Hank Luhring’s Blog

The Sand Hill Group operates a web site (SandHill.com) which it bills itself as “the premier destination site and resource center for CEOs, VPs, Entrepreneurs, VCs and for members of the software industry eco-system.”.  I just received an online newsletter from them mentioning an article entitled “Simplicity: What’s Next In Business Software”.

I recently wrote a blog post regarding the value we place on simplicity, so the timing was good.

The Sand Hill article is well worth reading.  One distinction it makes is that “simple” doesn’t necessarily mean “lite”.  The software can have a lot of functionality, but it needs to be simple to use.  Indeed, we’ve found that the programming to create simple software can be complex behind the scenes.  We shun complexity if at all possible.  But if it means being able to present a simple screen to end users so that they see only what they should be seeing, we’ll go that route.  Likewise if it means making the setup screens simple for the administrator, so all they do is check checkboxes to turn features on, we’ll do that.

The article also makes an interesting point that now there is such good software targeting consumers that enterprise software vendors must do a better job in making their offerings simpler to use, and simpler to deploy.  All this sounds great to us!

One of the best things about being named to the INC 500 list was the conference.  One take-away for me was Vistage, an organization of CEOs that is dedicated to sharing knowledge and experience so that CEO members can get better results for their business. 

 I went to my first meeting full Vistage meeting today, and it was great.  There was a speaker in the morning, then in the afternoon the members talked about how things were going, and discussed issues that they faced in their businesses.  There is a pledge of confidentiality, so it is a setting in which the CEOs can be frank about both the good and bad they face.  Group members are not shy about speaking up and offering suggested solutions to the issues that are brought forward.

The group meets once a month, and most meetings have a speaker during the first half.  The speaker this morning talked on creating a culture of accountabilty.  At one point we filled out a questionnaire that was then scored.  One thing that was measured was how much blame and finger-pointing goes on in your organization. 

It gave me great pleasure filling out that questionaire, because there is not a lot of that going on at IssueTrak.  We are very fortunate that we have a culture where people take ownership of tasks and projects, and get things done.  If something doesn’t get done right, people will say “sorry, I screwed up, I’ll do better next time”.  They don’t try to pass the blame on to others.

That’s one of the things I like about Vistage.  I can hear first hand how other companies work, and it gives me perspective on how we do at IssueTrak.  There are always areas of improvement.  But in general, we’ve got a really good, performance-oriented culture, with a great group of people, who also know how to have fun!!

We continue to grow and add employees.  At Senior Leadership Team meetings, we’ve discussed the importance of keeping our culture and making sure things don’t change.

For more information on Vistage, go to www.vistage.com.

Here’s an article by David Pogue in the New York Times discussing a new camcorder that has been the #1 seller on Amazon since it came out.  What is the secret of it’s success?  Less features, not more.  It has no optical zoom, no viewfinder, no menus, no settings.  It is called the Flip, made by Pure Digital.  And it alone accounts for 13% of Amazon’s camcorder sales.  The camcorder starts up very quickly, is easy to use, and is flying off the virtual shelves.

The success reminds me of the Wii.  While Microsoft and Sony were working on very sophisticated game machines, with faster processors, better graphics, etc, Nintendo took the simple approach with its Wii, and the marketplace responded enthusiastically.

When we designed IssueTrak back in 2000, we strove for simplicity.  Back then the Palm PDA was popular, and it was refreshing to work with its interface, which did not have an over-abundance of features.  It had the features that were useful, and they were implemented simply and straightforwardly.  It was a joy to work with.  We would say we take the Palm approach to software.

We went to great pains to be sure the interface was not cluttered with features that weren’t going to be used.  An example is Project support.  It is possible to turn on Projects, and associate issues with Projects, and gets lists of Projects that have not been completed yet, etc.  However, by simply unchecking a checkbox in the Admin screen, Project support disappears everywhere.  It is no longer on the submit screen, or the search screen, or in any menus. 

By doing this with many of the IssueTrak features, we end up with a clean, simple screen for end-users.  And the users report that the software is easy to use, and works well.

My son introduced me to this quote by Charles Mingus that I hope we strive for here at IssueTrak:

“Making the simple complex is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity”.

It is surprisingly difficult to pare down anything complicated to what’s really important.  When done right, the result is success like that realized by the Flip, the Wii, and we’re hoping IssueTrak!
 

