The Best Collection of Development Links I've Seen

The best current collection of links on developing a major project or website has come out of the OzIA conference http://project.cmd.hro.nl/cmi/hci/toolkit/index2.php. It is the beginning of a toolkit that offers an overview of the methods and techniques which can be used throughout the user-centered design process.

This is the first release of the toolkit, which is assembling the resources. Next we can expect more context information - but what a wonderful collection. For more information contact Bas Leurs (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, b.l.f.leurs@hro.nl).

Can Yahoo be Saved - A Strategy for failure

Know what your website does .. and does not do. A clear Vision or sense of purpose is a key factor that separates websites that succeed versus those that fail. A clear vision underpins all our design decisions. It helps us decide what functionality to include or exclude. Just because [insert trendy web site here - Apple, Microsoft, Google or Digg] does [insert fancy widget] is reason to be aware of a capability, but does not make it essential. Conversely, there are things your website HAS to do to win over your target market. When you don't focus, you will regularly fail to recognise what's essential. This is the situation Yahoo! seems to have been for the last several years.

It saddens me to write about Yahoo! in this context. I've been a member since March 1998, and a paying member for most of that time. It's apparently unbelievable to new web adopters that Yahoo! was once one of the great innovators. "Once upon a Time" they were leaders in tools we now take for granted - task list on same page as calendar, synchronization of data with the phone (or PDA in those days) and they developed a brilliant desktop search tool (that indexed USB drives and maybe even network drives - but my memory is unreliable here - it was a very long time ago).

The decline has been obvious for a long time, the missed opportunities, cost cutting the wrong things. So what has prompted this outburst (and planned, painful separation). The final straw seems trivial perhaps: Plaxo (Plaxo.com) has stated that they will no longer synchronize their data aggregation tool with Yahoo! because it has become too hard.

So what? Well let's look at why I used Yahoo! for so long, what did a paying customer like me join Yahoo! for. I'm a consultant operating a small to medium business looking for a low cost online place to centralize my personal and business information. It needs to be available to my phone, and any other application that uses my core contact, to do and calendar information.

Yahoo! was originally ideal. Each contact page has a unique URL so I can place that in, for example, a project management tool - click on the name, up comes the contact details, use it in a mind map of something - click on the entry and I can dial/email without having to interrupt workflow. Same with Notes - click on the URL and I can update the annotation. No PC-based package can offer that.

Now ... see what I almost, but don't quite, have - a low cost CRM. All the components are there - calendar, Notes, Tasks with due date and Contact details - all with unique hyperlinks. All can be synchronised to the Phone. Plus email with aliases (for paying customers). A centralized, accessible anywhere, collection of the information I need to run my life and my business. All wasted because while Google worked and worked to make synchronization of their data easy and pervasive throughout the web, Yahoo! have been tardy in making our data available to us. All wasted because they dropped the focus on paying customers and failed to do the next stage of development and connect the systems they already had.

Today, it is much easier to be assimilated by the Google Borg than remain in the Yahoo! camp. Google has, with focus and dedication, made it easy. But why is it so? Ease of data exchange is a priority with anyone that has the disposable income to use a smartphone. Isn't that the demographic to aim for? Which demographic contains IT journalists, bloggers, those who make recommendations to new users? Now look at your own websites - have you ignored Smartphone users or made data hard to get at?

As a sidenote, this is not a universal truth - just a general one: I've sometimes had to design websites for Indigenous or Rural and Remote communities where Smartphones are just not a priority - as always - know your audience, know your purpose.

Desktop search was another sad episode. I don't know the full story, but it looked to me as if Yahoo! bought in a package. One that I tried a couple of times and uninstalled each time. One that wasn't as function rich as the original Yahoo! product. One that doesn't touch USB drives (last I looked, I gave them a second chance before I installed Google desktop - that's it). The USB function isn't just important for me. Lots of people would overflow their local drive. However, for me it is crucial - I have 2 Terabytes of supplementary material I want indexed - training courses, white papers, coding examples and - if it's my turn to cook - recipes. Google desktop on my Mac still is nowhere near as good as the old Yahoo! desktop search, but it's reliable. Yahoo! started to lose me from the moment I had to install Google desktop search.

Increasingly, I'm even using Google Search for work. I don't want distracting news items or social 'stuff' distracting me when I have a task to complete. Surely this is something that Yahoo! could let me personalize.

