughly the same size.

The reason for this is because SAP HANA is highly optimised for the massively fast Intel Westmere-EX platform, which has really fast memory. The smaller Westmere-EP blade servers don’t have the grunt to run SAP HANA in an optimal way.

Enter Intel Sandy Bridge-EP

There won’t be a new EX platform until some time late 2012 or early 2013 – Intel is in no hurry because the EX platform is highly profitable and fast. But Sandy Bridge EP is out now and it provides some very interesting characteristics.

Westmere-EX. 40 2.4GHz cores, 512GB (4xDDR1333), 2x 6.4GT/sec QPI

Sandy Bridge-EP, 32 2.9GHz cores, 1TB (4xDDR1333), 2x 8GT/sec QPI

What this doesn’t show is the details of this great Real World Technology blog, which shows that for I/O intensive requirements like SAP HANA, Sandy Bridge-EP massively outperforms Westmere-EX. It has faster interconnects and lower memory, plus 50-70% better core performance.

Based on this it should be possible to run 1TB RAM in a (much smaller) single node with the same performance as Westmere-EX. Interested yet?

What will these systems look like?

Well Westmere-EX can take 1.5TB RAM in 48 sockets but you get a performance hit. As a result I think the right system will be a 32 RAM socket 1TB 32-core blade. Based on what I have seen so far in the blade server market, this means 8x1TB blades in a 10U blade chassis – plus roughly the same in shared storage. We are down from 128U to 20U – over 6x more dense.

Plus the cost reduction is extreme because Sandy Bridge-EP is much cheaper. The expensive item in a 1TB HANA node is the Fusion-IO log storage.

Does this pose a problem for the Intel sales engine?

In my opinion, it’s a big yes. SAP HANA is well suited to scale-out platforms and the highly profitable for Intel. With Sandy Bridge-EP you can use fewer, cheaper, less profitable CPUs for the same effect. HANA simply doesn’t need the scale-up that Westmere-EX requires.

What’s more this is big for a customer. A typical 1TB node currently costs around $200k. With Sandy Bridge-EP and the new FusionIO IODrive2 cards, you are looking at bringing this down below the $100k mark.

Interesting times indeed

Take a read of the article; you may find, like me, that you understand a bit of what Godin is trying to say. For 80 years ago, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. Now 80% of the workforce is employed, and they have got used to a culture of entitlement where you do your hours, pay your dues and get your retirement package.

Back in the 1980s and 90s, if you worked for Andersen Consulting or IBM, this equated to a boot camp on some technology or other, and bums on seats, earning your employer the big bucks.

But the world has changed and it is no more visible in the services marketplace in which I work – perhaps more visible than anywhere else. Because if people are paying a substantial day rate for your services – and that is universally true in the corner of Enterprise IT in which I work – they expect very tangible value.

There are those people who were born differentiators in my team. For instance, there are those that have a way of spotting cool new technology and relating it to customers businesses. These guys will probably always be one step ahead of the curve and always be able to add insight and value.

“If you’re different somehow and have made yourself unique, people will find you and pay you more” – Seth Godin

But this is what made me think, because this is a pretty elitist thing to say. Surely only the best people can be unique. The elite. And the more I thought about this, the less I believe it’s true.

I suspect that the secret to this could be as simple as knowing what you could be great at. With some people it’s bloody obvious, and their skills come to the forefront. With others, their differentiators are less obvious. Perhaps being easy to work with and never complaining. Or the gel to the team that isn’t visible, but keeps everything together. Or, the detail person, the completer-finisher, the documenter. Perhaps the ability to relate to people. To listen. To disseminate.

And perhaps the only thing you really need to know, is your strengths. Perhaps you should ask around a bit and find out what people value in you?

Because if there’s one thing that’s true about what Godin’s got to say – there is only one person that will differentiate you – and that’s you. You are in charge of your own destiny here, and that includes articulating your own value proposition. Are you being a back-seat driver in your own life?

When I first left university, I lived outside of London with my parents; I commuted into London every day and paid £9.80 for the pleasure. That’s approximately £0.17 per mile. It falls in line with what you’d expect: cheap, affordable rail travel. We’ve had a bit of inflation since then, and if you take that into account, you’d expect that journey to cost £13.50 or thereabouts today.

Well if you go on http://thetrainline.com and try to buy a ticket, it will be £45. Pardon, you say? Yes, that’s 333% inflation. But that’s not the full picture of their profiteering. Passenger numbers have soared, 37% in that same period, if you believe this ATOC report. That means that for a given train, they are earning 457% more than they did 10 years ago – in real terms.

