Here’s an extract of an article that Simon Marshall and myself wrote last week for Orange Business Services on their Orange Business Live blog…..

Social networking usage in the workplace has gone through the roof as Generation Y employees tap into social media such as Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, SharePoint and WordPress to interact with colleagues, partners and customers. As enterprises explore the legitimate use of social networking tools to gain customer intimacy and improve relationships, there are a number of factors that can make deployment more effective

Corporate social networking usage has grown out of message boards, Lotus Notes and intranets and is embracing collaboration tools and the social Web to increase productivity and profitability.  More corporates are using social networking as a response to the rise in globalization and dispersed workforces, and as a way of opening access to business-critical skill sets and information. But, there are a number of reasons why corporates must focus on achieving specific, measurable objectives in a corporate-created social networking environment that encourages positive rather than negative results.

Firstly, there’s significant evidence that social networking sites blur the lines between business and personal relationships. Although this might cause inappropriate behavior as personal lives move into the workplace, it’s more likely to cause ethical dilemmas for staff and exposure of valuable corporate brands to the vagaries of individuals or user groups. Companies can therefore struggle to delineate what social networking use is appropriate for their staff without over-reaching and denying access altogether to common tools such as Web browsers. There is some evidence to suggest that Web-browsing decreases productivity, but most firms deem it fair to allow access to a variety of Web sites and social Web applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Plaxo during work hours.

Who owns social networking within the organization?

Secondly, firms can fail to effectively deal with this situation because no one corporate discipline fully ‘owns’ social networking. Sometimes the IT department has control, sometimes Human Resources oversees this function. In practice it’s best to place the technical management of the social networking domain with the IT department, but have Human Resources, Sales or Marketing report to the CIO or CEO on the business benefits of such tools. IT and the CIO must meet regularly to ensure that tools are not being misused and to maintain a common fair usage policy for all employees. Problems commonly arise where listed firms must communicate material statements to their shareholders first, but run the risk of overzealous employees doing their job for them and releasing information to the general market illegally.

Finally, firms can struggle to devise a system that measures ROI. This can stem from a lack of clear objectives for the use of social networking tools. Although interaction with customers and partners is relatively straightforward to rationalize, companies must define their own measurement system that places value on employee-to-employee interaction if they are to derive full productivity benefits. Understanding how social networking tools can be used to boost discrete corporate functions helps to define who uses which applications, and with what end result.

Common internal uses include live communication and interaction based on presence applications; staff training, mentoring and performance monitoring; project collaboration; information sharing; knowledge management; social mapping for succession planning and unified communications. External uses include public relations and marketing products, events, ideas and new services; corporate social responsibility dissemination; market or competitive research; staff productivity; recruitment; project management.

Best practice for social networking

In an ideal world, the best way to tackle the challenges of introducing and benefitting from social networking is for corporates to build their own social networking framework that includes all the productivity tools employees need without recourse to them using their personal tools at work. Software developers such as Jive, Yammer, Social Text, YourMembership.com, Select Minds, SocialGO, WackWall and Ning offer different approaches.

Industry heavyweights such as the Cisco Collaboration platform provide options for big multinationals that include telepresence, unified communications and customized Instant Messaging options. Google Wave offers a centralized Web resource for collaboration across text, video, and document creation and sharing that provides an interactive record of social networking sessions.

In order to properly deploy any social networking system, best practice dictates that:

• There be a plan in place to monitor and mitigate potential reputational risks associated with inappropriate social networking site usage
• The divide between a right to know what employees are expressing online with their right to retain privacy is mitigated, and kept in context by helping them understand appropriate usage
• A code of ethics should be maintained and updated regularly, such as this one from Marks & Spencer
• Discussion of the use of social networking in the corporation must be elevated to the board level, as it is a strategic issue.

How social media adds value

• Organizational and geographical boundaries are bridged, with corporate information and discussion taking place on central, shared resources such as blogs and wikis, rather than on email or on the phone
• Teams can easily find the information they need, because social networking adds context, tags and social bookmarks to data that helps others find it more rapidly
• Employees with specific skill sets can easily connect with co-workers through user profiles and expert searches, and gain information that helps them do their job more productively.

