Use Tactical Urgency to Introduce New Technologies

Recently Kelly Emo, SOA Product Marketing Manager at HP Software wrote in her post "Is your SOA in Action? Four ways to keep it that way.." One element she offers in her Obvious Insite # 3 is to use your SOA governance to drive adoption of new technologies such as RIA and Cloud Computing.

Much of my work over the last decade in getting new technologies adopted by enterprise IT has been under the proverbial banner of "Herding Cats". I have learned is that it is very hard to introduce new technology as part of the strategic plan and that SOA governance is often more of a roadblock than a driver.

Technologies that help integrate data between silos require the endorsement of too many chiefs and even with executive stakeholder support strategic efforts can fail under the urgency of immediate problems. In my experience with technology adoption of RIAs and EBSs from both the vendor and purchaser point of view I have found that even with a strong business imperative the inevitable urgency of tactical requirements derails the best strategic plans.

A better approach is to use a tactical urgency to demonstrate a real benefit. In this way it is possible to establish a beach head through a small project that demonstrates a believable ROI. From there you can position the technology successfully in the broader strategy.

Visualize Facebook Relationships

Facebook has seen tremendous growth over the year. The Mary Meeker: Facebook Is Eating Your Lunch And Dinner post at All Facebook singles out the statistic from her presentation at Web2.0 that Facebook is the largest share gainer of online usage over the past 3 years. Indeed at over 300M users, if Facebook were a country it would be the forth largest behind only China, India and the US.

With all the hype on social networking I thought it would be interesting to highlight again a dynamic application called the CurlGraph. The CurlGraph shows how your Facebook friends are related to each other and is especially fun when you see how your circles of friends are interrelated.

If you are on Facebook I urge you to give it a try and to suggest it to your friends.

I made a brief demo video you can post to Facebook and you'll find the Curl website has instructions on installation.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Risks In The Cloud

The Internet is buzzing today with the news that Microsoft subsidiary Danger has lost the server stored data on T-Mobile's Sidekick phones. See Did Microsoft Just Kill the Cloud? and Sidekick outage says more about the future of 'Pink' than Microsoft's cloud and The cloud: no place for amateurs

While there are not a lot of Sidekick users out there this incident has once a gain forced the question: How safe is your data in the cloud?

Have we developed a false sense of security as we depend more and more on data out of our immediate control on servers managed by Google, Salesforce, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter? I dare say not many of us has thought through a disaster recovery plan if all our emails, contacts, photos and documents were to disappear overnight.

The Power Law of Social Networks

Yesterday Dion Hinchcliffe lists 22 Power Laws of the Emerging Economy. It's an interesting post worth a read but I think he omitted one of the most important "The Power Law of Social Networks" Social Networks themselves are defined by a power curve. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrates this in his book "Linked, The New Science of Networks." This interconnectivity drives the information age where popular nodes can rise up quickly. Like all social networks the Internet has a few nodes with millions of connections and millions of nodes with very few connections. Increasingly 6 degrees of separation is becoming 3 degrees of separation.

iPhone 3G Network Slow?

Has your iPhone 3G been going slower and slower? Mine has. Now this from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDnet - iPhone users strangling the AT&T network.

What is dawning on AT&T is that the iPhone changes the way people use phones.

"Up until the iPhone, smartphones were cellphones with a browser clumsily attached. The iPhone is basically a pipe to the internet with a phone attached."

This is exactly what I experienced when I wrote "Goodbye Laptop - Hello iPhone"

It is precisely whythe 9 million iPhone users are using more of the network than AT&T's 20 million other cell phone users.

Hopefully AT&T can continue to build out the plumping or Apple can sign another provider that can keep up.

Can Social Media Sell Wine?

Steve Heimhoff asks the question "Has social media ever sold anything, besides itself?" It's a great question and has prompted a good discussion on his blog.

There is a lot of evidence that making social media a strategic part of a winery's overall marketing mix makes good business sense. I've been working to create a concrete ROI for social media's use in wineries and in my research thus far I've have found a lot of evidence that a dollar spent on social media can be much more effective than a dollar spent on traditional media.

According to Nielson online we trust the recommendations of friends (90%) and online reviews (70%) a lot more than traditional media (62% and lower). A good wine review from a friend is going to influence me more than a good review by a known wine critic. Forrester's recent Social Technology report found that the prime wine buying demographic of 35+ year olds grew their online participation by 60% last year prompting them to conclude:

"... marketers can now safely create social media marketing for people ages 35 and older."

In a recent survey by Viralvines.com on Twitter use in wineries, in answer to the question "How has your presence on Twitter helped your business? 96.4% responded that "It has helped us engage more with our customers"

Furthermore the conversation about a winery's brand is happening even if a winery chooses to ignore it and that carries a real risk of negative effects. According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics 25% of search results for the worlds largest brands are links to user generated content. This extends to niche brands as well and a bad review without the appropriate response can have long lasting effects.

Forrester's Social Media Profile Tool

Last week Forrester released this fun social media Consumer Profile Tool.

The tools lets you query their 2009 data by age, county and gender and shows the percentages of participants in each of their defined participation categories: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives.

This reinforces the point that any social media strategy should start with a good understanding of your customers and how they communicate.




See Social Technologies Ladder for an explanation of the categories.

Thanks to Forrester for providing this fun way to access their data.