Something we call I.T.

Blog Migration

2008-03-14T23:16:00.002+11:00

I have finally taken the time to set up wordpress on my own domain. Please visit http://www.bluethots.com/ from now on. All the posts on this blog have been migrated over and I will update my blog at the new site. If you have any RSS feeds to this site, please click here to update it.

Fear-mongering in IT

2008-03-12T09:51:00.004+11:00

Interesting enough, I have seen a good amount of fear mongering in the IT industry through working with multiple vendors in a large project. From pitching solutions to clients to hiring a potential employee, I believe its a widely used practice around. I have heard this too many a times. Please bear in mind I am NOT referring to a CEO, vice president or directors. I am referring to the senior managers and managers on the ground.

For example, another vendor said something like this "If you do not spend $500,000 on this functionality, you will be outdated and potentially lose alot of customers." In this instance, when you look at the numbers, it doesn't tally up nicely. Half a Million for a functionality that would save approx $20,000 a year and less than 1% of the client base is expected to use it. These people are really good at instilling fear into the management who doesn't understand much about IT. If you do not do this, you will be screwed... and interesting enough many a times they manage to get a useless functionality into the system.

The problem with IT is that alot of the mid - senior people in IT used to be developers / architects but many of them do not have extensive education, training and experience in managing the details of accounting, finance and economics. We do need to understand more in terms of how technology and money can work together for the benefit of the company. At the end of the day its not how fast your system can process a workflow but how much money can you make out of the whole system.

15 golden rules for Web 2.0

2008-03-10T20:45:00.002+11:00

VisionaryMarketing wrote an interesting post regarding the 15 golden rules for Web 2.0. I must say the 15 rules are somewhat similar to Andrew Mcafee's Enterprise 2.0 success factors.

The one thing that VisonaryMarketing struck me was "bringing real answers to real questions". I totally agree with this statement. Some of the people I come across in my consulting career are extremely passionate about web2.0 and enterprise 2.0. However, they JUST want to implement a web2.0 idea and not think about the actual impacts, environment and culture of the organisation. As I always say, Enterprise 2.0 is not just a system, its a system that involves major cultural changes for both management and non-management.

Please bear in mind, only implement a system to solve a problem not implement because its cool!

Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening?

2008-03-08T21:32:00.001+11:00

This is an interesting perspective from senior management of various organisations on Enterprise 2.0.

Email free days - the enterprise 2.0 way

2008-03-08T21:14:00.004+11:00

Email free days is getting popular in the organisations. Read more about it here and here. Personally, I think its a great idea.

I personally spend too much time on my email and I am a self confessed email checking freak. However, I do not like emails. Its so impersonal and cold. But when I try to be friendly over emails, my boss complains I am not professional enough. What should I do? I just pick up the phone and have a chat. If I need email confirmation of my discussion, I will write a quick overview of the issue and get the other party to confirm it without sending 20 emails before reaching a conclusion (and in the mean time, driving both parties crazy).

With Wikis, Blogs, knowledge management systems and so many other content tools available in this information hungry society, living without emails (for one day of the week) is actually very possible. Without emails, you still have your phone which allows you to establish a real conversation with someone. You can also have a face to face chat and build relationships. Content tools can also provide information without searching for the other party. This would actually force people to use those websites to retrieve information that is already out there and not make someone else retrieve/rewrite that message/information to you!

I do not like the idea of building relationships purely over the internet only. I would like a combination of real world connection enhanced by the ease of communication via the internet. This is what the internet / emails should do and not replace the "human touch".

Making money with Web 2.0 Part 2

2008-03-06T16:49:00.003+11:00

Follow up from my previous post. If a Web 2.0 startup is so easy (only requires good idea, good business model and good tech skills), more people would be able to come up with great ideas and sell it. As long as there is one more better, stronger and prettier product out there that wins your product, the startup will not be too successful. This would pose as a risk as replication of web 2.0 technology is easy.

For any business to be successful, competitive advantage is important and the ease of web 2.0 development breaks the economic theory of competition - Barriers to entry. Unless you can stop / prevent others from developing a similar idea and at the same time build up such a large user base that even if the competitor joins the market, it would lose out due to the sheer amount of users on your product, it would be hard to gain any levels of competitive advantage.

Making money with Web 2.0

2008-03-03T12:27:00.002+11:00

Jeremy asked recently if anyone is making money on Web2.0. I thought about this question for a while and came out with a short answer. Clearly this is not the full picture but just an aspect of it.

Web2.0 is not a rocket science technology. If you have some good skills in IT, you can almost setup a Web2.0 company individually or with just another person. I have recently learnt Ruby on Rails and I must say its really simple and straight forward. With good tech skills, a solid idea with a good business plan, making money on Web2.0 is easy. You do not need a large user base for your application to make money. With two people on the team, overheads are low, server spaces is getting cheap by the days and making a profit is much easier.

Just my two cents worth

Enterprise 2.0 - A strategic system delivering competitive advantage?

2008-02-29T10:18:00.002+11:00

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 can be a strategic system to a certain extent. However this is not purely based on the IT side of enterprise 2.0 only. As I have described here and here, there is much more to E2.0 than just the tech side of things. After all, systems that deal with E2.0 is generally not very complicated.

