• Business Applications that drive industry
• On-Demand/Cloud computing
• In-memory technology
• Analytics, and
• Mobile

This is a great growth strategy, but it is equally important for large Enterprise Applications firms such as SAP and Oracle to incorporate in their offering technological tools that foster collaboration, not only within the enterprise (among employees), but outside the enterprise too (between employees and customers/suppliers).

Benefits of effective collaboration in driving down costs, improving productivity and employee engagement/morale cannot be emphasized enough. And in current economic climate where sales growth is hard to come by, higher productivity is the magic mantra. Collaboration among employees, customers and suppliers is the key that can deliver higher productivity organizations have been aiming for.

What do you think about SAP’s Growth Strategy? Shouldn’t Enterprise Applications firms such as SAPand Oracle incorporate in their offering technological tools that foster collaboration? Please do share your thoughts:

Operating under the tagline, “Engage expert companies,” Microsoft Pinpoint helps business customers find technology experts, software applications and professional services that solve specific business issues and support long-term goals.

At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology service providers get applications and professional services to the customers who need them.

Adlib Software and our application, PDF for SharePoint, are listed in all the English-language countries that are part of Pinpoint: Canada, US, UK, India and Australia.

Other organizations are trying to ride the SharePoint wave by building their own online communities. We belong to one example, PartnerPoint, and have reviewed but not joined others, such as the not-yet-launched SharePoint Village with its online “shopping mall” approach to vendors.

We love seeing how some of these online communities are expanding their brand and participation level into social media, such as the PartnerPoint LinkedIn Group, which we belong to (along with more than 12,000 other people).

We’ve also seen grassroots communities spring up driven by the people who use and sell SharePoint-related products/services, such as SharePoint Experts on LinkedIn and the SharePoint page on Facebook.

Check out our listings on Microsoft Pinpoint at:

• Adlib Company Listing
• PDF for SharePoint Application

Riley O’Brien Wolff
Microsoft Alliance Manager
Adlib Software 

Yes, that’s right! David Armano, Senior Vice President for Edelman Digital and whose birthday was just a few hours back (Happy birthday again, David!), spent a little bit over 16 minutes sharing a good number of rather compelling and very touching stories that highlight quite nicely the huge impact of social media beyond the technology focus and the marketing hype, trying to establish the main basic guidelines of what he feels is going to define social media in the not so distant future.

To get things started, he makes a great point that media is *not* social; people are. And, as such, we should stop that infatuation we keep having with everything 2.0 related and move on. Move on to where we should be focusing in the first place. And I bet you know, by now, where I am heading… Yes, indeed, it’s quite refreshing, as you can imagine, to see how other folks validate your ideas, and long term beliefs, and in this case it’s rather rewarding to see how David proclaims that the next challenge for social media is to move on and give the focus of the change … to the people. Not the social tools, nor the processes, but the people themselves who have been there all along as part of the equation, but which we kept neglecting, and ignoring!, time and time again over the course of the years… Specially in the field of Knowledge Management.

I couldn’t have agreed more with him on that point, plus a whole bunch of the nice slideware and visuals he used to deliver plenty of those key and powerful messages. Pay special attention to the one on the Social Media Conversion Scale, which you can read more about over here, and try to figure out for yourself where you think you would be on that scale. I think I know where I am and where I want to be and would love to know from you, on the comments, where you think you are and where you believe you would want to be in the next couple of years… I bet that would sparkle a rather interesting conversation for everyone…

Finally, not going to spend much more time on this blog post, since I think you would probably want to watch David’s video right away, but I would want to finish this short blog post with one other key major ah-ha moment I got after going through it. And that is his wonderful use of rather touching personal stories that tried to represent, and very successfully, in my opinion, the opportunity to benefit from social media: first, you, as an individual, to then benefit the rest of your social network(s). Forget altogether about the business! That is where it all begins and, to me, it is also a key message, not just from social media, but also for Enterprise 2.0: that unless knowledge workers take a much more personal involvement and commitment to augment their own individual productivity with all of these social tools, before they start thinking about sharing and collaborating effectively with other teams, networks and communities, our overall efforts of adoption won’t probably go much further beyond and eventually die off in the short term.

