Carter Maslan : Our Industry

New Technical Evangelist Position - Whidbey and WinFX

jcmaslan — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:14:00 GMT

I'm looking for an outstanding Technical Evangelist to join our team (this new job posting) Since our career site falls short on text formatting, here's a somewhat easier-to-read version of the same:

Technical Evangelist

Do you love helping companies change their business with agenda-setting uses of software? Are you a voracious learner, devouring new technologies and industry trends with an unabashedly geeky enthusiasm? Can you quickly digest your learnings into pragmatic, succinct suggestions that help CxO decision makers meet their particular business objectives? If so, join our team to evangelize Whidbey and WinFX as part of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division.

You’ll work with leading companies and the latest technologies to identify, develop, and drive strategic engagements that demonstrate the business value of key Microsoft platform technologies. You’ll be responsible for delivering:

Early, high-impact customer wins that demonstrate the value of building solutions using our latest platform capabilities
Compelling demos, presentations, and case studies that prepare field evangelists to create their own customer successes
Clear implementation guidance for top-of-mind scenarios
Critical feedback that helps product teams improve our platform
Community engagement (e.g. blogs, webcasts, videos, events, newsletters) that build awareness and excitement

From a day-to-day work perspective, you’ll:

Focus on opportunities that influence an industry, value chain or ecosystem
Qualify and select engagements that can execute quickly and set an agenda for the industry
Collaborate with product teams, architect evangelists, and field sales to flesh out prescriptive guidance for technical decision makers
Leverage resources across Microsoft’s commercial sector teams, evangelism teams, product teams, and account teams to execute quickly and effectively
Go deep to resolve technical problems and how-to questions experienced in early engagements

To be successful, you’ll need the following skills:

Solid technical background and development experience on the Windows platform
Ability to grasp quickly strategic customer/partner business objectives and to articulate an engagement plan that addresses these objectives.
Methodical approach with good organizational skills to manage multiple opportunities and projects concurrently.
Excellent oral and written communication and listening skills.
A blend of curiosity, creativity, persistence, commitment, passion and optimism

"Decade of Health Information Technology"

jcmaslan — Sun, 25 Jul 2004 07:24:00 GMT

The Department of Health and Human Services announced a plan to computerize and standardize health records. The report: "The Decade of Health Information Technology: Delivering Consumer-centric and Information-rich Health Care”.

I've often wondered whether the poor state of Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) was really an investment banking problem; it seemed to me that everyone in the healthcare system had a great ROI for modern HIT, but no one could afford to make the changes needed to get there. The report says:

EHRs will induce concomitant changes in workflow, in relationships between physicians and patients, and in process control that together will trigger subsequent waves of positive change, moving health care toward a more modern and consumer-driven model. A large gap remains, however, between the promise of EHRs and the capacity and willingness of clinicians to use them...
there are very few physician groups or hospitals in the United States able to sustain high capital expenses or operating losses over the long term simply because of mission or strategy. For the rest, short-term finances will determine whether they invest in EHRs.

The whole push for a consumer-driven model, with radically reduced capital and operating expenses, is so well-aligned with modern platform technologies like the ones mentioned in the Healthcare demo. I hope the newly announced plan is the start of serious, sustained market development towards the goals outlined in the report. Sign me up.

.NET "catching on like wildfire" despite initial "muddled messaging"

jcmaslan — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 06:10:00 GMT

A while back, Dan'l gave me a simple, memorable definition of marketing. He said “marketing is education.“

The function of marketing is to educate product teams on customer needs, and to educate customers on product offerings.

But experience is the best teacher. Fortunately, developers know that... lots of developers as described in this article.

Jonathan's Squarified Treemaps with XAML and C#

jcmaslan — Tue, 25 May 2004 02:58:00 GMT

I'm digging out from a 10-day-vacation-without-connectivity inbox, and just saw great work by Jonathan Hodgson that Chris Sells mentioned last week. Data visualization is going to be huge!

