Eric Gargiulo

I think your strategy is smart and reinforces the importance of agents and management. Self-publishing is a great way to explore interest in your topic or writings but the end goal for most would be to use that self-publishing to land a book deal. I am sure it happens, but I would imagine it is rare to see strategy in the other direction. Good…[Read more]

It is funny you brought up the U2 album. The strategy actually backfired. U2’s album was forced on iTunes users whether they opted to download it or not. Apple users actually got angry over being forced the download. http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/u2-apologizes-free-songs-innocence-album/story?id=26214810

One of the pros and cons is a lack of anonymity. The pros as outlined in the case is that every employee that participates is accountable for his or her idea. The con is that these employees may be perceived as having too much free time. I experienced that same problem last year when I volunteered to work on another project outside of my…[Read more]

The advantages are cheaper production costs. It is cheaper to publish and offer a digital MP3 than it is to produce physical media, a case, and shipping costs. Record companies can also fill all demand whereas in the past inventory shortages may have cost them millions of potential sales. There are also inventory costs such as warehouse costs that…[Read more]

I am a member of a digital marketing community of practice. I meet with other digital marketers throughout the year to discuss best practices, new methodologies, solve common problems, success/fail stories, new strategy, and just try and learn new techniques and strategy from one another. I found the community through Meetup.com and searched for…[Read more]

I agree with you in that the key is marketing. If you know how to market yourself and your book and have the contacts, it is probably worthwhile to continue to self-publish your material. The marketing assistance you’ll get from a big publisher can rarely be matched by someone publishing their own book. Perhaps a savvy self-publisher that worked…[Read more]

I have looked into self-publishing a few times so I can only speak on my experiences. I think every aspiring new author would rather work with an agent. A good (keyword) agent has connections to public relations, distributors, and other contacts that are not accessible by most new authors. However, a new author can spend years trying to land a…[Read more]

Hi Diane,

You assume we have staff meetings…just kidding. I think it all comes down to the managers. We don’t have an official policy here regarding this issue, thus managers are allowed to dictate as they fit, which is unfortunate in some cases.

Thanks

I can see your point Steve but I do see some fundamental differences in the way IT is being leveraged moving forward than it was in the past. IT appeared to be used more to support business requirements and stakeholder requests in the past. Moving forward, IT has become a big driver towards pushing the new global initiatives. IT are being used in…[Read more]

While there has probably always been a need for these components, the global initiatives are what drove the projects. As much of a bottom line company as Wyeth was, it is hard to imagine a business case that would have been given budget approval prior to the global strategy. The desire to centralize all of this information influenced the design as…[Read more]

In real simple terms, the cloud is a network that allows you to access information and data through the Internet as opposed to accessing it directly from a piece of hardware such as a hard drive. The information is obtained from a network of servers that are connected online. It is extremely important because it makes data accessible from remote…[Read more]

I can relate to you Amanda on the productivity aspect. I work for a tax technology and all of our information is very sensitive. In my case, our policy is less strict which is amazing if you really think about it. However (as outlined in my post below) I have used my own devices to streamline work and it is much more productive. Unfortunately not…[Read more]

The support for BYOD is inconsistent throughout my organization. An example is I have a director who will allow me to bring my own devices to complete a project if it performs better than the ones available to me in the office. Conversely, I have a manager who refuses me to allow me to use any device outside of the office to complete a project,…[Read more]

It is hard to answer these questions and not be repetitive but I’ll do my best. S3, EC2, SimpleDB, and SQS are the four major services offered by Amazon. S3 is online file storage. EC2 delivers virtual computers for rent, allowing users to scale their usage up or down quickly. SimpleDB provides real-time lookup and querying of structured data. It…[Read more]

Hi Mariya,

Yes you are correct. The lack of communication between the leaders led to the overlap in projects. It was embarrassing on my end, but my work leader had assigned me a project without vetting it through the proper channels. You are correct, that would have prevented this situation. Unfortunately even with all of the right checks and…[Read more]

Hi Kristen,

I experience your frustrations quite often at my place of employment as well. Your story reminded me of a large website re-design project I was involved in. The cost of the project was well into the six figures and after a few months I had several stakeholders asking me where the new website was, what was taking so long, etc. There…[Read more]

Thanks for the comment Amanda. Yes absolutely. A lot of those companies sell software on a subscription basis so they know full well that if their customer isn’t getting their money’s worth after a year or two, they aren’t going to renew. I believe most of those companies make the real money on the renewals. It is almost like remodeling your…[Read more]

I think the new process is a vast improvement. There needs to be priorities and business cases related to enterprise goals related to $210 million in spending. It is also critical to identify dependencies to properly access the business case. Unfortunately not all stakeholders will be satisfied under this system and there will be resistance by…[Read more]