Social media business leaders

• Best Western sponsors ‘On The Go With Amy,’ an evolving travelogue
• IBM Bloggers are encouraged to post to the site
• Coca-Cola employee Phil Mooney blogs on Coca-Cola Conversations
• Ford has pioneered Social Media Press Releases to communicate news using a variety of formats
• Kodak has dedicated a whole site to the development of social interaction with potential customers called 1000 Words.
• …As does Johnson & Johnson
• The New York Times has launched TimesPeople Beta, its social networking community
• Starbucks is currently asking its customers how to run the company, through My Starbucks Idea
• Suppository brand, Anusol, has launched a Facebook community
• MTV has extended its brand into the lives of viewers by offering an online interactive resource called Think MTV that deals with social issues.

The full article can be found here

Cloud computing is a staggeringly popular topic. Huge swathes of the work we did in 2009 related to cloud computing services and the trend looks set to continue into next year. Just about all parts of the information communications technology (ICT) industry are positioning themselves to take advantage of the predicted stratospheric growth. Although all hyped technologies will get their comeuppance at some point, cloud computing is unlikely to make much headway in enterprises if it they are worried about security.

Enterprise concerns over security are perfectly understandable: as a shared medium, how can they be sure that their data isn’t leaking into their competitors environment, and in fact are they even able to tell were their data is even stored. The latter issue can have a major regulatory impact in a number of areas, such as PCI-DSS compliance. Hackers are already reportedly rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of hacking cloud computing environments. At the recent Black Hat conference, speakers demonstrated how to attack the cloud and a Trojan keylogger was reportedly found on Amazon’s AWS site only this week.

Given the importance of security to cloud computing’s success there’s little surprise that the industry is making solving the issue a priority. Here are some interesting resources & articles:

• The European Network and Information Security Agency has published a report on the risks of cloud computing;
• The Jericho Forum famous for its work on deperimeterisation published a white paper on cloud computing security earlier this year;
• In June, Jericho Forum and the Cloud Security Alliance joined up to address security. I was expecting to see a result on this collaboration in the autumn, but I haven’t seen anything yet;
• Ariel Silverstone suggests some metrics for measuring the security of your cloud computing providers;
• ISACA has published a white paper that looks at some of the security issues;
• The CSA and Novell are running an interesting looking webinar on Cloud security next week.

Many years ago I was a budding Futurist (not an Italian painter), someone who supposedly could facilitate groups through a process of imagining their own futures in whatever area of specialist industry they work in. I learned tools like Delphi and scenario planning. Admittedly, I wasn’t very good and so carried on being a writer….but the future still fascinates and daunts me in equal measure.

I’ve written many columns over the years about technology innovations and trends that would change the way we work/travel/make fun etc. The timescale is usually a couple of years. Looking back through this archive of deadlines missed (isn’t Google great for finding those articles you wish were buried), some technologies are finally taking hold. I first wrote about M2M in 2002, and while the there are tens of millions of connected devices in operation today, its not the billions I expected.

But does it really matter if you get the timescales wrong? (Admittedly, it does with catastrophic events like climate change) What’s important are ideas. So here are a few of the standout tech memes for the next 10 years, even though some are already 10-20 years old. Maybe their time has come…

• Convergence of robots, artificial intelligence and genetics: we’re all doomed said Bill Joy in his famous “Why the future doesnt need us”  - from Wired back in 2000
• Spimes and blobjects - the chatter of a vast internet of self-regulating motes. Bruce Sterling again.
• Vernor Vinge’s Singularity (concerned with transhumanism), Bruce Sterling’s repose, and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity (an update to the Age of Spiritual Machines)
• Why we should all live in cities if we want to save the natural world – Stewart Brand’s seminar at SALT
• Good Enough technology revolution (where the best fails, and the quick/cheap/dirty fix dominates) versus The Long Tail where niche rocks.
• Expanding cone of uncertainly and problems with predicting technological revolutions by Paul Saffo at the Institute of the Future

Could you recommend some other prophecies and memes for the Tens?

My buddy at the ITU spotted this fantastic visualisation of global mobile phone penetration. Wonderful how a bit of number crunching combined with some charts can instantly grab you. The work is done by Richard Heeks on the ICTs for Development blog.

