Balancing Cost, Risk, Growth & Innovation: New Principles of IT Investment

Wednesday June 23, 2010

Summary:

 New realities of IT investment or New Principles of IT investment, a new theme at Gartner.

The webinar presenter Barbara Gomolski stated,…” Gartner has been doing this analysis for the past two and half years,… aligning their clients around the new economic situation.”

Gartner observed that their clients IT investment behaviors were different than before the economic downturn.

Currently three focus areas of Gartner’s clients are; the organization is asking IT to help “innovate and grow” the business, the second is to use the information available to help make IT and the rest of the organization more “efficient”. The third is to help management to “better understand risk”.

Barbara continued by declaring that most businesses still operate in “Silos”, meaning that Innovation and Growth initiatives were doing their own “thing”, Cost and value initiatives were doing their own “thing”, Risk initiatives were doing their own “thing” and the business was not truly an integrated effort.

Today’s requirements in business are to break down these “Silos” especially the unnamed “Silo” between IT and the business.  Barbara added that Gartner is seeing business starting to do this by realigning IT within the business and drawing on core IT competencies like business process management, decisions port, or business intelligence instead of the traditional technology based structure.

Gartner is observing a change in “IT Governance” in many organizations which evolves into “Business Change Governance”.  Not making decisions about just the IT department, but about business and how changes in technology are driving the business decision direction. Bringing IT as it were into the “adult” conversation within business decisions. These decisions are being done in the area of Enterprise Architecture. Companies will be looking at change in a holistic fashion with more involvement from the stakeholders.

Meat and Potatoes:

Companies are pressed on all sides, and are asking those who are still left in the organization to do more.  I’ve heard this cry from business twenty years ago, “cut cost”, “generate innovation”, but now there are less people to do so. It’s possible that a restructuring/realigning of IT could actually bring this about!

 

Conclusion:

If IT is given a “seat “at the grown-ups table, then business may move closer to realizing the synergy they have been taking about for years.

 

Chris Snyder on "Synthetic/Virtual Worlds (VW)"

Wednesday June 16, 2010 BiRG Lab Meeting  - Chris explained that “Synthetic World“coined by Edward Castrova is seen as more of a business tern in some groups, and the word “Virtual World” is seen as a common and universal terminology.

The First Virtual World was made in 1962 called the “Sensorama”  which used stimulation of the senses to create the virtual world.  Avatars were first introduced in 1974, known as “Eyeball Avatars” because of their perspective being the player’s on-screen view of the action. Next was role playing games not much more than chat rooms.

Speed ahead to today with Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) and Massively Multiplayer Online Real Life Games (MMORLG). The MMORPGs like “World of Warcraft (WoW) are mostly paid subscriptions. The online gamer assumes a character whereas the MMORLGs like “Second Life”, currently are free, and the online gamer is able to “edit” their Avatar.

Chris described an interesting reality with these online gaming environments is the term known as

“Magic Circle” meaning the activity done in real life crossing into the virtual life actions. Chris defined this as more of a “gate” than a proposed “barrier”

Another interesting aspect of “Linden Land”(Second Life, named after the currency used “the linden”) is the monetary flow of sometimes up to one hundred ten million linden dollars (110,000,000) a day. This equates to around three hundred fifty thousand (350,000) real U.S. greenbacks.

Chris pointed out that,” …Second Life is perhaps not ‘for life’. It seems many folk do tire of it at around 18 months with only around 20% going for longer than two years. Again this isn’t a real issue for brands as the cumulative user hours across the board puts Facebook, YouTube and other social spaces to shame.”

See you Chris, maybe, in SL or is it LL!

 

Freakonomics - William Brown

Wednesday June 09, 2010 BiRG Lab Meeting  - William delivered a great presentation on Wednesday June 9, 2010 in the Social Informatics / BiRG Lab.

