correlate Rotating Header Image

technology

Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture

May 9th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
No comments yet

Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDNet posted a very compelling read called Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst. It touches on all of the emerging technologies that are being adopted (to the chagrin or championing of CIOs) and also provided a great image visualizing all of the social elements of the Enterprise 2.0 movement. (See below)

Benefit of Enterprise 2.0

A key point in Dion’s post is that these enterprise 2.0 tools are currently being set-up and utilized whether organizations want them to or not. Often, they are being endorsed by innovative leaders in the largest of organizations. In other cases, they are taking place via grassroots movements (aka corporate renegades with corporate credit cards).

It does really shed light on a couple of key concepts. First, the centralized roll-out of tools and technology isn’t the only way people get tools that help them get their jobs done. Organizations are going to have to decide what their strategies will be to deal with this, enable 2.0 capabilities by providing them to the workforce or try to stop them. I’m not sure the latter is possible. Second, users will use the tools that are the easiest to use and assist them the most with their individual and collective productivity. And ultimately, that should be what organizations find important because that is where the corporate ROI will be.

Reverse mentoring is truly upon us…

Still a major pain point…Knowledge Management

May 8th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
4 comments

Quite often we discuss the technology solutions that surround us: entity extraction, text mining, discovery, etc. However, in the midst of all the technology speak, it is easy to lose sight of user and customer problems. What are people trying to solve? What is their pain point? That is what is important, not the technology. The technology is a means to an end. (Disclaimer: I love technology, I simply believe that it should be used to solve a problem, not for its own individual sake.)

There are lots of write-ups about knowledge management being dead. I won’t link to them all, simply do a Google search on “knowledge management dead” if you wish to read articles discussing the topic like, “Knowledge Management In Its Model T Era“. Much of the KM is defunct hype in fact gets fueled by Google being so good at assisting the average user it getting to information quickly. But in the enterprise business environment, managing knowledge and information is a very real problem.

Take a look at the survey results from the April 2007 edition of Scientific Computing:

Biggest Frustration in Searching

Knowledge management (KM) is certainly evolving from its initial definition where a person’s sole responsibility was to research on behalf of others (even though that is still a very important need for organizations when searching complex topics and looking for answers to complex questions). The role of KM is to overcome the exact issues found in the survey. Rich Hoeg, a manager of Information Services at Honeywell, writes quite often on best KM practices at his blog, eContent.

KM solutions must help people find relevant information, help people find where to look, help people find respective experts in the organization, help people discover relevant information that they wouldn’t know to look for and help people so they spend their time doing their jobs, not searching.

SIDE NOTE: Here is a great link to a page with knowledge jargon and knowledge management terminology.

Cisco CEO, Chambers, is apparently an Enterprise 2.0 Advocate…

May 7th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
No comments yet

Had an interesting article entitled “Why we mustn’t miss Web 2.0″ from The Australian come through my Factiva alert covering “Enterprise 2.0″. The term “enterprise 2.0″ is never used but the meaning is embedded throughout.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, is quoted as saying, “It’s about the power of the human network. People working closer together. It will change everything in business, from your innovation models and your supply chain to your bottom line.”

The article discusses at length the school environment and how that too will be positively impacted by the Web 2.0 technologies the are just now starting to power the enterprise revolution. We should consider educational institutions enterprises as well, their output being human capital rather shareholder return. In this context, Chambers states “Future learning will be more collaborative. You learn together in a group, which has a much more lasting impact.” The same is true for the corporation.

The final point of the article discusses how leadership will have to change as well. That the days of decisions going up to the CEO and back to the employee base is going to be dramatically different due to the existence of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities “because everyone can talk to each other” in the new paradigm.

This is just more evidence that Cisco plans on being at the forefront of the Enterprise 2.0 frontier, not that they’ve made any secret about it with their public statements and recent acquisition spree.

Split-Screen Computer Use?

May 6th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
4 comments

This brings up a whole new definition to term “collaboration”. Techmeme today has a post from the Discovery Channel that Split-Screen Tech Doubles Computer Use. Some others that picked up the story are Engaget, Slashdot and The Raw Feed.

Split-screen computer

I can see this being quite useful for one person’s use. VirtueDesktops on OS X is a productivity tool for me when I’m managing a lot of open windows and apps all at the same time. I can see a similar use here. However, the biggest pitch for this is for office environments where there aren’t enough computers for workers. When there isn’t a better alternative, of course, this is a definite upgrade from no computer at all. It is unclear to me how any two individuals can be productive sharing a monitor; how does one person not get distracted as to what the other person is doing? I just hope that because of this the minimum browser standard for web sites doesn’t shift to 400×300 or 512×384!

Web Services for Everyone Will Prove Challenging

May 2nd, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
8 comments

I remember when I first saw a post from Jeff Nolan about his joining Teqlo as CEO after his time at SAP Ventures. The concept of Teqlo I found very intriguing at the time: mash-ups and web services for everyone, the commoner…no development experience or understanding necessary.

The promise of being able to develop applications by leveraging web services without having to code was something I would find personally useful and on first blush, thought could be a category killer. At the same time, I had my share of skepticism about the plausibility of achieving such an objective. To clarify: I’m not saying it isn’t doable, everything is doable. But we are so early into the mash-up world, being able to provide ALL users a layman’s environment to develop applications using web services without technical knowledge seemed a bit far-fetched.

My initial skepticism was confirmed with my experience with the Teqlo alpha. There were still too many variables and panels that you had to deep dive to understand what they did, even simple attributes such as panel width/height. My experience caused by to really focus off of the “coolness” of their promise and think more about the user value. And it brings up an interesting question:

What is the value proposition of providing web services to the average individual so that they can build personal applications?

It sounds inviting. Build an app that pings the airline for flight status, brings directions to the airport right to your desktop and perhaps hits some APIs to get the traffic reports for that route. The question is what is the demand for this? How many people really have the need to do things like this? And does that number justify the investment to develop a platform that will gets wide enough adoption to have positive ROI?

Today, the circle completes with Jeff Nolan’s announcement that he is changing course and moving on. His reasoning:

Teqlo is a fantastic concept and a potentially very disruptive business but it became clear that it needs more time in the oven in order to further develop and, more importantly, package the service. Spending 6+ more months in development before re-entering the market is not what I want to be doing

Teqlo definitely could be on to something but we won’t know until they re-emerge with a fresh coat of paint. However, the technology is solvable. The question is whether there is a market.

← Earlier Posts Newer Posts →