I continue to ponder the implications of people with rare skillsets who are capable of making huge operational impacts on companies.  Skillsets like a combination of business knowledge and predictive analytics, of which I've recently become enthralled.

One of the areas that seem to be untapped so far but with a metric ton of potential is leveraging these unique individuals by way of hosted services.

Side Note:  I'm reluctant to use the word "Leveraging", by the way, because it is often used incorrectly.  When used properly and not by somebody who is simply trying to sound smart, it means that you get more work out of something than you put in.  (Hence the word lever, duh).  When used correctly it can increase your productivity exponentially, when used incorrectly it can bankrupt you, and when used by somebody who doesn't understand what the word means it is a synonym for the verb "to use".

I've really been enjoying my recent study of predictive analytics and data mining.  It's provoked me to think about the nature of value, how much of it there is lying around waiting to be uncovered, and what it takes to uncover it. 

It has also caused me to gain a much deeper appreciation for people who both have expertise in an area of business and the desire and drive to learn the skill set they can use to turn that experience into something extraordinary.

Um, that should really be Reporting ON the Future, but I thought this title was cooler :)

Anyway, what was the last thing you got really technically geeked out about?  (I'd really actually like to know, if you feel like sharing.  I dig stuff people are excited about.)

I mean, what was the last thing you saw that really made you say "wow, this is really going to change things"?

I haven't had one of those moments in a while but I'm learning something now that has me feeling that way.  You know, when you start thinking of the potential implications and it just takes things to a whole new level.

I've blogged before that I thought that a Twitter clone aimed at the enterprise world would be a stupendous idea for improving team communication and collaboration.  (I prefer to call this form of communication conversation clouds, because that's what they are in my opinion--a distributed conversation with a broad surface area.)  Today I got to take the concept for a spin, and it didn't disappoint.

Working at Cisco is a new experience for me, as far as the size of the company.  Prior to Cisco the largest company I worked for was around 5000 people.  Lately I have been thinking of the advantages of being a big, well-known company, and how those advantages can be leveraged in new ways.  I have found that there are many things a startup can do that a larger company simply cannot because of size, but there are opportunities larger companies have to leverage their brand which are closed to smaller companies.

The one thing that a startup can't duplicate is company brand and history.  Brand equates to automatic relationships and trust, especially from a business perspective.  There's a certain amount of latitude and respect that you get automatically when people recognize and respect the brand of the company you're working for.  That's been a very interesting thing to observe at Cisco.

There's one use case for this trust that I haven't seen explored much:  Cross-business social analytics.  Daydreaming about this, I can see some very interesting opportunities for a trusted intermediary to become a clearinghouse for metrics and industry insight.  By having access to individual companies' data and being trusted not to share it, competitor data could be aggregated and individual companies could compare their metrics against the industry average, without anyone's data being exposed.  The only thing required is that each of the individual companies trust the clearinghouse with their data.

Personally, I think it would be incredibly useful to see how my company's issue resolution rate compared to my competitors, what my conversion rate is compared to the industry average, etc.  By consolidating this over time you could even look at industry trends against your individual metrics etc.

It would be interesting to see how open companies are to this.  If it was actually successful I can see several interesting offshoots such as the clearinghouse becoming a "credit rating agency" for the industry, providing reports that verify that the company is in fact in the Top 10% for a given metric against the industry.

The one real drawback I can see is companies might become excessively metric-driven.  For example, if software development managers started comparing a BS metric like lines of code to the industry average, that would be an extremely bad thing.

I've noticed something since I started blogging, a nice little hidden side benefit that I've never really heard anyone talk about before.  The popularity of your various posts tells you how many people are interested in the topic you're blogging about.  If you're an entrepreneur, I'm sure you can see how this would be invaluable information.

For example, a few weeks back I posted a business idea I had for an online, Web-based data modeling tool.  This is a tool that I personally would love to use, and half the reason I posted it on my blog is because I knew from experience that Google would pick up the post and I'd get a gauge on how many other people need this as well.  I had no idea if I was the only one on Earth who saw the utility in this, but it turns out that there are quite a few people looking for something like the tool I described (a bunch of inbound traffic in my referral logs is what prompted the post you're reading).

Now, if you know anything about search engine optimization, you know that blogs are traffic magnets.  (They're rich in inbound link, Google appreciates original content, and their content is regularly updated, among other reasons.)  This means that if you post something on a blog, your post will usually float up to the top of the search results:

One of the primary benefits of being at the top of an extremely targeted search result is that you have a pretty good bearing on how many people are actually looking for that particular thing, and what search terms they're using to find it.  This is like conducting marketing research with your target audience, for free.

If I were trying to see what the market reception would be like for an idea, I would post it in my blog, it's the perfect gut-check.  Some people will inevitably worry that someone will steal your million dollar idea, but  I wouldn't worry so much about that--as someone smart once said (name escapes me): "If you have a truly great idea don't worry about protecting it, you will have to beat the people over the head with it."  That's the Marketing Department's job :)

Man, if I only had the time to actually build all of the ideas I have I'd be a disgustingly rich man.  But I don't, so they end up on my blog :P

Someone really needs to build an online AJAX-driven data modeling tool (a la Embarcadero ER/Studio, or ERWin).  If you've never used one of these for your software development you don't know what you're missing, because the data model really is the foundation for the application (especially if you use code generation utilities, which are just cool as all hell).

