The October issue of the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce has published our research on “The State of Risk Assessment Practices in Information Security“. It’s not easy to get data on information security practices (it’s secret, after all), but our survey was able to find associations between doing the things that security experts say we should be doing–more frequent risk assessment, use of quantitative loss estimates, more complete asset inventories–and higher levels of user satisfaction and perceived usefulness. Check it out.
This work was done with research wonder Jackie Rees at Purdue University.
The US has about 20 million businesses with only one person–the owner. Except for rare cases like plentyoffish.com (the #6 online dating service in the US, and #1 in Canada, serving hundreds of thousands of love-seekers every day), one-person microbusinesses are small money individually, but together add up to $1 trillion per year in revenue.
The number of free or cheap online tools for running a business is growing (see this article from mashable.com with 270 tools for small business). Open source tools for business are increasing in sophistication. But what about those times when even an eBay shop or PayPal button is too complicated for the budding online business person?
Enter the blogshop, a term used in Singapore to describe teenagers setting up a free blog with items for sale, usually funky fashions or accessories. Forget shopping carts or credit cards for most blogshops–buyers simply email or leave a comment for what they want, then do a bank transfer, or hide ‘concealed cash’ in an envelope. The buyers pick up their goods by mail, or by meeting at a subway station. Sometimes buyers band together for a ‘shopping spree’ to Taiwan or Korea to pick up the latest fashions.
Blogshop directories like blogshopr.com and emall.sg list over 300 blogshops in Singapore. A survey in the Straits Times found that 30% of blogshop owners spend over 20 hours per week on their sites. It’s not the route that I would choose for starting an online store, but sometimes ease and simplicity win over functionality.
The story quoted a young business school student as saying she learned much more about business from her blogshop than her ‘boring’ lectures. I have a difficult time imagining a ‘boring’ business school lecture, but that’s just me…
Slides from my MBA mini-lecture, 5 things you can do with your customers online, are here as promised. Offered as part of our USF MBA Kickoff week.
My advice for MBAs starting with social media? Try these simple tasks first:
- Set a google alert for a topic you care about (LISTENING)
- Comment on a corporate blog (CONVERSATION)
- Send a product evangelist email (EVANGELISM)
- Answer a question on an online forum (SELF-SUPPORT)
- Vote for a product idea online (CO-CREATION)
While WordCamp 2008 attendees were likely impressed with the huge number of page views (6.5 billion per year - roughly one for every person on the planet) and monthly unique visitors (up to 160 million per month) being racked up by wordpress.com, I was focused on a different number.
2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com. But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com. That’s a close race.
In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.
The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible. The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous. Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts). Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category. We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress. (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)
Not all is perfect in one-click install land. Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started. But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future: not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.
Tech is back, people. Two huge reasons:
- Tech is still innovating big-time. Thanks to innovation, tech-centric industries (software, networks, online, services), and closely related industries (electronics, telcos, digital media, entertainment, gaming, tech consulting), are going strong in tough economic times. We’re the ‘real’ economy now!
- Hardcore tech is easier to access than ever. It’s never been easier to move beyond being just a ‘user’ by actually customizing, assembling, and developing your very own apps and services.
In an effort to capture the excitement of this new era, we have launched the non-award-winning “You belong in tech” ad campaign to get students fired up. The campaign only consists of an eight slide presentation, but each slide is extremely high impact.
We have also launched the Campaign for Real Tech (CRT), which consists entirely of this blog post. CRT believes that a business school education in San Francisco deserves serious tech coverage. Students, if you want to learn more about any of these topics, leave a comment on this page, or grab your nearest b-school administrator:
social media, social technologies, online communities, tech product management, tech marketing and sales, web 2.0, open source, open innovation, enterprise architectures, web analytics, web apps, e-commerce (yes, it’s back), content management, customer relationship management, APIs and platforms, search engine placement, online ads, online experience management, usability, virtual worlds, mobility, location-based services, sensor tech, or enterprise 2.0
If you want to change the world, this is the time.
Fresh from the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08), slides from my talk on “How Web 2.0 Communities Solve the Knowledge Sharing Problem.” (Thanks to Andrew Clement for checking during the talk and seeing the slides weren’t there as promised! Caught again.)
