WWPFDS

November 3, 2008 – 4:20 pm

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What would Peter F. Drucker Say?

54 years ago Drucker published The Practice of Management. It is without a doubt the most important business book ever written. It is sad how few people in business have actually read it. One passage that I find particularly compelling, highlights how far most organizations are, even today, from understanding what he was talking about over half a century ago.

Peter Drucker

It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through willing [sic] to pay for a good or for a service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance — especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What a customer thinks he is buying, what he considers “value” is decisive — it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.

The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. He alone gives employment. And it is to supply the consumer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise.

If more companies had heeded this advice, I think the adversarial relationship most people experience with their service providers would not exist today.

So can we turn the tide and look at customers more like partners? I think Drucker would have applauded using the new tools available today to build better relationships between providers of goods and services and their customers. But what exactly will that look like? … Stay tuned.

By Lee White | Posted in Concepts | Tagged , | Comments (1)

My 1st Webinar

November 3, 2008 – 11:57 am

This Thursday (Nov., 6) at 11:00 EST, I will be offering my first online “webinar”. I mentioned it in an earlier post. There have been some changes since I wrote that. Most notable is that I will be hosting this event on my own. Circumstances have prevented my planned co-host from being able to participate… So on with the show.

Here is the key bit of information, https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/999220840 the registration link.

The panel will be:

The topic of discussion will be about how social tools can be used within companies to improve organizational productivity.

I hope you will join, and if you know of anyone else that might find this valuable, please forward the registration link.

By Lee White | Posted in e quint | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Exposing the Back Office with RSSBus

October 22, 2008 – 11:38 am

In several of my recent posts I have referenced Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote, where I recall he talked about Enterprise 2.0 being about exposing the back office. I was curious to see if anyone else had picked up on that meme, and found little evidence of it, so I wondered if maybe I had misheard what he said. I went back and found the speech and picked up the exact quote:

Enterprise 2.0 means letting users into your back office,


Listen from 5:30 to 8:20 to hear his entire argument.

Sounds cool, so how does one actually go about doing this? I wondered the same thing. This is where serendipity and social networks come into play. About the same time I went to Web2Expo, I was catching up with a former colleague from GSK, Ralph James. It just so happens that Ralph currently works with a company that does exactly what O’Reilly was talking about, creating a simple access mechanism for back office data. That company is RSSBus.

From the RSSBus whitepaper Flattening the Information Landscape:

In his iconic book, “The World Is Flat”, Thomas Friedman lists the World Wide Web as one of the ten key world flatteners making a wealth of information available to anyone and everyone no matter where they live.  He compares HTTP to the railroad track and HTML to the boxcar that carries information from everywhere to anywhere.

However, while HTML does a good job of presenting formatted pages of information to browsers, professional information providers know how difficult it is to extract the raw data from HTML for follow-up processing like filtering or merging - and this is only one of the limitations of today’s web:  there are countless databases, news groups, personal mail files, text documents, and spreadsheets lurking throughout the network that are not served via HTTP.  While most of these repositories can be accessed directly via SQL, Internet protocols or custom API’s, the inconsistency of access protocols and formats create a barrier to quick and seamless data access.

RSSBus is a suite of information access products that provide ready-to-use connectors to several dozen Internet and Enterprise information sources while hiding differences of data organization and access protocols. The RSSBus developer learns only one call mechanism, using it to access SQL databases, office documents, network protocols, message queues, email systems, news groups, blogs, financial services, web services like the ones from Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and FedEx, and dozens of other resources.

Check out their site for a more detailed description of their product and service. I, for one, think there is huge potential here for developing the next generation applications for creating customer value, the real objective of any enterprise.

By Lee White | Posted in Tools | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Is “Social Media” Really Social?

October 21, 2008 – 11:27 am

These days when it seems that everyone is extolling the virtues of social collaboration, it may seem odd to ask if social media is social. My point here is not to question the value of social collaboration, but to take a deeper look at the underlying characteristics of the tool-set we refer to as “social media”.

When blogs first came on the scene, I don’t think anyone was able to foresee the resulting “conversation” we all now take for granted. What the first bloggers saw was, an easy way to publish, the overcoming of previously high technical barriers. The resulting conversation was emergent, not intended. If you really look at it, I think you will find that the same is true for most of the social media formats, each was initially conceived as technical solution to a previously difficult problem.

OK … so what?

If we think of the “social tool-set” in strictly social terms, we can become blinded to the value these tools can bring to other areas of information management. I refer back again to what Tim O’Reily said at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last September, “Enterprise 2.0 is about exposing the back office.” When you think about the implication of what he was saying, there is a lot there that has nothing to do with social behavior, per se. Exposing the back office means,

  • having direct access to your account information with your cell carrier;
  • being able to directly schedule your own appointments to get your car serviced;
  • not having to wait 30 minutes on hold to get tech support.

These are all examples of what will be the next generation enterprise applications, built on a set of tools that are inherently simple, scalable and flexible. These applications will look a lot like blogs, wikis, RSS readers, etc, but they will not necessarily be social.

The point being, that social media came into being because for the first time a set of tools existed that was able to be easily used by a broad number of people and was able to adapt fast enough to mirror real social interaction, not because the tools were inherently social.

So let’s take off the social blinders and look at the these tools as a new and better way to move information simply and easily from where it is, to where it needs to be, regardless of whether that information is social or not.

By Lee White | Posted in Concepts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Relationship Aggregation

October 20, 2008 – 5:23 pm

I am coming to the realization that one of the problems with social networks (the online kind that is) is that the focus seems to be in the individual instead of the relationship.

Look at any of the SNs out there today, there is a huge amount of effort spent on the development of your profile: creating it, protecting it, generating new content to make it fatter, etc. While there is very little attention paid to the development of relationships. Oh yeah…there are lots of tools for creating new connections, but once connected, there is little ability to create a rich relationship.

I am wondering if a better model might be to center the network around the relationship instead of the individual. Think of it this way, between any two entities, there is, in reality, a large amount of shared content in many formats: email, IM, tweets, phone calls, collaborative documents. Imagine if that content was aggregated in such a way that it was equally owned and shared by both ends of the relationship. Now that would be valuable.

I can see where each entity of the relationship could manage their own use of the relationship aggregate through filters and feeds, but they would still retain equal ownership of the shared content.

This approach would have great applicability for personal/individual relationships, but the real value comes into play with B2B and B2C relationships. Imagine, for example, if you and your mobile carrier shared all of the content about the relationship, in a common accessible location…billing records, support records, email transactions, support chats, etc.

Yes, I realize there MAY be some SLIGHT ownership and control issues from the perspective of those that currently “own” the data, but I think that in time, as the inherent value in this approach comes to be appreciated, that will change.

These are just some initial thoughts. If you think there is something to this, please jump in and join the conversation. I would especially be interested in hearing what Doc Searles and the VRM gang think.

By Lee White | Posted in Concepts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
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