Portals and KM

Are You a Happy Tweeter or a Gloomy One?

There was an interesting article in the New Scientist, Happier people tweet together. Psychologist Johan Bollen of the University of Indiana and colleagues tracked 102,000 Twitter users over six months, analyzing the 140-character-or-less text from 129 million of their tweets with standard techniques from psychology. In other words. “they measured the emotional content of the tweets as reflected in the presence of positive or negative words from a lexicon previously established by psychologists. From this they could assess the "subjective well-being" of the users through their tweets.”

They found that happier people - those recording a high subjective well being - tended to be tweet with people who were also happier. The same was true for those who were gloomy. "It turns out that Twitter users are preferentially linked to those with whom they share a similar level of general happiness," says Bollen.

Of course there could be many explanations for these results. The researchers suggested happy or unhappy people may seek out similar people as reflected in their tweets. Another possibility as Bollen suggests, “it could be that the emotions expressed even in short tweets have an infectious quality, lifting peoples' spirits or filling them with gloom, depending on what they read.”

There have been a number of studies that indicate that people with similar states of “subjective well-being” tend to be involved in social networks in the physical world. This study suggests that that behavior may carry over to the virtual world.

In addition, sentiment analysis of text is a subjective and not yet precise art. This is true whether the analysis is done by humans or by computers. It was unclear from the article but looking at 129 million tweets must have involved some machine support. Perhaps the machines only literally looked at what they were directed at and did not make “decisions” on the sentiment.  

Perhaps I will start looking at my fellow tweeters. Since I tend to tweet more about ideas that feelings and those I interact with most on Twitter do the same, there may not be real indication. I know I use terms like good read to praise a blog post but not sure if this truly a reflection of my “subjective well-being.” For the record I do tend to think of myself as a happy person with a positive outlook. I am also attracted to people with a similar orientation. 

What do you think? 

 

My App Gap Posts for March 2011

Here are my AppGap posts for March. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for March. There will be more in April.

Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption

Wrike Project Management Goes Mobile

rPath Supports the New IT: Dynamic and Cloud-based

Crocodoc Eases the Task of Working with Online Documents

Retrevo Uses Semantic Technology and Machine Learning for Consumer Advice

Measuring the Economic Impact Of Using Google Apps

 

The Four to Five Year Tenure for CIOs

Patrick Thibodeau recently wrote an interesting piece for ComputerWorld, CIOs aren't CIOs for long. He talked about the relative sort tenure for CIOs and conveyed as assessment by Frank Petersmark, CIO of Amerisure Mutual Insurance:

“The first year as CIO is the honeymoon. The second year is about strategy and planning, and the third year is about implementing. In the fourth year they (the higher-ups) figure out that the execution isn't going that well, and in the fifth year, you start looking for your next job.”

The article also pointed out that ironically most quantitative survey support this five year tenure or less. For example, Gartner states that the average CIO tenure is less than five years. Janco Associates conducts regular salary surveys and found that the median job tenure for a CIO is now four years and one month. Down from four years and seven months in 2008. The Society for Information Management (SIM) has it at five years and one month in the U.S.

There are likely many reasons for this but not properly setting and meeting expectations may be a significant as Frank implies. There si also the changing technology situation as the cloud moves in. This eventually should free CIOs from some of the burdens of maintaining legacy systems within the firewall. This may allow CIOs to be more strategic.

A recent study by IDG found that cloud computing is enabling a more central role for IT in shaping business strategy and driving innovation. However, we are still in transition. While 54 percent of the IDG respondents survey participants acknowledge the current value of IT is largely defined by its role as owner and operator of IT infrastructure, they believe within two years, the primary value of IT will become managing the IT supply chain. This will change the skill set and that may effect the tenure situation.

Supporting this trend, Seth Harris, executive search firm leader is quoted in the ComputerWorld article, "The searches are taking longer because the client understands the strategic value of the CIO more so than at any other time."

A great example of the new business oriented CIO is Tracy Hackshaw, is the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. I met him at Lotusphere where he discussed how the government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts in very creative ways. They are clearly successful in looking for what their customers, the citizens, want and acting on these requests. I later interviewed Larry Bowden with IBM who said that Tracy is a role model for where all CIOs need to be in a few years or they will be gone.  Companies need to do all they can to keep people like Tracy. 

 

Disaster in Making: Letting Google Influence on How We Cook

Here is a horrible sign of the dumbing down of the world and that also exposes a flaw in Google’s popularity ranking approach. TechCrunch recently covered on how Google’s Robotic Recipe Search Favors SEO Over Good Food. It reported,” “every month about a billion of its searches are for recipes. The dishes that its search engine turns up, particularly those on the first page of results, have a huge impact on what Americans cook.”

Unfortunately a perhaps well-intended move by Google could make this a food disaster. It announced that it was adding a new kind of search, specifically for recipes. It inadvertently sided with the quick-and-easy faction against the cooking-matters group. As tech Crunch reported, “The problem is that this new search effectively prevents the thousands of excellent cooking sites and blogs from ever seeing the light of day. More importantly, those smaller sites and blogs are where much of the best work in food is happening online.”

I have written about food blogs a good bit in the past and find them wonderful. Here are a few sample posts, Exploring Food Blogs, More on Food Blogs, and List of Food Blogs. One of my favorites is Russelnod: the way we ate then to the way we eat now, written by my good friend Don Lesser.

TechCrunch gave a great example of the consequences of Google recent move. Doing a search for “cassoulet,” the French dish with beans, meat and other good things, you can refine the results by time. However, your choices are “less than 15 min,” “less than 30 min,” or “less than 60 min.” There is no option for more than 60 minutes. A classic cassoulet takes at least 4 hours to make. What ever happen to Slow Food?

The TechCrunch post concludes. “If they don’t change their current approach, I fear to contemplate the future of American cooking.” Me too.

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Dogs and Cats

This is the twenty second and last in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. Dogs appear very popular here. Having two dogs and a cat I am always interested in how these animals are doing where I travel. Here are a few examples. 

                  

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Western Cape Interiors

This is the twenty first in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. The environment in the Western Cape area around Cape Town is very different from the rest of South Africa. It is generally dry and the summer is their dry season while it is the rainy season for much of the rest of the country.  

                          

 

Supporting the Human Side of Content Monitoring

Thierry Hubert and I recently gave a webinar on the Human Side of Content Monitoring through the Marketing 2.0 network run by the Human 1.0 group. The session was recorded and we will soon make it available. Human 1.0 is in business to help you turn your customer-facing processes into social processes. I am part of the their network of consultants. They also manage the FastForward and the AppGap blogs that I write for.  In this post I want to share some of my opening comments that provide context for the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and address the issue of when to use computers and when to use people and how to best have them work together.

