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Reviews

PICNIC day one

My first ever PICNIC festival day started with a nice talk by professor Robbert Dijkgraaf, president of the KNAW. He talked about the relationship between creativity and physics. One of the best parts was about most important element of a formula, the equals sign. This sign brings together two worlds and lets ideas and concepts flow between these two worlds.

The second part of the creativity session was by Mark Runco, who talked about ideation and divergent thinking. Three elements are important in ideation: originality, fluency and flexibility. Time and associations have an effect on ideation and thus creativity. Playfullness will produce better ideas than being serious, so there is a wise lesson for all workshops!

The third part of creativity was about the concept of fractal. This shape is used by nature all the time and can be applied to business problems aswell. Searching the right information should use fractal trajectories to cover the most space on an efficient way.

During lunch I really enjoyed the Boom Chicago Pitch Training, where we learned a lot about giving a good pitch or presentation. A lot of good tips on stature, eye contact, acknowledging energy and presence. In speaking we should avoid “uhmm” and similar words, which can be done by a more than average preparation. At the office we discussed the hitchcock effect, that is to state the conclusion upfront and elaborate afterwards. During this session we talked about the scheme to state a conclusion “I like this bottle of water”, state three short reasons for the conclusion (“because it is fresh, sustainable and a good presentation prop”) and than elaborate on the reasoning. You can take a half day workshop at Boom Chicago for €95 euro, which should be fun and a good investment in your presentation skills!

After lunch I attended a workshop together with @ARoelofswaard on open data combining data from cities and people. The last one is trending as the Quantified Self lately. They mentioned some great stuff that is happening right now like weavrs.com, a site generates a fake person based on a big mix of data. The other service that was really nice is ifttt.com, a site that lets you make a litte app or service combining a number of channels, based on the priciple “if this than that”, hence the name ifttt ;-). Pachube was mentioned shortly, what is a nice service to manage data in the internet of things.

All together a really, really great first day and I am excited to go back to Amsterdam tomorrow!

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Neuroscience

Neuroscience & Information Management

Yesterday I gave a presentation at Rabobank on neuroscience, the final frontier of information management. At VLC we believe there are four barriers to information management. The last one is interpretation. If your information is digitally available, accessibel and relevant, interpretation is the last barrier. Can a person make the right decision based on that information. The brain has a big impact on decision making and information interpretation. The other presentations will be shared after the weekend when John and Paul are back on solid land.

 

Neuroscience [slideshare id=9192869&w=425&h=355&sc=no]

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Geen categorie

PICNIC2011 Poster Project

At the PICNIC site I found this slideshow on the posters for the upcoming festival, some very nice posters! Great work!

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Uncategorized

Processes and EIM

The world of processes and information is a world closely linked. The reason to manage your information is that it has value in the processes of your organization. If this is not the case why bother? Let’s look at the sorts of information that have value in the world of processes.

Describing the process is the first step. This can be done in either simple Word document or in a structured way like BPMN. The biggest challenge is to ensure that descriptions are as close to reallity as possible. There is a trade-off between ease of use and integration capabilities between using a corporate Word template (being far more easy and flexible) and using BPMN (because implementing a process from a technical point of view becomes far more easy).

Input and output of a process can be pieces of information. A client filling out a request form for an insurance is an input to a process. A newspaper is an output of a process. It is imperative that these pieces of information are tightly managed to ensure quality and stay inside the magic, six sigma objective of  3.4 DPMO (defects per million opportunities).

Exhaust information that enables analysis of process performance. Each time a process is executed, it generates information. This information is used in a business intelligence (BI) and/or business analytics environment to diagnose the flow of processes and enables improvement.

During a process actors communicate with each other about the product and process. This communication adds value and should be stored for future benefit. The information that is generated during communicating, like emails or IM discussions, is important because it shows how value is added in a process.

The four barriers for information productivity of course all apply to all four types of information in BPM. Let’s focus on process descriptions. If descriptions are not available to the people working on the process how can they execute the process as designed? If the workers are not able to retrieve the descriptions when they are available the same problem applies. If the descriptions are not relevant they are not adding value for the people working on the process. If the people that are working on the process cannot interpret the descriptions they will make the wrong decisions even if they have read the description. The consequence is that the highest levels of business performance are only possible if all barriers of information are removed.

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The 80/20 rule for Social Media

Yesterday I had a very nice discussion on the application of the 80/20 rule (aka the Pareto Principle) on social media. The nicest application of this rule is by Timothy Ferriss in the 4 Hour Workweek. He states that 20% of your customers take up 80% of your time. So you need to lose these customers to save 80% of your time. Social Media is all about conversations, this will mean that 20% of your network will take up 80% of your time on social media. Unlike the example of the 4 Hour Workweek, this is a good thing. In social media you want to engage with as much of your network as possible. Hopefully the 90-9-1 rule which segments your visitors in 90% ‘lurkers’, 9% contributors and 1% creator is a low estimate and 80/20 is more applicable!

What do you think?

