Posts Tagged ‘enterprise2.0’

Interview: 2010 Trends in Social Media / Enterprise 2.0

December 30th, 2009 | Popularity: 5%
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This is a very nice interview of Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang from Altimeter Group, by Robert Scoble (now of Rackspace). I am a big fan of all. They cover all the information in social media that I’m interested in. (Is RSS reading really dead?)

The Real Truth about Apple and Google and Arrington

August 27th, 2009 | Popularity: 2%
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  • The Real Truth about Apple and Google and Arrington – A fascinating look at the upheaval of the telephone/carrier industry brought about in a roundabout way by Apple and Google. What are the similarities in other industries, from trains, to planes, to music, and ultimately health care?

Death by Information Overload – HBR.org

August 27th, 2009 | Popularity: 2%
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Death by Information Overload – HBR.org – “Wow! Michalski, an independent consultant who advises companies on the use of social media, isn’t drowning in a cascade of information. He’s not even trying to ride it out in a barrel. He’s surfing Niagara Falls. So what’s his secret? “You have to be Zen-like,” he patiently explained to me. “You have to let go of the need to know everything completely.”

I think this is an important philosophy to embrace – “I don’t need to know everything completely” – social media is a lower fidelity communication than, say, e-mail.
The other interesting point this article raises is in the area of return on investment – avoidance of e-mail can be as significant as avoiding travel to converse with people….


Pentagon reviewing policy on social networking sites – CNN.com

August 6th, 2009 | Popularity: 10%
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  • Pentagon reviewing policy on social networking sites – CNN.com – “..the Defense Department realizes that social networking sites have value, noting the Army recently ordered all U.S. bases to provide access to Facebook.

    In addition, commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have Facebook pages to share information about operations, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has 4,000 followers on Twitter.”

Hospital Social Network List

August 2nd, 2009 | Popularity: 9%
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  • Hospital Social Network List – This is a compiled list of hospitals that use various social networking tools. Helpful for establishing a benchmark. The list doesn’t cover what internal tools are used, such as internal social networks. Does anyone know of any well developed internal social networks in health care institutions? Please post in the comments if you do!

Health Care Public Relations, Marketing & Internal Communications A Social Media Summit October 4-6 2009

July 22nd, 2009 | Popularity: 6%
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Do these Web2.0 Tools Exist?

June 15th, 2009 | Popularity: 11%
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I am, in this blog post, asking for leads on two tools that could be useful to me, or organizations engaged in social media. Do you know of any tools, free or other, available to do these things? Feel free to post ideas in the comments.

  1. Tool #1: Registry of Twitter/Blog/RSS Feeds : Let’s say that you are a professional group, or maybe a large medical group, and you would like to aggregate all of the RSS feeds generated by your members/employees/people affiliated with your organization on the Internet. This could be their Twitter feed, blog feed, delicious links, even flickr feed. The purpose would be to know who in your organization is out there, to follow along what they are doing, and maybe tap their expertise when needed. Friendfeed used to have an “invisible friend” feature, where you could add an RSS feed that was out there without having the person actually get an account, but that feature appears to be gone from the new version. This particular tool request may be hard to explain the first time, so feel free to ask questions in the comments.
  2. Tool #2: Preferred URL registry for individuals: This need comes up on this blog a lot – I decide that I’d like to reference a person who I’ve been working with or had a conversation with. Do I link to their Twitter URL? Blog URL? LinkedIn URL? Company biography URL? Or do they even have one? It would be nice if people had a place to indicate which place they would like people to point to when they are referenced. Maybe the default will be Twitter, but until then, I’d like to be respectful of each person’s preferences.

Thanks for any ideas!

Social Technologies in Health Care – Part IV | SMUG – Social Media University, Global

April 27th, 2009 | Popularity: 11%
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Social Media in the Workplace

February 18th, 2009 | Popularity: 11%
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10 Ways to Make Social Media Matter to Skeptical CEOs.pdf (application/pdf Object)

February 18th, 2009 | Popularity: 10%
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Now Reading: Network Citizens-Power and Responsiblity at Work

December 16th, 2008 | Popularity: 21%
2 comments

Not long ago I was ordering coffee and needed to wait a few seconds for the person taking my order to end a personal cell phone call. Once the call ended, she was extremely courteous, warm, and service oriented. I now realize that she was tapping into her social network, using her own information technology, at work.

