Outside Innovation

Gadget Freaks: Do Your Bit to Bolster the Economy!

I know that many of you love to use and show off the latest high-tech gadgets. Here’s a link to the winners of the 2008 Electronics Awards from the Consumer Electronics Association: Award-Winning Innovation. My favorites: the robot gutter cleaner and the Yoggie Pico security system – a Linux system running on a USB-sized computer to keep your system secure from threats.

   

Uganda Rural University for Women Podcast

A discussion on an amazing story of grassroots innovation, learning celebration, and community empowerment: http://podcast.oregonstate.edu/

Patient-Centric Health Care Coordination

Health is of vital importance to all of us. Healthcare policy, effectiveness and healthcare business models are hotly debated topics in the political arena, in boardrooms, and at social and family gatherings. Although we may debate the merits of single-payer models and nationalized medicine and the roles of insurers, government, and care-givers, there are several issues on which everyone seems to agree.

Don’t Shift Business Intelligence into Your IT Organization!

Last month, SAP agreed to acquire Business Objects. This week, IBM scooped up Cognos. Both companies’ shareholders received nice valuations. Business intelligence used to be an optional “nice to have” competitive differentiator. Now it has become a “must have” capability to run your business. Organizations that made good use of business intelligence differentiated themselves in the marketplace because they were able to spot trends, identify needs, and correlate seemingly unrelated factors (purchases of diapers and beer; purchases of chainsaws and mattresses).

Today business intelligence applications are no longer confined to the marketing department’s research analysts. BI applications are highly distributed and deeply integrated into many companies’ day-to-day operations. They track inventory, they monitor patient outcomes, they monitor financial risk, they predict customer defections, they correlate operational execution (inventory on shelf, flight delay, equipment downtime) with revenue forecasts and customers’ future buying behaviors. Today’s business intelligence applications are also among the most interesting applications because they’re typically written in-house by subject matter/domain experts; not by professional programmers.

As SAP and IBM’s acquisitions attest, business intelligence has moved from “nice to have” to “must have” investments for most organizations. BI needs to be tightly integrated, albeit loosely coupled, into the applications that run your operations. The danger in turning business intelligence into a core component of your IT operational infrastructure is that the care and feeding of business intelligence may wind up in the IT organization, rather than in the lines of business. The development of business intelligence applications might wind up in the hands of IT analysts as opposed to business analysts. This would NOT be a good thing!

Why Is Everyone Agog about Google’s OpenSocial ?

Last week Microsoft invested in Facebook. This week, Google unveiled the first details about its OpenSocial API platform. This move hit the news big time. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch broke the news. The New York Times ran Miguel Helft's and Brad Stone's story yesterday, and the Times' Saul Hansell blogged about it today. The blogosphere has been in a state of buzzaphoria for the past few days,  and Google's stock has soared again.

What Is OpenSocial? Instead of competing directly with other social networking providers, Google is spearheading an initiative to create a cross-social network set of APIs. As Stowe Boyd explains in his blog post, Google OpenSocial: The Open Common Services Approach, there are three key APIs:

• Profile Information (user data)

• Friends Information (social graph)

• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The way I read the preliminary information, the profile API enables you to request and send information about people; the Friends API enables you to request and offer connections and social graphs; The Activities APIs let you request and send information about activities (events, dates, locations, files, updates). Here's the link for the actual Google API (soon to be made live): OpenSocial API 

Instead of being platform-specific (working only with LinkedIn or Facebook, for example), the idea is to create a set of high-level standard calls that will work across social network platforms. Developers could then write applications to these “meta-APIs” and know that their applications can plug and play with dozens of social networking platforms.