Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on…

I am thinking of reviving this blog yet again. I’ve been part of the System Integrator industry for a long time and have seen it from close quarters. I believe there is much hype, too many myths as well as a lot of FUD about SIs. I also think there’s a serious lack of "balanced" [...]

Here are my
AppGap posts for August. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward
(see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of
January 2008.  Here, I am primarily
doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the
ones for August. There will be more in September.

The Forum Corporation blog
offers some excellent content on such topics as learning, leadership,
collaboration, enhancing customer experiences, and accelerating strategic
execution. It is a collaborative effort by a number of the Forum team members.
The Forum Corporation began in 1971 and it “helps senior leaders
execute innovative, people-driven solutions that accelerate business growth,
corporate change and overall performance.”
I have known and respected Forum for some time as I competed against them in
the 1980s when I was with Spectrum. See my post, Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization, for a review of their recent book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate
Execution.

Recent posts include,
Why is it so hard to create a great customer experience? by Jane Marham
Weinstein that makes a great organization structure point.  Customer experiences, whether viral or
physical, generally require an end-to-end process that involves multiple
departments. If the organization is structured around these different
departments (e.g. marketing, customer service, order fulfillment) it can be
like the blind men and the elephant with each department having a different, and
incomplete perception or the customer. However, if the organization is
structured around the customer experience, it can have a more accurate picture
of the customer and provide a better and more coordinated customer experience.

The VUCA Future – Are You
Ready? by Steve Barry describes the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous
business environment. I have heard of complex adaptive systems for some time
but this was a new term for me. Forum interviewed futurist Bob
Johansen for his thoughts on VUCA and what lies ahead for business. Bob said
that the term VUCA was coined at the US Army War College that is the graduate
school for future generals. In a VUCA world the best leaders have vision,
understanding, clarity, and agility.  Clarity and agility were two of the leadership
characteristics promoted in Forum’s new book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution. The world is
changing and leadership skills need to transition to adapt. The complete
interview provides many useful insights.

In the post, New Motivation Theory in Business: n Lrn?, Jocelyn
Davis builds on David McClelland (need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power) to offer a fourth
motivation, need for learning. People moved by this trait “would have a
strong need to collect and synthesize new information, to reflect on their
experiences, and to master new skills.” I would certainly fall into this
category so it makes sense to me.  Jocelyn goes on to compare these n Lrns (to use McClelland’s
notational style) with those primarily motivated by the three original
traits. 

For example, someone with the power motivation (n
Pow) would be motivated to teach for the ability to influence while a n Lrn person
would be motivated by what they could learn from the experience.  In contrast, someone with the affiliation
need would be motivated to teach by the possible relationships they could
establish. Of course, there can be more than one of these traits within an
individual but one or two are often dominant.  While Jocelyn notes that there does not seem to be
experimental evidence for this trait, it makes intuitive sense.  If you have employees with the n Lrn
trait, then you need to make sure they are properly motivated in their work.

This is just a sampling. There is much more by
additional authors. I would encourage you to explore if you are interested in
the learning, leadership, organizational development, collaboration, and other
related fields. 

I often write about my food
experiences with my friend and food writer, Don Lesser who lives in western
Massachusetts. The Pioneer Valley is a center for great local produce and food
and Don covers this on his blog, Russelnod.  I encourage you to explore it.

Don recently wrote about
making raw milk mozzarella and I had the pleasure of tasting the output. Below
is a picture of the cheese with local fresh tomatoes and basil that what we
shared.

I used have raw milk as
child when I visited my cousin’s diary and fruit farm in Oklahoma. She taught
me how to hand milk the cows and then we would sample the results. It is good
to see more raw milk cheese generally available.  You can also get raw milk from certain farms in western
Massachusetts.  Check out Don’s
post to discover the process he used for this great cheese.  It is much better than anything you get
in a store.  

A week ago, I wrote an article for CMS Wire on The Long Hill for Enterprise Collaboration.  Normally I put an announcement at the top of my blog sharing the link, but I wanted to write this post, and I’ve just been a tad busy…

You should read the article before proceeding much further.  In the article, I talk about the challenges facing the adoption of collaboration tools, an important one being the desire to perform one activity in one interface.  Email is a classic example because, for all its faults, you can collaborate with anyone with an email address.  People will tend to stick with one tool and not keep switching unless they are the “stopper” that is always on a mission to convert people to the good of collaboration platforms.

Well, this scenario is something I have seen quite a bit.  There is one example that really drives home the need to get people not just out of email, but to get everyone into something that can transfer collaborative data between systems just like email is transferred using SMTP today.  That example….me.

Pie Said What?

That is correct, I am a violator.  I am not always compliant.  I have been implementing collaboration solutions for a long time.  I almost always play the role of a stopper in any organization or project that I join.  In the last six months, I’ve noticed something….

