Welcome to our latest episode of Tom’s Tech Notes! This week, DZone.com’s research analyst Tom Smith chats with Dell Boomi CTO Michael Morton about how to innovate better. Learn who to approach about innovating, how to plan for it, and the importance of not just failing fast, but learning and implementing fast.
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Few people in an organization have been the focus of so much attention in innovation circles as middle managers. Depending on your point of view, they are seen as either an essential conduit by which information flows, or a barrier to the spread of ideas and knowledge.
Indeed, it’s a topic I myself touched upon when I looked at some new research from Wharton’s Ethan Mollick on the topic. Mollick suggested that middle managers are especially important in industries that require innovative employees such as biotech, computing, and media.
Malcolm Gladwell famously shed light on the role of ‘connectors’ in his best selling book The Tipping Point. He regarded connectors as, obviously, people who know a lot of people, but more importantly, people who can connect different worlds and spot things in one world that can be applied in another.
Or as Gladwell himself said, "connectors are people who link us up with the world. People with a special gift for bringing the world together."
"One of the most surprising things I’ve seen with Neo4j is the speed at which we’re able to innovate and deliver features to our customers," said Mark Hashimoto, Senior Director of Engineering, Digital Home at Comcast.
In this week’s five-minute interview, we discuss how Comcast uses the flexibility of the graph data model to develop and launch new features rapidly using Neo4j for persistence.
It’s a trend for IT companies to go "flat" these days. With so many thought pieces and studies on employee empowerment and self-organization out there, it’s tempting for some CEOs to give it a try.
A "flat" organization is a distributed management system where no one is the boss and employees can make impactful decisions at all levels. Other typical characteristics of such organizations are transparency, continuous feedback, and "fluidity" – grouping task forces around current problems rather than having fixed teams.
Who is really building applications? The answer might surprise you.
In a survey of 350 non-professional developers, Forrester research found that a significant portion of employees were also contributing to custom application delivery, even when not considered to be IT professionals (How To Harness Citizen Developers To Expand Your AD&D Capacity, Forrester Research, Inc., April 19, 2017). Whether or not app development was part of these employees’ job descriptions didn’t stop them from seeking out these opportunities.
One of my early blog posts that I wrote nearly 10 years ago that I called "Sony Baloney" discussed how the electronics giant cultivated some unusual, yet highly successful practices. One of the practices that Sony is known for is taking young and inexperienced engineers and putting them on new product development, while their senior engineers focus on reworking and redesigning their successful products to be more cost-effective. I consider this to be a very wise practice and so do they.
We want innovation in new products but we always want to balance it so that our work is maintainable and cost-effective. The electronics industry pays a lot of attention to this because manufacturing is expensive. Of course, there are no manufacturing costs, per se, in the software industry but there are maintenance and ongoing costs for software and that’s actually where the bulk of our funds are spent. So, paying attention to the maintainability of our code is quite important yet often overlooked.
Is a no-code platform a means to an end? Simply to build custom applications easily?
The answer is both yes, and no.
Co-working spaces are booming, with some 2.5m sq ft of co-working space in London alone at the moment. That’s an increase of 190% in the last year. Whilst the rise in the gig economy is an undeniable factor in this trend, there is also the promise of co-working providers that working in their facilities will make your work more creative and more effective. Great effort is put into designing spaces that are built to support innovation.
It’s a concept that has a lot to rationally support it. There is a strong need for flexible workspaces, and most facilities do look like superb places to plug into and work. Do they actually deliver on their promise though? Is the hype in the marketing material matched by reality on the ground? That was the question recently posed in a new paper by Creative Friction and the London School of Economics.
As a developer, how difficult is it to choose between innovating in an untested market vs. going with a safe rehash in a tried-and-true market?
This is the question of the hour these days, with so many players up in a frenzy over lack of industry innovation in the AAA market. So many developers are honestly just trying to put something out there that can generate income while simultaneously entertaining the masses.
