On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post

In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets.
An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some "thought-leaders" use it to ditch all attribution and pretend the tweet originated from themselves. Usually, their Twitter bio then also says "I tweet interesting links" - well, now you know how they do it and how original and carefully curated these are...

I wondered about the current state of affairs - and did a deep analysis this time, the results of which are depicted above

Innovation and inclusion - a matter of space and time

[Image by Salim Virji]

I am not sure anymore on relationship between innovation and inclusion . Need to think through it during the long flight to India tomorrow
— Vijay Vijayasankar (@vijayasankarv) October 26, 2012

Vijay Vijasankar and Ethan Jewett dragged me into a conversation on innovation and inclusion. Well of course they didn't, I butted in as usual

My answer was:

@vijayasankarv @esjewett that can't be true. They mean the extent of inclusion in space and time - I sure do hope
— Martijn Linssen (@MartijnLinssen) October 26, 2012

SAP may be betting on the right horses, but how about the jockeys?

Mark Finnern welcomed the new Sap mentors today, 20 experienced people with some ties to SAP. As Matthias Steiner says, everyone can nominate one, selection process is "top secret".
If I'd get to single out one addition that pleases me most, it'd be Fred Verheul. Congratulations, Fred!

A whole conversation unfolded after I asked Jamie Oswald about the little HANA, Cloud and Integration expertise among the newcomers. Summing up all reactions, there was HANA experience among a dozen, and Jamie assured me that

@vijayasankarv @martijnlinssen Important to remember that Mentors aren't for marketing - big part of job is helping existing implementations
— Jamie Oswald (@oswaldxxl) September 25, 2012

I decided to take a look at the whole group of 110, and see how they could help existing implementations. In plain English: how does their expertise add up to the latter?

What drives IT failure? Ignorance and Greed

It was an interesting question Charles Storm posed the other day: was I saying that solutions are primarily driven by ignorance and greed? I wasn't, but he made me think:

• Every solution is driven by need, or want, and some lack of knowledge.
• Every failure is caused by ignorance and greed

Let's see whether I can find good arguments for that, and where the twain meet

Resource identification is not a REST invention

An article on programmable web - pointed out to me by Fred Verheul (thanks Fred!) - gave me an adrenaline rush.
It was so full of bollox that I almost started to hyperventilate - which is a pun on the abundant use of the word hypermedia in that same post

Let me just quote one part of the post:

This subtle shift in the source of application control information makes it possible for the same client code to recognize and execute new features as they appear over time without the need for patches or downloads

The post contains more nonsense like this. Let me quote yet another brilliant piece, and be done with quoting:

How CEP will make SaaS the killer app

I got the insight at TIBCO's Transform event I blogged about yesterday - how we can finally solve the Customisation Riddle we've been unsuccessfully combating in IT for decades.
Software as a Service is breathing down our necks and guaranteed to replace quite a few on-premise apps in this decade alone. Starting with your tertiary (cleaning, reception, catering, leasing) applications and also your secondary ones (reporting, payroll, timesheets and maybe even some HR), it is likely to halt at your primary systems that support your core business

Why? Because the need for exceptions increases between the three types. Yes you can customise your SaaS and many will do so in the beginning, but it will only make your SaaS more expensive in the end - someone has to foot that bill.

REST definition and its place within Enterprise Integration

In a previous post I explained why REST is useless when it comes to Enterprise Integration. Even though at the very beginning I explicitly stated that

Roy Fielding wrote his dissertation entirely in the context of Web

and that

REST has absolutely no business benefits whatsoever with regards to Enterprise Integration

I got surprised to say the least by comments in various channels, most from professionals, even vendor representatives. Tech people, but nonetheless

Why management rocks, and leadership sucks

[Image by _MG_5503]

The past 24 hours I had a fierce conversation on leadership and management, and I love how just everyone joined in on Twitter; especially those that disagree with me because they teach me most in the shortest amount of time

I started it with

Every one wants to be a leader, but no one wants to be led #leadership
- Martijn Linssen (@MartijnLinssen) April 22, 2012

By the way, that picture of the Redskins cheerleaders is just there to spice up my blog and the post. Might lead your eyes astray for a moment, but no pun intended. I had a very hard time to select photographs that weren't shot at some battlefield or military institution, seems like the US army keeps their men happy that way. Now that is what I call management par example...

