Hi, I'm Daniel Gannon. Technology executive, entrepreneur, business strategist, traveler and budding guitarist. This blog is all about sharing ideas on business and adventure. Enjoy!
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
By just about any measure, I am a frequent traveler. My rough calculations show that I have flown somewhere between 3.5 and 4 million miles over the last 25 years or so. Not sure what that equates to in terms of how much time I have invested in going to/from airports, time at airports and the time spent sitting on an airplane. Just the thought of all of those hours makes me wince.
So, for someone that spends that kind of time engaged in air travel, the kinds of things that make air travel tolerable are certainly magnified. Decent fares, good customer service, on time arrivals, baggage that gets there when I have to check it, customer service…all essentials.
Which brings me to my switch. I have been an extremely loyal United flyer, having recently exceeded 2 million air-miles with them! I have flown roughly the equivalent of going around the planet 80 times with United. On the flight that I cracked the 2 million mile barrier, I did get a handwritten thank you card from the crew…delivered to me in the back of the plane. They also offered me a free drink, but I had to pass as it was 8:00 in the morning, although I will confess to considering a bloody mary.
So…why change? Why move carriers after all of the status that I have earned? It comes down to three things, all of which play in Southwest’s favor.
First, we all know that accumulating and using miles is important. Airlines reward loyalty by granting perks and mileage increase awards based upon your travel volume. These miles are valuable…nothing like a free trip right? (As though I want to get on another plane).
United has devalued their miles to the point that they are almost meaningless. They claim that there are “saver” seats available for a 25K round-trip, but I cannot ever find them, regardless of how far in advance I am booking. Case in point…recently tried booking two round-trip seats for late September to St Louis, a reasonably short hop from Denver. 3 month advance booking….50,000 miles each, for a total of 100,000 miles. A full years’ worth of travel to fly the two of us 90 minutes away! Similarly, when trying to use miles for a trip to Peru, I didn’t have enough miles in the bank for two tickets as I needed 300,000. Contrast that with a recent trip to Salt Lake City on Southwest where we spent a grand total of 17,000 miles for two seats.
Secondly, the matter of change fees. Some airlines have gotten very creative with the various ways that you can be charged, from bags to drinks to meals to which seat you select. Change fees fall into this category. The $100 change fee, plus the fare difference (which I can understand) seems usurious. Maybe after 2 million miles we could show a little flexibility? In the age where most bookings and modifications are all self service and done on the website as a kiosk without any support from the airline personnel, it becomes obvious that this is simply a penalty and another means for pure profit for the airline at the expense of customer service/convenience. I recall standing at the gate of a Frontier flight that was almost empty, but couldn’t go standby unless I paid a $150 fee. No cost to the airline to accommodate me…as a result I haven’t flown Frontier since.
Lastly, no one that I know gives high marks to a US carrier for customer service. Fly Air Singapore, Cathay Pacific or Virgin, as examples, and you notice the differences immediately. Most lists of top global airlines don’t have a US based carrier in the top 20. But for those of us who travel mostly or exclusively in the USA, you find Alaska Airlines, Virgin, Jet Blue and Southwest typically at the top of the list. However, if you value mileage programs, customer service with transparent fare pricing and travel flexibility, and just as importantly network and frequency of flights, Southwest separates from the pack.
Yes, the Southwest boarding process is a little funky, but everyone seems to get it and it works. Not really much different that the zone boarding used by United anyway.
One more thing that matters, although this is very subjective. I think that the Southwest crews are a lot friendlier than any other airline (apologies to my friend Lisa!). It seems to be the case of reality meeting the marketing hype, but it can make the drudgery of flying just a little less onerous when the flight attendants are cracking jokes and plying you with free drinks and the ubiquitous packs of peanuts and pretzels. You can fake a smile at the boarding door but it has to be hard to pretend you are happy for the entire flight! I couldn’t pull it off, myself.
My change isn’t 100%, or permanent. I will still shop for the best fare (within reason, which leaves out Frontier and Spirit), and international flying is a whole different animal. But my loyalty comes with a price, and when I am rewarded with stiff senseless fees, devalued miles, less than decent service…my business is up for grabs.
I recently read an excellent article authored by Phillip Howard of Bloor Research. The article, entitled “Testing is Broken”, describes at a high level some of the institutional and practical challenges to effectively addressing the reasons why testing and software quality assurance remain largely a manual process. Mr. Howard briefly touches on most of the substantive barriers to widespread test automation tool adoption.
I spend much of my time with executives that are responsible for software quality assurance. In the case of complex enterprise applications, this translates into the need for end to end, cross platform business process validation. Sounds complicated? In actual practice it is even much more complex than it appears. Why is this?
Enterprise applications (think SAP, Oracle EBS, and other monolithic applications) typically share a number of unique characteristics that make the business process validation process daunting. Most of these applications are:
- Mission critical
- Highly customized
- Integrated with other applications/technologies
- Change-centric
Often, the tools and processes used to ensure high levels of quality for these high-risk applications aren’t sufficient to accomplish the objective.
In many cases, the approach to resolve this has been to outsource manual and semi-automated (scripted) testing to off-shore outsourcers who help reduce the labor expense. This is frequently referred to by the end user as “their automation solution”. Unfortunately there is a notable lack of genuine automation in that approach.
Low cost manual labor isn’t automation.
Senior IT executives will tell me, with a straight face, that their automation solution includes hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of outsourced manual testers. This means that what we call automation is actually manual, repetitive, and error prone, which translates into severe limits in terms of scope and complexity.
