There were a swarm of papers published in the late 90′s and early 2000′s surrounding a very, very strange thing: turns out that asking people to fill out a survey about a positively viewed product actually causes them to buy more of that product, buy it more quickly, and become more profitable customers. This is called, in some circles, the “Mere Measurement effect.”Just in case you want to know where I came up with the above, here’s some light bedtime reading: Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry.

There are a slew more articles on the subject, a quick perusal on Google Scholar will get you acquainted with the literature.

There’s an older observation related to this new research: “What gets measured generally gets done.” Named for the place where studies were done on production improvements in the 1920′s,  The Hawthorne Effect has now been evolved into multiple lines of research and nuance, but the point is simple:  paying attention to things improves their performance.

Shocking huh?

Although today some research points to the fact that only measuring things does not necessarily improve them, the fact remains that measurement is vital to increased performance, especially as a form of attention given to a vital area. If you consider that timing a race is the only way to determine if one has run faster, and that looking at splits or heart rates or pace are also helpful to athletes in a training situation, it is obvious that measurement is a key to improved performance.

So how does Business Intelligence and the software industry as a whole make use of this?

Simple: turns out that any software that measures something, and shows that measurement, and interim measurements, to the people performing that behavior, will cause improvement against those measures. If that software shows those results publicly, or allows them to be discussed, things get even better.

We all see this is enterprise software sales, especially on inside sales teams, where the bell gets rung for each deal, where whiteboards show bookings quarter-to-date, and indeed in the entire performance monitoring industry.

If software not only measured those results, but also caused salespeople to think through and state their intentions (commits) and focus on the growth toward their intentions (pipeline), especially if we view the changes over time, the above research  gives us a clear indication that sales performance would improve.

Oddly enough, if we stick with the sales performance theme, we find that most people use a CRM package to look at actual results (bookings) and usually pipeline. But almost all CRM packages don’t show changes in pipeline over time, or bring the key measures that matter to the fore, and track them over time.

This is echoed through most software packages: measurement is for managers – but that’s actually the place where it does the least good.

I say: Measurement for the masses!

In Northern Climes

a man looks over barren wastelands

As forgotten

as you and I

In our times

life passed us by, silent

So amazing

its closeness

How ashamed

we should all be

Of what is

and what we don’t see

Funny thing that when we change an element in a system most people don’t think through the other changes necessary. Funnier that I am guilty of that!

Few days ago I received my Intel x25-M SSD 80GB hard drive from the hardware magicians at SoftMart! I then copied the Vista OS over from my old conventional drive with Acronis MigrateEasy – which worked just as the title suggested. MigrateEasy allowed me to connect my old drive via a USB controller, copy the disk image of the Vista OS to a hard drive on the desktop, then rewrite it back to the new solid state hard drive again with the SSD connected via USB. There were no hitches, and upon insertion in my Lenovo x60, Vista booted just fine.

However, there were some strange crashes and issues. So I started to look around for best practices, and found little. CAVEAT: I don’t *know* that this stuff is the right way to go – it’s just what I am doing now   But here’s what I am using as my working best practices, gleaned mostly from common sense and some web forums and reviews:

• Turn off defragmentation in Vista: the random access time on these drives is very fast, and I am under the impression that the Intel drive is allocating blocks of data into the areas it deems best for performance – no sense having an algorithim optimized for a conventional hard disk try to move things around.
• Turn off Active Protection from lenovo: After turning this feature, which stops the hard drive when it detects g-forces like being dropped, I noted much less machine freezing. I don’t think solid state memory is to shock-sensitive enough to warrant this
• Turn off the disk paging file if you have enough RAM: paging to an SSD is pretty fast, but some folks are opining that it keeps writing and writing and that SSD’s are more sensitive to multiple writes. I rarely run out of RAM, so am going to try this.
• Turn off superfetch: again, no need to cache the info on the drive when apps start very fast anyways.

If I see any adverse effects on my machine I will post back. Let me know if you’ve ot some additional ideas.

For those iPhone gripes, please go to pleasefixtheiphone.com.

The top gripe: cut n paste.

My gripe (and 23 other folks right after I posted it!): no search in the email app!

There should be a generalized gripe list for every product – like SFDC’s ideas app, only universal. Yeah – I know people have created these – but we really need a dictator to decree that there should only be one per product, and then things would get done around here!

Several months ago I started at WebTrends. Today we kicked off the WebTrends blog. So I will be blogging about the biz over there. WebTrends is a fantastic company, and I’m happy to call them my tribe

Today, at the Irfan Colloqium sessions at Louhelen Baha’i School, I attended a talk by Arsalan Geula, the author of the book Iranian Baha’is from Jewish Background: A portriat of an emerging Baha’i Community. The talks were well attended, and the followup conversations proved very interesting, as many of the audience had stories of their own to share.

The talk was fascinating as it provides some deep original research into the actual stories behind the conversion of Jews to the Baha’i Faith during the 19th and early 20th centuries in Iran. Some of the most interesting documents were in Persian, but written in Hebrew letters.

Take a look at his new blog for more info, or click here to buy.

I recently picked up the Suunto X10 hoping that I would get my one-device fix, but soon realized that it was not to be. As outlined in my previous posts, there are too many tradeoffs to the Suunto x10 on every pole of the usage triangle:

1) fitness / training device: no heart rate, short battery life, and few calculations that relate to training performance

2) navigation device: tiny screen, low gain antenna compared to a handheld or even the Garmin 305 according to my side-by-side ride, where the Suunto x10 missed large patches that the 305 didn’t. Also, no screen to speak of, compared to some on the 305, and large touchscreens on a dedicated navigation device.