Consuming most of the meeting time William lead us through “Freakonmics” a term cast by Economist Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago. William explained that Stephen Dubner did an article on Levitt and his wildly popular views that reveals the incentives of people. Levitt ‘s message declares the, “Exploration of the hidden side of everything.”

Part of William’s presentation focused on Sumo Wrestlers and Chicago Public High School Teachers as they are incentivized to cheat.  Basically it is the numbers, given the opportunity to win/score on their particular task; these groups use the system to their advantage.

William continued with an example of hidden things that tend toward the negative. For example the Klu Klux Klan and Real Estate Agents, both are groups that hide information.

As his presentation took several turns with a variety injections from audience participation, William shared with the gathering about a Southern Kentucky/Northern Tennessee Recreation area known as “Dale Hallow Lake”. As William explained his passion for this resource and how that the powers that be are closing down parts of the area. The group present began to encourage William that through the social media of blogging he could author an awareness that might turn the tide of public opinion, the power of a voice.

We may be hearing from William in the near future concerning his beloved  getaway?

 

FOAF - Friend Of A Friend By Paul Herd

Wednesday June 16, 2010 BiRG Lab Meeting  - Paul’s opening definition of FOAF was; “…machine readable ontology that describes people and their relationships to other people and things.” Paul continued that the goals of FOAF for data on the web are: organize, fragmentation reduction, SQL-like search ability, decentralized data storage, and centralized services.

Utilizing three web languages; Resource Description Framework (RDF), Dublin Core, and Web Ontology Language (Owl) developers are still below version 1.0, currently at version 0.97. We need to understand first that a  URI : Uniform Resource Identifier is a string of characters used to identify a name or a resource on the Internet. That understood, an RDF triple uses a three piece construct of; subject(s) which is a URI reference or blank node, predicate or property(p) which is another URI reference, and object(o) which is a URI reference, a literal, or blank node. A simple example would be “(s) Ellen (p) likes (o) tennis”

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) consists of 15 metadata elements: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, Rights. Each Dublin Core element is optional and may be repeated. As Paul describes, basically…”15 base text fields through which most resources can be described and cataloged.”

Last we have the Web Ontology Language (Owl) which is a family of representation languages for authoring ontologies endorsed by the W3C.

Paul concluded with, “…The easiest way to ‘get a FOAF file’ now is to have a profile on a social Web site that generates it automatically. OpenID and OAuth have the potential to allow many new ways of publishing and syndicating FOAF data.”

 

Graphs: Nodes & Edges - Part I and II Kyle Hicks/Anthony Smith

Wednesday June 2, 2010 - Kyle Hicks began his presentation in the BiRG Lab by distilling the term “Dyad – two nodes and an edge”. It’s refreshing how Kyle boils the topic down to easy-to remember terms.  He next introduced us to the pioneers of graph & network theory, Jacob Moreno (1937).  Next Kyle hit us with homophily and contagion; “…love of the same…” and “…yours spreads to theirs…” Kyle described  Barack Obama’s  presidential campaign as effectively developing a contagion of popularity and  inferred that Barack was successful at claiming himself to be the ‘every man’ hence, “homophily will kick in to create networks between the “infected”, and was able to, “spread his awareness and popularity via social networks”.

Kyle continued with “forced-based algorithms (fba)”. One of the most popular; Fructerman-Reingold   layout is determined by the forces pulling nodes together and pushing them apart with each iteration of the applied algorithm, the forces are measured and the nodes settle into place. Another Kamada-Kawai, - relates the graph layout to a spring system the strength of a spring between two nodes is inversely proportional to the square of the shortest between those two nodes the stronger springs are translated as nodes connected by shorter edges. Kyle visually demonstrated the fba’s with a column of text data on the left and a “sociogram type diagram” a hexagon with a tail, representing ten of the column lines of text data which pictured the relationships vividly; people (node) relationship (edge).

Kyle concluded by stating an earlier thought about transitivity (the dyad adding another node and producing a trans - configuration around the double bonds), contagion, and homophily, “…work with each other to form and strengthen social networks”.  He added, “Visualization through network graphs allows informaticians to bring meaning out of the data.”

