The other day I was thinking back to a Computer Science exam I sat in the first year of my undergraduate degree.  One of the questions required us to follow some instructions in a graphics language (postscript - which incidentally I was just reading a case on for our session at Stirling in a few weeks!) and draw out the result on some graph paper.  The result was the Sun logo.  I was surrounded by Sun equipment at the University for the four years of my undergraduate course, and in my first job in a semiconductor design company, so even before doing my externship here I felt a certain affinity for the company.

Today however, Sun desn't sell enough.  That's no secret, it's all right there for everyone to see in the financial statements and reports the company issues.  The question for all concerned here is "why?".  The company has a great brand.  Their products are well respected and widely used, and in many areas they are industry leaders.  Java is at the foundation of the web and many mobile device platforms, and MySQL is a key technology for web 2.0.  So why don't sales at Sun meet the potential that the organisation appears to have?

In computing, when some software isn't working, we hook up a software took called a "debugger" that lets us peer inside the process and see what is going on, hopefully in enough detail to find and fix the problem.  To be successful in debugging the real trick lies in breaking the problem down into smaller pieces, otherwise it is easy to be overwhelmed by the vast quanitty of information available.

With the help of what I learned at Babson and the expertise of the team here at Sun I am currently working on a very similar process - I am developing reports that delve into the marketing management system and pull out information to help people within the organisation see where the bottlenecks are, and identify what campaigns work well and which have room for improvement. Just as with debugging software, it is about ensuring the reports deliver "actionable" information without overwhelming people.

My time at Sun is really helping me to understand the operational side of Sales and Marketing, and how you can dig into it to measure performance and drive improvement.  I think many of the lessons I am learning are also applicable in other fields of operations, and frequently it comes back to extracting relevant information to make sense of complexity.  Operations is probably one of the areas where I have least experience - so the value I am getting from my time here is immense.