80-20: the deadly cause of IT project failure

There seems to be a rush of IT failure topics these days, all trying to find the Holy Grail of project failure. While I hold that this is a world of AND and AND, not OR and OR, I do see a major cause for project failure for the last decade: shifting from serial processing (waterfall) to parallel (Agile, Scrum, and so on)

Apart from the fact that Agile is solely focused on delivering a project rather than a product, this is not an Agile-bashing post: it is intended to show a very weak spot of contemporary IT projects

The benefits and concerns of Social

This post is the last in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

Well, this is it.

1. A small recap

The concerns of Social Enterprise

This post is the fifth in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the concerns of Social Enterprise. While yesterday's was all about the concerns of Social Business, this one will take those concerns and apply them to Social Enterprise. An enterprise is a company with 10,000 employees or more, regardless of geographical dispersal (my definition)

The concerns of Social Business

[Image by Diego Cupolo]

This post is the fourth in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the concerns of Social Business. While yesterday's was all about the benefits of Social Enterprise, this one will take concerns and apply them to Social Business

The benefits of Social Enterprise

This post is the third in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Enterprise. While yesterday's was all about the benefits of Social Business, this one will take those benefits and apply them to the Enterprise. An enterprise is a company with 10,000 employees or more, regardless of geographical dispersal (my definition)

So let's take all the Social we can imagine, and throw that to the current enterprise, and see where the benefits are. By the way, the drawing above is my favourite from Hugh MacLeod, and I got one in my office

The benefits of Social Business 2/2

This post is the second in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Business, part two of two. While yesterday's was all about the history of Business, this one will fill in the gaps left by it - it will deal with the present and the future

The benefits of Social Business 1/2

This post is the first in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Business, part one of two. It will relate the history of Business, and I'm sorry but that does take up an entire blog post - ask Socrates.
The definition of Social Business is this:

Social Business deals with business exceptions rather than rules, requiring flexible answers to complex questions in dynamic environments. As such, it isn't about giving predefined answers to predictable questions, it is about giving unpredictable answers to undefined questions.
Social Business serves best where an increased distance between people on all sides is negatively affecting business as a whole.
Social Business is best for establishing ties between unknown people.
As such, it will gradually replace distance by proximity, thus swapping anonymity for intimacy

Big Data? No. Big Information as a Service

I've been going through the Gartner hypecycle these last few weeks, regarding Big Data. I've been through the Trough of Disillusionment and back, and rocked back and forth a bit even, and I now figured out what's been bugging me so much about it.
It reminds me a bit of #E20...

Where will the social developers code? And what?

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a very interesting piece, and I missed it. But thanks to John Rymer I picked it up.
John shared an interesting question indeed:

Client gives up on enterprise PaaS deal with #Salesforce.com, asks me for options. Focus is "systems of engagement." Interesting question.
— John Rymer (@johnrrymer) February 16, 2012

We had a small conversation on that and I read Dion's post.
While I disagree with some statements like

Why it pays to keep rats on a starvation diet

Full credit to Dennis Howlett for this title. I tried to locate the very tweet he sent out years ago, but failed. If memory serves me correctly, he compared enterprise employees to rats being kept on a starvation diet.
Why enterprise employees? Maybe because they come by the tens of thousands, I guess. But I vividly saw the image in front of me

I often hear people complain about the way they are rewarded at their job - usually financially. And when I say people, I don't mean the top 1-2% in an enterprise that surf ahead of the wave and automagically keep their feet dry when it drops on everyone else

How Klout could make Twitter a better place

I've written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called "Why I have doubt about @Klout"

At the beginning of that I stated

First of all, I highly appreciate the service

- and I ended with

11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the one hand comforts me, and on the other makes me think about the stability and value of it all...

Since then, I've become increasingly weary of the product, especially because of the consistently incosnsistent quality of the product, its lack of service, and its continuous drumming on the marketing machine nonetheless - no wonder 2.5 million people instantly killed their Klout profile as soon as they finally got the chance to do so

Today, I present a way for Klout to actually create some goodwill on Twitter

Do uneducated vote conservative - in the USA?

My last post of the year was about the correlation between conservatism and education. I took the results per state of the US 2008 election, showing the margin percentage for Obama, and related that to total education spend per state

The outcome was astonishing: all but 3 states fit perfectly into the newly found rule. The odd ones out were Sarah Palin's state, Dick Cheney's state, and Louisiana. However, Pat McGuinness slapped me on the wrist 4 times in a row, assuming his ass off, calling me ignorant and prejudiced, and spreading dumb and unsupported rumours. So here's my answer.
The data in the table above is based on data from the National Center of Education Statistics and shows actual education level in 2006-8