I like this blogger blog: free, easy to use and manage, tied to my existing Google account and adequate for my purposes. However not everything is exactly as I would like. For example, when I or a reader of my blog prints a blog post, I don't want the print-out to have
1. the top navigation bar that includes the search box and other buttons.
2. the right sidebar with links to my profile and other posts.
Also I want the content of the post to occupy the full width of the page, and not waste the space on the right side.
If your Browser is IE and you take a print out of this post or just look at the print preview, you will notice that the print-out doesn't have the top navigation bar and the right sidebar and the full width of the page is utilized, even though the screen shows something very different.
How did I do this? The trick is know that Blogger uses CSS to specify presentation characteristics and CSS allows separate specification for "screen" and "print" media and you can specify the CSS for "print" media by editing the layout HTML. For this blog, I simply added the following lines within the <head> element:
<style media="'print'" type="'text/css'">
#navbar {display:none;}
#main {width:100%;}
#sidebar-wrapper {display:none;}
</style>
These lines may or may not work for you, depending upon the template you have chosen. However, if you know a little bit of HTML and CSS it should be trivial to figure out what will work.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Waste Management v. SAP: Lessons for Buyers of Enterprise Software
For those who aren't yet tuned-in to the Waste Management v. SAP lawsuit and Waste Management's side of the story: Waste Management Inc., a Texas-based provider of waste and environmental services in North America, bought SAP Waste and Recycling solution, including software licenses and implementation services to automate its Order-to-Cash business processes, believing the software to be "out-of-the-box" and "standard end-to-end solution" for waste management industry in the US. After more than $100 million of project expenses and 2 years of failed implementation efforts, Waste Management sued SAP for misrepresenting an "untested", "incomplete" and "defective" software as "mature", "tested", "proven" and "ready for deployment with no customization" during pre-sale discussions and evaluations.
You can read more about the lawsuit in CNet news story, SAP Watch blog post or the court filing itself. Surprisingly, the story hasn't got much coverage in mainstream media or even the noisy blogosphere. In fact I learnt about it through this blog post while browsing the Hacker News.
This is a remarkable story, at least for those of us involved with enterprise software, not because exaggeration of capabilities during pre-sale discussions is unusual but because is so common that it is almost expected -- akin to advertisements of consumer products. Note that I have used the word exaggeration and not misrepresentation, for a little exaggeration is part of the selling process. Time and budget overruns during implementation are also the norm.
Complete failures, the kind indicated by the legal filing, are somewhat rare but not unheard of. What is highly unusual is seeking legal remedy. Why so? After all, the loss to the buyer is very real and they every right to go to the court, especially when there is a feeling that they were misled on purpose. Then why don't we see lawsuits for every failed consulting project? It would be fascinating to discuss various reasons but then I would be digressing from the main topic of my post: the lessons for buyers of enterprise software. For the curious, here is a comment at Hacker News that, in my opinion, provides a pretty good explanation.
I think the Waste Management's experience, as outlined in their court filing, is an interesting and educational read for all buyers of enterprise software. Learning from your own failure is good, learning from some else's failure is even better. My takeaways are:
1. Don't take vendor claims at its face value. As per Waste Management, the claims of "out-of-the box", mature, proven and tested software solution were key in its decision to select SAP. However, it is not clear what steps did Waste Management take to verify these claims. At the minimum, they could have asked for documentation, references of successful implementation and could have even conducted a limited proof-of-concept implementation.
2. Understand how enterprise software vendors operate. It is well known within the industry that sales reps and pre-sales consultants are compensated by commission on sales and are highly motivated to close deals. Also, it is usually a different team that does the actual implementation. The former team has all the motivation to present as rosy a picture as possible. High level nature of discussions during pre-sales and presence of unknowns and ambiguity don't help either.
3. Beware of transference conclusions. Presence of a former Waste Management controller in the SAP's sales-team convinced Waste Management that SAP has good understanding of the industry and it assumed that their solution must be incorporating this knowledge. The problem with this reasoning is that the high level understanding of an industry usually doesn't translate well to low level implementation of data schema and steps within the business processes. Also, within a large organization an industry expert may be too busy closing deals and interfacing with external world than working with the development team.
