BizTechTalk

Open vs. Control - Opposites? Freaks? Geeks? Managers?

My colleague John Mancini has re-awakened my awareness/interest in SlideShare among other, well, slide-sharing services... and somehow in my Enterprise 2.0 research today, I ran across the following presentation by Stephen Collins, called "Liberate Your Control Freaks - driving social computing adoption in business." Embedded below, but should your RSS reader or e-mail mechanics not like the embedded presentation, it is also linked via the title above.

Tricky business to create presentations that still make sense when not delivered at all by a speaker - and this does a nice job, as do the recent ECM Guru presentations (one, two, three - as of this writing) that John Mancini has done.

As for the content - love the title, and clearly it's meant to grab your attention. As a Seth Godin fan, and ex-songwriter, I must say I approve!

However, Social computing, collaboration, collective intelligence, knowledge management, etc. - none of this is new folks, and this "culture of participation" idea that is getting so much attention in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 world isn't new either - it's how humans are wired! To interact, collaborate, *and* also function independently (I hope - but then again, I put much stock in personal responsibility - I fear I'm in the minority there).

I'm not saying I disagree with the basic premise (I actually greatly agree with The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Wisdom of Crowds, and similar books/rants), but personally, I think the message in this presentation is just a little too much of "drinking the Enterprise 2.0 Kool-Aid" - because providing the tools to interact is a separate beast from actually getting people TO interact. It's Knowledge Management all over again - same with Enterprise Portals, Instant Messaging, etc..

Enabling participation is one thing, participating is another - and understanding and leveraging the many levels of participation (completely passive reading, ranking/rating, commenting, trackback-ing [makes for an awkward verb, eh?], discussing, etc..) - and while none of this is new, the level and scale at which the technology underneath this can be rolled out, is in a different game now. Throwing technology has never been the answer, and even if these solutions are "free" (i.e. open source), change doesn't just happen all by itself, it's a slog, and needs significant hand-holding.

More on this as the days and months roll by - but I have to say (again) that the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference here in Boston felt a lot more real/substantive than the last four or so years in actually putting the "enterprise" angle back into the light-weight, low-cost, more-inclusive, models of the solutions coming from a blogging or wiki-oriented approach. It's rapidly becoming a much more interesting discussion on many levels.

Yee haa! Join the discussion - it's about to become a lot more interesting folks!

Innovate? Prepare to be Fired, Maverick!

You may have seen Robert Tucker, President of The Innovation Resource (http://www.innovationresource.com), on the Spring 2007 five episode series on CNBC entitled "The Business of Innovation" (fantastic series, BTW which you can watch at http://innovation.cnbc.com/), or through the four books that he's written, such "Winning the Innovation Game" (http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Innov-Game-Denis-Waitley/dp/0425115313) published in 1986 (and still VERY on key for modern innovation insight), or his most recent, "Driving Growth Through Innovation," (http://www.amazon.com/Driving-Growth-Through-Innovation-Robert/dp/1576751872/) published in 2003 and being revised this year to keep pace with the rapid growth in the "innovation movement."

I was lucky enough to "virtually corner" Robert, freshly back from consulting engagements in Russia and Europe and hot on the heels of the CNBC program, and the end result is a great 26 minute interview, where we discuss many topics, including the need to hunt down mavericks and misfits *as well as* those highly trained execution and operations-oriented business people, that business schools and MBA programs so frequently train.

How can you find "innovators" or "problem solvers?" Can you foster an environment that enables them to emerge from the shadows? Who "owns" innovation in organizations? Is upper management an enabler or a killer for innovation? Are you and your fellow employees ready to come in to work, fired up to make a difference, or get fired in the process?

Change doesn't just happen - it needs to be MADE to happen, and that does not occur accidentally these days!

Lots of ground covered here, and for my part at least, a great conversation with Robert that certainly helped me to further solidify my thinking on this topic, and of course raise new questions, which I'll continue to hunt down.

Listen in, and we would love to hear your comments. If you would prefer to call in comments, please dial 781-268-0716 and leave me up to a 2 minute message regarding this post. Enjoy!

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Web 2.0 Meets ECM

An interview by your host, Dan Keldsen, with Santi Pierini of Day Software (www.day.com), who is their Senior Vice President of Global Marketing.

Day Software was founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1993, and is no stranger to the needs of high-traffic, scalable, and cutting edge technology loving clients, with global clients such as McDonald's, DaimlerChrysler, 3M, and more.

In this session we discuss the buzz around * 2.0 terminology, whether people understand what any of that means, how stability in a Content Management system can help companies to survive swapping portals and other infrastructure, that the web as a platform can be a serious reality for enterprises (it's only taken 10-15 years!), and that user experience really does matter, and if done well, has great benefits across the board.

Listen in, and we would love to hear your comments. If you would prefer to call in comments, please dial 781-268-0716 and leave me a 2 minute maximum message regarding this post.

