Featured Software Articles

1. Striving For Enterprise Agility? How AI And Automation Can Help 11/20/2020

   Enterprise leaders know agility is important, but they don’t always know how to realize it. A report from PMI, for instance, found that 92% of C-level executives believe organizational agility is critical to business success, and 84% percent agree that organizational agility is necessary for success in digital transformation. However, just 27% consider their organizations to be highly agile.

2. Why Now Is Actually The Perfect Time To Give SaaS Users Ad Hoc Reporting 11/20/2020

   It might be time to consider how much stickiness and utility self-service (ad hoc) BI could bring to your SaaS product, especially if your company is being inundated with customer reporting requests.

3. Questions All Customer Success Professionals Should Be Prepared For 11/18/2020

   Growing up, we are taught about the importance of a first impression. You likely heard something along the lines of, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” This holds true in the software industry. Getting off on the right foot with a new customer is key to the long-term health of a relationship.

4. What to Expect At The First-Ever Virtual AWS re:Invent 11/16/2020

   It’s that time of year again. Where I live, the leaves are changing color, the temperature is diving, and turkeys are starting to fear for their lives. These signs all point to AWS re:Invent being right around the corner. This year, AWS re:Invent will kick off its 9th annual conference on November 30th, 2020 with a couple of major caveats. It will be three weeks long, 100% virtual, and free to all. This year will be a marathon, not a sprint, so make sure to pace yourself. As always, 2nd Watch is here to help prepare you with what we think you can expect this year, so let’s get to it!

5. Building Need Vs. Serving Need: A Pandemic Sales Story 11/9/2020

   Due to the pandemic, organizations have been slashing budgets and reprioritizing the focuses of their business and technology strategies. These drastic changes have directly impacted the channel, especially when it comes to sales strategies. Companies using even the most tried-and-true tactics are struggling to see results – but that may be the problem. The customers – and their needs – have evolved, and so must the vendors’ and channel partners’ approach to sales.

6. Please Stop Talking! Why Over-Communicating May Be Making Things Worse 11/6/2020

   Most organizations recognized the importance of communicating with employees and customers during those confusing, frightening early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. For some software companies, the underused employee communications muscle had atrophied, and executives were hearing from Forbes, HRD, and others that in times like these, overcommunication is what’s needed. But is it?

7. DevOps Is Dead: Customer-Centric Application Development Is Here 11/6/2020

   Corporations are at the end-of-life for current IT technology. Software can no longer scale – either to solve massive data problems or deliver agile apps written and deployed in days. Apps cannot be delivered in days if they are going to make available all the data a company has on that customer.

8. Gary Green: Leverage Cloud Marketplaces Without Killing Your Channel 11/2/2020

   The two hottest channels I hear discussed by XaaS vendors are MSPs and cloud marketplaces. If you haven’t already, now is the time to consider how hyper-scale cloud marketplaces from the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Google can fit in your channel strategy.

9. Value Stream Archaeology: Excavating Your Project Organization For Flow 10/21/2020

   Enterprises have embraced many different approaches to master software at scale. Yet no matter what methodology trends and transformations we have utilized in our respective organizations over the years, our value streams, like ancient trade routes, have persisted. It is within these value streams—the sequence of activities an organization undertakes to respond to a customer need that results in the delivery of value to the customer—that we can unearth the secrets into what impedes the flow of value. The emergence of data-driven value stream management (VSM) enables us to excavate our project organization to chart out the best routes for our products to meet market needs faster.

10. Accessibility And Feature Flags 10/21/2020

    Being able-bodied is a temporary condition. Some of us are born with disabilities, and some of us develop them. At some point in your life, you will get old enough to need reading glasses, or you will break your arm, or you will develop hearing problems. Are you reading this page through glasses? Are you using a wrist brace or ergonomic mouse? Is your operating system set to dark mode? Those are all accessibility modifications.