This week in links - week 52, 2008

The predictions for next year (and beyond) have been piling up in my RSS reader. Here are a few of them and some other stuff I've found interesting:

Peter Kim has put together a list of 2009 predictions from people he identifies as thought leaders. You can download the list as PDF. Here are some excepts:
"Although it is now cheaper to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology - it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful." - David Armano

"Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball." - Ann Handley 

  1. Cloud computing will cause a shift in the BI balance of power from IT to business users
  2. Simplicity will be the driving mantra for both consumers and vendors of BI
  3. The continued drive for simplicity will cause a shift towards prebuilt analytic solutions with best practices built in, and away from generic toolsets
  4. Data interpretation will become a significant challenge for new BI users

Moving towards suites…with wiki at the core...//...Inside organizations, people are already using wikis at a growing place, so a tool that has the wiki at its core, but also lets people blog, share documents, embed YouTube video, share presentation slides, and embed Flickr photos becomes even more useful.

This isn’t the oft-promised “portal” of the ’90s - it’s something different, and better, because people have a much easier time with a tool that’s centered on one major capability, but can do other things as needed. 

For me the absence of Enterprise RSS (and perhaps along with other key infrastructure, like Enterprise Search and social tagging tools) in environments where we find wikis, blogs and social networking tools is a sign of tactical or immature implementations of enterprise social computing. We are just at the beginning of this journey.

...if we really want to bring Web 2.0 inside the firewall, then we need Enterprise RSS functionality in that mix. And that's because the 9X email problem isn't just a barrier for Enterprise RSS adoption, but a barrier for Enterprise 2.0 itself.

In this respect, I can actually see many opportunities for integrating Enterprise RSS features into Enterprise Search solutions or into existing portal platforms (actually, Confluence is a great example of a feed friendly wiki platform - both to create and consume). And why doesn't Microsoft Exchange play a greater role in supporting sophisticated Enterprise RSS capabilities? I suppose in a way this is exactly what Newsgator are doing for the Microsoft suite.

"The Great Disruption" by Scott Anthony:
A recent New York Times article mentioned how the media still hasn't found a compelling way to describe today's economic climate. Everyone agrees that something important is going on, but no one has found a simple, memorable phrase that captures that importance.

Why the Great Disruption? In the Great Depression, demand, output and wages declined across the board. Today's times are different. It isn't just that demand is sagging. It's that change is ripping through markets at unprecedented pace. Competitive advantage that took decades to build disappears seemingly overnight.

For many companies, the Great Disruption requires nothing short of transformation. It requires fending off attacks from below and making the creation of new growth systematic. It demands embracing new forms of innovation, such as business model innovation, and dramatically improving the productivity of innovation efforts. Investing in transformational efforts in a brutal market appears difficult, but the alternative isn't stagnation, it is extinction.
That's all. 

Happy Holidays!
Oscar BergBI, Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, RSS, Social media, Web 2.0, Wikis