Archive for March, 2011
by Bill Ives
March 31, 2011 at 3:55 am · Filed under
CIO, Cloud Computing
Here is an interesting study by IDG that found that cloud computing is enabling a more central role for IT in shaping business strategy and driving innovation. The research polled 200 IT managers in the U.S. and Europe. The vast majority (96 percent) believes that the primary role of IT has changed over the past five years, and 71 percent feel the trend to continue over the next two years. While 54 percent of the survey participants acknowledge the current value of IT is largely defined by its role as owner and operator of IT infrastructure, they believe within two years, the primary value of IT will become managing the IT supply chain. Half feel that the cloud is contributing to this change.
Looking further into the results, IT professionals believe cloud computing can accelerate agility (63 percent), innovation (58 percent) and collaboration with the enterprise (57 percent). Respondents also anticipate cloud computing will boost IT productivity (55 percent) and decrease the resources dedicated to IT support (40 percent). These changes will likely trigger a demand for more business and management experience in senior IT professionals. Nearly 70 percent of respondents feel an increasing number of CIOs and senior IT staff will have a business (as opposed to a technology) background in the future.
The nimble nature of cloud based IT coupled with the reduction in maintenance needs, should allow CIOs to focus more on business issues. However this transition will set up challenges. At last years, MIT CIO Symposium, panelists talked about the CIO Paradox. They have to drive innovation, manage risk, and control costs and these goals can be at cross purposes. They often inherit costly legacy systems and then are told to go forth and innovate. I wonder what the talk will be at the 2011 session. I am planning to attend and will be reporting on it here.
by Bill Ives
March 28, 2011 at 3:50 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
AIIM has provided a useful service with their Social Business Roadmap. As their site states the roadmap is, “a tool to help organizations effectively develop social business processes and to help identify and address potential issues before they become real problems. The roadmap is designed as a framework – that is, it addresses a wide variety of issues and challenges, not all of which will be applicable to every organization. Organizations are encouraged to use this roadmap as a starting point, but to customize it to their particular circumstances including their regulatory environment, organizational culture, level of familiarity with different tools, and of course their overall strategic goals and objectives.”
They have set up a wiki partitioned along the eight steps they suggest: Emergence, Strategy, Development, Monitoring, Participation, Engagement, Governance, and Optimization. While you could argue that these steps follow many situations, it remains useful for them to serve as an organizing framework for the collection of useful content related to social business implementations. The wiki is organized around discussions of the “what’s next”, case studies, and the ability for you to add additional thoughts and feedback. This should be a useful resources if they are able to get contributions for a variety of organizations.
Here is a link to a detailed paper on the topic and to an infograph that they stated we are free to share.
by Joe McKendrick
March 25, 2011 at 10:40 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0
In a previous post, we pondered the lack of social CRM in evidence, asking whether all CRM should be social anyway. In a new post, Umberto Milletti talks about the issues getting in the way of social CRM.
Milletti says marketing and customer service have actually been effectively engaging in social media, but sales has been missing the boat. Kind of ironic, since sales is the most social activity there is in the business.
- Salespeople are not techno-geeks: They see technology as a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
- Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them: They know time is money, and don’t want to invest valuable time to learn technologies they don’t fully see a return on.
- Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow.
- Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them.
by Rob Paterson
March 25, 2011 at 8:23 am · Filed under
Adoption, FASTforward'09, Intelligence Services, NPR, Social Media
It appeared that the White House was blindsided by events in Egypt at first. The traditional intel sources failed to spot the undercurrents that suggested a revolt. NPR report today that this oversight is being corected – the Intellignce Community is going to learn how to scan the web for “smoke”.
Traditionally, intelligence agencies have relied on top-secret information to track changes in other countries. But wiretaps and secret intercepts didn’t help U.S. officials predict the Arab Spring that has brought revolution across the Middle East and North Africa.
In hindsight, officials say there could have found some clues about what was about to happen if they had read open sources more closely. Now they are searching for systematic ways to do that.
The uprisings in the region have shown intelligence officials that they need new ways to understand what motivates people around the world. While traditional intelligence tools can help, they are limited in their ability to put their fingers on the pulse of society or anticipate fickle human behavior.
“The traditional intelligence community is absolutely biased toward classified information,” said Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, an Army intelligence officer and head of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “I think that open source provides a critical lens into understanding the world around us in a much more dynamic way than traditional intelligence sources can provide.”
Isn’t this how all “intelligence” will work now?
In the past we have asked questions? Used artificial groups like focus groups. Our choices have influenced what we heard back. But now, we can listen and see patterns emerge. This is how we will also present the data – not in a linear report but as a pattern. Too weird an idea? Check this brilliant example of patterning and the Middle East designed by the Guardian. Here by taking a pattern perspective, we can see how momentum builds and broadens. We can see the dynamics!
We can all do this for any issue that we care about.
by Bill Ives
March 24, 2011 at 3:19 am · Filed under
Social Media, journalism
The Neiman Journalism Lab had an interesting story by Tim Carmody recently on “Journalists have lost control of the story”: Twitter, tech bubbles, and the nostalgia of the technology press. It discussed how the “accelerated news cycle of blogs, Twitter, and other digital media forces the technology press to work at the same speed as the investors they cover.”
They quoted Thomson Reuters’ Connie Loizos who said. “Thanks to Twitter and, to a lesser extent, other social media like Quora, information about startups and financings has become much more porous,” spreading good and bad information equally quickly, and in volume. “The first story out wins.” Reporters are not only competing against each other for scoops but also saavy investors and others who want to game the system in both legit and bad ways.
The article uses the term Churnalism, to refer to this situation and state that it is a much bigger problem than just press releases and wire stories. It is now everywhere and creating an echo chamber unprecedented in its size and reach. This echo chamber can crowd out more thoughtful analysis.
Picking up on this theme there was an interesting tweet that could a lot of play at SXSW
@robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not “here’s what happened.” It’s “here’s how to follow the story” http://t.co/sMqGOuh
It was reported and commented in Economist article, Meet the Curators. The article notes that that “aggregation” or “curation” of other people’s coverage is becoming recognized more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism. They add that, “Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.”
It goes on to state that Richard Sambrook, a former senior editor at the BBC says that news organizations now face three main roles: coverage of breaking news and live events, deep specialist niche content with analysis and expertise, the aggregation and verification of other sources of information. The article close by stating that social media is “likely to become as much part of the journalist’s toolkit in the 21st century as the dog-eared address book was in the 20th.”
Looking further at curation from a user’s perspective, Aaron Kahlow writes about the information curation potential of social media in his post, 2010: Social Media Removes the Dam of Gutenberg-Google. Aaron comments that social media can help break this new dam. Now we can “get good information through tweets of those we follow, Facebook Sharing, and from others within our networks who are usually connected online. We have a new discovery outlet and a new way to find stories, whether mainstream or from an unknown blogger. We find things based on recommendations of trusted colleagues, friends, etc.” This is how I found Aaron’s post.
Peter Cashmore raises a similar point in his predictions for 2010 than I commented on earlier (see Reflecting on Peter Cashmore’s Web Trends to Watch in 2010). Peter wrote that, “The Web’s biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: “Information overload” has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.” I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me. Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions, as well as the Neiman and Economist articles that were part of this discussion.
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