- About |
- Contributors |
- Contact us |
- Subscribe: via RSS,
- via Twitter +
- sponsored by QuickBase
The term “cloud computing” seems to have come out of nowhere and exploded on the scene in the past year. I wondered if it was just me, or if the term really was of such recent vintage.
To test my theory, I went out to Google Trends and checked to see how the term “cloud computing” was trending. As it turns out “cloud computing” didn’t even appear on the Google Trends radar screen before October 2007. But look at the spike since then:
And what does “cloud computing” really mean? It refers to everything from software-as-a-service, to hardware-as-a-service, to social apps like Facebook that we may use — anything where we are taking advantage of something in central data centers that you access over the Internet. BusinessWeek had a decent explanation:
“The term ‘cloud computing’ encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.”
Cloud computing is a major, fast-growing trend. Even if you are just getting the feel for this term, expect to see it regularly.
Gartner recently gave a cautious thumbs-up to the new iPhone 3G for use by business [1] . While BlackBerrys are still the workhorse of many organisations, giving access to email and effortlessly managing business contacts, the iPhone has now waded into the debate with its ability to not only interface with Microsoft Exchange Server, but also with Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL, and effortlessly provide access to modern, collaborative and connectivity-flavoured social computing tools. With this in mind, the University of South Australia officially announced support for the Apple handset last month, chosen from a short-list that included models from Nokia and HTC. Motion’s BlackBerry device was not listed. Currently, the university has 578 corporate mobile phones, with 183 enabled for high-speed 3G services, allowing users to browse the internet and use email, and has a need to replace approximately 150 handsets each year.
The university will join a list of well-known Australian corporations heading down the iPhone 3G path, including the National Australia Bank (NAB) and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. While some CIOs feel that the device is more of a consumer toy [2], the new security features, the 3G architecture, and its application store ensure that it is squarely aimed at the connect
ed, cloud-working, business professional.
The cool factor not withstanding, I’ve been using an iPhone 3G for the last 2 months, and it’s revolutionised the way I work. It’s a spectacularly simple piece of technology with an interface that adapts to the need of the application at hand. I’m on the road a lot and the ability to have a real browser (not a cut down mobile one), email, contacts and appointments synchronise with Gmail is something that I benefit from on a daily basis. A colleague has a Blackberry, but it lacks the GPS and mp3 capability of other mobile phone devices, making the Blackberry less appealing to those of us who want more convergence in our work tools.
While access to Gmail means I can access my personal email, my workplace doesn’t have open access other than through web mail. Through iPhone’s Safari browser, though, I now have access! When waiting for a meeting, even in line shopping, or waiting to see the doctor, I can check and respond to my webmail, read attachments, and visit websites that I’ve not otherwise had time to do while sitting at my desk.
Scott Forstall, VP of iPhone software, noted [3] that because the architecture is built on the same OS X kernel it has some specific benefits:
For me, personally, the killer application is the Application Store itself. Rather than going back to a computer to search for, download and then install new apps, the Store gives me search and browse access to the full-range of iPhone extras. Many of these apps are free and some only cost a few dollars., but they help make the use of the iPhone a seamless experience.
For example, I use AirMe to take photos and send them directly to Flickr. Other applications let me send photos to Kite or Twitter. This has been a great tool for use at conferences where I’ve been Twittering what’s been presented on using Twinkle and then sharing photos of the event as it happens. When it came to my turn to present, I used a cheap voice recording app to record the audio, and then made it available to Slideshare for the slidecast the very next day. I could have used an app to control PowerPoint from my iPhone, including being able to show me my speakers notes, but preferred instead just to use my Logitech cordless presenter.
My apps? Here’s my 12 favs:
With all of these applications at my fingertips, the iPhone enables me to be more organised and more efficient with my time and keep me connected with my trusted network. If you’re looking for a new smart phone to help with work, or if you’re considering a new way to keep your workers connected in an increasingly busy world, the iPhone might just be the choice of the bunch at the moment.
