Entries by Ross Dawson

The role of informal social networks in building organizational creativity and innovation

For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications. The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident […]

Where Google+ needs to go: Why we need to be able to follow parts of people’s personas

The centrality and ease of use of the Circles feature means Google+ is a significant step forward in social networking. It has been a key platform in its initial success. The Circles feature enables people to selectively share content. Someone can send work-related discussions to their public stream, photos of their children to their family, […]

Reality mining, pervasive data capture, and how Big Data can create value

On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium. CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It […]

DARPA offers $42 million for ‘revolutionary’ research on social media analysis

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (slogan: Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise) is offering $42 million in funding for “revolutionary” research into social media in strategic communication. The DARPA announcement states: The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media]sharing […]

Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on Open vs Closed Systems

Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context. […]

Keynote slides: The Future of Information Infrastructure

This morning I am giving the opening keynote at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, organized by the Storage Network Industry Association and Computerworld. Here are the slides to my keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure. My usual warning applies: these slides are intended as visual support to my keynote, not as stand-alone slides. In this […]

The evidence is in: we believe technology will create a better future but not better environment

The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050. Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version. Image source: Good The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation […]