I was thinking about what a nasty little web (pun intended) of connections I've created recently with all the social media sites. For fun, I spent a few minutes diagramming the connections last night. The hardest part was laying out all of the lines and bubbles to make sense of the connections.

One thing that I considered after the fact was how I work with the tools. For example, I find it kind of amazing (even being a technology professional) that I can be anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage, and send a text message that gets propagated across several sites in one shot. The text message goes to twitter, which then gets pulled into FriendFeed and Plaxo. From FriendFeed, the message is then forwarded as my status to LinkedIn and Facebook. My website also shows that message via a FriendFeed gadget.

The interconnections in the web definitely represent something more powerful than what is accomplished with just one site. This is where the real power of the web is these days.

Update: Jon Udell has an interesting post about a similar concept. While I just marveled at the current state of affairs, John describes some goals that he wants to see fulfilled.

Labels: personal, social media, web 2.0

It's interesting to me to think about the challenges of innovation within any organization, in particular a profit seaking enterprise. While small companies have the potential to innovate by virtue of their size and large companies have the ability to put capital directly towards formalized innovation strategies, there's a gap in the middle where it is a bit harder to drive change. If you have a small number of people, trusting that team to do what is best for the organization is really driven by hiring decisions. If you are large, you can set up a R&D function or implement corporate-wide processes for identifying and fostering valuable ideas. If you are in the middle, you lose a little control over who gets hired (not that you don't try to get the best people possible). Mid-size companies also don't typically have the capital available for dedicated research activities.

CIO Magazine recently published an interview with Tony Scott, the CIO of Microsoft, in which he talks briefly about their innovation strategy. Two interesting things to note: first, Tony makes a point that Microsoft tries to foster a culture of innovation, but at the same time it is important to remember that the company also spends large sums of cash every year running Microsoft Research. While there are certainly some skeptics that believe that Microsoft has become too large (for some time now) to really innovate and that they have only really driven major changes to their product set through aquisition activity, but I think that we might just be asking for too much from one organization. Sure, they are going to do things that are in line with what other market players are doing... but I really do like their Live Mesh platform strategy.

To me, the real question is how do you drive innovation without large budgets or small teams. Thoughts?

Labels: innovation, strategy

Insightful, scary and impressive

Charles Fishman has managed to both intrigue and scare me with The Wall-Mart Effect. This book is worth reading for anyone interested in the economy, corporate growth models, supply chain management, manufacturing or sales. Even those with no interest in any of those topics should read the book, just to understand why you SHOULD be interested in this company.

Not being focused on traditional retail or physical product manufacturing in my daily life, the book was still able to get my mind racing with thoughts about how to work with or against the massive force that Wall-Mart exerts on all of us.

Reviewed on Amazon

Labels: book review

I spent yesterday up in New York at a service-now.com executive briefing, which was actually very interesting. Service Now is a SaaS provider for an ITSM suite of applications, but they are also a platform for developing similar applications. We had spoken with their sales team back in October, but getting to sit down with some of their more experienced and technical folks was worth the train ride.

The top two presentation of the day were from Fred Luddy (CEO and founder of Service-Now) and Dave Osman (VP of Global Process and Information Engineering at Deutsche Bank). Coming in third was Rod Phillips (Director Solution Consulting at Service-Now.com), who was a very dynamic speaker that provided two of the demonstrations. He also fielded questions about the implementation process exceptionally well.

If you have an interest in ITSM tools, I definitely recommend that you spend at least a little time looking at Service-Now.com.

Labels: events, ITSM

Labels: personal

I just recently read a book called Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, published by O'Reilly. Amy Shuen has done a wonderful job with this book. Its ability to blend the business, marketing and technology conversation around Web 2.0 philosophies into a cohesive discussion makes this book worth the read. While I was slightly disappointed that the book didn’t spend much time on internal uses for these strategies (which could easily have been added as a seventh chapter), the focus on the value to changing a business was well researched and valuable.

In particular, spending time understanding the various value propositions around Web 2.0 was excellent. From innovation models, to monetization strategies and harnessing the long tail of a potential market, the revenue potential is clearly explored.

One comment that I read from another reader was that he felt that the language was contrived and not engaging enough. I couldn’t disagree more. The book was articulate and readable, especially given the fact that the book covered so many of the dry topics that are often ignored for the sake of hype generating content.

Labels: book review