White Papers Etc.

 
By Dennis D. McDonald

White Papers 

 

  • School Communications & Emergency Response: What are the Implications for Social Media? I’ve been reading documents from link list about school emergency planning maintained by Texas A&M University’s Integrative Center for Homeland Security. What can we infer from these reports concerning the incorporation of social media and social networking systems — such as Twitter, Facebook, and personal websites and blogs — into school-based emergency response? In this document I first review some communications relevant recommendations made by the reports, then I discuss some of the implications for incorporating social media and social networking into school-based emergency response planning and management.
  • How To Develop a Business-Aligned Social Media & Social Networking Strategy. Some organizations develop strategies for adopting social media and social networking based on an informal process that proceeds spontaneously and with minimal central coordination. Others prefer a more formalized process, especially in situations where management recognizes the potential for impacting so many different corporate functions. This paper is intended for the latter group.
  • The Justification of Enterprise Web 2.0 Project Expenditures. Given the difficulty of doing Return on Investment (ROI) analysis for IT projects, how do you justify an Enterprise Web 2.0 project? Vinnie Mirchandani suggested that one place to start would be to look at the criteria used in the past for evaluating large IT investments. Reviewing his list “Ten Ways to Justify Acquiring Packaged Applications,” based on work he did for Gartner in 1997, shows how much things have changed and how much they have stayed the same.
  • 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; lessons learned here may be relevant to other types of remotely hosted applications.

 

Other Publications

 

 

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