Recently there was a case in Norway (the first in our country that I know) where profiled Norwegian blogger Vampus tweeted “cleaned out my desk and ready for new challenges”. She was just internally reorganized in her company, and most certainly did not quit – at least not by communicating to her boss via Twitter.
The handling of the case by her management was an interesting one, where we should learn. I just posted at the Norwegian collaboration blog about what to learn if you are a manager or CEO, and here is the executive summary so to speak:
- Create good guidelines for your employees (and yourself) on what is allowed and not to write online. Ask employees already blogging what it should contain and use common sense.
- If in doubt when you read an online post from your employees, ask them what they meant by it, especially if something can be interpreted bad for your company, it may be ironic or “to the point”.
- Be aware of what one as a company want to acheive by having profiled bloggers employed and discuss expectations already when interviewing for employment. If already employed, make sure you give good guidelines as in bullet 1.
Filed under: On changing the culture, On collaboration, On social media, On the CIO role | Leave a Comment
Tags: enterprise collaboration, management, Social media
A call for car 2.0
I just watched the TED talk, Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars, and I became very excited with his proposal.
He says car 2.0 needs to be about infrastructure coherence and separating the battery from the car. So what does he need:
- Charging stations where you normally park your cars. He states that Scandinavia already have this many places, and we do.
- Battery swapping stations. This we do not have, so let’s start building.
Earlier i wrote about BYD and Tesla, now he tells that the Renault-Nissan alliance is committed to make his dream a reality. That is great news and it seems like most auto manufacturers are really starting to get around!
He also introduve the term eMile (should have been eKM I think), currently priced at 8 cents. Remarkable! Does anyone care to do the math and make comparable tables with gasoline?
Filed under: On dreaming, On entrepreneurship | 1 Comment
Tags: Car 2.0, electric cars, Nissan-Renault, Shai agassi
The tiger is back!
Finally! The moment I have been waiting for is here! The tiger in front of Oslo Central Station is back! Oslo is once again claiming it’s rights as Tigerstaden (tiger city).
I have tried to find out where it has been and whether it was plans for it to come back, but did not succeed. Well, here is proof, taken yesterday with my HTC diamond Touch (the kid happened to not want to move out of my picture).
Filed under: On dreaming, On tigers | Leave a Comment
Tags: tiger, tiger of norway, tiger of oslo, tigerstaden
I am referring to Swedish SaaS Company Projectplace International AB, which proves the Enterprise SaaS model absolutely viable. I was flying home from Tromsø the other day and read an 8 page insert to SAS inflight magazine Scanorana (a nice advertising media by the way).
More than 300 000 projects are currently run on projectplace. I have used it in a project – it works great, but I think it provides less flexibility than for instance a well set up Sharepoint site. However a couple of nice features extend those of Sharepoint, being the time and issue registration features.
I have had several skeptical comments to SaaS, but obviously it works very well for Projectplace. I do not think they have higher security than username and password. That seems to be enough for the projects mentioned above, so perhaps it is enough for Innovation also, ref Induct Softwares SaaS model?
Filed under: On collaboration, On enterprise SaaS, On outsourcing | Leave a Comment
Tags: enterprise collaboration, enterprise saas, projectplace, saas
Steria Norway is testing collaboration with Yammer – so far we are satisfied and a need is uncovered. It is a great example of enterprise software as a service solution featuring what seems to be good enough enterprise security by reducing visibility by others to only those with same mail domain.
Other than that it is a better version of twitter with file attachments, no post length restrictions and better group functionality.
Our community likes it. However, one needs to assess how it adds value to a projectized organization like Steria. Can it be too much collaboration?