Ah, you might say, but they have been investing in the future, building out new shiny trains, wireless access and other amenities. I’m afraid the evidence suggests otherwise. First Great Western are still using the fleet of trains they inherited from British Rail in 1993, and the trains were built some time between 1977 and 1982. Most domestic flights now have wireless internet, but First Great Western operate a Bring Your Own Wireless policy, and stick you in a big faraday cage so you can’t get signal.

How does this make any sense?

Essentially it is an unregulated and anti-competitive market, which is all bad. The monopolised environment simply means that there is no incentive to improve. No incentive to provide a better customer service. No reason not to continue to push prices up.

And the stations?

I think that the stations are more offensive than anything else. I don’t know how many times I have been stood on a cold platform. You see, they used to have waiting rooms, but they realised that this was valuable real estate, so they sold them to minicab companies and rip-off coffee joints.

I was just stood for 20 minutes on a freezing platform with this exact problem. A WH Smith newsagent stands proudly where the waiting room used to be. But it’s OK – I can go and buy a packet of chips there for £0.90, 120% more than a supermarket. Who says they aren’t looking after their passengers?

My local station, Hampton, just retired the station worker that has been there since history began. He wasn’t a spring chicken, but he knew every cheap fare out there. To be fair, one of his replacements is pretty switched on, but the other can barely string a sentence together. It took me nearly 5 minutes to get my ticket today, with a growing line of passengers behind me.

Which brings me neatly to Revenue Protection

My favourite station is Kew Bridge. The ticket office burnt down some years back and for several years it was not actually possible to buy a ticket at any of the stations I went through from home to work. I’d be stopped, periodically, by revenue protection officers (it’s extortion, really). How, I would explain, would you like me to buy a ticket, when you can’t be bothered to have a ticket office at either station in my journey?

Andrew Gilligan wrote a good article on this a few years back. One operator made £32 million out of revenue protection, and financially incentivises its staff based on the amount of revenue they collect from unsuspecting passengers. I have one friend who was actually protected by police at Waterloo by one abusive revenue officer who would not let her buy a ticket, having travelled from the aforementioned Kew Bridge.

What can be done about it?

I really don’t know. Rail operators simply don’t care about customer service. They know that because they operate in a monopoly and most passengers don’t have a choice, they can afford to treat their customers like shit and they will keep buying. And passenger numbers keep rising as roads become more congested, so they keep putting their prices up.

For example, my regular ticket price just went up 6.5% last week, despite UK inflation being around 4%. And more to the point, salaries for most people aren’t increasing so the average person is spending more of their income, in real terms.

Perhaps we can lobby our MPs and our government. But I’m pretty certain they couldn’t care less. My local MP is Zac Goldsmith and I’m pretty certain he doesn’t give a shit. Zac – feel free to prove me wrong by commenting on this blog and tell me what you’re going to do about it.

In the meantime I will be thankful that I mostly travel for work purposes and my employer pays my expenses. Many others are not so fortunate.

It’s not because they are stupid, or rude. It’s because they have bad ghongai. I’ve been theorising this for a while and my conclusion is that some people have good ghongai, and some people have bad ghongai.

For example I have a great relationship with my mentor, John. I think one of the reasons for this is that he has this ability to call at a good time. When I’m quiet, my mind is still and capable of being opened. And if it’s a bad time, we always easily setup a new time to continue the conversation.

And yet other people including suppliers, customer and colleagues always call at a bad time. This sometimes makes me look less available than I really am. Interestingly with these people, there are several factors that don’t matter. For instance, some have access to my schedule and some do not. This makes pretty much no difference.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason to whether a person has ghongai; but I believe that it is a bilateral relationship. For instance I like to speak to my colleague Tristan Colgate. But it is almost possible to get on a call with him – we are always busy at different times. In other words, he has bad ghongai. Or wait, is it me that has it?

But what I’m wondering is what the impact of the subconscious is here. Are there people I subconsciously prioritise, and therefore grant them good gonghai? And if so, what does that mean of what I secretly think of Tristan?

And I’m pondering why, whilst I love my iPad 2, I very rarely use it. It is an item of beauty, of fashion and style. It is better than the original iPad by a million miles. The battery life is amazing and it integrates with all my other Apple stuff. It is always ready to use, always on the Internet with cellular Internet or Wi-Fi and never goes wrong.

