Media Mention: Campus Technology – December 2012

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Campus Technology recently published an article that covered a presentation that two collegues and I gave at the Campus Technology 2012 conference in Boston this past summer. The article is entitled “Studying Data to Spur Better Campus Apps.” My quotes are on pages three and four of the article.

The presentation detailed Academic Technologies‘ experience related to launching a campus mobile application for the George Washington University. In two years, the GW Mobile application has been downloaded 20,500 times, and we had between 3,000 and 4,000 unique users per month during each month of the fall 2012 semester. We use a combination of custom code and Google Analytics to keep track of what features users are accessing, and what features can be dropped from the app.

Campus Technology 2012 was the second major conference where we presented our experience related to developing the app. Our first presentation was at the EDUCAUSE 2011 Annual Conference in Philadelphia.

Looking Forward to Educause 2011

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I will be attending the Educause 2011 Annual Conference at the Philadelphia Convention Center next month (Oct. 18-21). I have been attending the Educause annual conference since 2006. It is always great to hear the ways other universities are using instructional technology, especially when they present assessment data to go along with their solutions.

My team will be giving a presentation at this year’s conference on our experience developing and supporting the official mobile application for The George Washington University. We launched the iOS version of GW Mobile in January 2011, and released an Android version in April 2011. To date, the app has been downloaded over 10,000 times across the two mobile platforms.

I am also excited to hear Seth Godin speak at one of the conference’s general sessions. I expect him to have some interesting things to say to the higher education community.

Notes from Gary Hamel’s Keynote – Educause 2010

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Gary Hamel (London School of Business) gave the keynote address on the first morning of Educause 2010. Here are some rough notes I took during his session.

The question we need to ask is “How will higher education change in the next 25 years?”

Longevity does not guarantee future existence.

We assume the underlying business model of our institutions is immortal. This is not true. It takes a “valley of the shadow of death” experience for us to reevaluate our assumptions. Not all organizations come out the other side.

Be careful not to underestimate creativity for resources.

Our change needs to be automatic, spontaneous, and reflexive.

How can you build an evolutionary advantage? Here are four challenges for doing so:

1. Cognitive Challenge: Getting beyond denial
-Organizations miss the future because it is unpalatable.
-Cycle of Denial: Dismiss, Rationalize, Mitigate, Confront
-Treat every belief about your organization’s business model as a hypothesis.
-Seek out the dissidents and critics.
-Spend time out on the bleeding edge.
-Try to imagine the unimaginable.

2. Strategic Challenge: Creating options for renewal
-Evolution comes from experiments.
-Get more at-bats than your competitors.
-The oak tree doesn’t know where the right soil lies. It drops acorns in every direction.
-In most of our organizations, we are not generating enough ideas.
-1000 ideas –>100 experiments–>10 projects–>1 winner

3. Political Challenge: Realigning talent and capital
-Move resources behind new ideas.

4. Existential Challenge: Enlarging our sense of mission
-Don’t lose sense of mission for business plan.
-Innovation is born in the gap between resources and aspirations.
-Apple reinvented the computer industry, the mobile phone business, the music industry, and the retail industry.

Video: PBS interviews @DanielPink about motivation

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I just started reading Daniel Pink‘s new book on motivation entitled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I am really enjoying it so far!

PBS aired an interview with Pink yesterday on the topic of motivation, and I found it very interesting.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGyhaZnPtC4]

What motivates you to do your work?

For another great read, check out Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future. This book discusses why you will need to develop the following six abilities to be successful in the emerging business world: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.  

 

A Child-Like Response to Adult-Sized Obstacles

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My small business management classmate posted a video that I like in a blog post about the characteristics of an entrepreneur. (See the “Entrepreneurs can change the world” video on my lifestream here)

I think the video has a great message when it challenges people to think about healing the US economy the way they did when they were a child. Kids think with so much creativity and imagination especially when solving problems. Although many times their ideas are impossible to implement, they are not afraid to think of outrageous propositions. Many adults tend to apply common methods to obstacles and find it difficult to think of new approaches. In one sense, entrepreneurs are people who apply child-like imagination to adult problems. They have the self-determination to step out and implement a new business model even when people around them expect it to fail.

I have been trying to approach my job with a new level of creativity. This requires me to question my problem-solving methods on a daily basis. I find this difficult to do in my job because my first inclination is to do things the way they have already been done.

