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

11 July, 2008
Supply Chain
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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, and attacking muda are typically very physical exercises; roaming the floor, walking through the processes (gemba walks), reorganizing workspaces for flow, designing and simplifying standard…

Opportunistic Insights from the RSS Stream

I've written about using RSS for internal as well as external information sources. This past week, I found a couple of interesting tidbits in my feed reader (behind the firewall) ... Eyes on the Skies: It's that time of year again; oil price volatility will continue if any big storms create problems for refineries in the Gulf - something new to keep an eye on. Never fear - our friends at NOAA kindly put out an RSS feed for storm…

The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)

9 May, 2008
Web 2.0
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The volume of Twitter posts popping up in my feed reader is ticking upward, a phenomenon I find interesting because of something I noted recently on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, a new feature appeared, enabling me to report what I'm working on - Twitter for the office crowd. Always willing to try some flair, I jumped on the bandwagon, and set up a recurring ToDo for updating my LI-net on the day's focus. That lasted less than two weeks…

Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0

10 March, 2008
Web 2.0, Social Media
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Different areas of our IT department are using internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration spaces, with varying degrees of participation, readership, and success. Some observations: Blogging is Easy ... The blogs and wiki(s) have effectively removed the hassles of capturing and distributing information quickly. One important early decision was to not implement an editorial approval process for the wiki, and most blogs are wide open for public comments. No more excuses or complaints about a lack of documentation; if the explanation…

The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise

There are a few ideas circulating in the blogosphere as to what will bring Web 2.0 into the enterprise, including ... The Influx of the Millennials; recent college graduates who have come to expect social networking, instant messaging and collaboration via the cloud. This groundswell of pressure will force IT to implement these new technologies. Consumer High-Tech; populist technologies like Apple hardware and Google's suite of software has taken hold in our homes; folks who expect interoperability with their employer's…

Update on Blogs as PM Tools – Tales from the Front Lines

We seem to be going through a second wave of focus (hype?) in the popular technology press, on the idea of using blogs as an important project management tool. The topic made the cover of CIO Magazine this week - Lynch made a number of interesting observations - interesting because I don't necessarily see the same things in practice: The Reputation Hurdle: While I agree that blogs aren't fully understood by everyone, the folks that need to use them pick…

Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style

When talking about "innovation" in a non-digital firm, don't force-fit the trendy stuff - focus on the innovative stuff you've done with your traditional environment, like ERP and Data Analytics. Tie this to what creates value for the enterprise, and you have something meaningful.

Five Best Conversations with my Meebo (web IM) Client

29 August, 2007
Social Media
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Back in January, I added the Meebo client to my blog page, and over the past few months I've learned a lot about web chat in general ... There are other clients out there, and I've tried a few - most recently the AIM Wimzi, which came close to unseating Meebo as my web chat client of choice. Wimzi and Google Talk will allow me to use Trillian as a client, solving two problems I have with Meebo - logging…

Communication is the responsibility of …

Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is hard. Hard to introduce, hard to teach/coach, hard to require, hard to create. Which, added all up together, often make it hard to use. It may sound like unfounded pessimism, as the Internet is loaded with examples of successful collaborative sites that aggregate and repackage knowledge - it's been doing that for years, ever since there were Compuserve forums and bulletin boards. Unfortunately (for the corporate environment), the Law of Large Numbers takes care of…

The Right Web 2.0 Tool for The Job

16 July, 2007
Web 2.0
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I've had many discussions over the past few weeks on this post, trying to define the difference between Blogs, Discussion Forums, Wikis, and other Web 2.0-style collaboration tools. In a particularly interesting tight loop this morning, I got into an IM conversation on the issue via my little Web 2.0 Meebo widget, tucked away in the corner of my blog. Over the course of the conversation, my colleague "introduced" himself with a reference to his blog - The Best of Enterprise…