One of the most important questions to ask during a job interview or when preparing for an annual review is: "What constitutes success" or "what does success look like." For private sector organizations, there are often very easily quantifiable metrics: number and size of sales, or year-to-year growth. Even in the nonprofit sector, there can be widely-understood metrics: rate of growth for membership lists, the volume of participants at events, or the number of calls made or postcards sent during an awareness campaign.
IT Reform Bill, Redux. A bipartisan group of congressmen have unveiled a new IT acquisition reform bill, writes Sean Lyngaas, Federal Computer Week. The bill would create a Digital Government Office in OMB, headed by a presidentially-appointed, Senate confirmed CIO.
Users and Mobility. Alice Lipowicz has two articles up on FCW about mobility, one outlining how the FAA asked its employees how they would use mobile tech on the job, the other covering Anil Karmel's FOSE keynote (and other events) that showed the government is trying to think more about the mobile infrastructure than about the devices that will run on it. Some people, like CTOVision's
Can you hear me now? Kaifeng Yang, whose 2008 study on citizen particiaption I link to whenever possible, is the principal author of a new book of collected essays and studies on, what else?
Recently, I was in an auditorium waiting for a distinguished lecturer. He came out to a standing ovation, and when everyone was seated, said: “Your applause is humbling; an hour ago my 14-year old daughter told me in no uncertain terms that I was cruel, unreasonable, and didn’t know anything about anything.”
The week featured a few high profile departures - at least high profile for the Jerry Maguire way in which they occurred. In addition to Glen Smith's NYT op-ed trashing of Goldman Sachs, we have this gem about Google's former James Whittaker. Each should be seen as a single voice, but the lessons therein may be useful for companies hoping to thrive in a connected century.