4. Pay attention to what is behind a demo. Waste Management accepted pre-sales demos as normal working of the standard software solution but later learnt that these were fake, mock-up demos. Most enterprise solutions are essentially frameworks that allow substantial customization through installation specific configuration. It is quite likely that demos shown to Waste Management were created by configuring the SAP R/3 platform to meet Waste Management's test script. This would have been easy to find out by asking pointed and concrete questions or asking demo of scenarios different than the test scripts.
5. Have Realistic Expectations. Waste Management wanted a "out-of-the-box" that could be deployed without any customization. Though reasonable, this seems like an unrealistic expectation for a large company operating in a very specific market segment with its own business processes.
One could argue, as Waste Management has done in its court filing, that they were target of a systematic fraud by lies, misrepresentations and unethical sales practices and they may very well be right. All I am saying is that there are valuable lessons for buyers in this story. In the long run I think the enterprise software industry is better served by savvy buyers and not lawyers at every stage of software selection and contract negotiation, which may very well happen if this lawsuit results in a big award and more lawsuits follow.
You can read more about the lawsuit in CNet news story, SAP Watch blog post or the court filing itself. Surprisingly, the story hasn't got much coverage in mainstream media or even the noisy blogosphere. In fact I learnt about it through this blog post while browsing the Hacker News.
This is a remarkable story, at least for those of us involved with enterprise software, not because exaggeration of capabilities during pre-sale discussions is unusual but because is so common that it is almost expected -- akin to advertisements of consumer products. Note that I have used the word exaggeration and not misrepresentation, for a little exaggeration is part of the selling process. Time and budget overruns during implementation are also the norm.
Complete failures, the kind indicated by the legal filing, are somewhat rare but not unheard of. What is highly unusual is seeking legal remedy. Why so? After all, the loss to the buyer is very real and they every right to go to the court, especially when there is a feeling that they were misled on purpose. Then why don't we see lawsuits for every failed consulting project? It would be fascinating to discuss various reasons but then I would be digressing from the main topic of my post: the lessons for buyers of enterprise software. For the curious, here is a comment at Hacker News that, in my opinion, provides a pretty good explanation.
I think the Waste Management's experience, as outlined in their court filing, is an interesting and educational read for all buyers of enterprise software. Learning from your own failure is good, learning from some else's failure is even better. My takeaways are:
1. Don't take vendor claims at its face value. As per Waste Management, the claims of "out-of-the box", mature, proven and tested software solution were key in its decision to select SAP. However, it is not clear what steps did Waste Management take to verify these claims. At the minimum, they could have asked for documentation, references of successful implementation and could have even conducted a limited proof-of-concept implementation.
2. Understand how enterprise software vendors operate. It is well known within the industry that sales reps and pre-sales consultants are compensated by commission on sales and are highly motivated to close deals. Also, it is usually a different team that does the actual implementation. The former team has all the motivation to present as rosy a picture as possible. High level nature of discussions during pre-sales and presence of unknowns and ambiguity don't help either.
3. Beware of transference conclusions. Presence of a former Waste Management controller in the SAP's sales-team convinced Waste Management that SAP has good understanding of the industry and it assumed that their solution must be incorporating this knowledge. The problem with this reasoning is that the high level understanding of an industry usually doesn't translate well to low level implementation of data schema and steps within the business processes. Also, within a large organization an industry expert may be too busy closing deals and interfacing with external world than working with the development team.
4. Pay attention to what is behind a demo. Waste Management accepted pre-sales demos as normal working of the standard software solution but later learnt that these were fake, mock-up demos. Most enterprise solutions are essentially frameworks that allow substantial customization through installation specific configuration. It is quite likely that demos shown to Waste Management were created by configuring the SAP R/3 platform to meet Waste Management's test script. This would have been easy to find out by asking pointed and concrete questions or asking demo of scenarios different than the test scripts.
5. Have Realistic Expectations. Waste Management wanted a "out-of-the-box" that could be deployed without any customization. Though reasonable, this seems like an unrealistic expectation for a large company operating in a very specific market segment with its own business processes.
One could argue, as Waste Management has done in its court filing, that they were target of a systematic fraud by lies, misrepresentations and unethical sales practices and they may very well be right. All I am saying is that there are valuable lessons for buyers in this story. In the long run I think the enterprise software industry is better served by savvy buyers and not lawyers at every stage of software selection and contract negotiation, which may very well happen if this lawsuit results in a big award and more lawsuits follow.
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