Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all

Trivia whiz Ken Jennings has made a career as a keeper of facts; he holds the longest winning streak in history on the U.S. game show Jeopardy. But in 2011, he played a challenge match against supercomputer Watson -- and lost. With humor and humility, Jennings tells us how it felt to have a computer literally beat him at his own game, and also makes the case for good old-fashioned human knowledge.

How do you combine technologies to innovate?

This makes so much sense. It is the combination of technology that becomes so powerful in this model.

Well worth reading and thinking through as an enabler of innovation. Adam really nails this one.

These technologies can be combined in numerous ways, and we are just starting to see companies really taking advantage of the possibilities. These four technologies will have a disruptive impact on your business, almost regardless of which industry you're in. The question is whether you will choose to adopt them before a competitor does.

What are they?
1.  Microprocessors
2.  Sensors
3.  Wireless connectivity
4.  Databases

The Four Technologies You Need to Be Working With - Adam Richardson - Harvard Business Review

What is your mobile strategy?

According to Latha Maripuri, Director of IBM Mobile and Security Services, mobile technology has unquestionably changed how we interact in both our business and personal lives. In fact, mobile devices have quickly moved from a nice-to-have technology to a necessity for most of us.

But the integration of mobile within our lives doesn’t stop there. We’re using mobile technology in innovative ways and countless places across every industry. For example, doctors can track therapeutic effectiveness through remote monitoring apps, keeping them updated on patients even when neither is in the hospital. The examples are endless.

More here: Mapping Out the Top 4 Strategies for the Mobile Enterprise « A Smarter Planet Blog.

What is your new ecosystem?

The need for change is obvious. The CIO as change agent not only touches his/her own function, but also need make influence on entire organization and business ecosystem as well, it takes strategic planning, methodology and practice in orchestrating such transformation. This is a big deal. If the business isn't strategic it will be impossible for technology to be strategic as well.

Define Roadmap: In fact, the required changes, at the most fundamental level, need be well documented. A clearly defined roadmap is available, and industry best practices are in place to serve as a framework upon which the solution can be implemented over time. The transformation to a more proactive service/solution delivery organization with repeatable management processes in place of the 'crisis of the day' leadership model, can be a reality, but only if the CIO is the proactive, visible and charismatic sponsor.

Optimize Process: Meanwhile, to compete, business unit leaders need IT to ensure the availability and reliability of their business process automation tools/technology, so their staff can function as efficiently as promised, back when they justified the tool purchase. In fact, many organizations have little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. They have no idea where they are spending their money on and often assume it is mainly being spent on items which are actually much lower on the list. Every IT finance group can capture costs but the challenge is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. The leadership team needs IT to be the business process optimization expert for the company, to find creative sources for competitive advantages, to better compete.

Ask for Help: One of the first things a CIO must do in a transformation initiative of this magnitude is to ask the business for help. The effort will fail if the business units are unwilling to invest resources and accept a "period of pain" where service levels may be adversely impacted. CIO can envision themselves talking with business unit leaders, selling them on the challenges and the vision for the future. Will CIO be open to new perspective, willing to adapt the new skill set to the demands of evolving technology or adapt their role to the evolving business requirements for technology? Will CIO be learning agile to understand business ecosystem and connect innovation dot cross-functional, cross-industrial and cross-cultural border? It takes both attitude and aptitude.

Who is responsible for your nonprofit Digital Community Building?

When it comes to building community and increasing brand awareness, some organizations hire communications, marketing, and engagement staff to handle these activities. And that makes sense -- someone needs to be charged with keeping a close eye on the organization’s community growth.

Jamie Millard and Lori L. Jacobwith also suggest that building awareness for your important work in an increasingly cluttered space can’t be the responsibility of just one person or even a department. When an organization embraces the culture of creating and empowering all staff to become “brand ambassadors,” authentic and exponential growth starts to happen.

More here: Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Rebooting Your Digital Community Building | NTEN.

Can you eliminate the need for email?

With some careful application of social media tools, could you actually eliminate the need for email?

Luis Suarez, who works for IBM, ditched email. He still has an email account, but since 2008 he’s tried to wean himself off email.

Suarez documents the decreasing amounts of email he receives with blog posts tagged “A World Without Email“. When he started, Suarez received more than 30 emails per day; by 2011 he received 16 emails per week. (I always imagine the phrase being read with the deep voice of movie trailer narrators, “In a world without email, one man stands alone…”)

Headlines highlight Suarez’s lack of email as an oddity. In 2012, Wired ran a story titled “IBM Gives Birth to Amazing E-mail-less Man“. The idea that a tech professional could do actual work without email boggles! Bah. Nearly impossible!

