Loss of the baby boomers

In conversations this week, I discovered that by 2014, more than 50% of a certain oil companies most prized oil and gas discovery workers will have retired. For an industry whose share price is measured on the number of oil and gas fields discovered each year this is a disturbing trend.

One of the possible solution - social networks. 'Alumni' knowledge networkers are emerging in high knowledge industries (such as biotech and consulting) to retain access to the people most valued. As well having access to the alumni, there's growing evidence that social networking tools signficantly help those at risk of isolation such as homeworkers, those on maternity/paternity leave, in turn aiding our diversity and vitality agenda.

We know our workforce are already self-organizing and connecting on social networking tools such as Linkedin and Facebook - so should we be starting new networks or harnessing the ones already out there? and How can we leverage an increasingly popular consumer trend to our benefit?

Rumble in the Jungle

Turning unutilized assets into a profit stream is pretty smart - and that's exactly what Amazon is doing with their book selling infrastructure to create Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). S3 is an online storage web service offering unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Amazon charges fees for data stored and for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data.

So why might S3 be of interest? From a corporate perspective, a number of big companies are using S3 as a rapid development environment, to support cost effective experimentation and sand-boxing. As the model is a pure pay-per-use environment you only pay for what you use. There are no timely provision or sizing exercises to go through, so developers can do what they do best - develop.

S3 doesn't 'do' everything and should be approached cautiously as a serious alternative to professional data centers as it's not suited for most corporate apps. There are all the usual concerns around downtime, privacy etc. which is mostly out of your control - but many are willing to accept those risks in favour of the low costs.

Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services, up more than 30,000 from last quarter, according to Amazon’s recent quarterly earnings announcement.

If you want to get a hands on experience of Amazon's S3 service, I would recommend trying out http://www.jungledisk.com/ which is a cloud based storage company which uses the S3 service as a backend. It gives users unlimited amount of data storage for only USD 0.15 per gigabyte. If you want to read more on S3 - there's a good blog entry here.

Darwin & Self-Service

On a recent vist to one of our national businesses, I was pleasantly surprised to see 'Xobni' (pronounced Zob-Nee) http://www.xobni.com/ featuring on many non-IT desktops.

Xobni is a small plugin which runs alongside Outlook providing a people-centric view of your mail, and attachments. Xobni has some neat features, such as analysis of 'most frequently emailed', a league table of 'average email response time'. It's not perfect but it's an improvment over standard outlook. Xobni is proof that

• Users are getting smarter and are self-serving


• News travels fast unaided and only partially influenced by IT


• Even heavyweights like Outlook can benefit from consumer enhancement

In a similar vain - I received an email directly from a business users saying 'Can we do this already, everyone here is already using it' he was referring to http://www.doodle.ch/ a stark reminder that technology doesn't need to be sophisticated or expensive to be of value.

So, should we be listening more to what people are 'discovering' for themselves? If so how can we capture and share the knowledge? How should we deal with apps like 'Xobni' which touch core apps like Outlook? What role will IT play in the future - should we be saying 'no' to users or findings ways to share good news?

ps. Unsurprising ... Bill's got his eye on Xobni ....

Join the evolution

How do we get the rest of the IT community engaged and enthused about consumerisation? Anthony "Hiro"Cockburn (my trusted side kick) and I have been discussing the challenges we have been facing to get across the need for more "action not debate" concerning consumerisation. We have been involved in anumber of internal IT battles over the last few weeks since we joined the team - mainly due to concern about what this agenda is really all about and how it may effect an IT community who have traditioanlly been about increasing control.

How do we get people to start thinking differently about IT and embracing consumerisation? Does anyone have any ideas for how we get the message out to the masses in the right way?

Does one size fit all? Would you give Superman the same technology as Batman?

Does one size fit all?
Are we all similar people with similar technology needs?
Would you give superman the same technology as batman, or wonderwoman for that matter? Go with me on this one....surely superman would need some sort of high tech mobile device with news streaming capability from across the world to keep good visibility of the turmoil Lex Luthor is trying to cause, whilst batman might needs a good sat nav in his bat mobile to make sure he doesn't take an embarrassing wrong turn. Superman can fly, batman...well he likes bats. Would they really need the same tools to do their jobs?

These are questions I often ponder as I'm drifting off to sleep, whilst the world of consumerisation is still whizzing around in my head. The idea of segmenting people into categories depending on the role they perform and the way they like to work is becoming a key step in defining those who may be suitable for a more "consumerised" approach. How do you like the sound of a world where you are able to identify the way you need and like to work...and then have a bunch of tried and tested tools available for you to chose from to support you? Further more, how do you like the sound of being able to comment on your experiences and share the learning's with those around you to either a) scream and tell the world how amazing something is...or b) warn people to steer clear...?

