So when I write some articles on the latest thing to arrive on the technology marketplace, I cannot help thinking about how each arrival impacts on my greater goal – to get people to think original thoughts, and create positive results, on behalf of our clients.

I entered this marketplace a million years ago with a degree in Maths and Computing – much of which was about statistics and data analysis. Hence Business Intelligence became my thing.

But now I spend a lot of time analysing more things than data – like how much time we actually spend thinking about what we do?….and occasionally asking whether we need more data (in one place*)…or whether we are simply being led by the nose by those who care little about the purist ideals of leveraging intelligence and are much intent on achieving the target figure in column AA of their spreadsheet.

Topic of the season is Big Data. Big Data is great for our business! Great for Business Intelligence enthusiasts and vendors of BI software, services, storage, networks, appliances, journalists, social media promoters…seemingly almost everyone.

There’s a series on BBC at the moment called Britain’s Greatest Hoarders (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2012/05/britains-biggest-hoarders.shtml) Spooky synchronicity. Watching it as I write this, I cannot help drawing comparisons with the mad hatter’s tea party that is our marketplace.

Look at it this way….One of the things I ask my team to do frequently is to analyse their day (there I go again – old habits die hard) in the form of a pie-chart. It’s an amazingly cathartic experience sometimes. They have to white-board their workload, in real time, with no preparation, showing how much time they spend on key tasks. No data is involved; their brain has to draw a circle and section off the time allocated to each task. Simple?

What happens is that we frequently have to adjust the sizes of pieces of pie when it becomes embarrassingly obvious that we spend a disproportionate amount of time gathering and analysing, and hardly any time at all doing what really earns the money – thinking.

We are telling the world that all they need to do is gather more data and they will gain a greater insight that will make them more successful. And reduce risk – there you have it – my day’s work in one small tarte tatin-shaped slice.

How about this hypothesis instead: “Most of the data that we gather is useless. All that matters is what we do today. 99.9% of all the information on the web is as useful as our last breath. What we all need to do is reflect more..stare out of the window, ask ourselves ‘where is the best place to be next?’ …what can we do to make people happier?…”

Some might propose that apart from great poetry, music, teaching of the prophets (and that’s debatable), not much of anything we store can ever prevail for long. Yesterday’s news is exactly that. People’s opinions change in an instant and hence are not relevant for long. Historic figures were based on a different set of circumstances than exist now. Yes OK, some bureaucrat might one day ask us for an email we shouldn’t have written 10 years ago, but the world doesn’t really revolve around such microscopic possibilities.

Example: the chances of anyone reading this blog is slight, and the chances of anyone looking at the one I wrote before this one are minuscule, but it’s stored away for posterity – at £0.0001 per byte. Add them all up and someone’s making a lot of money out of our propensity to hoard; to file stuff away.

So what should my duty be as ‘just another social media commentator’?…

Today I want to step into the ring and fight the corner of the ‘No data’ camp. Just to correct the balance of debate and explore some sound reasons why organisations might allocate a bigger slice of their valuable time to encouraging creative thought based on things other than data.

• Start hiring fewer people responsible for gathering and analysing, and more people who have to, in business terms ‘sniff the wind’?
• Start looking for reasons to clear out stale data that’s never been – and most likely never will – be of any use to your business
• Give more airtime to listening to the views of staff, customers, channel partners. There’s real value in the stuff they might have to say, so spend more time listening to it
• Stare out of the window more. Look at the sky and ask for inspiration from sources less obvious that a 36Tb storage server connected to some global Hadoop network

No Data – there’s a career-killer for me…..

Alan

PS: New recruits to the camp welcome!

Bored with that, I then took up the OLAP lance and tilted against the spreadsheet bigots for years. Sure it was a hot analytic tool but no one had enough server power to drive it initially, so it was tough at first.

Then ROLAP (Relational OLAP) started to make sense. The big database players loved this of course – at it was their chance to properly make a bigger killing in the burgeoning world of BI hitherto occupied by niche specialists.