M
- - - -
2. Tindal, S. (2008) CIOs pass their verdict on the 3G iPhone. ZDNet.com.au. 11 July, 2008 11:06 AM. Online at: < dsdshttp://www.zdnet.com.au…-verdict-on-the-3G-iPhone >
12 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today
From Zen Habits, Leo Babauta talks about how new technology is rapidly changing the concept of work: “So you could wait a few years, resist the new trends, talk about how great things were back in your day … or you could embrace the new rules, and be a part of the change.”
Debunking The Myths of Multitasking
In this interview by Gina Trapani, business coach Dave Crenshaw exposes our false notions on productivity, and gives his take on how to create an ideal work environment: “Ultimately, a business or an organization is a reflection of its leader. The leader has to make personal changes before an organization as a whole can improve productivity systems. If not, the leader will constantly undermine any systemic improvements.”
Profanity Works
David Heinemeier of 37 Signals ponders research which found that swearing relieves stress and help foster office unity: “It seems that profanity can work as a record button for the brain. It brings people to the edge of their attention as they’re trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to be offended or inspired. And then the content warrants the emphasis, the idea seems to stick better and longer and with more affection.”
The Catch-22 of finding meaningful work
Matt Elliott writes about Generation Y’s idealism in this call for a reality check on Y Working: “You can see the Catch-22, can’t you? It’s that big, obvious thing heading straight at us. Young people don’t want to wait around for meaning, so they leave. Employers don’t want to give their new people big projects, because new people are notorious for leaving after a few months on the job.”
Learning From Every Job
There’s a saying that if you stop being better, you stop being good. Web Worker Daily’s Mike Gunderloy talks about how to keep yourself competitive: “But as a longstanding contractor myself, there’s one rule of thumb that I try to keep in mind when choosing between potential jobs: Only take a job where you’ll learn something.”
What Impact Is Technology Having on Privacy around the World?
For this report, Scientific American’s Larry Greenemeier looked at almost every corner of the world to study the negative effects of the Internet on society: “The state of privacy in the 21st century is a worldwide concern, given the Internet’s global reach. Although several key themes emerge when examining the impact of technology on privacy and security—including cyber crime (and crime fighting), the application of old privacy laws to new technologies, and whether companies can share customer data without consent—different countries find themselves grappling with distinct problems.”
The Rise of the Digital Nomad
Jay White explains the need to create a new corporate culture to support the increasing number of telecommuters: “Being a Digital Nomad used to mean either a traveling salesperson or perhaps the occasional work-at-home employee. Today, it means all of the above but it adds a caveat that includes capitalizing on connectivity and opportunity regardless of your location. Who can respond to multiple conversations the fastest and who can create solutions and opportunity for less.”
Enterprise 2.0: The Nature of the Firm
Bernard Lunn provides a little historical perspective on Enterprise 2.0 and the critical changes happening in the corporate world today: “The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970’s, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980’s, and accelerated in the 1990’s with globalization. Now, late in the 2000’s, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise.”
In response to my post on ROI for social computing, Atul Rai suggested we need to address the ‘whats in it for me’ factor, rather than just ‘build it and they will come’. So what do people get by collaborating?
Various theories from social psychology have been used to explain this ‘whats in it for me’ factor to better understand how to successfully introduce social computing tools into corporate environments. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is often the first theory put forward.
It reminds us that humans are social creatures and have recognised social needs that must be fulfilled. For a growing majority, the collaborative tools that Web 2.0 has brought into the world provide an excellent way for people to meet their social needs:
In corporate environments, these social needs are still important. Belonginness also applies to internal communities of practic; esteem applies to work peers; and the act of work itself is still an important aspect of self-actualisation so long as work is meaningful to the individual.
So what does this mean for managers considering strategies for the introuduction of collaboration tools? How do we take into consideration the ‘whats in its for me’ factor?
