Synergise IT

Threadless and Ponoko are leaders in collaborative designs where consumers, like you and me, with a passion for designing t-shirts or furniture would submit their designs and sell it other consumers who likes the design. Threadless is a community based t-shirt design company where users submit t-shirt designs and users will vote which t-shirts they like. The winning t-shirts would then be mass produced and sold. The designer for the winning t-shirt design would then get a sum of money which is up to $12,500. Ponoko is slightly more complicated - to get a good idea of what they are doing, see this

This has changed the way the market is operating. The old business models of continually innovating on designs and have a strong pool of designers working on new ideas for the new season has been attacked by the world of individual designers who are truly passionate about what they are doing. In Ponoko’s case, consumer can even mashup product designs and create something brand new for themselves!

The above idea is not new. Its somewhat similar to open source software where people come together to develop a software that they are passionate about.

Web 2.0 is hitting the markets faster than you can imagine and either you embrace it or you get left behind.

I might be shot for saying this but lets give it a go. This is a super far fetched idea and more than likely it will never work.

What do you think of a government who just executes the decisions made by the people? People vote for everything that is brought up by the people. I am thinking along the lines of Web 2.0 + democracy!

When I first heard of Twitter, I thought to myself, what on earth are these people thinking? Why would anyone use such a service? I have 4 different instant messengers and I am already overloaded and now there is microblogging… No offence to Twitter - it was due to my lack of insight. However, after using Twitter, I do find that Twitter is a pretty cool tool. But why?

1) You can receive Twitter on your Mobile!

2) It can potentially reach a mass audience (Twitter was used during the California Bush fires and Barak Obama used it in the upcoming US Elections)

3) You can choose to follow anyone on Twitter

With these 3 reasons, Twitter is a great service… Mobile phone is something almost every adult in developed country has and bringing selected updates from people to your mobile makes communication more streamlined and responsive. This is clearly showed by the LA Fire department twitter service. If anyone thinks twitter is the same as facebook or instant messengers, then you are wrong. The differentiating factor is mobile convergence.

On a side note, Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails. So if anyone says Ruby is not scalable, look at Twitter… They are hammered with data from all over the world and they are doing just fine. =)

SunCorp has made the move toward Web2.0. See AustralianIT report.

SunCorp is not the only company moving towards this area. ANZ has started releasing podcasts as well. This is a great news for web 2.0 within Australia. Stay tuned guys. More good things to come.

Emails are widely used everywhere from friends communicating with each other, lovers sending love notes, corporate organisations important decisions and darkest secrets to basically anything that can be put into words with pictures and URL links.

In my current project of just a mere six months, I have thousands of mails (both archived and on the IMAP server). As many efficient employees would do, they would have organised these emails into folders (a similar idea to tagging). (Disclaimer: I never sort them, I put them in one folder and search it instead because each email has a few ‘tags’ and I can never decide where it should go). Anyway, this client that I am working with is totally old school and relies greatly on emails - just like many other organisations and everytime someone asks for some information that is not at the top of my head, I have to trawl through outlook and then forward the email. Its such a waste of time for me because, different people require the same piece of information at different times or they misplaced the email and need me to send it to them again.

So as an Enterprise 2.0 evangelist, I have dutifully suggested and pushed for a team Wiki to be created so that people can access the information that they need from my team and thus saving my team sometime and effort. Our team holds alot of mission critical information for the project and most of the information is either stored in documents or emails. These documents is stored as a unique number that doesn’t mean anything and the content is not searchable. Logically if all these information is on the company’s intranet, it would be so much better.

Well, as expected, the client manager threw the idea out faster than any F1 car. The reason being, “I don’t think anyone would buy it” and blah blah blah. In my latest attempt to improve efficiency in my team, I have failed terribly and the reason being there is too much bullshit bureaucracy and red tapes in large organisations. I just want to do my job well and not be bothered about politics. Doesn’t mean its a good idea, organisations would buy it - You still need to play the corporate game well.

Dilbert has went Web 2.0. You can now “compete” with Scott Adams and see who is funnier! Check it out at Dilbert.com

Credit: United Media/Scott Adams

In part one and two of Talent Management I wrote previously, I talked about Just-In-Time resource management.

In this part, I am going to talk more about the way companies are hiring at the moment and how this can all change with Web 2.0. Let me start by showing you this quote:

The CV is typically a tool used to gain an applicant an interview, where the ability to shine and truly “colour” one’s experience should come. Is there the need to fast forward some of the ability to expand on experience onto the resume or is the resume best left as is? When is “good enough” actually just as it sounds?

-Ian Da Silva

Personally, I think the CV is a whole lot of rubbish, you make things that you have achieved sounds nice. Also alot of people lie through their teeth in CVs. Recently a mate of mine was hiring a number of Java developers in China. 100+ people responded and everyone claims they have excellent Java skills. My mate got suspicious as some of the stuff written in the CVs doesn’t match up very well and decided that all applicants have to go through a simple java coding test. The result was that only EIGHT people managed to code that really simple piece of code. You might say that this is an extreme case, which I agree as well but I am sure such things happen widely but not to such an extent in other developed countries.

