The Magic In the Middle

I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, or what it originally meant, but I have been using it a lot in the last few weeks …
Consider the entire user population for any web site or application. You can generalize all user populations into three Pareto-inspired groups …

Top 20% – [...]

More Amazing Social Media Statistics

A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics … would you believe …

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
80% of Twitter usage is on [...]

eMail is Dead, Long Live Social Networking: Don’t Get Left Behind

via Fred Wilson – a stunning slide from Morgan Stanley’s recent Internet Trends report:
The primary topic of the report is the growth and future prospects of the mobile internet – reason enough read through all 87 slides. However, I am slightly amazed by the fact that eMail runs second to the relatively new phenomenon of [...]

Notes from SAPPHIRE 09

Yesterday at work was “catch-up day” from a week at SAPPHIRE 2009, the annual user conference for SAP. As with the JDA/Manugistics conference earlier this year, there were concerns that attendance was going to be low, because so many companies are limiting travel expense. At the conference, I did hear that attendance was only [...]

Five Stages of Twitter Relevance

I’m already fielding internal (as well as external) questions about the application of Twitter in a manufacturing company, and I’m developing a reasonably good model, I think – one that will apply to the hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, manufacturing business leader that I’ve worked with at many organizations.
This “maturity model” approach has been used before; back in [...]

Practical Applications of Twitter in Manufacturing?

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of interesting discussions about the introduction of Twitter to Manufacturing. When someone poses a question like this to me, it throws me for a minor loop, because for very basic, practical reasons, it just doesn’t seem to apply. More keyboards & data entry on the floor? [...]

Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise!

If you are involved with manufacturing these days, you’ve no doubt heard about Lean Manufacturing. I’ll not go deep into this area here, but one fascinating (for me) aspect is the thread (in some quarters) that ERP and computer systems are the enemy of Lean. On the whole, I don’t disagree – process improvement, kanbans, [...]

Corporate Web 2.0 is Spreading – Here comes the Blog

SharePoint is starting to take hold at work, and that will take us a few steps farther down the collaboration path. There is a promise of enterprise search in the reasonably near-term future, but newly available tools include blogs and wikis (of a sort). I am psyched – this is in general a good thing, [...]