What was instantly striking was how far Estonia has climbed the mobile penetration charts – it’s the world’s no. 2 on 188 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, sandwiched between UAE and Bahrain. Not much further behind is Lithuania on 155.

Estonia’s economy has been rocketing along – 10 years ago it had a GDP per capita around 1/3 of the EU15 average, now its more like 2/3. But even this economic growth doesn’t explain quite why the small baltic state can have such an affintity with all things mobile. Could it be the proximity to Finland and Sweden? Or maybe it was the massive investment the government made in ICTs during the 1990′s to drag Estonia out of the ashes of the Soviet state. The web site of Estonia’s Tiger Leap is here and there’s a fascinating profile of Estonia’s online and ICT development here. Did you know Estonia has 200 licensed telecom operators????

What’s interesting about this visualistion of penetration is that you can see how penetration has developed. Back in 1998, not surprisingly, Finland topped the charts at 55 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, and the average in sub-Saharan African was a fraction of 1% (actually closer to 0.1%). Now it’s around 35% (my calculation). On their own, communications don’t lift people out of poverty but they are a massive contributing factor. I could go on forever about some cool initiatives to bring mobile to the unnconnected – such as shared access to voice, mobile banking for those without bank accounts, telemedicine cabins, green base stations extending connectivity into regions without stable power supplies (and don’t say how do they charge their mobiles then)….but it might be easier to scoot along to the GSMA’s Development Fund blog or check out the UN Millennium Project which was led by Jeffrey Sachs or check out the work that Grameenphone does in Bangladesh.

The role of mobile in the developing world is a bit of a pet topic – I’ll explore the impact of mobile broadband in a future post.

Data center operators, and those that use them, are under increasing pressure to go green. Demand for data center capacity is being driven up by a number of factors that make driving efficiency through green principles a complex process.

But, the introduction of new emissions laws, such as the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme makes the greening of the data center inevitable. The CRC has been causing great concern for data center professionals, who also need to save money on energy bills – as higher energy use may have tax levy implications, strengthen their green credentials to customers or reinforce a corporate social responsibility stance on climate change.

The European Union Emission Trading Scheme, and the US cap and trade carbon emissions schemes show that the greening of the data center is fast becoming a global concern.

In the meantime, demand for data center capacity remains locked into a continual growth curve, driven by a lack of consolidation of major users,such as Microsoft and Yahoo, the advent of services such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing, and the lack of power availability to key strategic locations such as London’s Docklands. These issues are in turn driving demand for ever more supply, heading towards a period where the gloomy predictions of analysts some years agoabout data centers running out of power no longer look unrealistic.

This is particularly the case where technical advances such as smaller hardware footprints, blade servers and high-speed processing density coupled with a greater need for storage capacity are quite literally sucking the life out of the power grid. As power consumption increases, so does the need to dissipate the heat generated by processing, which increases air conditioning costs – which also require their own power supply to deliver benefits. It’s easy to see how power, heat and cost are closely related and could easily spiral out of control.

Fortunately, data center practitioners can adopt a practical pathway to greening their data center or checking out the green credentials of their supplier, if they bear in mind several golden rules.

To read the rest of our guide to greening your data center, go to Orange Business Live: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-tips-for-greening-your-data-center.html

From a post we’ve just written for Orange Business Live…..

IPv6 has been talked about for so long without widespread adoption, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a solution in search of a problem: but nothing could be further from the truth. Vint Cert, co-creator of TCP/IP and currently chief Internet evangelist at Google, recently reminded us that the IPv4 addresses will run out next year or early in 2011. Its not just computers, servers and mobile devices that are gobbling up all of the existing address space: increasingly devices like the Amazon Kindle, M2M sensors and TV set-top boxes are searching for their own address.

IPv6 enables a whole spectrum of new applications across several vertical sectors. For example, cars using IPv6-enabled sensors could know, in advance, about traffic threats on the road, patients can be monitored in real time by their doctor and businesses can manage their supply chains and optimize them for maximum efficiency.