Part II of this discourse was offered by Anthony Smith beginning with James Joseph Sylvester in 1878 first using the term “graph - an abstract representation of a set of objects where some pairs of the objects are connected by links.” Anthony described three types of graphs, “ Simple  Graphs - at most one edge may connect any two vertices (nodes), and Multigraph - multiple edges, and Pseudograph - self-connected vertices and multiple edges.

Anthony presented further insights of an expanding network of dyads by using the term

Military Squad – A tightly interconnected group, the periphery being less and the center being more “embedded.”

Being a coordinated effort between Kyle and Anthony some of the same material was presented in both presentations, but both had uniqueness. One example was Anthony’s treatment of “Hubs - a number of nodes that are more connected than the others; they have far more lines connecting them with other nodes than the average node.”

 

TONIA BAYLOR on "SOCIAL CAPITAL"

Wednesday May 26, 2010 -  Tonia opened her presentation on Social Capital by providing this insight…

“…By inventing more casual modes of interaction and thereby making possible new categories of lower-commitment relationships, social networking sites are fundamentally changing how we live, work , and relate to one another as human beings.”

Tonia stated that people and business in society today have two sources of competitive advantage, Human Capital (HC) and Social Capital (SC). Tonia defines each;

HC - Talent, Intellect, Charisma, Formal authority.

Verses

SC - The currency of business interactions and relationships, knowledge, ideas, opportunities, support, reputation and visibility that is equally if not even more influential than human capital.

Tonia declared that, “…The collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.  This can be measured by trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals and is an essential component to building and maintaining democracy.”

Tonia cites research that shows by bringing networks online they enable people to be more capable and efficient at accumulating, managing, and exercising, social capital.  She adds that social networks establish a new kind of relationship that is more casual than what was previously acceptable. More fun, intuitive, visual, active, searchable, and self-updating.

Tonia continues,” A common objection to online social networking is that it sacrifices relationship quality for quantity.  This might have been true of first-generation sites, it is becoming less the case as people become more sophisticated about the connections they accept and establish.  Interactions on social networking sites tend to augment, rather than replace, offline interactions. We are seeing that online interactions tend to support rather than replace offline rapport, strengthening relationships you already have and laying the groundwork for future relationships you might not otherwise have enough context and capacity to pursue.”

A term I found interesting that Tonia used was, “Flattening Effect”, its definition is found in her statement about sites like ‘Facebook’  that were designed without hierarchy, “ They tend to flatten out”, the part of society that uses them.

 

Devin Harley - The Long Tail.

Wednesday May 26, 2010 - …Retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities.

Devin Harley did a fine job presenting this current phenomena occurring in business. Devin describes the meat-on-the-bones as, “20% of the (fill in the blank) owns, does, buys, creates, and possesses 80% of the (fill in the blank).

In the case of Long Tail and movie rentals, Netflix has over forty thousand (40,000) titles, while Blockbuster has in-store three thousand (3,000).  Blockbuster’s six hundred (600) titles make up 80% of their sales. Devin pointed out, “Blockbuster has more popular titles, and Netflix has the popular and not so popular ones as well. They sell larger quantities of downloads of the movies that are not that common. That is where they make most of their money,” She adds,” The tail is shortened and so only adds up to 20%. But if you keep extending the tail from 3001 to 40,000, and all the tiles sell if only a couple times, they'd add up to many more overall sales at the end of the tail”

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief of Wired was the “label maker” for the term “Long Tail”, and yet another example is seen in a ten year period of air travel in the United Kingdom. Devin discovered that, “…from 1998-2008 the top 50 destinations from the UK (the “head” of travel” fell from 36% of the total to just 26%, while everything else (the “tail”) grew.”

Devin explained that with tagging, blogging, and sharing systems, you are able to find exactly what you want faster and more reliable.