3) watch: too big, and poor battery life, coupled with truly abysmal visibility without backlight under any dimmer light condition – let alone running or hammering down the road on your bike with sunglasses on.

I don’t really fault Suunto – the technology is just going to require some more time to mature.  Given today’s tech limitations, I really think the pod approach is the right one – like the pds offered by Garmin or Suunto’s training series.

If I had my druthers, I’d pick up the Garmin 705, and use my Suunto Core for a watch. But the Forerunner 305 works great, and includes a heart rate monitor, and I can keep my Core ABC watch on which gives me backup altimiter, and other watch functions.

Even if you require a tiny gps device, this doesn’t suit: by the time you bring along your solar panel to recharge it every 6 hours of use, or even 7 days if you use the features from time to time, you might as well have brought along a regular watch and a regular GPS with all the bells and whistles, which would also get you solid basemaps and the like.

AFter one day of wearing the Suunto X10, military edition, I have to say this is one extremely functional watch. But there are downsides as well. Since all the stuff I’ve seen online just talks about the good, I will dispense the bad:

1) plebian style, bordering on G-shock: this thing is pretty ugly. The texture of the watch is great, and the underside of the band is nice, but it is high off the wrist, lacks any metal or coolness, and the white bezel and little colored (painted) dots on the fron look cheap in real life. I was honestly tempted to return it and keep the all-black Suunto Core (a Black/orange Core with a black strap and buckles) based on looks alone (even though the Core has no GPS).

2) unreadable in low light without the backlight: compared to the Core, the x10 military is not readable at all in low light without the backlight on. And if you think that the contrast settings will help, they do not. Setting the contrast higher than 6 causes streaks all over the negative face, and below 3 washes out the color of the letters.

3) won’t fit under almost any sleeve at all – too high. While not a huge watch, this watch is *much* bigger than say a Garmin 405, and much higher than a Suunto core. It’s also much higher than my Bell & Ross 46mm, which is around 11mm high – that’s a big thing.

4) REALLY stiff buttons – the kind that are so stiff that you will leave a depression on your finger – but you will *not* press one by accident!

And the annoyances:

a) even though this is a GPS watch, and updates time, and compass declination based on where you are, it will not figure out what time zone you are in!  That’s kind of dumb. I understand having a setting that keeps a person in a certain time zone, but I don’t understand why it can’t do a lookup from the GPS. not that hard. And the second time zone will sync seconds, but not anything else with the satellite sync on the main time zone (based on GPS fix). I can hope for a firmware fix I guess, but I am also guessing that this would require a lookup table in the internal memory of the device.

b) no dive pressure: the core has this – why take it away?

There’s a lot of cool stuff as well – some of that tomorrow!

The world of sport-focused wrist-top computers, also called watches, jumped ahead light years in the last few months. While I’ve been using a GPS-enabled heart rate monitor for some time now (The Garmin Forerunner 305), it’s huge, and not wearable on a daily basis (see pic @ right on a typical human wrist). The battery life is also not workable – you can’t expect it to stay on for more than 25-30 hours at best, even with the GPS off. But as a training device it’s excellent – tracking where you’ve gone, how fast, how high, and your heart rate along the way.

So Garmin innovates, and uses in the ForeRunner 405 an excellent GPS receiver in a more normal size watch, this time using the closest part of the batch bands as a way to hide the bulk of the watch. It’s still a little large, but a very workable daily war, and includes GPS tracking and heart rate tracking.  But alas, this thing isn’t the answer to all your prayers. First, it only shows one time zone, which is a drawback in my book. Second, it doesn’t have a barometric altimiter, meaning that you will have to burn major battery to get your altitude, and forget about any baro warnings that a pressure drop is taking place and a storm is coming!

Now Suunto, whose Core device excells in providing Altiture / Baromoter & Compass (ABC), and also sports a depth meter to 32 ft, has out a GPS watch called the X9i, which is not focused on the training world, but rather the navigation world. For instance, the x9i has no heart rate monitor!  As a matter of fact, Suunto offers *no* watch in all of its lineup that does GPS and a heart rate monitor at the same time as navigation features. You can get a training watch with a GPS pod, and that will help with training, but not with navigation, or get a navigation watch without the HRM!

Suunto’s new X10, which has better battery life than the X9i (lasting 6 hours of GPS monitoring and perhaps as much as a month of non-GPS use as a watch), seems to be the best compromise. In a few words it has: GPS, Altitude, Barometer, Temperature,Compass, and Dual time features.

But here’s the payoff: real integration – as a busy busy guy, I only want to go out, workout, and upload from one device, but I want that device to include the navigation features I need rather than having a performance monitor on one hand, and a navigation device on the other!  Now only if  these folks realize – it’s really not that much harder to cram a heart rate monitor into this watch – and it would be a *really* smart thing to do. And if they want a beta tester, I’m ready.

So Shame on Suunto and Garmin – why go 80% of the way, then stop, when it really wouldn’t cost much more, or take more battery life, to build the complete package!

Came across an interesting article from Paul Gillin, who does a great job of explaining a very powerful platform – the Serena Mashup Exchange – in a few simple words.

As I look at the amount of automation we have in place around the Mashup Exchange, the systems powering it, and how we’ve been able to “glue” these systems together for real business value and results, technological progress becomes apparent. SaaS is real, and has real benefits, and the move to SaaS represents another evolutionary step in enbracing the power of the web.

I’m currently attending the Metamorphosis 8.0 show in San Jose today, where we’re hearing about Integration generally. This is another crucial ingredient in the evolution of SaaS – and Pervasive seems to have a great story  – 150 integration adapters that can connect to a SaaS system. More on that later.