You've stood on your head long enough: now go reap the harvest of your hard blogging work!

The last coaching session is over: once again, I am very impressed by the results and the spectrum of topics. It is now up to you to do something with it.

Some blogs were more research-focused than others – these are necessarily not in the same shape as blogs since they were completed later. Some topics are revisited from previous semesters though you approached these topics with a fresh mind (IBMan, food, culture).

Whatever state your blog is in: keep looking at the google analytics indices as you tell friends and family about your achievement (using well-known channels on which you communicate, like facebook). If your project contains a commercial idea, consider developing it: after all, you are business students!

As for me, I’m glad once again that we did this and I am looking forward to your professional project presentations in the course of the coming weeks!

And if you haven’t done it yet: why don’t you take a virtual stroll down your colleagues’ blogs – it’s the summer of serendipity!

An interesting article appeared in Knowledge @ Wharton today making the point that e-commerce gets more personal in the age of mobile networks. Though none of you are trying to sell any products over your sites, you’re all in the e-commerce of information and many of the inferences of this article apply. It also says that ‘focus groups’ are overrated, measurements however aren’t: begin to look at those numbers Google Analytics surprises you with (see our student module, too)!

So get up and do those usability tests with friends, family, strangers, if you haven’t done them! You’ll be thinking about presenting your project sooner than you know it – the next three weeks will fly by, they always do at this time.

In the meantime, your own project blogs are coming along very nicely and I have dubbed your work as a whole “summer of serendipity” mostly because I have the impression that I haven’t seen too much of you as a group (except during our coaching sessions which were always well attended). Good luck for the final stretch!

HWR inside view: "You'll learn process modeling or you'll eat my spinach, dammit!"

As a deepening follow-up to my last post on blog organisation, please use this week to take a look at Bruce Spear’s article “Multi-dimensional WordPress”, which argues convincingly using many examples and illustrations in favor of turning blogs from a one-dimensional “journal with links and pics” into a story on the page. Since we finally started with business process modeling (BPM), please read the seminal article by Tom Davenport which is contained in your reader, for next week. We’ll use the expert map method to unlock the secrets of this paper.

After taking a look at MS Visio, a simple drawing program, this week and experiencing – via the “biography” exercise – how different process maps can look like without an agreed grammar, we will turn to Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) (see example below) as a simple and yet powerful way to model processes, which is also the basis of the process language used in the design of SAP, one of the most widely used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

EPC example of a simple ordering process - devil's in the detail.

And lastly: your individual blogs. Some of you were concerned this morning that you have not had feedback from me. Now, the main feedback, in such a large group of bloggers, should come from your peers – as you will remember, you are supposed to leave at least one comment per week on the blog of another student from this course, preferably not the same student time and time again. I will make sure to get to your blogs in the course of the next few weeks at least once before the final evaluation via – must I spell it out – the rubric! Hope this helps!

The illustration shows six different, important dimensions of your blog. How much you emphasise each (or more than one) of them decides which message your blog will send – and it allows you to stir your readers’ expectations.

6 dimensions of blog organisation

Examples:

• Many categories suggest a blog on many different things – since posts represent the most dynamic dimension of our blog, the reader assumes that something is going on here. Few posts only with one post per category is a little stupid.
• Many pages suggest that the blog author(s) may be working from a “book metaphor” – this very blog (few entries, many pages) is an example for that – it’s less of a blog and more of a course portal with links and pages. A sort of electronic brochure. Ideally, your blog is dynamical and not book-like.
• No tags make it very hard for readers to search and get an overview of the richness of your information. Use tags, use them freely (but accurately).
• No links suggest that your blog is a universe without exit. That’s a waste given the information out there unless yours is a blog everybody links to because you’re such a genius. (You may well be but give yourself some time to show it.)
• You need stats! For all student projects, you must have a Google Analytics (GA) account and plugin (check here for a former IBMan student project – a learning module – with lots of information on Google Analytics). On your dashboard, a simpler plugin like “ShortStats” is also useful, but GA is hard to beat. There are popular alternatives (like sitemeter).

Hey this really isn’t rocket science as you can see – mixed with the willingness to experiment and some design instincts, your projects are going to be just great! Your individual blogs already rock!

"After class, all we wanted to do was rest."

…much, much more to come. Not much more to add though after today’s session where we discussed blog examples mixing poetry, art, music, philosophy, psychology and information science…frankly, I was blown away by the combined creativity already visible in your blogs – including today’s featured blogs:

• “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (with podcasts!),
• “Go with the Mood” (art & music),
• “A small idea with big impact” (microfinance), >
• “Pissed Off” (weekly, free righteous anger),
• “A Power Blog” (on power!) and
• “Did you know…” (on anything you always wanted to know but probably never dared to ask).

Even Knowledge @Wharton, probably the world’s foremost online business school publication, features blogging as one of the greatest innovative tools of the future.

I must admit, after this very passionate start, I am kind of tired today. One reason is that I gave a talk at a large conference, which always takes it out of me. Here’s my blog entry about the event. I still have enough presence of mind, of course to remind you to look at the article by O’Reilly on Web 2.0 in your reader for next week.

Otherwise, all project groups are now well under way. You’ve received the instructions on how to establish your self-hosted WordPress blog and you know that you can create your own support group via Ilias. Right? And you also remember that, if in doubt regarding procedures, facts, technology…always post your question to the forum first. Of course you knew that, stupid me.

Source: weeklyreader.com

Another HWR professor (Bruce Spear, who, incidentally, will take over this course in the fall when i go into my research sabbatical) wrote this to me today:

” I’ve learned of another of my students today having presented her blogging during a job interview and the interviewer was blown away, said this made her stand out from the rest, was curious about what she’d done, and offered her a job. She turned it down for something better, but when she told her story her classmates sat up straight in their chairs. “

do i need to say more?

• afraid your blog might not be interesting? To ascertain if your posts are boring (this is really what it boils down to), ask around among people unlikely to want to hurt you. Check your comments (if any) and other feedback – perhaps you might even submit a poll. And give yourself a few weeks to get into the swing of blogging.
• if privacy or too much available information about you is a concern, better be safe than sorry, I say: anonymize your blog address, don’t mention names, don’t give your private e-mail but instead create a new, neutral one. Be discerning when it comes to posting pictures of yourself or others. And so on. This is unlikely to be very dramatic but in today’s information society our own transparency to the world is one of the issues we need to manage.

We also dealt with a number of practical issues and discussed the important static/dynamic balance of blogs – where static content goes into pages while dynamic content goes into posts – and the issue of linking and referencing images.

Managing the Digital Firm

"A Kindle? How romantic - thank you, Fred!"

We finally began to talk about the digital firm and looked carefully at the Amazon Kindle (via a 2007 interview of Jeff Bezos on the Charlie Rose show) as an example of a breakthrough-product in the consumer markets.

Finally, we discussed the setting for business information systems, including globalisation. check this article from the NY Times for a recent example the limitation of information technology…nature has a way to keep us grounded by catastrophes.

Next week (no class on Tuesday, 27 April – substitute session on Thursday, 29 April at 08:30 a.m.), we will look at different types of information systems in business.

Your assignments

• write your first “proper” blog article and publish it by Sunday 25 April, 23:59 hrs (this is our deadline so that I can check your output on Monday before our class in that week).
• write your first “proper” comment on someone else’s blog post by Thursday, 29 April, 08:30 a.m.
• read the article “Web 2.0″ by Tim O’Reilly in the reader – read the first four chapters only and jot down any technical terms that you cannot understand so that we might discuss them.
• since we didn’t cover it today: take another look at Chris Brogan’s 23 essential elements of blogging!