Every now and then it helps to be reminded of the basics:
* Make the phone call.
* Get the face to face meeting.
* Thank the prospect.
* Have your elevator speech ready.
* Offer to help.
* Keep in touch (Garrison Keillor's suggestion).
* If you can't say anythng nice about somebody, don't say anything at all (My mom's suggestion).
Expertise Management and World of Warcraft
While researching the topic “expertise management” as a follow up to earlier articles posted here, I came across a fascinating article concerning the automated construction of an “expertise database” that I think has some relevance for enterprise expertise management.
I recently wrote here about using social networking and information technology to improve access to expert knowledge within the enterprise. Luis Suarez has also commented about the "knowledge management" aspects of this idea.
An interesting experiment incorporating some of these ideas is already underway here in the United States -- the Peer to Patent Project.
In the first article in this series I commented on the web based evolution of systems for matching up experts (and their expertise) with users based on relationship management and social software technologies.
In this article I discuss the implementation of such systems within large organizations
Remember near the end of the first MATRIX movie, our heroes were fighting it out on the roof of an office building. They needed a helicopter – fast:
* Tank: Operator.
* Trinity: Tank, I need a pilot program for a V-212 helicopter. Hurry…. Let’s go.
Trinity, already a member of a tightly knit community, knew the right person to call, got a download of her program, and the rest is history.
We (Martin McKeay, Dan Sweet, Robyn Tippins, Jeremiah Owyang, and I) had fun schmoozing about three topics last Saturday: (1) HP's planned reduction in telecommuting, (2) Technological threats to the continued relevance of corporate marketing departments, and (3) Increasing incompatibility in how individual web based accounts are handled.
I've been thinking some more about the issues raised in my earlier posting The Inevitablility of "Too Many Gateways".
One of the reasons the situation exists, as Ismael Ghalimi described where he has to maintain many separate accounts to manage different internet gateway services for feeds and data exchange, is that it's becoming increasingly possible to create such services and to make then available on the web.
Bloggers are commenting (e.g., here) on the replacement of Times New Roman as the default font in the beta version of Microsoft's Office 2007 released earlier this year. An initial lamentation is that the new font sets may not be available for the Mac without separate licensing. The deeper significance of this move may be that a serif font is being replaced by a sans-serif font, perhaps because the sans-serif font is easier to read on screen.
So, who cares about fonts, anyway? Well, I certainly do, ever since my introduction to the Mac back in the 20th Century.
Given the types of issues that Ghalimi raises in this article, it is interesting to speculate on the role that a corporate IT department might play in "selecting and enforcing" standard for the use of Office 2.0 applications in the real world of business. Is this a role that IT is able to play? Or would users feel "put out" by IT's heavy handed demands for standardization?
According to an article in The Mercury News, HP is cutting back on the practice of telecommuting among IT professionals.
I've worked both sides of this issue but have to give the nod to HP on this one, especially in these areas:
1. IT's interaction with business units
2. Team building
3. Training of younger staff
My friend Ken Yarmosh is doing some soul searching about blogging. Since I go through this same thing periodically myself, I understand his feelings. Here are the ten rules I left as a comment on his original post:
In the old days of planned release schedules and successively more capable release functionality, the term “beta” was applied typically to limited-release software where both distribution and user environments were tightly controlled and monitored.
Nowadays businesses are being built upon “beta” software that goes into universal web wide availability along with statements of incompleteness and limited support. Users are invited to use and write about the software. Users get early peaks at and access to useful features. Producers get real world feedback which helps further the development of future releases.
Within one week of coming home after a successful first year at Virginia Tech, Number One Daughter started her Summer job hostessing at a large and popular riverfront restaurant in Old Town Alexandria. While driving her to work one day, I asked her how things were going at the job. The conversation that followed reminded me several things relevant to intelligent management practices.
Lately I've been reading Ross Mayfield's Weblog, which I discovered while tracking back an incoming link from him to an earlier posting of mine, Corporate Resistance to Enterprise Web 2.0.
Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext and has feet (literally) in both the development and business worlds when it comes to real world applications related to Enterprise Web 2.0. I like how he thinks and writes about enterprise adoption of systems and processes based on Web 2.0 technologies.
I'm fascinated by peeks into the inside of what actually happens in the real world of Getting Things Done. The web site Bare Naked App could therefore be a voyeur's delight.
How Secure are Secure Facilities?
One of the things I've learned from reading and listening to the thoughts of my friend Martin McKeay, a security expert, is that the best technology can be undone by poorly or inconsistently implemented processes.
I thought about this over the weekend when I drove a friend of mine from Alexandria to the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.
Should We Be Able to Buy and Sell our Personal Financial and Medical Data?
When I first heard about USA Today breaking the NSA domestic phone spying scandal involving the major long distance phone companies, I wasn’t surprised. I won’t even be surprised when, in the next few months, word leaks out that Federal agencies are also involved in non-court-approved electronic screening of domestic call traffic looking for specific words and word combinations.
Readers of ALL KIND FOOD will notice that its pages are not encrusted with badges, tag clouds, blog rolls, linkbacks, permalinks, scrolling comments, advertising, Amazon links, dancing babies, and other detritus and ephemera. I call these "Blog Page Doodads." My blog doesn't go in for doodads. That’s by design.
When Jeremiah Owyang recently announced to members of The Podcast Roundtable that he had added a cloud of tags supplied by ZoomClouds to his blog, I did wonder if I should add something like this to my own.
I've decided not to, at least for the time being.
I am puzzled by the seemingly robust nature of the US economy and the lack of a melt-down due to runaway gasoline prices. I still remember the inflationary hardships caused on the 1970’s by rapid rises in crude oil prices and the inflationary spiral that priced so many people out of the housing market due to huge rises in interest rates.
Why do economic conditions seem smoother now despite massive trade imbalances, crushing federal deficits, and an unending commitment to costly (in terms of blood and money) foreign adventures such as Iraq?
Is it the Internet?
Are DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems compatible with the current growth in the use of blogging and social networking technologies that actively promote the sharing of information? Maybe not.