Friday Reading #12

My job title is Social Technologies Specialist. I made up this job title in an attempt to show my areas of interest and focus. The problem is that the majority of social technologies i.e. the ‘media’ bit, I am getting rather bored with for a number of reasons, mainly the attempts to shoe horn exisiting ways of working into new models of interaction and particiapation. Emperor’s new clothes etc. I still believe in the value of these technologies but I am disillusioned by them at the moment and I am more interested in the linking pieces of the next generation of infrastructure APIs, Identity and Open Data. That being said I still want the company I work for to be good on Twitter. My favourite link of the week is a fictional story about social media use in large organisations. It resonated strongly with me as did @LouLouK’s post about the difficulties of being human on the web and working for Government. They point to a real challenge organisations have in presenting this glowing, shiny and perfect corporate brand vs the fact they are just made up of humans. In the seemingly endless drive for ‘greater customer engagement’ and ‘increased transparency’ allowing your human side to show is really the only way to achieve those things, without letting your people be who they are then they are just lazy business platitudes or buzzphrases du jour. Happy Friday All!

Four Million Followers

“Once or twice he replied to joking references or complaints with counter-jokes, and was surprised to discover that these replies usually ended up featured on well-known blogs and humour sites. He decided that people were so starved for interaction from faceless corporations so prevalent in their lives that even a small reply was taken as a special event. An acknowledgment by an unknowable and opaque authority, of sorts.”

Forgive me, for I have sinned

“Because on the flip side of this, there is a ‘thing’ around people getting to see that Civil Servants are normal people. Just normal people. We read MIT review, Forbes, Boing Boing and El Reg. We disagree with some things that happen in the world, we find science fascinating, we watch in awe as David Attenborough shows us yet more of the wonders of the world, and we get stuck in snow related transport failures. Just like everyone else. We are not faceless, we are not boring, we don’t wear bowler hats (well, most of us) and we have opinions.”

The Computing Deployment Phase

“What industries are the best candidates for the next phase of deployment? The likely candidates are the information-intensive mega-industries that have been only superficially affected by the internet thus far: education, healthcare, and finance. Note that deployment doesn’t just mean creating, say, a healthcare or education app. It means refactoring an industry into its “optimal structure” – what the industry would look like if rebuilt from scratch using the new technology.”

Welcome to the stack: the end of mainframe banking

“By embracing change and working within the grain of this new paradigm, incumbent banks can do much to ensure their future success and survival and will find it much easier to rebuild trust – with customers, regulators and their communities – mitigating the short term pain and setting themselves on a path to sustainable profitability. The alternative is to keep doing the same thing and slowly but surely rust away. The best banking executives of tomorrow will need to be as familiar with APIs and SDKs as they are with APRs andRAROC.”

Clayton Christensen Wants to Transform Capitalism

“You could see how, in each generation, an established company would start focusing on bigger, more powerful disks for the top end of the market and then just get wiped out when the lower end of the market found a way to make smaller, cheaper disks, even though those had lower profit margins. It made my thesis. Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.”

Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing

“Over time the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing. But when Microsoft got on top, it slowly started choking off the pathways to success for everybody else. It stopped creating more value than it captured.”

How Nest’s Control Freaks Reinvented the Thermostat

“I said, ‘How do I design this home when the primary interface to my world is the thing in my pocket?’?” says Fadell. He baffled architects with demands that the home’s every feature, from the TV to the electricity supply, be ready for a world in which the Internet and mobile apps made many services more responsive.”

Nike: the no.1 most innovative company of 2013

“One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that’s happy with its success,” he says. “Companies fall apart when their model is so successful that it stifles thinking that challenges it. It’s like what the Joker said–‘This town needs an enema.’ When needed, you’ve got to apply that enema, so to speak.”

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