On the money
Sometimes it’s not what you say or even the way that you say it. It�s what you imply or intimate that’s important.
Welcome to the world of “tacit interactions.” That is, interactions between people and between people and systems that really express what the person feels rather than what the person says they feel. Tacit interactions are important in businesses. They have implications in sales and marketing, shaping product strategy and pricing. Tacit interactions are also important in software development.
Captured and analyzed, tacit interactions can lead to real-world best practices that help software teams steer application development projects towards success. How? Because you are capturing information about the way people on your team are working. From there, you can refine and streamline development methodologies for re-use in other software development projects, helping drive those towards success. Software development is comprised solely of tacit interactions.
As Ross Mayfield points out, though, the technology used to capture tacit interactions is sadly lagging. To get around this, we have relied upon individuals’ judgment or expertise to assess the situation.
Ross notes that software as a service is one way to automate the capture process, but that SaaS has largely been limited to business applications (like CRM) and has been absent in tools.
6th Sense Analytics is stepping up to the plate on this one. We are providing SaaS tools to capture and exploit tacit interactions, so teams can deliver quality software and establish some real-world-based best practices, not some Harvard PHD best practice that bears no relation to what it is developers actually do.
We are definitely aligned with serving the needs of tacit interactions. Hell, we’d argue that we are the measurement solution for tacit interactions and that we are facing a huge market opportunity. Consultant McKinsey says 41% of all US worker activity is tacit yet just 24% of software investments today support them. That indicates a significant potential opportunity for companies like us with the right solution.
Any company providing a solution for tacit interactions in the field of enterprise software has a tough benchmark to measure itself against, though. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers general partner Ray Lane likes to evaluate investments by scrutinizing start-ups� technology and business models. Ray pretty much issued the rallying cry that providers of enterprise software must change their act.
Now Ray is talking about the Seven Laws that companies providing enterprise software must follow. These rules serve as a benchmark for someone providing the solution to measure tacit interactions.
You can read Ray’s Seven Laws by scrolling down here. Below, though, is how we think we score on Ray’s list:
- Serving individuals’ needs. Our tools mean developers get the resources they need to do their job while IT and business managers get the level of information they want to do their jobs, steering software projects to success.
- Vital/organic adoption. We have a free, entry-level version that means 6th Sense is something you can easily pass on to developer friends and colleagues.
- Contextual personalized information. Metrics gathered using 6th Sense can be viewed through a browser, using our AJAX-based interface in any way the IT or business user wants. We are infinitely customizable, meeting individuals� needs in infinite numbers of ways.
- No data entry or training required. Not on our watch.
- Delivers instantaneous value. The second you install 6th Sense you can start to gather metrics and begin to refine your development processes. There�s no waiting around.
- Utilize community and social relationships. We are open source, and working with the community to ensure our software meets the needs of customers and developers.
- Minimum IT footprint. 6th Sense is a hosted service, which takes up just a handful of bytes on the desktop. You can’t get much smaller than that.
6th Sense is, unquestionably, the Web 2.0 application for the software development industry.
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