One of our favorite books is Don Norman’s Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine.  In this book Norman argues that it is time for us to adopt a more human-centered perspective and to insist that informational technologies enhance and complement human cognitive capacities rather than undermine them. I have worked in many situations where the role of the machine and the role of the person was in dispute. For example, in developing support systems for call centers, I always tried to provide the reps with the right content in context and access to the right people so they could intelligently deal with customer questions. The same approach was also applied to insurance underwriters. 

Well others wanted to create automated scripts for the call center people and automate the underwriting decisions. Guess which approach the people favored.  Fortunately in the situations I was involved with the people won. 

This is also our guiding principle at Darwin. We want to better enable people to make decisions by using Chaos Theory principles to let the content self-organize and then creating useful content visualizations to facilitate the human mind’s ability to sort through content as you will soon see. It is the opposite of semantic technology that tries to get the computer to understand language and do some of the cognitive work. There can be a place for both.

So you can dumb down a task or smarten it up. Now there are perhaps some things that computers do better than people. IBM’s Watson has demonstrated that you can build a machine to handle some level of cognition. However, this takes considerable effort. Watson was built and trained by a team of experts over a number of years. It uses math algorithms coupled with semantic analysis to allow it to understand a natural language question and determine the probability that its answer is correct.

However, Watson is good for a very specific task and it is not perfect. The years of training may make it better than most, if not all, humans in playing Jeopardy. However, it will fail against humans in most of the other tasks we face every day. In fact, recent research noted that all the computers in the world have now reached the processing capacity of one person.

So the issue is not whether computers will outpace people but how the two can work together. Computers are very good at doing boring tedious, repetitive tasks than would drive people crazy at a rate and scale far beyond what people can do even with a fresh start on their best days. This frees people up to do the more complex and interesting tasks. That is what we are striving for with the Awareness Engine.

The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson wrote, “It is the unforeseen that causes the greatest disturbance, not the expected.” One of the skills that people have over computers is knowing where to look next and to quickly see anomalies. If you dumb down a task you will likely take away the person’s ability to see the unexpected. You will reduce discovery and stifle innovation. In contrast our scan cloud visualization displays the top 100 themes within your content of interest so you can quickly sort through them (see below for an example looking at social media issues over a recent 24 hour period).  Here is an orientation video. The more you know about a topic the more value you can derive from this Scan cloud.

For example, during a presentation we did of the Darwin Awareness Engine to a large energy holding company, the information curator, responsible for providing the CEO with reports on all public, political, and news events related to the company’s business and its owner’s public image, spotted the term “London” in the ScanCloud.  Most other terms and their highlighted relationships where within the expected context, but “London” was an anomaly (only someone with an intimate understanding of the company’s activities would have made this assessment).  She asked to be excused for 5 minutes and returned to the meeting. 

She shared with us that despite the tools currently available to her to comb the Web and the press, she had not noticed the event she just discovered using the Awareness Engine.  In fact, the event related to the violation of a UK court gag order that could have caused material damage to the company.  She identified the blogger and reported it to the Legal department. Subsequently, she added the event to the CEO’s daily report.

External algorithms and machine driven intelligence rely on rules and predetermined taxonomies that can hide the unexpected. People-centric tools can enhance our natural, and perhaps evolutionary, cognitive abilities to notice the unexpected.  The graphic below that Thierry created illustrates some of these contrasts between machine and human intelligence. Both have their place. 

Jackbe Offers Real-Time Intelligence

JackBe has been in the mashup and application development business for some time and I have covered them on several occasions. The most latest was: Jackbe Releases Presto 3.0 and opens internal Enterprise App Store. They recently announced enhancements to their newly launched Real-time Intelligence platform for the enterprise.. This is part of a number of new features within Presto 3.1, their real-time intelligence platform. Last week, I spoke with John Crupi, CTO and Chris Warner, VP of Marketing about their 3.1 release and other new features.

John and Chris said what originally started as an enterprise mashup platform has now evolved into a real-time (business) intelligence platform. This makes sense to me for several reasons. First, they are moving from an enabling technology to a business outcome.  Second, this business outcome is becoming increasingly strategic and third, many of the pundits are predicting that real-time will be an increasing focus of business intelligence.  They paraphrased an analyst at Gartner, “using up-to-date information, getting rid of delays, and using speed for competitive advantage is what the real-time enterprise is all about.”

They provided some useful contrasts between traditional BI and the new real-time BI.  First, the focus in real-time BI is on what is happening right now versus going back into a data warehouse to see what happened in the past. And in Real-Time BI there is greater support for self-service, collaborative decisions and low dependency on IT support to obtain the data.  While data sources can include a data warehouse in the new real-time BI, they move beyond that as a limitation to also looking at what is happening right now on the Web and elsewhere. 

Rather than using predetermined, static data models, real-time mashups can be created on the fly to explore new sources as they arise. Often speed is more important than completeness to make timely decisions. Rather than have “perfect be the enemy of good enough” Presto can quickly pull together the right content for decisions on demand and allow experts to fill in what remains. They have also created a number of data visualizations and can make use of third party tools for more. Presto 3.1 is not designed to replace traditional BI reports and dashboards, but make better use of them. I like this.

Another part of the new real-time BI is delivering intelligence (in the form of Apps)  wherever it is needed, One focus of the new Presto 3.1 release is to provide secure, real time access to information to mobile devices.  Apps can run on any mobile device (Blackberry, Android, iPhone, iPad, Tablets), as well a SharePoint webpart or in an enterprise portal, often without any code changes. They have modified the UI to accommodate the smaller screens. They also have a new mobile version of their App Store (still in beta, as they say) that runs as a native app to provide a better App browsing experience. And they are leveraging HTML5 for Web distribution of the apps themselves. This allows for more dynamic applications. Here is a sample iPhone apps covering crimes in DC.

Here is a sample of data visualizations on the iPad.

Another aspect of Presto 3.1 is enhanced support for SharePoint 201A0. SharePoint is becoming a dominant player in document management (and corporate portals). They have made it easier for SharePoint to be both a source and a destination point for Real-Time BI. The latter is especially important, as it can be difficult to get content into SharePoint outside of manual cut and paste methods. Jackbe made Presto3.1 a peer with SharePoint 2007/2010 so it is now easy to have content flow in both directions. This also enhances security. They see SharePoint remaining a major player in the market so they have worked hard to enable better connectivity between the two worlds, those in SharePoint and those outside it.. It is generally less expensive to make use of the capabilities within Presto 3.1 to enhance SharePoint content for business intelligence purposes than to resort to custom development.