The main addition to the original paper are thoughts about where we might apply knowledge sharing techniques from Web 2.0 communities. First, by bringing these knowledge sharing tools and practices into businesses as they are organized today (Enterprise 2.0). Second, and more profoundly, by helping to create a ‘business commons’ that shares practices and knowledge normally kept (and constantly reinvented) within specific organizations.
The only other addition is data on how the web itself has changed. Web pages are no longer just hypertext, but serve more as an interface to other resources (on average, there are 50 links to outside objects per page) and an environment for running programs (on average, 7 scripts per page, plus code on the server side). Web 2.0 is not just a business concept—it is also grounded in changes to the web itself.
The rest of the economy may be going to hell, but American tech companies are still going strong. Last week’s article in Network World featured some of my thoughts on why tech is holding up, and whether we’re headed for a repeat of the early 2000’s recesssion that started the dot.com crash.
Why might this downturn different from the dot.com days? From the article:
“Back then, company value was based on the stock price and now it’s based on revenues,” Allen says. “We used to talk about the New Economy. Now it’s the Real Economy. . . . You see over and over again that the financial results in the tech industry are based in reality. They’re not based on speculation about share prices or hopes that you can monetize visitors to your Web site.”
I go on to talk about how Enterprise 2.0 and analytics are hot areas for investment growth, how the U.S. IT labor force is larger than its ever been in history (including during the dot.com days), and how there’s real money behind these trends. It sounds like the happy days might be here again. Or maybe today’s days are even better, because they’re no longer based on fantasy (except for the multi-billion dollar online role-playing games industry, of course…).
Network World 4/25/08: “No slowdown for U.S. tech industry”. Also published on CIO.com.
Does our Information Technology match our values? That’s not a question you typically hear companies asking. They usually ask: does the technology match my business and technical requirements?
Requirements are the right way to think about technology needs, the argument goes, because requirements are objective, consistent, and can be ‘frozen’ to prevent changes. If someone were crazy enough to base technology decisions on an organization’s values, it would be doomed to failure, because values are fuzzy, changing, and usually self-contradictory.
But what if values are the bedrock that doesn’t change, while requirements come and go? Or, what if our attempts to define away conflicting values as ‘fixed’ requirements just don’t match reality? Can we find practical ways to accommodate differences between values (deeply-held beliefs about priorities) and goals (the temporarily negotiated requirements that allow work to continue) that do not go away?
I’m working on a new project with Karin Hedström at the Swedish Business School, Örebro University on how to cope with technology values in a practical way. She’s written extensively on technology values in health care, where values like quality care, administrative efficiency, and medical records security battle for supremacy in a very messy and complicated environment. I’m writing about the openness vs. accuracy tensions in new web communities such as wikipedia, where the technology builds in support for discussing how to resolve value conflicts.
Karin and her PhD student Ella Kolkowska were in San Francisco last week as Visiting Scholars at USF. It was wonderful having them here. Thanks to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) for sponsoring their visit.
The newly-released book Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion looks at how positive visions of the future convince people to invest in, adopt, and use new technologies. For many emerging technologies, rational arguments and financials aren’t enough, because of the uncertainty. At some point, there has to be a leap of faith. But how does this leap of faith happen?
My chapter, “Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies,” is a study of more than 2,500 articles published over a 10 year period, to see how companies in the once-hot Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) space convinced themselves to make big investments in the technology.
Through arguments with colorful names such as new mass markets, killer features, inevitable progressions, bundling together, and the ever-popular horse race, 34 of the leading companies in computing, telecom, and consumer electronics convinced themselves to make major PDA investments, though most were soon abandoned. When success didn’t materialize as quickly as they hoped, they used variants of these arguments to rationalize their failures.
The chapter includes two short case studies of companies that were able to successfully resist the prevailing rhetoric of the day, and how they did it. The British PDA maker Psion managed to resist the craze for ‘pen-based computing’, while the American company Palm resisted the conventional wisdom of phone-based ‘communicator’ PDAs with their own vision of a ‘connected organizer’.
(Added 6/23/08) A nice review of the book here that mentions the chapter.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 