It was just what the BI market needed as well of course in order to become seriously ‘legit and hit the mainstream. Thus ensued big investment from the biggest spenders in the IT jungle as they found a way of hitching revenues on this platform.

Then the next step – memory prices plummeted and almost everyone could crunch increasingly bigger numbers and cut reporting times down from days to seconds. Whereas there wasn’t much point before, now the market can start to see the potential of collecting even more data to analyse, on just about anything. This helped columnar calculations to help along another new, the really real time advance in BI operations.

Feeding this same monster comes email, social media, multimedia…a veritable tsunami of less-structured data which now all of a sudden is up for analysis as well.

And of course the big beasts in the storage industry have started to climb aboard – ‘Big Data’ is upon us. The next great white hope for IT has arrived and almost everyone wants a slice of this one.

As a marketer I’m well acquainted with the wonders of how an interesting theory can be turned into the must-have solution of the day, provided you can marshal enough journalists and opinion leaders into supporting the same cause with promises of a new income stream for all.

But sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself – who’s driving this one? Are the needs of end users for more rapid analysis of even more data pulling this elephant into the room?…or are the über-vendors of data  storage and processing power pushing it with as much energy as they can muster?

The adoption of Big Data, Hadoop, HANA and the rest of her family is the most wonderful news, both for a storage industry starting to flag as data becomes generic and virtualisation is virtually everywhere – and for server manufacturers looking for a new reason to provide more processing power.

And yes – it might be great news too for decision-makers looking for ultra-fast results on almost any aspect of their business activities, so hopefully it’s a happy confluence of innovative technology meeting urgent business needs again, just in time!

But the pushers would be well advised to beware, because being at the wrong end of an elephant reluctant to perform at the wrong time could get messy…

Fortunately we now have several campaigns under our belts already so we’re smelling sweeter already!

Indeed I am one of the masses – albeit maybe in the third wave – which deserted Blackberry for an iPhone, but some things I still miss about my old device.

But maybe my generation are not as important as we might like to think. My 14 year old daughter loves her Blackberry and actually moved the opposite way from an iPhone, when we renewed our phones together in the Vodafone shop a year ago.

A quick straw poll on the school run today revealed that she has plenty of mates with a similar allegiance to what addicted business users like me used to call the ‘Smackberry’.

Bizarrely – apart from Messenger of course which is the big draw – she loves the little key-pad which I miss as well. My fingers might be fatter than hers but it still suited me. It’s amazing how fast these kids can hammer out a message whilst watching Waterloo Road and eating dinner at the same time, and I’m sure many of this morning’s messages via this medium will be debating their switch to some other phone if Blackberry does indeed dump their favourite channel.

The real point is, these guys are the next generation of IT buyers and any vendor that has managed to win their loyalty would be advised to think really hard before sending them elsewhere.

Microsoft and the other global IT playmakers spend a lot of their money and braintime working out how to design solutions that appeal to the current young business crowd from Generation Y. Whether my daughter is part of Generation Y or even Z is irrelevant – she and her clever, feisty mates will shortly spawn the ideas that drive the future of our industry.

They are a fickle bunch of course, and Blackberry will not be missed by them for long, but I’m glad I don’t have to be the executive who decides to take the candy off these babies!

Europa’s work with Bucks students uncovers some fascinating facts…

It’s almost trendy to write off our school leavers as ‘unfit for purpose’ when it’s already tough enough for them to find a job these days. The recent work done by Europa in conjunction with schools in Buckinghamshire does indicate that there is certainly scope for improvement, but it’s not necessarily the students who ‘must try harder’. In the areas where students might need to apply more effort if they are to a) succeed in interviews and b) satisfy the needs of employers, there are areas where employers and teachers must make more effort as well.
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Report by Alan Haley, MD of Europa Communications

Over the last year we have been working with Buckinghamshire Schools – some as part of the Education Business Partnership (despite the Government’s decision to cull their budget) and some working directly with individual schools, doing our bit to help prepare the next generation for a career in business. It’s fun, rewarding and gives all concerned an insight into the challenges we may have if stakeholder participation doesn’t sharpen up!

