Nov 2, 2012 | Change, Collaboration, Social Media
I have a new email address, one that allows me access to an enterprise social network, run off the “Yammer” platform that has been deployed by an occasional client.
This is an innovation that will turn the time people spend on their social networks into hugely productive time for employers.
The client concerned has a far flung empire, not big, but very spread, delivering a specialised service. Last week they urgently needed someone with an unusual skill to address a crisis in a client factory, a skill that up to now may have taken weeks to identify, if it was around. Instead, the engineering manager stuck the request on their yammer network, and it took minutes for a young engineer in Perth to respond, he had skill required, developed with a previous employer.
The opportunity to use internal social media, Yammer, Chatter, the Salesforce.com equivalent, and others, is opening a door to collaborative work such that we have brely dreamed about before. Forget the complicated, time consuming, and mostly wasted project update meetings every second day, replace it with a daily SM update, create forums to address problems and spread news and ideas.
This is not just socialising business, this is a revolution in cross functional/geographic collaborative management.
That’ll scare some folks!
Oct 30, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Operations
Remember when there was a market for only 5 computers in the world, then a few thousand appeared in governments, huge corporations, and a few big R&D labs, then suddenly along came the PC, and there were millions of them in our homes, then hundreds of millions of “devices” in our pockets, seemingly almost overnight?
It is happening again.
Coming to a desk near you is the personal machinist, the 3-D printer that will do for small scale manufacturing what the PC did for personal information management and communication.
This post from Mitch Joel has a link to a video interview of Chris Anderson on his new book “Makers – The new industrial revolution” which should blow away a few intellectual cobwebs.
Theo Jansen whose Kinetic models have been a youtube hit has had miniatures produced, working models of astonishing intricacy produced by Shapeways technology, one of the revolutionaries.
This stuff is coming to a desk near you, soon, and the only limitation is your imagination.
Oct 29, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Social Media
One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
Oct 22, 2012 | Change, Management
Problems need a better PR agency, everybody hates them. The bigger the problem, the greater the angst, the higher up the enterprise the problem has currency, the more important it seems to become.
However, when you think about it, problems are the catalyst for creative thinking, questioning of the status quo, seeking alternatives, considering the unconsiderable, and looking into the dark “corners” of behavior.
All good stuff, all potentially leading to new and better practice, evolved business models, and new products, so why do problems get such bad press when they stimulate all this good stuff?
Clearly, they just need better PR.
Oct 3, 2012 | Change, Personal Rant
Talking about “the cloud” is common around the BBQ’s I go to, (pass another beer please, the sausages need turning). However, it seems few of my verbal combatants have any idea that the cloud, is, somehow, in fact, an industrial development somewhere, creating buildings, employing people, consuming huge amounts of power, and cutting down trees in the process.
Listening to the mumbling of Tasmanian politicians this week, conflicted by the implosion of Gunns, and its implications for the Tasmanian economy, and their entrapment by green politics has been instructive in the ways of political fluffing. How can you offer an environment that encourages the enterprise from which the tax revenue to provide voter demanded services is generated, whilst not allowing those very enterprises to actually do anything?
Building a “cloud” would seem the perfect answer. No tree will ever be in danger from an axe, or even someone looking at it from the vantage point of a car, and Clouds must be good, because not only are the pretty, almost everyone seems to want one now.
Experience elsewhere indicates that all is not green in the cloud, that the industrial nature of the cloud eventually emerges, as it has here in the Tasmanian like haven of Quincy, in Washington state. When Microsoft came to town with a cloud, a chunk of money, and some commercial expectations, some realised that the world had changed.
Seems like an opportunity for Tasmania?
Sep 24, 2012 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media
So, the Gruen team is down a member as Russell Howcroft moves on to take over running the ailing Channel 10. There must be a sense of irony here, he moves from career as a “Madman” moonlighting in a successful public subscription TV channel where he has pontificated on the merits and foibles of various advertising, to a struggling channel with an eroding advertising revenue base at a time when TV’s are turning off (my assumption) in favor of alternatives.
There are still plenty of TV’s out there, but are they being used as TV’s the way they were a decade ago? Probably not, they are playing recorded shows, either downloaded, bought via a subscription service or in a boxed set, and played when, and where it suits the viewer, on a whole range of devices, not when the “prime time” usage model of a fixed set and time table dictates.
How will an old school advertising guru perform in this environment of rapid and disruptive change? Even the disrupter, Google, who made a fortune out of placing ads in the way of what you are searching for has recognised that where you are is as important, and so are investing in Maps as a representation of the interface between the real world and the virtual one, seeing the next wave of innovation coming.
Good luck Russell, but my instinct is that a 30 year old social media whiz Kid may have been a better choice.
