Author: Curt Doolittle

OVERSING UPDATE

I have good days and bad days. On the bad days I see how far we must go to compete with the Microsoft’s and SAP’s of the world. Or even to produce the documentation and training for users. When I see bugs we shouldn’t have created, or features that are’t quite right, I feel like the sky is falling. When we estimate a week and it takes four. When we estimate a month and it takes three, then I want to jump off a bridge. Although admittedly, the variation in estimates is caused by the experience of the staff, the complexity of work and the small size of our team where every little ripple causes waves of consequences.

But then I have other days (today) where I talk to a friend from SAP, who tells me how bad the product is, and how hard it is for the company to modernize, and I remember what we had to do to get Microsoft to reposition CRM, and to ‘Sell’ me Commerce Server so that we could rebuild the platform space, and I realize that our problems are small.

We need a little money (very little) to expand the staff and launch. And we need three years of experience with customers to mature. And after that we can incrementally take the service, administrative, then parts and components businesses away from the major platforms.

Because unlike these businesses that do tens of millions or even a few hundred million, the enterprise software business generates billions with a ‘b’, and they are at least a decade behind in the technology now.

Oversing’s real value will appear when we have statistics. But we won’t have statistics until we have enough users in each demographic, and oversing’s demographics are ‘rich’:

Attribute Biases

….Age

….Gender

….Pattern Recognition (Raven’s)

….Moral biases

….Cultural biases

Skills

….Crafts

….Roles

….Soft Skills

….Hard Skills

….General (years of) Experience

….Education

Performance

….Likability

….Participation (‘karma’)

….Mentoring (‘helpfulness’)

….Customer Value (‘NPS’)

….Skill Value to The Organization

….Velocity (how ‘much’ you get done – varies widely)

….Estimating ability (how accurate you are – the single most important trust building skill is your ability to forecast and meet commitments.)

….Utilization and Chargeability (for revenue producers)

So **an Oversing Reputation is an asset that you build*** within your workplace. It supersedes rumor and recommendation. But more importantly it tells you the relative ‘truth’ about how you compare to others in your organization in your industry, and in the world. And better yet it disempowers the political and makes transparent the anti-meritocratic actions of people who engage in politics.

I see this as profoundly important information for all of us in the small, flat, digital world.

Imagine a world where your management’s opinion of you is irrelevant compared to your evidence. Then the truth will come out: loyalty in the workplace is as important as any other ‘skill’.

Anyway, my love of libertarian social engineering through truth and transparency is everywhere in the product.

It will take us a while. Another three years to cover the entirety of operations of the majority of businesses. But when we do, the statistics we will provide to you and your management and your owners and your investors will change the world for the better.

Truth matters. Everywhere.