Yahoo! continues to do some excellent things in small areas. Yahoo! Pipes is a great tool. However, the bright spots of excellence don't seem to be treasured and disappear in the surrounding smog of directionless missed opportunity. I'll keep my email addresses - I've had them a long time - but my contacts have moved to - you guessed it - Google as my central repository. How the mighty are fallen. All we can do is observe, learn and apply to our own websites. The web is always dynamic, and there is no place for complacency. So .. is there really a clear vision for each of your sites? If not, prepare to lose your visitors. Even a Yahoo! can fail.

Are you Bulldozer or Speedbump This Year?

Stayin' Alive

Chaos Paves the Way for Creation - i-Ching

If you stand in front of the Bulldozer of Technology change you are just a Speedbump on the Information Superhighway - Alistair Nicholson, IBM IT Strategy Course, Singapore 1999

Ten years on from "the Internet will change everything", 2009 presents the next version of disruption - disruption in business, technology and personal lifestyle. I just pray that no one will call it 'Disruption 2.0'. The good news is these challenges also create personal and professional opportunities. The opportunities arise because of the combination of economic and technological change -- the sort of "perfect storm" -- that influences our career path for the next decade (at least). Back in 1999 our IT Strategy course was divided into two camps - one (the mainframers) had Amazon driven out of business by the 'bricks and mortar' advantage of Barnes & Noble, the other (early adopters and web developers like me) that thought Amazon would understand the web better, and keep its customer base.

Amazon has survived, and thrived through a serious meltdown by understanding and 'infusing itself with IT' to use Tim O'Reilly's phrase. If I'm to get through this year I'll need a pretty good infusion myself, and I'm sharing where my path is taking me. Feel free to use what you can. Over the next few weeks I'll develop effective personal and professional strategies by assessing the economic cycle, the main technological and business changes, and our business and personal plans. (Enter Bee Gees Stage left singing "stayin' alii--ii- iive").

Let me be clear though - this is a time of great disruption. There is opportunity, but it is deadly opportunity. Wrong moves will end in checkmate, serious removal from the Island. I found an interesting re-analysis of the Chinese character for Crisis:

It is basically true that the modern word for "crisis", wei2-ji1 or wei1-ji1, is analyzed as "danger" + "opportunity"... The main meaning of the xiesheng character ("wood" added to "subtle sign") is "trigger of a crossbow", clearly related to the idea of a subtle but powerful military moment. Derived meanings include "weapon" (in general), "key object or idea", and "turning point" or "crucial moment". ...

One of the most idiomatic modern expressions incorporating this character is shi2-ji1, "time" + "trigger", meaning something like "turning point" or "key moment in time". The concept of seizing the correct moment is of great importance in traditional Chinese thought, military and otherwise.

I know the word 'opportunity' is substituted for 'problem' in corporate speak - but think of this 'opportunity' as a turning point in a battlefield full of violent, armoured, fighting warriors armed to the teeth, with half of them trying to turn you into one of the corpses strewn across the ground... 2009 is THAT sort of opportunity.

There are New Shoots Emerging

The commentators I respect agree on this - imitators will be swept away, but there is venture capital and market share for people that do something real. Peter Rip from Crosslink Capital explains some of the reasons in "The coming Venture Capital Boom".

... I see the today’s carnage as much as everyone else. This year is going to be tough. .. But the forest will begin its renewal because Life Goes On, and with it ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and innovation..... We will see dozens of these opportunities in the coming years, but it requires an investment discipline tethered to public market realities about who are likely buyers, why, and at what valuations.

The second phenomenon to emerge from 2000 was the re-invigoration of the Web. As with every wave of innovation, much of the activity became more imitative than innovative as this matured.... The venture money that went into most of these imitations will soon be written off.
.....
So why am I so sanguine about the prospects for venture capital as everyone seems to sound the alarm about Recession, the lack of capital, and the fear gripping the markets? It is simple:

1. Venture capital returns are predicated on scarcity of risk capital. It has been all too abundant. That will change.
2. Many good businesses will be left on the beach as the rest are washed out to sea – the remaining VCs will invest in them and both the entrepreneurs and VCs will get rewarded as the survivors gain market share and become successes in the economic recover[y].
3. The economic recovery plan of the new Administration will be massive and favor investments in productivity-enhancing growth sectors like information technology and energy technology.

We also need to think through what Depression 2009 would look like to ensure we are looking for new developments in the right place. This will be similar but different to what has gone before.

Social and Cloud are Real, Real, Real

How many cycles have we seen now? They all start with some bright idea. Gradually the ideas change into practical applications. This is the tipping point, but also a difficult time to risk clients or career. The 'sensible' manager will just have to point to promoters of the technology (and a few ever-present disasters) to show how 'unsound' it is. Managers and organisations that behave that way will arrive too late and lack the skill set needed for the new technology.