Today’s Wall Street Journal had an interview with Douglas Merrill, the CIO at Google.  What is IT (and support) like at the company with some of the most tech-savvy employees around?  There seems to be a lot of freedom!  People can choose from lots of different computers and operating systems — Windows, Linux, Mac — and they are all supported!  They can download and use various types of software.  Merrill says the freedom-of-choice approach is more costly, but the workers are more efficient, so the company is better off.

Merrill himself seems like an interesting guy.  He has masters and doctorate degrees in psychology, not computer science.  But he ended up a senior manager at Price Waterhouse and a senior vice president at Charles Schwab.  Here’s some information from the Google site about him.

The other thing that was interesting about the article is how long Merrill has been running IT at Google.  He started at Google in 2003 as Senior Director of Information Systems.   You hear about how fast Google is growing, and how they are continuously adding top-notch employees.  At the same time, they seem to have added such sharp people in the early years that those people still run things.  Eric Schmidt has been there since 2001.

Here’s a link to a video where Douglas Merrill and Eric Schmidt talk about Google Apps, and how people at Google use the word processing, spreadsheets and email capabilities.  Like IssueTrak and other companies, they find that eating their own dogfood is a good thing.

We had a visitor to our IssueTrak web site who sent the following email:

Hi,

Would it be possible to see some kind of demonstration of the system –below is a list of the features we’d like to see working  –let me know if that needs clarification.

Please let me know how we’d go about setting that up

Thanks.

-web based customer issue submission
-voicemail customer issue submission
-email customer issue submission
-customer input fields customization
-application customization
-full admin control
-hosting options?
-meta data (time tracking, etc)
-email threads tracking
-ability to assign/reassign ticket to different agents
-real-time usage tracking
-reporting capabilities
-integrated knowledge base
-file attachment capability for agent
-file attachment capability by customer and agents
-ability to audit customer’s system specs
-automated response customization
-scalability: number of simultaneous users and agents
-integration with defect tracking and CRM systems.
 
This person doesn’t realize it, but he is describing IssueTrak!  We have the three ways to get issues into the system - web, voicemail, email.  IssueTrak is customizable, we have powerful admin functionality, we have knowledge base, reporting, attachments, etc. 

It’s great to get these kinds of emails.  We didn’t have all these features in the product on Day 1 back in 2001.  But over the years we’ve added features people ask for.  And now when people specify their requirements, and it looks like our list of features, it’s very satisfying.

I enjoy podcasts a lot.  I no longer mind waiting in line at DMV, or driving in my car.  My time can be productive because I’m listening to the thoughts and ideas of sharp, successful people from Silicon Valley, Redmond, WA and anywhere else in the world.

Some podcasts sound like an NPR show - professionally edited, with great sound quality.  Then there is a podcast called ”iinovate“.  The sound quality is sometimes mediocre, sometimes not that good.  There are multiple interviewers, and sometimes they sound amatuerish.  But the guests are unbelivable!

How about this for a roster of interviewees?

• Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
• Michael Arrington, Founder of TechCrunch
• Timothy Ferriss, Author of the 4-Hour Work Week
• John Morgridge, Former CEO of Cisco
• Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar
• Mike Ramsay, Co-found of TiVo
• David Kelley, Founder of IDEO
• David Hornik, Partner at August Capital

The people putting this podcast on are students at Stanford University’s Business and Design schools.  Maybe that’s how they can gain access to their amazing guests.  Looking at their site today, I see their latest guest is John Hennessy, President of Stanford!  This is a very worthwhile podcast to listen to.

Ashley, one of our Client Care Coordinators, is expecting a baby.  The office organized a baby shower for her, and I wanted to buy a gift.  We have customers across the country and around the world.  And we also have a customer right down the street, called USA Baby.  I had never been there before, so I thought this was a good opportunity to visit.

I walked in, chose my gift, and as I was checking out, I mentioned to the fellow that I heard they had bought our software.  He asked what software was I referring to.  I said IssueTrak.  He broke into a big grin and said “IssueTrak is GREAT!  I had been looking for something like that for a year!!  We do a lot of custom gift work, and there are always issues coming up, and I wanted an easy-to-use web-based system that would let me track these things.  We love IssueTrak!”

What a gratifying response!  The fellow was a former web developer, so he knew something about web applications.  And he had a strong opinion about how an issue tracking program should work.  Fortunately for us, his vision and ours corresponded strongly, and he’s a happy customer.