If an organisation can make all their employees working as one and delivering the information required at the right time with clear transparency across the organisation, decisions made would be of much higher quality. However, releasing information might be seen as a power loss / threat to the senior management. After all, information is power. Personally, I do think that a person's capability is not based on how much information the person holds but more about how the person makes full use of the information on hand.

With a strong flow of information across the organisation, people can better decide on their course of action that would fit into the larger picture of things and as this builds up, the organisation would be constantly making better decisions thus achieving competitive advantage. There would be alot of cultural change in this space that is required but I do believe it is achievable especially if the company is predominantly younger people.

Fear of Enterprise 2.0

2008-02-28T16:19:00.002+11:00

Christian Smagg wrote an interesting post about "Enterprise 2.0 fear factor: Overcoming risks, uncertainties and doubts" All his concerns are valid and architects must devise a way to overcome some of these issues. I do feel that a cultural change must be achieved to be able to have a successful enterprise 2.0 implementation.

Personally, I feel that even though there is not much complicated, expensive work flows behind enterprise 2.0 the cultural change part will be quite challenging. One way to slow ease employees into the whole E2.0 idea is to slowly releasing it to them and collect feedback. By using Agile development, you can continuously adapt to the requirements and expectations of the users. This way would also allow users to slowly get used to the E2.0 idea instead of doing a big bang go live and everyone would be taken by surprise and end up feeling they were being thrown into the deep end. In any case if there is a cultural conflict, technologist should devise a way to overcome that issue.

Change management in this way can be a cheaper option as it is done is a slow and iterative and incremental manner.

Why would businesses implement Enterprise 2.0?

2008-02-27T10:33:00.004+11:00

One thing that struck me recently was "Why would businesses implement Enterprise 2.0?" From the business perspective, spending money on a system should return one of the following:

1) Make more money
2) Save money
3) Increase efficiency (streamlining business process, reduce redundancy, capture knowledge...)

Depending on what the enterprise 2.0 project is about, it must satisfy some or all of the above, otherwise I do not see value in the project. For example, FaceBook (by itself) within a company is not quite useful. It basically just links people up so that employees have one more communication tool (or bitching channel). However, if Facebook is integrated with, assuming, wiki or KM, then it would potentially capture knowledge and increase efficiency. All these really depends on what the proposed project is all about.

No matter what we as technologist do, we must satisfy the basic premise of business - improve the bottom line (directly or indirectly).

Ruby on Rails

2008-02-26T16:17:00.002+11:00

I have recently started learning and programming a project of mine in Ruby On Rails. If you think programming is a boring thing check out the youtube video below... and funny enough it actually describes ruby quite well.

Enjoy!

Everything is free

2008-02-25T21:52:00.002+11:00

Wired has a extremely good article "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"

I have read it once and I am still abit confused but I do see alot of value in it at the moment. Have a read...

Secrets of success for Enterprise 2.0

2008-02-23T23:24:00.002+11:00

Andrew Mcafee wrote a highly interesting post regarding the success factors for enterprise 2.0.

Below is the list described by Andrew McAfee

Technologies
* Tools are intuitive and easy to use

* Tools are egalitarian and freeform

* Borders seem appropriate to users

* At least some of the tools are explicitly social

* The toolset is quickly standardized

Support for the Initiative
* Incentives exist, and are soft

* Excellent gardeners exist

* Patient and dedicated evangelists exist

* Energy and activity are primarily bottom-up

* Effort has official and unofficial support from the top

* Goals are clear and well-explained

Culture
* People are trusted

* Slack exists in the workweek

* Helpfulness has been the norm

* Top management supports lateralization

* There are lots of young people

* There is pent-up demand for better information sharing

I cannot agree more with Andrew. This was a great post!

Brilliant idea

2008-02-20T00:14:00.002+11:00

I happen to chance upon a website that gives free domain names. Well this is not new for sure. However the idea behind this is absolutely brilliant.

Have you heard of this country called Tokelau ? I surely haven't until a few moment ago. As many would know, every country has it own country domain name extension like .au, .uk and so on and Tokelau has a .tk extension and since its such a small country with a relatively low GDP, the government of Tokelau appointed a company to be the registration entity and is giving away free domain names to anyone so that the world would know about Tokelau. What an efficient way of bringing such a small country of about 1500 residents to the world map. This project has also contributed to 10% of the country's GDP.

The internet is really powerful.

OpenID as your online social security

2008-02-18T21:29:00.003+11:00

Just a wandering thought I had today, the internet would be a much better place if I had one ID, one login for everything I want to do. Can OpenID do this? I doubt so. Also read this.

In the ideal world, I will have one login with access to all services and if I do not want to be tracked where I am going and what I am doing, I will just surf as an anonymous entity. Well easier said than done. It will not happen anytime soon. The logistics would be absolutely crazy.

However, this is absolutely possible within an organisation however, this is not what I am seeing at the moment. We have quite a distance to cover to get there.

Social Graph and Resource Management

2008-02-18T12:12:00.002+11:00

I have heard about this term too many times and know what its about on the surface. On Friday, I had a conversation with Michael and he was explaining to me how social graph and resource management can be implemented hand in hand.

