Blant de 200 norske it-sjefene som deltok i undersøkelsen er 46 prosent fast representert på øverste nivå i sin bedrift, den høyeste andelen i undersøkelsens seks år lange historie.

 

– I fjor satt 40 prosent av it-sjefene i toppledelsen, mens året før var bare 36 prosent representert på øverste nivå. Vi snakker med andre ord om en tydelig trend der it-sjefen får stadig mer innflytelse både i private og offentlige organisasjoner, sier Anders Lindgren, informasjons- og markedsdirektør i Steria.

Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.

That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

In many respects, Loughridge indicated IBM is a lot like a portfolio manager. The company makes big strategic bets and then lines up intellectual property under those efforts. General Electric is similar. Simply put, it’s unclear what businesses will drive IBM in the future, but the company won’t be shy about managing its units like portfolios.

Out of 104 submitted strategies, one called discountmachine was the runaway winner. The researchers expected that the best strategies would balance Observe and Innovate moves, in order to limit the costs associated with social learning. Surprisingly, discountmachine (as well as the second-place strategy, intergeneration) used almost exclusively social, rather than asocial, learning. The results suggest that social learning was successful because agents playing Observe were learning behaviors that other agents had chosen to play based on their high payoffs; in other words, despite the potential cost, they were consistently learning behaviors with high returns.

In the mid-1980s, as the full impact of personal computers on business began to be felt, Arthur put forth the idea that increasing returns — the expanding value of a technology as more people use it — could lead economies in unexpected directions. For example, Microsoft’s Windows operating system, deliberately set up as an open-architecture platform, was increasingly valuable because of the large array of hardware and software components that worked with it. The greater the number who used it, the more companies would fit their products with it, and thus the greater the number who would use it. Such a system would be vulnerable only to another product with an even stronger network effect (such as Google’s search engine, eventually). Arthur’s concepts provided an apt strategic explanation of the ways in which innovative products, surrounded by networks of avid users, came to dominate niches in the technology industry. (See Joel Kurtzman, “An Interview with W. Brian Arthur,” s+b, Second Quarter 1998.)

Arthur’s latest work, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009), delves more deeply into the meaning of innovation over time. He observes that new technologies are put together from existing technologies. Thus, the collective body of technological endeavor evolves by creating new elements from within itself. It forms a system that is constantly changing in ways that nobody can quite predict. This evolutionary process provides the impetus in turn for large-scale changes in science, the economy, and much of human culture.

It's the deadlines, stupid.

"Because of the pressures of news – you can’t have dead air or blank pages – so much of your focus and time spend is on today that you don’t have much time to think about tomorrow," said professor Robert Picard in a recent, in-depth interview I did with him.

Here's the big statistic from the survey. In response to the question, "How much TV do you currently watch on the Internet/online?", almost a quarter (23 percent) of the survey's respondents under 25 answered "most," another 6 percent answered "all," and 54 percent answered "some." That means that over four-fifths of this cohort of slightly more than 1,000 people do a fair-to-huge amount of their TV watching on the 'Net.

Not surprisingly, older respondents lag behind these numbers. But they're logging some serious video time in cyberspace, too. Fifty-one percent of all the survey's participants reported "some" Web-based video watching online, another eight percent said they do most of their TV viewing on the Internet, and five percent answered "all."

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not even aware before that they existed. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, pull gives us the ability to draw from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.

The power of pull puts each of us, individually and together, in a position to collaborate in a complete re-imagination of our biggest private-and public-sector institutions, one that may eventually remake society as a whole. As customers, we have more choices, and more information with which to make those choices, than ever before. As talented employees we have greater power too than before, since we create the lion's share of today's corporate profitability. As each of us votes with our feet and allies ourselves with new generations of institutions, we'll abandon the old ones, leaving them to drift into obsolescence and setting in motion a reshaping of broad arenas of economic and civic life.

"In a hyperconnected world, the costs of evil explode." Why is that the case?

What's different, immediately, about a hyperconnected world is that information flows much faster and more freely. So it's less costly to ascertain who's really evil — and who's really good. So the first force is information.

Cheap information lays the foundations for more collective action. It's less costly to punish those who are evil. Equally important, it's less costly to reward those who are good. Discipline is the second force.

With better collective action comes an enhanced incentive for competitors to provide what incumbents can't; to do good where there's evil. After all, both punishments and rewards are magnified. The third force is competition: competitive pressure by rivals to do more good, and less bad.

With greater competition comes greater probability of high-level innovation — new business models, strategies, and institutions that reinvent the deep economics of an industry, market, or sector. And so, thanks to the fourth force, disruption, the threat of fatality for incumbents grows.

With more innovation comes a greater emphasis on rule-making: the fifth force. As new disruptive innovations proliferate, regulators take a more active interest in assessing the social costs and benefits of each, and selecting for the most productive ones. Conversely, visionary organizations make new rules in their own ecosystems that alter the incentives for their buyers and suppliers to do more good, and less evil.

Ultimately, after a given threshold of connectivity, good is self-correcting, a dynamic equilibrium. Think about it this way. Wall Street banks sold the next guy toxic junk. But the next guy was selling their toxic junk right back to them. It's the golden rule of network strategy: what goes around, comes around. When an industry or market's connected tightly enough, doing good becomes the only game in town — unless, of course, you want to melt down catastrophically, like Wall Street did. Self-correction is the final force.

Wall Street banks thought they were in the rug sellers' world. But they were hyperconnected to the hilt.

 

Interessant, men finnes det virkelig  en sammenheng mellom radikal innovasjon og konkurranse?  

Enterprise technology executives are skeptical about cloud computing and 45 percent of them say that the risks outweigh the benefits, according to a survey.