 Yesterday I blogged part 1 of my report on the Social Media in the Enterprise event that Alan Patrick and I cooked up ( at Tuttle) to inject some enterprise related content in to this week's " London Social Media Week". We had 8 speakers (originally 10, but Will McInnes of NixonMcInnes had travel problems, and Dr Shefaly Yogendra came down with a migraine). Most "Enterprise 2.0" and "Social Media" events these days tend to cover social media for consumers, B2C marketing to consumers, and even for government services to "consumers" with the majority of the speakers being marketing and media types. We hear far less about the application of these tools by Enterprises to re-engineer themselves,, or their use in the B2B value chain, or how they are being used to create sustainable business value. When we do hear about enterprise use, we don't see much about the difficult stuff - how to integrate to existing heritage systems, how to handle security issues, or whether a flat social network structure can work in a firm with a traditional hierarchy. You don't usually get presented with any hard evidence of the potential Return on Investment. Each ...
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I blogged that Alan Patrick and I were running the only enterprise related event as part of this week's " London Social Media Week". Considering we only had the idea a week last Friday at Tuttle, and only promoted the thing with a few tweets, I'm both impressed and surprised that we had around 50 attendees (paying £10 entrance fee to cover coffee, booze and nibbles) and 8 speakers at last night's event. The attendance, and the fact that people were volunteering and making themselves available to come and talk, speaks volumes for the demand to hear about applying these new emergent tools to business, as well as an appetite to understand the organisational implications. We already have plans for follow on events and activities. So this is a two part report. Part 1 covers my own pitch on the night, and a video podcast of Dennis Howlett, that we finished but didn't manage to show at the event. Part 2 will report on the other 7 speakers and some conclusions about the 8 different views on offer. During yesterday afternoon Dennis skyped from Spain and suggested that we should record a video podcast for part of my session. I'm .. ...
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The first thing I've got to say is the title of this post was supplied in a tweet from Alan Patrick ( @freecloud), but it perfectly encapsulates the controversy going on in the geek world around the new Apple tablet device announced on Wednesday. Is it going to be as successful and "game changing" like the iPod and iTunes, or a flawed failure like the Apple Newton? I believe it will be very successful as an e-book reader, for news consumption and Internet access, but also in bringing a whole new audience of technologically challenged people for whom a laptop or a netbook are just too complicated to own and carry around. It was fascinating to hear how Steve Jobs was positioning both Apple as a manufacturer of mobile devices larger than Sony, Samsung and Nokia in that context, and then the iPad as a new category of product in opposition to the netbook. It's well worth listening to the keynote, and watching the slick demonstrations. For me iPad follows two important paths. The first is simple user experience and the second is Darwinian divergence in product categories. On the first path, the iPad uses the iPhone operating system ...
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Some of us of a certain age come from a time when presentations weren't created directly on the PC (or Mac) with PowerPoint (or Keynote), or with cool new online tools like Prezi. Back then before laptop PCs and low cost flash drives, if there was plenty of money in the marketing budget, and the presentation was really important you might create photographic slides, but usually it was paper on a flip chart stand, or more likely foils and an overhead projector (and you could write your notes alongside on those cardboard frames - oops, definitely showing my age!). With all of these approaches, you would sit down and write the presentation first, and then transcribe the final version to the presentation medium. These days it's just too easy to go straight in to the technology, because of the ease of shifting things around and making corrections as you go. I regularly get seduced in to diving in to the detail, opening PowerPoint and starting at slide 1, when I should be taking a mental step back and going back to basics.  I've blogged before that my favourite book on this topic Is Presentations Plus by David A. Peoples from 1988. David was a ...
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 The newly formed EuroCloud UK group held their first member meeting a week ago at the Thistle City Barbican Hotel - a panel led group discussion on Cloud standards and security. Chaired by Phil Wainewright, the panel experts were Dr. Guy Bunker, independent consultant and blogger, formerly Symantec's chief scientist and co-author of ENISA's cloud security assessment document, Ian Moyse, Channel Director of SaaS provider Webroot, and Adrian Wright, MD, Secoda Risk Management, formerly global head of information security at Reuters. In the spirit of cooperation we had invited Lloyd Adams from Intellect and Jairo Rojas from BASDA because we want to ensure that the three UK Cloud and SaaS vendor groups keep in close contact and try to coordinate their various deliverables and activities as much as is practical. In addition we invited Richard Anning who heads the ICAEW's IT Faculty. As I've reported before, Phil, Jairo, Richard and I have been in discussions, triggered by Dennis Howlett, about trying to achieve some form of pragmatic standard or quality mark on security and best practice. We decided to use this discussion to identify if there ...