Jackbe has also created a ‘Free Starter Edition’ to let organizations give Presto  a try with little risk. It is full-featured and available for up to 5 connected users. Support comes through the Jackbe community (www.jackbe.com/dev). This is a smart move. It is interesting to see the evolution a technology that remains one of the building blog blocks of enterprise 2.0. I look forward to what they do next. 

 

US Charities Outpace Other Sectors in Social Media

Here is more great work by Nora Ganim Barnes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This study is on the usage of social media by US charities. The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 by the 200 largest charities in the United States based on a list compiled annually by Forbes Magazine.

To gather this data, the Center for Marketing Research conducted nationwide telephone surveys of the nonprofits on the Forbes list. Their findings are based on detailed interviews with executives of the 78 charities that responded. Those that participated had a wide range in mission, average gifts, and total revenue. They include the Salvation Army, Easter Seals, Habitat for Humanity, Shriners Hospital for Children and the American Heart Association.

In 2007, the first study on the use of social media by large charities showed that these large non-profits were leading large and small businesses as well as universities in their familiarity with, usage of, monitoring of, and attitude towards social media. One year later, in 2008, the second study showed that the lead in knowledge, adoption and positive attitude was still intact.

By 2009 the research found that 97 percent of charitable organizations were using some form of social media. Now the latest iteration of their research finds that all of the top charities in the US are using at least one form of social media, either blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare), texting or video blogging. Usage of LinkedIn has jumped from 36% to 58% in one year, while the use of MySpace as a platform has declined from 30% to 22%.  Both Foursquare and texting were new in the 2010 study and made respectable showings at 28% and 44% respectively.

At present sixty-four percent of the organizations are blogging, showing no significant change from last year. Facebook (97%), Twitter (96%), and YouTube (92%) are now the most common tools used Ninety percent of those studied in 2010 report social media is very important to increasing awareness of their mission. The researchers concluded that while these organizations are best known for their non-profit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives. 

This is great work by the non-profits. Now business has to catch up. 

 

Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Push Enterprise Collaboration Adoption

Harmon.ie has now released a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of the dominant enterprise collaboration tools.   These include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. The goal is to increase user adoption of the broader collaboration platforms now available and stop sharing docs as attachments to email. The company was founded as Mainsoft in the 1990s but recently switched their name to align with their main product, harmon.ie.

I spoke with David Lavenda of hamoni.ie who offered some interesting research. SharePoint’s adoption by IT departments has been pervasive with close to 80% of the enterprise collaboration market. I have seen this consistently reported from several sources. However, what are the business users doing?  Harmonie had an independent firm look at the issue. They found that eighty-three percent of business users continue to abuse email, ping-ponging document attachments back and forth, thus creating document chaos instead of using SharePoint, Google Docs or other collaboration suites.  In addition, the study found that one third of survey respondents with access to SharePoint refuse to use it, or use it about once a month.

One of the main obstacles is that business users tend to ignore new IT tools that require them to switch contexts, juggle multiple browser windows, and learn new collaboration habits. I have seen this happen many times. So harmon.ie was launched to bring the social collaboration capabilities into email where business users already work. With one client the implementation of harmon.ie allowed them to go from a 30% adoption of SharePoint to a use by 70% of their business users in a few months.

Another client, Amway, company, has 6,000 email users working in their headquarters. They used to send 73,000 email attachments a day, on average.  Since deploying harmon.ie for SharePoint, the company reports a 42 percent decrease in the average daily volume of email attachments.

Several versions of the social email capability are offered. There is harmon.ie for SharePoint Enterprise, which transforms Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with advanced access to SharePoint document collaboration, email management, and social features within the Outlook and Office Communications Server interfaces. This capability appears as a side bar within SharePoint. You can see a sample side bar below.

David showed me how it works. When you send an email with an attachment, a message pops up enabling you to put the document in SharePoint and send a link instead without leaving email as shown in the screen below.

Then others can go from email to work on the centrally located document within SharePoint. Access controls are in effect reducing the possibility of the attachment getting in the wrong hands.  You can also see the profiles of the document author and all editors. Their presence can be observed and IM, video chat, or email can be sent to them as shown below.

You can also rate documents and sort them by ratings using that SharePoint capability but within hamon.ie within your email. Basically, harmon.ie brings many of the SharePoint capabilities within email.

For Notes users, there is harmon.ie for SharePoint, Notes Edition. Previously branded Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, this email sidebar transforms Lotus Notes into a collaborative workspace through access to SharePoint documents, email management, calendars, and enterprise social networks within the Lotus Notes^® and Lotus Sametime^® interfaces. They have found that there are many companies that have Notes as email and also SharePoint. Some of them are quite large. It works the same as the harmon.ie SharePoint version with a side bar on the right.

There is also harmon.ie for Google Docs Enterprise, which enables people to collaborate on documents over the cloud, in their native file formats, using Google Docs and the Microsoft Exchange^® email infrastructure. 

They offer both a free personal version and a commercial enterprise version. In both cases, there are over 3000,000 users. The commercial aversion has been implemented in over 80 companies.  

The time savings here is quite obvious. David mentioned a recent comparison they conducted. More than one hundred IT professionals and business users found that harmon.ie’s drag-and-drop access to shared documents is six times faster than the native SharePoint interface, which entails switching contexts and juggling several browser windows.  People averaged 61 seconds to publish an email message on SharePoint via the SharePoint interface. However, they completed the same task in just 11 seconds using harmon.ie. I can see this happening.

Comprehensive SharePoint adoption remains a challenge. As I have written about on this blog a number of firms are offering collaborative capabilities that sit on top of SharePoint to help with this challenage. Here is a different approach as the SharePoint capabilities are brought into the user’s prime workspace, their email accounts. I can easily see the value of this method. It will be interesting to see where this goes. 

 

Supporting Economic Recovery Through Software Innovation

Software innovation goes way beyond the high tech industry as more products are increasingly computer driven. For example, I saw recently that the new Chevy Volt has four-fold increase in computer components over prior cars. Mike Gilpin at Forester looked into this issue and recently offered the report, How To Foster Software Innovation To Exploit The Economic Recovery. His contributors in the report included Mary Gerush, Roy C. Wildeman, Dave West, Tom Grant, and David D’Silva. They interviewed experts in a dozen organizations that excel at software innovation and recorded the important process, organizational, cultural, geographical, and staffing practices that promote software innovation.  I was pleased to get a review copy.

