What I learned in IT Class

Essentially I learned that IT is not what we think it is. At least not when it comes to its application in public sector organizations. The impression that many of us have of IT is that of a young guy coming to the boss' office with a great new idea of how some computer application, network or new technology is going to provide such a revolutionary advantage that the entity will make zillions of dollars or meet its mission more so than all of its competitors.

While the companies that I work for never had that happen, I will agree that many organizations are run by managers who have this impression of IT. What compounds this problem are managers who don't know much about how the internet works and therefore wouldn't know how to appropriately utilize emerging technologies. This class sought to stop us from becoming one of those managers.

The class project challenged us to think of a way that IT would actually help an organization. Many times, you hear someone talking about how it would be so much more efficient for a non-profit or government entity to hire an IT guy to bring them into the 21st century. Everyone thinks that things like facebook are the wave of the future, so companies rush to open their own Facebook page and join in the benefits of this supposed magic IT answer. I guess its not that easy. Facebook allows for on-line communities to flourish especially when centered around a cause, objective or common interest. Do managers understand that while the cost of opening an account is free, facebook is not free for the organization! In order to have a chance at being effective, someone must administer the site in order to make sure that current themes of interest are constantly displayed. After all, who would visit the United Way facebook page (more than once or twice) if it always had the same things listed? And what would they be going to facebook to learn that they could not learn from the United Way website? What's pulling people to the facebook page? You can't just implicitly assume that all of these questions would work themselves out because IT solves all problems. Someone must take their time to make sure that the United Way facebook page actually does something to help (and not hurt) the organizations ability to reach its mission. Unless that person is going to work for free, than there is an associated cost. Thus, United Way, must decide whether a facebook page will add any kind of value to their organization.

Being able to work through the activity allows one to learn these sorts of things better so than if they simply found them in a text book. I only wish that the project could have taken more classroom time. While I think that the other activities were interesting and informative, the project was really where much of the learning was. There are certain things that have the potential to actually help you in the world of offices and decision making. This project really hits this well. When it comes to the planning process, I think that additional classroom activity could help to get everyone on the same page. Because it was a class on technology, it was easy to think that the goal of the project was to utilize technology. I assert that the goal is to find a way for a non-profit or government entity to better meet its mission with technology simply as a vehicle. "Better" can mean more efficiently, safely, politically expediently or in any other way that might matter to a key stakeholder. The technology being utilized was just a means to an end.

When it comes to learning to work as a team, it is important to establish roles early on and meet in person at the beginning of the process. Furthermore, milestones must be set so that presentation time is not the moment of truth. Everyone on the team should have a good idea of their concept and feel confident in it by the end of the semester. I would make sure that I took it upon myself to do these things in the future. With that stated, I think that the end result turned out to be a great improvement in clarity of the finished product, it would have been nice to have that confidence at presentation time. On teams, everyone is at the graduate level, bright and wants to do a good job. Yet, with all of the different working styles, an understanding must be met early.

As for the E-government part of the class, as can be observed in my blogs, I thought the class was very interesting. These are the things that the future gov't leaders are going to have to address. Like Pat Sine brought up, the E-government section sought to answer questions of how do we know that IT is more efficient, transparent or even the best thing for society. If these kinds of things aren't thought threw, the consequences can be even more disastrous than a lackluster presentation.

Does e-government really provide transparency?

One of the supposed benefits that politicians often tout off about transparency is they will post everything on their websites. The problem is, much of this is on the website that they control and we all know that they have a competing interest to hide information that is not politically favorable to them or their cause. Technology may not actually create transparency, but only better help political officials create the illusion of transparency. Even if the government makes administrative laws that it must follow, agency heads and bureaucrats know how to get around these laws and rules just as they did before the days of the internet. Thus, the illusion of transparency may actually be causing the adverse effect of giving people a sense of false security.

In the end, while some 501(c)4s may be acting as watchdogs of the government, they only have so much access. Thus, although technology gives people the ability to track things, is it the government that is being tracked or the people themselves?

E-Government, a marvel of technology or a double edged sword/

One of the benefits of e-government is the increase in efficiency brought about by the use of computers and internet based platforms that allow people to learn things such as what they're representative has agreed to fund. In a country that is getting larger and more complex, this benefit can be very meaningful. When the population becomes active and engaged, this means that democracy, in a sense, can become more efficient. What constituencies want can be better reflected as transparency increases in government.

Yet, studies have also shown that this increased level of access does not translate to a more representative democracy. Once the population has better access to information and to their elected officials, it is often the most engaged who dominate the attention of the Senatorial and Congressional staffs. Thus, those with the most organized and aggressive agendas are better able to crowd out the rest of the electorate and population.

For the most part, E-government has shown no solutions in addressing the latter matter.

I believe that e-government is in a state of transition where in which the full potential has not yet been realized. Today it exists more as a highly efficient version of essentially what was there before. This is common when matters of invention or innovation are applied. No one realizes the true applications of such technologies so they just mimic what they were doing prior to the discovery with marginal improvements. However, in time, technology will drastically change the way that government operates until it is virtually unrecognizable. Although everyone can be tracked through their cellphone or car, I believe that the way policy is formulated will essentially connect the dots and find solutions that crack many societal problems. I doubt any of us will see this until hindsight is available.

There is a reason that the first cars resembled horse carriages. I'm sure that no one at the time envisioned these enhanced horse carriages using an interstate system that expanded the city and changed the landscape, economy, and policies of America.

Campaign information and Momentum

Campaign intelligence is one of the most fascinating things about politics. The fact that so much of it is based on voter research is something that anyone in politics must know. Now, many of the decisions that campaigns are from polls. At this point, many of them are done with surveys that are by phone or paper, but the trend of moving to an internet based system is progressing.

