There can be few more important IT issues—for both large corporations and the vendors that service them—than making major technology purchasing decisions successfully. While technology is a massive expense for organizations, this money is often not well spent. To address this critical issue, CNET asked me to do a research study on this topic, which I did with Rob Cross of the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia, Andrew Parker of Stanford University, and key CNET executives. Here is the link to the full CNET report on technology purchase influence networks.
Organizational network analysis is an immensely powerful tool, which we wished to apply to understand better how large technology purchasing decisions get made. These kinds of decisions are not made by individuals, they are made by a range of people within the technology and business sides of organization, using both formal and informal decision-making processes. As such, it makes eminent sense to use a network approach to understand how these roles are combined, what inputs they receive in the decision-making process, and what the roles are in this process of vendors and other external parties. We also wanted to uncover the vital differences between successful and unsuccessful technology purchasing decisions, and what organizations can do to more consistently make successful purchasing decisions. We surveyed 289 organizations, and for each one uncovered the influence networks that supported a major technology purchasing decision made over the previous 12 months. The technology purchases covered spanned enterprise software, servers, storage, and voice over IP.
The figure below shows one of the diagrams from the report, giving the combined network across all successful decisions.
Summary findings from the research include:
* The archetype for a successful purchasing decision is based on a strong IT Director/ IT Manager nexus that is well aligned with business executive roles.
* Input from selected external parties support successful decisions.
* Involvement from other external parties, especially vendors, yields mixed results.
* Unbalanced involvement of IT Technical Support is strongly correlated to unsuccessful decisions.
* Getting financial and business input from the CFO strongly supports decision success.
Go to the report for far more detail on all of these findings, and on the key differences between successful and unsuccessful decisions. I will be presenting with Ted Smith of CNET on the study, and more generally applying network approaches to generating revenue, enhancing relationships, and improving decision-making, at the Network Roundtable conference in Boston next week.
I am very interested in taking the findings from this research into new areas. Immediate possibilities include working with organizations to uncover their internal influence networks and enhance the success of their major purchasing decisions, working with vendors to identify ways of adding value to the decision-making of specific clients or client segments, and applying and adapting the influence network methodologies we have developed to other areas of purchasing and decision-making, potentially for consumer as well as organizational decisions. Definitely get in touch if you want to bounce around ideas on any of this. I’ll post here on new applications we find.
MeshForum 2006: Connecting networks
By Ross DawsonIf you’re interested in any aspects of networks, definitely check out the MeshForum 2006 conference, which is coming up on May 7-9 in San Francisco. I ran a Living Networks Forum session at the inaugural MeshForum last year in Chicago. It ws a fabulous event, with great people who are involved in many aspects of networks, and lots of interaction, including of course my Living Networks session. During the conference I discovered a whole range of very exciting work being done in networks. MeshForum is driven by Shannon Clark, a highly energetic believer in networks, who has recently made the shift to the Bay Area from Chicago, and a group of other kindred spirits. MeshForum is described as “a conference on Networks – bringing together an interdisciplinary mix of academics, artists, business leaders and government experts for three days of learning and collaboration. Our mission is to foster the overall study of networks – across fields of industry and academia.” Some of the highlights of the conference are a focus on visualization, presentations by bloggers (and now authors) extraordinaire Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, and an array of content on networks political, social, transportational, technological, philanthropic, artistic, and more. Highly recommended.
Making successful decisions: Technology Purchase Influence Networks
By Ross DawsonThere can be few more important IT issues—for both large corporations and the vendors that service them—than making major technology purchasing decisions successfully. While technology is a massive expense for organizations, this money is often not well spent. To address this critical issue, CNET asked me to do a research study on this topic, which I did with Rob Cross of the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia, Andrew Parker of Stanford University, and key CNET executives. Here is the link to the full CNET report on technology purchase influence networks.
Organizational network analysis is an immensely powerful tool, which we wished to apply to understand better how large technology purchasing decisions get made. These kinds of decisions are not made by individuals, they are made by a range of people within the technology and business sides of organization, using both formal and informal decision-making processes. As such, it makes eminent sense to use a network approach to understand how these roles are combined, what inputs they receive in the decision-making process, and what the roles are in this process of vendors and other external parties. We also wanted to uncover the vital differences between successful and unsuccessful technology purchasing decisions, and what organizations can do to more consistently make successful purchasing decisions. We surveyed 289 organizations, and for each one uncovered the influence networks that supported a major technology purchasing decision made over the previous 12 months. The technology purchases covered spanned enterprise software, servers, storage, and voice over IP.
The figure below shows one of the diagrams from the report, giving the combined network across all successful decisions.
Summary findings from the research include:
* The archetype for a successful purchasing decision is based on a strong IT Director/ IT Manager nexus that is well aligned with business executive roles.
* Input from selected external parties support successful decisions.
* Involvement from other external parties, especially vendors, yields mixed results.
* Unbalanced involvement of IT Technical Support is strongly correlated to unsuccessful decisions.
