Innovation Through Design Thinking

Design thinking can be used to enter new markets or crate new brands. Apple uses design thinking for new products like iPad and iPod.  In creating a new design there are three overlapping spaces: inspiration, ideation and emplementation. Innovation through design thinking is a very important and is key success in many organizations this video was very informative about this process and the Q&A session really brought out all of those different components that were important. Apple is a huge company that relies heavily on these items for their success.  

Democratizing Innovation

The video is how the users are actually the one that innovates and develops the products.  He explains how important really your end users are in the development of your product.  We have been consistently told that the manufacture is key in the innovation but if you think about it products are consistently improved by the users.  Ultimately keeping the users at the top of the totem poll.  As your company grows you begin to build a support group of your end users that are ultimately building the next product.  Its a very interesting way of thinking and totally makes sense.

Collaboration in the real world for higher education

The video was about how collaboration is a unnatural topic and it really needs to be applied to get done. The speaker also discussed how its hard to depend on people and you must really make an effort to get people involved and collaborating. The speaker also discussed the notion of coordinating business objectives and leveraging resources with other institutions.  They also discussed how collaboration can be done through various open source software packages. Since the software is open source it makes it a very viable resource to utilize and channel collaboration through.

Neural Networks in Information Systems

Neural Networks are a intelligent way of processing data.  It is a structure that is made so a computer can make decisions based on its own. A application for Neural Networks in Information Systems would be data processing which is basically going through a large amount of data and processing it. This would include filtering, clustering, blind source separation and compression. Neural networks are forms of expert system but much more intelligent. They provide many features and decision making process that the expert systems just can't provide. Allowing the user to more accurate and user specific data. 

Creating Inspired Collective Intelligence

This was a very interesting video on collective intelligence really bringing together whats important these days and in order for an organization to be successful you must be a "inspired organization" To reach this you must know how to reach past the "good enough" stage and we can gauge this by the Margin of Difference. Ideas and products of the mind are very important factors of the organization and are key to the margin of difference. There are five main keys to the margin of difference and that is the social networks, social capital, conversation, engagement process, and individual thinking. These factors are what really take it from being good enough to inspiration. These days I think this is very important because you really have to be inspired to get any where you have to have the edge on everyone else and "reinvent the wheel" to really be a successful company. Knowledge and getting to that inspired point is the only place where you can really be successful in this world. getting past that good enough to the inspiration is one of the most important parts of being successful.

Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

This was a very intresting video on Collaboration bringing in some very intresting metaphores. First off Malone describes collective intelligence as a group of people acting together to produce intelligence that could not be produced individually. To do that they explained a few examples of how to bring this for example with kids using pokemon. Now a days we are staying connected and collarborated through facebook and other social sites. Facebook is now estimated at over 80 million users as Trebor speaks about which brings it to a very strong collaboration and collective intelligence. Cory discusses how the starwood group used second life to help make desicions on the design and building of there new hotel. Using this online community and virtual world they were able to make important changes and collaborate with thousands of people. It really got them involved it what needed to happen and what changes they needed to make in order to make the new hotel sucessful.

Tony Hsieh

This video was very intresting how such good timing and the right desicions can make you a top person.  From this video I really take how important it is to be well deversed in knowledge because it was ultimatly that, that got Hsieh where he is now. They estimate he made over 200 million from the sell of Zappos.  What stands out most to me is the fact that he took such simple concepts like realizing sucess depends on customer service. Creating a online retail giant that has amazing customer service features like 365 day returns, Full Time Call Support and other great features. Tony realized that the customer retention model was one of the best and thats what he aspired to create and did a great job. The other thing he realized was how important his employees were. He realzed that his sucess was based on their performance which came back to employee satisfaction. In keeping up these standards and really using his knowledge he has become a extremely sucessful person.

IT, Knowledge Management and fixing the Healthcare

The state of our country is at a unknown. We are faced with major changes ahead of us and of those changes is the health care system. I do believe that our health care system needs a overhaul but a mandatory system is out of my question. But of this overhaul one of the biggest that needs to occur is our IT perspective of health care. We are in a state where most doctors offices still are on a paper based system,  that's not efficient and not going to cut it. So what do we need? Well first we need a knowledge management circle in my opinion of the best IT professionals in the US. With that we need to develop a standard DBMS that all hospitals can adopt to allow easy access by medical professionals so that when a patient needs care no matter where they are the doctors have the resources required to do their job effectively. Another element we need is a country wide think tank that will allow doctors from all across the country to effectively communicate with each other and share ideas, trends, and innovations. These changes alone will allow a more effective, efficient, and powerful health care system. Which can ultimately be a driving force to correct a lot of problems.

