Hollis Tibbetts

Most technology companies, especially software companies, do marketing all wrong. Zendesk is NOT one of them.  Their "Customer Service Hero Tour" - taking place in various cities including Austin (where I'm currently based), Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston and New York, is a great example for other technology companies to follow. If you're connected with customer service in any of those cities, you should attend the event - any software company smart enough to spend their marketing dollars in this fashion is worth getting to know.  If they're smart enough to do "this" so very right, they're probably smart enough to do a lot of other things really well too. Plus, it sounds like a great event - I will definitely attend.  Check out the "registration page"...then read on for my perspective on why I love this event in so many ways. Me-Me-Me Marketing - Odious (Even on... (more)

Legacy Modernization

IT exists to support the business - and in best-of-class IT departments, this truism is embedded deeply into the departmental culture. Yet in so many cases, this self-evident truth gets lost in the mayhem of building, maintaining and supporting the myriad of complicated and brittle legacy application systems that have been put together over the years to support the enterprise's business. Legacy Application Modernization is a transformative initiative that has the potential to not only change the way IT supports the business, but to change the very nature and culture of IT. IT Cu... (more)

Modernization of IT: Solving a Legacy of Business Problems & Applications

I talk to a lot of CIOs. I met with one in early May who oversees the IT operation of a $6 billion yearly entertainment-related company with about 7,000 employees. This top-notch exec was all about transforming a huge investment in existing IT infrastructure into a new dynamic, extensible and agile platform that would propel the business forward - not hold it back. This guy is busy figuring out how to keep a Boeing 777 up in the air while simultaneously re-fitting aircraft to make it best-in-class. That's what IT should be all about. But in some organizations, it's not. Either th... (more)

Why Infrastructure Technology Is Challenging

I like writing about "Infrastructure Software." One of the most challenging things about being an advocate for a broad horizontally applicable technology is that it does not solve a particular business problem. Instead, it solves about 100,000 business problems. That was an admittedly uber-geeky joke I made on my column "Integration Edge" on ebizQ in an article about Legacy Modernization. Although I was making light of the situation, the impact for a technology advocate is real.  The problem with writing about infrastructure software is that everyone is impacted by it, yet nobody ... (more)

Twenty-Thousand Men Pregnant Because of Bad Data

Nearly 20,000 British men were pregnant in 2009 and 2010 - according to the UK's National Health System. 8,000 of them had office appointments with their gynecologists, and a total of 17,000 of them were admitted to hospitals to undergo various obstetric services related to their pregnancies. As a big believer in equality across all genders, faiths and genetic backgrounds - I was initially very enthusiastic about this medical breakthrough. But my excitement was short-lived as I shortly found out that it was simply a matter of bad data introduced as data were manually re-entered f... (more)