Stuart A. Lloyd

Good point about the abundance of social media turning into a platform for exposure and early marketing efforts for up and comers. My daughter is a huge Shaun Mendes fan, and having looked into it, this young man represents a textbook case of riding the Vine and YouTube wave to get himself exposed to a national audience in a relatively short…[Read more]

You make good points about this being a shaky model for other performers to follow, and that it may be that the main (if not the only) reason this worked for Radiohead is that they were very well-established at the point they decided to do this. I know of some other artists that are taking a DIY-type approach to getting their product out there,…[Read more]

I think that, from a certain perspective, the scarcity model necessarily encourages the kind of thinking and behaviors that contain and safeguard knowledge, and which rely on identifying and strengthening various levels of “us and them” type of distinctions between individuals, groups, and organizations. On the other hand, the abundance model see…[Read more]

When working at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), I was a member of an R&D community of practice (CoP) involving people working on problems related to the AF Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) function. Specifically, I was one of those working the problem of detecting and identifying individuals and small groups of…[Read more]

I suppose that the most obvious measure of success of any open innovation initiative would be to look at the costs associated with the program versus the amount of new business said program actually generated. Conversely, one could examine the opportunity cost of not engaging in certain open innovation efforts. At Siemens, it seems that the…[Read more]

Overall, I think open innovation’s biggest advantage is its ability to force an organization’s attention on the “unknown unknowns” – those ideas, problems, technologies, and solutions of which a company isn’t aware that they don’t yet know. While I’d think this alone should be one of the strongest selling points for open innovation with…[Read more]

The global nature of Wyeth’s initiatives definitely impacted the development and execution of its ERP and GDW systems. The problems Wyeth were looking to tackle were very global in nature, and centered on how differently the same processes were planned, communicated about, and executed from one country to another. Standardization then was a h…[Read more]

Great summary, Nicole. I think the lines between IT competence, overall success in the marketplace, and global expansion have really become very blurred, and there is now just a great deal of overlap between the three pursuits. While one can enjoy success without necessarily globalizing, I can’t see globalizing happening in any significant way…[Read more]

I agree. Now to be sure, there are times over the last 20 years in the military that I’ve wanted to go stand on the Comm Squadron’s head and yell something to the effect of “We’re so secure I can’t even do my job!” Still, I can’t imagine this BYOD paradigm gaining any foothold in the military or at the VA. I remember a couple of assignments…[Read more]

BYOD is not supported in any way at my workplace. Given that we are one of the largest federal agencies in the country and routinely deal with private personal and healthcare-related information, this probably comes as no surprise. In all, I’m not really sure the article did the idea of BYOD justice, or at least, I didn’t find that it made a com…[Read more]

Simply put, cloud computing means de-localized IT. Whether one is running a particular piece of software, storing and accessing data, or even building new software, doing these things “in the cloud” means doing them via the Internet on hardware that belongs to, and is operated and maintained by someone else. The implications for both ind…[Read more]

Amazon’s four major web-based services are Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple DB, and Simple Queue Service (SQS). S3 is a software interface that allows customers to store and access their data from anywhere on the internet. EC2 provides highly scalable, cloud-based computing capabilities that work with S3. S…[Read more]

Think about somewhere you have worked before. Do you think the company under-invested or over-invested in Information Technology? Is there anything about IT that makes it harder to get the balance right?

Honestly, I don’t have to think too hard on this one, as a new employee of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). While I will say that t…[Read more]

I was hoping someone would bring up how these concepts are reflected in the military. I have seen key partnerships evolve within the military over the last two decades in many areas. One example would be AF military family housing. When I first joined the AF, military family housing was the sole responsibility of a given base’s Civil…[Read more]

Consider the company you work for now (or one you have worked for in the past). Pick one of the “boxes” in the Ostervalder & Pigneur Business Model Canvas. Describe what goes in that box for the company you picked.

I currently work at the Dayton VA Medical Center (VAMC), part of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), within the Dep…[Read more]

If I’m understanding correctly the information presented in the VW case, then the new IT project prioritization process was a VWoA creation, specifically designed to focus on and make effective decisions about IT issues of greatest importance at the VWoA importer level. Given this, it makes sense that the supply flow project was unfunded b…[Read more]

In general, I agree that the system’s integrity and effectiveness would be compromised by making exceptions for certain executives once the decision have been made. However, I think that Marulovic would do well to take a somewhat nuanced approach to how he deals with these requests. For sure, if the system worked as advertised, then there’s not…[Read more]

How should Matulovic respond to his fellow executives who are calling to ask him for special treatment outside the new priority management system?

As the CIO of a large global company that’s made some rather poor decisions regarding its IT, Matulovic is definitely in a unenviable position. On the one hand, he has lead the charge to make s…[Read more]

This makes me think of a question I’ve been asking myself a lot over the last ten years or so, namely, how convenient is convenient enough? We push SO hard in this country to make things more convenient, and it seems we never quite understand when to stop. In many ways the countless “conveniences” many of un enjoy are to blame for how little…[Read more]

I don’t know…I don’t have anywhere near enough information to say this with complete confidence, but it still seems to me that there are plenty of very young folks with the skills needed to do a whole lot of damage in a very short amount of time. I would also say that it seems the stakes are much higher as we place ever greater amounts of vital…[Read more]