11/11/2010 by Socitm Insight Team
Gartner's Monica Basso observes that the Social Networking and Mobile Collaboration puzzle is not just about technology, it's also very much about culture. In the Social Networking and Cloud hype cycle, Wireless email is most commonly supported technology
Mobile Social Networks and how best to support
them create a disruptive trend, one in which Facebook is at the
forefront. Gartner recommends that organisations should not attempt to
inhibit or ban these technologies because this won't work: either
employees will work around these restrictions, or they'll move to more
enlightened employers. Instead, organisations should plan to explore and
exploit these social systems including microblogging and calendar
mashups.
Business Communications are evolving to the extent that Monica
Basso makes the aggressive prediction that by 2014, social networking
will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal
communications for 20% of business users. The drivers for this are:
Facebook, the demographic change, and vendor push; whilst the Inhibitors
include security concerns and management scepticism. If you doubt this
prediction, reflect that when Instant Messaging first arrived, many
managers rejected it. However, the reality is that today, 60% of users
employ IM. Under 25s consider email as a dinosaur, and they want to use
Facebook to communicate.
Monica Basso recommends that you use this age
group to find the best ideas for collaborating, and improving your
business. As an example, Oce adopted Yammer to address information flow
blockages, and worked with more receptive young. Subsequent measurements
showed major reductions in email traffic. Planning investment in mobile
collaboration is not easy because the technology changes every 6
months. Gartner's Market clock ( the subject of a separate blog entry)
helps understand when to invest, and when to divest.
A
recent case study in Devon County Council explored replacing internal
email with more modern tool, which reflect the way we interact with each
other and the increasing demands on knowing things "now" instead of
when someone reads their email and decides to reply.
Internal
Social Network: Bluekiwi captured conversations (formal and informal);
these were tagged by users and commented on by others. Bluekiwi also put
the individual in control of what content and conversations they
participated in: Much more effective than old school "CC".
Instant
Messenger, Googlechat, complimented the social network with instant
communication potential and 'presence awareness'. Users know whether
someone they need to speak to is actually available at that moment in
time. This made decisions and networking more productive coupled with a
social network. .
These systems
increased the productivity of the pilot groups so effectively, that it
was even suggested by some members of the control group that Devon
banned the use of email altogether.
Posted By Pete Morton and Carl Haggerty
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09/11/2010 by Socitm Insight Team
For local government to be effective and efficient the business systems which it relies on to meet its business objectives must interoperate and collaborate
In most organisations, these systems have
evolved over a number of years, and in the majority of cases utilise a
number of differing technologies, platforms and packages. To maximise
business benefit and with the growing reliance on the internet as a
mechanism for enabling customers, business and partners to access
systems, interoperability between systems is becoming ever more
important.
Recently I've seen Data Management and Integration
(DM&I) as a conceptual model for intelligent
and strategic commissioning in local government. I also see a huge
relationship and cross over to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - SOA
is an approach for aligning business needs with IT investment and then
building distributed systems that deliver application functions as
loosely coupled services. This provides a well-modeled and reusable
basis for common business functions. SOA offers a standard way to
represent and interact with application functions by building on open
standards.
As Public Service pressures increase, IT constraints are also
rising. The most fundamental question being asked by service managers is
how to build business applications to support business change or how do
i increase my business agility? In other words, how to take legacy
systems that constrain business today and make them assets for the
business. IT structures frequently hamper business agility, so it is
imperative to understand how to break down IT barriers to flexibility
and innovation.
Enough of the broad overview, now on to my notes and observations:
The session I attended entitled Key Priorities for Data Management and Integration was provided by Gartner Analyst Mark Beyer who shared the following Strategic Planning Assumption:
By
2015, data management governance strategies - which include metadata
management, master data management and data quality capabilities - will
more quickly absorb more data and data types, lowering data integration
costs by as much as 20% annually.
-
new data types
-
extreme data volume
-
data quality
-
data integration
-
master data management
-
alternative strategies
-
metadata management
One aspect which i think does not get enough attention and is
critical Metadata management and this is critical for DM&I -
Essentially metadata makes everything useful - which in turn informs
what information/data assets look like and how to use and transform them
Competencies - organisations need to look at developing
competencies in all aspects of DM&I, in particular Master Data
Management, Service Oriented Architecture and Data Quality.
You also need to ensure that you have Data Stewards, whose responsibility is to understand when data crosses a domain.
Cloud and cloud based failures - In just over a one-week period
during 2009, a number of Internet-based services experienced
embarrassing failures that affected millions of people. A couple of
examples.
-
31 January, ma.gnolia, a large provider of personal bookmarks, experienced a fatal data corruption.
-
1 February, Google's Internet search capability became unavailable for up to 45 minutes.
The new types of information - Unstructured data types, social
networks, video, audio etc will present challenges and opportunities
within the DM&I area.
There were a set of do's and don't but i didn't get a chance to capture what was on the slide.
Posted By Carl Haggerty
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