Capping IT Off

Wall Street Journal: Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures

Gosh, I sure hope we are making a good attempt at not being a boring a corporate blog here! According to the Wall Street Journal most corporate blogs will bore you to death. Fortunately, the author of the article provides some good hints and examples of good corporate blogs. Let's copy their style and we should be safe. ;-)

I would really value your opinion of our blog now, dear reader. Did I just see you suppress a yawn?

Posted by Mark Nankman on July 1, 2008

Milking the web

The web has become a very lively place. Around the globe, people are happily sharing all sorts of experiences with any subject you can think of. There now is an enormous collection of thoughts, opinions, stories and conversations that you can draw from when you are selecting a car, finding a suitable mortgage, finding the best hospital for treating your mother's heart condition, purchasing top quality roasted Guatemalan coffee beans or finding out personal information about someone you are thinking about hiring.

I use different web resource types (blogs, search engines, feeds, ...) for finding out about different subjects. Moreover, the resource type that I use for finding out more about a subject depends on my connection with the subject. This is visualized in the picture below. I call it my web usage spectrum.

The horizontal axis marks the favourableness of subjects. On the left are the subjects that I don't care much about and on the far right are my favorite subjects. The vertical axis marks the frequency at which I use certain web resources for finding information about subjects. At the bottom are my least used resources and on top are the ones that I use all the time. The length of the boxes inside the graph says something about the universal usefulness of a resource. It is by no means exact nor did I collect any statistics.

I wish to stay abreast with subjects that I am strongly connected with. For that I am relying on resources that I value and trust. As you can see in the graph, I follow these resources using syndication and collaborative tools. For less favourable subjects I take a more traditional, pre-Web2.0-approach.

My web usage spectrum is highly subjective and reflects how I prefer to milk the web. I adapt it every now and then when I learn new tricks. Usually an adaption leads to an improvement in the quality of the information I find, the time I need to find the information or the amount of fun that I am having.

My guess is that my web usage spectrum is not unique and probably sub-optimal. I know that it is tweakable but I am relatively slow at adopting new tools (I am skeptical and allergic to change...). For example, I was only very recently convinced of the use of twitter (you can follow me here).

This all poses an interesting question: How do you know if your spectrum is optimal in the sense that you use the right resources the right way? One approach to answer this is to compare your spectrum with other spectrums. So please share with me: how do you milk your web?. What does your web usage spectrum look like?

Posted by Mark Nankman on July 1, 2008

Internal blogs matter

Like many other companies these days, Capgemini has an internal blogging community. I used to write frequent posts on my own internal blog, but I have been passive for over 6 months. The reason is that I do most of my blogging out in the open these days, which is already taking up much of my time.

I must also admit that I had another reason, besides being too busy blogging elsewhere, for pushing aside the internal blog-o-sphere: the fact that it is only visible from within Capgemini. But I have changed my mind after reading this post on the "Go Big Always" (GBA) blog by Sam Lawrence. I am very much inspired by this post. Thanks for waking me up, Sam!

The internal blogging community of Capgemini is fairly large. People from all over the globe are active in this community. There are blogs that focus on development methodologies, on specific technologies and products, on right shoring experiences, et cetera. However, I am not sure how actively other employees read these blogs and benefit from their contents.

Most people at Capgemini (at least as far as I can see) use good old e-mail for finding and sharing information. They simply direct a question or item of interest at an e-mail group. This usually results in quick answers too. On the other hand, people also complain about receiving too much generally directed e-mail that pollutes their e-mail boxes. Maybe we should use e-mail for specifically directed information only, and use the blogs for generally directed information. That would take a rather large collaborative effort in our case.

But would that really solve anything? Moving information from e-mail boxes to RSS feeds doesn't make much difference to me. I still have to read them, and I still won't have time enough to do that (the number of feed subscriptions I have in my RSS Software exceeds 80...). For me personally, podcasts form part of the solution. I listen to them while I am commuting or mowing the lawn (if I had one). The podcasts that aggregate news and information are usually the best ones.

So, I can only conclude boldly with this: All Capgemini personnel should get iPods. Depending on your role, your skills, your position and your ambitions, your iPod will be automatically synchronized with what you need to hear. We'll probably need to be a little bit further in the development of the third version of the Web to really make this work...

Posted by Mark Nankman on May 12, 2008

Wikimania

Warning: this blog post has an extremely high link density.  When I wrote this, there was no article on "Link density" on Wikipedia yet. Feel free to create that article yourself. As of version 2.0 of the Web, everyone is allowed and entitled to do just that. In 1995 (long before the term Web 2.0 was coined), Ward Cunningham made this possible with his simplest online database that could possibly work. He was recently interviewed on the FLOSS Weekly Podcast and his original WikiWikiWeb is still online.

Probably because of its inherent simplicity, the wiki has become immensely popular. To give you an idea of this popularity, here are some crude statistics:

• Google yields almost 300,000,000 for "wiki",


• WikiEngines lists 147 implementations of the simplest online database,


• The most popular wiki engine MediaWiki has been downloaded 16,456 times in the last 2 months (also see the figure below),


• Wikipedia (based on MediaWiki) currently has 2,301,479 articles in the English language,


• Wet Paint, one of the most popular wiki hosting sites, has registered over 810.000 wiki sites.

