14 ms·

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget br

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS software. A tougher analysis to do is to ask what internal software projects various tech companies are working on. If you can get the list from 3-4 companies, you will undoubtedly see a few internal tool or product examples that should be built as a SaaS product for everyone."

0xff00ffee 7y ago
ERP is hard. VERY hard.
- UK-Al05 7y ago
  It is, but there is also a lot of artificial complexity created for lock-in purposes. A lot of ERP systems move away from well-trodden programming tools to their own custom stuff. I know of ERP systems have their own source control version control systems. Why? They're often awful to use. The programmers that use them are often business-focused haven't really used stuff outside that ecosystem. So they don't know how bad it is. Most ERP implementations i've come across make little use of automated testing as well.
  - NikolaNovak 7y ago
    Automated testing is becoming the norm, but I'd agree that otherwise ERP developers, on average, are either unaware, or simply not able to utilize most of the tools and practices from the wider market.
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    or... they create their own internal DSLs - customers and internal people use those - and everyone spends years thinking about the 'custom DSL' way. Developing any sort of automated testing around your own custom language basically becomes impossible. I did some work for a place where, they embedded groovy as their 'write custom rules stuff from the UI' language - that was at least easier to reason about, and to debug/test offline (not automated, but somewhat easier than a DSL that only runs inside the system).
rtkwe 7y ago
The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (and often multiple different copies for each SaaS the company is trying to use to substitute for just writing the software themselves).
- Plyphon_ 7y ago
  I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked freakishly good, and saved a whole bunch of time trying to find a file in the mess that everyones Google Drive becomes. The problem they were having was no enterprise wanted to hand over an entire copy of their data for them to index.
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    Was there no self-hosted option?
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    That's another difficulty. Even if the actual transfer is relatively painless it is a risk every time your company has given a copy of customer data to another company. Using AWS for example all it takes is a misconfigured bucket to expose massive amounts of customer data.
    - atwebb 7y ago
      At least it is private by default now...but the point stands.
  - 7y ago
NikolaNovak 7y ago
* I'd love to see that as well * At the same time: - A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there - A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized software. I'm not saying they're right... ;) - I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project. And the actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided by the business transformation part. And when a company views ERP as a technical/IT project, it is most likely to not end well (small scale example: Sally in accounting refuses to change and insists that the new fancy software, on-prem or SaaS, do things the way she's done them for 2 decades in Excel, because that's "how their company does it"... no matter how inefficient or outdated they are. If you're seen as an IT project, it's your duty to accommodate Sally and now you're building the same thing over and over, compromising any value in your new ERP, SaaS or otherwise. If you're seen as business transformation project, you have some chance to make a difference and make things better...] - Therefore SaaS would reduce FAR less effort in ERP than many techies (including myself) feel. Basically, you'd still have a consulting company come in to (try) to do business transformation so your internal processes actually accept and match the SaaS processes; build interfaces; and then maintain and support. Disclosure/example: I'm in consulting part of IBM, and while I'm currently on a legacy ERP project, my colleagues in "Cloud/SaaS" (i.e. "let somebody else host it for you") side are no less busy than before. Mind you, they are on average providing higher value services, so that's a plus :)
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  > companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external SaaS can be on-premises. > Sally in accounting refuses to change The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool. That said, if there are obvious efficiency gains (e.g. you can stop typing "COMPLETED" three hundred times a day and just click a button that fills the field for you; even better, the process marks it 'completed' once all the human verification has taken place) and the user is stubborn, well, maybe the tool should offer the efficient solution, allow the inefficient behavior, and log metrics on the whole thing. Management might take interest.
masonhensley 7y ago
I've gone down this rabbit hole, it's amazing how often orgs reinvent the wheel. I don't fault them, there's not support and guidance on this sort of stuff & incentives aren't aligned for product & development teams to focus on their corp's primary value prop vs basic stuff like user management and customer service tooling. Hoping to get a white paper or at least a one-two pager in the next few weeks. Shameless plug, follow here for updates if this sort of stuff interests you: https://hipspec.com/ https://hipspec.com/
AznHisoka 7y ago
"Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500." Just curious if the OP wants this so he can build a product FROM this data, or if he just wants this data as a product, alone.
oftenwrong 7y ago