After reading Dion Hinchcliffe post on - The Social Graph: Issues and Strategies in 2008, I am convinced the social graph is a great tool to improve the efficiency of an IT consulting firm. Let me explain.

IT consulting firms relies greatly on good resource management - delivering the correct resource to the right place at the right time. Traditionally, this is done by the senior management and also the HR team where they control staff movement across projects and geographical locations. This is hard work as to the HR team, staff members is just another name, another resume, another head they can stick into a project to earn money. Feedback is seldom received from staff members until the news is broken to them.

For resource management to work well, a collaborative effort must be used. Employee / project managers should actively plan their schedule ahead, look for projects that interest them, use the social graph to get in contact with the relevant project managers or use it to get in contact with other resources on the team to find out more. With this approach, there will be less work for the HR team, less headache for the management team and achieve greater efficiency across the organisation.

I am not saying that the social graph is the answer to great resource management, but I am saying its one of the required tools to create a great resource management process. It helps to link people up and allow people connect to each other and allowing them to search for a project that they are interested in and capable of doing. A excellent resource management tool is a strategic tool and not just a back end process.

Gen Y, Gen X and the Baby Boomers: Workplace Generation Wars - By CIO Magazine

2008-02-18T11:58:00.001+11:00

CIO recently published an article Gen Y, Gen X and the Baby Boomers: Workplace Generation Wars. A perfect extension from my previous post.

Web 2.0 and the Gen X / Y

2008-02-12T12:46:00.000+11:00

The internet boom since the mid 90s is more than 10 years now and kids and youth nowadays are more techno savvy than many adults. Just for example, I was in Singapore a month back and a primary school boy was chatting to someone on msn via his mobile phone in a train. There is also an advert on TV in Australia that says by the time a child is eight years old, the child would have taken in more information than their grand parents in a lifetime (not sure if this is true though).

I work in a consultancy firm with alot of young people and for us to learn how to setup and use wikis, blogs and stuff like that is just so simple. However, at my client's project, getting some of the older folks to work on excel spreadsheet can be a nightmare. Adoption of technology is just much slower with the baby boomers - in general.

Therefore I would like to infer that if your organisation is predominantly younger people, Gen X / Y, then then likelihood of enterprise 2.0 to work is higher.

Why people program for free?

2008-02-11T00:52:00.000+11:00

I was just thinking about the whole idea of open source and software being free.

Peer production is a great idea. With the whole world pouring in their talents and ideas into a product. However, why would anyone do that? Why would I program something on a Sat afternoon instead of having a beer by the pool/beach?

Everyone does it for a certain reason, I believe. Some might do it to build up their resume, some might be because the company that the person works for support open source and pays people to do it. Some might be due to passion for programming.

However, assuming that everyone on earth needs to make money for a living and would try to maximise their income, then why would open source work? There are a number of websites like odesk and elance which offers paid programming work. I do understand that companies like IBM is pouring money into open source software like linux but what about other software? There are a huge number of projects out there which is smaller and still very successful.

If you have any idea why people contribute to open source, please leave me a comment. Thanks heaps.

Google Apps Team Edition - The power of collaboration

2008-02-07T17:38:00.000+11:00

Google apps team edition was just released and as the name states, it has the power to collaborate! Check out the YouTube Video. I guess for all the Google apps users out there, there isn't any rocket science in what you are about to watch and some of these functionality has been around for a while.

The changing face of consulting firms

2008-02-06T08:54:00.000+11:00

As technology evolves towards SOA, open source, ready made web services and global collaboration, IT consulting firms must evolve as well. Traditionally, IT consulting are after large cash rich clients where they are able to fork out millions and billions of dollars and invest in IT. Consulting firms charge a huge amount as well and earn truck loads of cash from a big client. These projects varies from small functionality implementation to large end to end transformation project. Many of these projects involve customising off the shelf software like Oracle and SAP.

However, with the changes in technology development, delivering value for clients does not come in the form of software anymore but more in the form of strategy, aligning business and IT, change management and good system architecture.

Consulting firms must continue to develop their in house technical expertise but I believe, in future, it will be a small team of highly skilled developers instead of large warehouses of developers.

The future of internet

2008-02-04T09:29:00.000+11:00

There is a highly interesting blog entry posted by David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer - Yahoo! and the future of the Internet. He said:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

I do think that if Microsoft does buy over Yahoo, the competition in the online world would be even more intensive and aggressive. There will be three very big players in the online world - Mircosoft, Google and the open source world. We have seen wonders in the open source community so far with traditional successful examples like linux, apache and mysql being so widely used by web servers nowadays. Online traffic for content is also moving towards user driven sites like Wikipedia and YouTube.

The people in the online world is extremely powerful and Microsoft or Google must appease the internet community as a whole. Internet is a free and open platform - no one can control it fully.

Small companies and global collaboration

2008-02-03T20:55:00.000+11:00

Many years ago, I had a chat with my dad (he runs a small construction firm) and he commented that its difficult to compete with the big construction firms as they have the money to invest in technology which increases their business process, performance and efficiency.

SaaS has solved this problem for small companies. Office 2.0 database has a long list of SaaS providers for small companies to use.

