Social Media Tools within Hiring & Admin

With the increasing amount of attention on the utility of Web 2.0 tools in buisness and the growing investement in incorporating these tools day to day operations, I wonder how in general admin and hiring departments are adopting and using these tools (blogs, wikis, linkdn, facebook) to screen potential hiries? Do they evaluate a applicants blog? Their linkedin profile? Do they use this during the interview, pulling older blog posts to ask the applicant to further expand on their thoughts?

Given that a lot of bloggers spend a substantial amount of time in upkeep, design and authoring posts, it would seem as an obvious part of the interview. However, having gone through a few interviews over the past year and not one has done this sort of inquiry. Infact I have to bring it up and explain, but was confronted with what seemed like a blank look – indicating that either they don’t know what blogs, facebook, linkedin are, or that they were embarresed not to have checked prior to the interview. Others have also suggested that the entire hiring process is a complicated one. But I doubt that if a company can organize it in a fashion to require that from the begining both the hiring team and the applicant can manage to explore these topics during the interview and in some cases, could better reflect upon both the applicant and hiring division.

 

Banking’s Out Dated Technology

As I’m traveling for two weeks attending conferences on the East coast, I had some checks fedex to my hotel in order to deposit them and have access to the cash. However, it had slipped my mind that there Ill be subject to a ‘out-of-state’ hold on all my deposits that I deposited this morning. Now, think about this. We have technologies that serve our many needs in some extraodinary ways. There are so many that this blog post would contiue into eternity.  But when an out-of-state branch tells me that they have no access to my account Im left feeling a bit of outrage. When the same branch follows that up with the fact that I won’t have access to that cash for another five days, it pure rage. How has the a great majority of the world adopted technology, while banks have remained outside technological advances? Cannot access my account? Well there may be another factor causing these issues – banking laws.  How have banking laws -specifically the laws established by the Federal Reserve Board Regulation CC on maximum time frames – fallen so behind time and no one has been outraged enough to change it in Congress?

 

Nokia’s move on Symbian

Although a few months old, it was interesting to listen to a podcast on the Nokia’s purchase of all non-Nokia shares in Symbian. The move pushed the work and products of Symbian into the open source world. Now, any developer can contribute. This strategic move made finaical sense too – rather than paying Symbian around 250 million dollars a year in licsensing fees. Before the purchase, Nokia owned 48 perecent of total shares. But this move has not only benifited Nokia – it has also increased pressure on other smart phone developers – Microsoft – to either reduce their licensisnng fees or go completely open, as has Google w/ Android. The bottom line will see phone prices to be reduced and an increase in various types of services.

With new competition with Google Chrome, the push towards cloud computing, the purchase of Symbian, and a long laundry list of other threats, its seems Microsoft is missing the train – soon to be out of many equations of daily users of mobile, internet, and desktop applications.

 

F-book’s security?

Just a few quick links via other blogs. Can’t post to much – dealing with the humidity, the passing of Tropical Storm Fay – finally, and class.  Over at Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, he points to some important postings regarding the online security of social networking sites, and more specifically Facebook’s. Its within a longer post that also covers social networking sites user growth, profits, and additional links to bloggers focusing on various security threats to users.

 

eGovernment

Over at Fastcompany.tv, a recent interview covered the efforts of American Solutions to get more technology into the everyday use of the US government. Some ideas that were talked about was a database that housed all the contact info and bios of elected officials in the US, of which in 1992, was estimated to be around 512,000 officials. The interview also talked about the troubles that are still found with adopting technology to carry out government related work i.e. the 2010 census will be done w/ paper and pencil and the issues of locating illegal immigrants.

The interesting part of both of these examples is not that the technology isn’t present or in beta mode- rather its the continued use of outdated methods, stale behavior and old strategies used  by various agencies that if not change, will only continue to result in census counted with #2 pencils.  Adopting the technology isn’t simply enough – the entire process and understanding the role of technology and its benefits is the first step, not one that is taken at a later time.