Filed under: On collaboration, On enterprise SaaS, On outsourcing | Leave a Comment
Tags: enterprise collaboration, nettskyen, saas, security, yammer
Gartner and IBM says Cloud computing will skyrocket in 2009. Microsoft is more reluctant but coming along as well. Several news sites report that 2009 will be the year of enterprise cloud computing, but others are unable to spot the next salesforce.com, requesting it to come out of the cave. Why? I believe that security concerns are the biggest hurdle; IT department does not trust that services in the cloud are secure enough. I am not talking about uptime and availability, which is also a needed discussion, but I am talking about viruses, hacking, and information leak and so on. Ok, Gartner sees this as well, but they still predicts “sky rocket growth” three quarters of a year later – I am not convinced, and I consider myself innovative – I dare not think about conservative 50 year old CIOs.
Viruses in the cloud, you got to be kidding? Well, last week Norwegian Police went out of business because of virus brought to them by MSN. Phishing attempts is a well known problem, and the “fatter” the account you can phish or hack, the more vulnerable it is. When Barrack Obama runs a teleconference in the cloud, god knows who listen to that.
Hacking in the cloud? Well, the first is social hacking; it has always been and probably always will be a problem, but when running on level one security (username and password) it is no doubt that it is not good enough, to get someone’s password is just too easy. I heard from youths at the age of 13 hacking MSN accounts. And one expects enterprises to jump onto this with storing mission critical strategy documents? No fucking way! Maybe you could get around this with solutions like decided IP-range, VPN-solutions, RSA code calculators and so on, but then the usability (and thus the usage!) starts to drop, people start complaining, the money starts running out anyway, and the IT department has it going. Norwegians has used internet bank since around 1998, when I visited Poland in 2003, long queues of bill paying polish men and woman were standing outside the banks. They had no trust in online banks, and thus were not using it. The same goes for US Consumers, using checks to pay bills. I am 25 years old, and can barely remember checks in Norway. Yes Norwegians have a large trust in banks, but then, BankID has never been exploited in successful large scale hacking attempts, and banks have spent millions on campaigns building user trust.
Information leak? Not long ago I heard about EmailXtender, a plugin to Outlook, helping you search for lost e-mail. The company at question had set it up wrong so all incoming e-mail was searchable from every employees computer. How about if the same thing happened to salesforce, suddenly some competitor could see all the leads to someone else? Often you want to share with people outside the company, but not always. The “not always” unfortunately is a must have, whilst as long as email, google documents and public CMS-systems works, the other is a nice to have. You get to share your documents and texts somehow anyway.
All right, I admit it, I am very critical towards enterprise cloud computing, but realise that I might “look like a server hugger who want to sleep with a copy of my data under my pillow“. Why am I critical? I have spent two years working for Steria and visited several customers, and security concerns are always an issue. Now, it may be that Steria has a traditional look upon this, we even promote and sell security consulting, but no one has yet proven to me that security is taken good enough care of when it comes to cloud computing. That said, I love the many fantastic new services developed out there like doodle, vyew, etherpad, comapping and so on, just do not even consider using them when you are hosting a discussion that needs a higher security level – yet!
Filed under: On collaboration, On enterprise SaaS, On outsourcing | Leave a Comment
Tags: cloud computing, nettskyen, security
Sorry SecondLife
Ok, I admit, I have forgotten all about SecondLife, Linden Dollars and avatars in my recent research on social media.
In a class called collaboration at Uni three years ago I visited another 3D-world, and today (after being ticked off by a colleague) i joined SecondLife and now officially have an avatar called TigerOfNorway Riddler (why do you have to choose last name on your avatar, and why on earth do I need to type the choosen last name when logging in??) and I did some quick discoveries listed below.
People. What stroke me first was that there was actually quite a few people (yeah yeah, avatars, or what ever) in there. And I have heard that some Norwegian companies are establishing themselves there, but could not find them – how are you navigating this anyway? Eventually I found a way to search, but at first it gave me only web page hits. I learned to teleport after about four minutes.
Content and learning. My colleague said that content is moving away from gaming (if it ever was there) and more towards big and small companies establishing themself there, running electronic meetings in there, and sharing content in there. I have not had the time to discover this properly yet, but will eventually. My biggest question though, is how this will ever compete with Google + Wikipedia – there is no way I can see more content quicker in SL, then I can by searching and reading Wikipedia. Maybe the learning and illustration example will do the trick here but is that really enough?
