Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal Consultant at Information Architected, Inc. (IAI).

Today, the topic is Taking Open Innovation to a Global Organization.

In this episode, I am interviewing Jon Bidwell, the Chief Innovation Officer for Chubb & Son.

Mr. Bidwell is currently responsible for the development and deployment of Chubb’s global innovation platform, designed to engage employees and distribution in the collaborative development of new products, services and process improvements and has been with Chubb since 1983.

Jon and I had first met in Boston at an Imaginatik User Conference – where the sheer speed and completeness of both Jon (and Chubb’s) vision and execution truly stunned me. There is always room for innovation improvement, but as you will hear in this interview, building a strong innovation foundation has given them confidence that the future seeds of innovation have already been planted, sowing both short-term and long-term innovation success.

Key Concepts in Scaling Open Innovation

Scalability is a relative term, and the speed with which you can scale out, in this case to employees on a global scale, is not something that the vast majority of organizations have any experience with. If tapping more than the R&D or marketing departments for innovative ideas is of interest to you, then stay tuned…

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Jon Bidwell – Taking Open Innovation to a Global Organization

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Open Innovation? to engage employees, partners, and ultimately, the world?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within AND outside of your organization.

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected.

Today, the topic is Business Model Innovation – White Space and You.

In this episode, I am interviewing Mark Johnson, the author of a new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal.

Mark is chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India, which he cofounded with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. He has consulted to Global 1000 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries—including health care, aerospace/defense, enterprise IT, energy, automotive, and consumer packaged goods—and has advised Singapore’s government on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mark’s most recent work has focused on helping companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business model innovation.

Find copies of his new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, at your favorite online or brick and mortar book store. The official website for the book is www.seizingthewhitespace.com.

Key Concepts Covered on White Space Innovation

We cover several of the key concepts, including a deep dive into the Customer Value Proposition (CVP) and the “job to be done” mindset that Innosight typically uses in their work, which is part of an overall trend in innovation management that focuses on the outcomes that customers are searching for, rather than the products, services, or solutions-based approach, which is rapidly becoming a dated and dangerous approach.

We also discuss several aspects of innovation maturity – both from the standpoint of innovation practices, product innovation vs. process innovation vs. white space or business model innovation, as well as maturity in skillsets and personnel to execute on a variety of innovation initiatives.

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Mark Johnson – Business Model Innovation – White Space and You

Reference Materials for White Space Innovation

For reference, two of the figures or graphics referenced from the book, can be found below.

The Four-Box Business Innovation Model

And the Stages of Business Model Implementation

Closing Review

Whether you are just getting started with innovation management, or are already a seasoned innovator, I would readily recommend Seizing the White Space as a worthy addition to your innovation toolkit. Business Model Innovation may be the latest flavor of innovation to get air time, but not without good reason. By re-thinking the fundamentals of at least SOME aspect of your innovation portfolio, to make way for White Space Innovation opportunities, you will be in far better shape than your “head in the sand” competitors.

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for White Space discovery?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within your organization

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

A brief 20 minute video interview (embedded at the bottom) on the journey that a mid-sized company, Allyis, has taken in moving from a 1.0 to mindset, and where the journey will be CONTINUING to go from here on out. For them, 2008 was the watershed year when many previous efforts clicked into place and sent their 2.0 efforts into high gear.

Driven from the Top

This is the type of interview (audio, video or “just” text) that we typically do with Enterprise 2.0 customer engagements. The “soft” efforts that it takes to actively sow and reap Enterprise 2.0 needs all of the bottom-up AND top-down efforts you can bring to bear – while I’m a big proponent of emergent behavior, there’s nothing like stated dedication to an ongoing effort like a change of management thinking to Enterprise 2.0 to ACTUALLY (rather than theoretically) make change happen.

Allyis was kind enough to host me for 3-days last week in their offices in Kirkland, WA, for two separate sessions – one to continue sowing the seeds of Enterprise 2.0 Thinking (and Doing) with their executive and management team in a 2-day hybrid course of the Enterprise 2.0 Specialist course that Carl and I had developed for AIIM while we were the Market Intelligence unit of AIIM, and a 3rd day which I’ve been describing as a day-long Enterprise 2.0 keynote (I *think* that’s a good thing) largely for clients and the local contacts of Allyis to continue discussing and learning about Enterprise 2.0.

Engagement and 2.0 Nirvana

Fascinating discussions, and very interesting to hear how technology and/or culture lead and lag each other across various departments within companies, or across different organizations. Still a long way to go Enterprise 2.0 Nirvana, but I have to say I was VERY heartened to engage all of the people of Allyis and their peers in the Washington state area.