Sometimes people reinvent the wheel simply because they need a new project to take credit for. Every link in the chain needs an accomplishment to point toward when justifying themselves to superiors.
thdrdt 7y ago
I believe ERP SaaS would fall in the category "falsehoods programmers believe about how companies store their data". There is always this exception that makes a SaaS ERP not fit for a company.
amelius 7y ago
> I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. This is basically asking for a market gap in a potentially very profitable market. That's silly, everybody wants that.
SamuelAdams 7y ago
>Global 2000 company IT needs. Splunk is a good example of this. I've worked at several public and private muti-billion dollar orgs, and they all rant and rave about how good Splunk is over whatever else they were using. So, build more splunks. Maybe something that aggregates monitoring multiple servers. A plug and play Status Dashboard for a company's internal apps. Like this: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  If you knew the technologies/software that Fortune 2000 companies are spending the most on, you should build complementary products, or similar things that solve the same problems those products are solving?
  - SamuelAdams 7y ago
    I think there's value in both. Consider Duo. They took a common problem - authenticating servers and services with 2FA - and made it easy to add to existing infrastructure. There's not really a consumer use for this product, aside from maybe a VPN, but there's absolutely a huge demand for it in business. I worked on many CRUD apps that had say 4 different groups of users. We made a library / system for determining what "level" a user is, based on what Active Directory roles the user is assigned. In the application, you can show or hide components based on this level. Making some sort of middle-ware that abstracts things for developers, so they don't have to think about things like AD, is a huge area of opportunity.
    - bransonf 7y ago
      Duo is awesome. I discovered it because it’s the system my employer uses for 2FA and push notifications are so much nicer than having to enter codes. But similarly, I’ve found it convenient for all my other 2FA needs from GitHub to RuneScape. So even then, it has value to consumers.
TrackerFF 7y ago
FWIW, robotic process automation (RPC) is very hot these days, and it's always a bespoke service - unless two companies happen to use the exact same software, and follow the exact same business logic. The RPC consultants, often titled AI / ML consultants, make money hand over fist traveling from site to site and implementing some automatic procedures. Same with chat bots. The past 2-3 years there's been an explosion in demand for chat bots, and these often take entire teams to implement and train. Again, lots of bespoke products. Who gets these gigs largely depends on networking and sales. The big companies (Accenture, etc.) are rolling in this, since they also have a good picture of company software from previous projects. The accounting industry is also desperate to get in on the ML revolution. I've lost count on how many times I've been contacted by recruiters in that space, who want magic ML pixie dust. The market is there, but it can be difficult to break into as an outsider, or smaller player - if you're planning in building some one-size fits all product. Best plan, IMO, would be to focus on some niche part of the process, and become the best at just that - and then pitch to the big companies that deal with actual F500 clients. There are of course exceptions, but a 5 man startup vs Accenture offering the same base product, Accenture is gonna walk away with the gig 99 out of 100 times. (But with that said, a lot of the startups that focus on these spaces, seem to be ex-consultants from said big consulting firms. Logical enough, as they have both seen the problems first hand, and built networks within the industry.)
- pedrocx486 7y ago
  Just a small correction (sorry if I sound pedantic), I think you meant RPA instead of RPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation I noticed that since I worked at the RPA team of my current employer. :-)
dsalzman 7y ago
This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- gkfasdfasdf 7y ago
  Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school curriculum?
  - Wistar 7y ago
    ... along with how to write a good search query
    - mattnewton 7y ago
      Funny enough, I had a class on this in grade school, taught by the school librarian. It included quoting, AND, NOT and OR style stuff you could use in library search systems and it is pretty much all irrelevant now, but it was cool at the time and I wonder if it helped to be exposed to that kind of boolean logic early.
      - Wistar 7y ago
        I was thinking more about the thought process for how to come up with the right words to begin with and for refinements to make to yield better results rather than the boolean operators although I think they are good for the young minds, too.
      - beamatronic 7y ago
        Same, this was common in the late 70s and early 80s. Sure, you were on a mainframe terminal or a PC with a cd-rom, but the search principles are the same.
    - nothrabannosir 7y ago
      Funny you should mention this; we learned this in high school, 2 decades ago now. Quotes and OR and all. The task was to find some info on the teacher. It was in "computer science" class. Good fun. I got an F.
jpswade 7y ago
How would this be a product? Isn't this just research? Why would a Fortune 500 give up such information, which is pretty much how they make money. Also, if they did map out any tasks that could be automated, they would automate them themselves. Good idea, but not a product.
aleks5678 7y ago
Let me know if you find it
scirocco 7y ago
How about turning those into open source projects? Especially across public organizations who could develop the systems together if they just knew they shared the same needs

0xff00ffee 7y ago

ERP is hard. VERY hard.

