We Are Smarter Than Me
How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Wharton School Publishing, 2007

This book is a product of what it preaches – authors Libert & Spector apparently compiled their text with the help of thousands of contributors who chipped in with case studies, examples and the like. The authors dub this process “crowdsourcing” – the act of tapping on the resources of numerous external contributors.

The authors aim to explain how you can successfully leverage the potential of crowdsourcing in your own business.

That crowdsourcing is at all possible is due to the improvements in communications technology that makes it possible for disparate groups of people to collaborate in new and innovative ways. Smart companies can embrace such collaboration to tap into groups of volunteers who can essentially do work that had traditionally been done by employees.

The book is chock-full of real life examples of such crowdsourcing initiatives in a variety of business functions including product development, sales & marketing, technical support and customer service to name a few. One example is that of the Japanese company that produces Sodoku puzzles – it produces a magazine whose subscribers regularly contributes new puzzle ideas.

Other examples cited: Cookshak – a US oven manufacturer – only employs 25 people, but it effectively uses an extensive online user forum to provide in-depth technical information and advice to its customers. Mastercard allowed the general public to develop variations to its “priceless” commercials to good effect. iStockphoto – an online photo stockist relies on amateur photographers to provide much of its content.

While the potential to use crowdsourcing seems endless, the authors do warn that the process simply does not work for certain functions – particularly management and strategy. Also, getting it to work in other areas takes some effort – for example: a loyal extended community must be actively developed, in-house resistance must be addressed and you must spread the benefits in the longer term to keep your community engaged.

Overall, this book is recommended as a primer for the type of extended collaboration businesses will increasingly have to rely on – it introduces you to the potential of crowdsourcing, but may not go deep enough into the mechanics of how to make it work for those who actually want to implement such initiatives within their own businesses.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Harvard Business School Press (March, 2007)

This book makes a compelling case for enhancing a firm’s competitiveness through the systematic use of fact-based analytical decision making techniques.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is a primer on analytics; it covers the nuts and bolts of using analytics to assess and optimize critical business processes. A number of revealing examples of how some prominent companies successfully employ analytics are also presented.

Part 2 outlines a roadmap for implementing analytical techniques in you organization. It also contains an interesting discussion of the future directions of business analytics.

Business intelligence software and tracking applications available today make it possible for smaller firms to implement sophisticated real-times decision support systems too. Innovative methods to present information visually also makes it possible for non-analysts to understand and effectively use numerical data.

Overall, this book is well worth a read for anyone wishing to outperform the competition by turning his or her business into a strong analytic competitor.

In “The Big Switch“, Carr compares the trend toward grid or cloud computing with the development of the electric grid more than a century ago.Carr agues that much in the same way that stand-alone electric dynamos disappeared with the rise of national power grids, today’s islands of corporate IT resources will be made irrelevant with the shift to utility computing. And as the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centres into the cloud, the traditional IT department is set to go the way of the Dodo.Carr does make a compelling argument for the ascendency of utility computing and he is certainly quite right about the general trend lines – witness the rapid rise of on-demand and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions as well as web services from the likes of Amazon, Savvis, Salesforce.com and Google. However, I think it will be quite some time before most enterprises will fully embrace the utility computing model & completely abandon their internal IT resources.

In the small business arena however, cloud computing is set to make a more immediate impact. The vast majority of small businesses do not have internal IT departments with vested interests to protect.

Innovative on-demand services and emerging web technologies are making it possible for small businesses to deploy powerful IT tools and processes that were previously limited to large enterprises with deep pockets.This shift to cloud computing is set to create vast new opportunities for agile small businesses and is a topic you will be reading a lot more of in this blog.