Our objective was threefold:

a) To give students a better perspective on what business is all about – particularly in our ‘specialist areas’ of marketing and technology

b) To deliver to the BEBP and to school heads the results of our online survey of business opinion on the degree of ‘fit’ this new generation has for the needs of the marketplace

And c) ….perhaps most critically, to coach students through the process of ‘marketing themselves’ – applying for jobs (or University places), interviewing and ultimately winning a position.

Contrary to popular belief that education is getting easier, I see at first-hand how hard some of these young aspirants work in the ‘Bucks school system. My own daughter and her peers do more homework – and harder homework – in the subjects I scrambled through during my school years at the same age. She (and her mates) can use PowerPoint at least as well as 80% of my colleagues! And she can probably configure a new phone faster than most of us in the office.

So where’s the challenge with these kids??

Two ‘challenges’ that we see as a result of our work with them are: the majority don’t know how business works; nor do they know how to market themselves.

The vast majority of the six-formers in our coaching classes had little idea of how critical it is to construct a CV which will differentiate them from the masses and give them a chance at least of getting the job or college position they want.

We showed them how attention to areas such as researching their targets; refining presentation and formatting; and on how expanding upon their personal qualities, can put clear blue water between themselves and the thousands of other applicants. Simple stuff – not rocket science – but even the teachers in general admit to lacking the experience necessary to provide this sort of coaching.

However, the encouraging feedback from the students confirmed that they now have much more confidence, enthusiasm and sense of purpose as a result of these sessions.

But here’s the paradox – whilst fewer than one in five of these 17/18 year-olds had ever compiled their own CV, all of them we suggested, ‘actually already had a CV’ – their Facebook account.

This (OK, somewhat mischievous) point was greeted with general alarm by the students – the idea that a potential employer (or college) might actually check out their Facebook pages!! …

We piled it on with the shock revelation that some employees were being fired as a result of ill-advised Facebook activity concerning their employers.

The point of all this was to get them to focus on the fact that most of them had already told the world quite a lot about themselves – their character, their ‘pastimes’ and their aspirations, so why did they see a CV as such a great leap from there?

There is plenty of reason to get this generation to see the positive role social media could play in career-building, rather than to just panic that they may be caught with their ‘Calvins down. These students are the first generation where an online – multimedia rich – CV might become the norm.

Yet still they puzzled over how a photograph (and indeed this is still a point of debate with employers) could be a means of differentiating themselves by ‘including a smile’ in their CV at very least. Most of them readily published photographs of themselves online that they admitted would certainly not help their case!

The fact is that as technology advances the wherewithal of most employers of my generation at least, they have an increasingly outdated view of the definition of a CV.

So what did these students do as a result? Many went away to think long and hard about whether their current online profiles would help or hinder their job or higher education aspirations. Some were even considering creating a new version to promote themselves. Most agreed that their teachers gave them little or no assistance in CV writing anyway and certainly wouldn’t ‘get’ this more creative approach to the genre.

What about the teachers? It’s true, most of them admit that their own CV skills are restricted to form filling once or twice in their careers, with some commenting that they could do with some coaching themselves! Clearly there is enough alarm already about the damage that inappropriate use of social media can do within the pupil populus, so this is curtailing any positive use of the medium as a personal job seeking aid.

The feedback from Tracey Watts – our colleague from the BEBP – was kindly put: “With more support from employers like Europa, together we can make a big difference when it comes to improving the chances of success these students will have when promoting themselves in the most compelling light. Employers need to get more involved as teachers in the main do not have the right skills here.”

Meantime we have I hope given them a leg up by ensuring they now know how to differentiate themselves from the pack. Time will tell….

On February 16th Mayor of Portsmouth Cheryl Buggy bestowed upon Europa her very first ‘Your City Thanks You” Award for outstanding services to the community.

MD Alan Haley and IBM Account Director Steve Connolly were delighted – if a little surprised – to attend an award ceremony at Portsmouth City Hall to receive this recognition.

What was it for and why were they so surprised?

