Tag Archives: adoption

The Cloud is like a teenage driver

Nobody is shocked when they hear the teenager just learning to drive got into an accident. After all, even with the safest car on the block, the kid just lacks the depth of experience.

Maybe that’s the same growing pain we’re seeing from some of the recent outages at many major tech providers over the last few weeks. Maybe we simply lack the depth of experience? We think we know what to do but aren’t really prepared for situations that occur just 1% of the time.

Developing processes, buying hardware, staffing up, increasing complexity…. Making those significant investments just for something that just happens 1% of the time. Tough to get 20x return on that stuff. Tough to justify when the “accidents” just hurt you.

Now imagine that teenager is driving a bus full of people. Those 1% situations switch from potentially doing harm to just a few to endangering many. After all, they are providing a transportation platform for anyone willing to pay.

Isn’t this the same for our cloud providers that supply many others with platform-as-a-service? Now when Amazon or Google hits a rough patch, the thousands of others riding on their platforms get tossed around too.

I’m confident that our teenage drivers will get better. They will gain more experience, plan better, get help, and most importantly realize their actions (or lack of action) can and does impact others.

Let’s hope the leadership of the new guard for cloud computing are brave enough to fight for funding to take today’s platform offerings from ‘good enough’ to ‘great’ since we are all now getting on the bus.

Adoption – fun versus efficient

I love how this diagram highlights that the adoption of ‘fun’ things is much more viral than the adoption of ‘efficient’ things. Of particular interest with this diagram is that it considers older innovations and how they took off. This is part of the allure of gamification…. making things fun.

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This diagram is from the article “Household appliances and the use of time: the United States and Britain since the 1920s” by Sue Bowden and Avner Offer.  It was published in The Economic History Review, Volume 47, Issue 4, pages 725–748, November 1994.  

Gamification – the emperor has no clothes!

Shortly before the holidays I decided to stop checking in through Yelp’s iPhone app. I really gave it a go. For around 6 months I regularly checked in when I was at restaurants, grocery stores, music lessons, basically anywhere I went. What do you suppose I earned for over 300 manual check-ins?

I’m proud to tell you I’m the “duke” of 20 different places. I have acquired the prestige of 6 special “badges” while also being recognized by yelp as a “regular” at 11 establishments. Impressive, right?

No discounts. No special treatment. Nothing tangible. Just feel-good ego-stroking nothingness. This form of gamification simply plays to our competitive nature. It is hollow and empty.  I feel like I am wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Games are fun and don’t need to translate into tangible stuff but somehow I feel like somebody gets something tangible out of this.  Somebody also has gone through great pains to make me think I’m getting something out of it. 

I’m not faulting Yelp here, they are working with what they have and riding a trend.  However, I am concerned as we see more and more gamification in software offerings (particularly in the mobile space), we will begin to see more and more distrust by users.  Nobody wants to feel used… nobody wants to realize they are parading through the streets with no clothes on.

Practical uses for web 2.0 – your annual review

We’ve all heard the stories about web 2.0 and social computing and the difficulties some have in understanding its value inside the enterprise.  Seems like many people are confused or uncertain about why social web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise even exist.  They struggle to know where to start and how to apply it to the work they do.

Well, we’re all on the hook to do our annual reviews.  And that assessment can have some important impacts on both our personal and professional lives.  Perhaps introducing how social computing can help us all tackle this annual review challenge can help to unlock the value for some folks.

  • Blogs – Lots of folks (including managers) have tips on preparing and documenting your annual achievements.
  • Social bookmarks – Find pages that others found valuable by searching bookmarks tagged as “annual review”
  • File sharing – Look for presentations and documents on sites like slideshare.net to help you understand and prepare for the process
  • Discussion forums & microblogs – Practical real-time discussions about different topics…. A whole community who can help

Once you’ve used Web 2.0 tools to help with a personal / business effort, think how you could use it in other ways.

  • Planning your career
  • Doing research for a new project
  • Learning about a new product
  • Getting help on a challenge you face
  • Learning more about the folks you work with
  • Finding a SME to help you
  • Etc.

There’s an old saying…..  give a man a fish and he eats for a day… teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.   Good luck fishing!

 

Is Moore’s Chasm theory telling intraprenaurs something? Are we listening?

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Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is written with a specific focus of marketing high tech products to mainstream consumers. It cautions how many high tech new ventures fail in reaching mainstream adoption primarily because those companies don’t evolve their marketing strategies to cater to the tastes and preferences of a the very pragmatic early majority audience whose motivations and risk tolerance differ significantly from their existing visionary/early adopter clients.

I believe there is some wisdom in Moore’s pages for internal innovation teams as well. Complementing Andrew Chen’s recent blog, it seems we largely lack a consistent process or approach with respect to stimulating demand with more pragmatic and conservative user communities inside the firewall. Some firms have great internal programs for gaining early adopters and refining some of their technical innovations. But what happens we the pilot ends? Where is the graduate program that guides those early successes into more mainstream audiences?

Don’t get me wrong… being successful with innovator and early adopter types accounts for nearly 16% of the user population. In a firm with 300,000+ employees, 16% represents nearly 50,000 users. Reaching 50,000 internal users is remarkable and should be celebrated as an incredible success in and of itself.

BUT if we can break through to the early majority types, that is where the significant economies of scale and ROI really kick in. By gaining traction in the early majority, the usage would grow from 50k to 150k users. That is 3 times the value at nearly the same cost to support just 50,000 users.

Sure there are some internal innovations that have made it to the “big show” primarily through viral growth inside the firewall. But there are many other promising capabilities that seem to plateau and don’t quite make it to the more mainstream internal user. I believe we can overcome this adoption challenge through marketing innovation rather than technical innovation.