Category: Kev’s Blog

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The ‘Social Enterprise’ according to salesforce.com

I had the chance to go to the saleforce.com CloudForce/CloudStock event in SF yesterday. I went primarily to attend the tech sessions on using Heroku and Amazon AWS, but it was interesting to sit in the keynote session and hear the salesforce CEO Marc Benioff give his sales speech on why Social Media is big for business. In a nutshell, here’s my summary of what social means to business (from the view of salesforce.com):

  • Social Media has exploded in popularity. It’s massive.
  • Integrating the way you do business with Social Media allows you to connect with your customers/clients and their needs, wants, likes, dislikes – accessing a goldmine of marketing information and the potential to building ongoing/interactive relationships with your customers
  • Integrating social media concepts within the enterprise brings benefits of growing communities within the company, increasing inter-team/group/department interactivity, increasing group collaboration and access to current/relative information and events in real time

As a consumer, I’ve often had the opinion that I don’t want company x knowing what I ‘like’ on Facebook, or what videos I’m watching on YouTube. Hearing Benioff and other salesforce.com customers talk about the profound beneficial changes that Social Media is bringing to their companies, it was interesting to hear why this is an important trend for doing business in today’s world. Information is key to succeeding in business, and it’s obvious why businesses ‘want in’ on the social media scene to use this data for their own advantage. Whether all consumers want businesses they interact with to have access to their personal likes, dislikes and online activity though is another story.

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Understanding the ignorance behind avoiding new software development technologies

New technologies are avoided by companies for many reasons, the primary reason maybe to avoid the risk of the unknown. If your success of your company/business/project depends on the success of your software development project, then of course you want to minimize risks associated with the latest and greatest new technologies especially if they’re so new that there’s no success stories from others already using them. Sometimes this risk is worth taking if the potential reward is so great that it negates the downsides of the risk. For example if the competitive advantage that could potentially be gained outweighs the significance of the risk, then maybe the risk is worth taking.

When new techologies are avoided due to lack of understanding, lack of information, incorrect assumptions, and beliefs based on false information, then you’ve got a more serious problem on your hands. The problem with any decision based on false information worsens when the decision makers believe the information they are basing their decisions on to be correct. The higher up the management chain these decisions are made the worse this situation becomes for two reasons:

  1. no-one questions the decisions made because of the decision maker’s level of authority
  2. the decision maker loses credibility with their team because they are seen to be making wrong/poor decisions based on bad information

‘Community’ or ‘tribal’ knowledge is a dangerous thing when decisions are made and opinions formed based on bad information. Opinions and beliefs quickly spread within a group/team/project of any size, and once those opinions and beliefs take hold as ‘fact’ then the rot has already set in from within – it can be hard to undo this damage and replace this bad information with true and correct facts.

The trouble with believing facts to be true is that if you are wrong, you probably don’t realize you are wrong. The more time that goes by operating with false information, the worse the situation can become, as you poison the knowledge of those around you too. The poor/incorrect information spreads, and beliefs become truths.

In an industry where having correct and up to date information is key to what we do everyday and to be successful, we owe it to ourselves to help anyone who is operating with false information. The longer this situation continues, the worse it becomes, so the best thing to do is to stop the situation in it’s tracks as soon as you see this starting. When success depends on having true and correct information, its important to stamp out sources of bad information as soon as you can.

 

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