The background was indeed a little bizarre and unplanned, but the outcome a delight and an example of what can happen when business ceases to just be about business, and when compassion prevails…

Europa had scheduled a meeting with its clients in IBM’s North Harbour office for the week before Christmas and had booked 12 rooms in the Holiday Inn for all of the Europa staff who worked with IBM. Unfortunately the meeting had to be rescheduled at the last minute, and the hotel refused to refund Europa.

Steve Connolly explained: “We could no longer use the rooms but we had to pay for them and didn’t want to see them go to waste. I got in touch with The Big Issue who directed me to their partners Shelter, who work with the Rethink Mental Illness. We suggested they use the rooms to house some of the people they knew would otherwise be struggling to find a bed that night.”

Leon Runham-Cuenca, the Rethink Service Lead at Central Point confirmed the success of this last minute: “We were delighted to accept Europa’s fantastic offer and as a result were able to use the rooms for this one night only offer. Hence we felt it was only right to nominate Europa for the Lord Mayor’s Award for this innovative and considerate initiative. It is gestures like this that can really make a difference.”

Europa’s MD Alan Haley added: “Frankly this was a no-brainer to us. However we were slightly embarrassed to be the first recipients at a ceremony where other nominees seemed to have spent their lives helping disadvantaged and disabled people, when all we did was this one small gesture as a company. We’re already thinking about doing it again this Christmas and I’m sure IBM will be happy if we forego our end of year review meeting for this good cause. The only thing we might make sure we do next time is restrict the use of the movie pay-channels!”

For more information please refer to the following:

• About the Mayor’s Award
• About Shelter/Rethink
• About Europa or call Sairah Jahangir on +44 (0)1494 739800

I wish I could make people laugh as he did. I wish I could make people see the beauty in words as he did. His career may appear trivial against the standards of great poets and philosophers, but he made the common man see the irony in life and left them walking with a lighter step.

The ‘Y Generation’ reading this may never have even heard of Frank, but believe me, at the end of a hard working week he probably helped some of your parents relax enough to create you.

God rest him.

Al

Due to continued growth, we are searching for a new addition to our campaign delivery and client management team.

Based in our head office in Beaconsfield, Bucks, this role is open to anyone less experienced looking for a junior role to kick start their career or an experienced individual looking for a new challenge.

This person will take as much responsibility as their experience allows, for coordinating demand generation; digital marketing and telemarketing campaigns for a number of clients

Ideally the inexperienced candidate will have good attention to detail, take pride in their work and is able to think logically.

The experienced candidate will ideally already be familiar with today’s IT solutions landscape, along with the types of campaigns that work in this market.
Important skill-sets for this job include:

• Excellent communication and presentation skills (English – oral and written)
• Analytical and organised with good attention to detail
• The energy, intelligence and resilience necessary to work in a very focused, fast moving sales culture
• The confidence and initiative required to meet the expectations and gain the commitment of both clients and Europa colleagues alike.

In return this role offers as much variety and security than can be found elsewhere in the industry right now, as well as the opportunity to work with a refreshingly motivated, professional and fun team of people.

Successful candidates will in turn receive continuous career development and excellent training from an ‘Investors in People’ accredited organisation.

Salary will be commensurate with relevant experience but starting packages will range from £22,000 – £35,000.

Interested candidates should contact Sairah in the strictest confidence by emailing a CV with introductory letter to sairah.j@europa.co.uk and please ensure you state clearly whether you have a full UK driving license or not.

Thank you

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible”
– Jonathan Swift

Eighteen years ago when we founded this business, we worked on a vision which holds to this day: employ the best people, regardless of where they are based.

That was ambitious then. I had a dial-up internet connection which sometimes worked. Some of my colleagues even had one too!

We did need to meet up quite a lot then – on client sites; at my place; in some Marriott reception – but that was OK, petrol was cheaper.

I have to say, when it came to the ‘telemarketing’ element of our business – where clients were starting to recognise the benefit of having an experienced IT sales developer on the phone rather than a student – they still struggled to come to terms with the fact we didn’t have a call centre for them to walk around and inspect our ranks. We definitely lost business because of that in those days – the leap of faith from the old model to a new more flexible, more dynamic, more skilled solution was just too far for some to take.

