Octavianworld

Picked Up On MITX Exchange

Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange.  (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.)  I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.

Upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Panel: "What Blogging Brings To Business"

I'm joining Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, and Doug Cornelius on the "What Blogging Brings To Business" Panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 10.

Upcoming Talk: Carlson on Metrics (Minneapolis, May 23)

I'll be speaking at the "Carlson on Metrics" conference in Minneapolis (May 21-23, my talk is on the morning of the 23rd).  I'll be talking about "multi-channel marketing optimization".

Here's the premise:

• as people spend more time in digital channels, marketing dollars are following them
• this is challenging for marketers, since these channels are also much more fragmented (for example, we've gone from a handful of broadcast networks, to hundreds of cable channels, to millions of websites with embedded videos)
• there's a silver lining:  these channels are much more trackable, targetable, and testable
• but, in practice, this means a typical marketer is now faced with a fire hose of information to process from each of these channels
• so, what happens is that in most cases, firms end up "locally optimizing" their marketing spend within each channel
• this might have been fine if the typical "customer experience" for any given target segment was limited to a single channel -- say, physical stores vs. online storefront
• but, with channel fragmentation, the average "customer experience" through any given buying process now crosses many different channels -- see the infomercial, go online to research the product, ask a friend, go back to the site through a search engine to buy, and then maybe pick up in the store
• so, firms can't really afford to "optimize locally" any more -- they have to make sure that all these channels are working together effectively
• this is hard; it requires integration of data and coordination/ cooperation among functional organizations with separate, often different, and sometimes conflicting metrics, budgets, and cultures
• since it's hard, many firms are tempted by silver bullets: "If we build a data warehouse, the clouds will  part and the angels will sing multi-channel insights to  us."
• but in practice, such efforts often collapse of their own weight, and unfortunately it takes time to realize that prospect, since "If you don't know where you are going any road will get you there."
• there are ways to do better, and folks who have done better...

Hope to see you there, or hear from you about your experiences before, during, or after.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Hacking The Cloud, And Its Alternatives

I'm on a Forbes panel called "Optimizing IT for the Enterprise" this Thursday evening in Chicago. 

What's the market tension that might make an event like this remotely interesting?  In one corner you find the "old way" of doing things:  running your own infrastructure -- servers, storage, packaged apps you license, install, etc.   In the other, there's the "new way":  run your business using (e.g.) AWS/ S3/EC2, hack your own apps in PHP/Python/Ruby, on APIs from Facebook and Google.  In short man, the very soul of the IT organization, nay, the very industry, is in play! 

The challenge is to suggest what balance makes sense, when and for whom.  My frame of reference for addressing the "optimization" challenge is trying to reconcile accelerating "market cycles" with increasing "differentiation demands".  The former often pushes you to push as much of your stack to the cloud as possible.  The latter sometimes requires you to mine every nook and cranny of the stack for competitive advantage (there's a reason Google builds its own servers and runs its own server farms).  In my own recent experience with the client extranet we deployed at Marketspace, we pushed in both directions, with very happy results so far.  But your circumstances likely will be different.  I look forward to learning about them Thursday evening.

Hope to see you there.

Days of Wine and Anger

From my friend Bill Ives, this post on the subjectivity of wine appreciation.  Lots of wisdom here to support why disciplined development of users and use cases makes sense when assessing applications specifically and overall user experience generally.  And, what a great story to work into a talk!

See also Jeff Bonforte's excellent talk on "Anger in Innovation".  Message: market based on appealing to anger and pain, not on coolness.

Notes From Zurich

I recently gave two talks in Zurich at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut's 56th Annual Retail Conference and 7th European Foodservice Conference.  GDI, led by David Bosshart, is an old, established, and well-funded think tank that judging from the conferences has a very loyal, pan-European following among very senior executives.  Both were wonderfully intimate affairs where there were plenty of opportunities for interaction, in lovely settings with terrific food. 

Here are the notes from the retail conference that GDI published:

http://www.gdi.ch/index.php?id=1299

Here are some photos from the Foodservice conference (these folks know how to have a good time):

http://www.gdi.ch/61-80.1250.0.html?&L=1&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[7305][fid]=15&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[7305][record]=7305#7305

September 21: Business Blogs Lunch Talk at KM Cluster

Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington, who have just published a new book called "Business Blogs:  A Practical Guide"  have graciously invited me to speak at the September 21, 2005 meeting (postponed from June 7) of the New England KM Cluster  in Waltham at Novell's headquarters.  My lunchtime talk (title TBD) will be drawn from my own experience and from that of organizations like the 3E Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government  and from MIT's Sloan School of Management, both also covered in Bill and Amanda's new book.

See Bill's blog for an abstract of the talk.

June 20: Harvard KSG 3E Panel on Current Practices In Public Sector IT Program Management

On Monday, June 20, I'm moderating a panel at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  The panel, entitled "Current Practices In Public Sector IT Program Management", is part of a three-day workshop run by Professor Jerry Mechling, who directs the E-Government Executive Education Project (3E) at the Kennedy School. 

Panelists include

• Phil Bertolini, CIO,Oakland County, Michigan
• Scott Campbell, Chief eHealth Strategist, Government of Ontario
  
• Gopal Kapur, President, Center for Project Management
• Marty Wagner, Associate Administrator for Government-wide Policy, US General Services Administration
  

(Jerry recently won a Lifetime Achievement award from the National Association of State CIO's, and recently conducted an extended interview with Bill Gates you might find interesting.  Further, with IBM's support Jerry has been pioneering new e-learning techniques in the 3E Project's programs, using .LRN as his platform.)