Simplifying Software Architecture Improves Quality and Speed | CAST Software. Kudos to Roger Sessions, the CTO of ObjectWatch. Recently, Sessions took a stand supporting “the intentional architectural design of simplicity into a software application,” which he dubbed “simplility.” But while I applaud Sessions for championing the case for simplicity in software architectural design, I’m not sure we need a new word for it. In coining “simplility,” Sessions reasons that we a need a new word because “simplicity” no longer works.
He says people take “simplicity” too much for granted. I disagree. In a complex, confusing, cacophonous world, people beg for simplicity. Think about elements of our culture that crave simplicity. But how great is our desire to simplify our technology? Simply Software Simplicity deserves a place in the software industry lexicon next to a plethora of positive “-bilities” including scalability, flexibility and, most importantly, reliability. Simplicity benefits the developer. Unfortunately, speed can actually complicate rather than simplify. Why You're Talking Past Each Other, and How to Stop - Judith E. Glaser. By Judith E. Glaser | 12:00 PM December 20, 2012 Twenty-eight years ago I began my first experiment in what I call conversational intelligence. I was hired by Union Carbide to work with 17 high-powered sales executives in danger of losing a bid for a key contract.
My job was to figure out how they could raise their game and beat the other seven competitors. For more than two weeks I had them role-play potential conversations with “customers” and I charted what they said. Having spent thousands of hours observing executives in similar, real-world situations — from prospecting to performance reviews, business development to innovation — I can tell you this is a common problem. There is a biological explanation for this: when we express ourselves, our bodies release a higher level of reward hormones, and we feel great. These are natural impulses. Recognize your blind spots. Stop Start. The Best Strategic Thinkers – 5 Sure Characteristics. When it comes to determining the best strategic thinkers to invite into strategic planning efforts, the easy and frequent decision is rattling off a list of people based on titles and positions in an organization or team.
There’s a lot more to being a strong strategic thinker, however, than one’s organizational position. Consider looking for these five characteristics among strategic planning participants. The best strategic thinkers should be: 1. Open to valuable perspectives from multiple sources Some elements of strong strategic thinking can certainly be enhanced by seniority. Importantly though, great strategic thinking is about the right combination of three diverse perspectives: front-line organizational experience, broad functional knowledge, and creative energy. People with front-line experience help frame and ground business issues. Any of these groups, working by themselves, will create a strategic direction lacking in some essential way. 2. 3. But that’s only half the story. The Curiosity Chronicles - Curious About...Hierarchy. Crowdsourcing and Next Generation Collaboration - Part 1. The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise.
As we enter a new decade, it seems appropriate to reflect on the transformation of the “Enterprise.” No, I am not talking about the starship! I am referring to the organizational framework that has been the mainstay of business structure for the past couple of decades. Historically many models of enterprise structure have emerged: functional, divisional, centralized, decentralized and matrixed, to name a few. Rather than debate the merits and demerits of these, let us envision what the future model might be for a successful enterprise. What will the next generation business enterprise look like?
Well, there is no crystal ball to give us an exact answer for sure. By the way, it is important to point out that collaboration must not be confused with consensus or teamwork. The decade ahead will see the emergence of the Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise that will leverage innovation and operational excellence without boundaries. Now picture this. The Six Pillars of Social Business - Page 3. We humans aren’t the fastest animals on the surface of this earth. Nor are we the strongest, or the ones with the most powerful senses. Far from it. As individuals, we are painfully weak in the eyes of nature. Sure, we are at the top of the most intelligent creatures list, but that doesn’t help much in a one-on-one situation with a bear, wolf or lion.
Our main strength, as human beings, is our ability to coordinate our actions as a group of individuals. Just like other primates, we rely on our social networks to share ideas and information to help the group as a whole to survive and adapt to our environment. Now let’s look at this from the perspective of an organization. Yet, many organizations perform poorly in both these respects. Many of these organizations were once built like supertankers, and still are.
Now, it might have to turn on a dime. Some of us label this new organizational form "Social Business. " #1 Trust #2 Openness Continue reading this article: Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration. Build Social Media Relationships Before You Need Them. Managing without Managers, and What This Might Mean. Taking Social Media By The Horns, Where You Live. This post is about a social media conference, in Spokane, Washington. And the guy who’s presenting it. And a conference where you live. And you. Please read on. This Tuesday, September 25, 2012, at Spokane’s Red Lion Hotel Convention Center, if you’re lucky enough to have a full day and $149 to invest in your vital continuing business education, you can attend Go Social, hosted by Nectar Media. I’ve attended a session by the presenter, Nectar Media’s Josh Wade. I’ve watched Josh grow with social media. Go Social will feature presenters who have become experts by diving into social media back when it was kind of a curiosity, sticking with it, and getting results.
