What this is

The Four Seats publishes occasional long-form essays on enterprise software and PropTech, written by Brian Zrimsek.

 

The essays argue a durable point about how enterprise software actually gets bought, built, and lived with. AI is usually the doorway rather than the room. It makes an old problem newly expensive or newly universal, and the people who already understand the old problem tend to see it first.

 

That is the editorial position, stated plainly so you can hold the writing to it.

 

The four seats

Advisor. Analyst. Client. Provider.

 

Most people who give enterprise software advice have held one of those chairs. I have held all four, in that order, over thirty-six years.

​

Advisor. A decade at the Big 6, through the years when the implementation disciplines were being built. User acceptance testing, change management, cutover, benefits realization. I learned what those things were for before I ever had to sign one.

​

Analyst. VP of Research at Gartner, where producing a defensible view of where an industry was heading was the entire job, and where the apparatus around a claim mattered more than the claim.

​

Client. IT Vice President at the Irvine Company, advising my own executives and then running what I recommended. The only seat with no exit.

​

Provider. Chief Product Officer and Industry Principal at MRI Software, where advice stopped being a recommendation and became a roadmap that shipped.

 

Each seat licenses a different kind of claim. The advisor seat knows how a discipline came to exist. The analyst seat can say this is not your company, this is everybody. The client seat knows what happens after go-live. The provider seat knows what the demo was built to show, and on which entity it ran.

 

Not every piece spends all four. A piece that spends all four is usually spending none of them.

 

What you can expect

• Claims specific enough to be wrong.

• Dated where a date is honest, quantified where a quantity is honest. The alternative is the ambient forecast that cannot fail because it never said anything.

• Sources you can check. Real figures with the source next to them. Where a number comes from an industry body reporting on its own market, the essay says so.

• The objection stated before you raise it. If there is a good argument against the piece, it is in the piece.

• No cadence promise. Occasional means occasional. Pieces run when there is something worth three thousand words, and not otherwise.

​

What I am not promising is to be right. The first essay grades three years of my own published predictions, in public, before asking you to trust a single forward-looking thing I write. It is a mixed record with one embarrassing hole in it.

 

Frameworks

Some essays name something. When they do, the idea gets an entry on the Frameworks page with a definition, the case it came from, and a test you can run in an hour.

 

Nothing gets named because the page has room. A framework earns a name when a piece needs one.

 

Advisory

The writing and the advisory work come from the same place. If an essay describes a problem you recognize and you would rather have somebody in the room while you work through it, that is what the advisory practice is for.

 

Elsewhere

Brian also writes at BiZStoryGuru on business storytelling, where the subject is how to make a case rather than what the case should be.

​