Their research focus was as much on the leadership concerns of management as it was on the enabling technology. One of these concerns was an expectation that 2010 (and beyond) would bring a return to growth and a return to a focus on innovation as the top priority. At the same time they felt that they had, “in one way or another (outsourcing, attrition, soul-destroying management practices) frittered away their innovation competency, and that they needed to take urgent action to get it back.”  I have read about this shift from cost cutting to innovation in other sources and it is certainly a welcome change.

 Mike reported that Forrester is forecasting growth of 9.2% for the software industry in 2010 off a somewhat depressed 2009 base. Other industries will grow at varying rates, but Forrester expects information technology to play a significant role in the strategies of many enterprises aiming to return to profitability and growth. It is nice to see growth as a goal and not just profits. We certainly need growth.

They feel that what Forrester calls, Smart Computing, will play a significant role. This smart computing is defined as:

“A new generation of integrated hardware, software, and network technologies that provide IT systems with real-time awareness of the real world and advanced analytics to help people make more intelligent decisions about alternatives and actions that will optimize business processes and business balance sheet results.”

I put the whole quote here because I am a big believer in real-time awareness and the use of analytics. The transparency within enterprise social media offers a rich opportunity here and a number of people see this use of analytics to be the next major step in enterprise 2.0.  Analytics are not limited to social media but social media offer a new form of analysis - what people say and think, and not simply how the transactions and processes are running.

The report offers some examples where software innovation can play a major role including connecting mobile customers to a business through direct connections with mobile apps such as the Nationwide Mobile for iPhone app, the State Farm Pocket Agent, or the Pizza Hut iPhone app. I have seen elsewhere that the majority of computer interactions will soon shift from desktop computers to smart phones so firms should move into this channel full force. Another area is increasing the intelligence brought to a point of sales experiences by knowing more about the customer to make additional recommendations for product use of related sales.

Software innovation comes in two flavors; incremental and disruptive. The report expands this to four flavors incremental depth or incremental breath and disruptive that brings out a new product to an existing category and the creation of a new category.  Each has their value and each begins by listening to customers but it does not end there. The other path is predicting want customers might want in the future and then validating this with them.

The report goes into great detail on these and related issues. One of their concluding recommendations is to develop a social media strategy to compliment your software strategy. This can help with implementation. You can find the report at the Forrester site. 

 

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Wupperthal

This is the twentieth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. Wupperthal has been a Moravian mission station since 1965. It is located near Clanwillima several hours north of Cape Town. The name derives from the Wupper River in Germany. Two German missionaries arrived in 1829 and started a settlement. The populated grew after slaves were freed in 1838.  Rooibos tea is now one of the main products. The village is reached through a dirt road over a series of hills.

      

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Sevilla Rock Art

This is the nineteenth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. The Sevilla Rock Art area is accessed through the Traveller’s rest 34 km from Clanwilliam 240 km north of Cape Town. The art was created by the San several centuries ago. It is in the Cedarberg Mountains region. You can also see a giant termite hill below. 

      
  

Overcoming Information Overload on the Web: Part 3: Organic Semantics

This is the third of a three part series on how the Darwin Awareness Engine™ addresses some of the key problems generated by information overload on the Web. The Awareness Engine is a Web aggregation utility for anyone needing to maintain awareness of emerging events from the Internet and intranet.  The technology provides a temporal semantic visualization of events, by means of a Scan Cloud™ that facilitates a rapid understanding of trends, outliers and anomalies.

Issue Three: Organic semantics:

The Semantic Web and semantic analysis require human classification intervention and semantic model algorithms to infer and interpret meaning. Emerging concepts such as folksonomy and new assumptions that drive analytics challenge these semantic technologies.  The challenge is rooted in the detection of new concepts, and the application of evolving analytic approaches for new business usage.  The current model is robust but rarely resilient because it relies on machine-driven inference of meaning. 

Our technology’s use of temporal semantic correlation reveals the evolution of correlated patterns of terms.  It does not claim to know the meaning of the information, but simply displays what is.  This allows for the meaning to be inferred by the user.  A by-product of our technology is an organic semantic model that can be used to see the relationships that exist between terms over a period of time.

This representation accelerates the identification of terms to be included in Semantic Web classes, but also captures the intensity of relationships over time in an organic semantic web.  The use of such a resource can help in creating recurring pattern forecasts and improve variation detection for semantic analysis tools.  

This concludes our three part series on combating information overload on the Web. We feel that our key differentiator is our ability to overcome information overload by accelerating information consumption through synthesized visualizations outlining relationships and acceleration of emerging themes without attempting to analyze the meaning of the aggregated information. Although different in their delivery, intent and scope, our competitors are search engines, web aggregators and web analytic solutions.  

Our technology is being used to monitor and to be aware of emerging themes from: different industries, clients, political topics of interests, risk mitigation, business intelligence, brand awareness, journalist themes, enterprise 2.0 collaboration, conference buzz, twitter, etc.. It can also be used to improve advanced analytics and drive term-less search of the enterprise’s knowledge assets from our Scan Cloud navigation. Here is listing of Awareness Engine FAQs. 

 

Overcoming Information Overload on the Web: Part 2: Popularity Versus Temporal Correlation Ranking

This is the second of a three part series on how the Darwin Awareness Engine™ addresses some of the key problems generated by information overload on the Web. The Awareness Engine is a Web aggregation utility for anyone needing to maintain awareness of emerging events from the Internet and intranet.  The technology provides a temporal semantic visualization of events, by means of a Scan Cloud™ that facilitates a rapid understanding of trends, outliers and anomalies.

Issue Two: Popularity versus temporal correlation ranking:

Search engines operate on popularly ranking to deliver information.  This method is rooted in the Web 1.0 where information existed in great quantity and had a longer shelf life.  The Web 2.0 explosion generates information that is often isolated and relevant for a short period of time. This type of information may only appear in the 100th-plus page of search engine results.  In contrast, our temporal correlation-ranking model seeks the latest published information regardless of its popularity. This new model considers that the themes associated with the information are noteworthy if other related information is emerging across a defined timeframe.  This suggests an emerging or accelerating movement.  Darwin Awareness Engine reveals this emergence through its BuzzTape and ScanCloud.

