Entries by Ross Dawson

Slides for Opening Keynote at Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit

Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote, titled The Future of Living Networks and Organizations, at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit. Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are intended to accompany my speech, not to stand alone, so are provided for people who are attending the […]

US equities: zero gains over the last 12 years, how about the next 12 years?

In my misspent youth I worked in international equities sales for Merrill Lynch. That was when I was first introduced to the Capital Asset Pricing Model that still underpins investment analysis today. Aong other things the model suggests that the return on an investment needs to be commensurate with its risk to attract investors. Through […]

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. […]