Reaching For the Brass Ring

The vast array of business challenges and the software solutions to address those challenges reminds me of the old adage “Reaching for the Brass Ring”…. Back in the day on the merry-go-round, as riders on wooden horses circled around the center where the organ played, rings were fed to one end of a wooded arm suspended above all riders. As each rider rounds the bend, with baited anticipation, they approach the bright shinny ring, would the timing be exact ? Would their horse be in the right position to grab the ring? At this point you might be wondering what’s the connection, or perhaps I just have an affinity towards merry-go-rounds? It’s not so much the merry-go-round but the thought of wanting to succeed with a software/application deployment, the ultimate thrill of success, grabbing the ring, everything lines up, timelines, user needs, and the return on investment far exceeds expectations!

I mean how often do you hear about someone singing praises of glory over the success of deployment? No too often, frequently you hear about software becoming shelf-ware or not meeting expected goals of the initial purchase. More often than not I continue to hear about failures that stem from the lack of education or technical understanding on product features and business application, no ongoing best-practice guidance or perhaps misalignment on initial requirements of the business problem and technology solution… Organizations go through endless rounds of POCs (Proof of Concepts) and vendor analysis and after weeks, months, sometimes years finally make their vendor selection. There’s an overwhelming cheer on signed contracts and creating the initial project deployment plan. But then things start to breakdown.

Lets face it, success with software deployment is akin to success with relationships. After the honeymoon stage is over it requires work, commitment, ongoing learning, communication between both parties and application of lessons learned. And so too is the importance of the relationship with your software vendor, being in-synch lock-step. If you sign on the dotted line it should not only be a commitment of purchase and sale it should also be an agreement of success based on some of the key tenants I mentioned above.

Progress Actional, providing business transaction management for today’s interconnected applications, recently introduced a Tech Center. The Actional Tech Center does a great job of addressing an ongoing commitment to its customers. The Tech Center, now in Beta, isn’t full of marketing fluff but contains material from the trenches, with contributions from Technical Support, Professional Service and Engineering, with topics that range from Best Practices on Iterative Deployment with Actional, to Tips-N-Tricks on addressing Memory Errors through Performance Tuning. Just a few of the first nuggets of intelligent insight that will help Actional customers both begin and continue to realize the benefits of Actional in its ability to ensuring the success of every single important business transaction.

By the way the prize on the merry-go-round for successfully grabbing the brass ring is a free ride. Sorry but in the world of software solutions and their success there’s no free ride but admission to the Tech Center is!