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It's getting kind of late ...
Do you know where your next innovations are?
Technology Scout is a technology intelligence service tuned to your enterprise. On the look-out for:
· What new tech is important to your enterprise?
Does a day go by without an announcement about technology that is supposed to change your business or your life? How can you tell what each incremental change might mean? What can make you more productive, more efficient, more flexible and adaptive to your constituents' needs.
· What new tech might represent new opportunity for your enterprise?
A press release about a new technology is intended to sketch the features of the new thing, but it cannot speak to the specific needs or possibilities it represents for you and your enterprise.
· What new tech might represent a threat to your enterprise?
It's best to look ahead and try to spot trouble before it strikes. No successful enterprise can afford to be simply responsive to external events, and it can't ignore the reality and inevitability of change.
Full service available
The Technology Scout specializes in Web-based technologies clustered around:
- Server-based applications (so-called "computing in the cloud")
- Remote services and applications ("cloud computing")
- Web 2.0/3.0 applications that support collaboration, social networking ("community") and publishing
But no industry category is too remote for the Scout's attentions. Manufacturing, transportation, politics, education, agriculture - just a few of the fields in which the Scout has sniffed out new approaches and techniques and products that can change the course of business.
The good Scout always teaches the client - teaching him how to interpret the lay of the land, the tracks across the landscape, the signs of what has past and what is out ahead. And how to tell a valid track from the tech scat of dangerous predators ahead.
The network is the new metaphor for organization and basic relationships for the 21st century. Over the centuries we have seen the mind set evolve from simple lists to hierarchies. From alphabetization to complex indexing schemes like Dewey or the Library of Congress system. In fact, all these models benefit from the innate relationships and connections visible and navigable through the networks in which they exist.
Based on the network metaphor, an analysis of individual elements of your enterprise, along with relationships among those elements and trends of change.
RAB Communications will also handle:
- independent program production,
- project management,
- application of community and social networking dynamics to specific business problems,
- communications planning across the plethora of media appropriate for the messages and the audiences
Some Tech Scout "Rules of the Road"
- Networks and the emergent behavior nurtured by networks, both drive and control events in the 21st century world.
- Create "process" plans, not end-state objectives. There is no end state, only landmarks along a spectrum of change.
- Self-competition and creative destruction are uncomfortable but necessary realities. Look for opportunities to re-invent yourself before a capable competitor does it for you.
- Watch for the perverse in technology changes:
- Large processes (e.g., printing on demand, audio/video production, banking, education) tend toward the small, portable and personnel
- Small processes (e.g.., email, diary-keeping) become larger than life, very public, widely distributed, disproportionately impactive
Keeping up
Check out the on-going saga of the Next Big Thing. Tech Scout is more concerned about the wealth of opportunities to be found on the path to the Next Big Industry - Desktop Fabrication.
Here's why: 3D Printers - Fabrication on your desktop (Dorkbot Blog)
Here are more trailblazes (interesting/wise commentary packaged as books) that the Tech Scout has been reading in recent weeks:
- Influencer, by Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, MacMillan, Switzler (authors of Crucial Conversations) - If a habit is one of the hardest things in the universe, how do you encourage people to change of their own accord?
- The New Rules of Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott - Marketing and promotion cannot be after-thoughts - they are integral parts of product design, sales and service - this is a modern look, developed in part by a crowd-sourcing/community technique.
- The Design of Future Things, by Donald A. Norman - A look at the results of applying that least accessible resource - common sense - to efficient and effective design of new products and re-design of old ones. By a hero of the culture.
- Cradle to Cradle, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart - We have major issues with pollution and waste disposal because we design things to pollute and become waste. What if we turned that process on its head? Can capitalism survive in a world without waste? Can people survive in a world filled with waste?
- Smart World, by Richard Ogle - How network science impacts the "idea spaces" in which culture grows and innovation emerges.
- The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki - The bizarre but real dynamic among populations enabling them to know more than they think they know individually.
- Group Genius, by Keith Sawyer - How groups can work together in specific ways to take advantage of the group dynamic to speed innovation and adoption of new ideas.
- The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman & Rod Beckstrom - How supposedly "leaderless" organizations can out-perform and out-survive the classic command-and-control governance structures so common in corporate America.
- Glut, by Alex Wright - How our ideas about recognizing and organizing information have changed over the centuries - it's very instructive to know how many "new" ideas have their roots in ancient world views and practices.
For more resources about the evolution of network science and the dynamics of "emergent behavior" - Check out this Listmania on Amazon.
EnterpriseOhio Network IT Roundtable.
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