Facebook statuses can be useful!

So my flat-mate can't stand them. He finds it very annoying that he is inundated with the boring minutiae of peoples' lives (although this does not stop him using it to the same effect...!) However, I actually found a use for Facebook status yesterday. I'd emailed someone who I needed to get in touch with. Well, actually I hadn't emailed them, I sent them a Facebook message, so I wasn't 100% sure if he'd picked it up or not (strange that I still don't 'trust' Facebook on that front in the same way I do email or voicemail). So I checked his profile to see if he'd been on-line recently. He had, and his Facebook status said he was going to Singapore tomorrow! I would have probably waited until later in the week to chase up if I hadn't seen that and missed the window.

By the way, the reason I contacted him via Facebook as opposed to calling in the first place was because I didn't have his number - so how did I call him? It was on his Facebook contact info...

Surround yourself with greatness

For those who don't know basketball, Michael Jordan was the greatest player of all time. LeBron James (currently 22) is the latest in a long line of those considered to be the 'next' Michael Jordan (but he really might be. No, seriously...) Anyway, I picked up a great blog post about how Jordan was a unique combination of phenomenal natural talent, with a work ethic as if he was the worst player on the team, plus a 'supporting cast' of people who were the best in their field (trainer, coach, marketing etc.)

The real debate, as picked up in the blog, is whether or not that entourage reflected Michael's greatness, or whether they would have been successful by themselves anyway. My feeling is that they would have been successful anyway, and Michael would have been great without them, but together the whole was greater than the sum of the parts for all concerned.

Blogs - an online diary?

I recently recommended to someone that they read this blog to understand what my thought processes were and experiences as I joined Trovus. This was all pretty much work related so I posted it on Trovus's blog site.

However it got me thinking about blogs as personal diaries. From a business perspective I never liked that description of a blog. It sounds like a whistful time-wasting distraction, rather than a valuable business tool, so I tend to avoid that definition. However, in the same way that people (or at least I) use my sent folder to remember what I said to someone at a certain point in time for business reasons, blogs can be used to recall how I was thinking or feeling. Whether that is for my own interest or if I want to share with someone else what was going through my head at a certain point in time - a blog as an online diary captures that perfectly, rather than trying to recall and articulate the moment 6 months after the fact.

Perhaps there is value in the blog as a diary after all...

You can't stifle debate

At the Labour party conference today many of the guests were asked whether or not they thought Labour was right to "stifle debate". Now, I do not and nor do I wish to understand fully the workings of the Labour party conference machine, and whether the changes proposed to or don't stifle debate, but there were some interesting responses to the question.

The theme that kept coming back was that whatever the formal policy of the Labour conference as to what was and what was not officially debated, the conference has always been about discussions at fringe meetings and in the bars. People come to conference, so I was told, because it's the one time of year when all the personalities are present and everyone can contribute.

This led to two thoughts - first about stifling debate. This is similar to what happens if a company bans social networking or instant messaging. It goes underground, people will install and use it anyway, and you won't have any control over how they do it - the corporate equivalent of a fringe meeting or a hushed discussion in a bar. You can't ban it, so you might as well have it out in the open where you can clearly hear and monitor the points being made.

Second - the idea that people go to a conference to meet people, rather than hear speakers. This is something that has been mentioned to me more than once, often by people who argue against on-line collaboration as face to face discussion is more valuable. They misunderstand the point, face to face discussion can be more valuable, but the two should be combined. You can use on-line collaboration to cement a relationship that may have formed at a conference, but continuous dialogue after the event only re-affirms the connection, and make the second face to face meeting one year later all the more valuable and rewarding.

Should Northern Rock have a blog?

The BBC web site broke the Northern Rock emergency loan story on Thursday 13th September. It was not until Sunday 16th September that Adam Applegarth posted a one page letter on the front of the Northern Rock web site explaining the situation to his customers; that Northern Rock had only requested that a lending facility be made available to them, they had not actually needed to withdraw any money and that his customers' deposits were safe. During that 4-day span the public took all their information from the media, who used words such as 'dramatic' and 'unprecedented' which no doubt inflamed the story. Northern Rock's customers flocked to sites such as the BBC's Have Your Say and took their information from there and from the excited news reports over the weekend. Northern Rock only got their point across via news interviews where the interviewer controlled the agenda and from a pdf a few clicks into their site "Your questions answered" where they put some standard responses to the questions they thought their customers were asking.