There’s an ongoing conversation in many workplaces that starts with “(name your social network) is blocked by by my employer.”

This white paper, written by Demos, which bills itself as the think tank for every day democracy, delivers a broad look at social networking, and goes beyond, “your company should allow access to social networks.” On that point, though, here is what is said:

First, smart businesses recognise that ‘social’ networking is not neatly separable from ‘professional’ networking. Attempts to control employees’ use of social networking software in the office may end up damaging the organisation in the long run by depleting its network capital. Of course, bans on Facebook or YouTube are in any case almost impossible to enforce; firms may as well try to put a time limit on the numbers of minutes allowed each day for gossiping. A network permissive culture requires a degree of trust on the part of managers and responsibility on the part of employees; but to the extent that networks add internal economic value, this is usually a risk worth taking.

So, controlling access to networks in the workplace is futile (think about the coffee employee’s cell phone) and has negative consequence on recruitment, retention, and innovation among other things. At the same time, there’s an interesting conversation about the risks of networks, and not the kind of risks most people commonly think of:

Networks can build meritocracy, openness and democracy – but then can also exclude and discriminate. They can help to diffuse power away from hierarchical structures – but they can hoard power for themselves, too.

The authors point out that most social networks are opaque, compared to the transparency of the organizational chart. It’s easy to look at these and see who is connected. This is where responsibility comes in. Organizations should “go with the grain” of social networks and those engaged in social networks should be good network citizens and use the power they get from the network to further the goals of the organization. This comes together in the creation of a kind of network “constitution” or social contract, which supports good relationships, rather than hard rules. I think some companies, like Sun Microsystems, are starting on this journey through the creation of progressive social networking policies.

Some organizational approaches are to create Bespoke services, which are internally supported social-networking-like applications, and these carry some risk, as pointed out in one of the case studies:

The issue with our company is that the answer to every problem is a database. The problem is actually time – this utopian vision of being able to look up all this information and draw it down from the database is a bit unrealistic. – Interviewee, large professional services firm

I think Bespoke services can be successful if their purpose is thought of carefully and not as the solution to every problem. Every organization will likely need a portfolio of tools to support the needs of employees of today and tomorrow. The paper has a high philosophical tone, and the social networking analysis is very interesting ( I have to try that soon ). The idea here is to support the exploration of what those are in an open environment.

In this context, the fact that the person taking my order for coffee after tapping into her social network doesn’t bother me at all. I have a feeling it will help them and the organization they work for provide even better service in the long term. I hope this paper and blog post might help some have the conversation about whether (social networking tool) should be blocked or not.

Feel free to comment with your experiences in your organization, of course.


Do Brands Belong on Twitter?

December 14th, 2008 | Popularity: 14%
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Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog?

December 13th, 2008 | Popularity: 16%
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Social Networking For Work Explored : NPR

November 30th, 2008 | Popularity: 19%
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Technology, the Workplace, and Obama’s Example

November 16th, 2008 | Popularity: 10%
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  • Technology, the Workplace, and Obama’s Example – For companies that are launching internal social networks this is a potential taste of the future. If anyone here has experience working in an organization that is launching or has launched an internal social network, plese post your experiences/links.

Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

October 30th, 2008 | Popularity: 20%
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Community Platforms: Here Comes The CIO

August 30th, 2008 | Popularity: 15%
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Community Platforms: Here Comes The CIO – Interesting commentary about social platforms being integrated into IT shops. Yes, it has taken a long time. This reminds me of Nicholas Carr Big Switch philosophy – what will happen to IT in big enterprises in the future, if the Web2.0 wave creates more demand for lightweight solutions than an organizationally based IT shop can manage/understand?

