TheAgileStartup

Agile is Like Pornography - You'll Know It When You See It

In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, issued the following opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, one of the early challenges of pornography to the First Amendment of the Constitution:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

The 7,800,000 Google search results for "What is Agile?" not withstanding, based on my many conversations with Agile teams and their coaches and consultants, I believe that Justice Stewart's sentiment is as applicable to Agile as it is to pornography.  You can try as hard as you'd like to define or test for Agile, until you see it, you can never truly know it. 

In order to help us see Agile, I would like to introduce the concept of an Agile Moment, and with today's post, to begin sharing some of b2b2dot0's.

b2b2dot0 SaaS Availability - June 2010

June not only produced record breaking temperatures here in Raleigh, North Carolina but it also produced a record breaking month for our data center!  As you can see from the following chart, we registered an historical high of 99.934% availability for b2b2dot0's service.

There's a SaaS App For That!

A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post entitled "My Love/Hate Relationship with Internet Applications".  Today I'm going to add two new services to my list of applications that I'm falling in love with.  They are TimeBridge and Dropbox.

Uptick in Manufacturer eCommerce Spending on the Horizon

I just came across this Manufacturing Computer Solutions article that bodes well for our future here at b2b2dot0.  IDC Manufacturing Insights and hybris cosponsored this industry study which underscored the virtues of making the types of investments that we've been advocating for the past 2.5 years.

Google Analytics is an SAP Customer Service Agent's Best Friend

Wouldn't it be awesome if through some amazing telepathic feat of technology you could be alerted to the fact that one of your customers is starting to get really anxious about the delivery of their order?  You then surprise them with a proactive phone call and work them through their delivery anxieties?  Well, you can if your customers are using your real time integrated SAP Order Management website to check status and it is hooked up to Google Analytics. 

b2b2dot0 SaaS Availability - May 2010

Last month I introduced our first blog post on holding us publicly accountable for our Availability Service Level Agreement (SLA).  Today I'm going to discuss our May 2010 performance.

Grinding the Gears of Customer Service

At the end of the day, b2b2dot0's raison d'être is all about customer service.  Our company's mission is to enable SAP manufacturers to provide a world class self-service order management experience to their customers.  We also know that providing mind-boggling customer service to our clients is at the core of our business model.  So when I see examples of bad customer service, I just cringe...and write about it :-)

Santana, SAPPHIRE 2010, Blackberries, Jumbotrons and Twitter.

Sometimes you just have to sit back and marvel at how far we've come with technology.  I just got back from SAP's SAPPHIRE/ASUG conference in Orlando and this is one of those moments.

Monitoring b2b2dot0's SaaS Availability

At the heart of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model is the understanding that the service will always be available when needed.  In our 24x7 flattened world, that pretty much means all the time. 

How Hard Can It Be to Integrate an eCommerce Website with SAP?

Evidently not very hard if a consulting company wins a contract to do so and assigns a junior developer to make it happen.  I just found this post over at StackOverflow (a geek website) and couldn't believe my eyes. 

Agility in Action - Supporting an SAP Distribution Center Relocation in Real Time

One of our clients innocently sends us an email on Tuesday, April 27th asking us to close up one of their microsites in 3 days...for 3 days...in support of relocating one of their distribution centers.  The request was a simple one, "deactivate all of our French users, and only our French users, for the specified time period, so that we can make the physical and logical changes to our distribution model." 

B2C eCommerce in an SAP Integrated World

I'm not sure why, but over the past several weeks the marketplace has repeatedly drawn us into conversations about the B2C (business to consumer) business model.  That got me to thinking about what the B2C model actually is...from a business, technical and SAP perspective...and how it differs from the B2B (business to business) model that is our namesake...b2b2dot0.  Most importantly, it got me to thinking about what we have to do to in order to support these business models...in an Agile way.

Today I start a series of posts on this topic. 

Thinking Document Management? Think Esker.

I just came across a post with this title over at the itelligence blog.  That reminded me that I've yet to formally announce our relationship with Esker, which we entered into at the end of last year.  So that's the subject of today's post.

