Anatomy of a Hackday project

It’s hard to believe it was less than a week ago when I first started focusing on a concept I called Butterfly in preparation for HackDay at IBM.  Now we are less than a week in and we have a working prototype in its third iteration, a project wiki, some reasonable documentation, and lots of ideas on how to go farther….  all thanks to an ad-hoc team of seven collaborators in six different time zones around the world.  It’s been beautiful.  We are hoping to find some more collaborators to help out.

Butterfly

Here’s how the story unfolded (so far)….
I was recently trying out the StumbleUpon toolbar and found it really interesting and fun.  And it showed me stuff I would have never come upon.  And it occurred to me we have the same challenge / opportunity inside the enterprise.

  • What if we could provide a simple & fun way to help users explore the wealth of high-quality items tagged by staff?
  • What if we could weld together several of the wonderful internal web 2.0 tools to provide value for users, communities, and tool owners?
  • What if it was easy to create, easy to use, and got more powerful the more it was used?

Sure “stumbling” from site to site on the web is fun but it got me thinking about whether there was more value in the context of a business environment.  I’m pretty familiar with the challenges we all face when trying to find information, expertise, or new ideas.  There are lots of popular social tools being used inside my company.   Unfortunately, today its not very simple to converge my need to find high-quality content with all the tools that are available to assist me… there are too many options and they all have different learning curves.  Stumble lead me to think we could merge together my personal/professional interests with several internal data sources and incorporate some kind of rating/quality assessment based on social/community input.

But how to do it?  It seemed to me that we already had many of the puzzle peices available in the form of APIs.

  • Content: We have multiple sources of tagged content
  • Interests: Users can select from the Top 100 tags or enter their own keyword.
  • Ratings: We have a ratings widget that allows users to give stars.
  • Social networks: We have several “friending” applications
  • Blogs: We have existing vehicles for users to be able to comment / blog on things.

Since I’m not an especially astute coder I needed some help to figure that part out. I posted a ‘help wanted’ entry on the Hackday blog. To the rescue comes a group of folks around the globe who were intrigued by the idea and willing to give it a try.  It wasn’t until 3pm ET on Friday (Hackday) that we had our first informal conference call…. with just a few of the interested parties.  Well, turns out having the call so late on a Friday was a blessing. With the weekend right around the corner and an interesting challenge, our more technical collaborators found some time to noodle around over the weekend.

By Monday afternoon, the first prototype was born…. our butterfly was now out of the cocoon!  The Butterfly toolbar was created and the main algorithm for randomizing pages (what we call ‘flutter’ for boucing from site to site) was working!  When I installed it and Fluttered for the first time it brought back some coffee sites…. because part of my ‘About me” in one of our profile systems said I was into coffee.  Not only was I getting bookmarked pages but my profile preferences were implicitly built from my one of my social profiles.   Now we are onto something.

Yesterday afternoon the team met for the second time and by then they had incorporated some ratings capabilities and stubbed out the other elements of the toolbar.  Ideas started swirling around about getting more sources of interesting content…. so now we want to see about pulling in user-tagged content from other repositories.  We are also working to evolve the UI and enable the other stubbed out features.

Tag your name tag

I recently attended a barcamp event. One of the interesting activities that started the event was just registering. Once at the event, we were all asked to ‘tag our tag’ and indicate who we were and add a few tags about why we were there. I found this to be really a good way to explicitly state my agenda and interests.

We were all there on a Saturday and the focus of the event was Africa (BarCampAfrica). What I ended up observing was that most people simply put their name and company. I found it strange that so many people chose to “tag” themselves with the company they work for.

I chatted with a few other attendees about this and we discussed it was pretty common for people to automatically associate themselves with their company. Sure… makes sense. But I sure hope the next time more people tag themselves with interests rather than corporate associations. We lost an opportunity to make it easier to connect with one another based on common interests.

Reflections on BarCamp Africa

Yesterday I had an incredibly stimulating day at BarCamp Africa. There were just so many positive elements to this event I first need to create a list. (Each item below deserves its own post)

1) Effective use of social networking & web 2.0 tools before, during, after the event.
2) Incredibly positive attitudes and smart, passionate people.
3) Panel discussions that were “intimate conversations” between 150 people.
4) Tagging your name tag; tagging Africa map before and after.
5) Strong engagement of attendees to really participate not just observe
6) Broad range of interesting break-out sessions
7) Energy radiated by the Google campus
8) One session I participated in that was absolutely beautiful in how it unfolded
9) Self learning about helping and collaborating
10) Feeling like a true global citizen, proud, changed
11) Inspiration for possible book/study and new collaboration session format
12) Incredibly practical innovations and inventions
13) …..

So much more. I’m still processing.

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.