I have to stop myself and ask, “Am I doing this task in a certain way because it is the best way to approach it, or because I have done it this way in the past? Is there a more creative way to accomplish this task?”

What is changing? vs. What is staying the same?

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Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO of Amazon.com, was interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show on February 26, 2009. Bezos was on the show to promote Amazon’s Kindle 2 wireless reading device, but the opening segment of the show was focused on how Amazon has remained successful in the current economic times.

You can watch the show for yourself, but here is a business strategy quote from Bezos that stood out to me:

People often ask me, ‘Jeff what is going to change in the next five years?’ but I rarely get asked, ‘Jeff, what is going to stay the same?’ If you base your business strategy on things that are going to change, then you have to constantly change your strategy. Whereas if you formulate your strategy around customer needs, those tend to be stable in time.

Strategy: Dynamic Capabilities

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Dynamic capabilities is a new approach to strategy that focuses on a firm’s ability to build upon and adapt existing competencies to bring value to the customer while creating a sustainable, competitive advantage for the firm.

I just read an article entitled “Dynamic Capabilities at IBM: Driving Strategy Into Action.” It was published in the Summer 2007 issue of the California Management Review and written by J. Bruce Harreld, Charles A. O’Reilly, and Michael L. Tushman .

The article stated:

While earlier approaches to strategy were largely static (e.g., develop a positional advantage and protect it), dynamic capabilities call attention to the need for organizations to change over time and compete in both emerging and mature businesses.

Strategy is important to IBM’s trajectory from a successful company to an unsuccessful firm and back again.  The authors explain that up until 1999, strategy at IBM was assigned to strategy experts–not managers–and it was an activity completed to satisfy senior management. It was “not an accurate reflection of what the business needed to do to be competitive and certainly not a blueprint for action.”

In 1999, then CEO Lou Gerstner assigned Bruce Harreld, SVP Strategy, to develop a new process to make strategy more relevant at IBM. What resulted was the “IBM Business Leadership Model.” The model encourages IBM’s general managers to analyze the perception gap between current and desired performance and attribute that to either a performance gap or an opportunity gap. The gaps are defined in terms of a business owner, financial metrics, and a specific time frame for addressing the gap.

Bruce Herrald said:

Closing the gap requires both strategic insight to assess the opportunities and threats and strategic execution to build the capabilities to deliver market results.

Strategy at IBM is now an ongoing discussion between general managers and senior management, and is no longer an annual process assigned to internal consultants.

The authors summed up three important points made by the IBM Business Leadership Model.

  1. Leadership by general managers requires both strategic insight and execution.
  2. Strategy is anchored on either a performance or opportunity gap as manifest in hard performance outcomes such as market share gain, margins, growth, or profit.
  3. Effective strategy is not simply the articulation of a strategic intent, but the linking of it to innovation, solid marketplace insight, and an appropriate business design.

How could you realign your core competencies in order to address performance issues and opportunities that you should be taking on?

Dell Latitude XT

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I am currently evaluating the Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC for my university. I have been using it for about one week, and I am really pleased with its performance. It came from Dell with the Microsoft’s Windows Vista Business operating system installed, which includes Microsoft’s new Tablet PC Support features. Click here to read about all of the tablet features in Vista–Tablet PC Support is included in the following versions of MS Vista – Home Premium, Business, Ultimate.

I spent about three hours with the “Personalize handwriting recognition” function when I first received the machine.  This function has you write out 50 sentences, the English alphabet, numbers, and frequently used symbols. You can go back to this function at any time and select to either “Teach the recognizer your handwriting style” or “Target specific recognition errors.” You can also select whether to opt in to automatic learning for personalization. This allows the recognizer to gather information about the words that you use and how you write them and store that information on your local computer.

I am very impressed with the handwriting recognition technology. I purposefully write at the same speed as I normally would when I provide handwriting samples to the computer.  This way I do not write the samples neater than I would in a normal situation.

Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 is great for taking handwritten notes on the tablet during meetings. You can choose to leave the notes in your own handwriting, or you can have OneNote convert your handwriting to text. OneNote doesn’t convert every word correctly for me yet, but the simple editing and formatting that I must complete is a lot easier than typing up a whole meeting’s worth of handwritten notes. (Most of the time, I never go back and type up my handwritten meeting notes.)

Finally, I have found that reading web articles is really comfortable in “portrait” mode on the tablet.  You can use either the pen or your finger to scroll down the page, or select the next article that you would like to read. The XT is very thin and it weighs around 3.5 lbs.