So why then does it rarely get any use? When I go on holiday it is my device of choice – mostly because it is hard to work on it and temptation is kept at bay. At conferences where there is a lot of walking I sometimes use it. But the rest of the time it stays at home. And quietly downloads my email.

And then I think of Apple as a whole, I start to wonder when it last innovated. The iPod, in 2001. The iPhone in 2007. The iPad in 2009 and the unibody MacBook in 2008. Each of those were very interesting innovations. Like all good innovations, the technology wasn’t quite there to make version one a success.

What Apple has done amazingly well over the last 4 years is to execute on its past innovation. I have no doubt that their product line right now is the best, most polished it has ever been. Just like Nokia’s was in 2001. And that, you see, is the problem.

Because if Apple thinks that the new Apple TV, iPad 2 or iPhone 4S are innovations, they are dead in the water in 5 years time. The closest thing Apple have to innovation in the last 2 years is Siri, but their entire smartphone design is in such silos that Siri cannot integrate to the level it would need to, to innovate.

I don’t think that Apple is necessarily dead in the water yet, because there is time to be innovative once more – and remember that one amazing product every 5 years, with excellent execution in the middle, is still enough. The death of the innovator himself, Steve Jobs, makes that much harder for them.

Regardless of this, Apple will continue to grow because of their fantastic execution, for years to come. But unless we see a change, I predict that we will look back in 2020 as 2011 being the beginning of the end.

And it was so that I ended up today at The Cheese And Wine Company in Hampton. It sits on the site that has housed no less than four cafés in four years. Organic this, children’s that. Each was a failed business because they had no idea what their customers wanted – usually bad home-cooked cakes and muddy coffee. Really?

Steve, on the other hand, has created a simple and oddly unique value proposition. He selles cheese, wine, and associated paraphernalia. In the store, online, you can sit and eat it or take it home. He does tastings and parties and events and has engaged his audience very nicely. And what’s more, he’s not competing with the supermarkets because he sells stuff you can’t buy there. Stuff like Epoisses soft cheese and Binfield Brut sparkling wine, that comes from a few miles from where I was born in Berkshire.

It’s a simple value proposition and his customers love it. He’s sold out on every event and I had to settle for a rather nice stilton today, because he’d sold every other cheese in the shop. Trust me, he has a truckload coming tomorrow, on the next working day of the year.

The shop next door to him shut down a few months back. As far as I can tell, Harry and Paul’s I Saw You Coming took this store to run a parody. As they say, “It’s basically a bunch of crap that I’ve tastefully displayed. And a bunch of candles”. And now it’s been replaced by a store called OhSo. Which as far as I can tell sells the same rubbish that the old store (which went bust) sold. It’s sad, but they won’t be open in Christmas 2012.

And this neatly brings me to British Airways. The airline industry is in trouble. Their consumers have less disposable income than ever before. Fuel prices and taxes are rising year-on-year. A bunch of low-cost airlines have cropped up, cutting margins further and increasing competition. And consumers are better informed than ever before, with better price comparison sites.

They have two potential differentiators to choose from: either price, or quality of service. With airlines like the US domestics (US Airways, Delta etc.) and European budget airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair, you know what you are getting. Very little, for the lowest price possible. A return trip from London to Madrid is £37 by Easyjet in January, and £114 with BA.

So BA try to compete on perceived quality of service. But they have a serious problem here too, because their staff hate them. They are used to being given a platinum pay package for the last 30 years, and the market can no longer support it for the reasons explained before. What’s more, the delays to Boeing’s Dreamliner planes mean that BA are operating a tired fleet of ageing planes.

And in reducing their salaries and making the shifts and perks more similar to other competing airlines, BA have made their staff hate their jobs – and they take it out on the customers in many cases. In 2011 I have experienced the following:

1. Being charged for a ticket change after I was told I could have it for free because I was changing flights at their convenience.
2. Being charged for a ticket change after an administrative fault
3. A nice coat I left on a plane never made it to lost property – in a small airport
4. My bags vandalised and my property stolen on a flight from London to Madrid
5. Nearly missing a flight because of computer security check problems
6. Having my complaint letter opened by the crew that I complained about – they then confronted me
7. Flights with no water, broken heating systems, broken seats or rest rooms

And no one gives a crap. Their customer complaints department certainly don’t and from what I hear, the management team isn’t any different. When you talk to staff at the airport on a flight, they are invariably unhappy and disaffected.