Example:  The BuzzTape on Darwin Awareness Engine’s General News Edition displayed the relative acceleration of the term “Lou Dobbs”. Clicking on “Lou Dobbs” displayed a ScanCloud created from over 200 informal Web 2.0 social events showing terms such as “racist”, ”Latino Americans”, “petition”, “fire”, “CNN”  all created within the last 2 hours.  We searched Google News for the following five days without any coverage of this social reaction against Lou Dobbs. 

While being specific in our search, by adding terms that our technology correlated, we discovered related Web 2.0 documents buried deeply into the search results.  It took one week after noticing the social event for the press to address the issue and make the announcement of Lou Dobbs’ resignation over his indiscretions towards the Latino community.  Note that, in this example, we never programmed the system to specifically target Lou Dobbs.  The emergence was detected by our technology, as a result of his name being a term with great acceleration over just a few hours.

In the next post we will look at organic semantics

 

Overcoming Information Overload on the Web: Part 1: Too many sources, too many events.

This is the first of a three part series on how the Darwin Awareness Engine™ addresses some of the key problems generated by information overload on the Web. The Awareness Engine is a Web aggregation utility for anyone needing to maintain awareness of emerging events from the Internet and intranet.  The technology provides a temporal semantic visualization of events, by means of a Scan Cloud™ that facilitates a rapid understanding of trends, outliers and anomalies.

Issue One: Too many sources, too many events.   

As an information aggregator we target theme-specific sources through search and specific feeds.  Although accessible from on site edition, this body of information often remains overwhelming.  In contrast with traditional search engines, we do not first deliver the events in lists. Instead, these are presented in a Scan Cloud, revealing both the relative importance of terms as well as their inter-relation. This interactive representation makes it easier to understand the content without having to read through the content of the articles to understand “what is going on” and detecting emerging themes.  The user’s natural ability to infer meaning is leveraged by the tool.

Example:  During a presentation of Darwin Awareness Engine to a large energy holding company, the information curator, responsible for providing the CEO with reports on all public, political, and news events related to the company’s business and its owner’s public image, spotted the term “London” in the ScanCloud.  Most other terms and their highlighted relationships where within the expected context, but “London” was an anomaly (only someone with an intimate understanding of the company’s activities would have made this assessment). 

She asked to be excused for 5 minutes and returned to the meeting.  She shared with us that despite the tools currently available to her to comb the Web and the press, she had not noticed the event she just discovered using the Awareness Engine.  In fact, the event related to the violation of a UK court gag order that could have caused material damage to the company.  She identified the blogger and reported it to the Legal department. Subsequently she added the event to the CEO’s daily report.

In the next post I will look at popularity versus temporal correlation ranking as a means to uncover relevant content.

 

 

My Favorite Tweets for March 1 – 14 2011

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

RT @outstart: Skills for collaboration by @jackvinson http://bit.ly/i6ZrLi

RT @SylvieBokshorn: "Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss" http://nyti.ms/dO84qM

by @amcafee Data From The Edge http://bit.ly/eOoeJZ via @stangarfield

RT @mfauscette: Are You Ready for the New Peer-to-Peer Economy? http://goo.gl/rtuAX

RT @SBoSM: How to work with bloggers and influencers http://bit.ly/crFbXr

RT @outstart: Enterprise Social 2.0 Brussels conf notes http://bit.ly/eQi8Fl

RT @darwineco: from Apple To Zynga: Game-Changing Tech Partnerships http://bit.ly/dRjkmw

RT @amcafee: New post: When new techs meet old ways of working. @hubspot @rentjuice exs: http://bit.ly/fquxkQ

RT @outstart: from @absolutezero Enterprise Social 2.0 Conference – Day 2 http://bit.ly/hM18cP #e20

via @jackvinson: good point by @elsua: think / teach on how to use tools you have. http://bit.ly/gWfMb3

RT @fgossieaux: importance of culture in everything you do http://bit.ly/hrW1Mf - have long agreed > good points

Small Businesses Doubled Use of Twitter in 2010 http://bit.ly/dPUgVC

RT @outstart: Social Media To Grow As Customer Service Tool http://bit.ly/fW0v6K #sm

6 tools to measure your personal branding efforts http://bit.ly/gz7XTA

RT @mfauscette: 9 Web Apps for Gathering Customer Feedback - http://on.mash.to/gYDga5

RT @kevinokeefe: Companies that blog generate 55% more traffic to their website http://lexne.ws/8p

via @ITinsider @LotusKnows: The 2.0 Adoption Council Cases Andy McAfee mentioned at Lotusphere. http://bit.ly/igSJHC

RT @socialtechno: Sometimes stuff you can measure is not what matters http://bit.ly/fcvRJd via @euan > so true

RT @outstart: Collaboration Opportunities + Challenges for #Mobile Workforce http://bit.ly/hrwRWM

Only 1/3 of workers are engaged in their jobs http://bit.ly/fDF8Sg

Darwin Ecosystem makes the 100 companies that matter in KM http://bit.ly/hQ1te3

KFC shares Colonel Sanders stories via social networks http://bit.ly/gIs0RS > luv KFC

RT @AshleyFriedlein: How we (Econsultancy) measure Twitter via Google Analytics http://bit.ly/g4tlZt via @Econsultancy

Web nominated for 2011 Nobel Peace prize - does that mean we all win? http://bit.ly/hJbyHZ

Reciprocity: The Word of 2011 http://bit.ly/g02rWQ great post by @dpontefract - my fav word

Twitter Makes Its Oscar Impact http://bit.ly/enn9Ks > saw this first hand

 

 

 

Using Social Software to Increase Business Performance

The Deloitte Center for the Edge has issued a new paper, “Social Software for Business Performance” that discusses how companies can leverage social software to improve business performance in the short-term and transform it in the long-term. It states that early adopters of social software have the potential for gaining financial benefits. They can also develop skills and experience that can help build a stronger competitive position over time. It claims that social software has unique capabilities to address current operating challenges and improve operating metrics. I would agree.

To capture this value, however, companies need to more systematically assess the operating metrics that have the greatest potential and then strategically deploy social software to ensure near-term performance impact with modest investment.  Metrics, in the end, need to be business related and address bottom line issues and not simply cover areas like usage. For example, they claim that adoption metrics have not historically addressed what matters most to employees, managers or executives. As long as adoption is the primary measure of success, resistance, at all levels, will likely block successful social software deployment. I agree here also.

Companies must be strategic. Social software, applied against the problem of exception handling, can directly and measurably impact operating metrics and improve business performance.