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Idea Competitions - Inside or Outside

Interview of Dr. Frank Piller (a chair professor of management at the Technology & Innovation Management Group of RWTH Aachen University, Germany,  one of Europe’s leading institutes of technology, and also a founding faculty  member of the MIT Smart Customization Group at the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, USA.) by your host, Dan Keldsen of BizTechTalk.com on the topic of Idea Competitions. You may have heard of this topic in the innovation realm, under such names as Crowdsourcing, Crowdcasting, Idea Challenges, Open Innovation, Prediction Markets, and the like - but what is it?

Threadless, Adidas, Converse, Toyota, how are companies tapping both their customers and employees as engines of innovation for everything from naming new products, suggesting tweaks to existing products, or in building entirely new products, resulting in multi-million dollar revenue streams? Find out more in this 18 minutes interview, and join the conversation! Are you using such techniques and systems? Think it's bunk? Worried about crowds of idiots? Let us know!

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Welcome our new nomadic computing overlords

Reminder: The web isn't *everything*...

More specifically, being online (all the time), isn't everything...

If you've been online and particularly in a business setting for the last 7-8 years, you may remember during the early days of SaaS, on-demand, ASP, BSP (e.g. salesforce.com as the poster child, more directly in my normal crosshairs, SpringCM, Baynote, and more), there was this thinking that the Internet/Web would be our saviour and all "fat clients" would go the way of the dinosaur (other debates on the dinosaur and ark front happening right now - but that's a separate conversation).

What most people didn't realize then (and perhaps now), is that even as broadband adoption has risen, speeds have increased, web interfaces have gotten to be much more intuitive and interactive (Web 2.0 style nowadays), people are addicted to their BlackBerries, Treos, etc.., that well, there are times when you just aren't going to be connected to a live service. (think Planes, trains, automobiles, the MidWest, some skyscrapers in Boston, etc..)

Egad! How to survive! Will we have to speak with people in person rather than electronically? Write on paper rather than tap a graphite stylus? (separate conversation as well)

So, once you get over the hump in realizing that there are TONS of benefits (and acknowledging what you give up in the meantime) to have your infrastructure and applications on-demand (whatever phrase you want to use - SaaS is coming back with a vengeance lately), you begin to realize once again that, if you've gone completely into "the cloud" (the services/on-demand cloud), that you may have chopped out your own legs from under you. Whoops!

In the "real world" you need a bridging capability, to go from completely connected, partially connected, and fully connected - and across different form factors. Not everyone has a laptop or BlackBerry-style device, so they may need access from desktops at home and work, as well as at kiosks (security paranoia shudder!). For those that do have PDAs, still need a way to sync across, or deal with not having access to the apps you would have at your "desktop." And even if you do have a laptop, BlackBerry, and cybernetic implant, well, you still won't always have a live connection - and so need to be able to go offline yet still carry your work (or play) with you.

Google has been doing much experimentation in providing on-demand infrastructure, with services on the consumer and business side, but until last week was not addressing the offline or disconnected experience. With the announcement of "Google Gears" (a set of tools to run web-based apps offline, including relational database, caching server, and asynchronous agents to improve performance) and this week with the announcement of "Google Reader" (their web-based RSS/feed reader) in a newer (and even more beta?) release featuring an ability to download feeds and go offline, although still within a browser-based experience, that's beginning to change.

Very early days on this front - but just as Web 2.0 has been teaching people the power of slick Javascript, manipulating the DOM in browsers, and making the web experience a lot more fun and interactive than "the good ol' days" - this is another step in the right direction to meld the best of on-demand with the best of fat/static clients together, to truly make a seamless experience for users.

Now of course, lest it sound like I'm go go for Google (definitely not on the enterprise search front) it's not as though they invented the notion or capability of online/offline/synchronization - and in many ways, where Ray Ozzie and the Lotus Notes crew were 100 years ago (in Internet years), we haven't collectively gotten much farther than, but then again, not every "innovation" is the shiny, brand new spontaneous combustion we'd like to believe it is.

PS - back when these conversations first came up, there was a push to talk about this continuum between online and offline as "nomadic computing" - I loved that term. Anyone else? I for one, welcome our new nomadic computing overlords.

Reinvention Prevention

An interview by Dan Keldsen at BizTechTalk.com, with Stan Garfield, who leads the Worldwide Knowledge Management program in HP's Services arm.

HP's tagline is "invent" - but in the quest to invent, are cycles, resources, time, and money being wasted reinventing existing solutions?

Stan's longtime drive is to ensure that information becomes knowledge, and that knowledge is shared, to explicitly enable application of existing inventions, and as needed, new inventions, in the services/consulting work that he and his global team are involved in.

This conversation came about as a result of a recommendation that I speak with Stan after I'd posted a question on LinkedIn Answers wondering whether Innovation Management and Knowledge Management were the same, a subset, or superset of each other. Great material here - listen in, and join the conversation at www.BizTechTalk.com!

Reinvention Prevention

Get Smart with E-mail Classification!

A conversation with Robert Pease, VP of Marketing for MessageGate (www.messagegate.com).