Now look where we all are….

We have over fifty people largely working from remote offices – not just from their homes, but maybe one of our satellite sites (more about these mini-centres of excellence in the next blog); or increasingly from client sites.

When the snows hit us last year, and people couldn’t get out of their own driveways, our research and sales activity was hardly interrupted. Sure we had the challenge of making contact with targets who themselves failed to get into work, but we were in the main still fully functional.

When fuel prices hit the roof our employees’ commute budgets were largely unaffected. Their commute was largely a couple of flights of stairs.

When the ecology movement started to matter, we found that we were ‘greener than almost everyone’ before we knew what green represented!

At the same time, broadband performance increased rapidly and prices came down, making our offices as fully wired as any other.

Then our clients started to embrace our model and reduce office costs, as they were also encouraged to work remotely.

Today many call centres and indeed clients’ own offices up and down the country have more empty desks than occupied ones – redundant floorspace with little hope of recouping ROI anytime soon.

So did we just get lucky?

Well not entirely. Running a remote, invisible team of people hungry for training, collaboration, feedback, encouragement and …more work…is not a doddle. It is not something you can just step into without thinking hard about the cultural, ethical and logistical requirements to make this work well for you.

We invested in areas that call centre managers didn’t have to worry about. People used to the older-style businesses quizzed us regularly – How do we train these people properly? How do we monitor performance? How do we know they are working at all? How did we manage quality of output? How did we keep them motivated?

How indeed?! Like a blind person with acutely developed other senses, we had to become excellent at many things that it was just good enough to be ‘OK’ at in a warehouse full of people.

Europa’s ‘distributed model’ has required the development and refinement of specific methodologies for all of the important links in the service delivery chain, including: briefing; monitoring; reporting; coaching; client management; data management; knowledge transfer and staff assessment. Indeed each could be a blog subject in itself – and maybe will if the interest is there!

The other challenge is that as we are, in the main, hiring the more experienced sales professional, our staff can be more demanding – thinking people and often ‘less compliant’ than the less-skilled call centre workers. Hence we did need to manage them with more skill as well – and be cognisant of their lifestyle needs also.

So it has always been fun, and more rewarding. Indeed it still is.

Now we find the rest of the world moving towards this model, so we need to keep innovating, keep thinking and keep striving to get the best out of our workforce.

The good news for us is that the size, the depth of skill and the hunger of the remote talent pool has expanded rapidly as working lives and lifestyle preferences have changed over recent years. Some need to work from home; others have decided they want to get out of the metropolis but still need rewarding work to sustain their new goals. That’s great news for Europa, and we are great news for those workers with the experience, flexibility and willingness to embrace a model which is not new to us.

Indeed we have hardly known anything else.

Featured article image source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The test is based on the ‘Life in the UK Test’, a pass in which is required before anyone can take up British citizenship or settle here indefinitely.

Normally, there 50+ questions that must be answered in 45 minutes but this test is a shorter version and gives you 20 seconds for each of the 24 questions.

You must get at least 75% correct!

When you’re done, you’ll be able to see how you compare to people around the country…Take the test here.

• How did you do?
• Do you think the answers to the questions asked are common knowledge amongst Brits?

Seasonal Greetings to all clients, colleagues and readers in our industry. Once again we spend time here considering all things positive that can potentially make a difference to the way we all grow our business, regardless of these torrid times….

In this edition I invite you to ponder on the health of your arteries. I’m sure you would consider anything possible that would keep yours pumping with vigour, so an occasional examination doesn’t do any harm does it?

I am of course referring to The Channel, because the traditional Vendor-Distributor-Reseller model indeed has to adjust to cope with a new way of life.

Gone are the days when the primary requisite of a computer distributor was a large warehouse near a motorway. Holding stocks of hardware may still be a necessary feature of some IT supply chains, but as the tide continues to turn away from physical to virtual solutions, the old-style distribution business model is in need of a rethink in some areas.