Hear what Ethan Yarbrough, President of Allyis had to say about the start of their journey, and the ongoing work they are doing to push to the front of the Enterprise 2.0 curve.

What are YOU doing in your business to BE Enterprise 2.0? Let us know – transparency, participation, feedback – no progress without reflection and refinement.

Any efforts that you’ve used to market, sell, educate on Enterprise 2.0 within your organization, chime in  – we’re using these materials to build up the story around the 2.0 Adoption Council. More stories = better.

(Downloadable MP4 version)

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Collaboration? to leverage the strengths of the workers and teams within the organization?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within your organization

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting
• Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 Workshops, Coaching and Consulting

While much of the work that we do is focused on the application of technology to business workers, we’ll depart from that theme in this interview, to address issues around personal development, team-based working, and the “strengths movement” coming out of Positive Psychology – along with the re-invention of the publishing industry in the form of Manga-style books, blogs, twitter, and more.

The interview today with best-selling author Dan Pink, who you may know from his books Free Agent Nation, A Whole New Mind, or the topic of today’s conversation, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.

While there are 6 major points covered in the Business Manga Novel “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko“  – we hone in on two of the six that I had felt were the most important to the conversations I have with my clients the and work that I do.

Those are:

1. Think strengths, not weaknesses
2. It’s not about you

We discuss how the implications of this book are most certainly useful for individuals to focus on their own careers and growth paths, but how the larger ramifications of fully engaging in these behaviors is at the root of what seem to be the complete OPPOSITE of these ideals – as embodied in the big, slow-moving, and currently floundering automotive and airline industries.

As always, a brief discussion as to what Twitter means to Dan in his work as an author and speaker, and a bit of a diversion on crowdsourcing efforts that Dan and his publisher used in order to uncover the prize-winning 7th secret piece of career advice, out of field of over one thousand entries, as narrowed by Dan, and ultimately, chosen by the crowd.

Any and all feedback welcomed – and if you have an innovation story that needs to be shared, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, either by commenting, or contacting me directly – dk[at]informationArchitected[dot]com or 617-933-9655.

Dan Pink can be found on Twitter as @danielpink, and as always, I’m @dankeldsen .

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Collaboration? to leverage the strengths of the workers and teams within the organization?

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Dan Pink

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Collaboration? to leverage the strengths of the workers and teams within the organization?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within your organization

More details on our practices related to Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

In this latest podcast, IAM Talking with Carlos Dominguez, Senior Vice President in Cisco’s Office of the Chairman of the Board and CEO.

Carlos has worked at Cisco for 17 years in a variety of roles, and advocates for the broad and creative use of technologies that are transforming how companies do business, creating distinct competitive advantages and new business models for those who adopt them.

Dominguez says that video, Web 2.0 applications and the increasing use of social networks, at home and at work, are at the heart of the collaboration revolution that is helping companies use the power of collective intelligence to produce revolutionary ideas for new products, better customer service and greater cost reductions.

For those who attended the Front End of Innovation (FEI) Boston show in May this year, you might recognize that is directly an area that I was covering in my presentation “Do you have the strength for Innovation in a 2.0 World?” (details and bonus content available)

It was a sincere pleasure of speaking at length with Carlos, and for my part, I believe we had a stunning array of innovation and collaboration-related tangents that emerged, which I believe are well worth paying attention to. Not your average interview, by any stretch.

A sampling of the highlights until we have a transcription ready:

Social networking and open innovation:
How did Journey find the next replacement singer after languishing for years with the missing voice of Steve Perry (lead singer) in the late 80s? YouTube and social networking located a replacement singer from… well, you’ll have to listen to find out.

Virtual meetings and worlds:
Cisco is not immune from the worldwide dip in the economy, has taken steps to ban all large scale travel for their sales meetings, executive meetings – at a 10x cost reduction (minimally), and with no perceived decrease in the richness or validity of the outcomes. What is the role of telepresence? Gaming as a competitive driver for salespeople? Take a listen.

Culture:
To paraphrase Carlos:

Most great innovations are killed within organizations… as they are threats to the existing business… and the Cisco culture is specifically built and tested to prevent potential ideas from being killed

Cisco has a requirement for executives and managers each quarter, or at the least, yearly, to indicate exactly what they are doing within their business unit to Innovate (BIG I in my vernacular or “disruptive innovation” to some) versus innovate (small i or improvememt) within their areas. How does this compare with YOUR organization?

Healthcare:
What is Cisco doing themselves, internally, to innovate in the health and wellness of it’s own employees as well as their families? and what has the impact of that investment been?

