Dovetail Software Blogs: Enterprise 2.0: Start Small, Build on Success
“Allied
with the notion of starting modestly is the notion of remaining
somewhat informal. We’ve written extensively about this in Community
and Knowledge Within the Enterprise. What the enterprise is doing in
deploying collaboration systems is surfacing its tacit knowledge into
systems that render it explicit. It holds true for all processes that
looseness of control encourages random contribution to the system, and
tightness of control kills it – so, not too tight and not too loose is
the recommended spec.”
Improving the Call Center Experience
“When
consumers cite phoning a contact center as the second most stressful
thing in life, something is clearly very wrong. While moving house was
understandably quoted as the most stressful event in a recent survey by
Empirix, a call to a contact center surely shouldn’t be more stressful
than getting married.”
Connectivity Trumps Productivity: The Online Social Life of Stowe Boyd
“It
will happen, he said (or I am paraphrasing; I did not take notes), that
having a larger number of connections is more important at work than
simply doing a job well, or in his words, (on a great slide show from
his site titled Flow): ‘Productivity is second to Connectivity: network
productivity trumps personal productivity. That is, the more
connections you have the more resources you have to bring to a task:
all work can be co-work.’”
The Portfolio View of GE
“The
GE and American Express cases are great examples of using a portfolio
view and associated corporate portfolio practices to make large,
fundamental changes to the company by rebalancing the portfolio of
businesses the company competes in. As you aggregate data about the
portfolio over multiple periods and leverage the corporate portfolio
management discipline, trends like those seen by AmEx and GE become
discernible which lead you to some very material and highly strategic
changes.”
Google improves ‘Apps’, offers organizations clear path off Exchange, Notes, etc. to GMail
“For
organizations that are really ready to re-think their approach to those
on-premises solutions, Google today announced a migration tool that in
one fell swoop (at least after all the accounts are properly mapped),
uses the IMAP protocol to suck all the e-mail out of an IMAP compatible server like Microsoft’s Exchange or Lotus Notes and deposit it into an organization’s instance of Google Apps.”
IBM Hunts for Ways To Trim the Fat
“IBM’s
effort to cut its services costs accelerated last fall when the company
launched a business-refinement practice known as Lean. Pioneered at
Toyota Motor Corp., Lean is all about eliminating waste by analyzing
whether every step adds value to the end product. Toyota has even
determined an optimum method for how bolts are tightened.”
An SOA built without Web services!
“Last
week, I posted some thoughts about divorcing Web services from
service-oriented architecture. The two work together, but aren’t
necessarily the same [...] Lo and behold, this story from TechTarget
comes up — SOA is now being employed for the
monitoring controls for the world’s largest particle accelerator, but
employing Java-based technologies , not Web services. And all seems to
be humming along nicely.”
Agility is Global
“That
strategy is expressed and literally embodied in the design of the
solution system we will build. The design should leverage existing IT
infrastructure wherever possible and new development should be focused
on the delivery of new capabilities needed to effectively exploit the
chosen business opportunity. The system design is then broken down into
subsystems that each provide value in their own right and can be built
and put into production in 30 day increments.”
From Architect to CIO
“Now large companies certainly require multiple layers of architecture AND C-Level talent, but the move within small-to-medium sized companies (SMB) to merge the CIO and Chief Architect positions could be more significant.”
