Finance-Software

All full-time Microsoft employees received a complimentary copy of "Inside Out" just before it was released. I perused mine over lunch that day and confirmed that "Inside Out" is little more than a glossy, book-length version of the weekly internal newsletter--peppy, vapid, and grindingly dull. The only people I can see getting anything out of it are Microsoft employees, who can spend a diverting fifteen minutes skimming the index for the names of people they know. But of course they already own the book.

It is a motivating book... a must read!

This volume contains reminiscences of about a thousand MicroSoft employees who've worked there over its 25 year history, each about a third-page long in general chronological order. Interspersed are several longer pieces by the big guys like Bill and Paul and Bob. It reminds me of a high school yearbook. Most of the pieces are about business accomplishments, but there are digressions into work life, hobbies, and feelings about change at MS.

The book is from MicroSoft, but doesn't tell you how to be another MicroSoft. At first glance I thought it was a self-congratulatory piece on the occasion of MS 25th anniversary and mainly for its employees. But it contains a wealth of material on how a geek business culture operates. I feel it is unfinished. Some academic types needs to organize the material from the indiviual articles into a more constructive history.

Interesting corporate biography on Intuit, which arguably is the most successful consumer software company in the world.
The authors focus on Intuit's core values
1. Integrity
2. Do right by the customers
3. It's the people

It provides entertaining examples where the company did right by customers and did right by its employees. In particular, the authors focus on Intuit's strong customer oriented culture and its extensive user testing to make their software easy to use.
The Intuit story is told chronologically covering Intuit's conception to the present . Probably since the authors have a marketing background, there is a lot of coverage on marketing roll-outs, pricing strategies, and branding. I would have liked to read more on their engineering strategies. This really is limited to stories of engineers pulling all-nighters and a focus on usability testing. Not much insight is given on how they actually develop award winning software. There is interesting management insight to current CEO Bennett, and how he brought more discipline and metric focus to the organization. The authors had access to all of the key Intuit players , and Intuit's vision, mission and operating values statement makes for an insightful read in the appendix.

How many companies have survived direct battles with Microsoft? Not very many. How many lived to win over direct battles with Microsoft? Even fewer. Intuit is in that elite company. That experience alone would make the book worth considering.

The authors have done an outstanding job of building on that potentially fascinating subject matter by successfully capturing the key elements of how Intuit has continued to succeed as a business model innovator through four CEOs. I was especially pleased to see that the book captures the values that led to this innovation, the organizational and process methods used to stimulate and pursue the innovation, and the motivations of the key innovators.

In addition, the book moves down into the organization to capture the thoughts and emotions of many of the Intuit employees as it moved from its P&G style focus on customer needs to a broad-based expansion through acquisitions to a GE-style disciplined approach to achieve performance in key areas.

In fact, this book was so fine that I had to ask myself what was missing before I could spot any flaws. The only area where the book is a little light is in describing the details of how Intuit's software development changed over time, and what the lessons were. Now, don't mistake my point. There's plenty on that subject (especially when Intuit was a start-up), but there could have been more . . . if this book were to become a case history source on software engineering.

But no book can be everything to everyone, and currently there are few books that explain continuing business model innovation through generations of senior management. So Inside Intuit becomes a must read for those who want to master this critical leadership and management task.

By the way, Inside Intuit is a very apt title. The authors seem to have had unrestrained access to company insiders. The book comes away much richer as a result than any other Silicon Valley saga that I can remember reading. Most of those books focus on one to three people in the company, and leave it at that.

As I finished the book, I wondered what improvements in its continuing business model innovation Intuit will make next. I can hardly wait to find out!

When Inside Intuit arrived in the mail, along with four other books I'd ordered, it was the first one I picked up to browse. Seven hours later, I finished the book! Reliving the experiences, placing myself in the events (I worked for Intuit for over fourteen years - by way of ChipSoft), was an overwhelming experience for me.

