Confession: I believe in superstar Engineers. Nowadays, given the Agile emphasis on Team, reliance on Superstars seems to be roughly as fashionable as fat ties. Embracing inequality of production can also be perceived as naïve by the folks paying their salaries (why pay the big dollars in the Silicon Valley when engineers can be had [...]

New Year is the traditional time to swear off the calories and pledge a leaner you. Recently, the R&D team at KANA has been exploring a different form of getting Lean via the work of Mary Poppendieck. Poppendieck is the author of Leading Lean Software Development . She’s the leading thinker on the intersection of [...]

Business process management (BPM) has largely focused on making business processes more efficient and agile. It provides tools and methodologies to achieve this goal. BPM is quite valuable for back office processes where the processes can be well defined and there is not much customer interaction. BPM ensures consistency in the back office processes but [...]

The most common question from prospects and clients is: “What can/could we do to lower implementation risk?”. I suppose this is actually a polite form of the question: “What can software vendors do to make implementations go better?”. Well, based on the lessons learned from dozens of “post-mortems”, there is a clear answer. KANA is [...]

Agile 2011, the annual summit for all things Agile, is this week. KANA’s own Yukari Huguenard, Agile Program Manager extraordinaire, will be in attendance, along with some 1,600 Scrum evangelists, veteran practitioners and befuddled newbies. For KANA, as you know, Agile is much more than a software development method. The Agile approach is the heart & [...]

On April 27th 2011 US President Obama issued an executive order to heads of federal departments and agencies to streamline service delivery and improve customer service. The agencies were given 180 days to develop their plans and publish them on their Open Government webpage. Learning from industry In the order, the President exhorts government managers [...]

In my role as Social Media and Knowledge Management consultant for KANA I often get asked “What’s the point of social media?” How is it people are able to build such strong relationships and trust when they often can’t see or even ever meet the people they interact with? Why is social media such a powerful [...]

In the race for most over-used and abused Marketing-speak, ‘agile’ is gaining rapidly on smart/smarter/intelligent. How can we make Agile customer service real, rather than just facile jargon? Our answer: insure that KANA SEM is Agile, rather than just another technology fluttering aimlessly towards the abstract idea of ‘agility’. To that end, Service Experience Management (SEM) is designed [...]

I work in a business that invents cutting edge technology. It’s powerful stuff and it makes a tremendous difference to a company’s efficiency and customer satisfaction. Does all this happen by software alone? No… none of this is possible without the involvement of people. To deliver an outstanding product you need outstanding people. I firmly [...]

KANA’s enduring mission is service experience management. And, like most companies, we occasionally change the marketing tagline associated with that mission. Recently, we adopted the phrase: “Good Experiences. On Brand. On Budget.” Precisely as we intended, we’ve had many, many comments that boil down to: “Are you crazy?  We want great/delightful/amazing/unbelievable/world-class/dazzling customer service experiences! We’re [...]