Synergise IT

Since I have migrated over from BlogSpot to my own domain, I have spent sometime customising the template to something that I like. While doing so, I realised that I have so many Web 2.0 stuff that I use. Sites like Facebook, Digg, De.li.cious, Technorati and so on. Personally, I have a pretty busy schedule, holding a full time job, working on a large web development project on the side, my upcoming wedding and also trying to maintain a balanced healthy lifestyle, the sheer amount of sites / accounts that I check and maintain is way too much. These aggregators are excellent however, very soon, we might see an aggregator of aggregators.

Interesting enough, I have seen a good amount of fear mongering in the IT industry through working with multiple vendors in a large project. From pitching solutions to clients to hiring a potential employee, I believe its a widely used practice around. I have heard this too many a times. Please bear in mind I am NOT referring to a CEO, vice president or directors. I am referring to the senior managers and managers on the ground.

For example, another vendor said something like this “If you do not spend $500,000 on this functionality, you will be outdated and potentially lose alot of customers.” In this instance, when you look at the numbers, it doesn’t tally up nicely. Half a Million for a functionality that would save approx $20,000 a year and less than 1% of the client base is expected to use it. These people are really good at instilling fear into the management who doesn’t understand much about IT. If you do not do this, you will be screwed… and interesting enough many a times they manage to get a useless functionality into the system.

The problem with IT is that alot of the mid - senior people in IT used to be developers / architects but many of them do not have extensive education, training and experience in managing the details of accounting, finance and economics. We do need to understand more in terms of how technology and money can work together for the benefit of the company. At the end of the day its not how fast your system can process a workflow but how much money can you make out of the whole system.

VisionaryMarketing wrote an interesting post regarding the 15 golden rules for Web 2.0. I must say the 15 rules are somewhat similar to Andrew Mcafee’s Enterprise 2.0 success factors.

The one thing that VisonaryMarketing struck me was “bringing real answers to real questions”. I totally agree with this statement. Some of the people I come across in my consulting career are extremely passionate about web2.0 and enterprise 2.0. However, they JUST want to implement a web2.0 idea and not think about the actual impacts, environment and culture of the organisation. As I always say, Enterprise 2.0 is not just a system, its a system that involves major cultural changes for both management and non-management.

Please bear in mind, only implement a system to solve a problem not implement because its cool!

This is an interesting perspective from senior management of various organisations on Enterprise 2.0.

Email free days is getting popular in the organisations. Read more about it here and here. Personally, I think its a great idea.

I personally spend too much time on my email and I am a self confessed email checking freak. However, I do not like emails. Its so impersonal and cold. But when I try to be friendly over emails, my boss complains I am not professional enough. What should I do? I just pick up the phone and have a chat. If I need email confirmation of my discussion, I will write a quick overview of the issue and get the other party to confirm it without sending 20 emails before reaching a conclusion (and in the mean time, driving both parties crazy).

With Wikis, Blogs, knowledge management systems and so many other content tools available in this information hungry society, living without emails (for one day of the week) is actually very possible. Without emails, you still have your phone which allows you to establish a real conversation with someone. You can also have a face to face chat and build relationships. Content tools can also provide information without searching for the other party. This would actually force people to use those websites to retrieve information that is already out there and not make someone else retrieve/rewrite that message/information to you!

I do not like the idea of building relationships purely over the internet only. I would like a combination of real world connection enhanced by the ease of communication via the internet. This is what the internet / emails should do and not replace the “human touch”.

Follow up from my previous post. If a Web 2.0 startup is so easy (only requires good idea, good business model and good tech skills), more people would be able to come up with great ideas and sell it. As long as there is one more better, stronger and prettier product out there that wins your product, the startup will not be too successful. This would pose as a risk as replication of web 2.0 technology is easy.

For any business to be successful, competitive advantage is important and the ease of web 2.0 development breaks the economic theory of competition - Barriers to entry. Unless you can stop / prevent others from developing a similar idea and at the same time build up such a large user base that even if the competitor joins the market, it would lose out due to the sheer amount of users on your product, it would be hard to gain any levels of competitive advantage.

Jeremy asked recently if anyone is making money on Web2.0. I thought about this question for a while and came out with a short answer. Clearly this is not the full picture but just an aspect of it.

Web2.0 is not a rocket science technology. If you have some good skills in IT, you can almost setup a Web2.0 company individually or with just another person. I have recently learnt Ruby on Rails and I must say its really simple and straight forward. With good tech skills, a solid idea with a good business plan, making money on Web2.0 is easy. You do not need a large user base for your application to make money. With two people on the team, overheads are low, server spaces is getting cheap by the days and making a profit is much easier.

Just my two cents worth