I’m spending more time collaborating in email than ever before.

I am working more with people outside my organization than I ever have in the past.  Doing a lot of work in the Federal market, my company is frequently teaming with other companies, and not always the same ones.  For each effort, we have to find different ways to share content and track actions.  Rather than supply the collaboration solution for everyone, we tend to use email.  Why? Simple, our partners use it as well.

It doesn’t stop there though.  I have also been working with people at AIIM and vendor companies on CMIS efforts.  More users and more reasons to collaborate, but still no single system.  Once again, we all use email, so that is where we work.

Doing all of this in email, I have found myself collaborating with colleagues on purely internal efforts via email.  I’m just cruising along in my workday, and before I know it, I’ve sent documents via email rather than sending an alert or a link to a document in an email.

I’m regressing!!!!!

What Can Be Done?

Well, like any good American, I’m going to blame someone else for my problem.  There are two solutions which would solve the problem:

• Universal Collaboration: So we need an incredible, kickin’, collaborative platform with no storage or user limits that is online an free to everyone.  Let’s not forget security because I want to collaborate in one place on all my efforts, not just the public ones.
• Universal Communication: Bad name, I know, but the point is simple.  If my collaborative artifacts could be sent to anyone for interaction the way I send email, but they do their work in their collaborative environment and I am staying in mine, that would be great!

I think it is pretty safe to say that the first will not happen in the foreseeable future.  The second sounds like a lot of work.  Well, the efforts we expend to push Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 adoption is a lot of work as well.

Fun fact, one old, and lovely feature of eRoom is the ability to email content to a room.  That was a first step in the right direction.  If collaborative packages could just be emailed between systems in a standard format, that might solve all the problems.

There is no easy path.  Maybe instead of trying to get over the hurdles by creating new features, selling, and evangelizing, maybe we should make the tools the obvious in-process tools.

But why solve it?  There is a lot of money to be made telling people how great the software is now.

The joint is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
- HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU, BABY

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

I’d never heard of it until last week when I was lucky enough to meet the cool folk at betaworks (@Borthwick and @aweissman). These guys don’t mess around – they’re behind such social media hits as TweetDeck, bit.ly and twitterfeed. You heard it here first – chartbeat is going to be big.

It’s really easy to get started – you just stick a couple of JavaScript tags onto all your pages a.l.a. Google Analytics, and you are done. The reports you get are much simpler than those from GA, but it is really real time. You can see the visitors on your site within a couple of seconds of their arrival. I wrote a test link bait post (sorry), tweeted it, and saw my 17 concurrent visitors within seconds.

Visitors to your site in real time. Notice one person is writing a comment. Click for large image.

But there is more. GA simply registers a hit when a page is loaded. chartbeat has a heartbeat and chats to the server every couple of seconds. This means that it can more accurately measure time spent on the site, user actions like scrolling (giving a nice scroll depth metric), and even keypresses. In the screenshot above, you’ll see one person is writing – they were leaving a comment at the time.

Typical detail page. Gotta love the scroll depth and engagement indicators

It also comes with a nice preintegration with backtype. This searches the social media buzz of the interwebs and reports activity as part of your report. When @izahoor, @theg, @irina_guseva, @cmsreport and @kevinc2003 were kind enough to retweet my horseshit blog post, I saw my dashboard get a bit busier and saw their link love appear shortly afterwards in the backtype console. Good stuff.

Nice integration with backtype. Click for large image.

It has an API and a bucket of prebuilt widgets. I haven’t had time to play with these, but I might add a widget here soon. The downside being, of course, it would pretty much always say “1 user currently viewing this page”. And that would be you.

It gets better. chartbeat even monitors the health of your site. While I was testing, my dickhead hosting company GoDaddy had yet another embolism, and my site flatlined for about 5 minutes. But unlike the previous million times this happened, it didn’t die silenty. I got a nice email from chartbeat informing me of the tragedy. Also, it tells you how long a page took to load for each user. 20 seconds isn’t great, GoDaddy. And yes, it has a free iPhone app too.

Because I’m a social media guru who understands transparancy and douchebaggery, I’ve shared my wonderful stats with the world. So have a look at my chartbeat dashboard.

You do have to pay a small fee for all this goodness, but it is money well spent. Buy it. Finally, a huge nod to @arctictony for helping me out.

Hang on to your woman if you got one
Remember in El Paso, once, you shot one.
She may have been a whore, but she was a hot one
- BILLY

Sorry, so very sorry, dear reader. This isn’t a real post. But it is research for a real post. You see, I’m test driving a new analytics package which, on first impressions, is awesome. Problem is, my blog doesn’t get enough traffic to make any screenshots interesting. Which is why you are here.

