Measuring: You really do get what you measure

Mar 17, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the last in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last few articles in this series have covered metrics that I believe are important in running a business but, of course, in order to analyze...

Solvers and sunscreen

Mar 2, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the third in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. The last post discussed the fact that the cost for keeping a specific customer may be higher than expected and may even exceed the revenue...

Measuring: How much is that customer costing you?

Feb 12, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the second in a series of articles exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. In the last post, we covered using overall market data to measure success. This post discusses the cost of acquiring and keeping customers....

Measuring: Are you #1 or #2?

Feb 3, 2010 | Hot Topics

This is the second in a series of posts exploring business metrics and their usefulness in the engineering software space. This article focuses on two types of external metrics companies can use to measure their market success: market share and category penetration....

You get what you measure

Feb 2, 2010 | Hot Topics

An interesting tweet came across the Twitter timeline today: “Most important reason to measure – to know what’s working and what’s not“ from @abelniak retweeting @amyblack and it got me thinking. Knowing what’s working and what isn’t is probably the...

Social media changes some of the rules

Jan 29, 2010 | Hot Topics

In business school we were taught that businesses should engage with prospects in a systematic, organized way, moving them through a standard set of steps to purchase:awareness –> consideration –> preference –> trial –> purchase.The Internet...

Are you social?

Jan 14, 2010 | Hot Topics

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about PLM’s efforts to engage in social media, so it’s time for an update. On a somewhat depressing note, not that much has changed. Yet. And that’s the good news: a number of PLM companies are still in the watching phase, trying...

5 billion tweets — and counting

Oct 20, 2009 | Hot Topics

According to Gigatweet, the 5 billionth tweet was delivered sometime today (maybe yesterday – we’re at 5,005,611,937 as I type). That’s a lot of people saying a lot of things, 140 characters at a time.To put this in context, the one billionth tweet was delivered...

How often is too often?

Sep 21, 2008 | Hot Topics

The length of release cycles continues to be a point of contention between developers and users of engineering technology. On the one hand, developers want to get new releases out there to bring in revenue, deal with competitive issues and fix customer bugs. But users...