These are tough times for many. Countries are struggling with debt, people get laid off and entire industries are being wiped out. So the news three days ago that Nokia’s profit last quarter slumped by 90% may not come as a particular surprise.

Nokia is suffering from a slump in consumer demand, not alleviated by a parade of new products. These include new handsets (which, some say, look suspiciously like spruced-up versions of some old ones) and Ovi, its new music, maps and more internet portal.

Nor is Nokia suffering alone. Its mobile industry cousins, the operators, have long fretted about becoming merely “dumb pipes,” through which traffic flows but someone else gets the real money (much like you access the internet through your local internet service provider, yet it is Google with its online services who earns billions). New customers, an important engine of revenue growth in the past, are rarer, and ARPUs are stagnating despite a surge of creativity from marketing departments.

Yet, just as countries that were slow to implement structural reform are now painfully discovering, it might not have been that bad. Many of the mobile industry’s real and as yet imaginary woes come from being overwhelmingly exposed to the capricious consumer market. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest get-together, only one out of nearly 30 sessions was devoted to enterprise solutions.

Mobility and enterprise IT seem to be in denial about each other. IT departments are staffed with people who know, well, IT. The IT industry obliges by providing them with applications that cater to companies’ business processes and with ways to deploy and manage these applications enterprise-wide. It listens to the desires of companies and makes new software in tight integration with them. In other words, IT needs of companies are well understood and catered for.

What of the mobile industry? Innovation even in the consumer market looks sporadic: companies (particularly mobile operators) churn out hundreds of applications and services in the hope that some will stick. Mobile video conferencing was a failure; the fate of music download subscriptions bundled with phones remains to be seen. Apple’s much-touted AppStore brandishes its billionth download just nine months after opening, but look at what downloads are these: a Native American flute simulator, a flight game and an application that imitates an x-ray machine. Small wonder enterprise IT isn’t particularly excited in embracing mobility. Of course, there have been successful enterprise mobility implementations, and employees have welcomed mobile e-mail. But by and large, mobility hasn’t got deep into internal workings of the enterprise.

Opportunities for mobility in the enterprise may be huge. By weaving itself into business processes, the mobile industry will be less exposed to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t demand from consumers. But the industry should take the task of understanding the needs of the enterprise — and indeed, of individual consumers for that matter — seriously. They should also start making their way into enterprise IT departments. At the moment mobility and enterprise IT look like two distant and overly polite relatives at a big party: both know they are kin, but neither dares to start a conversation without proper introduction.

With the economic turmoil that businesses will face in the coming year, technology managers will face a new level of difficulty that should seem especially tough after several recent positive periods regarding business technology. Many technology analysts are now releasing reports that summarize CIO concerns for the difficult times ahead.

Most analyst seem to agree with the opinion stated on CIO.com, which is that “CIOs who underestimate the economy and overestimate their own prowess risk losing their jobs in the coming year. And the count may be surprisingly high…they may not see the dangerous gap between how they and their bosses rate their work.”

Unfortunately, many CIOs made these mistakes (waiting too long to react and not realizing business goals) after the technology bubble burst not long ago. CIO recommends that CIO’s be proactive this time around and that “what happens to CIOs on the other side of this economic bust will be different from 2001 only if you assert yourself, don’t wait for an invitation, certainly don’t wait to be told.”

Many of these proactive moves will likely involve shifting high-risk, large-scale technology and process changes to smaller, less-riskier, and measurable technology and process improvements. Networkworld.com predicts that cuts will also include spending on consultant work, technology refreshes, and new hires. They also say that the key will be spending on process improvements. As they report, “Now is the time to take advantage of process-automation and workflow tools. They are reasonably mature, and they introduce efficiencies that ultimately save money. It is important that IT take manual processes and codify them to free up staff wherever possible.” Smart spending also may include software-as-a-service and cloud computing, which allows organizations to not have to maintain software and easily scale it as needed, since it is based on a subscription-based model.

Unfortunately, the Financial Times reports that the biggest concern for CIOs next year might be finding another job. They report that “the perception among chief information officers (CIOs) that their influence on business strategy is steadily waning, coupled with continuous and increasing pressure to cut costs. And since the main areas of satisfaction among CIOs are “having a greater involvement in business strategy and a fresh challenge,” many CIO’s may look to move on. However, greener pastures will not be easy to find in the coming year, and most CIOs will have to withstand the difficult time, be proactive (as discussed above), and lastly, “make sure projects come in on time and on budget.”