I remember the first time I met Scott Cook. Leo Redmond, at the time managing the Intuit Supplies Group, and I had just finished lunch in Palo Alto. As we drove back to his office, we talked about Quicken and how it was the second product I bought for my first computer in early 1989 (the first was Sim City). Leo said that he'd like me to tell Scott about it. Scott was excited - "You have five years of Quicken data?" He told me to install the latest Quicken beta as soon as I got home - he wanted to know how it handled large data files (mine was over two megabytes at the time). That was nearly ten years ago.

What an experience! Having been hired by Evy Chipman in late 1988 and working closely with every top-echelon executive on the ChipSoft side (Gaylord, Harris, Gleicher, Lane), I never thought I'd be so intimidated - stammering - as I chatted briefly with Scott in his office.

Reading Inside Intuit brings you into Scott's (and many others) office - you are in the presence of greatness when you read this book.

Quinn's work is an excellent guide / explorer for the 21st century. I highly recommend this groundbreaking work to everybody who is interested in changing nature of tomorrow's organizations.

Quinn's work is an excellent guide to explore the world of 21st century. I recommend this groundbreakink work to everybody who is interested in tomorrow's organizations.

Quinn has long been among the absolute finest academics at helping real world managers understand the best practices in the world for managing & generating innovation. In earlier works he brought to our attention such groundbreaking concepts as the role of chaos in innovative organizations, the implications of our shift to a services based economy, and the rise of intellect or human capital as the critcal resource for competition among companies. His newest book may be his most useful to date. With his usual meticulously fact based research Quinn not only lays out the emerging tools, techniques and approaches the world's leading companies are using, he also provides breathtaking evidence of the real world performance gains that are available. The sections on software paradigms, "beyond teams" organizational approaches, and knowledge systems deserve especially careful reading, in my opinion. As usual, the biggest problem with Quinn's work is the sheer density of important new ideas makes consuming this book and putting it to work a significant investement. As a private investor, I will suggest to the executives that I work with that they make the time.

The collection of papers in this book represent the collective knowledge of a diverse group of international experts. While this book has wide appeal to academic readers, it is also an invaluable source of material, case studies and approaches for consultants who specialize in IT management and/or strategic planning and operational reengineering.

There are five topic areas, each with two or more papers:

(1) Benefits Realization, which addresses how to assess and quantify IT investment benefits. This topic area will be of interest to program management offices, governance committees, CIOs and anyone who is trying to develop a portfolio-based approach to IT investments that shows a clear ROI.

(2) Evaluation and Research Methods. This is an extension of the previous topic area, and focuses on after-the-fact evaluation of investment decisions.

(3) Alternatives to Traditional Evaluation, which is one of the more interesting topic areas. Each of the four papers are excellent, although I'd been exposed to the mechanics of each of the approaches from previous works.

(4) Evaluation of New Technologies. This topic area's three papers are each worth reading. My favorite was by Murphy and Simon, titled "Using Cost Benefit Analysis for Enterprise Resource Planning Project Evaluation: A Case for Including Intangibles". What made this paper a favorite is the fact that cost-benefit analysis is a questionable technique for defining IS benefit because intangibles are difficult to quantify. The authors tackle this problem and give what appears to be a workable solution.

(5) Evaluation Through Balanced Scorecard. I'll confess that this topic area is why I bought the book in the first place. I wasn't disappointed and felt that the five papers in this topic area justified, in my opinion, the cost of the book.

This isn't a book for the casual reader, nor does it give an end-to-end approach for evaluating IT investments and methods. If you're seeking that kind of book I recommend and of Dan Remenyi's books, especially "The Effective Measurement and Management of IT Costs and Benefits". However, if you are a consultant that works in any of the topic areas you'll find the material within to be thought provoking and informative.

I use this book as the basic text in my university course on computer auditing for CA's (CPA's to you south of the 49th) because it is the best text out of a bad lot. At times, Hall is concise and to the point. On occasion, for example in ch's 8 and 9 when he describes the audit of a receivables and a payables systems, his advice is detailed and valuable. Most of the time, though, he wanders into side issues in too much depth, ignores the concepts of risk and control, provides superficial advice and examples on CAAT's (despite the inclusion of the ACL disk, which, although stripped down, is worth the price of admission) and is just too thin on practical discussions of auditing in an EDP environment.