It is a fundamental strategic planning error "playing the man not the ball", but an easy debating style. The problem is that the tipping point occurs at the very moment the first effective tools enter the market enabling commercially viable implementations.

The story from that moment is the same - whether it is adoption of PC's, Unix midrange servers, NT Servers, web sites, Relational database, online editors, high-level development languages or web-based email - rapid momentum becoming explosive. At the end of the process that same manager expressing that same idea ridiculing the technology is considered incompetent, hopelessly inefficient and a liability to the organisation.

So, this means more change, but we have to deal with it because it's reality - it's part of what IT is about. The Obama campaign changed the view of Social software techniques for managing activity. Once Harvard Business School starts blogging about it, the outcome is foregone. Harvard had several blog articles out the morning after the election. In fact it is such an orthodoxy that Doc Searls is calling social another bubble.

“Social” is a bubble. Trust me on this. I urge all consultants on “social ______” (fill in the blank) to make hay while the sun shines. Even as the current depression deepens, lots of companies are starting to realize that this “social” thing is hot stuff and they need to get hip to Twitter and the rest of it....

Meanwhile, here’s the challenge: make the Net personal. Make relationships personal. Equip individuals with tools of independence and engagement. That’s what VRM is about.

Social is colliding with technology outsourcing to create the new Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 beasts. Language for opening up the technology options moved from leading edge to hit the mainstream in 2008; Cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), application service provider (ASP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Are you prepared? Are your people prepared? Are you sure? Look at this:

Robert Scoble (Fastcompany, Scobelizer.com) started the year with a cool product that prompted The story of 2009? Enterprise disruption?. He found a product that has let me finish a Web 2.0 environment for building Business Service Transformation skills for a very low cost. He said:

So, why did this catch my eye? First, they are taking something very expensive, Business Intelligence charting and dashboarding, and making it free. That alone is pretty disruptive. ...

But don’t focus on that disruption.

Instead, look at the bigger picture. Here they are using Google spreadsheets to bring you live, collaborative, business intelligence. Watch the second video to see how different this is from most of the “old-school” approaches that haven’t yet built on a platform designed for the web from the start.

See that’s the real disruption: there’s a new platform being built. Right now it’s ugly and incomplete. But every year it gets better and better. Will 2009 be the year when lots of you try out a web-based collaboration suite like the ones from Zoho or Google?

However, we must be careful how this is interpreted. Many will go for the comfort of a 'quick fix' and familiar letters. The point is not that successful organisations use Web 2.0 or SOA or whatever. It is that they are using IT to do their business better - focusing on the Institute of Government Business Mantra of "more effective and efficient business Processes" through technology. Tim O'Reilly puts it this way in the Power of the Real Time Enterprise:

What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative change in their entire business.

I get frustrated when I see people highlighting use of social media--blogging, wikis, twitter, customer feedback systems like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucksIdea--as if they were exemplars of what has come to be called "Enterprise 2.0."

So what can you do to survive? Here are my personal short term action items, yours might be similar:

Action: Make sure YOU understand the emerging technology for Social and Cloud computing.
Action: Make sure you have a plan to use this for your own career.
Action: Make sure your organisation or business has a plan to use Social and Cloud computing, train the staff, create new and adapt existing systems.
Action: Make sure your organisation isn't going to be destroyed by Social and Cloud computing. If so, move now, not soon, now!

Create Something with Meaning

Tim O'Reilly has been through these cycles before. He keeps saying that to get through downturns "do stuff that matters".

• Work on stuff that matters...
• Exert visionary leadership in our markets....
• Be prudent in what we spend money on....

  These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count.

Tim O'Reilly is suggesting that although the guy that developed a "Fart" application for the iPhone made $40,000 in two weeks, this superficial 'eyecandy' application is fleeting, and will evaporate in difficult times. We can survive this downturn, if we understand what is changing and what is emerging.

Understand the new social and Cloud implications. Understand the way the economy is reshaping. Plan well. Train yourself. Train your staff. Bon chance.

Business Survival needs good IT People

What a ridiculous proposition. How could embracing web 2.0 and having a good IT strategy be important for business survival in a recession/depression? Or even anywhere near the top of the list. This sounds like spending money.

Well, yes it is spending money, just like wages. One lesson that is common from all our previous experiences is that strategic shortcomings are punished hard in downturns. When we learn lessons from the Great Depression we have to make sure we adjust for a world that really is different (telephones, TV, internet, for example). How could IT and Web 2.0 be important though, for a washing machine manufacturer for example? How can a web site and good IT affect their sales? Surely only Geek-based businesses have to worry.