The next step is for small companies to experience the power of global sourcing that large companies enjoy through outsourcing.

Collaboration across nations is just not just about cost savings but having access to a pool of global talent. Global collaboration is about capability. Its about experiencing endless possibilities and growth and innovation. As long as a company has an idea, they can find an expert around the world, get their expert advice, build and implement it. In fact this is something that anyone can enjoy - large or small companies.

I have heard people say, globalise or die but now I believe its "Collaborate or die"

Microsoft and Yahoo - what it means for web 2.0?

2008-02-03T16:53:00.000+11:00

The deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is an interesting one. Why Microsoft is interested in Yahoo? What are the strengths of Yahoo that interest Microsoft?

Yahoo
Yahoo is great for online content and innovation. They have heaps of sites like Y! Sports, Y! Movies that generates alot of online traffic - which is something that live.com doesn't have. Yahoo is absolutely innovative as well. Buying De.li.cious, Flickr previously, displays the fact that they have recognised web 2.0 is a phenomenon. However, even with the amount of online traffic it generates and numerous innovative ideas, Yahoo was not able to turn it into cash.

Microsoft
Even though Microsoft has started on embracing web 2.0 but they are generally slower in adopting such technologies and making it a large scale product/offering. I do believe that microsoft, is serious about innovation (for example, web2.0) but they are lack of a vision and possibly talent as well. Microsoft would be buying yahoo's innovation, people and online traffic (thus advertising revenue / large user base).

If Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft, there will be massive job cuts and I am not sure if Microsoft would be able to fully take advantage of Yahoo's innovation and the Yahoo 'spirit'.

Preventing the buy over
Yahoo isn't good at search and to prevent them from being bought over by Microsoft, Yahoo can cut a quick deal with Google, outsource search to Google, focus on content and innovation and that would prevent the buy over. However, I am quite sure this deal will go through.

Conclusion
This is a good move for technology in general. Microsoft is serious about innovation and improvement. This buy over is not about competing with Google on search but at a higher level - innovation and traffic. In general, this is good for web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. More innovation, more fun and more improvement. I do hope that this deal is all for the better.

Wikinomics

2008-01-30T23:49:00.001+11:00

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2006.

This is a truly fantastic book if you are interested in enterprise 2.0 / collaboration. This book rocks!

5 out of 5 stars.

Below are two book reviews I picked randomly:
Blogcritics
itmanagersjournal

Communication, Connection, Collaboration

2008-01-29T14:10:00.000+11:00

Personally, I DO NOT think that facebook will be the next big thing in the enterprise environment. However, it will be part of the next big thing in the enterprise environment - after all facebook is about connecting people. I do believe that the next big thing in enterprise is about effective communication, connection and collaboration between different groups of employees/teams across geographical locations, time zones and cultures.

Organisations need to analyse their business operations and find out what can IT do to help them improve their processes which is aligned to the culture of the company. Though its relatively difficult for IT systems to provide sustainable competitive advantage (as competitors can replicate the technology relatively quickly in this highly advanced market), reducing information asymmetry within the organisation, providing the correct information at the correct time and improving work processes in the long run might provide some level of sustainable competitive advantage for the organisation. Work processes are different across organisations and unlike IT, its not easy to replicate the successful combination of IT, culture and work processes from one company to another.

Simplification of technology

2008-01-25T22:36:00.000+11:00

Quote of the day:
Technology is only as smart as the person/team who developed it. - Sean Lew

--------

P.S. The quote has nothing to do with the post below.

Personally, as a technology consultant, I believe that technology is all too hard for the average person on the street. I am passionate about what I am doing and sometimes I struggle to learn new technology, ideas and just analysing some of these stuff can be a pain. So for the average Joe, wouldn't this be too much for him?

For enterprise software, its even more complicated. It takes so much understanding, analysis, development, testing and support for the system and IT keeps changing, new stuff has to be implemented and new business rules.

I do believe that IT should be simplified. Instead of large Oracle / SAP implementation, SOA should be used. Build them in modules, change whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want - at a low cost. Data should be organised in a smart and logical way using Mike2.0. Websites/GUI should be 100% user friendly.

I do believe that IT is moving towards the path where everything is simplified for the user and more AI is built in to understand what the user is thinking off. One good example is when excite, lycos was around, searching for anything was hard. One needs to type in the correct phrase and understand search technology to get the results that one is expecting. Google made it simple.. just type and go.. and Google enhanced it by storing your search history and understanding your general needs thus providing a better search experience.

Embrace Mass Collaboration

2008-01-21T22:02:00.000+11:00

IT outsourcing has changed the IT industry dramatically, India's strong economic growth is partially due to the huge IT investment made by large corporations worldwide from the simple call centre operations to global development centres for IT firms. The drivers for outsourcing are simple: cost-effective, better resource management, access to special skills and allowing the company to focus more on their core business.

What people do not see very often is that setting up something like this is not cheap and risks are rather high. Its not as simple as hiring a team in India, switching on the computers and start taking calls or programming. The team has to work well with the team at the head office. There are also other risks like culture, language and political issues in developing countries. Hiring a large team also means a fixed overhead every month.