If you’re anywhere near Spokane, a day and evening at Go Social will be well worth your investment. This brings us to you and your town I salute Josh for making Go Social happen. Sound like your town? Chances are, there’s an event like Go Social near you. It can make you better at social and digital marketing. Why do people share? InShare26 Last fall, at an Intranet conference in Oslo, Norway, one of the speakers raised a very important question during his session: “Why do people share?”. I have been asking myself the same thing many times and written about it a few times, such as in this blog post from 2010: “Understanding the psychology of sharing – what makes it tick?”.
So, I waited eagerly during the presentation to hear what he had to say about it, hoping for some new insights and perhaps an interesting discussion among the audience after the session. But to my big disappointment he never returned to the question to answer it. Immediately after the presentation I did some more research on this subject and created a draft blog post (this one), but for some reason I forgot to post it on my blog. Better late than never. Sharing is giving In "Stop Spreading Viruses & Start Giving Gifts", Ivan Askwith writes that when consumers share something with other consumers, they do it for their own reasons.
LDAP Directories: An original NoSQL solution? | UnboundID Blog. By Nick Crown, Senior Product Line Manager A brief NoSQL primer: There is a lot of discussion these days on the merits of selecting a data store that aligns with the unique requirements of your application. Gone, it would seem, are the days when Relational Databases are the de-facto option for persisting data for your application.
The “movement” to recognize and promote this trend is called NoSQL, or “Not Only SQL”. Much has been written on the topic of NoSQL, and as @sogrady pointed out well over a year ago, it’s not going anywhere for a while. But, where is it going? What is it being used for? On the relationship between directories and NoSQL: The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, “is an application level protocol for reading and editing directories over an IP network.”
So, what are directories? Most directories, our Directory included, are simply key/value stores underneath the covers. “So, is Berkeley DB a “NoSQL” solution? So what? FOCAS 2012: Towards Open and Innovative Governance. The 2012 Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS) convened August 5-8 in Aspen, Colorado to discuss the movement towards open and innovative governance and develop tangible proposals and recommendations to increase transparency, promote smarter governance and enhance democracy. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation sponsored the Forum. Participants included media and technology experts, government officials, academics, and leading NGO directors. Notably joining the conversation was President of the Republic of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves, White House Digital Strategist Macon Phillips, Ushahidi Executive Director Juliana Rotich and a number of up-and-coming technology innovators with expertise in designing platforms and applications for open governance systems.
FOCAS12 Presentations: FOCAS12 Video Library: For more information about this forum, please contact senior project manager Sarah Eppehimer at (202) 736-5851 or sarah.eppehimer@aspeninstitute.org. Employee Education Is Key to Social Business Adoption. Last week I posted a story about how TD Bank Group planned for, chose and launched its enterprise collaboration platform. Key to its success was the partnership IT had built with the business: The business supported the initiative from the start and worked in concert with IT to develop a list of requirements it wanted to fulfill. TD Bank CIO Glenda Crisp named two additional reasons the deployment to more than 65,000 users was so successful: strong senior executive sponsorship as well as the investment and support from its technology partner, IBM. And while these three factors were important in the success of the project, there was one other step TD Bank took to combat a common problem many enterprises face in a social business implementation: lack of engagement.
That's where the "genius program" came in. This group of employees, called the Geniuses, has more than 600 members today. TD Bank's Geniuses aren't necessarily managers or executives. The “Four Cs” of 21st Century Education | Entrepreneur the Arts. Most of us know that “there is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces.” So states the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national organization comprised of both business (Apple, Intel, Adobe, HP) and education (National Education Association, Pearson, Scholastic) leaders, committed to “fusing the three Rs and four Cs.”
As an advocate for the skills of innovation, I’m thrilled to see attention now placed on these Four Cs, with 14 states, including Illinois, having signed on to adopt the Partnership framework as a way to ready K-12 students for the 21st century. Most of us know the three Rs are reading, writing and arithmetic, but what are the Cs? In the Partnership framework above, the Four Cs make up the “Learning and Innovation Skills” and are as follows: 1. Creativity and Innovation 2. More from Adam on his Innovation on my Mind blog. Re:Re:Fw:Re: Workers Spend 650 Hours a Year On Email - Jordan Weissmann. Unless you happen to get some sort of obsessive compulsive satisfaction from keeping your inbox in shipshape -- and hey, if you do, more power to ya -- dealing with email has got to be one of the most deadening aspects of any office job.