As well as allowing objects and sensors to interact with the world around them, IPv6 applies some very specific network control advantages that enhance the experience of anyone using them. Primarily, IPv6 is built to be more robust than its predecessor and this is apparent in its ‘always on, real time’ traffic delivery capabilities. Another IPv6 advantage is its support for more robust ad-hoc networking support where objects and sensors in different geographies could be moving on and off the network at any given moment, such as during a war or disaster recovery.

Network operators such as Orange have begun rolling out IPv6 support by upgrading their networks in advance of the proliferation of devices that will have their own address and a more interactive purpose in life. Industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, environment and transportation are best positioned to take advantage of the efficiencies that IPv6 brings.

To read our top 5 applications, go to the Orange Business Live blog: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-5-next-generation-apps-for-ipv6.html

Recent figures from In-Stat suggest that hot-spot usage surged in 2009. In-Stat predicts that usage will increase 47% in the year to 1.2 billion – presumably it means sessions, although that isn’t clear in the release. The analyst says that the turnaround for the market has been driven by mobile operators who are looking to offload browsing traffic from their 3G networks onto Wi-Fi. In some Wi-Fi hotspots smartphones already account for the majority of sessions. In the UK, mobile broadband networks such as 3G and HSPA overtook Wi-Fi as the most popular way of accessing Internet on the move back in September 2008 – according to Point Topic.

So why are we looking to Wi-Fi again for browsing on the smartphone? Part of the reason is simple usability, because it is much easier to access Wi-Fi network on the new generation of smartphones. But there is also a network reason: new mobile internet browsers – such as Safari and Opera – are also much more multimedia rich, which puts strain on available network capacity. Although HSPA is becoming increasingly widespread, coverage is still very patchy in rural areas and browsing the Internet or downloading email over GPRS is truly a painful experience. You could, therefore, consider the surge in Wi-Fi use as an indictment on the  quality of 3G networks, because operators have been forced to offload traffic. Essentially, however, the underlying network technology should be irrelevant to the user. Operators just need to make sure that they provide the necessary bandwidth by whatever means if they don’t want their users to churn.

I’ve been having a ponder over the Good Enough culture. It was sparked yesterday by a flittering debate on Twitter – obviously not the best tool for discussing such an ephmeral idea – about the closure of the Guardian’s technology supplement. The tech editor asked, rather tongue in cheek, would we be prepared to translate our collective grief about its demise, into cold hard cash – would we pay for the supplement on an iphone app or on Scribd. My reply: too few people want to pay for quality content anymore, what’s happening with media is the same as what is happening to technology. Excellence is no longer required, we want “good enough” culture.

I’m not sure it there’s any research on this – but it seems to me to be a confluence of Flat Earth News (the expose of just how low British journalism has fallen) and an article on Good Enough technology from Wired magazine back in August.

We consume online because it’s free, it’s quick and its convenient. Buying a newspaper is no longer as quick and convenient. Advertising pays because we are not prepared to, which means we are prepared to accept “good enough” content.  (The same is happening with the London free papers, which have admittedly struggled of late. They are proof that you do not need to invest heavily in content: you recycle, tap news feeds, and churn out celebrity pap. Investigative reporting is expensive – even writing off-diary pieces is an exception these days).

That’s not to say not to say that the Guardian, or any other successful media site, is destined to collapse (though on the wane it maybe). We’ve been through the debate about news aggregators, and the complete disintermediation of the news creators already, and to an extent this has come to pass. Some people do consume their daily news from Google Alerts, Google News, news feeds into Yahoo and MSN and so on. With aggregation, you can be the  editor, creating your own  news agenda. But most people will not be quite so dynamic, hence the online success of news from the BBC, the Guardian, New York Times etc.

So what’s the idea of Good Enough?

Well, simply put, there is not enough advertising spend to fill all of the competing media, whether that be mainstream news, tech publications or golfing mags. This is excerbated in the downturn when advertising contracts. The FT’s IT technology supplement has shrunk because there are no ads to sit next to the features; the Guardian’s tech supplement suffered a similar fate (and undoubtedly, surveys of why readers where buying the printed newspaper showed that the tech supplement was not a significant reason anymore).

And yes we are happy to consume “good enough” content – which you might otherwise call churnalism.

I’m in the content business – I’ve been writing since the early nineties and seen the rapid decline in the status of the journalist. We work with many very skilled, knowledgeble journalists who know how to research, how to form an opinion, how to translate complex messages.