So, before you leave, browse around and read some shit. It’s all in the interest of science. Retweet it, leave a comment, tell your friends and make my screenshots the busiest darn screenshots any analytics review ever had. If you’re very very lucky, you might even notice your visit in a picture in my next post.

Let’s see if 1337 Twitter followers are worth anything. I’m serious. I’ve got elite followers. And I’m sure I’ll lose a whole bunch of them pretty damn soon.

UPDATE: You can read the real blog post now – It Can All Change In a ChartBeat. And I only lost 2 Twitter followers. Fuck ‘em.

 I do not often
cover TV shows on this blog but I do write a good bit on my home town, New
Orleans. You can explore these posts through the New Orleans category in the
right side bar of this blog. I really appreciate the coverage that HBO has
recently brought to the city.  I
watched the series, Treme, three times. First I saw each episode twice as it
appeared and then went back and watched the whole series over again.  I think it is the best production I
have seen that was originally produced for television but I may be biased on
the subject matter. It showed the strengths and weaknesses of the city in a
balanced way that made me want to move back. In my mind the strengths far out
weight the flaws.

Now Spike Lee has returned to New Orleans to
see how the ambitious plans to reinvent the Crescent City are playing out in
the all-new, four-hour documentary, If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t
Rise. He finds a “patchwork of hope and heartache in
a story that is book-ended by a pair of momentous events — the historic 2010 Super Bowl victory and the disastrous
British Petroleum oil spill — that changed the history of
America’s most unique city once again.” The HBO film debuts in two
parts on Monday, Aug. 23 (9:00-11:00 p.m. ET/PT) and Tuesday, Aug. 24
(9:00-11:00 p.m.).

The man in the poster is Lionel Batiste who is with the Treme Brass Band and was also featured in the HBO Treme series. My friend Paul Tamburello met him and the band in a recent trip to New Orleans. To see pictures of the 79 year Lionel dancing at the Candlelight Lounge see Paul's post: The Treme Brass Band Lights up The Candlelight Lounge. 

I was in New Orleans at the time Spike arrived. See Men in
Dresses Celebrate the New Orleans Saints Going to the Super Bowl, Brief
Explorations in New Orleans Live Music 2010, and Images of Support for the New
Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl Today for three posts about this trip.

This film continues the story of the rebirth
of NOLA, begun in Lee’s epic, Emmy^®- and Peabody-winning 2006
documentary “When the Levees
Broke:  A Requiem in Four Acts.”  I really liked that first effort. In
this second film, “Lee
documents the successes and failures in the ongoing
efforts to restore housing, healthcare, education, economic growth and law and
order to a battered but unbowed community, alongside the city’s storied ability to celebrate life with
unmatchable ebullience.

I will be sure to see this show more than
once. I also heard that HBO has signed up for a second season of Treme, a wise
move. Lee’s film shows that there remains much to do in the rebuilding of the
city. “A lack of affordable housing is one of
several serious ongoing problems faced by the city’s poor, especially the
primarily African-American residents of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward and St.
Bernard’s Parish.  The four large
public housing developments have been shuttered, and rents have soared, with
the average fair-market value of an apartment rising from $578 in 2005 to $881
in 2009.  Only 38 percent of the
private homes destroyed in the hurricane have been rebuilt.” The Treme series
showed this unnecessary closing of public housing that was done more for
political reasons that any damage suffered by the projects.

There was a revealing poll put out recently by the Smart Blog on Social
Media. It asked: Does your company
have a formal, written social-media strategy? Here are the main results:

No, but we’re getting around to it 32.73%

No, and we probably won’t write
one anytime soon 27.64%

Yes, and it’s really useful
20.00%

Yes, but it’s not that relevant
to our daily operations 12.36%

 We’re not using social media
5.82%

  We paid a consultant to come up
with one for us, but we’re not sure what it really means 1.45%

I like the honesty of the last one.
However, why would a consultant create a social media strategy for a company
rather than with them. In the latter case, it would be understandable and
perhaps more useful.

More than 60% of the 320 SmartBrief on
Social Media readers who took this poll say their company is using social media
without a strategy.  I read that social media is seen as a fad by many
people and firms. In this case, why would you have a strategy? On the other
hand why would you want to invest time and money in something without making
sure it aligns with your business goals and supports them. I would side with
the latter view.

I have helped a number of firms over the
past few years with their blog strategy and, more recently their Twitter
efforts.  Some come to it with a
strategic outlook. Others start out tactical and become more strategic as the
they reflect on what they are trying to accomplish and the resources required.
A few stubbornly remain tactical.

I think this poll reflects the nagging
immaturity of the social media field. However, like many other efforts, those
with a strategy will win out. I heard a politician on NPR talking about political
passion.  He compared it to fire.
If it is guided and focused, fire can heat your house and cook your food. It
not guided, it can burn your house down. The same holds true for social media
as we have a seen many times.