June, 2008

Main — Comments Off
1
Jun 08

Circumventing Corporate IT

Aaron Roe Fulkerson writes an excellent piece for Internet Evolution on How, and Why End Users Circumvent IT. (Emphasis added)

Who’s deploying and feeding these guerrilla applications (often of dubious engineering quality and even more questionable security)? It’s the users in the business departments [gasps of horror] who are installing and driving adoption independent of IT sanction and governance. The business users are taking matters into their own hands in an effort to improve their productivity and remain competitive. They’re turning to easy-to-use and flexible tools like wikis, blogs, lightweight content-management systems, social bookmarking tools, and others that are often grouped under the category of Enterprise 2.0.

Are you running rogue applications at work to improve productivity? What are you using, and why doesn’t your IT department like it?

Main — Comments Off
1
Jun 08

Toyota chief: refrain from using PowerPoint

Garr Reynolds reports on Toyota’s CEO Katsuaki Watanabe recent comments. Mr. Wantanbe wants his employees to minimize the use of PowerPoint. Or more precisely, minimize the ineffective (and common) use of PowerPoint. (Garr likes to call the Document-Slide combination slideuments).

In the context of a challenging economy and an atmosphere of reducing costs, what would you say of any business practice that (1) takes more time, (2) costs more money, and yet (3) appears to be less effective?

When you make presentations, do you create a stack of slideuments, or a stack of slides to go with a good presentation and informative handout?

Main — Comments Off
1
Jun 08

Consumers, Not Businesses, are Leading Innovation

Terry Sweeney recently wrote Role Reversal and had this to say on poor quality enterprise software:

“It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security, and speed,” said Douglas Merrill, CIO of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). “None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore [as they are in some consumer software].” Some 15 years ago, enterprise technology was higher quality than consumer technology, he added. “That’s not true anymore.”

What higher-quality consumer technology would you like seen implemented in the enterprise?

Newer Entries →