But these skills are not so sought after anymore, or at least not by traditional media. Not when you can procure articles at $1 for a 100 words from sites like Elance. Copy factories in Asia, stay at home moms in the Midwest and so on are benefiting from disintermediation of the media (which in itself is not a bad thing). They can create copy for a client which will be syndicated on web sites searching for SEO; it can be syndicated over multiple news sites; it can be used to drive traffic to sites that are porn or drug outlets. And there is the blogosphere, where publishing has become democratized – inevitably some opinions are worth hearing, others little more than pub chatter.

So how do you seperate the wheat from the chaff? Have you collected favourite sources of info, or go to sites where you know content has been investigated and researched? Maybe you have, but are you paying for these sites or contributing to their upkeep? Unlikely.

Rupert Murdoch may seem an unlikely champion of of quality content, but he is fighting a losing battle.  We skim, we flip between sites, we have very short attention spans. Futurity manages some very successful blogs with thousands of readers. We believe we are writing some genuinely interesting and useful articles but dig down to into the web site stats, and you would probably be surprised how little time is spent reading a post. It’s fleeting (so you probably haven’t read this far). Our content is not at fault, I hope. It’s that readers have found what they want in the first few paras and moved on. Content is just “good enough”.

We are all suffering this – the creators, the content owners and the concent consumers. I wonder where it will all lead?

#stewartbaines

News from IDC that 6000 technology marketing executives will have lost their jobs by the end of 2009 is hardly a surprise.

You only have to glance at the recent figures from Gartner about 2009 IT spending to see that those that are responsible for marketing, branding and selling kit are going to be in for a rough time.  They paint a picture of the IT industry’s “worst year ever”, with worldwide IT spending falling by 5.2% during 2009,with enterprise IT hardest hit, with a fall in spending of 6.9%.

IT services declined during 2009 by 3.6% to $781 billion, global telecom spending was down 4% to $1.9 trillion, software spending fell 2.1% to $197 billion. The biggest kicking was felt in hardware (servers, storage, network equipments, computers, printers) with sales falling 16.5%, to $317 billion.

(Please bear in mind that this time last year during the worst of the economic crisis, Gartner estimated that the worst case, global IT spending would grow at 2.3%. If you don’t remember this bullish optimism, check it out: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=776112 )

So it’s not the fault of marketing departments then? Well, according to IDC, they have contributed to their own demise. Yes, IT vendor marketing budgets will have declined by 8.3% during 2009, the first decrease in year-on-year marketing spend since the dot-com bust of 2001-2002.

But what money has been available has often been poorly spent, with inefficiencies from product-based marketing not being aligned with brand, sales and corporate marketing. IDC recommends more thematic marketing campaigns, and shared services to remove redundancies.

Over the past decade, we have worked with many of the world’s largest (and smaller) IT organisations, and we’ve experienced these inefficiencies first hand. Many of our clients really do understand integrated marketing, and are a pleasure to work with, but others (ex-clients) can be ingredibly disorganised with product, brand, corporate and PR pulling in opposite directions, with completely different messages and timescales. Projects get abandoned because they are not cleared, audiences recieve mixed messages and marketing is the first to be cut when lean times begin. It’s a pretty simple rule for success though – recognise that sales and marketing are inexorably linked, that your brand must be apparent in everything you do, and be committed to communicating your messages when times get harder. Now, more than ever, your customers need you to be confident.

Long fans of automated vending machines for just about everything and unusual parking arrangements, the Japanese have come up with yet another technological solution to a long-standing problem in cities – where to park your bike safely. In Japan apparently they have a big problem of bicycles being parked ‘illegally’, so they’ve come up with an idea for an automated bike store, as described in this Guardian video: Bike tree. Basically you buy a season ticket for the facility, tag your bike, and use a smartcard to store and retrieve it. The manufacturers of the solution – a steel company bizarrely – outline their idea here.  Could be worthwhile investigating in London, where a couple of train-based bike stores are already emerging, such as the one at Finsbury Park, which can store 125 bikes. Compare that to the nearly 6,400 bikes that can be stored in the Kasai Station ‘Cycle Tree’ in Tokyo!