More Amazing Social Media Statistics

4 May, 2010
Social Media
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A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics ... would you believe ... If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's 4th largest 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices 25% of search results for the world's Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content Pretty amazing stuff…

Business Proposals and The Lesson of Jabberwocky

When someone asks my opinion on their writing, I'll get fairly detailed; I've noted in the past that there is a lot of power and influence in the written word, and it's fairly important to get it done well, or your project proposals just never seem to get off the ground. This particular proposal suffered from a lack of direction; it didn't take the reader (the decision maker) through a clear progression. Admittedly, the subject matter was a bit technical and…

Lost Weekend: Troubleshooting a MySQL Installation

21 March, 2010
Hands-On
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Spurred on by Blogger's decision to stop supporting FTP for publishing blogs, I have finally started the long process to implement a WordPress blog - hosted by myself, not Wordpress.com. To be fair, I am making this longer than it necessarily needs to be, but I am continuing my efforts to maintain a comprehensive Admin guide for all of my development efforts - configuring servers, installing software, etc. Needless to say, this adds overhead and time, but it's worth the…

Leading Innovation: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution

15 March, 2010
Design
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Four required competencies for leading innovation - defined, and put in context with examples.

Leading Change: Knowing, Understanding, Empathizing

28 February, 2010
People Management
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Understanding the job - not just the How, but also the Why - is just as important as Doing the Job. A key component of Change Management is helping the team see the difference.

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Leading Change: Pick Something, and Do It Well

14 February, 2010
Change Management
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To be successful in leading change and creating value, demonstrate your ability to make Change happen skills in People, Process, or Technology.

Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

24 January, 2010
Collaboration
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This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered - embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical Among Us. We've all been in large meetings, with tens of people from the project team, along with the expensive consultants, sitting around a table…

Data Visualization: How (2 of 2)

19 January, 2010
Visualization
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Previously ... creating opportunities for insight ... The short answer, as you know, is that it's impossible to tell you how to be insightful and imaginative in a single blog post. All I can do is point you in the general direction, and (hopefully) ignite a little spark. What's the Goal? and, Where to Begin? I previously talked about the growing calls for effective data visualizations; we have access to all this great information, and there are insights in there…

Data Visualization: Why (1 of 2)

13 January, 2010
Visualization
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Between business requests and breathless vendors, I am getting caught up in the growing tide of interest in "data visualizations" - managers requesting highly interactive, highly graphical, highly intuitive analytics interfaces (think Minority Report). But what are we trying to accomplish here? We keep on hearing about "executive dashboards", a heads-up display of in-my-face KPIs, or statistics and exceptions delivered automatically to my e-mail and/or Blackberry. However, when I ask management folks to get a bit more specific - how…

Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech … and How to Change the Game

There is a fundamental difference in the level of innovation and design for internal "enterprise" technologists vs. external product developers. Internal teams are rewarded for getting work completed, while external folks win when their work is actually put to use. What are some ways to change that dynamic, and improve the work of internal teams?