For some examples and coverage of how web 2.0 tools and increasing investment in technology within government circles, readers could follow two great bloggers that cover these issues. For the past three days at the Synergy Conference, Bob Gourley of CTOVision (Day 1,2,3) blogs about the speakers and presentations, lessons, tools and all the various ideas of moving forward with adopting more technology to help with government duties. We see how web 2.0 tools – blogs, tag|connect, gallery, ivideo, etc- are being unwrapped throughout some government agencies and how they are slowly, making their way into the broader daily life of users/employees/analysts, etc. Three goals aim to change the understanding, reach and implementation of daily responsibilities through these tools:

1. Work at broadest audience possible
2. Think topically, not organizationally
3. Replace existing business processes

Lewis Shepherd focuses on similar issues and as a former senior technology officer within government and now in his new role as the CTO of Microsoft’s Institute for Advance Technology in Governments, both he and Gourley provide great insight on what is currently being done to adopt 21st century technology and the future of web 2.0 tools in government.

I was surprised to hear that there isn’t a central database containing the information on all elected officials. The idea sounds like a valuable one and if properly done and provided to the public, it will only increase voter rolls in the terms of elected officials. Exciting times ahead.

 

SF.WordCamp.2008

I attended the SF WordCamp yesterday. Overall, it was a fantastic conference, with a smart dual-track agenda to accommodate developers on one floor and users on the second. My raw notes are up but some highlights included:

Om Mailik (GigaOm) conversation

Tantek‘s presentation on microformats

BuddyPress and the future of WP.

Exciting to see how WP is growing among bloggers.

Photos/Video/Notes

The one day format was a good idea, however, a second day w/ more would have been better. Maybe next year…

 

Understanding Cultures via Mining Telephone Records

I came across this short paper on new studies that are looking at using mobile telephone records within different cites across the world to understand different cultures, how social networks evolve, and behavioral effects of urbanization (via Harvard’s Complexity and Social Network Blog). It was very interesting to see how we can gather this data, and then measure how people react to different events outside their daily routine. Eagle used the examples of the Red Sox winning the world championship and the subsequent riots in Boston and the Kenyan presidential election outcome and the protests against the results.

Eagle talks about a group of MIT students who embarked on tracking the data (location, physical proximity, and communication) to gain a better understanding of patterns.  The outlier issues were dealt with the examples of the Red Soxs and Kenya.  I think this was the group of students Zeraus referred to in his Long Now Foundation lecture last Friday.  Zeraus connected this sort of research into mining telephone records and travel patterns of individuals in their car to show how easy it is to follow someone without their knowledge and all outside the law.

Eagle also touches upon egocentric social networks and how they are different from normal social networks. Regular incoming students into university/college develop their social network over the first few months, gaining friends and expanding their network ties. Within a few months, this network becomes steady with very little expansion or change. However, when you contrast this to the students starting at business schools you see a different dynamic occurring. Business student’s social networks never stop growing – even after the first few months, the network keeps expanding.  These interactions within social networks of business schools is further supported when you compare phone logs between social networks of normal students and those students in business school.

Business school students have a culture of networking and place high value on the contacts they make in school; these types of values are immediately apparent in their call logs.

 

Impact of Enterprise Software on Companies

I was finally able to read the entire HBR case study by Andrew McAfree and Erik Brynjolfsson (When BART tracks catch on fire, I’m provided with endless amounts of time to read). Its the ‘longer’ version of McAfree’s video he has posted on his blog that he taped-but I recommend reading the case study over the video.

The paper has some great examples – CVS, Cisco, Oits – of companies that have successfully increased their IT investment and have come away with a better operating model, while increasing customer satisfactions, implemented company wide and, in the example of CVS, all within a year. A year-imagine that.