I love using them, but it drives me up the wall that I have to use a fat Windows app to do it.  That makes collaboration even more difficult because usually to hook multiple installations together you have to purchase some kind of uber-expensive enterprise package that usually only works over a LAN anyway.  I would be in heaven if I could use some kind of Google Apps type of online application to do data modeling and collaborate with other people.

So there it is, somebody please take this idea and run with it, this is a market just begging to be disrupted.

I had a chance to read a few books on my honeymoon (French Polynesia--I had no idea places that picturesque actually existed, it was incredible), so I thought I'd review them since a couple were pretty good and definitely worth a read.  One that I'd recommend is The Dip by Seth Godin (he usually writes great bite-sized content), which is a nice short read but also very thought-provoking and it was giving me deja vu the entire time I was reading it.

The Dip is about difficulties in achieving goals, and what to do when you hit them, as you inevitably will.  When to quit when you hit a road bump, and when to keep on plugging along.  As I read it I repeatedly experienced deja vu as I remembered various difficulties I ran into while starting up Latigent.  There are definitely smart times to quit, and not-so-smart times to quit, and it's pretty important to know which is which.

The Dip provides some nice mental tools to help sort out which projects deserve your energy, which you need to abandon, and which need to be refocused.  For people like me who seem to juggle hundreds of balls at any one time, that's a pretty critical thing to get right, because inevitably SOMEthing falls through the cracks.  At only 96 pages it's a quick read, and I'll probably pull it out to re-read it from time to time just to make sure I'm looking at the big picture and spending my time and energy wisely.

I find the Enteprise 2.0 adoption discussion very interesting, and it brings to mind some lessons I had to learn the hard way.  I come from the geek mindset, where the tool itself is what is cool, because I use them directly, I read about them, and sometimes I even build them.  I get very excited thinking about semantic Web technology, tagging, user-generated content, federated identity, etc, etc.  But it took me a long time to realize that technology is just a tool, not a solution.  I get excited thinking about all the possibilities, not necessarily about solving a problem.  It’s a problem I have, and I’m working on it :)  But really, if all you have is a problem, to a large extent you don’t really care about the tool as long as it gets the job done.  I think geeks like me tend to lose sight of that, and the result is vaporware and eventual disillusionment.

Imagine if Home Depot sold Web 2.0 tools.  You could walk in and pick up an automatic tagging tool, a user-generated video tool, a rapid AJAX-ifier, social networking connectors, an RSS attachment, and of course the handy rounded-corner router.  Well, I can’t see Home Depot going and trying to sell these tools to companies that weren’t looking for them any more than they would hit the streets to hawk the newest hammers to carpenters that had no need for them.  The customer comes to them for the tools they need, not the other way around.  You don’t shove the tool down people’s throats, you wait for them to see the value in it and ask for it.  Otherwise, you’re just a glorified traveling salesman trying to sell a better mousetrap.  No Soliciting.

So, to be honest, I really don’t care when someone looks up from their beer and shouts “Eureka!  There’s no tagging for the enteprise yet!”.  There’s no YouTube for the enterprise either, that doesn’t mean there’s a hole begging to be filled.  Yet.  Unfortunately, end users take time to digest new technology before they realize they need it—before they can put the pieces together and realize that this tool solves that problem.  That’s why the dot com-boom of the 90’s turned into a dot com-bust.  It wasn’t because the technology was bad, people just didn’t realize the value yet.  That’s how I see the relationship between Web 2.0 tools and the enterprise right now.

The true secret to new tool adoption lies in the cross-functional geek.  IT folks who are not only good at what they do, but are also familiar with the business itself.  They probably even came from the business side but moved over to IT because they saw how to apply the tools there to solve real problems.  Those guys are worth their weight in gold, and if a geek is ever able to truly be successful he needs to be able to put himself in that person’s shoes.  THAT is when Enterprise 2.0 will happen.

Chris just IM'd me about a press release from SalesForce.com.  What it says is that they're launching a customizable "customer portal", but if you read further it sounds an awful lot like they're launching a social network for businesses.  This actually sounds a lot like what Cisco is trying to do with their recent social network acquisitions.  That is, it looks like they're going to offer a plug and play social network for businesses that will directly integrate with their existing SalesForce.com deployment, with the goal of connecting large companies more intimately with their customers.

This is really great stuff for SalesForce.com users.  In fact, I had something similar on our roadmap as a custom development project for the last couple of months as a customized Drupal deployment.  Whether or not that still happens remains to be seen, but the ability to integrate your CRM data social networking is pretty powerful not only for the customer insight you can gain, but also for the customized customer experience it can offer.  That includes security-based file and content access as well as community and user-generated content features.  What I've realized over the past few years is that I really want for my business is a portal that will create a much tighter communications channel with our customers, and a social network--or at least a subset of its features--is the perfect vehicle for that.

So, I applaud Cisco and SalesForce.com's decision to dive into this market.  I think it's very smart, and I think it's the perfect application of Enterprise 2.0, and it will be interesting to wach this brand spanking-new social networking for business marketplace take shape.  Will SalesForce, with it's extensive hosted customer base prevail, or will the premise-based model take the lead under Cisco's guidance?  Who else has yet to join the party?