And much, much more in this slightly more than 30 minute interview…

We had some issues with Skype introducing noise into the system, but keep your ears open for some fantastic points on the state of Innovation within Cisco, Cisco’s customers, and what Carlos’ experiences in seeing and working with some of the most cutting-edge technologies available, make possible.

Any and all feedback welcomed – and if you have an innovation story that needs to be shared, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, either by commenting, or contacting me directly – dk[at]informationArchitected[dot]com or 617-933-9655.

Carlos can be found on Twitter as @carlosdominguez , and as always, I’m @dankeldsen.

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Collaboration? for a Global Workforce?

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Cisco

Is your Information Architected for Virtual Workers? for Collaboration?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture and design approach that will enable you to maximize the value of your workforce, regardless of where they might be without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

More details on our practices related to Collaboration can be found at:

• Information Architected for Collaboration
• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting
  

As far as IT organizations have come in the last few decades, there is still much that just doesn’t quite work as it should.

Why are IT (the technology) and IT teams (the people) frequently seen as “part of the problem” when they (and all other players) should all be part of the solution?

Is business as usual, chargebacks, and the practice of “running IT as a business” causing heartburn in YOUR organization?

Too much process, not enough practice = PROBLEMS…

Today’s interview is with Bob Lewis, who is president and a consultant at IT Catalysts – itcatalysts.com, the award-winning author of seven books which are distributed through his publishing company issurvivor.com and author of more than 650 columns dealing with how to effectively lead information technology organizations.

Bob is known for his unique blend of vision and pragmatism, the result of having been a practitioner as well as an advisor. He has held a wide variety of executive, staff and consulting positions in the field of information technology, as well as positions in manufacturing, product development, and business planning.

The discussion is hosted by Dan Keldsen (@dankeldsen), Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected, and discusses several of Bob’s manifestos from his most recent book, “Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology.”

The manifestos of Bob’s book eerily reflect my (Dan) own path through IT, which was part of the attraction in discussing this topic with Bob.

There are better ways to run IT folks, and with any luck, Bob and I have surfaced some useful business and IT practices for a saner and more agile way to run businesses.

What is your experience in the war or collaboration of IT in Business?

If you have examples (good or bad) within your business, I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU, so please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, we can work to not only keep the joint running, but make it far more likely that your organization will weather the recession and come out stronger your competitors who have NOT figured out the need to get everyone on-board and rowing together.

Is your Information Architected for Business? for Collaboration?

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking: The Problems of Process, In Practice

Is your Information Architected for Business? for Collaboration??

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture and design approach that will enable you to maximize the value of your content, information and knowledge without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

More details on our practices related to Collaboration can be found at:

• Information Architected for Collaboration
  

Let’s face it, most enterprise systems, the systems that employees have to use EVERY DAY to do their job, are painful interfaces to use. They are barely usable, let alone elegant.

Why is that?

And more importantly, what can be done to FIX this seemingly inevitable problem?

Is “elegance” to high a bar to ask that our systems, software, processes, products and services measure up to?

What is Elegance?

What makes a design elegant, and what can we borrow from design across a variety of industries, from entertainment to mobile devices, from manufacturing to ongoing learning, to bring elegance into our own companies?

The podcast interview today (below) features Matthew May (@matthewemay) author of the brand new book “In Pursuit of Elegance” (more information on the book at InPursuitOfElegance.com), as well as author of the critically acclaimed book “The Elegant Solution” published in 2006, and which I had a tremendously enjoyable time interviewing him about in early 2007.

The discussion is hosted by Dan Keldsen (@dankeldsen), Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected, and discusses the four primary components of elegance, as brought forth in Matthew’s most recent book.

Do You Have Stories of Elegance in the Enterprise?

If you have examples of elegance within your business, whether the elegance is found in the products you sell, the systems you use internally, or any other application of elegance… I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU, so please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, we can work to make elegant solutions far more common than they typically are.

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Sustainable business? for Elegance?

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking: Sustainably Elegant

Is your Information Architected for Elegance?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture and design approach that will enable you to maximize the value of your content, information and knowledge without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

More details on our practices related to Elegance and Innovation can be found at:

• Information Architected for Innovation Management
  

There is a phenomenon in the content management world called SharePoint, which, like it or not, has really changed the level of awareness of electronic content concerns in businesses today.

While SharePoint has nearly made content management a commonplace term in organizations, it’s not as though SharePoint or any other solution is perfect.

To a certain degree, the Basic Content Services of SharePoint will be “good enough” that many businesses will not run into severe problems any time soon.

