Links for June 30 2013
- Oh I See (CIO Inverted): Flexible or efficient ?
Quote: Can organizations and CIOs create a balance between the efficiency and flexibility agenda ? Is such a position desirable and achievable ? Can IT help the cause ? I asked these questions to a few learned CIOs; everyone nodded unanimously to the fact that cost containment drives every few years has taken away a lot of energy. The yo-yo keeps them and their business folks running to stay in the same place. Discretionary budgets not being available now, the tussle for flexibility is an uphill journey.
- Why Marketers Get Social Media Wrong
Quote: The social brand is one that nurtures relationships with its current customers, develops new ones with prospective customers and is glad for conversions whenever they may occur.
- How Facebook matured its data structure and stepped into the graph world — Tech News and Analysis
Quote: Facebook has shifted away from a relational database model to one more supportive of a graph that needs to stay consistent and support tons of reads. Its TAO data store does all this and more.
- Cargo Cult Requirements
Quote: When developers are following the rituals of good software engineering practices, it does not cause them to create good products. It only causes them to create products effectively. There’s no correlation that assures that they are being asked to build the right product. The developers have no power to make planes drop cargo. Like the Melanesians, they can only march in formation. Without the right requirements, the product will fail.
- Innovate on Purpose: The innovation box
Quote: What does it take to get a team to think outside the box? More transition time, to help the team make the transition from the old box to the new box. More training, new tools and new facilitation to help the team become proficient at the new work. More time and commitment to taking on new perspectives. A commitment to shift not only a small team, but the rest of the organization, to new perspectives and a new “box”, or a new method to commercialize the ideas the old organization will simply reject. Until and unless executives are willing to countenance these investments, asking for ideas “outside the box” is a cynical exercise at best.
- Ambition can be poison by David of 37signals
Quote: Over-dosing on ambition isn’t just an occupational hazard of sports. It goes for all walks of life. I’ve met many extremely accomplished people who’ve had the grave misfortune of reaching one too many of their goals, only to be saddled with an impossibly high baseline for success. It’s devoured their intrinsic motivation, leaving nothing but an increasingly impossible search for another fix of blow-it-out-the-park success. When that doesn’t happen, the withdrawal is a bitch.
- How Are SMB’s Using the Digital Space?
Quote: So we come to the million dollar question that is asked by SMB’s and consultants alike all the time: What is considered a strong basic platform, how much should it cost (reasonably) and what kind of ongoing commitments are required to build success?
- How a Scientist Gets Things Wrong
Quote: “More than 20 percent of Einstein’s original papers contain mistakes of some sort,” Livio writes. “In several cases, even though he made mistakes along the way, the final result is still correct. This is often the hallmark of great theorists: They are guided by intuition more than by formalism.”
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