We work in an industry defined by its need to evolve and reinvent itself rapidly, yet some things seem resistant to forces of change. The ‘vendor-disty-reseller’ conduit may be under pressure, with margins for all hard to come by, but for whatever reasons the underlying model remains much the same as it always was.

In our role as an enabler and executor of business development programmes, we are able to be the impartial witness of weaknesses in the system, from manufacturer right through to end user. We act as the glue between one partner and another and the adhesive elements we bring to play can be wide and varied depending upon each situation. What is clear to us is that there are chronic inefficiencies that not only continue to affect campaign success for everyone, but that the gap is widening in some areas, as the nature of the business continues to change.

Sometimes our role can be just about our people doing a job that none of the partners in the chain have time or resource to do. Sometimes we provide expertise in marketing or market targeting that may be needed. Or sales people…or better data…or digital marketing…our job is to deliver whatever is needed to make the channel function efficiently to the benefit of all concerned.

We are constantly evaluating our role, asking what each party needs in order stay ahead, be more effective….and generate profitable business. We see opportunities everywhere – not just for us but for our clients and their clients as well – but only if they are willing to take some bold steps themselves to adjust to what we see as a new market paradigm.

Factors we see placing stress on the old constitution….

The list is long but here are some factors which may force a review of how we expect things to function:

• Shrinking margins
• Intense competition and challenges of differentiation – both for vendors and distributors
• Cloud delivery and continuing shift to ‘license key implementation’
• Reseller frustration with ‘lack of personal touch’
• Fickle reseller loyalties
• Increasing importance of digital marketing and social media
• Vendor frustration with lack of time/focus given to their products
• Restrictive vendor financing model
• Short termism of campaign funding when the market needs a programmatic approach
• Clunky, restrictive data policies when the market needs more accuracy and focus
• Headcount squeezes in account management and support roles

So what’s the remedy?

Firstly this is a holistic treatment – and the solution needs to involve our client and possibly their partners as well! Together we can create a business development machine that eliminates many of the old channel challenges, forming a much better ecosystem of people, intelligence and processes which will energize and optimize the whole system.

Here’s another list for you…. of positive factors that will pump ‘value’ back into the ‘value-added’ equation…

• Maintaining segmented market intelligence hubs at a distribution level that transform the accuracy and response of digital and tele-campaigns and impress the vendor and reseller alike
• Putting experienced account management heads into the channel on flexible, target driven contracts that focus on long term as well as short term business
• Guaranteeing ‘touch rates’ with all resellers – not just this month’s spenders
• Providing resellers with virtual and onsite sales expertise in vendor solutions until they are fully productive and committed
• Bringing together tele+digital+personal presence into the marketing mix and driving end user awareness and loyalty
• Providing proper continuous analysis and market insights to vendors

To steal an edge on the competition, we think contact with end-users and reseller partners alike needs to be more joined up, more continuous and professional. Who is the best channel party to do this? Does this mean that someone in the channel needs to consider expanding and/or refocusing its call centre operation? Possibly – but it doesn’t necessarily require them to increase their headcount. Many of our clients deploy our people, either on their own site or virtually, working seamlessly with their own teams. This is working well, so we urge you to consider how this could work in your operation. Our people bring new skills, high levels of motivation, guaranteed deliverables and plenty of new ideas!

As tides turn; when markets are stormy and the shifting sands demand that you re-evaluate how you navigate the channels available to you; now may be a good time to have a total rethink. At very least you can compare how we fit into other vendor channels and maybe get some inspiration from that as you plan your passage through the New Year.

Happy holiday and good luck in 2012!

Alan

PS: In a competitive distribution market where price or product differentiation is hard to achieve, we also spend a lot of our time talking to resellers about what motivates them to do business with a given distributor or vendor. Maybe you’d expect margin to be at the top of their list? Or ‘What’s in it for me’ being the most prolific quote we hear? Well not necessarily so. What we hear from partners time after time is “all we want is someone who gets in touch with us more often!” Easier said than done for most distys, but partnering with someone who can do this, at a predicable cost and with tangible results, has to be worth thinking about? Our next report is a deeper analysis on what motivates resellers, so stay in touch if you want an insight!