And we wouldn’t want to do that, right? Like David shares on the video, we need to reinvent social media, each and everyone of us, as individuals, one step at a time, before we can move further on into our next challenge: address and fix our business problems! We first need to fix ourselves!

Tags: TED, TED Talk, TEDx, Videos, David Armano, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Productivity 2.0, Edelman Digital, Social Media Conversion Scale, Individual, Knowledge Workers, Reinvent Social Media, Hippie 2.0, Personal Productivity

Figure 1. Current Boarding Pass

Figure 2. Redesign by David Yoon

(Via Graphicology and Timoni Grone)

…the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person. Likewise, the books lining your living room or office can tell others about your interests and background. But on the Kindle, no matter what you’re reading, all anyone else will see is an unchanging plastic device.

(Via Clive Thompson)

This is from an actual Digital Asset Management (DAM) job description posted this year. Really. More on that later in this post.

Several people have asked what are typical DAM job descriptions. Here are some actual DAM job descriptions and knowledge shared by DAM professionals on the job market today.

All this takes people as part of the equation with process and technology.

Your best bets are

What are you looking for when filling the human resources gaps with the people needed to help manage your organization’s digital assets? Well, here are a few DAM job descriptions. There are no hard and fast rules, but rather guidelines. Any of these could be staff or contractual positions.

• Administrator (DBA)
• Business Analyst (BA)
• Consultant
  • Either an internal, permanent staff for daily (ongoing) consultation OR an external (temporary), outside perspective looking in with a fresh viewpoint
  • Advisor, coach and/or functional role
• Information Architect
• DAM Director/Digital Asset Manager
  • Support DAM system and users
  • An industry expert in the field
• DAM Specialist/Coordinator
  • Organize and upload assets
  • Metatag assets
• Archivist
• Librarian
  • Organize and upload assets
• Engineer/Developer/Programmer
• Help Desk
• Intern
  • Temporary position (more on this in a future blog post)
  • Willingness to:
    • Learn about DAM
    • Work on metadata
• Project Manager
• Taxonomist
• Metatagger (aka “Metator”)
• Analyst
• Archivist
• Assistant
• Database Administrator (DBA)
• Data Entry Specialist*
• Engineer
• Librarian
• IT Specialist
• Marketeer
• Project Manager
• Sales
• Taxonomist

Some of these positions may be combined

IDEAL FOR THESE PROFESSIONALS

• Art and Photo Buyers
• Channel Program Managers
• Corporate Communications
• Creative Services
• Graphic and Packaging Design Services
• IT Program Management
• Licensing and Clearances
• Localization Managers
• Marketing Communications
• Multimedia, Media Archivist
• Photo Librarian
• Sales Support
• Technical Documents Manager
• Web Content Specialists

A large international shipping organization asked me what kind of position they needed to fill for a certain gap in their staff/process they had identified, but were not sure what qualifications they needed to list in a job description. They did not need an engineer, but rather a very computer literate person who can understand the technical information and can get the job done regularly (aka a geek)

While some job positions may use Digital Asset Management (DAM), there is an increase in the need for people who may work full-time on DAM within an organization. We’ll explore several of these positions may do to give you an idea what some organizations have as far as talented resources who do this work.

Clerk, data entry,

Digital Archivist

Today, Job Description should include the high level business needs which this role will be involved with Digital Asset Management.

Digital Asset Management is a business need, not just a technology or another database.

Here is the direct way to get answers you need for potential candidates to fill an “Asset Librarian” position:

“Please include the following questions and answers on the first page of every resume submitted:
1) Have you worked with an Asset Management System, where, how much?

2) How much experience do you have creating Metadata Schema?

3) Do you have any training experience? what type?”

   Here is the second part of my notes from the

Cesar Hidalgo from MIT began this segment by covering global economic development. He said that one of the issues is that diversity is not spread evenly. He introduced several principles to address global economic development. First how many capabilities does a country possess, rather than resources. He used legos to represent capabilities in his visuals.

Here is more on Cesar’s lego theory of development thanks to Eric Andersen. Typically, GDP is seen as a function of just a few inputs (i.e. different types of putty using Cesar’s imagery). These are capital, labor, and some kind of technology input. The types of labor and the types of capital are more or less interchangeable (just as putty is). Of course, economists know this is a massive simplification of the world, but it is useful in helping describe an extremely complex reality.

