Jama Software Unplugged

Happy New Year! Welcome back to work. By now, the presents are all unwrapped, the tree is on the curb to be recycled, the holiday cookies have all been eaten, and your wrists are sore from playing Guitar Hero III on your nephew’s new Wii for 2 straight days over the holiday break. You’re back now at your office sharing stories of epic skiing and bowl game highlights with your colleagues at the water cooler. It’s that time to set a few new year’s resolutions (half of which you’ll break by end of the week). And, it’s time to look ahead to what’s in store for 2008.

From from our collective conversations with customers, partners and peers (and, of course our own perspectives), we see 2 trends this year worth highlighting here. Yes, we’ll focus on just 2, not everything requires a top 10 list. We like to keep things simple. So, here we go:

1. From buzzwords to reality - the emergence of innovation management.

If 2007 was anything it was the year of buzzwords. And, the kingpin of them - Web 2.0 - spawned many offspring last year. It seemed everything was 2.0-ified: ALM 2.0, PLM 2.0, Project Management 2.0, Innovation 2.0 and on and on and on. Where 2007 was the year of the next big thing, we believe 2008 will be the year of action. The mantra being, Enough talk, let’s get things done.

Specifically, we see 2008 being the year that 3 highly talked about strategic initiatives will converge and materialize into real value for many companies. The big 3 being: Innovation, Collaboration and Community. When integrated, they shape the emerging category of Innovation Management. So what’s new here?

Innovation is a major strategic initiative for over 70% of enterprise organizations and has been a leading cover story over the last few years, BUT success rates are still low for the majority of efforts. Data shows that spending more in R&D isn’t a silver bullet. So, what is? Is it process? Is it people? Is it technology? That’s where collaboration and community come in. These concepts aren’t new either, but where things have recently changed and continue to move is the scale at which collaboration and community are being leveraged within the innovation process to increase success and get closer to what customers really want. The community, or simply put the group of people influencing innovation decisions, is growing to include not only your talented employees and business partners, but now also customers, potential customers, industry influencer’s and many other external audiences with ideas, voices and blogs. And, as you embrace greater collaboration with your ever-growing community, the front-end of the innovation funnel explodes open, and with that, a new challenge emerges: How do you manage all of these ideas? How do you capitalize on them within your product planning and development efforts in an automated way? And very tangibly in era of simply getting things done and done successfully, how do you translate them to specific requirements that will satisfy customer needs and make up the next generation of your products or services? The simplest way to summarize it is - if innovation is the primary goal or what, then collaboration is the how and community is the “who”. And, they work hand-in-hand together to raise success rates. That’s innovation management.

2. Bigger isn’t better - the explosive growth of light-weight, Web-based apps to manage core business processes.

This trend has been underway for a few years, and we see it only accelerating in 2008. It’s a trend sweeping across many technology categories that fuel core business processes, such as ERP, CRM, ALM, PLM and the things close to home for Jama like innovation and requirements management.

OUT are big, bulky, expensive, proprietary suites of applications to manage core business processes.

IN are light-weight, open, flexible, Web-based applications that bring people together, eliminate overhead, integrate well with other tools and make it easier to get things done.

Granted, we’re biased here because this is how we build our tools, such as Contour, but there’s a reason for that. We want to get things done right and help our customers do the same.

Welcome to 2008. Have a great year.