Avatars. Not long ago, I saw something about us designing computers to more or less replace humans, rather than augment them. I think the entire SecondLife smells of this life replacement a little bit and is still skeptical. Compared to video conference where people is unable to do anything but look either at you when they talk and they expierience you looking down on them or the other way around (see “the problem with video conferencing“) however, I believe avatars actually improve collaboration, avareness and the conference expierience.
The world loads slowly. Last time I visited a 3D world was at University as stated above. My expirience then was reduced by the fact that it loaded slowly. And so did SL today. I was sitting at work at relatively proper lines, but still things moved slowly and lagged a lot. I also had trouble zooming on details. This bugged me quickly.
Now that was four cents from me. Hopefully I will overcome some of these on my next visit. Until then, I stick to Vyew, Skype and MOSS 2007. Any comments to my SL opinions? How is secondlife going to be really useful and take on?
Best regards,
TigerOfNorway Riddler
Newbie in SL
Filed under: On collaboration, On entrepreneurship, On social media | 2 Comments
In this blog post I criticize journalists for being to tabloid and immediate referendums thrown at the people for contributing to stupidity. Here goes.
According to the biggest newspaper in Norway there was a Norwegian girl who first reacted to the new terms from Facebook and eventually gathered enough support to get them changed. This time to the good! Such immediate referendums made available through Internet have totally changed the way both companies, but also the politicians have to do their work. Dramatically!
However, they have a potential downside (at least one). When our Minister of Justice, mr. Knut Storberget nearly have to leave his chair because of an uncontrollable and extremely tabloid flaming from Norwegian newspapers and media, supported by the simplifying opposition, I understand that people turn to blogs instead of newspapers, but probably not to a large enough scale. And if they add to their media habits with blogs, do they read them with a critical analysis in mind? People have a tendency to believe in what they believe in, and then search for (and of course find) supporting evidence wherever they look. This is also why the Liberalistic Party (Fremskrittspartiet) is finding so many supporters these days. They tell people the simple story; Storberget did not have control over his Ministry, and should leave (and add to the story a couple of other blunders he made in the fall). I do not think it is that easy.
No one is perfect, not the secretary who happened to post the Police Hijab press release on the ministries web pages too early, neither the minister himself who followed up very clumsy at the beginning. He might however have learned by now. I do not know. He is probably no worse than any unknown alternative, but to be forced to step down by the opposition on this matter, because the press and opposition wants blood. As more and more voices are fronted, more and more blood seem to be what one want, and more and more dirt is being written about our high profiled politicians, I can not do anything but conclude that it has become a hell lot harder to be a politician, and that they have to listen to many almost immediate referendums to stay on top, and have the journalists back away.
Are the journalists just doing their job as the critical media shall be, or are they stressed to the brink, buying good stories based on presumptive evidence, and trying to make them hit the front page just to sell more papers, miscarrying justice as they go, and terrified that the media house they work in will set them on the street due to bankruptcy?
Filed under: On changing the culture, On social media | Leave a Comment
Today I read the latest Norwegian issue of Computerworld (nr 5 2009, pg 6), and to my great pleasure I found an article from our Senior Gartner columnist about the “war” between the IT Organization wanting to standardize and the vast amount of different quick win business applications that the business side want to use right away. These two agendas just does not match. Who wins; the IT department or the business side? And what happens with the IT department if they always loose? And what happens to innovation if the IT department always win? Gartner predicts that individual system choices will be more and more common. This, to my delight, foster creativity, but it also makes defining a complete IT Architecture nearly impossible and to manage, and if I may add, IT risk even harder to manage. The suggested solution: managed diversity.
I am a follower on the IT Strategy blog by Raj Sheelvant where he earlier wrote about rebranding the CIO, meaning the CIO could be an enabler instead of a brake in the organization.