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What is it? As our contribution to London Social Media Week we are putting on Social Media in Enterprises on Tuesday Feb 2nd from 6 till 9pm at the Cass Business School in London (map is over here). Why? Well, at Tuttle last Friday Alan Patrick and I realised that there was no event for the more B2B (Business to Business) and value chain based aspects of Enterprise/Business aspects of Social Media. This is the "Elephant in the Ecosystem" - a huge arena, but hard to get your head around easily and see clearly. So, being us, we decided to put one on - and this is it! The aim of this event is to look at this unmentioned "Elephant in the Ecosystem" from lots of angles, so we may get a better view of what it is. So, what we thought we would talk about is how Social Media can be used by: - Enterprises: How can use it internally to re-engineer themselves, - Supply and Value Chains: How does it restructure a B2B value chain, which can be complex and global - How to create sustainable business value, not an easy to replicate one-off. Also, we want to touch on the Hard Stuff that is brushed under the carpet, for example: - how to integrate into existing heritage ...
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 I've been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about the basics of presentations combined with how you get the positioning and messaging for your product right. To help I've been reading Jack Trout's In Search of the Obvious, a marketing book which is all about making sure you focus your strategy on what is simple and obvious rather than clever and ingenious. We are bombarded by clever and entertaining advertising these days, but does it really sell the product? I'll do a review of the book here shortly, but it's good. So two things jumped out at me this week. The first was a section in Trout's book about the proverb "A picture paints a thousand words". The second was a post highlighted to me by @solobasssteve from Mike Smith - "Narrative is important in technical presentations". It reminded me telling a story is important in any presentation. Trout, on page 129-131 of the book suggests that actually, the ear is more important than the eye in picking up the message, and that this saying from Confucius is a popular but misguided preconception most of us, particularly in marketing, have. He rightly points out ...
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Yesterday I got the "lowdown" on how Thingamy, which Sigurd Rinde describes as a "Work Processor", has just been connected to ESME, the microsharing and collaboration platform. I believe the combination is a big step forward for Sig's solution, as well as representing one of several approaches that signpost the direction of enterprise 2.0, or enterprise collaboration for 2010. It's all about linking collaboration to process. First let me disclose that, although we don't have a contractual relationship, we're big fans of Thingamy, we've been playing around with the product for years, and we're on the look out to help and support Sig to find potential clients here in the UK. Although the basic concept of Thingamy remains the same, the user interface and way you use and deploy the product have steadily improved over time making the product much easier to grasp than when we first met Sig back at the start of 2006. So what is Thingamy? It's a product that addresses all of the things that any organisation does which are NOT handled by their conventional business process based systems. Sig calls these Easily Repeatable . ...
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A month ago on Monday 7 December I was sitting in the London version of the CloudForce2 Partner Summit, and then stricken by a virus overnight, I watched Marc Benioff livestreamed for the 2 hours and 15 minutes of his keynote in the general customer session on the following day. It sounds like he did a shorter, sharper version than his reported performance at the big Dreamforce show in San Francisco where 19,000 attended. I've been re-acquainting myself with the Salesforce story, and considering whether my company and our Twinfield colleagues should become part of their partner ecosystem. The combination of Force.com platform, combined with Salesforce applications, and partner applications makes a strong story. Benioff was emphasizing companies like FinancialForce.com and Jobpartners who have developed their applications natively using their Cloud technology. However, the big announcement was their new "Twitter and Facebook" style micro-blogging product and the addition of the Chatter Cloud, alongside the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Custom Cloud in their presentations and messaging. I'm impressed by the functionality . ...
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I recently mentioned Richard Messik's great post castigating Cloud vendors on their jargon overload in the panel discussions at Softworld back in October. Over on AccountingWEB there has been some vigorous debate around the Cloud issues in discussion threads on whether accountants should be talking to their clients about Cloud Computing, the business case for SaaS, or the terminology itself. If you meander through the discussions I draw three conclusions: - There is plenty of confusion about the terminology, jargon and marketing hype spinning around the topic.
- The debate goes all over the place, highlighting a definite need for education and resources to explain the business benefits with more use cases and good examples.
- There is a group of anti SaaS/Cloud types on AccountingWEB (like many places elsewhere) who seem more keen to argue about semantics and jargon, rather than moving the debate on to business value.
Dennis suggested this is a self inflicted wound and highlighted how some vendors are avoiding the Cloud term. Back on those AccountingWEB discussions, Gary Turner of Xero commented: "I'm really struggling to find .. ...
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