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Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
"Rogue IT" is about to wreak havoc at work" is Fortune's headline.  Not a moment too soon, I might add. 
From the article:

"Rogue IT is the name given to the informal, ad hoc software and devices brought by employees into the workplace. If you've ever taken your own iPad to work or used cloud-based software like Evernote or Dropbox in the office, you may well be an offender. And you're not alone. Some 43% of businesses report that their employees are using cloud services independently of the IT department, according to a recent survey of 500 IT decision makers.

"In the past, these enterprise software and hardware decisions were often the exclusive domain of a company's chief information officer or CIO, the senior executive in charge of information technology and computer systems. "Sitting in his high chair in a grey suit barking orders, [the CIO would make] product decisions for big companies with even larger user bases," explains Peter Fenton of tech investors Benchmark Capital. Rogue IT turns that model on its head, effectively crowdsourcing IT choices to employees. So where does this leave the venerable CIO? And what does it mean for the future of IT at the world's largest enterprises?
"The good news is that enterprise IT has plenty of room for improvement. "[Traditional IT] carries connotations of interminable rollouts, bewildering interfaces, obscure functionality and high prices," writes CIO.com's Bernard Golden. Security, compliance and back-end compatibility have traditionally topped CIO wish lists, not usability. As a result, employees have sometimes been left with programs that are anything but intuitive. This exacted a heavy toll in terms of time, money and organizational well-being.

[...]

"Bloated, enterprise software no longer cuts it. Seduced by Facebook (FB) and similarly intuitive platforms at home, millennials balk at staring down monster spreadsheets or decoding web 1.0 UIs at work, writes Fast Company contributor Marcia Conner. Increasingly, they expect their work suites and software to be just as user-friendly as the apps they know and love in their personal lives, a trend known as the consumerization of IT. And they're willing to go outside company walls to find products that work best for them."

So do we still need a CIO?  Apparently we do, but with employees and customers doing the heavy lifting, voting with their feet (to mix a bunch of metaphors,) the CIO will finally have time for the big, important, profitable stuff.  OK.

But if you think it's just your employees (and maybe a few physicians) going rogue, well, your customers went over that wall a long time ago.  You probably didn't notice or care until that first iPad appeared in your waiting room.


Read the whole thing, here.

And, here, from HootSource, HootSuite's blog.
6:58 AM
As of today, and assuming you haven’t already given enough of your life to the social networking juggernaut, you can double down with a share or two of Facebook’s common stock.  Now I’m not a licensed investment advisor so I can’t tell YOU what to do. But I will tell you what I’M going to do.

One word: FLEE.

Listening to CNBC while driving to an appointment yesterday, I heard a commentator rave about this “historic investment opportunity,” saying something like:

“Even at this valuation level, Facebook’s stock is cheap.  With that huge behavioral database, they'll find a way to monetize their 900 million users...”
Notice the choice of language.  It's not “They've FOUND a way..."  It's "They'll FIND a way..."  In the future.  Someday.  Hopefully.

But the future's a tricky thing.  All along, I’ve assumed the right sequence of events is this:
  1. Find a way to make money (i.e. a business model.)
  2. Make money (i.e. prove that your business model actually works.)
  3. Go public.
  4. Get rich.
Apparently I’ve been misinformed, and the correct sequence actually is:
  1. Go public.
  2. Get rich.
  3. Find a way to make money.
  4. (Optional) Make money.
Sounds eerily like the first dot-com bubble back in the 1990’s, when it was all about eyeballs and hits, and investment bankers tossed bushels of cash at every twerp entrepreneur who correctly (if accidently) spelled ‘www,' assuming that, somehow, somewhere, eyeballs would magically turn into earnings.

We all know how well that turned out, yet here they are again, telling us that a good story and hope matter more than bottom line results.

Flee.
7:57 AM
Fox News: "Facebook users heap baggage on Spirit Airlines after dying vet refused refund."

That we're living in the age of the Facebook mob assures Spirit Airlines that they'll lose far more in business and customer goodwill than the $197 refund would've cost. And somehow I doubt that many of Spirit's customers are, today, saying "Thanks for looking out for us and keeping fares low."

More likely they're saying "What a bunch of clueless chumps."

There's following policies and procedures to the letter, and then there's doing the right thing. Frequently the two converge. Not this time.

UPDATE:  The chump caves.
1:39 PM