Archive for April, 2008

Very press 1.0 (or lower)

Published by Ben Kepes on April 15, 2008 in Efficiency, IT and New business. 5 Comments

Greg from GetStaffed is a reader of this blog, and the other day I stumbled upon something he’d written.

It seems that a reporter from a major New Zealand paper got interested in the GetStaffed disintermediation story and spent time with them writing a piece about what they do. After waiting considerable time, the Get Staffers contacted said journalist to find out what the problem was. Apparently;

…a story about a Recruitment 2.0 start-up could offend the papers large recruitment agency advertisers.

Here on Diversity Blogs we hate commercially forced censorship, and love disruption and disintermediation. To this end I’m going to tell the story that couldn’t be repressed (or similar melodramatic terms!)

So what is GetStaffed? It simply seeks to disintermediate the current paradigm of IT contractor recruitment. GetStaffed are aware of the expense, poor service and lack of proactivity displayed by traditional recruiters. To this end they’ve created a service where potential contractors can register, upload their CVs and have testimonials for completed contracts build the kudos. All this is creating something of a “rise to the top” service.

For businesses their service saves money ($3/hour service fee for temp assignments, $2000 fee for permanent), and provides some nice features like being able to watchlist a certain individual and be advised when they become free. There’s also some nice things like points to the contractor for hours worked which can later either be donated to charity or converted to airmiles.

GetStaffed currently has over 700 contractors but that number should grow virally as they get more exposure.

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Will the Google revolution engulf IT departments? No.

Published by Mike Riversdale on April 15, 2008 in IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 0 Comments

(cross posting from Mike Riversdale: Enterprise 2.0 New Zealand style blog)

Will the Google revolution engulf IT departments? is the question posed by Jason Hiner:

Gartner has embarked on a wide-reaching new study of Google and its potential impact on IT, enterprise businesses, and society in general in the coming years. On April 10 at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas, Gartner Vice President Richard Hunter revealed some of the first data points from this study.

The two most interesting points were:

1.) The best way to think of Google is as a disruptive technology.

2.) Disruptive technologies create big losers and big winners, and one of the biggest losers in the Google disruption could be traditional IT departments.

Listen to Kathy Sierra to find out why this picture is hereMy view - no, it won’t.

And not for the reasons that early commenter’s on the article have listed - IP security or sudden application of charging for the services.

It won’t because it will be a quiet, unassuming and quite natural evolution of IT Departments. Of course there will be those that will be left by the wayside much like there were some COBOL programmers that never quite made it from the old mainframes. Most however will go with the flow, change the way they are required and get along quite nicely.

There will be no “revolution” and it won’t “engulf” no matter how much we’d love to use these emotive words.

If the real question is - will IT Departments be the same in 5 years time as they are now? Probably not, not for those that service ‘knowledge workers’ at least. They will be much more end-user orientated, much more linked in with what the business is doing and probably be a part of the business in ways we can’t imagine now.

But there will also be the need for some ‘computer help’ - all this on-line stuff needs a permanent and reliable connection, it needs something to be seen on (normally this is a PC) and it needs guidance as to “why” use it.

Also, as I have stated before, a large proportion of what we talk about with the likes of Google and Microsoft Office/SharePoint is around ‘knowledge work’ - the shifting of generic information about. This stuff ain’t gonna move cranes, look after your bank account or monitor your elevators and most companies have something like that deep within in them.

What do you think - leave your comments here or at the original posting …

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Once you’ve read the above article I would also direct you to:

* and why the gratuitous picture - to prove how right Kathy Sierra is (Webstock preso)

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Digital Strategy…

Published by Ben Kepes on April 14, 2008 in Collaboration, New Zealand, Society, Strategy and nzwc. 2 Comments

Calling all Kiwis (or those with an interest in New Zealand in the digital world). Communications and Information Technology Minister David Cunliffe is calling feedback on the Draft Digital Strategy 2.0 which was released for public comment today.

What do readers think? Hollow platitudes or a visionary document? Substantial paradigm change or same old same old?

It’s a good opportunity for the kiwi digerati to contribute - carpe diem!

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Mashup tools for Enterprise…

Published by Ben Kepes on April 14, 2008 in Governance, IT and Web x.0. 0 Comments

Interesting to see that IBM today released a pair of tools to help non-IT types to create, deploy and share customised web applications.

Firstly IBM Mashup Center, which will go into beta tomorrow, and secondly WebSphere sMash, a development environment which incorporates dynamic scripting languages (downloadable today at www.projectzero.org).

Interestingly, and in answer to enterprises continuing concerns over governance and security implications, both include the management, security and governance capabilities that IT departments require.

IBM says that;

The browser-based tool includes a set of pre-built business widgets, a widget builder, and a catalog to store and share widgets and mashups. A company can use publicly available widgets or create its own, each with community features like ratings, tagging and user comments. Data can come from all sorts of enterprise sources, from Office documents to Information Management System (IMS) databases, and is stored in RSS, ATOM or XML formats.

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