Our washing machine broke down two days ago and we rang our trusted repair technician. He won't repair that brand any more. I asked him why not? Reply "their website is crap". In what way? "well, to give you an example, of the last 7 orders we put through it for spare parts, 5 were wrong. It wastes our time, which costs us money, and the customers get annoyed because of the delays and blame us, so we don't touch them anymore". His recommended brand? - Bosch or Miele. Our replacement brand - not the one we have now, even though I was happy with it. Sure it can be fixed by the outfit in town that doesn't care what they fix, but the point is that they don't care. People that don't care usually cost a lot more in the end. I'm not going to drill down to the cause - it's probably a poorly implemented parts catalogue. What I am interested in is that I am lost as a customer through a poor website, and the Company won't even know it has happened. It's not the customer-facing part of the site - it is the maintenance person part. There is no obvious way to measure the loss of my custom, nor how many others are lost as well.

What has fundamentally changed is the way customers interact with businesses and each other. There's good news in this because transforming technology gives us future growth. There's bad news in this because managing by, and measuring the wrong things will kill a business stone dead. The toxic effects of bad measurement have been discussed before. It's affecting the new crop of IT people - the very people that will save their organisations - but the organisations don't even know it.

Business (including Government) is still slow to recognise the importance of web 2.0 to future survival, and to identify their own people that can help them. I recently responded to a Twitter stream from a 'thought leader' - an influential networker, who needed to explain what he does in 'value adding' to his own IT management.

Yeah, how can IT or even HR (who should be making the call on productivity) measure the efficiency and quality of work I perform ..
.. that I've leveraged through my professional social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn etc?


YOU are 'peer reviewed' as worth following on a daily basis by 573 people (twitter followers) - the peer review bit is key
HR does not measure quality. So give them stats. Training.gov.au has nn unique hits and 17 committed (daily) followers from zero [in just a few days]

So why aren't we asking these questions? These are the very people that will lead our organisations to better efficency and effectiveness. At the very least they will see us through to survival. What do you know of your people -

• who blogs,
• how are their blogs rated by peers,
• who Twitters,
• how many followers do they have,
• how many retweets,
• who is monitoring the twitterspace for mentions of your organisation, service or product?

Right now is the time to update your business and IT strategies for what will be the toughest year we will have ever faced in our working lifetime. Are you ready? Are you measuring the behaviours you need to have a future?

More Management lessons from Obama Campaign.

Well, in my earlier post (8 factors for Web 2.0 Business Success) I said the Obama victory would have an impact on how management theories for Enterprise 2.0 and business agility would be applied. Huffington Posts' Daniel Debow believes that the clear results from the new way of doing business and the ongoing communication with the Obama base will convince business to move and adopt faster. Success is a real convincer.

Daniel Debow: How Fast is Bottom-Up Coming Up? What Does Obama's Internet-Powered Election Mean for How Business is Managed?

This week, I attended Don Tapscott's book launch for Grown Up Digital. Don's latest is a follow-up to his two prior best-sellers, Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital.

Don didn't disappoint. He outlined two key trends that are changing the way businesses are organized: Internet-based, bottom-up collaboration; and demographics. Don focused on the Net Generation's entry into the workforce and their use of the Internet as a communication and self-organization platform.

I loved the talk, but wondered: "How long will it take for traditional business people to really start changing their organizational structures, social norms, and expectations to account for the reality of the Net Gen?" Will this change occur over the next 12-24 months? Will it take a few years? Or will it take a decade or longer? Will it wait for the Net Gen to take on more senior management roles and force business to redesign around Net Gen models of communication and collaboration?

I don't know for sure, but I think the shift to "bottom-up" is going to happen a whole lot faster than most business people imagine.

When I talk to people about Rypple's goal of re-inventing performance management and professional development as a bottom-up, collaborative, and self-organizing process that integrates work with learning... light-bulbs go off. People get it, which is great.

But, I wonder... how long until the early majority start to get it and change how they do business?

Up until last week, I didn't think the mainstream population took this stuff very seriously. Sure, people heard about Linux software being built in a open source fashion, but... hey, that was just a bunch of tech stuff, right? There have been dozens of stories about corporate wiki-style innovation. But these were just gimmicks and experiments, right? And while everyone (not under a rock) got YouTubes emailed and chatted about (and maybe joined) Facebook, most people were cynical when they heard how things are "different" with this generation.

The Harvard blogs were out the morning after the election. Umair Haque posted Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators said:

It's a momentous day for America - and the world. Barack Obama is poised to take the reins of the Presidency.