McAfree and Brynjolfsson credit the increase of IT investment and the ‘overabundance of new technologies’ as part of a new era that companies have entered after the 1990s, which “enabled improvements to companies’ operating model and then made it possible to replicate those improvements much more widely.”

The advancements of newly increased investment in IT has shown to be very beneficial – ex: Otis and their distribution of elevators only when the front line manager certifies the site to be ready for delivery, rather than the traditional delivery method of shipping the elevator the day the factory is finished assembling it. Increase in IT investment have also increased the three quantifiable indicators the authors used in their research – those are; concentration, turbulence and performance spread.

Great read overall.

 

IT Competition & McKinsey 2.0 Survey

Over at Shepherd’s Pi, Lewis Shepherd has a more extensive and an overall better analysis of the web 2.0 survey conducted by McKinsey that I had posted a while back.

Second, via Andrew McAfee’s HBS blog, you can watch a short clip on his research on how IT has impacted competition and companies in both high and low IT industries over time. McAfee used 60+ years of data that was compiled by the US gov and broke it down. Measuring the impact within three factors – concentration of market share, turbulence (jumping order of company ranking among industry) and performance spread the results are interesting. Watch the whole thing…

 

Bots and the future…

Last night I checked out the Long Now Foundations newest seminar. The events speaker was Leinad Zeraus the author of Daemon . It was a really interesting and fascinating talk on the world of bots. I took about 8 pages of notes and will summarize them-but can’t wait to read the book. I also couldn’t ask my questions as I didn’t know you had to jot them down on a card which I never found.

Summary of notes:

Zeraus a software guy, developing enterprise software, started talking about how we – the world – is in pursuit of one goal, hyperefficency. This is partly driven by corporations and their traditional behavior to squeeze every penny out of every worker, piece of data or equipment. We are always trimming the fat, which is there for one reason – to protect when times get rough. W/out the fat, there is no protection.

Being big brained isn’t a guarantee to success (parasites are the small brained yet they dominate) – Our perseverance to achieve ubiquitous uniformity, chasing efficiency and in turn the creation and development of bots.

Bots are designed to complete three parts of the biological building blocks found in the human world- Search, Retrieve, and Act (SRA) and with bots, we take these attempts and try to achieve them w/in the digital world via creating/unleashing bots. Also, there is a Strong vs Weak AI component to the story of bots. Strong, or general, AI, isn’t used to describe bots. Bots are rather part of weak, or narrow AI, where their functions are “not intended to match or exceed the capabilities of human beings.

Zeraus expands on this limitations – he brings in the example of how the most advanced research and programming today is found within the gaming world – online gaming. Within this field, both programmers and players are trying to devise ways to have the PC play on their own, without the need of a human and only will intervene when necessary. This involves tricking the bots within the online game – ex: Second Life – to in thinking its a human reacting on the other end, when in fact its just another bot. They act in stealth mode, the scary part of the whole bot research field.

Later, Zeraus went on to talk about how our interaction online is tracked and stored – as storage is almost free today, our foot/finger prints on the internet creates a sort of ‘pollution’ which we don’t think is a dangerous thing. But 10 yrs from now, when we take that data and mine it, we can get a very clear picture of online users. What happens if this falls into the wrong hands. Foreign governments? ID thieves. Remember, you are your data. Once your data is compromised/stolen, you are now fully effected.

In his conclusions and Q&A, Zeraus spoke about how we can get away from this anonymous actor – bots. To do so, we would need to create a darknet, a newly created internet, solely built on actual people, who prove who they are to gain access and whose actions are stored to be evaluated over time, giving a user a rating for others to gauge or measure trust with.  This idea is nice, however, I had two questions which I couldn’t ask

1) What happens to the old internet? Is it left open to become a ‘black market’?

2) What happens in those countries which limit or ban the use of the internet? By forcing everyone to open up and prove their identity, they are also inviting those governments to crack down, remove, jail or kill those who have broken the law.

The talk was great, and the book looks even better.