And if the tedium of Outlook management wasn't already dreadful enough, consider this: There's a good chance you spend more than a quarter of each week reading and answering those emails. That factlet comes courtesy of the McKinsey Global Institute, which broke down how so-called "interaction workers" spend their days. They describe these as people whose jobs require "complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and access to information.
" I'm interpreting it as consultant speak for "office stiff. " The upshot: we spend 13 hours a week, or 28 percent of our office time, on email. As anyone who has spent an inordinate amount of time typing out a formal email to their boss knows, this is not an efficient state of affairs. Concept Mapping as a Tool for Group Problem Solving.
Peer Support for Network Weaving. I’m doing some network coaching with a small group of network weavers and thought I would share with you some coaching frameworks and practices that help people quickly adopt and adapt network approaches. Especially with a new domain such as network weaving, people may need some training to learn about network concepts and practices before they can apply them. However, I’ve learned that the smaller the training unit (5-15 minutes max), the more likely it is that people will be able to apply the learning. Part of the training needs to be a quick activity to try out the practice in the training session. If you’re talking about ways to create network maps, have the individual or small group develop a map for a project. The final part of training is for the participants to identify an action step they commit to undertaking before the next session.
What happens when people try something out becomes the content of the coaching. The next step is creation of peer support. Social curation is much more than just a market. In 2010, “curation” popped up on tech blogs and VCs’ radars. Since then, people have been asking whether curation is a legitimate trend, a new market to be exploited, or just the latest buzzword. Some people, including GigaOM writer Bobbie Johnson, have wondered if curation is a bubble, and if it is, when is it going to burst? When Johnson asked this question, I think the jury was still out. As the chief evangelist for the social library Pearltrees, I was directly involved in the “Web curation” movement early on, and I think it is now clear that social curation is not a bubble. The more I watch the development of social curation and the more I learn about the what, how and why of it, the more convinced I become that what we’re seeing is going to grow well beyond a simple market.
One of the characteristics of online activities that transcend simple markets is that they are analogous to behaviors that seem to be hardwired into humans. I agree with his perspective. 5 Must Have Steps To Better Collaboration. The 7 Pillars of Connecting With Absolutely Anyone. IBM Midmarket CEO Study: Collaboration and Transparency Key to Providing An Edge. IBM Launches New Mobile Collaboration Platform, Integrates Big Data Search and Analytics. 12 Most Mind-Blowing Content Curators to Follow. How Enterprise Collaboration Tools Will Change The Future Of Work - PSFK.
People Influence Tools List. Pinterest analysis: PBS, USA Today engage with readers most effectively. From Co-creation to Collaboration: 5 pillars for business success. Collaboration Can Be Messy - Managing Technology. Developing a Collaborative Approach to Improving Project Management Practices, Part 1 - Managing Technology. Let’s Call It What It Is: Pervasive Communication | Intelligent Catalyst. How to Moderate a Brainstorming Session. Increase Your Team's Motivation Five-Fold - Scott Keller.
Total CRM including projects, billing and more. More than just a CRM - WORKEtc - WORKetc 2011. Collaborate | Online Collaboration Software for Engaging, Collaborative Learning. A structural model for Identity based on certification, recognition, reputation and anonymity. The Pillars of Influence and How to Activate Cause and Effect. The-sad-state-of-social-media-privacy-infographic.png (1000×2533) Why Atlassian is to Software as Apple is to Design. Sharing is a Talent. Network Weavers « opencollaborarchy. Bluewolf Taps Bunchball to Incentivize Culture of Collaboration.
Curation – in Need of a Cure? « opencollaborarchy. How Twitter Chats Will Open Your Mind and Network. The 5 Models Of Content Curation. The Curation Economy and The 3C’s of Information Commerce. The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators. 12 Provocations on The Future of Social. Pinterest Rival Fancy Gets Fancier With “Match By Color” Visual Search. Collaboration.jpg (JPEG Image, 599 × 330 pixels) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Mt.Gox - Bitcoin Exchange. Strategic Business Success - 3 Critical Perspectives. The Camera Bag: The Descriptive Camera Churns Out Words Instead of Pictures. The 8 Essentials of Innovation. Crowd_Business_Models.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Crowdsourcing_Landscape_v2.pdf (application/pdf Object) Managing beyond the organizational hierarchy with communities and social networks at Electronic Arts. Look Beyond the Team: It's About the Network - Jon R. Katzenbach.