Clayton M. Christensen describes in his innovation book “Seeing What’s Next” IBM’s strategy of focusing on designing computing machines where they control and develop everything, going from processor, memory, hard drives, to the operating system and software. This gives IBM full control over the machine so they can heavily optimise all the components and software for maximum performance and reliability.
“Clients usually ask us how they can drill that hole in the wall. As consultants we are obsessed with finding the best drill that does it in the fastest and most cost-effective way. Sadly, we often forget to ask the client why he or she needs that hole in the first place.” (coaching advice from a VP in my previous company)
Last week, a client asked us for some help with finding a good name for their Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge platform. The internal Headshift chat was buzzing with suggestions and one person remarked that in his previous company they called it “the big black box where knowledge documents go to die.” Sound familiar? Continue reading!
With the ubiquity of the Internet, we see more and more of our data moving to the cloud. There is a potential threat: who will own that cloud? Or differently said, will the cloud enabling companies “turn evil” one day?
Several shark species need to keep on swimming, otherwise they die. Does this hold true for companies as well? If you “stop swimming” will it cause the death of a company, as it will do for a shark?
A lot of people are dreaming about driving a Ferrari one day, unfortunately only a few are privileged. So what do you do if you are a car nut? You start with a Fiat Grande Punto, later on upgrade to an Alfa Romeo, when you get that promotion you go for a second hand Maserati and maybe one day you’ll have budget enough to buy that Ferrari.
One of the first things you learn at university in your first year of computer science is data normalisation. I don’t know about the other people out there, but I found it such an utterly boring course. Mankind has such an obsession with categorising every single piece of data that this behaviour is crammed into the minds of naïve and unknowing computer science students, just fresh from high school.
“Why don’t they understand that social media can help us work more efficiently? Those stupid corporate drones! I want to get it more widespread in the organisation but every time I hit this frustrating wall!”
Let’s be honest with each other, Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 isn’t the best kid in class with respect to being an Enterprise 2.0 or social media platform. Although the dedicated Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Social Computing website boasts the enterprise social computing features of SharePoint, it is a mere “what it should’ve been”, rather than what is being delivered.
With large corporations storing more and more data in their Enterprise 2.0 (and overall IT) systems, we have the danger of getting big data silos or disparate solutions. To make matters worse, they are often stored locally in systems that are owned by different business units with different purposes.