Understanding these initial "work styles" is a hot topic for me and a lot of other people at the moment. The UK "Leatherhead" team (UK Business is moving from 3 sites down to 1 in Leatherhead) has already defined a set of work styles to help understand how people will work in the new building - where there is intense pressure on desk space and parking spaces. These work styles will now be mapped to an IT service catalogue to provide users with choice concerning the technology that supports their personal style. In addition to this initiative, the new ways of working team have done some excellent research in this space and are now working with the consumerisation team to set up some practical definitions that we could test out in the field...

Is anyone else aware of current internal activity going on in this space?

It's a bit late now, but tomorrow I'll share some more about some work Dell have been doing in this space....good night for now

Penny for your Eyeballs?

Adobe wants your eyeballs. They're chasing the lucrative consumer dominated business model pioneered by Google.

The beta service creates the capability for authors to monetize newsletters, whitepapers, reprints - anything exported to PDF. The idea is that you upload your PDF file, Adobe analyzes the content and connects it to ads (as per Googles AdSense). When the viewing public opens the document in Adobe reader,annoying relevant ads pop up alongside. When the unsuspecting victim viewer clicks through - the author collect a referal fee. It's Googles primary source of cash so why shouldn't Adobe get a piece of the action?

For content producers / creators, even employers with a large workforce is this a future way to subsidize production costs, offset licence fees or even creating new profit sources? If you want to know more sign up for the Beta and start earning today.

Google Analytics is watching you ...

Thought you might be interested to know that you're not alone. I've now embedded a small amount of code into this page which means you're being watched....

Analystics is really designed to makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

If you want a demo click here

Large File Sending ...

As business globalises and externalises and as media formats grow in richness, depth and fidelity .... files are getting larger and needing to travel further. Enter the 'Large File Transfer Service'.

These services offer tremedious value (many if not most are free), and they solve an age old problem of how to send artwork in development through to an agency and get a decent turnaronnd time.

Secuirty should be addressed in the short term by educating the workforce to think about the content before sending it through the net, password protecting content, validating and advising on which services are legitimate and meet corporate standards (blacklisting those that don't). In the mid to long term enterprises should be focusing on Rights Management - that way concerns of the quality of the messenger or legitimacy of the recipient can be removed.

If you're interested to find out more Lifehacker, have just reviewed a number of consumer file sharing model...

1. Microsofts SkyDrive - 5GB limit, SkyDrive works on a folder-based system, emphasizing the ability to organize your files in personal, shared, and public folders. SkyDrive requires a Windows Live account to get started, individual uploads are limited to 50MB.

2. Box.net - Popular for its simple interface and large feature set, file-sharing site Box.net provides 1GB of free space. Users love it for its collaboration tools and open format, which enables fun features like mounting you web space on your desktop and web service support, and RSS feeds. Like many others in this Hive Five, Box.net provides direct links to files so users aren't held up at a landing page to get their download. Box.net's biggest drawback is its free account's filesize limit, which sits at a rather paltry 10MB.

3. DropIO - Renown by users for its simplicity and impressive interface, Drop.io (original post) doesn't require registration for use and specializes in document sharing, offering built-in previews of everything from images to PDFs. The innovative service has recently added a couple of new features, like free sending and receiving of faxes and voice recording. The free account has a 100MB storage limit, so unless you're ready to spend some cash, Drop.io is best-suited for smaller files.

4. Yousendit - Free transfers up to 100MBs, plug-ins for Outlook, Photoshop, and Macs Aperture - which offer a seemless and transparent experience for users. Impressive 2GB transfer file size limits.

Social Technographics Explained

An interesting apporach which Forrester is launching to segment user populations. Would be interesting to understand how these profiles vary industry by industry and function by function. Short slide show paints enough of a picture to be able to grasp the key concept. Tip - if like me you're struggling to read the words (and don't have your glasses / microscope) click on the little icon in the bottom right of the slide show and then click the option - full screen.

View Upload your own

Going Public is the only way to get RSS Feeds ....

Techie interlude ...

Becomes apparent that you can't have a closed group blog and have RSS or Atom news feeds enabled. :(

The reason - RSS doesn't support authentication ..... yet. The full story below ....
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/03/private-blogs-do-not-have-newsfeeds.html