However, mass collaboration allows organisations to acquire the right talent for the right job whenever the organisation needs it and they are allowed to source such talent worldwide. Anyone in the world can work for anyone as long as both parties agree to the salary paid and the expected delivery. There are some companies like programmermeetdesigner, odesk and elance that are providing similar services where you can outsource your web design and other IT requirements to any available people.

To bring this idea to the next level, organisations can start to think about doing this internally and search for people around the world to work on the organisation's projects, provide good money for the expected deliverable and still be able to save cost and achieve similar results from outsourcing IT work to a developing country. There can be a team of five developers from five different countries arcoss 16 time zones working on the same project with the same objective.

Collaboration tools must be developed to help in the communication and excellent communication within the team would be the main success factor for mass collaboration. I do believe this is the next big thing in IT outsourcing - without the large risks, setup costs and fixed overheads. Someone in India or China would enjoy working from home in their PJs and earning similar salaries as compared a developed nation.

The end of large consulting firms?

2008-01-16T08:50:00.000+11:00

John McKendrick wrote an interesting review on Don Hinchcliffe's predictions for Enterprise 2.0 for 2008.

As I followed this topic closely, it seems like IT is moving towards small SOA type development instead of large scale, end to end enterprise wide transformation. Traditionally, such large scale developments generally consist of multiple vendors and millions or billions of dollars being invested with high risks and great uncertainty. I am not saying that its the end of enterprise transformation, I just believe that organisations with a relatively stable IT infrastructure would rather develop components that adheres to the SOA framework than to embark on a large scale IT transformation.

So does this mean that large consulting firms like Accenture would be affected? Generally, these companies charge more than smaller firms and since smaller developments can be handled by small to mid sized consulting firms, which may be able to deliver the same or better quality work as compared to large consulting firms - this industry would be facing some fierce competition. Large consulting firms have to evolve to adapt to such changes. The cost of running a global company might be too high to be nimble to compete in local markets.

One way to make full use of a global firm is to make full use of resources worldwide. If you have worked in a consulting firms before, you would have realised that there are alot of people on the "bench" doing nothing when they are in between projects. Also, global firms have to make use of specific technical expertise around the globe to deliver higher quality work.

I am getting married!

2007-12-30T04:28:00.000+11:00

I know this is extremely off the topic of IT, enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 but I wanna share my happiness with everyone in the cyber world.

Today I went for gown fitting with my fiance and she looked soooooo good in her gown. I am totally stoked and it has finally hit me that wedding preparation is well and truely on its way. Therefore forgive for the lack of post in the next few weeks as I will be busy sorting things out before my holiday ends.

Have a great NYE 2007 and hope that 2008 will be great for everyone!

The world without boundaries

2007-12-21T08:53:00.000+11:00

I just remembered an ad I watch when I was a kid. The ad was from a clothing store and the tagline for the ad is "A world without strangers". With facebook, there are surely lesser strangers in the world nowadays.. but what about a world without boundaries where geographical boundaries are broken down and with the advancement of video conferencing and IP telephony, global collaboration is so much easier nowadays. Content driven adverts would find people around the world and provide information at the right time at the right place. Maps would be overlaid with information that we need and addresses of your friends and calling a cab might just be a click on your GPS enabled mobile phone.

Making a difference

2007-12-17T08:53:00.000+11:00

Tom Davenport wrote an blog post recently titled "Enterprise 2.0: Boo Hoo?" He basically wrote

Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations ? power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today ? won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone.

I must say I disagree with him. Many a times, such problems exist due to poor communication. With regards to trust, as I always believe, trust is earned not given. If communication across the organisation is good and open, alot of these problems would be solved and people can understand each other much better and easier. I am not saying that enterprise 2.0 would solved all the problems that Tom had listed but it will surely reduce it by a fair amount.

Considering all the benefits that enterprise 2.0 software can achieve, it would be more beneficial than harm to implement it. Design and requirements is paramount to the success of enterprise 2.0.

Engaging your customers

2007-12-11T10:09:00.000+11:00

I have been discussing alot about how organisations can use enterprise 2.0 within the organisation. But enterprise 2.0 / web2.0 can be used to connect with your customers/clients, reach out to new markets and to some extent marketing as well.

campaignforrealbeauty.com has been highly successful in connecting with customers, delivered important messages and increase brand awareness (in the case for Dove). A browse on their website and you would find that there is a community within it where women participate in giving advises, mentoring and also various activities like quizzes and fashion tips.

What Dove has done was creating a community with an aim to improve the self esteem of women and a social network for women to support each other and provide a platform for women to communicate across the world.

This is not a new idea at all and many other organisations have been trying to do this as well. Robert Hillard wrote an interesting post with regards to using Facebook as a CDI. Organisations can bring marketing to the next level by analysing the customers online and providing customised data for the consumer.

Organisations should try to connect with customers at a deeper level, provide a sense of community and listen to feedback from customers. Constant improving of an organisations products and/or services can provide some level of competitive advantage to an oragnisation.

FaceBook as the intranet part 2

2007-12-11T08:57:00.000+11:00

I was asked a question by a non tech savvy friend: "is facebook a passing fad?"

