Ghātanji I’ve sent once a new manager to attend a project management training class. (I always believed that a good software development manager needs to master the basics of project management). He came back and informed me right away that he knows what is “the problem” with our organization: we did not follow the PMBOK to […]
Category: Technology Management
An Introduction to Cloud Security
This fall (2009) I have talked several times about cloud computing security. The latest talk was on Nov. 2, 2009, at the 3rd International Workshop on Cloud Computing, organized by IBM as part of CASCON 2009 in Markham, Ontario. As it happens, this was an introductory talk — many more technical details can be found […]
Measuring Innovation — The Truth
In a previous post, I have talked about how to measure the innovation process in a company. The main point is that the corporation has to find a way, adapted to its lines of business and cost structure, to try many ideas and fund them incrementally, through a rigorous process of validating business potential at […]
Two-Way Enterprise Social Computing
When consultants talk about “enterprise social computing” they usually mean using the well known pattern of applying the tools and concepts found on the Internet inside the corporation. And here it comes: enterprise wikis, enterprise blogs, internal podcasts and video sharing, internal social networks? Stepping back… Enterprise Social computing evolved from Enterprise Collaboration, Knowledge Management […]
A Wiki Reading List
After several years of wiki promotion and use, I forget the many steps it took me to understand why wikis are useful — and the (so) many times I had to ask my teams to stop inserting their thoughts and comments in a “reply all” email and instead document the discussion collaboratively in a wiki. […]
Control Theory Advantage
I wrote this in 2003… Six years later, looking at all the excitement about cloud computing and the maturity that has been achieved (see “A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing“), I am glad our ideas at ThinkDynamics proved correct. Applying Control Theory to the automatic management of data centers is the way forward. The computing […]
Enterprise Ecosystem Social Network
(adapted from previous work in collaboration with Mike Wing, Jack Mason, Brian Goodman) In a global enterprise, where does the individual fit into the organization? How must the relationship between knowledge workers and global enterprises evolve and adjust? Does the focus move from the organization as a hierarchy to a smaller networks of connected people? […]
Measuring Innovation Input
I spend a lot of time talking to clients about how my company manages the innovation process, and the discussion invariably gets to the point where I’m asked about ways to determine the “best” innovations beforehand, so we know if we want to invest money to bring the idea and/or prototype to life, to production, […]
Wikis or Blogs?
In an eye-opening blog post, Andrew McAfee talks about “How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye“. His theoretical foundation is derived from Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties” — applied to social computing. In a nutshell, McAfee argues that the we need to look at social relationships from the perspective of their relative strengths. While […]
Five Simple Rules
One of the “advantages” of working for a number of years is that you develop a small set of rules you apply to many (if not most…) of the situations you encounter. The way you have those guidelines applied varies from project to project, however you need a way to make them known to the […]