This is the video of my talk at the Lucene revolution conference in San Francisco. If you don’t want to listen to my voice the slides are availble on slideshare..
Search, APIs, capability management and the Sensis journey Presented by Craig Rees, Sensis from Lucene Revolution on Vimeo.
Over the past few months, I’ve been through a couple of strategy development and product roadmap type exercises and the key thing that jumped out at me is where do the ideas come from, is idea generation a skill you are born with or is it a process you can learn or for that matter, instigate within an organization?
Big companies seem to be bad a idea generation, it seems to happen in pockets of individuals but it doesn’t come together in a way that allows new products to be brought to market, I recently read an interesting article (from pragmatic marketing) about how you shouldn’t or rather can’t innovate like Apple, so how are we supposed to do it, and who in an organization should be doing it.
I don’t know about physical companies and so my thoughts may have no value to you what so ever (that has never stopped me talking before) but when it comes to the digital economy everyone in an organization should have the opportunity to put their ideas forward and with the right environment the best ideas should float to the top.
There are certain parts of the organization that should spend a significant part of their day looking at the external marketplace, The Strategy department should be looking at new business models along with vertical and horizontal market expansions, marketing should be looking at the customer and be an advocate for their needs, product should have their finger on the pulse of their industry, knowing what’s hot and what’s not, who is doing what and what is the next game changer coming around the corner, and technology should be investigating new platforms, architectures, patterns and frameworks. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case and most of the time these departments are totally focused on BAU and the products that are already in the market place, the products that are hitting maturity not the ideas that require investigation.
And then there are all of the other passionate people within an organization that want to contribute to success and who have been formulating that off the wall concept that will blow the competition away.
Firstly the teams who have direct responsibility for idea generation and new product development should be targeted and incentivized to do their job properly, secondly there has to be a process by which all ideas can be reviewed, filtered, evaluated and tested quickly with the chaff being thrown away and the gems being taken forward. The R&D team plays a key role in this process.
More thoughts to come on this one…
Since starting to play around with Twitter, I’ve been amazed at how quickly the twitter ecosystem has changed from random tweets about people waiting for a train or listening to the radio to crowd sourcing for answers to difficult questions.
Last week I noticed someone asking the crowd for a restaurant to go to while they were in San Francisco. There are many stats floating around at the moment pertaining to the level of influence that user reviews can have on product selection but this seems to be going to a new level (A form of digital word of mouth that crosses geographical and social boundaries and delves into the remit of local search providers).
I think this is still an early adopter usage trend but it could have huge implications on how people search for products and services, it may not be the Google game breaker but it will definitely have a disruptive influence on search as we know it today.
We’ve been using Yammer (a cross between twitter, a blog and a wiki for internal organizational use) at work for the past few months, at first there was little activity, but I think we must have hit a critical mass because there are a lot of really interesting conversations going on, even the advent of senior management signing up hasn’t reduced the level of interaction or the tone of conversations.
At the start the majority of conversations were about events in the media, blog posts or interesting articles that had been found, in fact at times it felt a bit like a race to read Techcrunch or Mashable and a post a link, but we are now starting to discuss new business opportunities, feature enhancements and project issues which is great, as people who wouldn’t normally be involved in these types of conversations are taking an active role in the discussion.
Even better the platform seems to have a business model which should mean its around for a while which can only be a good thing.
Over the Christmas break I’ve started reading Fast Company magazine again (I don’t know why I stopped in the first place, its a great read, not just about technology but about how business can work). November’s edition, courtesy of airmail has a great article about Gary Flake. Gary is head of Live Labs at Microsoft, basically Microsoft’s innovation department (Think Yahoo brick house). What is great is that this guy was chief science officer at Overture then head of research for Yahoo (very cool jobs) and then he took a job at Microsoft – not what may people would do.
Reading the article 2 things jump out at me, firstly that Microsoft is actually trying to be innovative in the online space not just chucking out office software with too many functions, secondly is how Gary has gone about building innovation into company such as Microsoft.
Some of the facts covered are interesting such as the ratio of 1 designer to 10 engineers in Live Labs compared to 1 to 100 in Microsoft proper, but I particularly like the way that when Live Labs hits a problem (or brick wall) due to the companies organisational structure it first tries to work with the system, if this doesn’t work they try to go around the system, if this doesn’t work they walk straight over the top of if.
Having work in a few big companies (I’m currently in another one) I tend to get frustrated by the lack of action, decision take forever, business cases even longer and delivery well you might as well wait for your pension. I hope that when I get the chance that I follow Gary’s approach; I guess if you are right most of the time you have little to lose, for the rest of us mere mortals we probably need an understanding boss, that or a sod it attitude.