More for-profit companies should have a focus on social change.  This is the premise of the statement I provided @AlbersatSU to get into next year’s graduate leadership cohort.  In starting a business the choices of profit (focus on bottom line) or non-profit (focus on service goals) should not be mutually exclusive.  I believe building a profitable, service oriented business isn’t easy, but achievable through a people oriented culture which can create unique value to the community.

People are sick of the status-quo at work and want something more.  I just finished reading Rework http://37signals.com/rework/ and Linchpin http://www.squidoo.com/linchpin which both reached similar conclusions that people are looking for something that inspires them to do their best work.  Listening to the stories of the Red Winged Leadership finalists http://bit.ly/bdiCOR inspired an auditorium of people last night.  My hope is the cohort I am a part of next year is able to foster the awards program created by this year’s team to inspire even more.

@BrookBuchanan

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Happy designing,

@BrookBuchanan

A few nights ago I started thinking about some of my favorite concerts from earlier in the 2000s.  I started searching for some of them and came up with this gem flier from an early 2000 concert.  Hunting down band and concert info from 10 years ago made me realize how much the web has changed music since 2000.  Ten years ago I would spend hours in front of my computer with a slow internet connection hunting for new music and favorite band tidbits.  I used AltaVista to hunt down most of this info, and the other night found myself going back to this search engine as it produced the same page results I remember seeing a decade ago in their GeoCities like glory.

Concert recordings stopped at the guy with the recorder and mic taped to his chest.  (A note to any bootlegger with a tape of this Sleater-Kinney concert, it is on the top of my want list).  In short, if a band wasn’t a big name act, there isn’t usually a ton of info out there that has been preserved.  Flash forward to 2009, I was out of town when Corin Tucker, singer from above said defunct band was played a mid-week solo show in Portland.  I considered going to some great lengths to fly in, but had to let it go.  A week later I was elated to find someone had posted the entire set on YouTube.  Wasn’t the same as being there, but definitely was a happy find.

The findability, quantity, and relevance of content generated by both artist and user is continuing to increase.  A personal experience is also increasingly needed to offset the standardization of content on cookie cutter MySpace pages and search results.  Don’t get me wrong, standardization has brought a lot of value.  When I discover a band, the time to preview tracks, purchase, and sync to my devices is seconds to minutes.  Looking into the 2010 and beyond, availability of music across platforms will continue to be increasingly important.  Much has been written and speculated on how this will happen as netbooks become more popular and more content moves to the cloud.

However, I find initial discovery of music still difficult.  I listen to a lot of new releases and it is just a small fraction of the music available in genres that I am interested in.  Similar to the news industry which has seen content begin to spread out from traditional news sources due to real-time services, I see music discovery heading towards a transition.  Some glimpses of this trend have been seen in the last couple years.  Muxtape started as a site to share user generated digital mix tapes until the RIAA stomped it out.  The site is in the process of reemerging as a platforms for bands to share music.  Blip.fm is another Twitter-like site to discover new music and follow stations of friends.  As services like these continue to expand over this decade several opportunities will be realized:

1) More content experts will emerge leading to an increased number of trusted sources of discovering music.  In the 2000s I discovered new music using recommendations from local radio station KEXP, a few blogs I follow, and suggestions from friends.  Music services attempted to recommend content, but only generated picks cramming Coldplay down my throat, provided genius content I already knew about, or related content reducing music to a shopping cart item.  Two of the most successful experts of the 2000s were Dave Fridmann, and Alexandra Patsavas.  Fridmann created indie hits by producing a broad range of brilliant albums from Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Sleater-Kinney, and others.  As the music supervisor for shows like The O.C., and Grey’s Anatomy, Patsavas helped launch bands like Death Cab for Cutie and The Fray into the big-time.  My prediction is more genre specific experts will add value over the coming decade, some promoting the tops of genres and others making sense of the noise within a genre’s depths.

2) Deeper content will be found in every genre that you want to listen to.  Increased efficiency in discovery will lead to the ability to digest more content in a genre.  A lot of this content is there now, but it still takes a lot of effort to listen through what is good and what isn’t (some of which is interpretation).  Also, with studio equipment costs decreasing and the increasing ease of distributing content online, many bands starting out may ask themselves what benefit they get out of a label.  If more good to great artists were to strike out on their own innovation could increase faster by weakening the influence of the RIAA.

3) More content will be available around an artist.  As I mentioned in the starting example, the amount of content around your favorite artist will continue to increase.  Part of this will be user driven as the lone bootlegger morphs into a entire concert venue of video enabled devices.  Artists and services however will create this content as well.  As content trends towards free there will be a need to differentiate from other services and torrents.  Some of this has already started with special deals when purchasing through iTunes or Amazon on album release dates.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with my “Best Of” lists for the 2000s and 2009 ordered by release date.