Headlines about Suarez should read “Man Chooses to Work in Public”. Suarez replaced email with a mix of internal and external social networking tools. He posts to his Wordpress-powered blog at elsua.net several times a month. He uses Twitter and Tumblr to share what he’s doing. He even uses Google+ now and then.

Suarez’s choice to share his work came as a result of thinking and practice. He worked for years in the field of Knowledge Management. And he’s highly proficient at learning new tools and ways of working: he started blogging back in 2005.

So, can you eliminate email? Yes, with the careful use of social media and the willingness to "work in public", it can be done. What is the value? Knowledge is shared. Work is collaborative.

Crossing the Innovation Chasm. Does CIO stand for Chief Innovation Officer?

Why does the Innovation Chasm exist? As a CIO, you have been charged with protecting your organization’s valuable assets, and with providing a reliable and stable infrastructure. As a result, you have become the “CI-No”:

• “No, we can’t buy that application you saw in an airplane magazine.”


• “No, we can’t have a new Web site built in two weeks.”


• “No, we can’t do that because it will expose our customer data.”

You could be the CI-No because you were the only game in town: if the business wanted access to technology, they had to come through you. That’s not the case anymore. One of the byproducts of the perfect storm is that the business can now access technology directly from the Cloud without your involvement, and without your knowledge. It happens in companies of all sizes, in every industry, regardless of your IT or security stance. When business has access to that technology, it widens the chasm.

IT has to up its game, and smart CIOs are on a path to help the business use technology to innovate both what they do and how they do it.

Here is a great visual of how to align with the CEO.



via Crossing the Innovation Chasm.

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From the oracles at IBM - 5 very interesting possibilities

Big Blue always has some great ideas in their “IBM 5 in 5” — five innovations that “have the potential to change the way people work, live and interact during the next five years.”

Here’s the Cliff Notes version:

1. Generating electric power through everything from your running shoes to water flowing into your home;


2. Eradicating passwords through facial and voice recognition technology;


3. Linking your thoughts to your devices (i.e. technological mindreading);


4. Wiping out the digital divide, thanks to mobile broadband advances;


5. Targeted ads so precise that spam ceases to exist.

More here: http://bit.ly/uINd4p

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This is disruptive. Work.com redefines what HR Software is.

This should be a wake-up call to work support specialists (Learning and Development, Organization Development and Human Resources) that “net work” has to be integrated. For vendors, the days of stand-alone learning, talent, or performance management systems are numbered. It should also be a clear indication that industrial/information age work structures, and the disciplines they begat, are losing. relevance. This is business technology that will continue to disrupt how traditional IT works as well. Who needs IT when you can buy this "off the shelf" and don't even need to install anything?

If systems like Work.com are integrated with the lines of business, there may be less need for specialized HR practitioners or at less fewer of them. Managers may begin to ask why they need HR, when they can manage 80% of performance management themselves. And performance management is just the start. Why not learning management, when the vast majority of learning happens on the job?

I played around with Rypple about a year ago. I really liked it. With Salesforce.com's acquisition and now launch of work.com (how much did they pay for the URL?), I think Salesforce is now positioned to do with HR systems with what they did with CRM years ago.

The work.com strategy is unique and powerful in many ways.

First, the whole system is completely integrated into the Salesforce portal – so the 150,000+ companies that use Salesforce can just “turn this on” and employees can start using it immediately. There is no new “HR portal” to login to.

Second, because the system is built on the Force.com platform, Salesforce can quickly add new features and leverage all the infrastructure in place for reporting and management. Goals can be tied to accounts, contacts, and other Salesforce objects, making this a truly “integrated” goal setting and work environment.

Third, the system is integrated into Chatter, Salesforce’s rapidly growing collaboration system – so everything you do can be shared (or not shared). People can give you badges, comment on your goals, give you private or public feedback, and collaborate around a goal – without the need to install yet another collaboration system.

The HR software market is red hot right now. SAP, Oracle, and IBM have just spent billions of dollars to buy their way into the market, and other companies like Workday and CornerstoneOnDemand are already capturing huge valuations. (Workday has not yet gone public, but its valuation will be well over 10X revenues).

These tools all play a vital role in helping HR and business leaders handle the administration and talent management processes for people. They are both back-office systems which help companies administer their people, and also employee-facing systems which give people tools to better learn and manage their teams.

Along comes Work.com from Salesforce.com with a compelling strategy to disrupt the entire market.

via Work.com Redefines what HR Software Is - Forbes.

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