Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Iran’s Twitter Revolution Holds Lessons For CIOs

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
CIOs Need To Plan On How To Deal With Twitter <br> (c) 2009

CIOs Need To Plan On How To Deal With Twitter (c) 2009

Politics is a fascinating subject and I’m sure that we all have our own opinions about the events that are currently unfolding over in Iran regarding their recent elections. However, this posting isn’t about the elections or who won. Rather it’s about the amazing flow of information that happened even in a heavily restricted / controlled environment. We live in the 21st Century and this unfolding story holds many lessons for modern CIOs…

What Does An Election In Iran Have To Do With Twitter?

Noam Cohen over at the New York Times has taken a look at how information has flowed since the unrest began. In all honesty, “twitter revolution” is probably an overstatement. Web sites, text messages, and simple person-to-person conversation probably did a better job of spreading news than Twitter did. However, Twitter did do an amazing job of getting information OUT of the country.

Remember that Twitter is only three years old. It’s impact is much greater than its age would lead a CIO to believe. Although you might not be dealing with a disputed election, Twitter could play a big role in your company’s future.

What Twitter Means To Your Firm

There will be times in the future that your senior management (CEO, Chairman, etc.) will want to control what information is released about your firm and have some control over what people are saying about your company. Twitter opens up a whole new channel for people to talk about your firm. Here are six lessons that the Iranian election have taught all of us about this powerful new communication tool:

  • Twitter Really Can’t Be Stopped: Twitter messages (“tweets”) are really a form of one-to-many communications. There is no centralized site that can be shut down or forced to remove information by court order. There is no stopping this beast.
  • There Is Power In Numbers: A single tweet probably doesn’t mean much. A couple of tweets won’t attract attention. However, a series of tweets about the same subject will start to create an ecosystem about an event or a viewpoint. This can attract attention and start to generate more conversations.
  • Buyer Beware: Remember, on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog (a saying from the early years of the Internet). Since the people participating in Twitter have no real identity, you really can’t trust what they are saying until its been verified.
  • Home Of Bad Information: There are probably people trying to communicate truths using Twitter, but there are probably also people who are trying to spread lies using Twitter. Whether it’s to drive your stock price down (or up) or prevent / encourage a takeover, all sorts of people will use Twitter to spread completely made-up stories.
  • Twitter People Use Twitter: CIOs always have to keep in mind that the people using Twitter are generally tech savvy folks who are online a lot. This does not necessarily represent the public at large.
  • Twitter Is Connected To The Media: The popular media “gets” Twitter and they are listening in order to get leads on new stories and dig up sources. This means that almost any storyteller now has a potential direct line to a major media outlet.

Final Thoughts

Twitter is yet one more way for people to communicate. It takes a little getting used to for most of us as we struggle to understand why anyone would take the time to send 140 character messages to communicate when we have so many other tools that we can use. However Twitter (and all of its variants) are here to stay.

CIOs need to adapt to this new world. When future events affect your company (disasters, mergers, takeovers, product issues, etc.) Twitter will probably play a role in how information gets out to the world at large. Developing a communication strategy that includes Twitter is a critical CIO responsibility. Addressing this issue this will mean that CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

Are you using Twitter now? Is anyone discussing your firm on Twitter today? Have any of your competitors had discussions about them happen on Twitter? Does your communication strategy currently have a plan to include Twitter as a part of how you communicate information to the outside world? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the great things about working in the IT field is that whenever things start to get boring, we have the ability to create new buzzwords and make things interesting all over again. The arrival of “Cloud Computing” on the scene a couple of years ago showed that this cycle has not gone away. Maybe it would be worthwhile to take a step back and make sure that we’re all on the same page here – what is cloud computing and why should anyone care?

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Web 3.0 Is Coming – Are CIOs Ready?

Monday, July 20th, 2009
What Is The Web 3.0 And Are CIOs Going To Be Ready?

What Is The Web 3.0 And Are CIOs Going To Be Ready?

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. CIOs have been slow to take advantage of all that the Web 2.0 had to offer, will they lag behind again when the Web 3.0 shows up?

What Was Web 2.0?

Before we run off and start making predictions about the future of the Internet, maybe it would be a good idea to take just a moment and make sure that we are all on the same page as to just exactly what the Web 2.0 is /was.

When the web first showed up (Web 1.0), everyone rushed out and created static web pages. That was a great start, but it got a bit boring because nothing changed without a great deal of effort. Web 2.0 extended what we had by adding blogging, Wikipedia, social networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and even microblogging (Twitter). This changed everything because all of a sudden things could be easily changed – and they were!

What Is Web 3.0 Going To Be?