Increasing Revenue Via an SAP B2B Order Management Website

The economy must be turning around. Over the past couple of years most of our conversations were about  investing in an SAP Integrated B2B Order Management website in order to save internal operating costs.  Now we're starting to hear more companies talking about justifying their investments by having to demonstrate that they are capturing new business.  So that got me to thinking.  Can a B2B Order Management website really generate incremental revenues for a company?

b2b2dot0 Sees 3565% Annual Growth in Item Sales

Since today is tax day in the US, I figured I should do some accounting in its honor.  I did a quick scan of Google Analytics for eCommerce sales for all of our clients from the beginning of this year to today (January 1, 2010 - April 15, 2010) and compared it to the exact same period in 2009.

ThinkStrategies' Evaluation of b2b2dot0's SAP Hybrid Cloud Offering

Several weeks ago, Jeffrey Kaplan of ThinkStrategies published a challenge to Cloud Vendors for 2010 in eCommerce Times.  I thought it would be fun to see how we stacked up against them, so here goes.

Placing Spreadsheet Orders Directly into SAP

If you think of yourself as a car company, you're destined to produce nothing but cars.  However, if you think of yourself as a Consumer Electronics Company, as Fast Company magazine just dubbed the Ford Motor Company, you're free to produce cloud enable entertainment centers that can take you places.

I Hate Awards...Unless I Win Them!

Well, we won another one! 

Last year, Nordson won Progressive Manufacturer of the Year based on our SAP Integrated B2B Internet Based Order Management project.  We also won a grant from NCIDEA validating that we were (are) a promising young North Carolina based company.

This year (so far :-)) it's the Small Business Commerce Association's 2009 Best of Business Award.

SaaS? Multitenant? ASP? Cloud? Oh My!

I've resisted writing about this topic for the past two years because I didn't think it really mattered.  After all, who cares how we architect our application and hosting infrastructure? 

Are Corporate eBusiness Managers a Dying Breed?

Back in the day, when the Internet and eCommerce first came on the scene in the late 90's, corporate eBusiness Managers were springing up left and right.  They were the ones charged with defining and executing their corporation's eCommerce strategies, which for the most part, was in defense of the well funded dot com threats in their individual markets. 

SAP B2B Analytical Insights - Segment Your Users

When it comes to achieving B2B ecommerce success, leaving well enough alone isn't a winning strategy.  If you want to increase the value that you and your customers are deriving from your SAP Integrated B2B website, you need to understand who is coming to your website and what they're doing there (we rely on Google Analytics to provide us with many of these insights).

Measurable Insights from SAP B2B eCommerce Websites

Now that we're approaching close to 70,000 visits, and almost $10M of revenue, per month from our various B2B websites, I think it's time to reflect on what we're learning from an analytics' perspective.  If for no other reason than to establish  benchmark metrics that can guide future SAP Integrated sell-side B2B ecommerce projects across the industry. I wish we had access to this information when we got started!

What is SAP's CRM Really Being Used For?

Last October, SAP announced that they were offering free CRM licenses to the market.  Coincidentally, over the course of the next several months, we heard of many defections away from SAP CRM and a couple of others where it was evaluated and dismissed as an unaffordable B2B eCommerce offering for the mid-market. 

So that got me to wondering...who was actually using SAP's CRM and what were they really doing with it? 

The Value of SAP Order Status According to Google

Over the last several months, we've had several conversations with manufacturers who have told us that their primary means of receiving orders from their customers is via EDI or FAX/email. Furthermore, because of their desire to provide superb customer services to their customers, that was not going to change in the near future.  They reasoned that if that was their customers' preferred way to interact with them, who were they to tell them otherwise?  They certainly were not going to ask their customers to retype their orders into an eCommerce website!

The Evolution of b2b2dot0's Client Services

Last September I wrote a post entitled "Customer Support in an SAP Integrated World".  In that post I discussed the (positive) impact that our "On-Demand" model has had on our ability to respond to our clients from a technical perspective.  Today I'd like to take a look at the impact that the On Demand model has on our client services from a business model perspective.