BrookBuchanan.com Best Albums of the Decade

Radiohead – Kid A (2000)
The White Stripes – White Blood Cells (2001)
Death Cab for Cutie – The Photo Album (2001)
The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)
Beck – Sea Change (2002)
Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake Its Morning (2005)
Sleater-Kinney – The Woods (2005)
Cloud Cult – Meaning of 8 (2007)
Sigur Rós – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008)
Sons and Daughters – This Gift (2008)

BrookBuchanan.com Best Albums of 2009

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Death Cab for Cutie – The Open Door EP
Conor Oberst – Outer South + Gentleman’s Pact EP
The Horrors – Primary Colours
Girls – Album
Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk
The Gossip – Music for Men
The XX – The XX
Flaming Lips – Embryonic
Boat – Setting the Paces

Search Trends, SharePoint 14, and the Net Generation

The traditional model of information portals is fading in favor of search driven experiences like topic pages that allow for greater ease of publishing and information access.  Social software is becoming part of everything and has stopped being a mere feature.  The vision, business value, and technology that will drive the next several years of enterprise search is available to you today.  What is not as easily accessible are the answers of how do we get there and what change the technology will bring to an organization.  The answers will come as more search driven solutions are developed and best practices shared.  Dell for example gave an excellent presentation on their work with SharePoint and FAST.  I expect there will be at least some search implementation sessions at SharePoint Conference 2009 in the fall.  There definitely needs to be.

SharePoint 14 is poised to drive intranet search experiences for the masses similar to what SharePoint 2007 did for information portals.  FAST Search for SharePoint, the next evolution of FAST ESP shipping with Office 14, along with the recent inclusion announcement of PerformancePoint, is building a solid value-add story for SharePoint enterprise customers.  Microsoft has worked out a licensing model where customers can, and in my mind should, start planning for search solutions using the current FAST and SharePoint 2007 toolsets.  The benefit of search is there, but in most cases is going to require considerable planning.

There was much talk of the Net Generation (Millennials/Gen Y) during the conference, and how this generation is changing the shape of business as they enter the workforce.  While this discussion was very thought provoking, the demand generated by this cohort is not the business case for search within your organization.  While the younger members of your workforce can help speed adoption of new technologies, greater ease of access and management of information is the reason to move toward newer capabilities in enterprise search.

Tweetstream at #ffc09

The Twitter activity at FASTforward was a very exciting thing to watch.  I had TweetDeck open for the majority of the conference and activity was constant especially during the keynote presentations.  Some people acted as reporters, tweeting comments from the speakers in realtime.  Others engaged in further discussion on some of the topics.  Conversation like this a few years ago would have happened in delayed blog posts and not been as candid.  Especially with the virtual conference option for FASTforward, there was a way to keep connection between those in Vegas and remote.  A few speakers even looked at the Tweetstream while on stage to catch the pulse of how the presentation was being received and any questions.  Twitter as much as FAST technologies had a win from FASTforward.

A Changing Microsoft

The talk is turning into action as I saw a changing Microsoft at this event.  This Microsoft was focused on the user experience aspects of search design and providing value to customers.  The technology was there, but not in the frame of technology for technology sake that I have seen in the past.  As the recession continues, it was reassuring to see the energy and innovation at this conference as the work in enterprise search is really just getting started.

Partner Awards

EMC walked away with the User Experience Solution of the Year from FASTforward.  Many people stopped by the booth to see the live demo which incorporated Microsoft Surface.  It was great getting to talk with some of you and hearing some of the current SharePoint implementation challenges facing your businesses.  I’ve included a video of the solution.

Recently enough time has opened on my calendar to come up for air and start blogging.  A little about me.  I’ve been a program manager for a number of years, and most recently took a solutions architect role with the Microsoft solutions practice of EMC Consulting.  This latest career move has been an effort to connect with customers and work to solve complex problems in the enterprise.  My experience has ranged from building a startup technology department from the ground up to work at large scale enterprises.  In addition to the U.S., I’ve been fortunate to also get to work with a lot of great IT professionals across Europe, India, and China.  

If you were to ask me my specialty, I would probably tell you a number of things depending on who you are and how long you’d listen.  My main goal is to work with technology organizations to plan and design enterprise solutions that connect the information worker and improve IT efficiency.  Enterprise content management, business intelligence, along with agile project management processes and tools are my main specialties.  The technical implementation of the solutions I design are centered in Microsoft SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server, SQL Server BI and Reporting Services, and Microsoft Enterprise Project Management.

The Focus of this Blog

There are many successful Microsoft, MVP, and Partner blogs today that cover code walkthroughs and feature implementations of custom Microsoft solutions.  Additionally, many process centered blogs exist around methodologies such as PMI, Scrum, and XP.  These topics are an invaluable part of the IT community that I utilize every day, but will not be my focus in writing this blog.  Instead this blog will focus on the planning and design topics that precede a sprint or build phase of a project.  While this may at first glance seem like a very broad concept that is handled differently across organizations, there are trends in the questions I hear from customers, both directly and indirectly, and common solutions that can be found in Microsoft technologies.

- What can enterprise content management do for my business and how do I get there from where I am at today?

- How can I design a BI strategy that lets me keep a pulse on my key priorities and is flexible enough for a changing and growing business?

- What projects should I focus on and how do I ensure they are delivered and the value understood and realized?

- How do I keep my information workers, development teams, and IT professionals trained and able to absorb the change that will be needed to attain the value of implemented projects?

- What is this going to cost me year over year, and how do I continue to do more with less?

I see the benefit in answering these types of questions resulting in more successful Microsoft ECM, BI, and EPM solutions along with increasing the value and efficiency of a technology driven organization.  

Thanks for reading,

Brook Buchanan (.com)