(the elderly gentleman in the picture is Vilfredo Pareto, courtesy to wikipedia for the nice picture)

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Content Management

Visualizing the Flow of Tweets

I am looking at two very nice vids twitter posted on its blog yesterday. They are illustrating nicely how tweets from japan were posted, replied retweeted! Information has to move to create value. How does your organisation move information?

[flickr video=5885172082 secret=8fb27274bc w=400 h=225]

and

[flickr video=5884626815 secret=d851598b9a w=400 h=225]

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Marketing Analytics

CIOnet and Again Big Data

This afternoon I visited the last CIOnet meeting before the holiday season. The subject again was Big Data. The organization had some great foresight in planning this session a few days after all big research companies like Gartner and McKinsey published some great reports on this topic.

The session started with Edgar Heijmans, programdirector at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Edgar has a long track record with IT within the government. He made a critical warning that combining data not always leads to the correct insights. Precautions should be made to get real valuable insights that match with reality. Job Witteman, CEO of AMS-ix, took over and talked about the business of the AMS-ix. They actually connect 1,3TB of data per second on peaks every day! AMS-is is the dataport of the Netherlands and is an important asset for our country and Amsterdam to attract all sorts of creative internet companies. The session ended with a speech of Daniel Erasmus, CEO of DTN and NewsConsole. He talked about radical different thinking in architecture to setup a bigdata environment. A doghouse looks nice and is stable when it is normal size. When you use the same structure but make it 1000 times larger it will collapse. This means new ways to think about architecture. We ended up in a nice discussion about traditional databases and new concepts like Hadoop.

Conclusion is that Big Data is here to stay and can provide valuable insights combining more information. We are generating more data than ever before and the volume of data will continue to grow. We need new concepts and new skills to give businesses valuable insights that will increase productivity and ultimately profit!

Job shared a nice video on the work and role of the internet exchange!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAUedhcjAY&w=560&h=349]

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Marketing Analytics

Bigdata and Social Business

Today I was taking a look at some of the posts and tweets on last weeks Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I visited this conference in 2008 and always keep an eye open this time of year. One of the keynotes was from Lee Bryant from Headshift. He talked about Data Driven Business Improvement. In his talk he combined Enterprise 2.0 (social media at the office) and Bigdata. The Enterprise 2.0 concept is know as “Het Nieuwe Werken” in The Netherlands or in better English The New World of Work. Bigdata is a concept that provides insights in very large amounts of data. The large analists like Gartner and McKinsey Global Institute have published reports on this concept lately.

Data-driven business improvement [slideshare id=8388855&w=425&h=355&sc=no]

View more presentations from Lee Bryant

Lee combines these two concept and shows how this can improve business. This is more or less the same way we at VLC are looking at ways to improve information productivity in organisations. We add Search to the mix to find, combine and present information from both structured (like large amounts of usage statistics of your your website or intranet) and unstructured sources (like douments or tweets).

Thanks Enterprise 2.0 for sharing the photo!

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Geen categorie

Quitting Internet?

Today I read an article on The Next Web, titled “Could You Quit The Internet?”. We had an interesting clash of the generations last weekend at home. On sunday there were four of us sitting at a table and three were occupied with their iPhones. Obviously the only one without an iPhone reacted ;-). If you had looked at the situation from a distance ot would have appeared really awkward, but I think you might recognize it. I am afraid I was one of the three people using my iPhone and I am not proud of it…

There is a continuing discussion in society about the ever increasing usage of internet and mobile phones. The recent book Alone Together By Sherry Thurkle sheds some phychological light on this issue. It seems strange that we are getting less social the more we are using social networking sites.

Can you disconnect completely like Jim Stolze did a few years ago? For me it is very hard and my life and work is getting more intertwined with internet usage. What is the effect of social media on your real social life?

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PICNIC and Social Media

Yesterday I completely forgot to blog, sorry guys! But yesterday was a nice day. I had a nice conversation about social media and we planned a social media strategy workshop. For me social media is all about conversations between real people with passion. We are going to use the POST methodology from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (of Forrester Research).

After this nice conversation we had an internal project team meeting discussing a infographic metaphor we are using for our EIM Scan results. During 30 minutes we really made progress and my colleague worked hard to produce a great first concept we discussed with the client today. During the discussion again we made some very nice progress. Most important: ownership of the infographic is already shifting to the client. Infographics are a very good way to communicate results and help to conquer the last barrier for information value: interpretation!

Yesterday I had to catch up on the Apple WWDC 2011. With some great news on Lion, iOS5 and iCloud. I am really looking forward to downloading Lion directly from the App Store!

Today I registered for PICNIC 2011. A few years I have followed this festival/conference online because I was always to late to register… But this year will break this tradition, so I already have my e-ticket in my inbox! The entourage, people and subjects are very interesting and I hope for some great inspiration from other ideas and concepts. Watch this video from PICNIC 2010 about Instrumenting the city: Data is King by Charles Weigend.

 

Instrumenting the city: Data is King – Andreas Weigend – PICNIC ’10 from PICNIC on Vimeo.