Personally, I do not think that online social networking is a passing fad. What I am sure about is that some of the inane applications on facebook will be a passing fad. Applications like "X me" and "Send a drink" are absolutely non-beneficial to the community. X me is an application where you can perform a selected action on your friends like "wave", "kiss", "slap", "lick" and so on. Send a drink is a application where you can send drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) to your friends.Seriously, I would love to catch up with my friends online and have a chat and share photos but if I want to wave to them or buy them a drink, I rather do it in person.

I believe Facebook is evolving. Soon applications would surface where people can conduct some form of transaction online. For example, network gaming between friends, buying wishlist items when your friends birthday is coming up, understanding the individual consumer via the data posted on Facebook and recommending items to buy and displaying information from other sites. Technically and fundamentally, the idea of facebook is very powerful. With the wide variety of applications, anything can happen and at the same time you are interacting with friends.

However, everyone wants to be quiet and alone once in a while and especially when you are working. You have tasks to complete and deadlines to adhere to. You have no time to check out what is the latest "Hi, how is it going" message sent from a friend 3000 miles away or a colleague who is 2 cubicles away. Its not urgent and you can reply that at a later stage.

What we need at work is information when we request for it, real time collaboration between staff members across various office locations and any sort of assistance that can make our work more efficient and more effective.

The Human Network

2007-12-07T12:26:00.000+11:00

Facebook as the intranet

2007-12-07T09:05:00.000+11:00

Andrew McAfee wrote an interesting article asking people about the viability on using social networking software as the foundation of Intranets. He has asked "what are the good reasons for continuing to invest in and forge ahead with 1.0 Intranets?

I found his post extremely interesting and I must say it is obviously possible due to the fact that Facebook allows customised applications to running on its site and is very scalable. However, the first thought that came to my mind is Facebook is a SOCIAL NETWORKING software whereas an intranet is a "mini" internet for the organisation. So my argument is can facebook be the launch pad and foundation to the internet? Maybe... Some Facebook fanatics would do it, but I surely won't.

Intranet is a place where people log on, search for information and conduct some form of transaction. My idea of a good intranet is a series of Mashups just like Google personalised homepage where you can access the applications that you want , a good search engine, provide news and feeds on on issues that matters to your job scope. So if Facebook is to be the intranet it would have to be setup similarly to Google personalised homepage and some attributes of social networking. Social networking will be good for an organisation but as the intranet, I think this idea is being brought too far out.

However, in large companies, Intranet is pretty much a host of different sites, applications and design. To consolidate all these information together would be mammoth task and the value in doing that might not be very high.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Web 2.0 going bonkers??

2007-12-05T21:38:00.000+11:00

Recently I have posted a post regarding the FirstPartner's Enterprise 2.0 web. If you have gone to the link you would have seen a few other maps. The interesting thing, after browsing through some of the maps, there are so many applications, ideas and possibilities out there to achieve Enterprise 2.0 or apply Web 2.0 applications.

I have realised that alot of organisations have engaged vendors telling them this technology is good and that system can help the client achieve whatever they want. However at this stage, no detailed business analysis has been conducted but a vendor has been signed off to design and implement a multi-million dollar project. At this stage, the client doesn't even know exactly what they need, what they want and what is nice to have.

Would you ever go off to a shopping centre to buy "mystery box of goodies" that cost thousands of dollars without know what is inside? I certainly wouldn't.

However, this is what some organisations are doing - not just with Enterprise 2.0 technologies but with any kind of technology.

Please think, try and analyse before you buy. We are never short of good technologies but we are always short of a good strategy.

Incentives for using Enterprise 2.0

2007-12-04T18:32:00.001+11:00

Wikipedia has agreed to pay some of their "key illustrators" some money for their contribution to their site according to NY Times. Even though the end sum of this pay out might be extremely small and insignificant but from the organisation's perspective this this an important milestone. Incentive is needed for employees to get on the enterprise 2.0 bandwagon and even Wikipedia is doing it. Employers must give their staff some kind of benefits (tangible or intangible) for contributing and this is one of the important success factors for enterprise 2.0.

Gaining Value with Enterprise 2.0

2007-12-02T02:43:00.000+11:00

Following up on my previous post regarding how Enterprise 2.0 can deliver value to an organisation.

Competitive advantage from better interactions by Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika (Mckinsey Quarterly 2006, 2) has provided very important insight to this question and might have possibly answered a large part of the question. Please try to get your hands on it.

The most interesting point the authors have made is "The old strategies for efficiency improvements don't apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve tacit interactions; instead, company must boost these workers' productivity by making them more effective at what they do. As a result, the company will build talent-based competitive advantages that are difficult for rivals to replicate."

I absolutely agree with the authors on this point and by using enterprise 2.0 technologies, it would allow employees to collaborate and work more effectively. Thus gaining competitive advantage. Everyone knows the importance of gaining competitive advantage and organisations can transform their business all they want but gaining competitive advantage through technology is an expensive and frustrating experience. Unless your organisation is like Google who can constantly innovate, build and deploy innovative solutions for your workforce and customers, otherwise it would be very difficult to gain much competitive advantage.

