“…that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion…”
REM lyrics are appropriate, for I HAVE lost my religion. The eerily well-oiled machine that is my employer has decided that it will save a fair bit of coin by carrying out training in, get this, a virtual SECOND LIFE campus. Continue reading
Business people have problems. The other thing they have is existing infrastructure: things, people, technologies, systems, teams, policies and so much more. And infrastructure, being part of the environment, informs not just what unfolds within that environment but how people think about what can unfold within that same environment.
This becomes spectacularly apparent when the infrastructure in question is technological in nature. Continue reading
So in my previous two posts, I talked about how intranets need to mesh with the ‘reality’ of a particular organisation or business, and now in this post I just have some final thoughts on how the mechanics of that kind of meshing might look like. Basically, it’s:
Highjacking human interaction for fun and profit
So it seems that at it’s core, we have a bait and switch problem: we want people to bring social media habits to the workplace, even if we haven’t exactly/perfectly figured out what for; but once it’s happily ensconced in the workplace we fully intend to make it count. Continue reading
In the first post of this tiny series, I basically just oriented myself to the topic and declared my stance on social media to begin with! In this post I look at how social media at work can attempt to make itself relevant, and hopefully quantifiably so.
As I have always said, social media needs to grind gears with reality at some point or another (as in fact, ALL enterprises must), otherwise it is just hot air. It’s interesting to note, then, that Microsoft Sharepoint*, of all things, is doing rather well in this space.
Since stitching together (admittedly it’s OWN) apps has always been the bread and butter of microsoft’s strategy, this learned intra-operability is definitely helping them, now that they’ve staked their position in the enterprise social media (and cloud computing) space. Existing business apps have, one would hope, a positive business impact (otherwise giant corps wouldn’t spend so much money on licenses for the same). In short, such apps are provably useful, and a social media platform that hooks up with these and similar existing business apps anchors itself in the realm of established usefulness. Continue reading
In a short series of 3 nibble-sized posts, I’m going write about some of the things I’m learning about a rapidly expanding field: Enterprise intranets – specifically the inclusion of social media platforms with the attendant folksonomies and enterprise search functionality.
First off, I should declare my stance: I am a social media luddite. I am fence-sitting on this whole topic, and really just watching this niche crack wide open into a giant, grand-canyon-sized fissure in the business landscape. Then I’m going to tiptoe to the edge of the gaping maw and see if it’s worth getting my glider out. (I suspect this last romantic scene will be made moot by my employer, who will likely just shove me on the back and send me sprawling into the myriad hungry categorising mouths of the brand new intranet. Which net is being pushed forth from the loins of our IT folks as I write)…
[Begin update October 2011]: It was suggested (by one of the business leads at work) that I join twitter. It wasn’t like ‘twitter is great! you should get on there!‘. It was a more humdrum thing, like… yeah, there’s a bunch of good places to get info and stay up to date on these topics… and twitter was one of them. Sigh. Oh well… I’ll not be spouting my own greenhouse gases into the tweetosphere. That much I can do for humanity. I don’t think I know enough useful things about anything to TWEET. And yes, I realise that has never stopped anyone from tweeting in the past. [END Update]
In the same way that we kid ourselves that we are artists and writers, poets, lovers, mothers, Olympic sprinters, whatever… so too do corporate entities become mired in their own necessary delusions of purpose.
But of course… I persist in my unholy (hollow?) belief that the one true original purpose is the simple, banal processing of information.
And since the gravity that is ‘information processing’ is inescapable, already we can witness its warping effects on the future trajectories of businesses and corporate entities.
[updated : 2009-12-19]
The only thing that’s interesting about the copenhagen climate summit is the strategies that nations employ to wriggle out of real and tangible cuts in emissions.
The interconnectedness of environmental and other systems on our planet has made us turn, naturally, to network theory for gaining useful insights. This is becoming more so with regard to how we manage the environment.
The first weapon drawn from the network theory arsenal is almost always economic theory… which – I feel – is just a narrower, more specialised type of network theory. Economics seems to be a set of stripped down routing games that focus on monetarily-quantifiable payoffs.
Hulu, the tv station in the sky, is wanting to grow its business by adopting a subscription-based revenue model alongside its regular ad-based model. In case you didn’t know, or in case you’ve been putting up with the geo-hobbled Hulu experience served up for non-US denizens, what content there is on Hulu is free mainly because of ads.
And, surprise surprise, this hasn’t proved to be enough. So now they want after our hard-earned dosh, by wading into subscriptions territory… Continue reading
First off, I know diddley about venture capital and the entire VC industry. However, I have been in a few organisations now which have sought VC-assisted growth, and the ensuing fallout each time has got me wondering if:
1) it’s truly inevitable that things go pear-shaped after VC (if so why does anyone get on the VC gravy train at all?), and
2) someone can tell me what goes on in a VC’s head (are they really all a little nuts? Or am I missing something?)
It’s been a mini-mission of mine now to come to an understanding of these things. While scraping about for a bit of confidence to do the requisite mingling at a recent new biz / startup mixer, I somehow managed to fall into conversation with a seemingly-successful entrepreneur. Before you knew it we were on to the topic of venture capital and he tried to put me straight. This is my adjusted understanding of things: Continue reading
[updated 2009-03-30].
We don’t seem to have an intuitive grasp of the concept of how much ‘enough’ is.