Big Corporate - Stop Stopping Innovation

I watched the Social Network tonight and was fascinated with the part of the movie when the young Zuckerberg initially built Facemash (a hot-or-not type website for on-campus Harvard students) in one night. Whether this was fictional or not, as a skilled programmer by trade, I believe he totally could do it in one night (and drunk, as portrayed), assuming no bureaucracy was stifling his innovation.

But Big Corporations have Big Problems - security issues, compliance (SOX) issues, availability issues,public relations issues, etc. etc.

These are real problems that need to be seriously considered and dealt with appropriately. But these constraints should not constrain innovation.

Too often large corporations put big processes in place to solve these big problems. And that's fine when it comes to deploying to production, or the public eye. But the amount of effort and cost needed to spin up innovative environments, needs to be free of these constraints.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: Marketing Department A has an idea to create a consolidated Twitter account made up of employee's tweets, tagged appropriately, to be fed into a corporate Twitter account. This is a smart idea, crowdsource tweets for the corporate account (this is what we do by the way).

Do I need to go through a heavy-set bureaucratic ITIL process to see if this can work? What if I'm not sure if I even want to launch it until I beta test it? If I can hire a programmer for $2K to beta test this, why do I need to spend additional thousands of dollars to justify the spin up of an innovative environment?

Infrastructure departments need to keep pace with innovation. And although it's important that they maintain consistent records of what environments exist and where, don't stifle innovation with bureaucracy. Utilize virtualization to feed development and test environments to your user-base on demand, as needed (private cloud baby!). And put an expiration date on them and spin them down for pilot projects that never make it to the real world.

Don't punish innovation with process. If you're a big corporation, use your capital and your data centers to encourage innovation. Leave the ITIL process to when things are baked enough to go to production, that's where the due diligence is needed. Maybe even use cloud environments for these innovation test beds. And if a company is truly being innovative and Agile, there may be a small percentage of environments that are actually spun up for production use. Finally, the owners of these seed-environments should not be punished, but commended. This is what keeps companies alive, kicking and competing with the dorm rooms ready to redefine any and all industries.

Does your company have this figured out? Let others know in the comments below.

OH S*&% Is My Business Reliant on Facebook?

We use Facebook to promote our brand and enable more meaningful customer interactions. It's been sweet. But what about those situations that aren't so sweet? Can it handle the bads as well as the goods?

My Facebook account recently got hacked by some 419 scammers, and through Facebook IM, these turkeys contacted some of my friends asking them for money claiming my family and I were mugged in London and needed them to wire some money. Thankfully, no one fell for it. One of my friends reported the conspicuous activity to Facebook and they quickly disabled my account.

After I realized what happened, I filled out Facebook's re-enablement form. That was over two weeks ago. I've filled out the form two more times since and I haven't received any correspondence back from them. . .Boohoo, right?

But here's the deal. Facebook is a big communication platform, not just for me, but for my business. My company has a very active Facebook page (facebook.com/solsticeconsulting), of which I am one of the administrators. We post all of our events through that channel, cross promote them through our personal Facebook networks and get a lot of attendees to our events from our Facebook "friends". Thankfully there are other administrators besides myself for our company page, but what if there wasn't?

I also use my network on Facebook to crowdsource feedback on some of our ideas for our business. For example, we're launching a product development arm of our company and I wanted some feedback on our logo competition. I love tapping my Facebook friends for candid feedback on stuff like that. Cross industry, honest, multi-demographic, no-holds-barred-feedback-from-that-girl-in-high-school-that-never-gave-you-the-time-of-day, it's a gold mine of great reactions. But I was locked out and couldn't use it. Sure I tapped LinkedIn, but those guys' feedback is blah. It's two different contexts and conversations. Facebook gives me a more candid market reaction.

So what gives? I've filled out that re-enablement form three times now without so much as an auto-reply back that they got my request. In the meantime I've coincidentally gotten a (no-reply) email notification that our Facebook Ads credit-card on file is going to expire in two months. Sorry, can't update that Mark Z, I'm locked out of my account.

At the end of the day that's bad business. Facebook isn't a garage-band start-up anymore. Their valuation tops Amazon.com in some circles. Could you imagine Amazon not replying to an account lockout problem? And what if I was a small business owner (or a marketing department) and I was the sole administrator on my company's Facebook page? Social Media Life Lesson: Make Sure You Have More Than One Admin for Your FB Company Page

Hackers are a problem, and they are going to migrate to where the people are (Windows, Facebook, eBay, Craigslist and the like). But their infiltration should not impede the power-users of those platforms. The power users are the lifeblood of making these networks continue to grow and proliferate purpose beyond their original intention.

Zuckerberg, if you're listening, crank up the customer service. It's a big shop now, and although I'm not expecting a 1-800 number to call, there does need to be some attention made to your most active constituents; to breed confidence that the platform is not only some place to share videos of my kid eating Cheerios, but getting some business done as well. We're promoting your platform as a business-enablement tool, I need you to stand behind it.

Locking out hacked accounts is not the answer to solving your hacker problem. The answer is building in better fore-front security and secondarily, providing a simple means for a real user to re-enable their account, and quickly re-gain access to the personal (and business) content they trusted with you in the first place.

In the meantime, follow me on Twitter (@jschwan).

-J