The idea for this post came to me after I had followed two recent stories on the web. The stories, while seemingly unrelated, touched upon two intrinsic elements of crowdsourcing (I’m using this term loosely here): noise and manipulation. As I was reading through the stories and the ensuing blogosphere chatter, I though that how we deal with these elements is likely to determine the trajectory of social media in the future. Sounds important, doesn’t it ? So, here are a few thoughts – bear with me:

Story 1 – Noise. The first story dealt with the so-called “citizen journalism”, or in other words a crowd-sourced version of news production. Several pundits have claimed recently that traditional news media, like CNN etc., have become the thing of the past and that witness-journalists can now provide faster and more complete news reporting. As the recent tragic events in Mumbai have shown, however, this is not always the case. There is no doubt that by using mobile phones and platforms like Twitter, Youtube etc. witness-reporters can deliver the information faster. They can also deliver it in massive amounts. Yet this does necessarily translate into comprehensive and/or accurate information– qualities we all look for in news reporting. To the contrary, the Twitter reporting on Mumbai attacks was filled with noise. As blogger Tim Malborne puts it, it actually turned into an “incoherent, rumour-fueled mob …(that) was so drowned in …personal utterance, revenge and irrelvance as to be incomprehensible”. Read his full post here – it’s quite illuminating.

The problem of noise, of course, is not limited to “citizen journalism”. So far as crowdsourcing by definition involves a large number of random people contributing their input to accomplish a certain goal, this approach is bound to generate, along with legitimate contributions, a large amount of garbage. This garbage can be observed in abundance across most social media venues – just browse Youtube to get a feel.

So how can we tackle the problem of noise in crowrsourcing? One obvious solution is to introduce filters to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. Chris Anderson devotes an entire chapter in his book on Long Tail to talk about filters and their role in linking democratized production (read, crowrsourcing) with demand. But the million dollar question remains what should these filters be. Would it be better to delegate control to a select group of individuals with the proper reputation or perhaps those who are motivated to take on the task? This seems to be what Tim Malbone is leaning towards in his follow up essay on how to clamp down on rubbish chatter on Twitter. This is also in line with the approach taken by Wikipedia, which lets page patrollers oversee the process of content creation and editing. In fact, in his recent visit to Barcelona a few weeks ago Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, went as far as to suggest that he would welcome if folks from Encycolpedia Britannica start vetting Wikipedia articles to certify them as accurate and worthy of the “encyclopedia” status.

But isn’t the “power of a few” exactly what social media was supposed to help us get away from? Didn’t we have plenty of similar filters in the past, like traditional news media, recording labels etc., that determined what was deserving of our attention and what wasn’t? If so, there must be a better way to do this, a way based on the new principles and not the old ones. Can we establish filters to sift through the massive amounts of crowd-sourced content based on… well, the input from the crowd?

…And this is where the second story comes in.

Story 2 – Manipulation. Digg.com is an online community platform designed to help its members discover the most interesting news stories on the web. It works by letting users vote for, or digg, stories submitted by other users; stories that receive the most diggs are then promoted to the front page. If you think about it, this is exactly the type of filter we were talking about – the filter that does not rely on input of “the elite” but that of the community. Guess what, Digg recently banned a large number of its top users for alleged manipulation. Officially, the ban was for using scripts to exploit the algorithm used by Digg to decide which stories to promote. As a result of manipulations, Digg claims, the top 100 users were responsible for over 50% of the front-page stories. Sounds like we’re back to square one and the selected few are still calling the shots. Read David Chen’s blog for the complete story.

According to James Surowiecki the wisdom of crowds comes from putting together inputs from a large number of diverse individuals. Whereas each individual’s input may be imperfect and skewed, their sum usually produces a set of fairly sound and unbiased results. Well, as the Digg story shows this ideal “democratic” process can be distorted through manipulation by a few powerful users. …But should these users be blamed for it?

I would agree with David Chen and say no. And here is why. In the absence of material rewards, the main driver for people to get involved in crowdsourcing production is recognition. Yes, people want to be recognized for what they’ve created and they want this recognition to be explicit. That is why, as David points out, “MySpace has “Friends,” Youtube has “Number of Times Viewed,” and Twitter has “Followers”. But once you have a metric in place and a system that calculates it, it is only natural that people, in their rush for recognition, will look for ways to exploit it. And that’s exactly what happened on Digg.