3 Days of Nice in San Francisco, Courtesy of Twitter

August 20th, 2008 | Popularity: 30%
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twinkle

This photograph is from a session using Tapulous’ Twinkle software, which is a location-aware version of Twitter. This exchange is evidence that the iPhone’s most powerful innovation is not 3G, it’s GPS, which Apple, Inc., has now seeded into the mainstream, just as it did with a host of other technologies, like Wi-Fi.

What is shown here is community being created with complete strangers based on location – this exchange happened when my tweet was broadcast to everyone within a 1 mile radius of the San Francisco airport.

Some of you out there have been expressing your reservations about Twitter, Friendfeed, and the like. Here’s a nice article about both. Don’t be reserved, these are important technologies that will have applications in healthcare. Get your Twitter accounts now. Post your ideas in the comments, as well, please!

And San Francisco, thanks for being nice. You never disappoint.

Twitter Brand Index « Fluent Simplicity

August 7th, 2008 | Popularity: 13%
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Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund

July 21st, 2008 | Popularity: 12%
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  • Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund – Note the criticism of Enterprise software. It's time for Enterprise 2.0, probably starting with lighter weight packages used by consumers now, and then gradually tweaked, not the other way around.

General Motors Works to Develop in the Open, Too

June 30th, 2008 | Popularity: 20%
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Atlantic Monthly: Electro-Shock Therapy

This quote caught my eye about General Motor’s approach to planning their next generation electric car:

Perhaps most audacious of all was a decision to allow unusual public access to the Volt program. The industry’s standard procedure is to develop new products, especially risky ones, out of sight, unveiling them only when proven. GM decided to do exactly the opposite. The PR department flung open the doors. GM executives discuss the program’s progress as publicly as if it were a bill in Congress. They show off photos of batteries under development. They promise to let reporters ride in test cars. They lead them through the labs and design centers and even into the wind tunnel. They run ads, for instance in this magazine, touting the Volt in the present tense, as if it already existed. By earlier this year, expectations were so high that President Bush was commending the car, and it had developed a national grassroots following. This article is itself a product of the fishbowl strategy.

GM is using the publicity to excite the public, of course. It is also using the publicity to push itself. “We thought it would be a motivating thing to do,” Wagoner says. “Certainly it gets everybody aligned”—not always easy in a giant corporation. And GM wants credit for trying, which it never received for the EV1. “If it fails,” Harris says of the Volt, “we want people to know exactly why it failed. It wasn’t lack of commitment or passion on our part; we hit a hard point we couldn’t get around.”

On the other hand, I don’t see a newer update than March, 2008 on the official Volt Web site. There are blogs about it though, and it’s possible that those publishers have good access to how things are going.

People-powered customer service & support for Twitter

June 4th, 2008 | Popularity: 12%
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Beyond Blogs : Businessweek

May 26th, 2008 | Popularity: 16%
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  • Beyond Blogs : Businessweek – A refresh of Businessweek's landmark 2005 story about Social Media and businessweek. Interesting update: prediction of mass firings of employees who blog (being "Dooced") has not happened, with the exception of a few well publicized cases, like this one. Perhaps Web2.0 is subtly changing the expectation of transparency on the part of organizations and their customers – participation is becoming more of a norm.

The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit – Dawn of Employee Asset Ownership in IT?

May 6th, 2008 | Popularity: 32%
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This week’s cover of Businesweek appears to triumphantly announce Apple, Inc.’s comeback (sort of) into the enterprise, even if Apple isn’t actually marketing to that sector.

For Mac afficionados, this is a big change from Businesweek’s former pronunciation of near-death (see The Fall of An American Icon, from 1996, or the Apple Death Knell Counter from Mac Observer).

Okay, so Apple is back; however, the opportunity here for enterprise IT is not so much to bring on a new platform, it’s to explore more thoroughly the idea of “employee asset ownership.” I didn’t find much searching for this idea on Google (maybe there’s a more official name for this? If there is, please add it in your comments), except that a few companies like BP and Unisys are experimenting with it.


» Read more: The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit – Dawn of Employee Asset Ownership in IT?

