Technology Prediction and The Look Back

ADVISOR. ANALYST. CLIENT. PROVIDER.

THE FOUR SEATS

I have been giving enterprise software advice for 36 years. At the Big 6, to clients. At Gartner, to clients and markets. At the Irvine Company, to my own executives, and then I had to run what I recommended. At MRI Software, to a roadmap, where advice stopped being a recommendation and shipped.

The seats are the point.

Most people advising in this category have held one seat. Having held all four means the advice accounts for what the other side of the table is actually doing, which is usually the part that decides whether something works.

There are four seats in the name. The fifth one is yours.

Recent Enterprise Software and PropTech Essays

Five seats at a table, one open for you.

The Second Disassociation

I spent four hours on a golf course this week and cleaned up a large dataset during them. I did none of that work. I directed it. In 2020 I sorted which activities would stay separated from their places, and the mechanism held in six of seven. Here is the same sort, pointed at people instead of rooms.

Aug 1319 min read

AI generates woodland animals having a meeting

Everyone Sells AI the Same Way. You Have to Buy It Differently.

I asked an AI assistant for a foursome and it gave me five players. Twice that week, two different vendors, the same failure. The QA profession has been discussing this for two years. The person who signs the acceptance form has not been in the room. Nine questions to ask before your name goes on it.

Aug 1315 min read

The Year I Stopped Writing About AI

In December 2020 I wrote a list of six things that would matter the following year. All six did. Not one of them was artificial intelligence, and twenty-four months later ChatGPT was released. We audit what we said. We do not audit what we stopped saying. Three steps to find out what fell off yours.

Aug 1317 min read

There are four seats in the name. The fifth one is yours.

The Second Disassociation

Everyone Sells AI the Same Way. You Have to Buy It Differently.

The Year I Stopped Writing About AI

bz@thefourseats.net