And the share price shows it. They are down from 243p at the beginning of this year to 150p at the time of writing. To be fair, this is more or less in common with the rest of the industry – but what is not in common is they are barely breaking even. Lufthansa, for example, has an operating margin of 4% compared to the International Airlines Group (which owns BA and Iberia), which made 0.7% last year. I’ve not looked into it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some creative accounting going on there.

Now last week, FedEx got in trouble on YouTube, when a disaffected customer uploaded a video titled “FedEx Guy Throwing My Computer Monitor”:

Now this video already has nearly 7,000,000 views and 22,000 comments. Fedex Senior Vice President Matthew Thornton III turned this into a fantastic opportunity and apologised to the customer, as a YouTube response, here:

And if BA want to survive, I believe they need to apply some customer-centricity. I’ve been told by some senior people in BA that they have a program in place to try to ensure retention of frequent flyers and offer them a good quality of service.

Now, I get a fantastic quality of service from Carl and his team at BA in Philadelphia International Airport and this is probably the main reason why I fly BA (along with the rewards points, and the convenience of London Heathrow Terminal 5). But I think this is a pocket of excellence caused by a good manager and it is not representative of my overall experience.

The risk to BA seems so obvious – there will be some major casualties of the recession. I’m already tempted to switch to US Airways, who have a very generous upgrade system (they always fill business class, upgrading passengers by order of seniority). The fact that US Airways don’t give you access to their lounge, even if you are a frequent flyer, is the reason I’ve not. It costs $375 a year.

During a visit to the NASA space center in 1962, President Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?”. The janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon, Mr. President.”

It sounds corny, but having a company with a single vision may have something to be said for it. I work with a lot of large global organisations and it is often a problem that IT functions do not serve the wider needs of the business. One company that this is not true in is Howdens Joinery (previously the wholesale arm of MFI), which is a very interesting organisation.

For a start, everyone in the organisation is remunerated based on the same criteria. This shared sense of purpose is very visible in the CIO, David Hallett. We were talking about depot outages and he explained that they don’t operate on the basis of an acceptable failure rate: a depot which is not operating, is margin lost, and that is unacceptable.

What’s more interesting is that it appears that because everyone has a shared and common goal, they work as a team. The results are clear. Revenue in 2009 was 769m with 6.5% profit after tax. This was up to 808m and 8.2% profit in 2010. 2011 Interim results are available here but they aren’t very relevant because Howdens does much of their business in the run-up to Christmas. What is interesting is the first few pages which explains their business model.

If you do so, you will understand that Howdens is 100% customer-centric. They know who their customer is (the small builder) and know exactly what is important to them – and they deliver it, surrounded by a viable commercial model. Their massive market share is testimony to getting that right.

For my money, there will be airlines that figure out that being customer-centric first and foremost builds long-term sustainable success. And there will be those that will roll over and die. And from where I’m sitting, British Airways may be a Very British Institution, but I’m not convinced it can survive this recession.

What’s even more interesting is there was a knock-on effect on other tech stocks. TIBCO was down at -11% and SAP at -6% on the same day – and they hadn’t done anything. TIBCO’s results were due the next day and SAP’s are due in mid January; the markets clearly believed that if stalwart Oracle had done badly, then presumably others would follow.

Let’s deal with TIBCO first; they posted fantastic results for Q4. 22% up on revenue. 31% up on profit. Innovation, success stories and all that; despite this, the stock is now only back up 1% above what it was before Oracle posted its results.

As for SAP, they posted blockbusting Q3 results and did the smart thing by keeping the full year advisory as it was. If they didn’t have a great Q4 then they would likely still hit the full year milestones – and if they had a great Q4 then they would smash them. Either way, investors would be happy.

I don’t have inside information on SAP’s results but Oracle blamed deal slippage. Some of the same seems to be visible across the enterprise IT space. From where I’m sitting, customers scrutinise where they spend money because they have to get value. If you’re a customer reading this – please do this. Take your time and ensure you spend it wisely – this way you will spend on the projects that help meet your strategic objectives. That can only be a good thing.

The worrying elephant in the room is further macro-economic trends We all know that the Euro is shafted. The UK economy is tightly linked to European exports so we are reliant on their – non-existant – buying power. The USA is reeling from the financial mess it has put itself in and only China is a huge buying force right now.

How much of the deal slippage can we attribute to the ailing global economy? Is everyone avoiding talking about it because they are afraid it might be true? And does this reflect on what might be a very tough economic market for 2012 and beyond?

We will see.