CJBryan's blog

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn have increased in popularity at an incredible rate in the past two years. Facebook for example boasted 60 million active users in mid-2008, growing at an average of 3% weekly since Jan 2007, (according to Tunheim Partners), with active users doubling every six months. Over ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, adding to the estimated 70m videos hosted in March 2008.

If you follow my tweets or link to me on LinkedIn you might have picked up that I am teaching the CRM Topic on an MBA course. As part of this I have been developing the teaching material and case studies, this of course means that I am currently very sensitive to CRM and customer service approaches and issues. So when I was called by County Carpet Cleaners, while I was putting together the customer service module it was manna from heaven.

August is the silly season for news and business. 50% of my marketing mailer had out of office replies. 25% had changed jobs and 25% replied. Remarkable result, thank you everyone.

Notwithstanding all the above I am preparing for a series of assignment briefings this week that I am expecting to start in the next week or so.

The seven houses where I live received a letter from East Hampshire District Council this morning.

It read:

“It has been brought to our attention that there is a considerable amount of garden waste being dumped in the footpath…”

It went on “Under section 33 of the Environmental Protection act…. you arte liable to 12 months in prison or a £50,000 fine….”

Computer Weekly published a very interesting article this week: “PAC reveals its exasperation at endless public IT failures.” There is a copy here.

If you worry that your cv is just a jumble of words that no-one can make sense of, take a look at this.

If you are interested in trying this yourself. Paste your CV into the window on http://www.wordle.net/create and press go.

There are some phrases that have almost become business clichés  to a point where they lose any agreed meaning. In this context “Change” is right up there alongside “Rightsizing” and “Business Process Re-engineering”. An ex colleague of mine put together a bit of a rant about change (and using Dilbert  cartoons in presentations) challenging the need for change managers.

Choosing a systems implementer is often not a straightforward decision. You are entrusting your organisation to another company with at best conflicting objectives and at worst a strategy that is the polar opposite of yours. Potentially your people will be impacted, your processes changed and your ability to keep doing business challenged.