Know Good Matches for a “Dream” Job?

jcmaslan — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 01:31:00 GMT

Do you love helping companies change their industry with agenda-setting uses of software? Are you a voracious learner, devouring new technologies and industry trends with an unabashedly geeky enthusiasm? Can you quickly digest your learnings into pragmatic, succinct suggestions that help CxO decision makers meet their particular business objectives? If so, join our Longhorn Vertical Evangelism team as a Technical Evangelist.

Apply or refer candidates to the position posted here. “Marketing Manager” is the Microsoft-internal job title, but I’m looking for an Evangelist - someone with a very strong blend of technical, business development, and product marketing experience.

I agree with both meanings behind Brad Abrams’ characterization as “dream” job – it’s a role at the nexus of multiple disciplines, and an opportunity to change our industry.

Don't Outsource Your Brains

jcmaslan — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 07:46:00 GMT

I like a couple summary points in Moore’s article today “The Unattainable Real-Time Enterprise.”

· “Unlike past generations of technology, today’s IT in and of itself is no longer a differentiator – what differentiates a business is its application of IT.”

I don’t agree with the first part of his statement (even in past generations of technology, do you really think differentiation was ever independent of the intelligent application of IT?), but I certainly agree with his conclusion that differentiation comes from a company’s application of IT. I’ll consider that another vote for not outsourcing the brains of your IT organization!

He’s also applied his “core vs. context” thinking to SOA:

· “What service oriented architectures do in the short-term is allow more business process flexibility, and that’s particularly important for core. It is a way to add capabilities that will differentiate and add to core on top of the powerful enterprise applications that more or less take care of the context, and that’s exciting.”

This is not a Religion

jcmaslan — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 10:00:00 GMT

I run a Linux web server from home on an old Dell 266mhz/64mb clunker. It’s in a corner, headless, wireless, and always powered up to serve pictures and videos to my remote family. It works OK for the job. Even as a Microsoft evangelist, I don’t see the O.S. as a religion J

I set it up when Red Hat 7.2 was first released, and had scheduled nightly runs of up2date to keep it, well, up to date. But then, that service wasn’t free anymore, so I decided to live with the periodic vulnerabilities in SSH and other subsystems – after all, it’s just an isolated machine with duplicate files – nothing critical, right?

But now, as I catch myself looking at the Dell catalog with an eye towards replacing the clunker, I’m certain I’ll choose Windows. My experience, as an individual home web server user, is apparently shared by some enterprise users too – like Carey said in Wednesday’s Forbes article on Linux – “this is not a religion, I want the most value for the dollars I spend.”

Paper and Pen Meets Web Services

jcmaslan — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 08:27:00 GMT

Today a partner showed me a very cool device from Logitech based on Anoto technology. It seemed like a very promising way to bring paper and pen into the digital world – it’s like Tablet PC vector-based inking for paper forms.

Perhaps Anoto is hope for all those entrenched paper-based business processes that need an incremental transition to digital input methods. It’s yet another reason to build systems with a Service Oriented Architecture using Web Services –your clients span Web pages, Office docs, Tablet PCs, phones, paper forms … all sharing back-end services. A quick web search tonight revealed that Eric Rudder found Anoto interesting too.

Longhorn Business Value – Where’s the Killer App?

jcmaslan — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:14:00 GMT

Yesterday I read (and recommend): “IT Doesn’t Matter – Business Processes Do.“

It’s a good analysis of the controversial HBR article “IT Doesn’t Matter”, and also cites others like John Hagel’s “IT Does Matter”.

It was timely reading, since I was returning from a Platform Strategy Advisor Summit where we discussed ways to illustrate Longhorn’s business value. I started my presentation with a phrase Cliff Reeves (a co-worker) used to characterize our platform value: “driving the marginal costs of integration to zero.” For an hour, we went through industry concept demos and debated about the kind of materials that help customers identify and exploit opportunities.

