I doubt that would work very well… Chuckle. They would keep getting mail from guys like oldman telling them what an amateur I am. I should get back to my welding…

A bunch of interesting, well written, and informative stuff. You should write for Gartner. You make way more sense than there current writers do. You can write from the comfort of your own den and make a lot of money doing it too. I know, I used to work for a company that hired a bunch of technical writers for different projects. They would sometimes do contract work for Gartner. I was not one of the writers though.

It’s not something that can be defined because it depends on the particular customer, the particular business at the particular place in time. They give examples from a cruise-ship that are pretty specific. Customers value not having to wait in line for anything. They provide customers with a debit card for every service. It identifies the customer to the system and does the “paper-work”. I can relate to that. I remember going to dinner some places where the wait was longer than the meal. The customers also had instant access to utilization so they could time their visits or choose locations that were efficient for everyone. The business gets huge value from that because no genius has to manage all the juggling. The customers do it automatically.

In education, because we often do not sell a product for money, value has to be about the results. Students get a lot more out of education if its flexible to their needs and each student is different. Schools that do charge money are essentially the same as businesses but they still need the same performance a non-profit school needs.

I’ve been in schools where we could value the day by the number of fights that did not happen in the hallway in the last hour. Hardly a day went by that classes were not interrupted by a “lock down”. It was like being in prison. Better IT would have had an important impact on that value if students felt education was relevant and useful. Obviously what was going on was not relevant and useful. Administration balked at any changes. They had spent decades making that school the way it was and they weren’t about to throw all that effort away. I suggested shipping in a bunch of Computers for Schools machines and was told the cost of maintenance was not affordable. Yet, I have worked in schools in the North where we got PCs for $0 and students and teachers were able to maintain them just for the fun of it.

Everyone has some different values. Thinking that everyone should value what M$ values is what got the world into the current mess that is IT today. It’s past time we valued things that work for us like FLOSS.

That last paragraph did that to me.

“Those combinations increase the accessibility of new sources of customer value to expand the potential of digital business. Defining value at this digital edge also helps to create addressable revenue that reflects the best of the digital and physical worlds. The process begins with expanding the definition of value in a digital world.”

These are the key phrases that left me with a feeling like I was suddenly in 0 gravity:

customer value
addressable revenue
expanding the definition of value

“Customer value” sounds like what you get with a pole dancer without the pole. Something is missing between customer and value. And though they speak of expanding the definition of “value”, they didn’t define it in the first place. They do a nice dance around a subject and never define it. They never nail it down. That kind of writing just pisses me off. They don’t say anything.

I can appreciate that Gartner has given a strong emphasis towards greater digital efficiency and the possibility that FLOSS may be a part of that efficiency. But the analyst speak it’s written in makes it unaccountable. “Customer value” is not defined. Is it defined later on? If it is, I suspect it’s defined with more nebulous phrases that boil down to nothing.