"The real problem we're up against is not technology, it's that management DNA in companies.... When you concentrate the responsibility for innovation at the top, you're holding your capacity to change hostage. It disempowers the little people."
- Gary Hamel, quoted by Lucas Mearian, The next corporate revolution will be power to the peons, Computerworld, June 4, 2013.
"Innovation is an art, but it is an art where “managerial” interventions can accelerate or retard the rate of progress. Much of this concerns the sources from which ideas originate, the speed by which ideas move through an organization, the invitations to participate, the attitudes of the key decision-makers and the sources of inspiration that they draw from."
- Bill Fischer, The Virtues of Having Strange People Close By, Forbes.com, May 17, 2012
"It's often the employees--rather than outside consultants--who know a company's products and processes best. According to management experts, many of the most innovative companies tend to solicit ideas from staff throughout the organization, not just the executive ranks."
-Rachel Emma Silverman, "For Bright Ideas, Ask the Staff", The Wall Street Jorunal, October 17, 2011.
With the boom of tech-savvy employees in the workforce, companies are in search of unique engagement tools to keep the Gen X and Gen Y employees interested. In Dana LaSalvia’s article called “Building an Employee-Enriched Culture with Social Media” she wrote that “organizations should think about integrating companywide marketing messages and upgrading their employee’s recognition programs to be more virtual.” To do this, implement an intranet!
"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."
- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way, AndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.
Nashua, New Hampshire, USA – Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announced the re-launch of their Trees for Bugs initiative. Company employees will plant a tree for every software bug reported in each latest version of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. The company also promises to fix all reported bugs within 7 days.
”I’m proud to say that although our product gets more complex, we are constantly eliminating the number of bugs in new versions. We have also been successful to keep our promise and comply with the 7 days bug fixing policy since its announcement back in 2009.” said Martin Hejtmanek, CTO at Kentico Software. “Our efforts became an indivisible part of Kentico's commitment to deliver a stable platform for managing websites, on-line stores and social networks.”
“Kentico has always been committed to provide high-quality user experience to our customers and partners. While we test our software extensively, it’s important to make sure that we encourage our customers to report any bugs they find. Based on the feedback on our initial program, which was only related to the 4.1 version of Kentico CMS, we decided to keep it for all upcoming CMS versions, starting with the current 5.5 R2 release,” said Petr Passinger, PR Manager at Kentico Software. “From now on, we will plant a tree for every bug found in each latest version of Kentico CMS.“
The Trees for Bugs initiative is well explained in the following one and half minute animated video:
The current number of bugs, and therefore the number of trees that will be planted, can be seen at the re-designed Trees for Bugs website: http://trees.kentico.com.
The homepage of the Trees for Bugs website shows a graph that represents distribution of bugs/trees between individual development teams. With almost 6,000 active customers in 84 countries, the website provides country standings in the “Bug-Finding” discipline.
Each planted tree is dedicated to the person who reported the bug and labeled with their name. The tree is also listed in the tree gallery and its location is marked on a map.
If you have ever worked for a large organization, you should easily relate to this Dilbert cartoon. As the IT guy trying to make everyone happy at work, I've spent the last year making sure everyone that needs two monitors gets two monitors. It's not an easy task in an era of tight budgets and cycle replacements but we're getting there...
"You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?"
Andy Grove, Intel CEO 1987-2005, Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs, BusinessWeek, July 1, 2010
Who really defines what is a CMS?
You do.
I'm more convinced than ever that CMS experts aren't really in the driver's seat when defining the content management system. Experts in the field of content management are more or less observant passengers that are there to help you not get lost and to point out the significant landmarks on the way. This journey takes you to places while you the customer remain in the driver seat with all the privileges and responsibilities of being the driver.
Over the past few years I've realized that my work preference is to keep things as simple as possible. Sometimes when defining information systems keeping things simple works while other times the system is new and remains too complicated to define. Thanks to my reply in a productive rant against CMS by Laurence Hart I'm not only understanding my aversion to being called a CMS expert but also my philosophy and role in defining what is a CMS. This personal philosophy is developing...
Scott Abel convinced me a few years ago on my own blog that the definition of a CMS is never static and always changing. We’re chasing our own tail when we get nit picky in our definitions of a CMS. Somewhere in all the marketing that has been done for terms such as CMS, ECM, and WCM…we have forgotten the difference between information system and information technology.
