February 2008

At the grand ol’ age of 46, he feels old, especially when seeing how his daughter tackles problems the Generation M (or is it Y, Z…I’ve lost track) way: My 14 year old daughter and her cheerleader friends were in my living room working on a routine…. Then they downloaded it to YouTube and text messaged their friends and told them to check it out before practice tomorrow I stared at them like they’d just invented fire and angered the gods…. Flitting between MySpace, multiple instant messaging instances, music sites while barely touching email and yet talking to friends in SMS speak, I was amazed at the way he’d taken the power of opposable thumbs and turned the computer into a dazzling light show…. As these children move through the education system and into business training, I wonder how much of this kind of behaviour will be knocked out of them…. The whole notion of social computing is about re-forming the relationships that govern the way we interact with our peers, staff, business partners and customers. It’s a big topic area with many nuances but with the ultimate goal of tapping into the collective knowledge that is shared among those ecosystems of people and processes…. If our professional institutions don’t address this issue soon, they will find it very difficult to attract the kind of people needed to make social computing a reality…. We can argue that professionals will always be needed to keep the transactional lights on, but that will count for nothing as human intervention is squeezed out of transactional process steps.

Last evening I fielded a call from Rod Drury, CEO with Xero, a New Zealand based vendor that is hoping to make it big in the UK…. The company IPO’d early on the theory that credibility through public ownership matters and in order to lock in value. Both ideas play directly towards vendor viability, a key element in any software buying decision They kicked off by looking to attract accounting practice partners…. Today they have about 100 in NZ including some international brands They then backed that by partnering with local banks to provide host-to-host connections that could be used by Xero to change customer behaviour through auto uploading of key data…. Developing a strong vertical market strategy that allows them to quickly understand and develop markets based on need…. As a founder he’s not lost any of the gung-ho crazy spirit you need to make a business like this fly. I’ll be taking a peek under the covers and will share more of what I learn about this company that hails from what Rod describes as: “This tiny rock from somewhere in the South Pacific.” If the first impressions are indicative of the company’s DNA then it will be an interesting and entertaining day.