I’m a member of the online group SdB+PM Forum, a collective of 825 senior project managers who are also members of the Linkedin professional networking group.
All in Management Tools
Are the Privacy Cyberwars Already Here?
In my daily perusal of my Megite news feed, I ran across these two articles: * Ask.com Unveils Search Privacy Tool: Users Control Their Search Data
* Scheme to Destroy Your Competition with RivalMap
Presentation: Blogging and Project Management Survey - Preliminary Findings
This presentation is a progress report on the dozen or so interviews I’ve conducted so far in my blogging and project management survey:
How To Develop a Business-Aligned Social Media & Social Networking Strategy
This document describes a process for helping organizations define and prioritize the steps involved in applying social media and social networking to their operations.
Potential Applications of Social Media and Social Networking in Local Disaster Response
People use the tools available to them when a crisis hits. Increasingly these tools include blogs, text messaging, and social networking systems such as Facebook. The use of such communication tools in disaster and emergency situations is evidence of an obvious fact: the people most involved in an emergency are going to communicate about it. The question is, how can those in an official capacity take advantage of these communication channels?
I received an email today from Penny Edwards, who is studying for an MBA. Penny is conducting a survey on wiki use in a business environment.
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.
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.
I'm using Raw Sugar as a research tool. Here's what I added to my Raw Sugar directory as a description:
According to an article in The Mercury News, HP is cutting back on the practice of telecommuting among IT professionals.
I've worked both sides of this issue but have to give the nod to HP on this one, especially in these areas:
1. IT's interaction with business units
2. Team building
3. Training of younger staff
In the old days of planned release schedules and successively more capable release functionality, the term “beta” was applied typically to limited-release software where both distribution and user environments were tightly controlled and monitored.
Nowadays businesses are being built upon “beta” software that goes into universal web wide availability along with statements of incompleteness and limited support. Users are invited to use and write about the software. Users get early peaks at and access to useful features. Producers get real world feedback which helps further the development of future releases.
Within one week of coming home after a successful first year at Virginia Tech, Number One Daughter started her Summer job hostessing at a large and popular riverfront restaurant in Old Town Alexandria. While driving her to work one day, I asked her how things were going at the job. The conversation that followed reminded me several things relevant to intelligent management practices.
Lately I've been reading Ross Mayfield's Weblog, which I discovered while tracking back an incoming link from him to an earlier posting of mine, Corporate Resistance to Enterprise Web 2.0.
Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext and has feet (literally) in both the development and business worlds when it comes to real world applications related to Enterprise Web 2.0. I like how he thinks and writes about enterprise adoption of systems and processes based on Web 2.0 technologies.
I'm fascinated by peeks into the inside of what actually happens in the real world of Getting Things Done. The web site Bare Naked App could therefore be a voyeur's delight.
Are DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems compatible with the current growth in the use of blogging and social networking technologies that actively promote the sharing of information? Maybe not.
There’s an interesting book excerpt available on the Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” web site titled Managing Alignment as a Process, by Robert S. Kaplan and colleague David P. Norton. I read through the excerpt and what it says about “alignment” is interesting to put into the context of enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and processes.
Basically, “Web 2.0″ means different things to different people.
* To the programmer, it’s a set of tools and techniques that have the potential for fundamentally altering how network based applications and data are managed and delivered.
* For start-ups and venture capitalists, it’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of another bubble.
* For the corporate CIO or IT manager, it’s another set of technologies and architectures to be adopted and supported in an era of continued I.T. department budget strains.
* For newer or smaller companies, it’s an opportunity to acquire technical and business process infrastructure at a fraction of the investment made by older and legacy companies.
* For the marketing manager it’s an opportunity to “end-run” a traditionally unresponsive I.T. department.
* For the CEO of an established legacy industry, it’s a threat of loss of control over customer relations.
* For the customer it’s an opportunity to establish and maintain relationships that are both personally fulfilling and empowering in the face of the traditional power of larger institutions.
Recently fellow blogger Philippe Borremans, owner of Conversationblog, asked me to check out a program he had been using (Qumana, www.qumana.com) to manage his blog. It had stopped working and he asked me, a fellow Squarespace user, to check it out. (Philippe's blog was later selected for the LinkedinBloggers March 22, 2006 "Blog Boost.")
One thing you can do with Google Analytics is compare the references your web site gets from different sources. This installment in my Learning Google Analytics series compares one weeks' visits referred from Google itself (e.g., from searches on Google that resulted in someone linking to my web site All Kind Food) with one one-week's visits that were referred from one particular web site where I had left comments and a link back here on a blog entry.
On of my favorite blogs, Fashion Incubator, has an interesting post about "best practices" (she calls it "standard work") applied to manufacturing in the clothing and fashion industries.