The paper states that the current technologies (pre-social software) support standard business processes but fail to support the dynamic informal communications needed for resolving exceptions. Employees need tools that enable them to navigate organizational boundaries, connect to the right people and accelerate exception resolution.

This was the point made in McKinsey’s excellent 2005 paper The next revolution in interactions. Those authors wrote, “In today's developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services.” They say that traditionally the focus of business and IT investments has been on production rather than interactions.  

Now a new class of enterprise software has emerged to address these interactions and the recent McKinsey paper, The rise of the networked enterprise:  Web 2.0 finds its payday documents some of the financial and other benefits from social software.

The Deloitte paper closes with several excellent points. Companies must act now as those that move quickly can reap significant financial rewards and develop skills and experience that brings the potential to help them build a stronger competitive position. Skeptics will finish last. Those who operate without a strategy will be will not perform much better.

 

 

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Lambert’s Bay

This is the eighteenth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. Lamberts Bay is known for its long stretches of uninterrupted white beaches and abundant marine life which gathers in the cool blue waters. It began as a fishing village and this is still a major factor. Lamberts Bay is named after Admiral Lambert of the British Navy who did a marine survey of the bay between 1826 and 1840.  In 1887 Mr Stephan bought the commercial buildings and built the hotel in 1888

    

 

 

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Clanwilliam

This is the seventeenth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. Clanwilliam is located 240 km north of Cape Town. It is a center of the rooibos tea industry. First stetted in 1725, the town was first known as Jan Disselsvalleij but was changed to Clanwilliam in 1814 by Sir John Cradock who named the town after his father-in-law, the Earl of Clanwilliam. Clanwilliam is one of the then oldest towns in South Africa. The Old Gaol seen below in the first picture is now used as a Museum. It was also used occasionally as a garrison during the Anglo Boer War. The nearby Cederberg Mountains are a major climbing area. 

                  





 

 

Join Our Darwin Webinar: Supporting the Human Side of Content Monitoring

Thierry Hubert and I are pleased to provide a webinar through Marketing 2.0, Supporting the Human Side of Content Monitoring. It will air on March 24 from 1 – 2PM EST. It is co-hosted with Human 1.0. The session is free and you can register through this marketing 2.0 site.  Here is our session description:

The transparency within social media offers a rich source to monitor the conversations within communities. At the same time it can contribute to the growing problem of information overload. One approach to these two issues is to use semantic technology.  While semantic methods allow for machines to understand information, there is no machine as complex as the human brain and its cognitive power to correlate what is meaningful from what is not. In this session we will cover a complementary approach (awareness engine) that does not rely on semantic technology, but rather uses data visualizations to allow an individual to easily understand the essential themes emerging from a massive number of events and conversations.  

Awareness engines operate on the premise that people, rather than computers, know best about where to look next. In this session you will see how real-time awareness plays a key role in making sense of timely and unstructured information, and revealing an organic and intimate semantic pathway within a filtered body of information.

We hope you can join us. 

You Can’t Tape-Delay Social Media; Web TV Convergence is Here

As I wrote a few weeks back, TV Web Convergence is already occurring through multi-taskers. Now could the Grammy people not know that their show would attract a lot of social media people tweeting about the show, the winners, and the losers.  So why did they do a tape delay for the West Coast? As Cory Bergman wrote, “the taped (delayed) broadcast was getting underway, all of the top Twitter trends were related to the Grammys. This is just another confirmation of what I wrote last week.  You cannot separate TV from social media and The Web. The convergence has arrived.

The live blog on Grammys.com was even worse as organizers didn’t even try to cater to the West Coast audience. Just as West Coast users first logged into Grammys.com, they saw the biggest spoilers of the night from the end of the East Coast show. Cory adds that ‘two-screen experiences are now the norm for many TV households.” This is especially among key younger demograpghics that network television desires. Social engagement is at its highest for live events “where the outcome is uncertain,” said Twitter’s Robin Sloan after MTV’s VMA awards, which was broadcast live on both coasts. 

 

Nielsen Norman Group Names Best Intranets for 2010

Nielsen Norman Group has announced winners in their 11^th annual contest for best intranets for 2010. In the announcement Usability expert Jakob Nielsen was quoted, “If there’s anything that has been overused, abused and hyped almost beyond the level of cliché, it’s ‘knowledge management.’ It might therefore be better to say that the winners in this year’s intranet design contest were very strong in ‘managing knowledge’ on their intranets. Employees are the ultimate knowledge resource, and the winning intranets provided features to transform their behavior into manageable knowledge. In particular, organizations used social networking—a natural inside the enterprise—to give employees practical and simple ways to communicate with one another and even change the way work is done at the organization.”

So if read this correctly knowledge management was mostly useless until social networking came along.  While the introduction of social networking and other social applications has grealty increased the potential of knowledge management in my opinion, I would hardly say that KM was simply a cliché before their advent.  You can set up siloed document repositories as a strawman for bad KM but when it is aligned with business processes I have seen a lot of value over the past 15 years. Having said this I do like the strong support for enterprise 2.0 concepts in this current report.

It is ironic that such weight is placed on social networking since social media was seen somewhat skeptically by the same group when the 2006 winners for best intranets were announced. The 2006 summary said that the winners “took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques.” It also said. “Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of “what I did on my last date.” This is an anachronistic straw man as business blogs had been around for several years, getting high marks from Fortune, Business Week, and Harvard Business Review as early as 2005. Blog on.

The 2010 winners are described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s 433-page report entitled “Intranet Design Annual 2011: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” co-authored by Amy Schade, Jakob Nielsen and Nielsen Norman Group researcher Patty Caya. The report is available for download from the Nielsen Norman Group website. In alphabetical order, the 2011 world's 10 best intranets are:

AMP Limited (Australia), a wealth management company

Bennett Jones LLP (Canada), one of Canada's largest law firms

Bouygues Telecom (France), a telecom, mobile, fixed, TV, and Internet communications services company

Credit Suisse AG (Switzerland), a global financial services company

Duke Energy (US), an electrical power holding company

Habitat for Humanity International (US), a non-profit, non-denominational Christian housing ministry

Heineken International (The Netherlands), a leading brewer and owner and manager of a portfolio of beer brands

KT (Republic of Korea), an information, communications, and technology company

Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A. (Portugal), a leading construction enterprise

Verizon Communications (US), a provider of wired and wireless broadband and communications services to US consumers, as well as of global business networking, data, and managed solutions to enterprises worldwide

There were no repeats from 2006 when Verizon competitor, Comcast, was named along with Volvo, DaimlerChrysler (nsme at the time), Microsoft, and others.

