Month: May 2010

Note to self – innovation

I think innovation requires just four things:

1. idea management process – i.e. go from suggestion box-to-value creation

2. a reward mechanism – where the ultimate reward is working in an innovative company

3. scanning – i.e. scanning internally and externally for trends and small ideas that need to be nurtured

4. a structured approach to analysing the organisation to determine where to apply innovation

I think the structured approach bit (#4) is often missed and without it how do you grow or evaluate your ideas?

As an IT guy I know enterprise [business] architecture is the answer to this.

However, for a more general audience I think this approach is very interesting (free PDF book extract to download):

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/

Why can’t BI tools help develop effective KPIs and measures

Just just woke up at 4am to watch a webinar on business intelligence. (it was about this product but it could have been any product).

The product was fine in the sense that it had a lot of good visualisation and analysis features but it was, as always, disappointing because it didn’t actually provide any features to help define effective KPIs, reports, and measures.

There must be a way of incorporating traceability between measures, balanced scorecard like categorisation, and checklists to link KPIs to management reports such that the BI tool helps you actually populate itself with the reports, dashboards, etc that will be most useful to the organisation.

Given these tools are becoming more ‘self-service’ they will need to do this because there will be no IT/BI consultant engaged at the time of dashboard development to help.

Mobile video conferencing as a safe option

Given the on-again, off-again, on-again (but we wont say) link between cancer and mobile phones, I’m surprised I haven’t seen any mention of the significance of mobile video conferencing.

Surely, the different way you hold a mobile phone when you are video conferencing will reduce the incidence of brain cancer caused by mobile phones (assuming, as I do, there is a link).

Anyway, add it to your list of reasons to upgrade your iPhone to G4 as:

iPhone Video Conferencing All But Confirmed with Latest Leak [IPhone]: “

Another day, another video chat/video conferencing bit of debugging code to throw atop the heap that’s amassed around the coming ‘iPhone 4G.’ Today’s revelation: A menu screen from a ‘field test’ that purports to show video conferencing. More »

(Via Gizmodo.)

Infrastructures

I have defined Matthew’s Law (with thanks to Arthur C. Clarke, of course):

Matthew’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technical advice is indistinguishable from autism”

Because I saw this…

Infrastructures: “The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.

(Via xkcd.com.)

We should probably all read “The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur” by Peter G. Klein

I owe some of my interest in organisations to a guy called Peter G. Klein.

Over 10 years ago, when I first decided that there was going to be a shift in the skills required to be an effective manager in an environment of cross-organisation coordination and open information, and when I was developing the initial ideas around ManageWithoutThem, it was in part driven from something Klein had written.

Specifically, I was skimming through an article call ‘0530 New Institutional Economics’ that Klein had written for some sort of encyclopaedia of economics. (It’s still available here)

The article opened my eyes to the possibility of a deep understanding of organisations and the fundamentals of why they exist. Something told me that this was the fundamental economics of the firm and that the ‘managed organisation’ (in the sense that piles and piles of management books that I was reading at the time assumed) was an anomaly.

I’ve since learnt some more of the political dynamic that keeps organised managed; but I still believe the ideas introduced in the original NIE article by Peter G. Klein are the fundamentals.

I even found myself, when often disagreeing with something a manager had said, saying ‘you don’t have a valid theory of the firm’ – until I realised how completely ridiculous I was starting to sound…. 🙂

Though I never actually finished reading the article. To be honest I went on a 10 year tangent. But with the release of Klein’s new collection of writings I’ve decided I’m going read every word. I’d also recommend managers do the same.

Links to purchase and download for free are available on the Mises.org blog: Why Klein’s Book Is an Event to Celebrate

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