The Workplace Blog

If Nichalos Negroponte and the OLPC group have their way, they could be shipping tens of millions of these very cool low cost laptops. Check out images and details about the devices here. It looks like a bunch of countries already have orders in. Definitely an innovative concept with the integrated strap, hand crank for power, instant on, instant off, linux based device there seems like a lot of potential. The innovations go beyond the hardware to include online/offline synchronizable ebooks, quick easy ways to build applications, and lots more. The olpc wiki has captured some of the discussion. Think time is very good indeed, especially when that time is connected with people’s passions.

If you’re still not sure what Web 2.0 is, then here’s a video explanation from the editors of ZDNet. Everybody seems to be defining Web 2.0 these days and that makes me wonder about coinage of the term. Here’s my definition which borrows heavily from o’Reilly over at Boxes and Arrows. Be sure to read the comments at the end of the article.

CIO magazine this week talks about how people are using VOIP to execute a ‘vishing‘ attack. Leveraging voip, it’s easy for people to get a number, use it for a short amount of time and then drop it. Skype and Vonage, among others, provide a fast way to get a voip number. Looks like another item that your chief security officer will have to look after.

CIO magazine had a great article on governance and the impact it can have on an organizations productivity. “we have ‘business projects’ in which IT is a major and often critical component.” is a great quote from the article. The point is that staying close to user and business needs is critical. We have learned this over the last 5 years and need to remember it moving forward. All too often it was easy to get caught up in massive implementations in which the project was an IT project and not a business project. In this new world of agile like approaches and smaller release iterations it should help us stay on track, ensuring that we are always delivering business value. Agile, refactoring and other techniques have helped teach IT and Business organizations stay more nimble and focused on the business. Growing lightweight manageable governance policies can help deliver more of the same.

The promise of wikis within the enterprise has been much touted. For example take a look at this (“Hands On: Why you need a wiki”) article.

There are at least two areas worth mentioning that might still be needed however: One has to do with search (cf. Seth Godin’s recent post) and the other has to do with strategy integration. (cf. Mike Yamamoto’s article)

We’ve already seen how wikis have improved in their user interface (i.e. see article on JotSpot). Endeca’s recently patented Guided Navigation search engine might (arguably) help wikis reach their promise within the enterprise. (see Forrester’s Vendor Report excerpt of the fee-based article).

In The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that the traditional view of economics as a static, equilibrium-balanced system is going through a radical rethinking involving a multitude of disciplines. The new spin is “complexity economics,” in which the economy is a highly dynamic and constantly evolving system that is all but impossible to predict. Given such radical dynamism, how can companies set strategy? Beinhocker proposes viewing strategy as not singular or unified but rather a portfolio of experiments. He writes:

“The key to doing better is to “bring evolution inside” and get the wheels of differentiation, selection, and amplification spinning within a company’s four walls. Rather than thinking of strategy as a single plan built on predictions of the future, we should think of strategy as a portfolio of experiments, a population of competing Business Plans that evolves over time.”

An excerpt printed in Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” newsletter details how Bill Gates’ and team pursued six competing strategies in 1987 thereby enabling Microsoft to rise to dominance.

What I find compelling about this mode of thinking is its emphasis on preparedness. By preparing for multiple scenarios, businesses can be more agile within an increasingly complex and dynamic marketplace and hence remain competitive. A major step toward facilitating the preparedness and agility necessary to practice a portfolio approach to business strategy is making knowledge management a top priority. For further insights, download “The New Knowledge Management Imperative: User Centered, Focused, and Organic” and find out why Avenue A | Razorfish was named one of KMWorld’s 100 Companies That Matter In Knowledge Management.

Looks like Bill’s energies are heading toward the Philanthropic side of life at this point. Imagine what he can do in that area, given the success he has had in the enterprise software world. This is very exciting, especially when we consider that Ray Ozzie will be taking over as Chief Software Architect. I think this is a fantastic turn for Microsoft especially consider the strong focus in the industry on web 2.0 style technologies like wikis, blogs, tagging, and user generated content. Having cut his teeth creating the ‘groupware’ industry, Ray certainly has the focus on the right place. Getting enterprise workers to come together.

Rim and Palm have announced that Blackberry Connect will run on the Palm OS. With the treo supporting Windows Mobile, Blackberry and PalmOS, it’s an interesting strategy. Just like the day last week when I watched a Mac PowerBook boot up with the Windows logo, the times are a changing. Interoperability is the word of the day.

There is a new Google Enterprise Search version available. One of the cool new features is OneBox. OneBox can help you access information from existing business systems. There’s an impressive list of enterprise software vendors who have already signed up like Cognos, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce.com, SAS and many others. Thinking how to make that effectively show up within a search result will be a fun challenge.

This deal brings together two of the most popular open source products available to the enterprise workplace today. As they highlight in the red hat press release, bringing together these companies provides a great open standards based toolkit to implement a services oriented archtiecture in any organization.