Resume keyword cloud

I heard about wordle.net via some tweets and decided to check it out.  It is a where you can very easily create some interesting and highly customizable visualizations of keyword clouds.  Here’s a sample I created based on my resume.

Wc-resume-tagcloud

There appear to be many visualization apps out there including IBM’s own Many Eyes.  I find these visualizations to be really powerful in communicating magnitude and scale.  I’m sure lots can be learned if we apply visualization techniques more often to data and content we handle on a daily basis.

Mike Moran – a mentor retiring from IBM

For those of you that don’t know Mike, he’s a Distinguished Engineer who has had an illustrious 30 year career at IBM.  Mike just announced his retirement from IBM.  I had the pleasure of meeting Mike Moran one time.  Since that brief encounter just a handful of months ago, I have learned much from Mike indirectly.  I try to keep up with his external blog (Biznology) and even follow him on Twitter.  (Not quite stalking him but close.)  He is full of sage advice and practical tips.  He is knowledgeable yet humble.  He is techy turned marketer.  He is a mentor to me without even knowing it.

Thank you Mike for making me feel confident that its ok to be interested in what a business can get from technology without having to know how all the technology works.  Focusing on the business value that is derived from practical, common-sense application of technology rather than simply valuing the technology itself is a critical (but sometimes rare) insight to have.  Although you are leaving IBM, I will continue to gain insights and knowledge from your external activities.  Best of luck.

When am I gonna die? It depends on what you factor in….

A friend sent me a link to a Real Age calculator which takes you through a series of simple-to-answer questions and gives you insights to how old your body is actually functioning as and what your life expectancy is based on your answers. The thing I found interesting was that this calculator asked about 34 different factors that can contribute to your “real age” — talk about a comprehensive model. It covered everything from the typical health items (smoker, cholesterol, etc) to unexpected characteristics such as whether I am bald or not, whether I feel happy or not, how far I drive each year, etc.

I can image a day when it becomes more commonplace to use more comprehensive models for our decision making activities. The thing is there are a bunch of less-known factors which can alter outcomes in meaningful ways. In the application requirement world, we typically consider things like who is sponsoring the item, which user groups it is beneficial for, how much it will cost, etc. Unfortunately we don’t have well defined models for getting at some of the other unexpected but influential characteristics… is it “sexy” and fun, will it generate buzz, is it part of a critical process, etc.

Look, I’m an overweight guy and have been most of my life. If my life expectancy was based on just that factor, I should be on my deathbed by now. Fortunately, its more complex than that. So I like to know that my encroaching baldness and my happiness levels and many other things are other indicators of my “real age” so I can keep on going. Sure, I still need to lose weight but at least I won’t statistically keel over tomorrow.

Tone sets the mood

I have a pretty big presentation to make this week and I’m a little nervous. The charts are all done so now it’s about the delivery. My message is one of opportunity so I need to establish that before getting past the title page. I want to immediatey set the right context with my audience.

My wife has given me great advise time and time again. And she shared some wisdom with me for this event as well. She told me to try to:

  1. Be enthusiastic – let the audience see the passion
  2. Be confident yet vulnerable – demonstrate your competence but be honest with where your weaknesses are
  3. Know what I want to achieve – focus on the 2-3 big takeaways you want your audience to get

I’ve been giving presentations for years but I know I can incorporate some of this into my preparation process. So much to do in 2 minutes before digging in but with some forethought it is completely achievable. Thanks for the reminder that memorable presentations require more than good slides.

Middle-aged degree worth it

Today I received my degree certificate in the mail and it led me to thinking that I’m glad I had more business experience before pursuing my MBA. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t consciously decide to defer graduate school… I simply didn’t have the ambition to go after an advanced degree when I finished undergrad. But now, having just completed the Santa Clara University EMBA program at the age of 37, I think the lessons I learned over the last 2+ years are more meaningful and practical than if I had been exposed to the same teaching 10-15 years earlier.

Just out of school 3 months, I find I’m employing a whole range of approaches and techniques in interesting ways at work. So I’m immediately employing my learnings in my already-established career. I’m finding my level of analysis has deepened and I’ve matured in other ways thanks to the leadership skills I’ve acquired through this academic experience.

I’ve also learned much more about myself and can more accurately define the type of work I want to do, the type of company I want to work for, and the type of opportunities I am capable of aggressively pursuing. Fortunately, I’m finding there are worthy options available and my new degree has given me greater confidence in my capabilities in both known and unknown spaces.

I have great admiration for one of my friends from school. He not only decided to change jobs… he changes careers and industries. Bravo to you Mike… you are a brave one. I suspect Mike and many of my other Bronco brothers & sisters would echo the benefits I’ve expressed regarding getting a graduate degree when you are middle aged.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.