Category: Technology trends

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Tom Peters and Seth Godin – Open Forum

by  on  in Personal development, Reinventing the enterprise, Technology trends

Looking for the edge in today’s economy? Trying to increase employee engagement? Don’t forget your employees.

In this interview Tom Peters and Seth Godin tell us if you have loyal employees the loyal customers will come.

There are more interview excerpts on the site “Inside the Entrepreneurial Mind”.

Check out New Perspectives on Business. Also take a look at the other sections: “The Business of Technology”, “How the Biz does Business”, “The Business of Food” and “Richard Branson”.

The site is Open Forum, sponsored by American Express.

Twitter CEO predicts future uses for Twitter

by  on  in Reinventing the enterprise, Technology trends

If you are small or large business, you should be paying attention to Twitter. CEO Evan Williams talks about using Twitter to connect with your customers.

From: ZDNet.com

Office design changes

by  on  in Reinventing the enterprise, Technology trends

Can the benefits of an open office design benefit established enterprises as much as it seems to drive productivity in start-ups? A recent article from Accendor Research Inc. suggests just that.

For enterprises that truly want to benefit in the area of agility and teaming, a quick read and action can reap huge benefits.

We observed, for instance, one workgroup that rearranged their standard cubicles so that, instead of having a cluster of four served by a centre aisle with barrier walls to provide privacy, they opened the four up and created a centre meeting area with a round table. This group — technically oriented — wheeled up to the centre table and back to their “desks” at the margins of the space 10-15 times a day. (The lunch period, instead of being an “eat out” time, moved to become much more of an “eat in” session at the centre table, a mix of social time and “what have you heard” information sharing about industry news and developments.) This group was the parallel to the same function in another office: the other office made no such changes. Four people outperformed (quality and quantity of work) twelve in a more traditional setting: none of the four had ever been anything above a “satisfactory” performer before the change.

Today’s technology (wireless, VoIP, web conferencing and online collaborative spaces) allow anyone to work in the office environment that is suitable for the task. As office furniture is upgraded or offices relocated, fully reconfigurable offices should be high on the list.

Everything is connected

by  on  in Reinventing the enterprise, Technology trends, VoIP

Tough morning. Arrived at work this morning and the Internet connection was down. Seems like a firewall configuration change prevented outbound access to the Internet.

True, but when you announce it in that way the ramifications of that failure is not fully understood by everyone. Many ignored that message as they did not need Internet access just them. They went about doing their business.

However, like many organizations we have an internal Blackberry Enterprise Server connected to our Exchange system. So while email was working in-house, messages were not being delivered to the Blackberries.  This was not initially obvious and communicaitons did not go out alerting those users. The BES needs to connect to the RIM server prior to reaching the handheld devices and visa versa.

So now the problem, how do you let someone in the field know that they can’t send or receive messages on their Blackberry, when the tool used to let them know there is an outage (email) only works in-house to Outlook workstations?

I’ve thought that setting up a private Twitter account for out-of-band communications (SMS and the phone still worked). How about using a bulk text messaging service that can use a preset distribution list. Does anyone have any ideas.