Even the firms that outsource the development of semi-automated “scripted” tests are in danger since the people with the technical skills necessary to develop these scripts rarely understand the applications under test and they are too far removed from the application owners, who aren’t scripters. The gap between these two skills creates obvious problems.
Furthermore, the people who are developing the manual tests rarely understand the applications under test since they are too far removed from the application owners who don’t know how to write tests or don’t have the time. Yet these are the people who own the responsibility of ensuring that the applications function as required.
As Philip mentions in his article, the service providers have no incentive to change either dynamic. They are, however, greatly incented to perpetuate them because they stand to make more money this way. Because the knowledge of the systems and the test artifacts are vendor-specific, it becomes extremely difficult to manage the provider and ensure that the process is efficient, not to mention have them take ownership of the process and result. The resultant cost, inefficiency, and lack of tangible results becomes the norm and a vicious cycle of hiring/firing offshore service providers ensues.
Today’s innovative test automation tools tackle the inherent problems with manual testing. Modern architecture eliminates the need for highly specialized technical skills to create automation manually, putting easy to use technology into the hands of the business users that understand the application. Testing resources can greatly expand the depth and breadth of the application coverage, resulting in more agile, rapid turnaround and improved overall quality.
The cost of poor quality can have a disastrous effect on a business. Enterprise applications, often used for everything from finance to HR, manufacturing and supply chain management, measure production outage cost in the millions of dollars per hour. Customer satisfaction and retention suffer. Using today’s test automation technology can replace the cost, inefficiency and limitations associated with manual testing and deliver substantial operational and financial benefits.
So don’t be fooled…lowering the cost of manual testing and scripting isn’t automation.
In my business, probably like many of you, one of the critical steps in a sales/buying process is establishing the business case for acquisition. Assuming that the technical and economic buyers are on board and established that your company and solution are VOC (vendor of choice), there is typically a gauntlet of approvals necessary before a sale takes place. How onerous this process is will be dependent upon transaction size…the larger the transaction, the greater the oversight and scrutiny and more levels of approval.
Most technical buyers are not experts in developing a business case, particularly one with a financial bent. They are generally quite good at describing the operational benefits, but establishing the financial impact in terms that a CFO understands is more challenging. Additionally, it often requires getting data that isn’t right at hand, then expressing value in a number of ways…IRR, MRR, NPV, ROI. From a sales process perspective I have always advocated delivering a framework to capture and express financial impact, and helping translate the operational benefits financially.
Most companies that go through this exercise focus on ROI. While this is an important metric, stopping there is stopping short.
No business case analysis is complete unless you also establish the cost of doing nothing.
Two things work against you when selling. First, the general law of inertia. Unless there is a real, acute problem, most people aren’t interested in incremental process improvement, particularly if it means more work assessing the offering. Secondly, the corporate machine works against spending. Most companies biggest competitor isn’t other providers…but rather prospects that don’t buy anything.
This comes at a cost. And if you know what that cost is, using their numbers, it changes the dynamic. As much as corporate procurement works actively not to procure anything, they hate losing money even more. No one wants to hear that for every month that a decision is delayed, they are losing (or excessively spending) significant $$. This quantifies the value of action and urgency.
This also really helps in the negotiation process. Once, while negotiating a 7 figure software agreement, the “buyer” was pushing hard for about $100K in concessions. The back and forth went on for a few weeks. When I gently (OK, not gently at all) pointed out the the delay had already cost them about $1.3M, it brought context to the negotiation and also underscored the value of my products. The negotiation ended very quickly at that point.
So do yourself and your prospects a favor…find the cost of doing nothing!
Recently TurnKey Solutions was selected as one of the top 20 HP related solutions in the IT market. As part of this recognition, I was invited to author an article discussing the increasing rate of change in the technology market, it’s effects on IT organizations, and in particular the pressures that increased pace of change exerts on application quality and agility.
Article below-
http://turnkeysolutions.com/documents/CXO%20Insight_CIOReview_web.pdf
I have had a rough stretch for international travel over the last several months. Having just had my flight to Dublin cancelled due to the impending winter storm in the New York area, this marks the 4th international trip that I have scrubbed consecutively. Of course, sitting here in Denver in 70 degree, sunny weather makes a blizzard cancellation a little surreal.
Last fall I cancelled a trip to Buenos Aires at the last minute when my proposed meetings fell through. Next, I had to cancel my annual trip to HP Discover in Barcelona and my speaking slot at the conference when I came down with pneumonia over the Thanksgiving holidays. Finally, after going through the entire visa process for a trip to the TurnKey offices in Delhi, India, I made the decision to postpone due to some other urgent business priorities.
So the obvious pressing question is what is the next exotic, fun destination that I want to miss going to? Any suggestions?
I have been considering launching a blog for a long time…a very long time. It is finally time to take the plunge!
This Is Not Complicated is one of my favorite business sayings…usually in the context of a situation where it is easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of what is important and relevant. Hopefully on occasion you will find these posts interesting and/or relevant.
The blog will contain a combination of business related themes and personal observations, trip reviews, running & race reports and anything else fun that comes to mind. Business posts will go to LinkedIn; personal posts will go to Facebook. If you are interested enough you can just subscribe and you will see everything.
Many thanks to Tony Kraayenbrink at In Form Creations for getting this site up and running. Tony is awesome to work with so if you want to take the plunge yourself he is a great resource.
More soon!