Today we discussed a new idea about a masterclass on information productivity. We looked at our ideas about Enterprise Information Management and tried to envision the next steps. What is Information Productivity and which topics do we want to include? During our two hour discussion we got to the essence and were satisfied about the results.
What do you think should be included in a masterclass information productivity and how do you want to learn from?
Today started with a trip to our The Hague office to discuss a the people management transfer to the Advisory of one of our colleagues. Because I was sick yesterday I did not prepare myself enough, but I did come up with two questions concerning ambitions and objectives. These answers gave great direction to our meeting. The other thing I did was be honest as this is my first people management experience. I asked for feedback in the future to set a learning atmosphere.
After this meeting I raced back to Utrecht to visit a client and was barely on time for the meeting. On the way over I was behind a motorcyclist when he slipped on the tarmac, so I had to hot the brakes big time. I was glad to see the driver was OK and I quickly hit the gas. During the meeting we prepared for a workshop next wednesday. This project has big time pressure. This means focus is key and distraction unwanted. When we were finished I went home to get some work done over there.
Today I encountered this video from TED. The video is about the algorithms Google and Facebook and many many others are using to filter information on the web for us. These companies try to make information relevant only forget the person on the other side of the screen (yes that is you) is the one that determines if the information actually is relevant. The major concern is that you cannot control these filters to ensure actual relevancy or chose not to see relevant content!
Today was EIM2011 Day. We had some great speakers and a great audience. This summed up to a great and inspiring day. First Paul Baan kicked off the day with some fresh insights on Information Productivity. Jeroen Derynck updated us on Enterprise 2.0. Toon Abcouwer described the circle of life for organizations and the different needs for information. Roeland Dietvorst explained what the automatic processes in the brain do. Andy Boyd shared some insights on his work with Shell and the London School of Economics. The last speaker was Bert van Marwijk how told the story about the road to World Cup 2010.
Collaboration counts for 36% of all business performance
Information used to mean power but today it means freedom
There is tension between desire, obligations and capabilities
25% or less of all information can be put into systems
Organisations shift from status quo to crisis to innovation to enterpreneurship and back to status quo. Based on (un)certainty about desires and obligations versus capabilities
Our brain shape our view of reality
Asymmetric dominance (aka the decoy effect) forces choice
A little early update today on two books and a blog about information. The first one is a blog by Erik Brynjolfsson about Economics of Information. Mr Brynjolfsson is a professor at MIT Sloan Management School and Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business.
The first book is on Competing on Information by three Dutch consultants from Nolan & Norton. I have ordered it but you can download the book by chapters. In a few weeks I will post a book review about it.
The second book is called Information is Beuatiful by David McCandless. It is a book about visualizing information to make it more understandable. Visualizing will enhance the value of information. This book shows some great examples. You can take a look at the companion site www.informationisbeautiful.net for some online examples.
Last weekend I read the Planet Google,; One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything. I want to layout some lessons to be learned from the ambitions and results Google made. The first one is Open vs Closed. Google needs every piece of information to be free and open to let the Google spider index it. This is needed to make all information on earth searchable. This ambition is a big challege that will take Google another 290 years to accomplish.
From a business perspective it is a challenge as well to open up every piece information within the company and make it searchable. The access to information can provide your organization a lot of insight in the way customers are being serviced, processes work and the performance of business units or teams. This information is both structured and unstructured. If done in a good way this can prove a competitive advantage for an organization.
One other lesson is to disobey your superiors from time to time. During the development of Gmail the AdSense program was discovered after a programmer showed that it was possible to read a e-mail message and show some ads on that page. This discovery generates more revenue than Gmail will ever do. The lesson here is to follow your instincts and view a problem and a solution from different standpoints. Thinking out of the box and linking stuff together will generate a lot more profit than sticking to the default path.
A challenge Google and every company has to work on is that not everything can be done by an algorithm as good as a human can do (yet). The only problem is the amount of data. Google outsmarted Yahoo with the algorithm versus the human input. The problem with some tasks is that humans can apply knowledge and do things way faster and better than a computer. Flickr solves this problem, they let humans add tags to photo’s. Even though they get enormous amounts of photo’s everyday they manage to engage enormous amouts of people as well to do the tagging for them. Indexing is done by hand and supplies a great way to navigate through all photo’s on flickr.