Cesar proposes a new approach that will help take into account a bit more of the complexity that's out there in the world. He calls it the "lego" theory of development. If we look at those countries that are wealthy, we see that they produce products that require many different types of inputs or legos. Further, wealthy countries don't specialize in one or two products (in contradiction to a simplistic interpretation of comparative advantage) they export many different types of goods. If a product is very complex, it can be best produced by the few countries that have all the requirements.  You need to match capabilities with product requirements for growth. How do you accumulate capabilities?

Another principle is having the capabilities centralized. The industrialized countries have a great concentration of capabilities in a centralized manner.  He showed how this increased concentration of capabilities occurred in Malaysia as the economy grew. Cesar feels that diversity of capabilities predicts growth more than traditional inputs. This would argue for increasing the diversity of capabilities through effective education.

Felice Frankel, a photographer, provided a session titled more than pretty pictures. Felice covered three main ideas. She said the process of making a visual representation clarifies an idea. This process requires decisions that encourage reflection. Second, the process of making a representation should be collaborative. Third, the process of making a representation teaches. This third principle is her real passion. I certainly agree with her points and there has been a lot of research on this concept.  Muhan Zhang next very movingly performed a Mongolian instrument.

John Werner and MacCalvin Romain covered learning out of the box. MacCalvin told us how his creativity was criticized in elementary school. However, he was shown that his interests could turn into a career through Citizen’s Schools. John discussed how US education is following behind the rest of the world.  He discovered that schools tried to keep the community outside of the schools. Fifteen years ago he and others started Citizen Schools to help expand the resources that students are exposed to.  John gave examples of bringing business teams into the schools to create more learning opportunities.  He said there is a lot of potential for people to help. Eight million people do jury duty each year, What if there was education duty?  If we just two percent of the scientists helped we would double the amount of science teachers available to our kids. Good ideas.

Bill Walczak shared more good ideas on education. His group started a charter school in a community health center in Dorchester. They involve students in the health care professions there. He said that Boston ninth grade students who do not go to one of the three prestige Boston public high schools have a 7% chance to graduate from high school. At the school in the health center they have achieved an over 70% success rate through the involvement in the community health center operations. This is a great model for integrating high school with the community and a growing professional field. Now it was time for lunch. More to follow in the next post.

This TEDxBoston session provided access to a diverse set of themes, some are not directly related to the major themes of this blog but I wanted to share with you how a TEDx session flows.  The common theme is thinking outside the normal and creating innovation. I felt that the message across most of the sessions was that innovation becomes effective when it involves innovative way people are engaged with new ideas and technology. I think this is very related to this blog.  I was pleased to attend and will be looking at the TED site for more. 

Fight for our clients. Fight for our beliefs. Fight for our ideas to be heard and understood why we’re presenting them.

Fight for our value and worth.

Choosing when to fight, though, isn’t easy. Even though there are times when we know we are so right, no matter what we say it’s going to be viewed as wrong.

It takes a lot to walk away at times like these.

You put in a lot of work. Man hours, development hours, project hours. But that’s the work stuff – you expect that. There’s also the personal hours away from those you love.

But you do it, because you’re doing it to make a better life for those you love. That’s why you fight.

Pride comes into it too. You can see why those that are fighting with you are having qualms, but you also have the solutions to those qualms. Or at least you would, if they would let you.

But they don’t.

So now you have to decide, do you fight or do you surrender?

Surrender isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It smooths the water and allows you and your combatant’s ships to sail more easily in the same waters again. And everyone loves plain sailing.

But every sailor knows the next big storm is only one grey cloud away.

So now you’re back to fighting. But how long do you allow a fight to go on before realizing it’s only creating lasting damage? How long before you’re punch-drunk and unable to fight any more? And not just with this opponent, but every single one from now on?

Anyone can fight. Some can fight better than others, and for longer.

The question is, are the victories sweet or bittersweet? Are they even victories at all?

photo credit: Profound Whatever

And, boy, did we have such a good fun with that interview or not? John asked us a few rather interesting, insightful and provocative questions on what we thought were some of the major key points behind figuring out the business value of social networking. That was just a blast! What an adrenaline rush of back and forth between Mark, John and yours truly! I had such a great time!