From those discussions, two comments in particular captured the torque I feel in describing Longhorn’s business value:

“Where’s the killer app?” and
“Where’s the business value? These demos were just feature pitches showing benefits for specific industry players.”

My immediate reaction to #1 was “it isn't about a killer app; it’s about killer business processes improvements”, and to #2 was “you just saw $50 million savings in one process for one healthcare company, what do you mean ‘where’s the value!?’”

But the questions call attention to the gap between two extremes of business value descriptions. At one end, you have high-level talk of things like “Digital Customer Relationships” and “Value Chain Efficiencies”, and at the other end you have very scenario-specific case studies.

Where's the middle ground?

As developers planning with your business counterparts, what materials would help you most?

New Concept Video: Longhorn for Financial Services

jcmaslan — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 19:20:00 GMT

This Longhorn demo focuses on ways that Indigo and WinFS help you build collaborative applications that blend peer-to-peer workflow with back-end system integration.

It shows how deploying a simple client app can make a complex datacenter project easier. It used to be that every project that had to integrate lots of companies began with questions like: whose datacenter will host? which database will we use? how do we setup userids? how do we administer authentication? authorization? …

We picked Loan Syndication in Banking only because it’s easy to understand and is analogous to other Financial Services scenarios like New Equity Issuance, Bond Research, and Reinsurance. The demo depicts the kind of software I wrote about earlier.

On Being a "Longhorn Evangelist"

jcmaslan — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:29:00 GMT

I’m *still* amazed by the Internet.

You’d think that after having used it for 20 years, and having been at the center of the Internet boom at Inktomi, I’d lose just a little of my fascination. But once again, I feel like the guys from “Tin Men” who marvel at the fact that their everyday salad ingredients come out of the ground.

Why? Because I’ve gotten lots of email from around the world this week after posting 1 file on 1 site.

I sometimes forget the international scale of the Internet; I also forget how odd jargon like “Longhorn Evangelist” might sound. In fact, one email asked me what I meant when, at the end of the demo video, I said “I want you to be a Longhorn Evangelist.” Even in the USA, I get questions about the “Evangelism” title on my business card. It makes me wonder whether the term is just too overloaded with religious zealot connotations – especially in today’s climate – for use in a job description. So let me explain what I meant.

Longhorn Evangelism is all about helping developers see and exploit the opportunities for their business – to be excited about building on Longhorn’s new platform technologies. No one can be excited about something they don’t understand; so job #1 is to “grok” Longhorn. That means going deep on the technologies and re-emerging with a clear picture of the salient features of the platform. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a demo is worth a thousand pictures. A concise demo that cuts through the noise, showing Longhorn’s value in your specific application scenarios, does wonders. So far, I’ve simply described someone that’s good at evaluating and applying technology. The transition to “evangelist” comes when you see the opportunities with such enthusiasm that you can’t stop telling everyone you know about Longhorn J Have fun.

High Growth Again in Software?

jcmaslan — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 08:49:00 GMT

It’s nice to find sensible words of encouragement amidst the doom and gloom headlines in our industry. Check out The Chasm Group’s “Under the Buzz” section 3 starting half way down page 5: Does Software Have a Future as a High-Growth Business? You Bet it Does! Their description of “Emerging Enterprise Applications” is great context for the vertical industry Longhorn demos we’ve been developing with partners over the last six months.

Talk of “cross-functional process coordination across organizations” is a bit esoteric – you really need to go pretty deep into each industry’s value chain to see the specific examples of high-ROI enterprise software. Only over the past year have I started doing that for industries like Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Education, Telecommunications, Government, Music/Entertainment, etc. So far, the possibilities seem huge. The Commercial Real Estate demo (get WM9 BTW) is one example, but if you caught Jim Allchin's PDC keynote, you also saw a Merck clinical trial demo that illustrated only a fraction of the total addressable opportunity in that industry.

Platforms never do anything that programmers couldn't do themselves; but they can radically improve the economics of pursing opportunities that just weren't practical before. My work with partners continually renews my optimism about growth in software.