Video Review: Composing a Career and Life

The video that we watched in class was very intresting. The message I got from the video was really never give up on what your trying to achieve. It's pretty amazing how hard her and her husband tried to get there company off the ground for years and how long it took her to get to where they are now. You know its so easy these days to get discouraged especially with the state of our economy and give up, for example my Dad has recently started a company and its been a rough battle getting started but with a little work he is slowly getting a footing, but there has also been so many negatives and hard times for him. So really the message I get from the video is if you trying to start a company don't give up you will get faced with problems and hard times but eventually it will work out.

Knowledge as a Strategic Asset

Today knowledge is a vital part of business and it's something that companies should hold very close to one of their biggest assets. Lets use Apple computer for example, Apple revolutionized the music industry with the iPod. Why did they revolutionize the industry because they had a product that helped increase effeciency and productivity when it came to managing and listening to music. The product worked like it was suppose to and was built to a very high quality and was designed in a way to suit all users. This knowledge of what users want and needed propelled them to the company they are now. I would sit here and argue that if it wasnt for the iPod, Apple wouldn't be the company they are today. They were at the time a company that was recovering from slow times there main business was education and they could hardly keep there heads above the water, Microsoft was pushing the software industry further ahead every day. After the iPod took off apple slowly has gotten ahead, now they are the top media player manufacture and one of the top cell phone manufactures and leading designers when it comes to quality. I have to hand it to Apple and you better believe they got this far because of knowledge, Steve Jobs and his top guys have come up with these products that have revolutionized the way we do things for example right now I am setting here typing this blog on a iPad. But their top designers knowledge has ultimately let to the power of Apple today and this knowledge has been what's kept them afloat and really brought Microsoft down off the pedestal.

Incresing Returns

Increasing returns in my opinion is the fact that the more volume you have in the market the more market share you will have. Also users will stick with what they know rather than switching to something they don't know. For example when a user buys a piece of software and learns that software they are less likely to want to upgrade and change software to learn a new product But developing a new piece of software that will increase or change productivity can ultimately keep the returns increasing but you never want to tinker with the user interface. Take Microsoft Office for example it is one of the best selling productivity suites in the world and has been for a while. Microsoft has made billions of a great set of products and only made minor tweaks to it over the years. So in short "The more you sell, the more you sell."

Knowledge Management and Xerox

After reading these two articles on Xerox and their implementation of Knowledge Management, I was shocked to see how much they benefited from this. It also opened my eyes on how much a company I work for right now could use a system like this. There problem was a very common one, they have a large company that provides document and networking services, when they send technicians out to fix problems there are many times where these issues aren't written about. These problems can't just be looked up in a book so a lot of the times technicians have to solve these problems themselves. But like in many situations there will be other technicians having the same problems and having to spend the time to figure this out like the first tech. So the solution is to implement a Knowledge Management system to share the solutions of the technicians, to reduce time working on machines and get a more accurate and quick fix of the problem, the company created a online database to share these information to technicians and employees and allowed them to add or update solution records. This system had some great benefits. It allowed employees or technicians to work more productive and efficient because instead of five employees finding a solution to five identical problems, they would now have one employee sharing his solution to the other four employees so they could quickly fix the problem. This also saves the company money because a misdiagnoses is avoided and the employees are spending less time on the job. The difficulties faced with this though is getting the employees to actually take time out of their busy schedule to write up these solutions, to the problems. Xerox found a way of providing incentives for the employees to write these articles up they allowed these employees to attach their names to the articles so they could claim this and say it is their solution. It's amazing how much we could use a tool like this in my current job. I have worked for wolf camera now for about four years and we have about 300 stores in every store we have a wet lab printer there are many times a month where we have to repair our machines. A lot of these situations we (the employees) are having to find solutions to the problems because our service technicians can't make it out. It would be great if would had a KM system to share our findings to other stores so they could easily fix the problems and also help our service technicians out.  I learned a lot from these two articles and how beneficial to a company they can be for example just increasing productivity and efficiency.

Links to Articles

Xerox Article

Xerox Article