John himself has actually put together a rather nice short blog post on that podcast under the title Social Media ROI and Hippy 2.0… It all made sense... In it he mentions how the recording lasts for about 56 minutes and it starts off at around minute 5, after he spent a little while sharing some further thoughts on the news and trends of the day / week related to social media.

I bet you may be wondering, right now, what we actually talked about during the course of nearly one hour, right? Yes, I agree with you, that’s a long time to spend on a podcast, but it certainly was such a good fun that I don’t think none of us minded at all! Thus here you have got some of the headlines and an annotation of two on the topics that we covered during that live podcast show:

• Business Value of Social Networking: Where we talked about how sometimes it’s much more effective, and productive, to focus on figuring out how to get the most of all of these social networking tools as our next generation of business tools to help us collaborate and share our knowledge more efficiently than trying to figure out the Return On Investment (ROI) of those social interactions without having even gotten things started in the first place!

  How it may prove to be much more convenient to demonstrate how social software can change the way we interact with customers, as well as with the rest of our peers, by humanising those very same business interactions helping nurture, even better, our own personal business relationships. We eventually shared plenty of thoughts and ideas of how this could pave out for almost any business out there!

• Living "A World Without Email": Yes, of course, we couldn’t miss out on this one, could we? Most of you folks, regular readers of this blog, already know quite a bit what this topic would be about, but what you may be interested in is the part of the conversation where I shared some further insights on demonstrating the ROI of giving up on corporate email and what it’s meant not only for me as a knowledge worker, but also for the organisation I work for and for those other peers I get to interact on a regular basis.

  Reducing your corporate email conversations by over 95% and instead move those into open social software spaces is one heck of a success story, don’t you think? Specially when over 3.5 years ago, most people felt I was crazy for doing such thing in such an email driven corporation like IBM (And probably like most of them out there as well!) and today, more and more teams and groups are also seeing such substantial reduction with their incoming emails by utilising more various different social tools. I may not be that crazy after all …

• Or, maybe, I still am! Because the other topic we talked about, during that one hour conversation and which we covered quite extensively, was a new crazy? idea that I came up with a few days back and which is picking a rather nice momentum and plenty of traction. Of course, I am talking about Hippie 2.0.

  Who would have thought about that? An initial blog post that I put together and shared across a little bit weary about it (I wasn’t sure whether it was going to strike a chord or not!), eventually has been raising a huge amount of rather interesting and very refreshing conversations on the true nature of embracing social networking beyond the business context, that is, how it is affecting us all as a society.

  That blog entry so far is one of the most popular threads on this blog and has sparked a good number of developments that will certainly keep a bunch of us buzzing for a little while longer! Who knows, perhaps for a long while…

  The thing is that we already have got a Web site up and running under Hippie 2.0 (Using Posterous at the moment and with a unique opportunity to have an open space where everyone can contribute with whatever the relevant content); we talked extensively about it on yesterday’s live podcast; a few people have already contributed some top notch content (Including some fun stuff!); and a few folks have been leaving comments already throughout the various entries and we have got a bunch of other really cool things coming up!

  I say we because my good friend Jay Deragon has been doing an outstanding job in pushing forward some of the content you will see on the Web site when you head over there. And for that, I am incredibly grateful! Thanks ever so much, Jay!! Really appreciate all of your efforts and glad you, too, feel the same way about this crazy idea!

Right, there were plenty of things related to social networking and proving its business value altogether that we talked about during that live podcasting episode over at Blog Talk Radio, but I think I am going to stop commenting further on it for now. Instead, I would encourage you all to go and listen to it, by perhaps quoting one of the best live tweets that people shared across during the show and which clearly represents the true spirit behind such a movement as Hippie 2.0:

"If you focus on fear, you’ll get fear. If you focus on humor, you’ll get laughs" (Superb quote from Mark captured by Susan Scrupski)

I hope you have enjoyed listening to the episode, just as much as we did during the live recording of the podcast. Like I said above, I had a great time participating in it and from here I just would want to take this opportunity to thank John Moore for inviting both Mark and myself into the show, to Mark for being such great fun, smart, insightful, witty, and another Hippie 2.0, like yours truly, and, finally, to Eric Andersen for helping facilitate the connection over … Twitter!