UK-Al05 7y ago
It is, but there is also a lot of artificial complexity created for lock-in purposes. A lot of ERP systems move away from well-trodden programming tools to their own custom stuff. I know of ERP systems have their own source control version control systems. Why? They're often awful to use. The programmers that use them are often business-focused haven't really used stuff outside that ecosystem. So they don't know how bad it is. Most ERP implementations i've come across make little use of automated testing as well.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  Automated testing is becoming the norm, but I'd agree that otherwise ERP developers, on average, are either unaware, or simply not able to utilize most of the tools and practices from the wider market.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  or... they create their own internal DSLs - customers and internal people use those - and everyone spends years thinking about the 'custom DSL' way. Developing any sort of automated testing around your own custom language basically becomes impossible. I did some work for a place where, they embedded groovy as their 'write custom rules stuff from the UI' language - that was at least easier to reason about, and to debug/test offline (not automated, but somewhat easier than a DSL that only runs inside the system).

rtkwe 7y ago

The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (and often multiple different copies for each SaaS the company is trying to use to substitute for just writing the software themselves).

Plyphon_ 7y ago
I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked freakishly good, and saved a whole bunch of time trying to find a file in the mess that everyones Google Drive becomes. The problem they were having was no enterprise wanted to hand over an entire copy of their data for them to index.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  Was there no self-hosted option?
- rtkwe 7y ago
  That's another difficulty. Even if the actual transfer is relatively painless it is a risk every time your company has given a copy of customer data to another company. Using AWS for example all it takes is a misconfigured bucket to expose massive amounts of customer data.
  - atwebb 7y ago
    At least it is private by default now...but the point stands.
- 7y ago

NikolaNovak 7y ago

* I'd love to see that as well * At the same time: - A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there - A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized software. I'm not saying they're right... ;) - I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project. And the actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided by the business transformation part. And when a company views ERP as a technical/IT project, it is most likely to not end well (small scale example: Sally in accounting refuses to change and insists that the new fancy software, on-prem or SaaS, do things the way she's done them for 2 decades in Excel, because that's "how their company does it"... no matter how inefficient or outdated they are. If you're seen as an IT project, it's your duty to accommodate Sally and now you're building the same thing over and over, compromising any value in your new ERP, SaaS or otherwise. If you're seen as business transformation project, you have some chance to make a difference and make things better...] - Therefore SaaS would reduce FAR less effort in ERP than many techies (including myself) feel. Basically, you'd still have a consulting company come in to (try) to do business transformation so your internal processes actually accept and match the SaaS processes; build interfaces; and then maintain and support. Disclosure/example: I'm in consulting part of IBM, and while I'm currently on a legacy ERP project, my colleagues in "Cloud/SaaS" (i.e. "let somebody else host it for you") side are no less busy than before. Mind you, they are on average providing higher value services, so that's a plus :)

jagged-chisel 7y ago
> companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external SaaS can be on-premises. > Sally in accounting refuses to change The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool. That said, if there are obvious efficiency gains (e.g. you can stop typing "COMPLETED" three hundred times a day and just click a button that fills the field for you; even better, the process marks it 'completed' once all the human verification has taken place) and the user is stubborn, well, maybe the tool should offer the efficient solution, allow the inefficient behavior, and log metrics on the whole thing. Management might take interest.

masonhensley 7y ago

I've gone down this rabbit hole, it's amazing how often orgs reinvent the wheel. I don't fault them, there's not support and guidance on this sort of stuff & incentives aren't aligned for product & development teams to focus on their corp's primary value prop vs basic stuff like user management and customer service tooling. Hoping to get a white paper or at least a one-two pager in the next few weeks. Shameless plug, follow here for updates if this sort of stuff interests you: https://hipspec.com/ https://hipspec.com/

AznHisoka 7y ago

"Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500." Just curious if the OP wants this so he can build a product FROM this data, or if he just wants this data as a product, alone.

oftenwrong 7y ago

Sometimes people reinvent the wheel simply because they need a new project to take credit for. Every link in the chain needs an accomplishment to point toward when justifying themselves to superiors.

thdrdt 7y ago

I believe ERP SaaS would fall in the category "falsehoods programmers believe about how companies store their data". There is always this exception that makes a SaaS ERP not fit for a company.

amelius 7y ago

> I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. This is basically asking for a market gap in a potentially very profitable market. That's silly, everybody wants that.