Could it have been different? What if Adam Applegarth had a blog where he had been posting regularly on the difficulties of the current credit crunch and how he felt this might affect his business. What if he allowed and encouraged customers to respond to his postings and he took time to answer to the most pertinent. Then, as soon as the information had been made available to the stock market that they were requesting a lending facility from the Bank of England he could have announced it on his blog (in his own words, not drafted by PR as the letter on the front page of the site comes across) and encouraged customers to post their questions and concerns and addressing them, engaging with a direct dialogue with his customers rather than a static "Your questions answered" page? Granted, I am not saying that Applegarth should have launched a blog to deal with the crisis, but if he had one already as a means of communicating directly with his customers, they may have gone to the blog to find out what was going on, rather than the media. Instead, an information vacuum was created, which the media outlets jumped on, creating the panic which fortunately seems to be receding today.

Blogs as whistleblowers

There is a story on the BBC News website about an exasperated police officer who blogged about having to spend too much time doing paperwork whose identity has now been exposed. According to the story - he "risked his job" to write the Policeman's blog, and only now, as he leaves the UK to move to Canada, has his identity be revealed.

This poses interesting questions around the extend to which organisations should police the on-line activities of their employees when they comment about their organisation outside of work. The situation is perhaps more sensitive when the organisation is a public body, such as the police or the armed forces.

Yet despite the idea that an individual making comments of the sort Mr Davidson made could threaten his job - his blog seems to have had a positive impact. According to the report, the minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, Tony McNulty, dismissed the blog, yet has now "shifted his position", and, whilst not accepting that everything Mr Davidson has alleged is true, admits that things could be improved.

So if Mr Davidson had not started his blog, would Mr McNulty not be fully aware of the day-to-day activities of his officers on the ground? The government wants to protect whistle blowers yet at the same time is struggling to come to terms with technologies such as blogs which allow Mr Davidson to pass comment on sensitive and potentially embarrassing issues.

Where this case may be fairly straightforward as Mr Davidson is leaving the UK for Canada it becomes more complicated with organisations such as the armed forces, who were recently banned from blogging. Obviously there are very good operational reasons as to why unfiltered comment from serving personnel could compromise security, but without the opportunity to pass comment would incidences such as Abu Ghraib go unnoticed? As a final thought, a comment on the ThisIsLondon article above actually cites Abu Ghraib as a reason why army blogs should be banned - as it should have been kept secret to deny left-wing liberals the ammunition to attack the Iraq war!

Whatever your views on the rights or wrongs of that particular situation, one final thought is that throughout history society has progressed to being more open and more accountable and attempts to stem the tide ultimately fail.

The art of sales

The other day I went to a fascinating event hosted by Clarify Solutions. It was a guest panel discussing issues around how to build and measure high performance sales and marketing teams in software. This was actually quite an interesting experience in its own right, both in terms of the people present at the event and the people on the panel, all highly experienced and able individuals. One of the most interesting questions that came up was whether an outstanding sales rep is born or trained.

I'd recently had a similar conversation with a colleague who almost took offence at the concept that their 'art' of sales could be trained. Having gone through gruelling IBM sales school training myself I have certainly seen individuals who have a natural flair for the role but also tools and techniques that can be used by anyone to improve their success rate.

There is certainly something about individuals who come across as 'natural' sales people - outgoing, pushy, always seem to end up convincing their friends to go to their favourite bar or eat at their favourite restaurant. But my view, and that expressed at the event, is that as naturally charismatic as someone is, at the Enterprise sales level the ability to manage the sales process and ensure there is alignment at all levels (from executive to technical) within the customer is far more important. Not only that but the software business is moving away from the second had car sales approach, and more of a consultative model - understanding the customer's business problem better than the customer themselves, and aligning the suppliers product at all levels in the organisation to the business issues.

That opens up another challenge - how do you gauge this and identify the skills required to be a good sales individual in a 60 minute interview? This was another question posed to the panel but the answer will wait for another post...

IT department a barrier to Web 2.0

There is an interesting article in Computerworld how Web 2.0 business champions are finding resistance to introducing Web 2.0 tools into their organisations. This ties in with a trend I have been noticing in my new job - after years of working in this industry I used to find that IT are the ones pushing the new technology and the business is resistant to change. The mantra for the IT sales rep has always been to "find a way to call on the business" rather than IT, and they have almost always failed up to now. But in this new job I haven't met a single person in IT! It's marketing execs and CEOs who want to talk to us!

