Publications & Interviews
Selected Publications by Dennis McDonald
- Web 2.0 and Sales Process Management. Developed for Social Media Today LLC and Oracle Software, this report discusses how “web 2.0” systems and applications can support management of sales processes. Click here for free .pdf download.
- Assessing Readiness for Enterprise Social Software. Developed for Jive Software, this report presents a method for assessing enterprise readiness for adopting collaboration technologies. Click here for free .pdf download.
- School Communications & Emergency Response: What are the Implications for Social Media? This document reviews communications-relevant recommendations made by various school emergency planning reports and the implications for incorporating social media and networking into emergency response planning. Click here for free .pdf download.
- How Can Collaboration Systems and Social Media Complement Agile Project Management? This discusses the importance of communication to successful project management. It includes specific references to Agile project management techniques. Click here for free .pdf download.
- How To Develop a Business-Aligned Social Media & Social Networking Strategy. This report describes a formal process for designing strategies for corporate adoption of social media and social networking. Click here for free .pdf download.
- The Justification of Enterprise Web 2.0 Project Expenditures. How do you justify an Enterprise Web 2.0 project? Vinnie Mirchandani suggested looking at the criteria used in the past for evaluating large IT investments. Reviewing a list based on work he did in 1997 shows how much things have changed and how much they have stayed the same. Click here for free .pdf download.
- Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0” Tools. Co-authoring this paper with Jeremiah Owyang convinced me I wanted to find out more about what is really involved in getting companies to adopt blogging, podcasts, and wikis. In April 2006 Jeremiah and I updated this paper with this podcast.
- Things to Consider Before Changing a Voice Response System. I wrote this after a consulting project to help a company think through changes to its automatic speech recognition (ASR) system’s menu structure and language. This experience convinced me of the benefits of taking into account how companies manage the language we use for communicating with customers.
- What I’ve Learned Using a Hosted Web Based Sales Force Automation Tool. The number, variety, and sophistication of remotely hosted systems continues to increase with people selling access to applications as diverse as sales management, program management, and image management. Here’s a review of one particular remotely hosted sales force automation tool based on my own personal experience.
Article Collections
- Seven Articles about Strategic Planning and Social Media. The most consistently popular articles from my web site are related to strategic planning and social media. Click here for free .pdf download.
- Five Social Media Engagement Tips is a compendium of five blog posts offering practical advice for those planning to use social media to “engage” with professional populations. Click here for free .pdf download.
Published Elsewhere
- Daksh Sharma interviews me about social media, web 2.0, 3.0, & other topics.
- Web 2.0 adoption: Lessons from associations, corporations, project management, and disaster response is an interview by Dave Witzel with me about various social networking and collaboration topics.
- It’s Time to Take the Quotation Marks Off “Web 2.0”; Why Enterprise Resistance to Web 2.0 Applications Makes Sense – and Why It Will Crumble is a Sys-Con “Web 2.0 Journal” article, published April 15, 2006. This paper (1) reviews the different perspectives people have about Web 2.0, (2) discusses the real (and sometimes understandable) opposition that exists in certain types of large organizations, and (3) lists ten practical steps for initiating a Web 2.0 application within the enterprise.
- Web 2.0 and Maintaining the Integrity of Online Intellectual Property - Is “Meta-Information” the Answer? is a Sys-Con “Web 2.0 Journal” article, published March 3, 2006, that addresses what happens when individual writings become modified and changed — sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose — through the collaborative and transformative functionality of content-oriented Web 2.0 applications.
- Mergers & Acquisitions: What Executives Should Know about I.T. This is a high level view of a multi-year project that consolidated the data and software of two large public energy utilities. As a consultant I provided management and administrative support and learned a lot about the need to balance a highly structured approach to project management involving a diverse group of full- and part-time projects staff that at times numbered several hundred participants.