Many would also have come across the benefits of knowledge management systems (KMS) and how it can benefit an organisation. However, KMS can be hard to build, time consuming and might be very expensive as well. Enterprise 2.0 can deliver the benefits of the KMS, provide collaboration opportunities, can be deployed using the numerous open source applications in the market, integrate publicly available information with organisation specific information and provide employees with an excellent background information to make the most informed decision. The more informed the decision is the likelihood its a better decision and this will allow organisations to gain "baby steps" towards competitive advantage.

I believe this is the spot in which organisations would buy into the idea of Enterprise 2.0 and be willing to spend money on it. Knowledge is power and enterprise 2.0 technologies is just the tool to deliver the benefit. With internet all competitors are on the same level playing ground, the only way to beat competitors is to constantly innovate new products and services, listen to what consumers have to say, feed it back to your organisation and update and upgrade your offerings. Speed is key and enterprise 2.0 delivers it - real-time.

Enterprise 2.0 map

2007-12-01T17:12:00.000+11:00

Firstpartner produced a interesting enterprise 2.0 map for organisations. Please check out this page. I was looking through the map and as you would see there are alot of technology involved. I work in a IT consulting firm and just to get technologists to get across all these applications and use them effectively would not be easy. I am not saying that we would take alot of time to learn but just to get across so many different applications on a regular basis is not easy. After all, large organisations have been trying to transform their operations from many disparate systems to one platform. Also, implementing Enterprise 2.0 is almost creating a workplace revolution.

The important lacking issue about enterprise 2.0 is that there is a lack of methods to track and understand the value of enterprise 2.0 for organisations. Also, the human aspects of Enterprise 2.0 is not fully understood as well and how it will impact an organisation. As many of us are technologists, designing, building and implementing technology is easy for us. But there are alot of people in this world that are still not comfortable with technology and i can safely say these people are the bulk of the workforce.

I will be exploring more into the area of measuring the value that can be delivered to an organisations in the next few weeks.

Delivering the correct data

2007-11-27T22:08:00.000+11:00

Before Google appeared, too many a times, we have searched for something and something absolutely unexpected would appear on the web browser. Even though Google has made our life much better but it will delivers the unexpected information once in a while. Some might say that the search string was wrong or a whole range of reasons but ultimately this is not what the consumer wants. We want it now and we want it right.

So even though mashups, social networking and web 2.0 are all great ideas but once everyone gets onto the bandwagon, it becomes too much data to go through and people will get sick of the information overload - my RSS reader has hundreds of unread articles at the moment! We must understand that the final audience/consumer of technology are humans, it doesn't mean that as technology becomes better, humans would be able to process more information. We are still fundamentally the same human thousands of years ago. We are only capable of certain tasks to some extent.

Therefore for any of enterprise 2.0 initiatives to work, organisation must be able to deliver the right information to the right user at the right time... Easier said than done. Google, web 2.0 has certainly made life better but there is much more to be done in this space. We must be able to profile the consumer so well that we can deliver whatever he/she wants. Searching is the key and Google is doing a good job! Keep it up.

Enterprise 2.0 - a workplace revolution?

2007-11-22T17:36:00.000+11:00

My experience with working in government agencies previously was a eye-opener. Everyone was relaxed, happy and takes things at their own stride or their own sweet time. There is no rush to complete anything or accomplish much. It almost seems like working in the government sector is almost like a lifestyle, mindset or a kind of personal belief. Employees at my current client is similar in this way too. It used to be a government agency and it got privatised many years ago but work habits are still very much the same as the government sector. (I am not saying all government agencies are like that. The above is just my experience and I might be very wrong in some cases)

Enterprise 2.0 is a ideology that requires a fair amount of proactive human participation. It would work very well when everyone is willing to share knowledge, contribute to the online community and do their part well at work. But in the case of the above, how would enterprise 2.0 work? Even with enterprise 2.0 installed and implemented at the work place, the technology might make life better for employees and increase efficiency by a small margin but the promises that Enterprise 2.0 would never be achieved. The more I think about enterprise 2.0, the more I think it is a workplace revolution.

Anyone has any thoughts on this topic? I would like to discuss this further.

Thanks!

Flux beta

2007-11-20T20:03:00.000+11:00

Flux beta is an interesting new technology that enables social media distribution to social networking sites by anyone - whether you are a individual blogger or multi-national media companies. Currently only fShare has been released and it allows users to deliver blog posts, videos, and photos to your favourite social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace or Friendster.

However, when Flux is fully released in Dec. It will allow companies to deliver content and applications with greater control and customisation to all popular social networking sites from one place.

This creates a brand new advertising channel where organisations can reach out to the millions of people on social networking sites all from one place. Flux is still in its infancy stage and I will follow up more on this story in future. Check out their website.

Its all about the data

2007-11-20T09:48:00.000+11:00

No matter what enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 or collaboration technologies promises, quality data is of utmost importance for success. Many knowledge workers are constantly swarmed with emails, tasks, meetings and deadlines. Therefore in order for knowledge workers to contribute to Wikis, update documentation or websites, that would mean that they either need to forgo some work they are tasked to complete or stay back at work later. The technologies above allow people to connect to each other much easier through wikis, social networks or mash ups but the underlying driver is that data is brought to the end user is faster and of high quality. Therefore, people must maintain the dataset well.