The internet is used heavily by campaigns to collect dirt on political oppositions. Campaigns will also study the skeletons in the closets of their own candidates as to make sure that the opposition does not discover anything vital.

Micro-targeting is a scary technology that can track the likes and dislikes of any person to better learn how to target a message. Thus, if some candidates care about one issue, while other candidates care about a different issue, two different messages can be sent to each potential voter that essentially was crafted to compel each of them to vote for the same candidate using the information collected in micro-targeting.

These elements are used to maintain momentum among other things in political campaigns. The new and traditional media is often used to accomplish this through micro-targeting on the internet. Campaigns can track whether some users are interested in an issue such as crime, and then send messages siting examples of the candidates actions on crime. Ads can even be targeted to these people that track their interest as the campaign progresses through the months. Some people may be more interested certain news stories, and the candidate will be able to tailor their message to the most up-to-date information on such stories in order to keep followers interested in the candidate.

Yammer

https://www.yammer.com/


Kind of like Facebook for businesses. At first, sounds kind of silly but it turns out, this kind of platform is very valuable to a company. Companies are based upon information and communication. The days of the manufacturing based companies are virtually gone, now bosses, staffs and shareholders work in a business of data and the more efficiently data can be handled the better. Yammer can change a company's entire organizational structure.

Yammer: used by Unicef, Reuters and Deloitte

Free or $5/User/Month (One sign-on/ multiple domains/ custom branding)

Yammer provides the following features:

Enterprise Microblogging - Start a conversation, read posts, and actively collaborate with your coworkers in real-time. The value is that workers can exchange ideas on projects quickly instead of waiting for meetings. This also cuts down on redundancy in operational tasks.

Groups - Create and join private or public groups and collaborate in small teams within your network. Workers who work in geographically far away locations can easily work together.

Files, Links, and Images - Upload and share documents with co-workers, groups, or your entire company. Now anyone can come up with a good idea, not just the boss or the guys in development.

Company Directory - Use Yammer to connect with employees in other departments.

Topics - Tag content and messages in your network to make content easy to organize and discover. This is invaluable because this means that anyone can access a file instantly, which would multiply efficiency

Mobile - Connect to your network anywhere, any time. Download free iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile applications. Now you’re truly always at work.

Profiles - Upload a picture and fill in your expertise, past work experience and contact information to become discoverable across your organization. Personalizes everyone across an organization, thus making it smaller.

Direct Messaging - Create a private dialog with one or multiple co-workers.
Communities - Create communities for working with partners who are outside of your network.

Applications - Install third-party applications into Yammer to increase the functionality of your network. Integrate Yammer into applications so that ideas and data can be shared even more readily.

Security - Message privately and securely in the cloud. User passwords stored on our servers are encrypted by a strong salted hash algorithm.

The I-95 Coalition

Last week we talked about how Michael Carr left much to be desired in his article about how IT not giving much of competitive edge in the market place. This week I want to give a bit of information about the 95 coalition.

Interstate 95 runs the entire span of the US east coast and crosses through many jurisdictions. It is the most heavily traveled corridor in the US and plays a large part in the economy. One of the most difficult problems with this corridor is raising the necessary capital needed to do things such as allow double stacked freight cars to travel from one end of the corridor to the other or eliminate bottle neck regions. This is difficult because the the corridor spans so many different counties that have their own separate regulations and budgets. Thus, it is hard for one county to spend money fixing something that only benefits another county in another state. To solve this, alliances must be made in order to forms bounds and find common incentives among parties. The 95 coalition seeks to do this through many different means. Policy specialists and transportation personnel would benefit from the knowledge of this entity.

Please see the link to see the 95 coalition website: http://www.i95coalition.org/i95/Home/I95CorridorFacts/tabid/173/Default.aspx

Why Nicholas Carr doesn't seem to Know Much

In his article IT Doesn't Matter Carr argues that companies invest too much into IT under the impression that it will give them a competitive advantage in the market place all the while not realizing that nearly all advantages IT would have offered have come and gone and companies must be much more conservative in their IT expenditures.

While I believe businesses characterize themselves this way to the public, I don't see this reality actually playing out anywhere. We always here about the advances in computers and every company I see advertises about some high tech system that gets "me", the customer, an added benefit. ADT Home Security tells me about a more high tech system than the one they sold a decade ago, I know that's part of their sales pitch. It's the same system my parents used. The door opens and guess what... the alarm goes off.

There is a reason why no one from Home Depot uses a"segway" to roll around on and why I was never issued a "Palm" when I worked as a Pharma rep years ago. Companies are very prudent and they tend to only invest in technology that will have bankable returns. Not only do few if any offices hand out I-pads to their employees, but most of them still keep a typewriter on the shelf and frequently make use of their fax machines. Most of the companies I've worked for invest most of their money by way of the people that work for them and most of that goes to sales, marketing, management and healthcare. Organizations are most concerned with efficiency and will only invest in IT so much as they believe it will help them more of it. For instance, Home Depot's computers will tell them when to increase and decrease the prices of their products based on supply and demand in real time. This makes them more adaptive to the market. They don't seem to invest in technology for the sake of being more high tech in hopes of gaining an advantage of some kind as Carr would suggest.

Whether a company invests more tech dollars seems to depend upon the nature of their market, their organizational structure and the company's access to different applications. While I will agree with Carr that every once and a while their is someone in a tech department who is a bit too eager and some how succeeds in persuading the boss into investing in a neat, but useless piece of equipment such as a projector that allows one to edit the screen with the use of a high tech maker, by in large, too much tech investment does not seem to be as much of an issue as the author claims it to be.