Imagine a CIO fully grasping this concept? I certainly think an CIO coming to me and saying, use whatever program, as long as you tell me, and you try to convince the others doing the same as you to use the same program, would give me positive feelings. Now, how to make this work in practice? I think it is possible to sum it up in four very clear actions/policies:
Internal money
I absolutely think the Gartner approach where one may has to pay “internal money” in order to deviate from the given IT standard gives meaning. This not only incentivizes the business side to choose the preferred IT Standards, but it also enables the IT Department to provide some supporting resources to the new choice of technology if they should choose to deviate. It raises the question of how to price this though, but that is a whole other discussion.
Taking the consulting role
The CIO is no longer in charge of just operations of his system portfolio, but to give the business side good advice on how their choices of technology will work. He may ask questions like “how is backup taken care of” and “who do you call when it does not work” and last but not least “how is it integrated with our other portfolio of systems”? The CIO will have to “sell” the benefits of his policy, and enabling the organization to make informed choices. This is totally the other way around, opposed to the more or less undocumented denial one sometimes meet.
Keeping control
Make sure to define clear system policies that enables individual freedom, but keeping the necessary level of control. This must mean that applications used at work should be approved, so the IT Organisation knows about it, but that denying people to use it, given that they can pay for it as in the first bullet, is more difficult.
Dealing with the lifecycle cost and risk
To be aware of the lifecycle cost when enabling a new tool is critical. The feeling that deviation from the standard creates higher costs later, may also be why the CIO seems negative in the first place. Often quick and dirty projects only thinks about getting the tool up and running and forget about maintenance, backup, access control, security and so on. These issues must be tackled in order for the new tools to meet a long and prosperous life in the organization.
Any comments to these four elements? Anyone missing?
IBM illustrated this new role at their CIO Conference in November 2007 like this:
Good luck CIOs!
Filed under: On changing the culture, On collaboration, On the CIO role, On the IT Industry | Leave a Comment
The media sector has since the dot-com been in a changing world. This week it is also evident in Norway. Schibsted, the leading Norwegian media conglomerate said they need to cut 750 mill NOK, most due to plummeting advertising revenues (and some due to failed Classified Ad initiative in Spain). This is not a unique incident, as many media companies see the true results of the financial crisis. Hjemmet Mortensen is another example who published information about their cuts today.
I think I have to repeat my mantra, change is good – it opens for new opportunities. I must admit however that I wonder how the ad-market will look like in the future. The future is for fortune tellers to describe, I on the other hand, just wonder how one sell more stuff if you do not advertise? Is this the real social media revolution that we see? More Twitter, recommendations and relations, a more transparent reality – a flatter world! Now it is here for real.
A surprising effect is that local newspapers in Norway are still more or less withstanding (actually Norwegians reads more papers than most others). I guess it is because national and international news are available best online, while local news is still best in the paper. Are there entrepreneurs out there who are ready start the war for local content? Oh yes!
Filed under: On entrepreneurship, On social media | 3 Comments
My last tweets on Twitter- tigerofnorway: Searched Twitter for steria: http://tinyurl.com/l23yj3
- tigerofnorway: Host a summit on entrepreneurship? Where? When? Me want to go, Global startup workshop should be reprensented. #cairospeech
- tigerofnorway: Bridges between people leed to action - sounds like he wants us to mingle more :) #cairospeech
Recent Entries
- Did your boss get social media? Three bullet points to get him there
- A call for car 2.0
- The tiger is back!
- Projectplace flies high on SaaS model
- Yammer – Free enterprise Twitter as SaaS
- Enterprise cloud computing and security, the missing debate or solved?
- Sorry SecondLife
- Norwegians are talking, but are they thinking and analyzing?
- Evolving the role of the IT organization – rebranding the CIO – CIO 2.0
- Social media to Struggling media – and back
- BYD, Changfeng, Brilliance, Tesla, Think or Volt?
Categories
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- On enterprise SaaS (3)
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- On the CIO role (2)
- On the IT Industry (3)
- On tigers (1)