1. Understand that individuals will be social whether you like it or not. If you close down access to Facebook or Twitter they’ll look for other ways to connect to their external friends and their internal communities of practice. If they’re Gen-Y or Connected Workers limiting or removing access may even drive them away.
2. By blogging, individuals can establish themselves as thought leaders within the organisation and meet a range of personal, social needs. Let them tell the stories about project tools, techniques, and lessons learned as a part of a knowledge management strategy.
3. When people blog, others will know what they stand for and will know who to turn to when they have questions. This is better than posting a question on a discussion board and not knowing who might respond.
4. Instant gratification is an important factor for meeting needs — why else has the mobile phone been so popular a piece of technology? Allowing people to contribute without barriers will encourage them to participate more often.
5. Being seen to be a part of a larger community also has its own rewards. Identification is an important part of our social needs and having instant access to group-leaders through Twitter, for example, and being seen to be talking with them, has big WIIFM appeal.
M
Dave Pollard, who thinks and writes about the future of the world, has a good post on tools, technologies, and artifacts that will go the way of FAX and CDs. Included on his list: hard drives, “wall of text” reports & documents, “best practices,” email & groupware, corporate intranets, corporate libraries and purchased content, cell phones, classrooms, meetings, job titles, and offices. The notion of job titles going away resonated with my own recent post on the importance of well defined roles in some circumstances.
Pollard says,
“Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)”
I agree that titles in this case are meaningless, but that does not mean that people should not be clear about their roles in each of the projects that they contribute to. And sometimes these roles may also be “titles.”
Meanwhile, Dave Snowden has been developing an organizational model to support working across organizational silos; he refers to this concept as crews. A crew is an organization formed for a particular project, mission, or task. It “ritualizes and formalizes” cross-silo activity by ensuring that the crew starts with identifying the specific roles that it needs and then fills those roles by selecting people from different silos. This is, prima facie similar to the “Hollywood model,” which many researchers and writers have used to exemplify a potential future state of work wherein individuals belong to professional associations (”guilds”) and come together to work on specific projects. As Snowden goes on to say,
“A crew works because its members take up roles for which they are trained, and where their expectations of the other roles in the crew is also trained and to a large extent ritualised … A crew has cognitive capacity beyond the sum of its members, members occupy their roles for limited time periods…”
Being Snowden, Dave also integrates his concept of network stimulation into the crew model, in which he sees “people swapping between roles to allow for continuity. ” Within an organization (or, in the case Dave is writing about, a network of organizations) the requirement for working cross silos and swapping people in and out ensures that the network ties broaden and deepen over time.
Back to Hollywood: I found it very interesting to read “Can Hollywood Help LinkedIn?” in the New York Times this week. It appears that LinkedIn is looking for a niche in an industry that has long used a networked, “crew,” guild-based model in which roles and titles identify precisely what skills a person offers as well as access to relationship information that reveals context.
RightNow is a customer centric CRM company located in a very nice part of the world, Bozeman, Montana. I just came back from a visit my daughter near there in Jackson, Wyoming as I write this. They have just announced a new version of their August ’08 release that contains a number of new features. I have written about them before on this blog, (see Customer-centric CRM from RightNow and on Fast Forward - Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail). Last week I spoke again with Andrew Hull, Director of Product Marketing to learn about the new features.
The new RightNow Customer Portal allows organizations to brand and personalize their web service experience with interactive web 2.0 information resources. The portal provides for the integration of company generated content with user-generated content. For example, a customer’s YouTube videos, Flickr posts, or input from an online forum can be added to the online information provided by the company to offer more context, authenticity, and variety. They have also provided integration with Adobe Dreamweaver to help company web designers create a more consistent look for the self service portal with the firm’s other web presence and add other creative design features. They found that a vast majority of their customers were familiar with this tool. Here is an example of a Customer Portal.