Verizon Pill Phone for Adherence; A Place for NHIN News; Lee Aase’s Social Media University; Merck and Web 2.0

April 29th, 2008 | Popularity: 34%
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Photo Friday: Discrete Call, A Metaphor for Information Technology and Health IT

April 4th, 2008 | Popularity: 25%
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This week’s photo was taken by DC Photographer MV Jantzen. It is a beautiful illustration of the challenge of the use of information technology in health care and in the workplace in general. It was taken during a Revolutionary War re-enactment here in the mid-Atlantic area.

For patients, it is a metaphor for the ways we ask them to be (or not be) involved in their care by restricting their access to 19th century technologies.

For health care providers and all employees, it is a metaphor for the restrictions we place on them when they leave the consumer IT sphere and enter the workplace IT sphere.

In most parts of health care, we are regularly asking patients, nurses, and doctors to forgo 21st century tools in favor of Revolutionary War gear.

Some companies, including British Petroleum, are exploring ways to support employees in leveraging all of the best tools to serve customers
. We should all come to work prepared to leverage the best tools available, and have fun doing it, without checking our 21st century clothes at the door.

Challenging Peer Review (on several fronts); Consumerism in Health Survey 2007; Accepting suggestions from Customers using Web 2.0 at Starbucks

March 30th, 2008 | Popularity: 78%
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March 28th through March 29th:

  • WordPress ? Search and Replace « WordPress Plugins – Wordpress 2.5 is out. I have a feeling this plugin will be useful to have handy
  • JAMA — Preserving Confidentiality in the Peer Review Process, March 24, 2008, DeAngelis and Thornton 0 (2008): 299.16.jed80000 – With tremendous respect for Catherine DeAngelis’ leadership during a tough situation. I am left wondering if the best place to hide is out in the open – if peer review became more Web2.0 like. What would happen in a situation like this?
  • Findings From the 2007 EBRI/Commonwealth Fund Consumerism in Health Survey – EBRI – About 2 percent of the population is enrolled in a consumer directed health plans. Significant points for me: (1) almost half of the population with a chronic condition reports not filling medications or skipping doses or delaying care due to cost. Sobering reminder that patients can and do choose to do what we doctors prescribe. (2) “There have been no significant gains int he provision of information on provider cost and quality by any health plan type over the three years of the survey. There has been no increase in the share of CDHP or HDHP enrollees who say their health plans provide them with quality and cost information about their providers, and they remain no more likely to receive such information than enrollees in more comprehensive plans.” Okay, one more point – they did not ask about the impact of involvement in care in choosing a health plan – no mention of medical records access or involvement in information sharing at the level of the encounter.
  • My Starbucks Idea – How about doing this for a health care org?
  • Bronson Beta – Mail.appetizer – Nice Mail notification tool, Leopard

Physicans and Blogs; Explaining the RUC; Nice Use of Second Life

March 22nd, 2008 | Popularity: 39%
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March 18th through March 19th:

  • The ‘World Wide Computer’?Another HAL? – Businessweek’s Review of “The Big Switch” – I used it for comparison
  • NPR: Doctor Blogs Raise Concerns About Patient Privacy – I agree with points raised – a patient should never seek care and then discover that they have been written about on a blog. Instead, they should receive a copy of the medical record that has been created about them. At the same time, physician bloggers are doing something very important – they are testing the boundaries of transparency, to support a more accountable health care system. If anyone saw the 60 minutes story about Dennis Quaid and his family, the rationale for this become very clear.
  • What Every Physician Should Know About the RUC – January 2008 – Family Practice Management – The information is useful. As primary care providers I think we need to be careful to include our specialty colleagues in the conversation, not distance themselves from it. As a member of a large multispecialty medical group, I know that there is interest across the physician community in supporting community health and the best experience for patients.
  • MindBlizzard blog: Virtual Healthcare 2: Palomar Pomerado Health – All right – More news about the utility of Second Life – testing a hospital before it launches
  • What is the ROI on employee suggestion systems? – A nice example from the toothpaste industry. But not necessarily one that supports the evidence, that far less toothpaste than people think is needed to protect teeth…..Maybe a customer suggestion system might be in order.