Now, e-mail classification is not quite up there on the sex appeal meter as say Web 2.0, YouTube, or other aspects of daily tech life, but with the recent changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in December of 2006, US-based companies have a much keener eye to the problems that are lurking in their e-mail archives.

Unless you are a very small organization, or are not using e-mail (and please let me know if you've found a way to sidestep e-mail, I'd love to hear your secret!), it is extremely unlikely that you can scale e-mail classification by relying on individual users or even a SWAT team of technical or legal personnel to do upfront, manual classification of e-mail into your archiving system.

The good news though, is that by running through scenarios up front, you can lop off anywhere between 60-80% of the e-discovery pain you're likely to incur through "traditional" discovery firedrills, which are not only painful due to the number of systems and queries that have to be pieced together for an "ad hoc" solution, but may simply take too long for you to adequately comply with the FRCP rules, and thus force you to settle out of court or incur fines or other penalties.

Less is more, as you'll hear in this interview, and if you've been overwhelmed by the issues of mass quantities of e-mail in your organization, listen up, and perhaps a few rays of light can pierce your cloudy discovery nightmares, and *also* set you up to build a stable information architecture that can be used for more enlightened and revenue driving business issues in your organization.

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Sowing the Seeds (of Innovation)

Dan Keldsen interviewing Dr. Alex Pattakos and Elaine Dundon, of The Innovation Group based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico (www.SeedsOfInnovation.com and www.SeedsOfMeaning.com).

Does your organization, or for that matter, you, have fertile ground to plant the seeds of Innovation? Is it possible to innovate in the public sector? (hint, yes!) How does the drive to meet quarterly numbers drive out, or possibly, foster, innovation in a publicly held company? What is the process or processes that support sustainable innovation, and how can you find the beginning thread within your organization to fully embed innovation in yourself and your organization?

The organizational development, marketing, business and psychiatric backgrounds that Alex and Elaine bring to this discussion are well worth your time.

As comes up in nearly every conversation, every blog entry, or any other output you may see or hear from me, there is *absolutely* more to innovation than simply slapping a label on a product or company and stating a claim to innovation. Learn how to begin - the conversation starts now!

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Enterprise Search Grows Up

Search has been around for a long time (particularly text-based search, which is NOT the only search game in town folks!), and while much of the buzz these days is about tags, folksonomies, and Invisible Crowds (see prior podcast with Jack Jia), search technology in and of itself is experiencing a revolution!

The revolution brings usability across the board, to users, to administrators, and to content managers looking to get the most bang out of the content as they can. In this interview with Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and Co-founder (http://searchdoneright.com/author/valdes) of Vivisimo (http://www.vivisimo.com/), we discuss what Vivisimo has been targeting to push Enterprise Search through it's next growth spurt.

We hit a number of topics that are my hot button topics - as a former hands-on IT guy, while I was happy to have usability figure heavily for end-users, inevitably any user interface for the administrators and implementors were the worst interfaces you've ever laid eyes on. Just because someone in IT is comfortable typing commands into a terminal, that doesn't mean that's their PREFERRED way of working. Anything that software companies can do to speed up time to deploy, time to maintain, and time to extend integration (think federated search - which we discuss here), and FINALLY Enterprise Search Grows Up!

I would love to hear your feedback on using Enterprise Search tools, from either the user or administrator point of view, and whether you are getting the flexibility you would like out of your search solution. Comment on the blog (www.BizTechTalk.com), or call in to my caller hotline at 781-268-0716 and leave a message for me!

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Chowda Chat - Catch my interview on Chowda Chat at beantownweb

As anyone who has followed my blog and listened to the podcasts I've done, I quite firmly believe in LinkedIn and other networking sites as to way to find interesting people, as well as to be found.

In the early weeks of LinkedIn rolling out their "Answers" functionality (ask a question of your network or the network at large and get an answer back), I was aiming to ask intriguing questions roughly every week, to test the functionality, as well as to see whether it drove interest in my blog, or in increasing connections within LinkedIn. It worked on both counts incidentally, and I'd recommend that as a way to increase your exposure for nothing more than the cost of your time in asking or answering questions on LinkeIn.

In one of those questions, I asked "Who should I interview next on the topic innovation?" and interestingly, a local Bostonian (Gene Babon) saw the question and flipped it around on me - asking if I'd like to be the interviewee instead. Well, how can I say no to a local networker and content creator?

Gene uses an e-mail interview format rather than audio, and so the responses can be found at his site, beantownweb. Great questions, and I sincerely hope, useful answers.

Go forth and read the interview! Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc. either on Gene's blog, or back here at BizTechTalk.com.

Thanks Gene for getting in touch, and turning the tables. A pleasure to participate!

Another tip for anyone networking, don't be afraid to reach out to people who are doing or have done work that really intrigues you. Make sure the pitch you make to connect identifies a real connecting point (not just "I want to expand my network"), and you should have a very high success rate. I certainly have, and have had some fantastic conversations as a result. Make it a connection for a reason, and you are likely to break through the noise.