Sustainable Business

Consulting

Submitted by dthoma7 on Thu, 2010-08-26 14:25
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For several years now I have been consulting with a wide variety of clients to help them improve their processes and systems. If you bring me in, note that I am trained as a socio-technical systems analyst and make a couple of core assumptions:

1) Every system exists in its present form for some reason (nothing is totally irrational, there is probably someone with some power and control who wants things to be as they are)

Modeling: what we have yet to learn

Submitted by dthoma7 on Mon, 2010-08-09 03:18
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This week Bill Gates noted that we need better modeling tools for software in order to solve some of the persistent and hardest problems facing the planet. I agree, but I would suggest to him that we not only need better tools. We also need better concepts and techniques for modeling. Som research on modeling human-machine systems by my friend Andrew has indicated that modeling techniques still lack meaningful representation in complex systems [1]. I have reviewed a number of papers this year analyzing Gantt charts and their capacity to improve project management. In each case, Gantt charts tend to get used as eye candy with no impact on improving project outcomes. The idea is to have a representation a group can use to jointly visualize complex data and understand it [2], but these current representations are still inadequate. So, simply making software that add digitizations of current concepts will not be enough. We need new concepts.

What does good citizenship look like?

Submitted by dthoma7 on Mon, 2010-07-26 02:22
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This question was posed to a group of people attending a conference on Civic Studies at Tufts this past Friday (http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/?pid=715). Some attendees were professors. Many were students. Others ran non-profits. A few ran foundations. All were concerned about the future of our civic society. We were posed with the question and asked to form and then discuss our results. What does good citizenship look like?

Here is what came to me.

The importance of organizational agility

Submitted by dthoma7 on Wed, 2010-07-21 11:51
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Over the past two years I have found myself increasingly involved in the movement to use technology to increase organizational agility. This movement had relied on manufacturing technology speed and precision improvements for the past two hundred years with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Recently, this is all changing as cheap access to high-speed internet and communications technologies are enabling true interaction and work product creation in distributed teams. A few weeks ago I participated in a small summit meeting at the Mountain Quest Institute (MQI) in Frost, West Virginia. MQI is a neat place, certainly restful and supportive of deep thinking.

The Age of Design

Submitted by dthoma7 on Thu, 2010-07-01 16:48
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I am marking this space to begin collecting my thoughts on the Age of Design. Future Shock, Network Nation, and Megatrends all predicted the information age. People would become information-empowered.  

 

The Internet connects people today and offers access to pricing, regulations, other government and public documents, as well as tools for manipulating data and producing more information.

Social Media and Virtual Communities

Submitted by dthoma7 on Fri, 2008-02-29 19:54
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This is a course for the students with a strong interest in new technologies and how they may be used to create new business opportunities, particularly new social networking media. Topics covered will include social networking and how the business world leverages them, virtual worlds and technologies, skills in designing and implementing social media for business value using sharepoint and iTunes U (hands on projects).

Course Web Site (Sharepoint Server: requires login. Email me to request access.

As Disney describes it, to some degree we will "imagineer" the future of business in this course... what would you do in business if anything were possible? Look at how highly Microsoft values the social networking and virtual community components of Yahoo! as a competitive factor against Google. Why? See comments from Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft. The future is integrated and collaborative. Look at how firms are now using Facebook, My Space, Linkedin, and other networking tools to improve knowledge flow and enable marketing and hiring processes. Where will these tools go next? There are already tools for specific communities, such as doctors, to share cases and best practices. They may even get paid for their contributions (see the medical portal Sermo as an example).

Legal Issues and the Internet

Submitted by dthoma7 on Tue, 2007-04-24 15:19

Legal issues have a meaningful role in enabling and controlling Internet usage and evolution. I collect information on these laws in order to better understand how they impact development of information and communications technologies and how people use them.

Business and Ethics at the UN

Submitted by dthoma7 on Tue, 2007-04-17 21:01
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The UN has taken an interest in understanding corporate social responsibilty and how businesses help and hinder the betterment of the human condition. Recently, they released a report examining these issues available at this site.

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