Now Reading: The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr

March 18th, 2008 | Popularity: 27%
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This book was recommended to me by another Health Information Technology professional, and I really got a lot out of … the first half of it. I was so on the fence about what I thought about it as a whole that I looked up both the review of the book on BusinessWeek.com, and I read Nicholas Carr’s article “IT Doesn’t Matter,” from the Harvard Business Review to check on my thinking.

I’ll start with the first half, which was very engaging and engrossing, comparing the rise of the electrical industry to the commoditization of information technology. I have read about the electrical industry before, but not so well laid out. There are many parallels worthy of drawing, such as the way our culture was deliberately and unintentionally changed as a result of electrification. Fascinating, especially around the way that managing a household changed – the same number of hours doing house work, just higher expectations and more technical skill required. This is where the HBR article also helped a little bit, because the concepts are important for health information technology. In the article, he says

In the earliest phases of its buildout, however, an infrastructural technology can take the form of a proprietary technology. As long as access to the technology is restricted – through physical limitations, intellectual property rights, high costs, or a lack of standards – a company can use it to gain advantages over rivals.

That sort of sums up the state of Health Information Technology, and a nice analysis done of this recently also alluded to the idea that there’s an inertia present among vendors that’s keeping HIT in this phase.

That’s unfortunate.

That HIT though. What about the rest of IT within a health care company – the storage servers, the document creators, e-mail, etc. He says

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form. It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into “the cloud.”

The HBR article helps here as well, where he says that the IT buildout in most companies is complete, and “Commodities can be essential to business without being essential to strategy.”

The second half of the book is about the “World Wide Computer” and the implications that it has for privacy and the general threatening of industries as we know them today. I think the data about the publishing industry is compelling and of note – 13 percent, or 150,000 jobs lost since 2001. This potentially awaits any industry that is disintermediated.

I thought, though, that this section was written for a different generation of reader, though, one who has not grown up with computers. It’s a nice overview and a lot of the truths make sense, but they didn’t seem like revelations to me in my GenX state. I was really hoping for more detail on how the new IT department would be like and how companies were moving to things like employee asset management and software as a service.

So, maybe worthy of a read, at least the first half, from your local library or book rental service (more on this in a future post).

There are some provocative ideas and I would be interested in learning about companies that are moving to software as services across the enterprise, so reduce the waste of excess storage and maintenance of data centers. If anyone knows of companies doing this, let me know either in the comments or by contacting me directly.

LEAN Hospital and Public Comments; The Unconference Concept; The State of Agile (LEAN Software Development)

March 18th, 2008 | Popularity: 37%
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March 14th through March 17th:

Getting out of IT prision through employee asset management; DC still growing up

March 15th, 2008 | Popularity: 63%
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March 12th through March 13th:

Microsoft opens up; Illustration of Chartjunk; CNN fires an employee who blogs

February 25th, 2008 | Popularity: 31%
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February 23rd through February 24th:

Hoshin and S.M.A.R.T. goals; What incentivizes Medical Schools; A CIO that embraces Web2.0 (I approve)

February 21st, 2008 | Popularity: 47%
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February 18th through February 19th:

A CIO that embraces 2.0; Walmart going into the EHR business?; The Superfriends

February 18th, 2008 | Popularity: 39%
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February 10th through February 14th:

Toyota misunderstood by Businessweek; Enterprise 2.0 from Google

February 10th, 2008 | Popularity: 30%
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February 7th through February 9th:

Spirit of Innovation, as told by Apple, Inc.

January 14th, 2008 | Popularity: 22%
1 comment

I love this new ad, because it’s a bit of a metaphor for generational change and innovation within organizations. Sometimes it feels that innovators are moving at 10 times the pace of the normal beat of things. The joy of creating change is to present the face that is going at the same beat or just slightly faster, so others can join in.

Also, on the eve of MacWorld, I dug out one of my favorite quotes, from 2006:

“We have a lot of health-care customers and maybe 1 percent of a company’s research department is on Macs but they have 99 percent of the influence.” – Jim Murphy, practice manager for Strategic Computer Solutions, a Syracuse, N.Y.-based IBM partner.

Original source for the ad can be found here.