So what's changed? I see the following elements:

1) Web 2.0 is all about user experience. Both in the terms of highly usable sites in terms of design but also the human touch factor - blogs and wikis generate conversations with other people in a way that a Web 1.0 online banking site does not. This raises the level of interest amongst business people as it is something they can see and touch and think could improve their lives, in a way that integration or SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) does not.

2) IT people get very nervous about the level of business interest this generates. IT has always been their own domain where people have made good careers out of mastering the 'dark art' that business was always afraid of and simply wanted to ensure it didn't cost too much. Now business people are coming in and getting more involved - IT are nervous about Web 2.0 requiring skills they don't necessarily have, but also about business people championing projects without a full understanding of the IT implications. If IT is told to 'start a blog for our customers' which results in a security breach or non-compliant material being posted it will be IT who gets the blame, not business!

As always with these things it is usually a question of balance. This should be an opportunity for business and IT to work together, not for one faction to win over the other. Business should challenge IT to produce the productivity gains possible and undergo the cultural change required to adopt the 'perpetual beta' whilst maintaining support for critical systems and ensuring that the IT infrastructure, including security can cope with this new model, and making sure that the business understand the wider implications of what they are asking.

This is why at Trouvs we're partnering with IT companies such as Repton and Cisco (and hopefully IBM soon) to understand how their IT infrastructure expertise can help ensure a Web 2.0 project is not let down by unforeseen IT issues. In fact - we're having a seminar with Repton on September 27th (email me for details) and Cisco on October 31st. Come along to hear more!

This is why we do this

A recent McKinsey quarterley looked at the quality of content in wikis and blogs for coprorate use. They looked at 573 users of the four most popular video sharing sites in Germany and found that the motivation behind posting was fame, have fun, and share experiences with friends rather than any expectation of financial reward.

This certainly strikes a chord with me after I published the Lotus Connections install guide on Trovus's blog. It's been picked up by the lotusconnections blog, and some sites in a foreign language that I don't understand! That certainly boosts my ego (those who know me will question whether that's a good thing!) and encourages me to produce and deliver more useful content to the community. So thank you very much to Stuart and Neil for thinking it was a worthwhile document to post.

The best response however, was an email I received from a lady in Holland which read thus:

"Dear Mr. Mell,

I want to take this oppertunity to thank you for you excellent document on installing Lotus Connections. Without it I would not have managed it. And even though I run on Linux, the Windows instructions have proven to be extremely valuable.

So agian, thank you very much."

That completely made my day, and gave me a warm feeling that a financial reward would find very hard to compete with. I would just like to say thank you to the person who sent this, and hope your project is a success.

However, the pace of technology is so fast - IBM have released an update to Lotus Connections with a "quick install" option, making my document pretty much useless! Oh well, thanks to people like Neil, Stuart and by Dutch contact I now have the motivation to produce something better!

Facebook public searches

At the risk of this turning into a Facebook blog I notice that Facebook has publically stated its policy of anonymous searching. I personally think this is a good idea in principle, I have started adding my Facebook profile as a contact method to documents/email signatures etc. In any case, Tom Critchlow over at Distilled has blogged about this with far more authority than myself, so I'll just link to him...

London United Basketball

Unfortnately London United, the basketball team I worked with last year has had to withdraw from the UK professional league the BBL. This is a real shame as I think the club had some fantastic successes last year whilst struggling with the issues that any start-up business faces, as well as the challenge of making a profitable basketball team operate in London. Additionally, we made good on the promise to build the team around British talent, and were competitive on the court without relying on imported Americans. Hopefully they will still be able to operate the academy and school coaching programmes that they run.

If anyone can be of any help in securing a new sponsor please contact Chris Morris on cjm364@yahoo.co.uk

Two weeks in...

Well, an excuse for the lack of posts for a week is because I've been so busy in my new job! I honestly think I've done more in my first two weeks than my entire (short) time at my previous employer.

So far I've had meetings with customers, potential customers, partners as well as some time with Caspar and Edworking out what our strategy should be in terms of new offerings we should be developing. We're using ourselves as guinea pigs for a lot of this stuff, using prototypes of the tools ourselves and working out what would need to be improved before releasing them to market.

In essence, it's everything I thought it would be and certainly no regrets so far!