Jacob’s Lifestream

Forrester has issued a report, Collaboration Needs Will Fuel A Smartphone Surge, by Ted Schadler with Matthew Brown, Brownlee Thomas, Michele Pelino, and Peter Schmidt, with the subtitle: The Surge Can Be Funded Through A Bring-Your-Own Smartphone Strategy.  I appreciate receiving a review copy.  It predicts that 2010 will be the year of the smartphone surge.

The Forrester team surveyed 3,904 information workers nad found great excitement about about smartphones, “attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with documents from anywhere.” While only 14% percent of information workers across the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones, another 64% would like to. This compares with general consumers usage at 78% with mobile phones and 11% with smart phones. That yet to be fulfilled demand in information workers, along with some employers’ willingness to share monthly mobile costs, sets the stage for the surge. This calls for KM and other information professionals to determine a strategy for effective and coordinated usage. There is also the numbers to pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across plans.

APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.

Funny. On the day the iPad was revealed, I too thought of "The book of Jobs". Funny to see other people relating in the same way ;)

If you like visual aids to help understand how OCS 2007 R2 works, how the clients connect, protocols used, then there is an excellent poster available for download here. It is perfect your techno geek cube wall!

For everyone working with OCS 2007 R2, this is a seriously cool poster to have on your wall !

Most businesses are structured and controlled. There are processes to follow, strategies to set in motion, and bureaucracy to wade through. This structure can give us a false sense of control about the other stuff in our workplaces. Make no mistake. People cannot be controlled; in fact, they are downright unpredictable and messy, for a lot of very wonderful reasons. Leading people can be messy too.

When I work with my clients on new behaviors that will help them to impact and influence their workplaces, they can often get a false sense of the control that they are wielding over their employees. “Well, if I do this, then they will do that”, as in “If I become more inclusive and empowering, they will do what I want”.  It’s really not likely that you can predict precisely what others will do when you change how you manage and lead them..

SAP released the public beta of 12sprints yesterday:

"SAP AG has made its 12sprints collaborative decision-making project available via public beta and has formed a strategic research partnership with The 2.0 Adoption Council ― a peer forum of IT and business leaders and thinkers who are discovering new ways of working in modern organizations. Both of these moves demonstrate SAP’s commitment to helping companies bring the power of Web 2.0 technologies and trusted information into their business processes. 12sprints, the codename for a new collaborative decision-making application, is the first and only software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that brings together people, information and methods to drive swift, informed decision-making. The public beta phase of 12sprints invites everyone to take the solution for a free spin, evaluate it and contribute feedback to enrich its further development."

Well, I signed up for an account earlier today, and had "took it for a spin", as SAP encouraged everyone to do in the press release.

My reactions: