Workplace Engineering

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I bought the audio book and think I need to by it in print too. The whole idea of turning your business/organization/industry into a platform is incredibly compelling. Kind of wish I’d read it before starting my business.


View all my reviews.

Zen Habits post A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twitter Simply, Productively, and Funly: is really helpful to anyone like me who’s been trying to figure out how to engage with Twitter….

“Twitter is like a river … you can step into it at any point and feel the water, bathe in it, frolic if you like … and then get out. And go back in at any time, at any point. But, you don’t have to try to consume the entire river — it’s impossible and frankly a waste of time in my eyes.

So that’s how I approach Twitter these days: I’ll just jump into the stream of incoming tweets and see what people are saying. I can ignore them or follow their links or reply if I want. Then I get out of the stream. I don’t try to read everything I missed, and if I miss a lot of stuff, I’m OK with that.”

I think this advice could apply equally to all the corporate information my clients have to keep up with. There are some core performance KPIs that they need to be on top of all of the time, but much of what passes an executive these days is just the flow of the corporate river.

(See the rest of the post in Zen Habits.)

Chris Spagnulo in Commons Blog reports that according to a survey 40% of CIOs are indifferent to the quality of software they produce. Chris rightly reports that the costs of failed software in a business are tremendous. I’ve heard horror stories of automated bank account payment systems pulling a monthly payment from an account more than ten times in one night due to a glitch and key systems dropping out on a whim.

I hadn’t quite realized how lucky I’ve been to work with a few of CIOs and IT professionals that are fanatical about quality and understand the that a workman is only as good as their tools, yet based upon personal experience I can’t say that these statistics surprise me.

Liam Tung reports in CNET on August 14 that HSBC may be considering an iPhone fleet:

Global banking giant HSBC is considering ditching the BlackBerry and adopting Apple’s iPhone as its standard staff mobile device, a move that could result in an order for some 200,000 iPhones

Although he goes onto write that HSBC state the decision has a fairly low priority at present and it is part of normal business to evaluate different technologies, it is pretty telling that a large financial institution would even consider switching.

One of the things that HSBC (and Apple) would need to consider is how would Apple deal with a batch order for so many phones? Even for a company of Apple’s size and considerable supply chain management skills, this would be a huge order with some pretty tight service level agreements.