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Talk with Tom

"Tolerate nothing less than 'Departmental excellence and coolness.'" Tom Peters

TOM'S OBSERVATIONS

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WORDS/TITLES/NAMES ARE IMPORTANT!

More fun today! Spoke in Orlando to NCR users conference ... those who run "data warehouses." (I.e.: humongous data repositories at the likes of Sears or Wal*Mart.)

Started by telling them I thought "data warehouse" was a wretched term! Sounds dull. They ain't! In Internet world … mass customization world … the "data warehouse" is the (potential) Strategic Engine of the Corporation. (E.g.: Dell, Amazon.com.)

Words/titles/names are important!

Dull name = Dull image = Unimaginative role in the corporation.

My session to 2,000 was led off by a brief, live, vibrant rock performance. I said I thought "data warehousers" ought to imagine themselves as "Rock Stars of the IS/IT Age." Hint: I meant it! (Hint: They liked it!) (Hint: Why not?)

Bigger issue: "Depts." that are seen as "cost centers" and/or "support functions." Horrible -- and I hope misleading -- image. Data warehousers, I said, are in the "sales, customer retention/loyalty, service, customer R&D 'business.'"

(This came just three days after the CEO of Bentley Systems, Inc. thanked me for treating engineers and architects as "sources of scintillating value-added in the brain-based economy" rather than "overhead." Why -- oh why -- these dreary images????)

(One convert: On the way out of the hall at the NCR event, one fellow accosted me and said he "absolutely" would change the name of his group. Hooray! One for two-thousand … not bad.)

-tom