What is the future of the IT department?

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The future of enterprise technology is a massively important theme, which impacts organizations, vendors, governments, and indeed society at large. Taking each of these perspectives provides a different view on how the space is evolving.

One of the most interesting perspectives is from the very center of the fray: the IT department itself. It needs to deal with the minutiae of technological change as well as the macrotrends shaping organizations and their shifting place in the global economy.

I’ve teamed up with the outstanding strategist Greg Rippon of NetFocus, who I first worked with back in 1999 on a broad-ranging scenario project for a major bank, to create a one-day workshop for IT departments who want to take a structured look at the future and what it implies for their current strategy.

Click on the image for the flyer for the workshop on the future of the IT department.


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Bring in the serendipity dial – for search, music and beyond

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At the client workshop I ran earlier in the week, I raised the concept of the “serendipity dial” (something I have written about many years ago in the context of creating enhanced serendipity, and more recently asking Last.FM to introduce a serendipity dial.)

Source: sixdegrees.hu Click on the image for a very large size version including artist names.

The image above shows the similarities between different musicians, as determined by the users of Last.FM. If you like an artist, you are very likely to like other artists positioned close by, and far less likely to like artists positioned on the other side of the chart. This is an example of collaborative filtering, whereby many users behaviors can be used to predict what others with similar musical tastes will like.

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The 9 kinds of context that will define contextual search

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Yesterday I did the kick-off presentation and workshop at a strategy planning session of a major online media company. The intent was to provide some different perspectives on trends in digital media as input to their deliberations.

One of the many topics I discussed was the rise of contextual search.

Looking back over the last decade, I think it’s fair to say that the search experience has not evolved much. Sure we’ve had the shift to real-time indexing, experiments with multi-category results, predictive text in the search field, and a few other innovations, but if I was sitting in 2001 wondering how search would develop over the next 10 years I would be sorely disappointed to find out how little actually happened in that time.

Clearly it is a nonsense to always get the same search result, irrespective of who you are and all of the conditions surrounding the search. Yet for all major search engines there is currently minimal difference in the results from the same text string search performed by different people, in different conditions, very likely looking for different things.


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MySpace’s new strategy: building a new and valuable space in social content

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I just caught up for a coffee with Nick Love, head of MySpace and IGN Australia. I haven’t been following MySpace closely for a while, so it was interesting to hear how it has repositioned. Here are a few thoughts and pointers from public information.

As it happens AllThingsD yesterday put up an interesting article Trying Out a Revamped Myspace which includes this brief video review – well worth watching:

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Top 10 posts of the year on social media

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Continuing my sequence of top posts from this year, today I have selected the 10 most popular and interesting posts on social media I’ve written this year.

1. We are fast learning how to create “enhanced serendipity”

Reflections on the meaning of serendipity and why it essential we strive to enhance it.

“Serendipity is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It originates from the story of “the Three Princes of Serendip”, which tells the tale of three princes who had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries (see more on the story here).”

2. Some thoughts on why Australians are #1 globally on social media usage (from a slow start)

Following news that Australians are ranked #1 in the world in their usage of social networks, 6 reasons why Australians have caught up on social media.

Socialnetworkstime_0110.jpg

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Delicious will be shut down. What to do and 6 major alternatives for social bookmarking.

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TechCrunch has reported (and close-as-dammit confirmed) that Yahoo! will close down Delicious. If so, it’s close to a tragedy.

Social bookmarks have been one of the defining aspects of Web 2.0. As described in our Web 2.0 Framework, sharing in very simple ways can create value for many. It is a simple step to take the bookmarks you are doing anyway, and make them visible along with your tags to describe them. That simple step “transforms mass participation into valuable emergent outcomes” for all, part of the shift to collective intelligence.

Many have called for Yahoo! to make Delicious open source or otherwise try to keep it alive rather than close it down. I would be one of many very unhappy with Yahoo! if they don’t at least make an effort to do that. But I’m not holding my breath.

So… if Delicious disappears what will Delicious users (of which I am one) do?

Get your bookmarks out: Export your bookmarks immediately, and keep doing so regularly if you continue to use it.

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Collective Intelligence

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

In a world of infinite information and diversity of opinion we will not drown, but harness our dormant potential to be more together than we are individually. Crowdsourcing platforms and aggregators of insight will be part of the planks that create the reality of a global brain, expressing our destiny.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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The rise of mini-blogging in 2011: Tumblr will continue to soar

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogging.

Here are a few further thoughts on mini-blogs. I have written another post on the rise of social shopping, including 7 examples.

Here is an excerpt from the article on mini-blogging:

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Australian government releases Government 2.0 Primer

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The Australian government is gaining momentum in its Government 2.0 initiatives, marked today by the launch by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) of a handy Government 2.0 Primer.

The Report of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce was submitted in December 2009. Although the Taskforce chairman Nicholas Gruen had earlier noted that Australian Government 2.0 initiatives were significantly behind countries such as the US and UK, the report and the government response impressed Gartner sufficiently to say “if the Aussies walk the talk, they have a very good chance to be the real leaders in the Gov 2.0 / Open Government race.”

Since then, the Declaration of Open Government by the Finance Minister (with comments enabled!) has pushed the ante up.

The primer is exactly what it says, a compact guide to Government 2.0 for neophytes, in the spirit of Gov 2 released early to be subsequently refined.

Gov2_PSI-dataflow.png

Source: Department of Finance and Deregulation

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Australia’s top 25 business blogs ranked by traffic

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SmartCompany has released a nice list of Australia’s 25 top business blogs, created by Brad Howarth.

With the list is a useful article running through the highlights of the blogs on the list, including why these leading businesses blog, the value they get from it, how they go about it, and far more. There is also a number of good points on the keys to running a success blog.

From the article it sounds like I was the first of the 25 bloggers featured to start blogging, kicking off in 2002. Next month I’ll be celebrating 8 years of blogging. Many more have joined in since then.

Below I have put the list of the 25 business blogs together with their authors, ranked by their web traffic from Alexa as of today. A couple of cautions to sound here: This list is about the top business blogs, which is more about business impact than traffic. Also Alexa figures are pretty unreliable, though at the moment there unfortunately aren’t many better tools to rank blogs, with Technorati rankings changed and Wikio not comprehensive.

My blog comes up at rank 7, though most of the ones ahead of me are professional blogs while I get to this when I can (unfortunately this is my second post in over two weeks now :-( ).

See the article in SmartCompany for the full review and to see descriptions of each blog. Brad has added some other blogs that just missed the cut this year on his blog.

1. Problogger (Darren Rouse): 2,069

2. Telstra Exchange: 8,771

3. Just Creative Design (Jacob Cass): 21,866

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