 

 

World's Total Combined CPU Power Now Equals One Human Brain

Here is an interesting fact. John Timmer writes that a pair of researchers, Martin Hilbert (USC) and Prisicilla Lopez (Open University of Catalonia), have been looking at the growth of computer power and storage over the past twenty plus years. They found that GPUs account for the “lion's share of the 6.4 x 10¹⁸ operations a second that the planet can now perform.” They also showed a compound annual growth rate of 86 percent over the study period. Breaking down the results by devices, they found by 2007 94% of our technical memory was in a digital format and that phones held six percent of world processing power, but the big story was gaming hardware, which shot up to a quarter of the total computational capacity, pushing the PC back down to a two-thirds share. Supercomputers are apparently rare enough not to measure.

However, before we get impressed with our technological prowess, the authors make some comparisons with biology. "To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10¹⁸ instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second," they write.  So all the computers in the world have now reached the capacity of one person. Congratulations.

At Darwin we have long respected the human brain and designed our Awareness Engine™ to enhance the human brain’s capacity to decide where to look next and quickly scan through large amounts of content to find what is relevant, as long as the visualizations around this content are designed to help with the process. This is welcome news. 

 

Recommind Supports End-to-End eDiscovery

Recommind provides predictive information management software through search-powered business applications. I last spoke with them in 2009 (see: Recommind’s MindServer Search™ 6.0 Addresses need for More Effective eDiscovery). Recently, I spoke with Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s VP of marketing and General Counsel. I noted the unusual job combination, and Craig said when your main clients are law firms and law departments within corporations, the combination helps. We mainly focused on their Axcelerate™ Review & Analysis suite with Predictive Coding™ and how it impacts eDiscovery.

First I asked Craig to define eDiscovery. It is a term that I have seen used both narrowly and broadly. Craig said it was initially used in a more narrow sense to refer to the process of preserving, collecting, reviewing, analyzing and producing relevant documents after a legal process has begun. Now, it generally extends to include information management in anticipation of possible legal issues, as well as during them, while also addressing regulatory needs. This reflects a more proactive approach that is being adopted by many Recommind customers. This broader approach means that content collection is not an isolated activity but one that is integrated into an enterprise’s total information management system on an ongoing basis.

Cisco is using Axcelerate to take a more proactive, strategic approach to eDiscovery. One of the drivers of increased eDiscovery costs is the explosion of enterprise content, which ironically Cisco is helping facilitate with its technology that simplifies the creation and transfer of large files, such as videos. Cisco wanted to have its own enormous stores of enterprise data easily accessible ahead of any legal issues that might arise. They also wanted greater cost containment and predictability so that legal costs do not dictate when they settle and when they fight a legal challenge.

Axcelerate offers customers like Cisco a powerful, end-to-end platform for eDiscovery management. First, Axcelerate’s Predictive Analytics™ capability automatically categorizes documents and enables deep analysis of the data at the start of a legal process, before major costs have been incurred. This greatly reduces the amount of expensive manual labor by legal experts as they decide which documents are relevant and/or privileged in a case. It can create a taxonomy on the fly based on the content and/or work with an existing taxonomy. Here is a sample Review and Analysis screen.

Here is a diagram of how the entire process works.

Second, Axcelerate’s Predictive Coding™ technology and workflow automatically analyzes, prioritizes and codes all documents in a collection. After a knowledgeable attorney reviews and codes a small number of documents, the software can automatically sort through all remaining documents on its own, in the process flagging all other pertinent documents while setting aside the rest. This dramatically expedites the document review process, slashing eDiscovery timelines and costs by 50%-90%. 

Third, Axcelerate’s Predictive Sampling™ methodology provides metrics on the accuracy of the Predictive Coding process, thereby making Predictive Coding not just the fastest review but also the most accurate and defensible. The availability of a specific accuracy rate makes courts far more comfortable with the process, as it goes well beyond what is considered “reasonable” – far more so than traditional linear review. Here is a sample Predictive Sampling screen.

Craig said Recommind offers both on-premise and private cloud options. The private cloud option has been growing fast (over 500% in 2010) as firms see the cost savings and flexibility of cloud solutions and become more comfortable with them.

Recommind offers other search-based applications as well. We briefly spoke about Decisiv Categorization, which many companies use for information management and governance. It uses Recommind’s patented Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) technology to look for patterns in the text within documents and automatically categorize them. I think that as the explosion of content continues there will be increasing applications for the technology that Recommind brings to the market. 

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Hermanus

This is the sixteenth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. Hermanus is south of Franschhoek and is famous for whale watching. The Southern Right whale spends a number of months in the area and you can easily see them from shore. They were mostly gone when we got there but a few remained and we could easily see them.  We also went sea kayaking with some seals. 

             

                       




 

 

Cape Town South Africa Area: Franschhoek Wine Region: Part Three – More Wineries

This is the fifteenth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. The Franschhoek wine region is east of Cape Town and was settled by French Huguenots over 300 years ago and retains a French influence. I covered some wineries in my last post. Here are more and another lunch. 

                           

 

My Fast Forward Posts for February 2011

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in March.

Cloud Positioned to Grow within Mid-size Companies but are they Prepared?

Email Usage Down and Social Networking up in 2010

Forrester Says Global Tech Spending is Expanding

Using Smart Content in the Enterprise

Creating Successful Online Communities

Using Software Innovation to Fuel Economic Recovery

 

Looking at the Toyota Recall Through the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and Google Search and News

Here is an example of how the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can uncover breaking news stories and the shortcomings of traditional search for this task.  Now search is great when you know what you are looking for and I use Google search every day for this purpose. However, if you do not know what key words to put into your queries to find the unexpected a search engine falls short. This is one of the goals of an awareness engine.  Here is how it works using the Toyotas recall as an example. Thanks to our friend Romain Goday for this example.

The Buzz Tape™ runs across the top of the screen and shows topics of rising coverage in your target source, in this case general news sites and blogs.  Below we see that Toyota is a rising topic of interest.

Making Toyota the focus of a Scan Cloud™ brings up the term ‘recall’ as the predominate theme in the past hour.

Clicking on the term recall shows the related articles in the right column.

 Looking at one we see an article on the recall.

We can also explore other articles. In addition we can change to focus from “Toyota” to “recall” to see what else is happening in the recall space.  Let’s see what a Google search at the same time on Toyota brings.

There is nothing on the recall.  In addition searching on the term “recall” brings up nothing on Toyota.