So how did this unlikeliest of candidates do it? How did Obama utilize radically asymmetrical competition to shatter Washington's toxic, bitter 20th century status quo?

The most critical part of the story is the organization Obama built. Though conservatives are still arguing that Obama has little executive experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday's political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday's corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.

This is just qthe start of the analysis. If you are a manager or a strategist - it is time to get across what just happened and understand why.

Web 2.0 Inspirational Startups

Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media, Inc., Enterprise Radar - yes - THAT publishing empire is talking about how Web 2.0 (c) is changing into something that interacts with the real world - sensors, people, user created content. He addresses the inspirational and vision aspects of startups - going for the big idea. Ordinary ideas and me too are already funded and won't attract more. During the talk Tim refers to several sites - I've put links to some of them here:

• 23andme - 23andMe's mission is to be the world's trusted source of personal genetic information. They offer a high-density, custom genome scan. Data is used for research as well as personal health information.



• Benetech - Benetech emerged out of the pioneering work for Arkenstone, the world leader in reading machines for the blind. Seeing the value in providing affordable tools that greatly empowered the reading disabled, Jim Fruchterman was inspired to found a business that utilized technology to serve social causes. Benetech was born.
  

More links to sites below the video ...

Click To Play

• ClickDiagnostics - ClickDiagnostics, Inc. has a dual mission of bringing quality medical advice at the doorstep of every household in the developing world at an affordable price, and developing cost-effective solutions for gathering critical data needed for planning and executing public health interventions. They utilise mobile phone technology to connect rural patients with remote medical specialists.


• InSTEDD - InSTEDD is an innovation lab for technologies designed to improve community resilience and save lives through early disease detection and rapid disaster response.


• Omidyar - Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm that is committed to creating and fostering opportunity for people around the world. It makes both grants and investments, identifying likeminded organizations that they support, scale, and champion to maximize their social impact.
  
  Omidyar sees philanthropy as more than a type of funding. In its truest sense, philanthropy is about improving the lives of others, independent of the mechanism. Therefore, they use a wide range of tools in their work, embracing market-based systems and open, web-enabled platforms as key means for making the world a better place.


• PatientsLikeMe - PatientsLikeMe is committed to providing a better, more effective way to capture valuable results and share them with patients, healthcare professionals, and industry organizations that are trying to treat the disease.


• Prosper - Prosper.com is a peer to peer Bank - an online community for lending and borrowing money, with over 810,000 members and $173,000,000 in loans funded on Prosper. Borrowers enjoy fixed monthly payments, no hidden fees and no pre-payment penalties.


• Ushahidi - The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.


• WITNESS - WITNESS is an international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns. Beyond providing video cameras and editing equipment, WITNESS is committed to facilitating exposure for their partners' issues on a global scale. They help broker relationships with international media outlets, government officials, policymakers, activists, and the general public so that once a video is made, it can be used as a tool to advocate for change.

Slide show from slideshare:

Timorexpony

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Why should I Deal with You?

Staying with the theme of motivating the workforce and keeping your company in business ....


Why Should I Do Business with You? - Harvard Business Online's Bill Taylor

This consultant, whose firm has conducted thousands of “mystery shops” and interviews with front-line employees at retail banks, told the gathering that during their visits, his researchers always ask bank employees a simple question: “As a customer, why should I choose your bank over the competition?” And two-thirds of the time, he said, front-line employees have no answer to that question—they simply “make something up on the fly.”

How can any business expect to outperform the competition when its own employees can’t explain—simply and convincingly— what makes them different from the competition? This question isn’t just for bankers. Gary Hamel, the influential strategy guru at the London Business School, makes the case that most companies, in most industries, suffer from a kind of tunnel vision: They chase the same opportunities that everyone else chases; they miss the same opportunities that everyone else misses.

How the Web will change with Gen Y

A thoughtful overview of changes. The unknown, though is how the financial meltdown will change those who have never experienced a serious recession if it becomes prolonged.

Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web - ReadWriteWeb

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we're going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.

unintended consequences of licensing enforcement

A headmaster was tried after he acquired a improperly licensed copy of windows for the school. Response: if licensed software is causing problems - stop using it.



Russian schools abandon Windows after piracy scare

Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region’s Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin. The announcement was made in line with the report on ensuring 'license purity' in the region’s schools.

According to Karpushin, schools would start using freely distributed software like the Linux OS, Russky office and Open office desktop apps, Ekho Moskvi reports.

The flavour of Linux being used will be one of the cheap localised Russian Linux distributives in Russia.

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