SamuelAdams 7y ago

>Global 2000 company IT needs. Splunk is a good example of this. I've worked at several public and private muti-billion dollar orgs, and they all rant and rave about how good Splunk is over whatever else they were using. So, build more splunks. Maybe something that aggregates monitoring multiple servers. A plug and play Status Dashboard for a company's internal apps. Like this: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
AznHisoka 7y ago
If you knew the technologies/software that Fortune 2000 companies are spending the most on, you should build complementary products, or similar things that solve the same problems those products are solving?
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  I think there's value in both. Consider Duo. They took a common problem - authenticating servers and services with 2FA - and made it easy to add to existing infrastructure. There's not really a consumer use for this product, aside from maybe a VPN, but there's absolutely a huge demand for it in business. I worked on many CRUD apps that had say 4 different groups of users. We made a library / system for determining what "level" a user is, based on what Active Directory roles the user is assigned. In the application, you can show or hide components based on this level. Making some sort of middle-ware that abstracts things for developers, so they don't have to think about things like AD, is a huge area of opportunity.
  - bransonf 7y ago
    Duo is awesome. I discovered it because it’s the system my employer uses for 2FA and push notifications are so much nicer than having to enter codes. But similarly, I’ve found it convenient for all my other 2FA needs from GitHub to RuneScape. So even then, it has value to consumers.

TrackerFF 7y ago

FWIW, robotic process automation (RPC) is very hot these days, and it's always a bespoke service - unless two companies happen to use the exact same software, and follow the exact same business logic. The RPC consultants, often titled AI / ML consultants, make money hand over fist traveling from site to site and implementing some automatic procedures. Same with chat bots. The past 2-3 years there's been an explosion in demand for chat bots, and these often take entire teams to implement and train. Again, lots of bespoke products. Who gets these gigs largely depends on networking and sales. The big companies (Accenture, etc.) are rolling in this, since they also have a good picture of company software from previous projects. The accounting industry is also desperate to get in on the ML revolution. I've lost count on how many times I've been contacted by recruiters in that space, who want magic ML pixie dust. The market is there, but it can be difficult to break into as an outsider, or smaller player - if you're planning in building some one-size fits all product. Best plan, IMO, would be to focus on some niche part of the process, and become the best at just that - and then pitch to the big companies that deal with actual F500 clients. There are of course exceptions, but a 5 man startup vs Accenture offering the same base product, Accenture is gonna walk away with the gig 99 out of 100 times. (But with that said, a lot of the startups that focus on these spaces, seem to be ex-consultants from said big consulting firms. Logical enough, as they have both seen the problems first hand, and built networks within the industry.)

pedrocx486 7y ago
Just a small correction (sorry if I sound pedantic), I think you meant RPA instead of RPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation I noticed that since I worked at the RPA team of my current employer. :-)

dsalzman 7y ago

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

gkfasdfasdf 7y ago
Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school curriculum?
- Wistar 7y ago
  ... along with how to write a good search query
  - mattnewton 7y ago
    Funny enough, I had a class on this in grade school, taught by the school librarian. It included quoting, AND, NOT and OR style stuff you could use in library search systems and it is pretty much all irrelevant now, but it was cool at the time and I wonder if it helped to be exposed to that kind of boolean logic early.
    - Wistar 7y ago
      I was thinking more about the thought process for how to come up with the right words to begin with and for refinements to make to yield better results rather than the boolean operators although I think they are good for the young minds, too.
    - beamatronic 7y ago
      Same, this was common in the late 70s and early 80s. Sure, you were on a mainframe terminal or a PC with a cd-rom, but the search principles are the same.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Funny you should mention this; we learned this in high school, 2 decades ago now. Quotes and OR and all. The task was to find some info on the teacher. It was in "computer science" class. Good fun. I got an F.

jpswade 7y ago

How would this be a product? Isn't this just research? Why would a Fortune 500 give up such information, which is pretty much how they make money. Also, if they did map out any tasks that could be automated, they would automate them themselves. Good idea, but not a product.

aleks5678 7y ago

Let me know if you find it

scirocco 7y ago

How about turning those into open source projects? Especially across public organizations who could develop the systems together if they just knew they shared the same needs