Co-Browse and Proactive Chat lets companies offer live, interactive assistance for online consumers. Co-Browse allows company agents and consumers to be on the same screen. For example, an IT help desk can see what the problem is a caller is encountering or better help a customer complete the final steps in an online shopping experience. Co-Browse can be activated by an agent talking to a customer on the phone or during an online chat session. The configurable Proactive Chat component generates invitations to begin a chat session based on definable circumstances, such as being a premier customer or spending a certain amount of time on a Website. Here is an example of Co-Browse from RightNow’s agent desktop.
These three components can integrate to follow a consumer through an online experience if necessary. Andrew offered this example. Suppose a consumer needs help with a wifi router. They can go to the self-service web site of the router provider and access the company help augmented by a customer-generated YouTube video of how to resolve the issue. The Proactive Chat can be launched if the consumer is having trouble with self-service. Then the consumer and company agent can move to Co-Browse to see the consumer’s computer screen and help make the final adjustments or settings. Here is a Proactive Chat screen.
I like these additions as they all support greater communication between companies and their customers and operate in the spirit of web 2.0 to promote greater customer engagement.
It’s clear (to me and I am guessing to most or all of the readers of this blog) that the future of knowledge work involves a great deal of continuous collaboration .. which implies social computing, which implies the use of web 2.0 tools and services.
Knowledge management (KM) was one of the early responses to a workplace being flooded with ongoing streams of information … knowledge creation, knowledge capture, knowledge re-use, contextual search, collaborations spaces, communities of practice .. the list of new terminologies stretched on.
of course, today we are seeing the early days of widespread conversations about Enterprise 2.0 … the introduction and penetration of collaborative tools, services, practices and dynamics inside the firewall (and the firewall becoming more of an osmotic membrane of sorts as opposed to a moat-and-gate protected fortress wall.
One of the more popular posts I have made in the last several years contained an interview with Dave Snowden, in which he looks forward to issues regarding the construction and use of knowledge in an era where social computing tools, services and dynamics are beginning to be adopted for use in knowledge-intensive workplaces.
Here is Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge holding forth on some the important ways social computing is affecting the ways we work with knowledge.
.
.
Dave Snowden - KM and the Impact of Web 2.0
Powered by Qumana
Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
Among the Web-based tools he's reviewed: Zoho, QuickBase, and TrackVia.
Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”.
The AppGap has hosted a series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers intended to illuminate how new apps and approaches are changing the way we work and help companies and individuals implement better collaboration, project management, and productivity practices and solutions. Access, via the links below, the recordings, each about an hour long, of the discussions.
- 5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done
- Should Your Business be Friends with Facebook
- The Future of Work
Need help in getting organized? Want to keep things from falling through the cracks? Check out this free and simple to use online "To-Do List" called Intuit Task Manager, offered by our sponsor Intuit QuickBase. Sign-up is easy so you can get started with it right away.
Intuit's QuickBase, the sponsor of this blog, has just been named an Editor's Choice by PC Mag. Check out the review which calls QuickBase a "a surprisingly simple and elegant application."
Recent Comments
Can today's project management software be done better? What can online CRM help companies companies accomplish? Which development platform can help individuals and organizations build better online databases, Web based applications, and HR solutions? And what are the processes and best practices that help organizations large and small achieve success. Find out more.
AppGap Tips Artisan Economy Change Management Collaboration Collective intelligence Communities Culture Distributed Work Economic Development Enterprise 2.0 government 2.0 greenIT Information Architecture Intranets KM Learning Management Networks + Networking Notable + Quotable Prediction markets productivity Product Management QuickBase Reviews Scenarios Security Semantic Technologies Shareable Databases social media social networks social tools Sponsored Post Talent Management Technology Management Tips + Pointers Tips for Tough Times Videoconferencing Virtual Environments Web 2.0 Web 3.0 Web Apps Web Commuting Webinar Work Design