So what’s next I can hear CIOs and soon-to-be CIOs asking. Dr. Jim Hendler at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been spending some time thinking about this and he’s come up with some interesting ideas. Dr. Hendler points out that it appears to all be based on Tim Berners-Lee’s (you know, the guy who invented the Web) vision of a semantic web.

In this next iteration of the web, what we’re going to see is more and more complex mashups of data from different applications being used to deliver data in more useful ways. Dr. Hendler believes that the read-write abilities of Web 2.0 applications will be used to build Web 3.0 applications that operate at the data, not the application level.

What’s Going To Make The Web 3.0 Happen?

Before the Web 3.0 can show up, a few critical pieces need to drop into place. Ultimately, what needs to happen is that it has to become easier to integrate web data resources. Here are the emerging technologies that are going to allow this to happen:

  • Resource Description Framework (RDF): provides a means to link data from multiple different websites or databases. Uses the SQL-like SPARQL query language.
  • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): We already have these – this is how you merge and map data that is found in different locations on the web.
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL): allows relationships to be inferred between data that is stored in different parts of the same application.

Final Thoughts

Rare are the times that CIOs actually have a chance to get in front of a significant change before it happens. Right now they have such a chance – Web 3.0 is not here yet, but it’s getting ready to arrive.

Spending time now to understand what business problems could be solved or solved better if you had a better description of the data that is available on the web is a necessary first step. Assigning staff to learn and become experts on the new Web 3.0 technologies early on will allow CIOs to have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

What is the level of adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in  your department currently? Is anyone currently studying the new technologies that Web 3.0 will be built on? Have you created a planning committee to study how Web 3.0 abilities can be used to help your business? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Politics is a fascinating subject and I’m sure that we all have our own opinions about the events that are currently unfolding over in Iran regarding their recent elections. However, this posting isn’t about the elections or who won. Rather it’s about the amazing flow of information that happened even in a heavily restricted / controlled environment. We live in the 21st Century and this unfolding story holds many lessons for modern CIOs…

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Posted in technologies | 1 Comment »

Google’s Staffing Problems Have Much To Teach CIOs

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

If you could be running the IT department for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems…

Google’s Staffing Problem

Google is in the middle of what is often called a “brain drain” – some of its best and brightest workers are leaving the firm to go join other companies. In the past few weeks they’ve lost Tim Armstrong who was their advertising sales boss and they’ve lost David Rosenblatt who was in charge of their display advertising. Oh, and they are losing their top engineers to Twitter and Facebook…

What’s Google Going To Do?

Google’s plan to try to stem this exodus of talent is a typical Google solution – they’re going to try and solve it by crunching numbers. Unlike many IT firms, Google has both the data and the processing power to attempt this.

Google plans on using data that they’ve collected from surveys and peer reviews in order to discover which of its employees feel underused. This may sound a little far fetched, but Edward Lawler who works at the University of Southern California says that eventually all companies will be approaching HR issues this way.

What’s Gone Wrong At Google?

Using algorithms to find unsatisfied workers is clever and all that, but clearly there is something else going on here. Interviews with former Google employees reveal some interesting things about the day-to-day practical realities of working in this high-tech Shangri-La.

Former employees reveal that people are leaving because many employees don’t feel that their efforts will make the same amount of impact as the company matures from its startup days. Compounding the problem is the fact that Google does not appear to provide much in the way of formal career planning. Often these tasks would be addressed by a company’s Human Resources (HR) department, but it appears as though Google’s HR department is viewed by many as being quite impersonal.

So What Should Google Be Doing?

As amazing as it may seem, the answer to Google’s problems is actually very simple – hard to implement, but simple to describe. What they need to do is to put their customer first. By clearly communicating to the entire company that Google exists to serve their customers, a great deal of other staffing problems will fade away.

Final Thoughts

One of Google’s biggest problems is that they have not found a way to keep their employees engaged. This isn’t surprising because Google dominates its market and so it doesn’t have any big competitors to use as a rallying cry.

Making its customers first would allow Google to focus its staff on a single goal that would extend throughout the company All of a sudden every employee would have a way to measure the value of his/her work. Once again, this wouldn’t necessarily be easy to do, but it’s the right thing to do. If you can figure out how to do this with your IT department then you will have found another way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

Do you think that Google’s algorithm will be able to identify those employees who might leave? Do you think that it will make mistakes? Do you think that this type of algorithm would work at your company? Do you think a customer focus would solve Google’s staffing issues? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Didn’t we solve that whole outsourcing thing years ago? Specifically aren’t the IT and the Finance departments on the same page when it comes to not only IF we should outsource some of the IT work, but also HOW it should be outsourced? If this is true, than what does the Satyam scandle mean for your IT / Finance relationship?

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