However, there are a variety of deficiencies of SharePoint that I hear from time to time – one of which is the Red Herring of almost any discussion, which is “will it scale?” Another, relating to businesses who take uptime, availability, and governance seriously is, can you REALLY manage the content in SharePoint as well as we’d like?

Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Ted Orme, Director European Operations for RepliWeb and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of SharePoint from a scalability and governance perspective, and how these concerns are not at all NEW to the content world.

If you are currently using SharePoint – have you experienced problems in rolling-out large-scale sites, or changes to those sites?

If you are using alternatives to SharePoint and are considering SharePoint as a supplement or replacement to existing solutions, such as from OpenText, IBM, EMC/Documentum – do you already have practices and processes in place that can easily be transfered to the SharePoint realm?

Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, we can make the most of ANY content management system, regardless of the provider. After all, your business is more likely to be about something else OTHER than running a content management system.

Is your Information Architected to get out of the way of your business, or better yet to fully support your business?

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking: Scaling SharePoint Deployments… and Surviving

Is your Information Architected for SharePoint or Enterprise Content Management as a whole?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture that will enable you to maximize the value of your content, information and knowledge without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

More details on our practices in these areas can be found at:

• Information Architected for SharePoint
• Information Architected for Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Free resources on SharePoint

We have made a variety of free resources available regarding SharePoint, including a whitepaper written in early 2009, a series of nearly 100 questions answered from client inquiries in recent months, case studies, and more.

• Information Architected Resources for SharePoint (free)

Is the legal industry ready to change their standard practices in billing, particularly given the economic climate of 2008-2009 and at least the short-term future?

If they do change that model, will it least, or go back to “business as usual” when the economic smoke has cleared?

Knowledge = precedent = expertise. Why not efficiency and effectiveness as well?

Is the industry that should have been the poster child for Knowledge Management finally going to see more reasons to be time and cost efficient, just as most other industries have had to do so to remain competitive and retain clients?

Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Christopher Marston, Esquire, CEO and Founder at Exemplar Companies, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of the traditional law firm model, and how that model is evolving and even being flipped upside-down in a disruptive innovation sense.

If you are currently a client of a traditional law firm – have they adjusted their model in recent months? Do you feel they should?

If are a knowledge management practitioner within a law firm, how do you handle cost justification and Return on Investment (ROI) for knowledge management practices within the firm? Only in certain pockets? Firm-wide?

What are the pros and cons that you have seen?

War stories you’d like to share from any side of the fence?

Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can all be that much wiser as the market overall, and awareness of Knowledge Management itself matures. It’s not dead yet – and we haven’t even gotten started yet, particularly in the legal industry.

Listen now!

Download

Download the MP3 of this podcast

Is your Information Architected for Innovation Management and Knowledge Management?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture that will enable you to maximize the value of your content, information and knowledge without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

More details on our practices in these areas can be found at:

• Information Architected for Innovation Management
• Information Architected for Knowledge Management

SharePoint seems to rank nearly as high as Twitter in any given conversation these days – although I’ve yet to hear Oprah talk about SharePoint (not that I’m watching).

While there are many reasons not to adopt SharePoint or to use it as THE 100% solution for your content management, portal, search or workflow needs, it most certainly IS having a huge impact on our industry

Why is this?

What are some of the strengths of the “core” of what many call SharePoint’s “Basic Content Services” capabilities, and for the purposes of true enterprise-wide or cross-enterprise deployments, what are some of the hazards to be aware of regarding how information is organized and shared within a SharePoint environment?

Are the capabilities of SharePoint enough, if you care about managing and maximizing the value of your information? Are the tagging and taxonomy capabilities of SharePoint sufficient, or seriously deficient?

While we will not answer the questions to their entirety in this slightly over 22 minute podcast – I hope it prompts you to question whether your current or planned strategy for the use of SharePoint, or really, ANY content management system, is up to the full task or tasks you’re trying to accomplish, particulary with regards to organizing schemes such as tagging, metadata or taxonomy models.

Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Lowell Anderson, Vice President of Marketing at SchemaLogic, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of tagging versus taxonomies, where some of the weakness and strengths of SharePoint sit, and where we might be heading with SharePoint and the types of concerns that customers of SharePoint have in trying to wring out the most and best effective use of SharePoint in their organizations.

Is your organization struggling with SharePoint schemas? Succeeding?

What are the pros and cons that you have seen?

War stories you’d like to share?

Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can all be that much wiser as the market overall, and SharePoint itself matures.

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking: Smarter Tagging in a SharePoint Enterprise