John P. Holden, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), President, The Woods Hole Research Center, and Teresa & John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy, Harvard University, delivered a lecture at the annual meeting of the AAAS on February 15, 2007, titled “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being.”
All in Collaboration
John Newton is one of the bloggers discussing SalesForce.com's purchase of content management software vendor Koral. (For information about Koral check out Zoli's Blog or Read/WriteWeb.)
This purchase is a significant move, for several reasons:
WIkipedia Revisited (Again)
I've witnessed firtshand some of the editorial craziness surrounding Wikipedia. Frankly, I'm tired of the subject.
For those who are still awake to this topic and would welcome a wonderfully long and opinionated discussion of the issues swirling around Wikipedia, check out WIkipedia Revisited, by Walt Crawford, in the newsletter Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 7, Number 3.
Timothy Noah’s editorial I’m Being Wiki-Whacked in the Sunday, February 25, 2007 Washington Post (registration required) tells the sad tale of one author whose biographical entry in Wikipedia may be deleted because a Wikipedia editor has determined that it is not “notable” enough.
Needed: Enterprise Strategies for Innovation, Content Management, and Social Media Infrastructure
Jeffrey Phillips’ blog post Innovation Location suggests that one of the management challenges that the innovation process creates is “… where should it be done, and who should be doing it?” He lists the following possible locations:
* Within R&D and/or a product group
* Across product groups
* White Space innovation
* Innovation between a business and a partner
* Innovation in the open
“Most Folks Belong to Several Communities” — this is one of the points made by Jeremiah Owyang in his discussion of replacing the term “Audience” with ‘Community.”
Is Innovation Management a Process or a Project?
I've been thinking about innovation management recently in connection with some consulting projects. The question I've been considering is how to best manage the innovation process that surrounds adopting various social networking and collaboration tools.
One can view the adoption of such tools as an innovation.
Web 2.0 and the Manhattan Project
While listening to a podcast of a recent interview with Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I was struck by the question, “What if the Manhattan Project had been conducted using the collaborative and social networking tools we now have?”
The Peer to Patent Project has published a series of technical documents that describe requirements for the test system that is under development to expand "public participation" in the patent prior art research.
Chief among these documents is the Use Case Model. This describes a series of actions that need to be supported by the new system.
Mike Stopforth called me from South Africa last week to chat about Web 2.0 in the enterprise. We talked about a lot of things. One topic that piqued my interest was how different technologies are adopted at different rates in different cultures.
Let's Get Real about Enterprise Web 2.0
As I talk with friends, prospects, and clients, and as I cruise the blogosphere, it’s beginning to look like some sanity is emerging into the world of “enterprise web 2.0.”
I learned yesterday that last night a Writely “planned outage” was planned so I rushed to make necessary modifications before I emailed the sponsor tha a new version was available for his inspection.
I need not have worried. The planned time, midnight Eastern time, came and went without a hiccup. One moment I was using Writely. The next moment I was using “Google Docs & Spreadsheets” and Writely was no more.
Luis Suarez recently blogged and podcasted about social bookmarking services. He highly recommends BLINKLIST, a service that I have not used.
I have been using RAWSUGAR, COGENZ, and CONNECTBEAM, so I also have been forming some personal opinions about social bookmarking.
I learned basic data analysis techniques by studying the relationship between demographics and political opinion poll responses. As an undergraduate in a graduate Political Science course at Ohio State University I used 80 column punch cards (send me an email if you don't know what that means) to instruct an IBM mainframe computer to crosstabulate age, sex, income, and race data with voting behavior and political opinions.
Now you can do the same stuff online with little more than an Internet connection and a browser.
Introducing Collaboration Technologies to the Enterprise is a Challenge
One of the interesting topics that came up several times at last week’s The New New Internet conference here in Northern Virginia was the challenge of how to introduce collaborative tools into an organization. This is a topic that is well reviewed in a recent post by Shawn Callahan in the Anecdote web site titled Why People Don’t Use Collaborative Tools.
One blog I read is the Microsoft Knowledge Network Team Blog (registration required). It describes development and features of the "Knowledge Network" product that will accompany Microsoft's upcoming Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 which is also in Beta status.
The title refers to the Wikipedia article that was begun last week and mentioned by Andrew McAfee in his blog. It was a brief article that repeated a few of McAfee's ideas and began listing some relevant links. Recently, though, someone deleted the Enterprise 2.0 article. Gone.
Rod Boothby (or someone using Rod’s name) recently stopped by and left the following comment attached to my recent accelerating network effects post:
The IT Director in a Large Manufacturing Company Discusses "Baby Boomer Brain Drain"
Last week I interviewed “Ferris” (not his real name) about how his company is handling the pending retirement of senior IT staff.
Ferris is the IT Director in a large manufacturing company. Ferris’ company doesn’t have the mix of custom legacy Cobol and Assembler based mainframe systems that Boris the Insurance Company CIO has.
Last week I interviewed “Boris” (not his real name) about his and his company’s handling of the pending retirement of senior IT staff who are critical to the maintenance and operation of a number of his company’s business-critical mainframe legacy systems.
I was initially interested in learning whether Boris thought that modern social networking and collaboration tools might be useful in documenting and transferring the specialised expertise staff needed for maintaining critical systems. Instead, the discussion took a different direction and revealed some underlying issues that go beyond technology enabled knowledge sharing.