Now you might think: "So, wikis are hot. Thanks for the stats, but what's in a wiki for me?" A wiki has proven to be a simple and effective tool for building a database of collective knowledge of a group of people. Fruits of a wiki range from solutions to problems to ideas for new products. The added value of a wiki lies in the possibilities that it creates for harvesting collective intelligence (crowd wisdom) and for collaborative innovation. Tim Hyer excellently explains this. I have much trust in the wiki model too. Some time ago, I even played with the idea of applying that model to a country's civil code. Thinking of adopting a wiki yourself, but not entirely convinced yet? Then watch this 21 episode movie series about wiki adoption (Blip TV).

The wiki certainly seems the easiest way to add collaboration functionality to your website. All you need to do is choose a wiki engine, style it to your company's style guide and your done, right?. Well...not exactly. You will first need to choose a wiki engine. There are quite a lot of wiki engines that we can choose from, but fortunately, there is the Wiki Engines wiki that provides us with a nice top 10 of wiki engines. You could start by picking a wiki that you can deploy in your back office. There are, of course, more selection criteria. Selecting a wiki engine is just like selecting any other software package. The Wiki Choice tree might ease the selection process.

Once you have launched your wiki, how do you make it work? We all expect to see a flourishing community, but how are you going to convince people that they should submit their knowledge and ideas? In order to grow a wiki needs fertilization (generating interest) and cultivation (monitoring and moderation), so point out a Champion. A wiki, like any other social site, requires substantial investment before you can reap its fruits. Will there be any return on your investment? What does a wiki cost? Maybe you will find answers to these questions at the International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym) (the WikiSym website is, of course, a wiki).

Finally, here's a list of 12 wiki's that actually work. How is your wiki doing? Are you reaping fruits or are you still investing?

Posted by Mark Nankman on March 25, 2008

BI and Financial Risk Management

I'm sure we're all acutely aware of the current financial market problems as a result of sub-prime lending and the the down turn in the economies in many countries resulting in bad debt.

We could look to better intelligence to predict the market down turns, to look for the early triggers in the economy to help spot the warning signs and to help manage the situation. Complex mathematical models that give varying levels of probablistic outcome would have shown the shifting nature of the risk. We've also had increasing levels of legislation and regulation to identify individual risk and fraud and general improvements in risk determination at the Business to Consumer level. And yet after all these things we've seen a financial service market in near melt down.

What has surprised me most in this current period of crisis is the seeming lack of understanding of corporate exposure to risk through institution to institution trading. It appears that financial institutions may have been deeply concerned with the individual risk of a customer transaction, they've not had a suitable handle on the bigger and as events have transpired, potentially organisation crippling decisions they've been taking.

How many companies are looking back at their balanced scorecards and their array of metrics and rethinking which ones are really important to survival? I hope most of them.

Posted by Jonathan Gibbs on March 20, 2008

iPodification obsolete?

Ron Tolido wrote that iPodification leads to nothing (quite literally) eventually. Until then, we will unfortunately have to carry around all our cumbersome gadgets. Sure thing, they are indeed getting smaller and smarter, usually right after you bought one, rendering your new precious obsolete (no matter how long you wait).

In the impressive 6 volume epic "Reality Dysfunction" Peter F. Hamilton writes about a far and dazzling future where people have the ability to have themselves genetically customized. They have genetically enhanced senses and can even digitally (for lack of a better term, I use digitally, because surely, digital computing will become extinct) record experienced senses for later replay. These senses are shared on a universe wide web. This same medium is used for telecommunication. Messages are e-thoughts with attached e-experiences. A nice example of a compelling nothing that iPodification could lead to.

In the mean time, iPodification is taking some very interesting shapes. Take the iPodified baby for example, or Levis' iPodified jeans. But mostly, iPodification means making "digital stuff" portable. I don't know how to put that better. The digital stuff can be anything: books (have a look at Podiobooks), maps, movies, language courses, schedules, music, e-mail, news, directories... Some of that stuff is expected to be there when you need it, even if you don't know you are going to (context bound stuff, like local maps and directories, and ads too because without them there is no business case).

In short: Based on your current situation, your iPod should intelligently synchronize itself with a personalized repository of digital stuff. Wait a minute, were we talking about a PDA or an iPod? The boundaries between gadget categories become blurred. PDA's entertain you while helping you navigate and iPods are organizing your life while you are dancing. How applicable does that make the term "iPodification"? Has iPodification become obsolete already? Help me find a better word!

Posted by Mark Nankman on March 11, 2008

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

A quote often used and with various theories on its origin, some attributing it to Dr. Deming although others claim him to be misquoted. Irrespective, the simple reality is that a lot of executive management is done “to make the numbers”; which is fine so long as the numbers you’re trying to make are still relevant.

Industry measures like churn and average basket size all grew out of historical models and operating principles, but today we’re in a rapidly changing environment where some of these historical principles are being overturned. For instance we have the long tail that challenges the traditional view of the market, and the importance of customers is changing from a simple basket size or repeat purchase model with the advent of cross selling within an ecosystem.

While companies who wish to be agile and change the rules of the game might be suitably led from the top, execution can be hampered by the slowness of change in the way businesses measure themselves, coupled with Market analysts still wanting to see traditional measures to gauge underlying performance which can rapidly translate to impact on the share price. Maybe we’ve seen the consequence of not having these measures to fall back on. Was the dotcom boom and subsequent bust based on not really understanding the underlying measures that these businesses needed to conform to? Having one hand on the fundamentals of a business, even when trying to change, seems to be a pretty sound foundation, but an organisation should not let these dominate, they should be scrutinised and reassessed, and they should reflect how the business needs to be, not how it once was.

Posted by Jonathan Gibbs on December 4, 2007