Thanks ever so much, guys! It’s been a great pleasure and hope to see you all soon over at Hippies20.com!

Tags: Blog Talk Radio, Podcasts, Podcasting, Radio Shows, Mark Masterson, John Moore, Business Value, ROI, Return On Investment, Hippies 2.0, Hippie2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Productivity 2.0, email, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Eric Andersen, Susan Scrupski, ITSinsider, Jay Deragon, Posterous, Twitter

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I went to the simulcast room so I could use my laptop to take notes. The intro talked about this is a local event just using the TED branding and format. Economic Growth through Crowd Sourcing Dave McLaughlin as listed as the first session, a topic of interest for me lately, but it started with some drummers, the Marcos Santos Group, to get us stoked up. Crowd sourcing is an obvious starting point for an event like this. Meanwhile the drummers are good. Next there was a quote from John Adams, one of our local revolutionaries, and this is the theme of the day.

They discussed the diversity of the audience including eight dozen CEOs and high school students. I am humbled to be here.  Dave McLaughlin began with audience interaction. He discussed horizontal relationships between vertical grouping for cross-fertilization.  Boston has invested to seed these cross-fertilizations for local economic growth through Boston World Partnerships.  For example, what is essential infrastructure is being rethought. Horizontal relationships have become the new connectors.

Susan Avery from Woods Hole next discussed our global ocean and its role in how the world functions.  The ocean has only been systematically studied for 150 years. Now since WW2, technology has evolved rapidly to further this exploration. The hydro-thermal vents are one new discovery that are places where life forms emerge and were life likely started on this planet. This study is very important as human impact on the ocean has greatly expanded. 

We have entered a new geological era with humans as the dominant impact on the globe. For one thing the ocean is becoming more acidic because of our carbon emissions.  This can greatly impact sea life such as shell fish.  We view the ocean as a limitless resource but it is not. The fish at the top of the food chain have decreased by 90 percent a since WW2.  The ocean is also used as a garbage dump but there are limits here also. There is a lot of plastic in the Pacific that ends up in fish. If we eat these fish we eat our own garbage. She also addressed the oil spill in the Gulf. Each spill is unique so the result is not predictable.

Seth Priebatsch covered the efforts toward Building the Game Layer on Top of the World.  It is already happening but is cluttered. Game dynamics are already in play but many are poorly designed such as credit card promotions. Seth said we can build better applications of games using game dynamics. He said this is important as we have been building the social layer but that is done. He said Facebook has won this one. How it is time for building the game layer. It said the game layer will be more important than the social layer so it is time to think about it in a open way.

He showed four game dynamics. First, there is the appointment dynamic. People have to do things at a set time and place.  Happy hour is one example.  Farmville has more participants than Twitter and you have to return to water your virtual plants at a certain time.  Second is influence and status.  People want to be cool and status is a great motivator.  School is a poorly designed status game. We could better use game dynamics to improve participation in school. Third is the progression dynamic. You have to go through certain granular steps. His firm is working with businesses on applications of these dynamics to create loyalty, engagement, and revenue.   Fourth, there is communal discovery. Everyone works together to solve problems. Digg had a leader board but it was too successful and had to be taken down. He closed with the concept that game dynamics is the next frontier.

Mary Gunn discussed two problems and one solution.  Her organization, Generations, Inc. pairs older adults with kids in prompting literacy. It helps both sides and she offers results.  I can believe this. A group next covered the digital fabrication of homes so you could design homes in an automated way. Then the specs are sent to a factory to produce the materials in a more cost effective manner using compressed wood chips.  This also produces less waste, uses smaller trees, and get homes up quicker. You can more easily do curves.

Before the first break John Harthorne discussed starting a startup renaissance. John said that our economic crisis can drive innovation. He started Mass Challenge to run a one million dollar global competition on innovation. The finalists get funds, advice, and free office space nearby at Fan Pier. He said why Boston for this?  Boston is number one on many innovation measures: more investment per capita, more VC firms per capita, more universities per capita, etc. than anywhere, even California.  This ends the first group of sessions.