SD Times on 6th Sense Analytics’ New Attribution Engine

Jeff Feinman of SD Times Magazine writes "New features in the 6th Sense Analytics update include a framework for attributing time to various categories, and an attribution engine that allows users to define their systems and create rules for attributing time to projects. System reports have also been refreshed with user-defined values and uniformity in tracking and reporting."

Read his full post at SDTimes.com:
http://www.sdtimes.com/article/latestnews-20071215-06.html

 

Integration Developer News interviews Todd Olson, Co-Founder, CTO of 6th Sense Analytics

Vance McCarthy of Integration Developer News interviewed Todd Olson, our co-founder and CTO.

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Software Metrics Don’t Kill Projects, Moronic Managers Kill Projects

I don't like to create "link blog postings" but Alberto Savoia created a gem with this entry. He points out that just because someone dumb abuses a tool, it's not a bad tool. It means the dumb person is, well, just dumb.

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Don’t Ignore Your Career, continued

Continued from this post...

The execution section of Fowler's book is about day-to-day activity—how you're delivering value to yourself, your team and your projects. The emphasis here should be at the team and project level. Fowler suggests that sometimes we get wrapped up in ourselves and expect everything to revolve around us, which can cause our overall performance to decline. Instead we should be focusing on the quality of our job and deliverable—daily. Loving what we do, even the maintenance or drudge work, and truly embracing our profession. What a concept!

Other good points he makes relate to not burning ourselves out with overtime and learning to say "No" more often, and learning how to fail. Failure implies that we're stretching ourselves and taking risk—that we're trying to do things outside of our comfort zone and that with each failure comes a later, more experienced success.

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Getting Back to Basics with Data

This article on call-center CRM popped up on the radar. While the piece talks of the challenge in monitoring and managing call center agents, one paragraph in particular caught our eye.

Analyst Gartner: “Cautioned contact centers and enterprises to listen closely to whenever a vendor uses the term ’suite,’ as many bundled offerings now on the market actually consist of components that were built using a variety of tools. As a result these offerings are more ‘portfolios’ than they are suites, resulting in countless administration environments, support complexities and overlapping functionalities that are both unnecessary and costly.”

Anyone who’s wrestled with application development and reporting suites will recognize this parallel. IT vendors have grown their development and reporting “suites” through the years and during multiple acquisitions. The result? Tools that were intended to help reporting on projects that actually hinder the process and cost money into the bargain (through licensing and support). These tools fail to collect data in real time while lack of integration with the rest of the portfolio makes its difficult for customers to filter data or access information in real time.

The suites argument has always been something of a smoke screen by IT vendors. It’s time to get back to tools that actually do what they say on the packet.