Perhaps, the right solution for how to establish filters is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps, it is OK if some people participate more and have a greater say in what goes and what doesn’t. After all, subject matter expertise still counts for something, doesn’t it? What’s critical, however, is for the system to remain flexible and capable of weaning out those filters that become bottlenecks. How do we do that? Well, that’s what we need to figure out to take crowdsourcing, and social media in general, to the next level.

One of the main concerns for many people in tough economic times is the job search process.  Researchers have found that a poor economy can have a significant psychological effect on individuals looking for jobs. Individuals affected by downsizing will likely have low confidence and self-esteem and will think that it is necessary to appear
super-qualified to get a job. Many studies have found that around 40% of people already provide false information on their resumes, and with the tendency mentioned above, lies on resumes are likely even more prevalent in tough times. Organizations should realize that in traditional face-to-face interviews, recruiters are able to catch a little under half of the lies with which they are confronted, and so they should be careful in these settings. However, they should be even more aware of interviewers' abilities in the computer-based settings that many companies are starting the recruiting process with now. Many job-search websites now provide features so that the interview process can be started online, using e-mail or instant-messaging (IM) chat communication. While these features are useful because they allow organizations to easily interview many candidates in different places, the also present new challenges, such as detecting interviewee lies. Unfortunately, interviewers are only able to catch about 8% of the lies with which they are confronted when using computer-based communication, such as email or IM. However, in a recent study conducted by faculty at IESE and by researchers in the US, it was found that when other individuals (that were not involved in the interview process) review transcripts (or recordings) of computer-based interviews, it is possible to more than double the lie detection rate in these new interview settings. This is good news, because with this added step in the interview process, distance-based interviews that take place over the computer may be effective enough for initial interview stages.

To find out more about these studies and some of the new findings about lies and new interview settings, take a look at "Hiring. How to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff" and "Truth, Lies and Audiotape: Finding Fibbers Before Hiring Them" at the IESE Insight website.

A couple of posts ago, I talked about Microsoft’s potential move into cloud computing. However, since that time, Microsoft formally announced their development of a cloud-based system and cloud computing has been getting even more media attention. This post is a follow-up to the previous post, and it is meant to be a quick guide to a few more of the current discussions about this new technology.

David Chappell describes the importance of cloud computing in a research report sponsored by Microsoft. He talks about the potential impact that a new type of application environment can have. As he says, “A new kind of application platform doesn’t come along very often. But when a successful platform innovation does appear, it has an enormous impact. Think of the way personal computers and servers shook up the world of mainframes and minicomputers…” While the old world of desktop applications will not go away, a new approach can quickly become the center of attention for new applications, and so desktop development may be passed by for many new and cutting-edge applications. When talking about another way that cloud computing may cause a major disruption, CIO.com reported that cloud computing will likely allow organizations to more easily outsource non-critical computing processes. This means that cloud computing could also cause further reductions in IT workforces in the coming years.

One recent discussion in the cloud computing arena that has been gaining momentum is related to legal and ethical issues involved with online information storage. Once applications are stored online (as they are with cloud computing), much of the data associated with these programs will likely follow (if it is not already there). The economist reports that “several governments have recently passed new laws forcing online firms to retain more data, and at some point, cloud providers may find themselves compelled to build data centers in every country where they do business.” This is potentially a major obstacle for small to medium sized companies that want to get into the cloud-based infrastructure business. Also important are the ethical issues regarding information storage. A BBC article questions, “What happens when Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and IBM are actually running programs and storing data behalf of their customers? We may criticize Google for censoring search results in China, but what happens when Microsoft data centers are being used to store data on political prisoners or transcripts of torture sessions?” Clearly, the decision of how to handle ethical issues related to the information stored on cloud-based machines will be important.

Another recent discussion looks at how one of the key challenges for cloud providers is to create the entire infrastructure needed to support business applications. Information Week mentions that many platform developers are using other online resources to support their own infrastructure. For example many providers use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and Simple Storage Service (S3) to support their online processing and storage needs. As they say, “The advantage is that tasks needing an extra blast of processing power or storage capacity can be handled by Amazon, so-called cloudburst computing.” Also, providers are trying to allow easy integration (for applications on their platforms) with other online environments, such as Facebook. A resource such as Facebook can make it possible to connect employees, customers, and partners in new ways.

These are just a few of the early discussions related to cloud computing. However, as companies develop more owerful infrastructures, application developers will recognize new opportunities for online applications, and the issues related to cloud computing will get larger and more complex. It probably isn’t a bad idea to read up on it now, before the possibilities and issues are hard to get your head around.