* Getting financial and business input from the CFO strongly supports decision success.
Go to the report for far more detail on all of these findings, and on the key differences between successful and unsuccessful decisions. I will be presenting with Ted Smith of CNET on the study, and more generally applying network approaches to generating revenue, enhancing relationships, and improving decision-making, at the Network Roundtable conference in Boston next week.
I am very interested in taking the findings from this research into new areas. Immediate possibilities include working with organizations to uncover their internal influence networks and enhance the success of their major purchasing decisions, working with vendors to identify ways of adding value to the decision-making of specific clients or client segments, and applying and adapting the influence network methodologies we have developed to other areas of purchasing and decision-making, potentially for consumer as well as organizational decisions. Definitely get in touch if you want to bounce around ideas on any of this. I’ll post here on new applications we find.
Social networks and search
By Ross DawsonTwo years ago I did a four-city speaking tour of New Zealand under the auspices of SmartNet. Before my lunch presentation in Wellington, I sat out on one of the tables, and was astounded to find that the person I was chatting to was an executive of Eurekster, which was at the time a hot new player in applying social networks to search. I’ve never come across much public mention of this, as they present themselves as a US company, but much of Eurekster’s development has been done in New Zealand. The news today is that Microsoft, in endeavoring to integrate social network functionality into its own search offering, will either buy or partner with Eurekster, according to BusinessWeek.
While there are a number of approaches to what is being called “social search”, the heart of it is drawing on the experiences and search results of people with similar interests. Rather than using pure algorithms to rank relevance, it makes a lot of sense to use as inputs what people have found to be useful. This can be done in bounded groups, so for example racing car enthusiasts could form a social group where all the members can draw on the search processes or interesting results others are finding. A search for “fiat” would give very different results than it would in a generic research, or even for a car buyer’s interest group. However I think that forming specific search groups is only a preliminary step down this path. Everyone has many interests and roles, and it is not easy to find and join relevant search groups for each of these areas. In the long-term, collaborative search must automatically draw on people’s most relevant peers and their search results. This relates to how reputation networks will develop, where you have an implicit trust rating for each person’s input into the system. This may be through personally knowing that person, or it may be by how they – or the information they uncover – are viewed by your peers. There is no question that social search will over time give far better results than pure algorithmic search. But what Eurekster, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are doing now in this field are very early steps.
The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs
By Ross DawsonI read through an article on blogging in the Financial Times this morning to help me as I develop some frameworks on the changing content creation landscape. The article was clearly negative on blogging being the transformative media it is touted to be, though brought out some interesting points. The writer makes the point that blogs are not self-sufficient – they depend largely on the mainstream media for their fodder.
Cute metaphor. Yet symbiosis is far more apt than parasitism. Mainstream media in its online form largely gets attention through blogs. Blogs add immense value to the original articles, by identiyfing what’s important, pointing out flaws, adding other perspectives, making visible to all the conversations that stem from media pieces. Blogs depend on mainstream media, with its resources and editorial capabilities, for sure. Yet media is increasingly dependent on blogging for the direction of attention and layer of value-add created.
Keynote on the Future of Global Business at the Harvard Club in New York
By Ross DawsonThis April 27 I’m doing a lunch address at the Harvard Club in New York City on The Future of Global Business, organized by Claxton Speakers International – description below. Details and registration here. If you’re in the area, please come along and say hi, or feel free to pass on word if people you know may be interested in coming along.
The Future of Global Business
Business is now truly global. Communications technologies and deregulation are creating a world in which there are no boundaries for competition. Manufacturing has already gone to low-cost locations. Now almost-free communication allows legal work, financial analysis, and other professsional work – as well as customer service – to be done anywhere on the planet. Innovations are copied in the blink of an eye. Blogging, podcasting, and internet TV change the rules for media and advertising. The entire planet has become a intensely interconnected hive of business activity.
Yet despite the challenges, there are massive opportunities in this new global world of business. How should individuals, companies, and indeed entire countries, position themselves for success? The answer is in connecting. You must have at least one world-class capability, and then tap into global networks for both suppliers and clients. Those organizations that can create effective collaborative networks will dominate. Those that attempt to stand alone will fall. Today it is still about who you know, but also about how you can create value with your personal networks. In his compelling and energizing keynote, Dawson brings clarity to the unfolding world of global business, and provides specific, actionable strategies for individuals and companies to succeed in the challenging times ahead.
Newspaper headlines and search optimization
By Ross DawsonAn interesting article in the New York Times on how newspapers are finding the art of writing headlines is changing. Back when you were solely trying to draw attention from readers of a broadsheet, being clever was the name of the game. But now that online content is starting to become a significant revenue stream for newspapers, and much of their traffic comes through search engines such as Google News or other new aggregators, creating headlines is becoming a very different art. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making your website friendly to search engines. As it turns out, headlines are a critical part of this. Google and other search engines very heavily overweight words that are in page and story titles. Words used in titles need to be relevant to the article, so search engines can classify them. It’s been very interesting to me as this blog has gained traction to see how people are finding the blog, and what gets good search engine rankings. For example posts on this blog come up #1 on Google for a wide range of search terms, including “monetizing eyeballs“, “client sophistication“, “blogging serialization“, and many others. These are all words that are in the titles of the respective blog posts. Understanding how this works strongly influences what I – or any blogger or editor – choose to use as headlines.
