Archive for November, 2010
by Bill Ives
November 14, 2010 at 3:57 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
The Myths of Innovation, by Scott Berkun, was first published by O’Reilly in 2007. The recent 2010 version has four new chapters and revisions through out. I was pleased to receive a review copy recently. In this volume Scott Berkun takes a “careful look at the history of innovation to reveal powerful truths about how ideas become successful innovations — truths that people can apply to their challenges today.”
The book begins with the myth of epiphany and the perspective that ideas never stand alone. It has long been held that innovation is generally a collaborative experience and that has been my observation so I am already aligned with the premise of this first chapter. It is also the premise of crowd-sourcing. Scott notes that we often see ideas as existing independently from our selves and we have to find them. This concept is traced to the early Greeks but it does a disservice today where modern psychology sees a closer connection between the thinker and the thoughts and, at the same time, the strong impact of the social context on our thoughts.
The seemingly moment of eureka when the final piece of the puzzle falls into place does not do service to the long process of putting together the foundation for this final effort. Scott refers to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy on creativity. I have long respected his work and did a review of it in the early 80s. Mihaly studied the thoughts of highly creative people He wrote, as Scott quotes, “Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume… that some kind of information processing keeps going on when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep.” I find this to be so true and often will take a nap to get a breakthrough idea for a presentation or an article. The lesson is to work hard but take time for reflection. This works for group research as well. People are starting to get this. Even Agile development builds in reflection points.
This is just the starting point. Berkun explores other myths around innovation such as: the best ideas always win, good ideas are hard to find, and people love new ideas. Just ask Copernicus, Darwin, and many of the others who had breakthrough ideas about the last one.
There are four new chapters that address what you might do after coming with an innovative idea. They include how to move forward with an idea, how to pitch an idea and how to stay motivated. The book concludes with a useful annotated bibliography. There are a lot of examples throughout and in many ways it is a history book and I find this approach interesting. The author points out that most great innovators did not start out by reading a book on innovation. I think they would have liked this one.
by Joe McKendrick
November 8, 2010 at 6:15 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
MIT’s Andrew McAfee, one of the world’s leading advocates of Enterprise 2.0, says he has started to notice a “sea change” in enterprise and CIO thinking about the Enterprise 2.o constellation of capabilities.
Speaking to an assembly of “old-economy” CIOs — typically jaded and seasoned individuals who have seen technology fads come and go and come and go again — McAfee says they recognized that Enterprise 2.0 had much to offer their organizations. “I realized that a fundamental shift had taken place: these executives were no longer talking mainly about their concerns, hesitations, or reasons for caution around Enterprise 2.0,” he relates. “Instead, they were talking about their frustrations that their companies weren’t moving faster toward it. For the first time with a group of ‘old economy’ CIOs, I was preaching to the converted.”
I have been hearing similar messages from CIOs over the past year, and Enterprise 2.0 offers two types of advantages to their businesses. First, it offers a way for IT and business end-users to better collaborate on new technology initiatives. One of the greatest criticisms of IT departments over the past decade is their “disconnect” from IT. Think about the mega-millions spent on large ERP and CRM systems over the years, only to face end-user resistance. Practices such as “Agile development” are intended to get IT and end-users to work more in sync with one another; social media and Enterprise 2.0 transcend physical and geographic barriers (e.g., executives in EU; developers in India; sales offices in USA) to enable groups to come together in real time.
Second, Enterprise 2.0 offers a way to put power directly in the hands of end-users to create and manage their own applications and networks without the bureaucracy of IT to slow things down. IT still has an extremely important role to play — ensuring the security, availability and conformity to standards of Enterprise 2.0 environments. But end users shouldn’t burn daylight waiting for reports and interfaces from their IT departments.
by Bill Ives
November 8, 2010 at 3:53 am · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Advertising
The new book, Empowered, by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, provides a path for companies to response to the newly empowered customers who operate in the Web 2.0 world and to take advantage of the opportunities this transformation offers. The sub title is: “unleash your employees, energize your customers, and transform your business.” That is the proper sequence although your employees need to first listen to their customers as an initial step.
The book introduces the term HEROs or highly empowered, resourceful employees. It is divided into two main sections: a description of what HEROs do and how management and technology can work in concert to create a HERO powered business.
These empowered employees can provide innovation in both how customers are engaged and how increased engagement can occur within the enterprise. A great example of the latter occurs within Black and Decker. Instead of producing the usual dry, boredom through PowerPoint, sales training for the many products that Black & Decker offers, the head of sales training decided to empower the sales staff to create their own training. He gave many of them Flip cameras and some free video editing software, Windows Moviemaker.
Armed with these simple and inexpensive tools, the sales force started producing a stream of videos on the many Black and Decker products and the right way to position these products against the many competitors that Black and Decker faces. The sales training group serves as the central clearing house, does quality reviews, organizes, and provides the servers to host these videos. I have always found that the degree of relevance and engagement for both software and training is in direct proportion to the involvement of the audience. With the new tools, Black and Decker took it a step further and the audience responded.
