I just finished reading The Social Factor:  Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networks, by Maria Azua.  She served as IBM’s vice president of Technology and Innovation, where she helped implement social networking tool across IBM’s 125,000 global workforce.   While not exactly a book about IBM’s practices, it does draw heavily on them.  Overall I found the book a little long on generalities, and thin on specific examples.  This might be exactly the book for an upper-level executive with little-to-no experience with social media.  But anyone with an active Twitter or Facebook account will find much of it too basic. 

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Innovation is hard.  Sure it sounds like a good idea in the abstract — but when the everyday pressures of cost, time and keeping people happy come into play, the old familiar solutions normally win out.   I fall into this trap myself more often than I care to admit.  For instance lately I’ve been shopping around a really cool idea — a complete game changer for one of our key web sites.  We’d replace a bunch of custom web programing with Drupal, integrated with our CRM system making content updates much easier, quicker, and distributed across more staff.   We found two organizations doing something similar who would even share their custom modules.

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A request came up to put one of the departmental student handbooks on-line.  Requirements include ease of editing/updating, access control (only our students) and search.   A wiki would be one way to go.  But our WordPress MU installation makes deploying new sites a cinch, including the access control, making this my preferred place for this new application.  And when I think of WordPress and book-type content, I think of CommentPress .   CommentPress works with WPs page hierarcy, which I find users find more familiar than the more open wiki style of organization.  And it uses WPs comment structure to allow readers to add their own notes to a page.  Still allowing some interactivity, but also lets the author control the official language of the document.

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Jon Mott and David Wiley have posted their paper on Open learning.  Well done, nicely argued, with good supporting references.  Bravo!  Their basic point is traditional Content Management Systems — i.e. Sakai, Blackboard — reinforce the the management side of teaching to the detriment to the innovative, student-centered, learning side of the equation.  And while I agree with much of their argument, I’ve come to realize that this approach also misses some important  points: Read the rest of this entry »

A recent post on the Museum 2.0 blog got me thinking about the introduction of new technologies, like social networking tools, in the workplace.  The example cited in the blog is a book tagging program in a library.  When people returned their borrowed books they were presented with a set of bins each with a different label:  amazing, boring, reflective, etc.  They dropped their book into the bin that best represented their impressions.  The books were then shelved in areas reflecting the different labels.  I think this is a cool way to easily pass on an impression to other library patrons, and build a sense of community around book reading.  And while the customers responded positively the program ultimately was discontinued due to staff resistance to the program.

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Today’s New York Times has an article on what programmers are doing with government data — it is great to see the value creativity can create out of something as mundane as reams of government data.  StumbleSafely suggests safe routes home for DC residents based on crime statistics — Routesy is an iPhone app for transit schedules in San Francisco.  Much of this data has been available publicly for years, but not in a format that was readily accessed.  But services like DataSF and Data.gov are changing that, and opening the door for creativity.  What about in your company?  Is it easy to get at various data sets, or are they locked up behind proprietary and departmental walls?  Unfortunately all too often I see more of the latter than the former.   Technology isn’t the problem here — making data should not require a lot of technical work.  What it takes is a committment to the process, and trust in the benefits of openness over the tradition of hording information.  Information = power?  How about openness = innovation?  And builds value many times more valuable than the old way.

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