In we combine Toyota and recall – “Toyota recall” – we find one article in Google news but we have had to anticipate this combination. The Darwin Awareness Engine does not require this anticipation and lets you discover the breaking story regardless of whether you were looking for it.

So we can see the traditional search engines have trouble with breaking news as it takes some time for items to become poplar and rise to the top. Google news helps but you have to anticipate trends to get good results. In contrast an awareness engine let’s you discover the unexpected. Rather than looking at a lot of RSS feeds, it aggregates the content scanning processes to single screen.  Here is how it helped the St. Louis PBS affiliate track in real time the conversations in the US immigration debate. 

 

My Favorite Tweets for February 16 – 28 2011

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

KM World 100 companies that matter in Knowledge Management 2011 includes www.darwineco.com

NYT on Queen of Mommy Bloggers http://nyti.ms/hoemc3 over 1M revenue

via @outstart RT @christineptran: Mobile World Congress: 5 Trends to Watch from GigaOm « http://ow.ly/3YpkY

John Alonso @outstart on #mobile #learning http://bit.ly/gAy1Fg

via @SylvieBokshorn: Sanofi-Aventis Builds Out Diabetes Social Media Presence http://bit.ly/euIn2E .

Blogging Is Dead Just Like Web Is Dead http://bit.ly/hwyopa > good response :)

RT @tonykarrer: Top 10 eLearning Predictions 2011 #LCBQ http://bit.ly/gMY04z

3 Biggest Stories in Tech, Dev & Social Media today http://on.mash.to/ejrN6c via http://bit.ly/f1uahy

RT @CarriBugbee: Interesting article in HBR: Who Rules Web Now? http://j.mp/emjtgJ via @christianborges

older generations staying with blogs while they decline in youth http://nyti.ms/eojCYA

RT @DavidGurteen: The Primed Directive http://bit.ly/hfjP1J via @johnniemoore /I want to weep

RT @jonhusband: The Saturday interview: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales http://gu.com/p/2n8ef/tw via @guardian

Lotusphere 2011 Highlights – People-Centric vs. Content-Centric from @elsua http://bit.ly/dFcjj2 > must read #ls11

Google Makes Search Results Social http://bit.ly/hxBzNC via http://bit.ly/f1uahy

Jeopardy Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against supercomputer. http://slate.me/fTBtVE

RT @SameerPatel: 3 Lessons Watson Taught Us on Customer Service @ crm intelligence & strategy http://ow.ly/3YfnL - @ekolsky nice work

via @outstart: Developing mobile content for last 4 ys by Nancy Munro of KnowledgeShift: http://bit.ly/eSn3sL

one take on Top 50 Social Media Blogs http://bit.ly/eU0SVW

via @Pistachio: "time to stop comparing us to Silicon Valley. We have much to be proud of (Boston)" http://awe.sm/5GX1d > ahem!

RT @fgossieaux: Check out this ChangeThis Manifesto - 7 Myths of Hyper-Social Organizations - http://bit.ly/e6OWtK

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans http://nyti.ms/eHNYsA

Social Networks: Good or Evil? good read by @NigelFenwick http://bit.ly/hHoaYd via http://bit.ly/f1uahy

from @attspin: Why hard to socialize on SharePoint? http://bit.ly/hHxqLR @sympmarc > its doc centric rather than people centric

 

 

 

 

rPath Supports the New Dynamic and Cloud-based Vision for IT

A major transformation is occurring with enterprise IT services. I recently spoke with Jake Sorofman, CMO at rPath, to get his perspective on these changes. Jake pointed out that IT used to have a local monopoly on IT services. Their internal customers were forced to accept poor service levels because they had no alternative. Now the Cloud is fast becoming and alternative channel.  Instead of waiting weeks or months for a critical application, business managers can simply license and deploy many applications in minutes. Instead of incurring massive implementation costs prior to any performance, they can just lease apps on a monthly basis and stop at any time.

Faced with this potential competition, IT organizations are under pressure to transform—to replace bottlenecks and bureaucracy with on-demand IT service delivery models. But this transformation to IT-as-a-Service requires new thinking about old processes. Jake pointed out that the reality is that today's manual and ad hoc IT provisioning and change processes will collapse under the weight of self-service, cloud and other on-demand IT models. Particularly vulnerable are today's practices for constructing and changing system images. Jake added that those IT departments that fail to make this transformation will be outflanked by development organizations and business lines who follow the path of least resistance to the cloud.

The cloud is becoming more versatile. In a blog post, 6 IT Predictions for 2011, the first three that Jake listed were: private cloud proliferates, public cloud thrives, and hybrid cloud emerges. In the latter case, this will first be more likely simple shifts in deployment environments based on lifecycle stage—for example, dev and test workloads only in public cloud. This will set the foundation for the “dynamic data center of the future, where workloads can move fluidly between deployment environments. By enabling application portability, workloads become a liquid commodity and a marketplace emerges. IT can dynamically retarget workloads based on optimizations for price, policy or performance, and they achieve true leverage over service providers.” This makes a lot of sense to me.

To help IT departments become more responsive and operate successfully in the on-demand world, rPath provides capabilities to automate application deployments, updates and retargeting across physical, virtual and cloud environments to allow for the dynamic data center of the future. Their tools help break down the traditional silos between development and operations. It is increasingly important so that when development speeds up it does not hit a speed bump when apps are deployed. Jake said that often when Agile currently meets operations, it can become fragile.

Part of the challenge is to extend the Agile concept into operations. Traditionally, operations views change as evil. Because of all the hidden dependencies within applications, changes can cause things to break.  Now the fast paced changes within today’s business world make constant change a competitive necessity.  rPath provides the infrastructure and environment to support these new change requirements. It helps automate many of the traditionally time consuming IT processes.

rPath is based on a version-controlled repository that acts as a definitive software library for controlled reuse of application, OS, middleware and other system artifacts across development, test and production organizations. From this repository, rPath automates four key functions: automated generation of images for rapid deployment to physical, virtual or cloud, automated updates and rollbacks, compliance reporting and remediation, and controlled lifecycle promotion. You can see this illustrated below.

Jake closed his predictions for 2011 by suggesting that the new architectures that enable dynamic workload portability will also change CIO’s prime focus from operations to sourcing and portfolio management. He wrote that we will see some old-line CIOs cycle out in the face of change. At the same we will see “new stars born on the basis of a new vision for IT, inspired—and not threatened—by the rise of public cloud services.” This is very consistent with what I have heard from other sources recently. The times are changing.