And to top it off, Ashley appreciated the gift.  A successful outing!

I’ve heard Jason Calacanis a few times on the TWiT podcast.  He’s a lively, smart guy, and fun to listen to.  He is the CEO of Mahalo, a web site that bills itself as the world’s first human-powered search engine.  Jason has lined up significant funding from a variety of firms, VC and other.  I listened to one of his video podcasts, and it sounds like he is in it for the long haul, hoping to build a search business over a period of years.

His latest blog post “Note to self: stop promoting, start thinking again (or “Scoble’s Law”)” suggests that he is quite capable of talking about himself and promoting Mahalo, but when he talks about other people, his rankings go up.  He mentions Robert Scoble, one of the most popular bloggers, is always talking about someone else; rarely promotes himself.  And Scoble is wildly successful.  Jason refers to this as Scoble’s Law. 

Check out the video podcast .  Here’s the blurb that describles this particular cast:

“In this episode, Jason gets feedback on Mahalo from four formidable figures in the SEO industry; an industry that Mahalo aims to make irrelevant. Is reasoned debate possible in a roundtable with such polarized participants? Watch or listen to CalacanisCast 29 Beta to find out.”

These four fellows are Jason’s adversaries.  They have written terrible things about Jason and Mahalo in their blogs.  Jason has fought back in his blogs.  So Jason and these four enemies of his have a conversation!  It is fascinating.  They are quite civil to each other, as they continue to disagree.  By the end they were willing to sit down and have a drink, but none of them agreed to go back and remove the vitriol from their blog posts.  This is a very engaging and intellectually stimulating podcast.

We are a software company that uses our own software. When a customer has a question or problem, the issue goes into IssueTrak where it is tracked, assigned to a support technician, tabulated with other issues to provide metrics, and eventually closed.

We’re coming out with a new version of IssueTrak soon.  One of the new features will be the ability to automatically close an issue if a customer doesn’t get back to the support desk within a specified period of time (after a warning note has been sent). 

We track how long an issue is open.  We have a mechanism where we stop accumulating time on an issue if we’re waiting to hear back from the customer. 

The new feature to automatically close the issue is part of our “escalation rules”.

Our support manager, Mike Messina, went in to our VP for Development, LaDonna Beauregard, saying how excited he was to have this new feature, and to thank her.  He said he would implement this right away.  But then it occurred to LaDonna that there is a small problem.

The purpose of the escalation rules is to send emails or do other actions when issues have been open too long.  If the system clock has been paused on an issue because we’re waiting to hear back from a customer, then we don’t want to escalate the issue.  So the escalation rules don’t fire if the clock has been paused on an issue.

But if we now add an action to our escalation rules so that the system will automatically close an issue based on an elapsed amount of time, that rule will never fire if the system clock has been paused!  In this scenario, the elapsed time counter has stopped, and no more time will accumulate for the issue.  And thus no escalation rules will be invoked, and the issue won’t be closed automatically.

To fix this situation we have added a new condition to the escalation rules so that when creating a rule to automatically close an issue, the administrator can specify that the rule should fire regardless of whether the system clock has been paused or not.

Because Mike was eagerly preparing to try out a new feature our software, we discovered a defect before the software was released.  We’re fortunate that we use our own software in our support operation.

I’m going to start blogging.  I realize I’m late to the game, but it’s time to get started. 

We’ve had discussions within IssueTrak on what to blog about.  We can talk about features of our product, or how customers use IssueTrak, or what a great job our support people do.

We’ve recently read books on blogging, in particular Robert Scoble’s book “Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers“.  It seems that the idea is to keep the marketing-speak out of blog posts as much as possible.  Instead, the blog should speak with the voice of a real person, talking about what’s really going on.  It should be a way for readers to get to know the person blogging, and the company, warts and all.

One thing we’ve found at IssueTrak is that when a prospect talks to multiple people within the company, the chances for a sale go up.  They might start out with the person scheduling a demo.  They’ll get to know the Sales Engineer during the demo.  They might have a question for tech support.  They might even need to talk to a developer if they have a tricky integration question.  We found the more contacts, the better.

Hopefully the same concept will hold true for blogging. If we can communicate a glimpse of what’s on our mind as a company, and as people – genuinely interested in software, support, and how applications can best serve the end users, then we hope readers will choose or recommend our software.

So here goes.  We’d appreciate any comments!