Real value of social media

It occurs to me that one of the the biggest, and seemingly ignored, benefits of social business tools is the benefit to team dynamics. In simpler terms -- how well the team get along is a contributer (or hinderance) to team performance. Research shows that for geographically dispersed teams and virtual teams, social interaction is key to helping the team acheive high performance. (citation needed) It's genuintely important to have those water-cooler conversations and build relationships between team members. For the hardcore skeptics of SocBiz, there may be no direct value in personal micro-blog updates - but the improvement to team relationships and espirit de court translates into better performance in project work, better hand-offs for transactional work, and better general communication. The net effect of social media in the organization may be most powerful just in raising this soft, indefinable productivity.

More to come...

What good is "Enterprise Search"

Interesting topic came up at work the other day about the real value of search to a business. McKinsey recently published some data about this, and by their research, U.S. enterprises realize $74 to $110 of increased productivity per knowledge worker per month. That's $890 - $1330 of value per year. The full report is definitely worth a read, and I'm thrilled to see that it comprehends social networking tools like Facebook.

It's only with social network content that search realizes its full potential. The most value and benefit will be realized when you can search structured data, documents, blogs, project artifacts, web sites, and everything in between all in one consolidated view.

Here's a scenario: Plant manager misses a profitability metric. One should be able to search a Product Line Profitability dashboard, do a decomposition tree to find which product or part has the biggest impact on the miss. Let's say there's a quality issue - too much scrap. One should then be able to search for Six Sigma projects focusing on scrap, and come up with projects on similar product lines. The plant manager could then scan the BlackBelt's blog, glean information from the posts, and scan their activity stream to see if they're working on a similar project. At some point, one could send an Instant Message requesting assistance with the issue.


In the long term, the real value of search isn't in how much more efficient it makes us when finding information, it's the ability to connect us with the people and ideas that we hadn't originally comprehended, make new associations, and help us synthesize concepts.

Marketing managers in big companies: Listen up!

I'm reading "Website Design and Development: 100 Questions to Ask Before Building a Website" by George Plumley. It's a good collection of things to think about before setting up a web site. For a small business, this is exactly the approach one should take.

There is a block of questions missing from this text however. For those working in organizations with established Information Technology or Information Systems teams, one would be smart to engage the IT organization before answering any technical questions. The risk of technical debt is substantial here. If a marketing team were to engage a vendor directly without consulting with IT/IS, the vendor could create a solution which is incompatible with the company's infrastructure.

If I could add a supplementary section, I would include the following question near the beginning of the book, which will lead to a host of subsequent questions:

Who on the IT team should I work with? Consult with the IT team to engage the right people. Listen to them.
- A business solutions person can help you identify if an existing solution will fit your needs, and help fit this project into the queue.
- The enterprise architect may be able to help fit a new web site in the overall context for the organization, and help with upstream and downstream process integration.
- A project manager might be assigned to engage the hosting team, network, firewall, web admin, and system administration folks.

And to expand on Plumley's first question - why build a web site at all? - What do you intend to achieve with this web site? One must have a very firm understanding of what the site actually will do and not do before starting. The requirements gathering work that this book facilitates need to support the core purpose of the web site -- anything else introduces complexity, time, and support costs. To paraphrase the Mad Hatter, describe your requirements, and when you get to the end, stop. Don't let scope-creep or "evolution" put you on a treadmill, where the project is never really done, or the original purpose gets diluted with immature changes that do not fit the original concept of the site.

EC2

I've been thinking a lot about Amazon lately. The Elastic Compute Cloud is changing how consultants provide services to small business and deploy custom solutions. A couple years ago, I would have sold a VMWare farm to a small business office, offering excellent resilience and capabilities in a small footprint. Today - I would never sell that solution. The risks and infrastructure requirements for even a half-rack solution are far too expensive compared to solutions deployed in Amazon.

My home lab is a good example. Last winter I scoured eBay and invested in some servers coming off a lease. I have enough compute power and storage to run 10 virtual machines and store 4000 DVDs, and it cost less than $5k. (I chose a hardware solution for my lab to better understand virtualization.)

But for a busines customer, I would have built the environment in Amazon for a couple hundred a month. It would be 2 years before I hit my up-front costs, and I would never have to worry about power, air conditioning, insurance, security, wiring, or backups.

As a consultant, it is a revolution! I don't have to invest my capital to build a solution, and then wait the Net90 to be reimbursed. I setup accounts in my customer's name, with their credit cards, and I just bill for services. I have less exposure to risk, and I can sell a more robust solution.

Translating this to the enterprise is still a tough sell, but for independant IT folks, Amazon makes too much sense not to deploy.

My take on HP's WebOS decision

HP's recent decision to shutter their WebOS and tablet division strikes me as extremely short-sighted. Spinning-off the PC busines strikes me a smart move because PCs are on a path to extinction, but HP now has no in-house solutions for Tablets or Mobile phones. In a future dominated by ubiquitous computing and connectivity, having in-house knowledge, platforms, and intellectual property are necessities. HP hasn't moved fast enough to deploy consumer-oriented Internet services (aka Cloud) which might help it maintain long-term market dominance, so having client platforms for cloud services seemed like a real opportunity for long-term advantage. And HP needs to purchase a lot of companies if they hope to compete with software and service giants Oracle and IBM.

Short-term, HP will probably recoup their costs by selling Palm's patents, but it's hard for me to understand how they'll deploy that capital in their existing businesses to better effect than the investment in mobility.


P.S. See Al Lewis' column in WSJ. "H-P's One-Year Plan" highlights all the stuff I forgot. What is going on at HP?