Organisations can achieve the stipulated promises of such technologies in two steps. Firstly, employers must evangelise the benefits of sharing information and provide some level of incentive for employees to contribute knowledge. Some examples of incentive can be: using a public ranking system on the quality of the information delivered or providing feedback and evaluation from management.

Secondly, an analysis and management of data within the organisation. Implicit data is extremely powerful, it can tell you things from demographics of customers which can in turn determine your marketing strategy to analysis of the bottleneck within the business processes. If anyone has done reporting and analytics in a large organisation, you would know that extracting implicit data can be a tedious and difficult job. This issue can be solved by using Mike2.0 information management methodology.

Mike2.0 provides a open source methodology for Enterprise Information Management that provides an organising framework for information management. This allows organisations better control and deliver their information to end users and it covers both implicit and explicit knowledge.

High performance teams

2007-11-18T22:09:00.000+11:00

I have always been extremely interested in high performing teams in general. I would like to know what is their success story, how they did it, what were the contributing factors and what were the tools they used (if any). Today, while reading some articles online, it dawned upon me that there are still many workplaces operating in a highly structured and controlled manner. To give one extreme example, there are workplaces which uses the time logging system and tracks when you arrive at work, when you leave for lunch, when you return to office and when you go home. In one story I read, an organisation even tracks the amount of time each employee spends at the bathroom.

We have left the era of industrial revolution where workers are highly skilled in only one specific area (e.g. screwing the car door to its body) and nothing else. Those were the days where the workplace was a highly controlled environment and everyone just did their specific small job scope and nothing else. We are currently in the era of knowledge workers who can think, decide and follow up on their own responsibilities and actions. Knowledge workers nowadays do not have a small job scope but is responsible for many different areas of work. However not all organisations are treating their employees like knowledge workers.

In order for Enterprise 2.0 to succeed, the workplace culture and environment must embrace such forms of activities. After all, Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. Definition from Enterprise2Conf.

Employers must liberate their workforce and allow people to contribute and be responsible for what they say. HR must employ people that fit into this sort of work environment and employees themselves must have the mentality that sharing of information does not mean that they lose competitiveness but gaining recognition for contributing and sharing. This is a whole new mindset and people need to adopt quickly.

FAQ?

2007-11-17T22:44:00.000+11:00

I was speaking to a friend who works as an accountant for a mid-size company and he was telling me how the FAQ he had setup became a hit within his company's intranet. Within his FAQ, he consolidated from various public and private data sources about their clients, names of client to contact for various issues, likes and dislikes of client (he even included things like "Becareful of XXX he has a really bad breath) to many other sensitive information about their clients.

To me, he definitely had created his own version of Wikipedia. Before he knew it, his company have stepped into the shallow waters of Enterprise 2.0. His colleagues were giving input about their clients and updating client specific information. With the release of freely available information people had access to a single point of truth which is constantly updated by dedicated team members. People from his office and regional offices would check out his FAQ before contacting their client providing them with useful information.

Enterprise 2.0 is moving into work places faster than you think. Teams nowadays is not just made up of the immediate colleagues sitting around you in your office but also the colleagues in the regional offices and even global offices. The world is getting flatter and creating a strong united team and allowing the freedom of knowledge is the only way to be highly flexible in this competitive market.

Yahoo Pipes

2007-11-16T13:04:00.000+11:00

Many would know something about feed aggregators but we have so many of them around at the moment. Say if you are a iGoogle, live.com, De.li.cious, etc member, you have some serious work to get down to just to view stuff that you are interested in. Unless you are capable web-savvy netizen, its hard for you to be able to aggregate all these information to one place and read it from one screen.

Yahoo Pipes have solved this problem. In a nutshell, described by Tim O'Reilly, "it's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output." If you have noticed, its a drag and drop editor - no programming required.

I have created a simple pipe by watching the demo. There is a whole lot of operators and functions you can use and not just filtering the information but also do mathematical calculations, union some sites, filter information, location builder and have your own user inputs. After you have done this, save it as RSS, ATOM, JSON, XML and you can use it for yourself or publish it to the WWW or popular search engines.

This is a good example of mashups with ability to improve the quality of the mashed data and it brings mashups to a whole new level.

Welcome

2007-11-15T21:20:00.000+11:00

This blog is dedicated to technology specifically in the area of collaboration between any two parties of people or systems. Some of the technologies that surround this topic include Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and application mashups.

Most, if not all, will agree that technology has changed the way we live in some way or another. Even for the poorest people in the world, for example, with the advent of internet, news travel much faster as compared to 50 years ago. We can now react to a call for help or disaster much faster, donate money online and receive RSS feeds of the latest breaking news. However, the basic theories of life still stays the same, we still communicate with people face to face, go out for beers after work on Fridays, businesses' main aim is to make money and humans are after all humans. I will be applying some traditional theories (e.g. game theory and chaos theory) to analyse and pen my thoughts on this blog.

We are constantly looking to improve and simplify our lives and the situation we are in and this blog is dedicated to do that using technology. I would use this channel to pen down my humble thoughts and hope that all who are reading this will enjoy it.