The authors introduce the strategy of IDEA: “identify empowered customers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower them further with mobile information, and amplify their word of mouth.” The HEROs can support this process and examples are given.
They also take Gladwell’s Mavens and Connectors concept and apply these terms to the Web. Mavens are authorities and connectors are distributors of content. Sometimes the same person is both. There are a lot of interesting stats offered. Mavens account for 80% of posts on products and services. The most likely products to get online opinions are restaurants and books and the least likely are flowers and home décor. Mavens and Connectors tends to be a bit younger on the average the most Web users. But the most important concept is that with the rise of peer influence, customers matter even more after the sale.
Zappos shoes is a well known example. They do not spend money on advertising but instead invest the money in excellent customer service and then use the IDEA process noted earlier for viral marketing by their fans. Zappos has become a well-known twitter success story by following these principles.
A key part of the IDEA process is to increase a company’s mobile presence and gain more control by offering useful apps and information to customers. I think the same thing applies to employees. Twenty two percent of online users make use of mobile devices and this segment is growing rapidly. In some places it may exceed laptop Web use. Mobile devices and social software like Twitter lend themselves well to the quick responses and comments about products. A company needs to be part of this conversation whether it is between customers or between employees.
With any new powerful channel there are also risks and the authors spend a lot of time on this topics with suggestions for mitigation and policy concepts. This is a place where management and IT need to combine. The goal is not to stop social media but assess, and manage the related risks. The biggest risk may be to not use it, as others will. They suggest creating a cross-functional advisory council to set strategy.
There is much more and this is a comprehensive guide on how to survive and prosper in the new “markets as conversations.”
by Joe McKendrick
November 4, 2010 at 8:26 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0
The issue of employee comments made on social networking sites outside the workplace and work hours is uncharted legal territory, but will easily spill over into corporate interactions as well. Now, in one instance, a US government agency is stepping in and saying that employees have the right to freely comment on workplace issues over social networks. This is a case to watch.
The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency charged with handling workplace complaints in unionized settings, has just filed a complaint alleging that a company “illegally terminated an employee who posted negative remarks about her supervisor on her personal Facebook page.”
The complaint also alleges that the company “maintained and enforced an overly broad blogging and Internet posting policy.” Read the rest of this entry »
by Bill Ives
November 2, 2010 at 3:09 am · Filed under
Search, semantic web
I have been reading a very interesting report, Semantic Software Technologies: Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise by Lynda Moulton of the Gilbane group. This is a topic I am both curious about and, at times, find puzzling so I was eager to see what Lynda wrote as I have great respect for her work. I am not the only one as I often see conference sessions with such labels as “Is semantic technology real?”
Lynda wrote that she deliberately chose title of this study to refer to semantic software technologies not simply semantic search technologies. She added that the end point of any semantic software is to improve finding and interpreting content, a search activity. However, Lynda wanted to look at the total range of surrounding software tools and not simply search as narrowly defined.
The semantic tools surrounding search are often not familiar to IT and business managers so they are underutilized when opportunities for major enterprise semantic search improvements could be made. In her study, offerings that are complementary to search are examined and highlighted for their business benefits.
Lynda explained that the vision of semantic search is the availability of software algorithms that would improve retrieval for the average person by interpreting their native inquiry and returning semantically relevant results. This is as clear a definition as I have seen. In 2001 Tim Berners-Lee published an article in Scientific American proposing a semantic web evolving out of the expanding worldwide web and this concept has been seen as a holy grail for the Web ever since.
The concept has followed the trend of other tools of moving from the Web to the enterprise. However, Lynda notes that in the enterprise, expectations for relevant search results are much higher than on the internet, where much content is already optimized for e-commerce. Each business unit in an organization has its own specialized requirements for finding information that may be in many different formats and operating under different taxonomies or none at all.
This is where other types of semantic processing beyond search can give organizations a “competitive edge by getting workers to answers more quickly, with more conceptual relevance, and even with pinpoint accuracy. The idea is to get only the right information (only relevant) and all the right information (everything that is relevant).” Well stated.
Her study exposes the scope and depth of software technologies that comprise the semantic tool landscape to address these issues. Topics include: text mining and text analytics, concept and entity extraction, concept analysis, natural language processing, content data normalizing, sentiment analysis, and auto-categorization. Lynda notes that these categories of technologies are very interdependent and most semantic software application offerings use several of these tools.
This is a comprehensive work that runs over 80 pages. It covers an important area that is one of the next frontiers for enterprise IT. In some ways the semantic web has run parallel to Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. I have even heard it described as enterprise 3.0 or Web 3.0. This is ironic since it emerged beyond the 2.0s. However, it has taken longer to become concrete. This report helps with that effort. It is available for a free download at the Gilbane site.
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