Part of what the newspapers are doing is setting up dual pages, one with the traditional newspaper headline, the other with the search-engine friendly version, intended for different human or automated readers. The thing is that you are not just targetting search engines, but also news aggregration sites such as Memeorandum and Daypop News. Michael Parekh makes some interesting points on this regarding optimization for multiple platforms. Tagging and other approaches will help on this front, but for now content creators need to work out their priorities in how they optimize their sites and content to be found on the web.
Massively multi-player sex games
By Ross DawsonClick on the image for a trial of Red Light Center, the most popular multiplayer 3D virtual sex game
This is going to be big. Naughty America: The Game is a massively-multiplayer game, due out in the next few months, in which players assume the role of characters who meet, date, and have sex. Up until now the big multiplayer role-playing games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft have been set in fantasy worlds. Now it will be in sexual fantasy worlds, where characters can invite others back to their apartment, designed to their own taste with home decorator tools. Or they can flirt or have sex in a whole variety of realms including the beach, back alleys, a cruise ship, or theme rooms such as make-your-own-porn. And just so it isn’t too tame, you can switch to sex mode, where you can turn on personal webcams, or of course set up in-the-flesh dates. A good overview article discusses some of the ins-and-outs of the market, including how Naughty America intends to deal with distribution, fears of sexual predators, and bringing people into a new experience. However, interestingly, Second Life, the biggest free-form online world, is said to be one-third based on sexual interactions. I think that the only potential limitation here is the quality of the graphics. But if it’s not good enough now, it will be soon. Having recently delved into World of Warcraft and been staggered at how far the multiplayer online games have come in the last years, I don’t doubt that a significant portion of many people’s lives will be spent in virtual worlds, as and when the graphic and interaction quality is up to it. And sex will be part of that virtual interaction.
Online video heats up
By Ross DawsonYouTube, recently the belle of the ball at the Digital Hollywood conference, has just raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital in a Series B round. YouTube is currently the leader of the pack in providing online video hosting, but it still doesn’t have an evident business model. Apparently it will start putting advertising into its site – which it currently doesn’t do – by mid-year, but the costs of hosting video means this revenue stream has to be significant. Far more likely it will look to cut deals with major entertainment companies to be an outlet for video content, in turn tied in with related revenue streams. However YouTube is far from alone in the space, with Jumpcut launched yesterday, and yet to be released service Motionbox declared the best video service by TechCrunch, even before its launch. Both of these services allow video editing, with Jumpcut in particular having some nifty video mashup and remix features, while YouTube is just an upload site. Bubble, bubble, toil, and maybe trouble on the other end of this boomlet, but it has a very good run to go first.
Choosing a feed reader
By Ross DawsonFor those of you out there who have not yet set yourself up with an RSS feed reader, the better to tap the best of the Internet, TechCrunch provides a brief but useful review and comparison of the major online feed readers. There are certainly other ways of tapping RSS feeds, including PC-based software applications and Outlook-integrated applications, however most people still use online feed readers, as they are easy to set up and use. Bloglines, Newsgator, and Rojo are still probably the most used by the major bloggers, but there is a continual array of new players in this space. Since each provides default feed suggestions, this helps to support their revenue models.
Internet video becomes true new media
By Ross DawsonWe all know that television will migrate to distribution over the Internet. Broadcast and cable will certainly co-exist with the Internet as distribution channels for moving image content for the foreseeable future, however broadband access and the availability of capital for new media ventures mean that the Internet is already becoming a viable alternative for television viewers. Some traditional free-to-air television channels will at some point simultaneously broadcast their programs over the Internet. However what is more interesting is how video programs over the Internet take advantage of the channel and the media consumption patterns of the likely audience. Case in point is Heavy.com, which targets young males with a showcase of funny, sexy, and crude short videos, set in an extremely advertising-intensive frame. It looks different from just about anything else out there, with few words, and plenty of user-driven interaction, movement, sound, and color. The site is openly modelled on video games. An a very interesting recent article in the New York Times that discusses some of the dynamics of advertising to this demographic, says that the site had 5.5 million visitors in February, while the company estimates it will take in $20 million in revenue this year. Advertisers like not just the audience, but the depth of exposure they get from the in-your-face advertisements. Around half of the videos are amateur productions submitted by the audience, though selected by the site editors. Heavy.com is now ramping up its own video production capabilities. Of course, this is just one facet of the Internet video world, with other players like Youtube, Videobomb, OurMedia, and others providing a whole new domain of user generated and filtered content. Heavy.com is showing the way in actually doing something new which has not done before, rather than simply distributing traditional content in new ways or taking text and image models into video. There will be a lot more exciting and new in this space in the very near future.