I find it appalling that some companies use a tool to electronically read through all the CVs that comes in, through an algorithm, CVs get “accepted” or “rejected”. I understand that these people gets alot of CVs and do not have the time to get through them all in a day. However, I feel that the CV is already not a very true representation of oneself and plus the tool to electronically read through your CV, that really doesn’t cut it for me. Hiring someone to do the job is not about the number of years the person has been doing that job scope nor which company they used to work for before. There are so much more to hiring the right person. Things like attitude, aptitude, their career goals and things that they are interested in.

Just look at how senior directors and CxOs are hired. They go through an indepth analysis of their history, character, capabilities and behaviour. However going through this exercise can be rather costly if done manually. So I am here to propose the Web 2.0 way of hiring the right person. With many companies currently going out to linkedIn, facebook and other social networking sites to understand potential employees more, this is probably the first step of understanding more about their potential employees. Many employees have blogs as well, may it be personal or professional, it is probably the best platform to understand the way an employee thinks and operates. The more stuff that an employee puts online, the more you can understand about that employee.

To save time and cost, I believe an aggregation of a person’s profile can help to tell a true and clear story. From Facebook, MySpace, linkedIn to participation in SourceForge, TopCoder or any other professional development forums can help to understand the employee more. Such publicly available information of oneself when aggregated and studied can give the employer the best understanding of the person other than CVs and interviews. Tell me what you think…

While the world is talking about how to implement Enterprise 2.0 and how to get there, there are many organisations have relatively stable Enterprise 2.0 systems in place. However, alot of these applications have been created on an ad-hoc basis and generally via a bottom up approach. Tech savvy employees have the capability to introduce such systems within a relatively short amount of time and its sprouting all across the organisation.

I have seen in one organisation, there are multiple wikis and blog platforms running and the worst thing is that the technologies used are all different. It ranges from MediaWiki, WordPress MU, Confluence and Mindtouch. With such disparate knowledge repositories around, the organisation is not achieving the expected benefits outside of the teams using it. With the walls of the organisation coming down with Enterprise 2.0, having multiple repositories is not a good thing. In one extreme case, there was multiple document managers running and some employees are asked to upload/update their work in at least three different of such systems! That is an absolute waste of time, money and effort.

Enterprise 2.0 applications like wiki, document managers, social networking platform and document collaboration platforms are only good in an organisation if everyone is accessing one place for all their transactions. What an organisation wants is for everyone to contribute to one knowledge marketplace and transact on one platform. After all, one of the aims of Enterprise 2.0 is to get employees out of their only little team silos and work as an organisation towards a common goal.

With much of Enterprise 2.0 coming from the bottom up approach, the senior management must now recognise that Enterprise 2.0 is a upcoming suite of applications entering via their backdoor. Its either they let it be and in future spend hundreds of thousands to consolidate and migrate all these knowledge into one place and suffer some levels of mutiny from employees who are passionate about their own individual platform or get it right early and once and for all and save the hassle in future.

Google’s Q1 results surely shows that this search and innovation giant is doing very well. See Tech Crunch’s overview and the slides below for more details.

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I look at the numbers and its pretty scary, revenue was $5.2 billion for Q1!!! This amount of money is not very large for a global organisation, however considering that much of this money comes from people clicking on links on Google’s platform, thats alot of clicks!! Google is surely doing alot of right things at the moment, innovating heaps and coming out with cool products and clearly a great search engine.

One product I still do not quite understand from Google is Google Sky. I do not have the interest in astronomy nor the sun, moon and stars and other than the small population of the people who are interested and do have have a great telescope to see all these real time, Google Sky might be a great idea… But for the rest, I am not so sure. Maybe Google has some great plan to take over the universe and build a space station or new life in Mars or the moon. I hope someone can enlighten me on the use of this product.

I have always believed that the game industry is one area the enterprise can really learn from. I have always marveled at how dozens of people can connect to one server, play online shooting games and a click on one end of the world is being transferred IMMEDIATELY to the other end of the world real time and all these includes High-resolution graphical movement, logic and sound! This is performance tuning at its peak! Its absolutely incredible.

Online sharing, communication and collaboration in gaming is not a new thing for sure. While gamers hammer away on their CounterStrike, WarCraft or Whatever they play, they talk about stuff among themselves thru a headset and communicate anything from how to win the game to work and even relationships. This gaming platform has evolved from just a game to a social networking community and this is clearly very successful with the younger generation. In fact, Geek Squad in the US uses such gaming technology openly as a way to collaboration and communication among their staff.

We have alot to learn from these games, not just the technical aspect of it but also the social aspect. Would be interested to hear any interesting stories with relation to this.