Blogging Blogging

I've been thinking this evening about the discussion on the presentation day. I do not know how is people so afraid about connecting things, but for me comes by itself. I think the blog or learning diary is really good idea to reflex about the topics on the course because you can do it at home whenever it comes to your mind and without the worries of being wrong!! It's just your oppinion!!! I really like this method, not for the teacher more for the writer him/herself!! So let's keep on blogging!!

Time to review

Well this is almost gone already, so I think is time to review. What I have learned in this course?? Good question, dificult answer. Is difficult becuase I learnt lots of new things, so I do not know from where I should start.

First of all, I think this course has help me to grow up as a proffesional. I hardly belive that an engineer should be multidisciplinar proffesional so that , we can solve the problems of others easily. During this course I had to express myself in terms of another science, not only technically, which I think is really good for me. On the other hand I'm improving my skills on business, that is good knowledge for my future career.

I found networking really interesting beacuse is based on the dynamic of team work, basically the same I've been working with (software development) and I though that in business that was not used. I realized that computer science and business are closely related, on contrary I was thinking because I could find lots of relations between my own experiences in my line of work and the topics on the lectures.

Then, I have to say that I improve my skills on thinking critically, and on rellating all the ideas that I have stored in my brain... In conclussion, I'm more than a hard drive and I can use my brain for something else than keeping info....

I think it has been a great choice!!

My "Group Report"

I would like to start this entry saying THANK YOU to the firm that helped me to make the "group report".

The study of a real firm has been really good tool for applying the knowledge I gain during this course. It has help me to think critically and to link my knowledge in this and other areas of life. I realize that the ideas proposed in the course are really going on in the real world of firm environment, and I really appreciate that , because my experience is that most of the things I have learnt in University are simply the theoretical base, and I had to learn how thing are done in the real world by myself.

About my findings, I would like to point out the idea of embededness again. I find out that fear is the biggest barrier for the network development. But, not in the way of changing minds or methods, I think that what most scares firms is the threat of be used. I think this is closed to the first idea of the course, how the things we do affect the people around, and of course with the idea of trust. Human being are supicious for nature, so the challenge now is how to avoid this feeling and to leave out of the networking environment those firms that are not trustable.

Cleaning the Spiderwebs!!

Wow, more than one month without publishing anything, I'm really shamed of have my blog so disused!! Well but even when I was not keeping records of my learning I have lots of things to talk about so is time to clean the spiderwebs and start being a rational and seriuos person again.

My topic for today: Learning!! When I was dealing with the material of the last lecture I was feeling like that was not new at all. Is well known that humans learn from the mistakes, so why not learning from the experience, wether our experience or our partners experience.

I have my own stories about collaborative work, both positive and negative experiences, but when I was thinking about how the collaborative work was affecting my live, I realize that, as in the interfirm collaboration, I learn lots of things from my own experiences. Collaborating with someone either firm or a person changes your way of behave, that is, after a couple of bad experiences in collaborative work, I became more carefully when choosing my partners and when dealing with them. On the other han, I feel like working in a team teach you how to develop responsability skills and how the things that you do can affect other in different manners.

I think I can keep writing thousands of ideas that I learn when I was working collaboratively, but just for sumarize I came to the conclusion that the collaborative work has helped me to grow up as a person and as an engineer, so if is such a positive thing for individuals I can not imagine how it can be for firms.

CIAO

I did it again. Since I'm taking this course I'm realizing how involved am I with the e-business activities. Last week, during the discussion about social media, we were talking about those sites for evaluating products. I've used Ciao (www.ciao.es in it spanish version) like one thousand times, but since today I've never stopped before and think about the real power and meaning of this site.

For those who do not know what's Ciao, is a portal where consumers share opinions about products. You can also find some price comparisson for the same items. I've been surfing the web, properly in order to choose a good new camera, and also to find out some information for my post. And what I can say, is that I couldn't find any non ethical post, all are more or less imparcial and show either advantages and drawback of the products on analisys. I couldn't find an explicit ethical code for posting, but I think it is implicit due to is a kind of collaborative task and it is just made of real opinions. There are some guidelines for posting, so I think there is this implicit moral code.

I really like this kind of sites, I find them really usefull.

Bliki Bliki!!

It is amazing how social media is evolutioning. Last Friday, during the class I discovered a new tool, the bliki. This new collaborative tool comes from taking the advantages of blog and wiki. Basically consist in a simple blog structure in which wiki edition is allowed in order to perform the post or blog entries.

This could be a great tool for teams and organization, because the blog is not anymore a closed structure of single ideas posted by a single author. Each blog entry, turns into a wiki article that can be edited collaboratively.

So again, the cooperative work and sharing experieces are taking advantadge!

Open your mind, use Open Source

Nowadays, choosing the technology and software that you want to use in your business is really a huge and risky decission, specially if you are involved with a Small or Medium Size Company. After the discussion on class about the Open Source tools, and also after making a small research between mates and friends about Open Source software I can say that people has no idea about which is really Open Source.

And now I can imaging the face of a SME's CEO when an IT Consultor suggests to change all their owner system, that sounds safe and easy to use because all the competence has the same (ie Microsoft software), and start using something called Linux or some Subversion system or using Apache...

Let's think for a while what's Open Source : "Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in." (Source www.opensource.org). But how this affects our bussines?

• Economic Advantages: Obviously this is one of the most important advantages, when we are hiring a developper to create any kind of software, we are the owners of the source code. That's a great advantage for us, due to we can reuse and adapt our own code without taking care of paying licenses or updates.
• Estability and Maintenance: the technology we use controls mostly all areas of business, so the needs of updating the software do not change as fast as the technological market grows and change. Using an owner software, we are oblied to follow the trends of the market and change our software and hardware according to the owners changes (updates of software sometimes are not needed at all and usually force us to change also the hardware). A well done software project can be extended, updated or changed maintaining a technological stability.
• Customization: It is imposible to find an owner software product that covers exactly all our needs. Using open source we can customize our tools according to the real needs of our business. This is also a great advantage regarding the security, because our software is unique, so it is more dificult for a hacker to find or to know the weakness or the backdoors of our system.

Due to all these reasons, we can be more competitive with a small invesment on technology. Giant companies are saving lots of money yearly using Open Source, i.e. Amazon saved $17 million in 2000 implementing their services with Linux. Yahoo, Google or AOL are implemented using Open Source as well. The European Union or the World Bank adopted Open Source in order to improve the security of their systems, and Sun Microsystems Iberica is working to be 100% Open Source... What else do we need to prove that is the best invesment for a small company??

Trust in me

Last lecture we have a huge discussion about TRUST. Maybe for a common user of e-commerce platforms and internet business systems, auction sites and so on, the fact of not trusting in someone online sounds ... a bit imposible!! But actually is a huge drawback for starting new e-business activities.


The idea is not only to trust in the companies or people behind the web or e-shop, but also to trust in the payment systems, the logistics and in an intangible service. Problems like phising, spaming or cracking do not contribute to create a trusting environment.


That's why is so important to create an image and a feeling reliability when we are operating online, the question is how to do it. Surfing the internet I found a non-proffit association, The Latin American Institute of Electronic Comerce eConfianza whose goal is to develop parameters and practices to evaluate how trustable is an e-commerce site and to create trust marks that allow the consummer to recognize those companies that use good e-business practices. Surfing their internet portal http://www.econfianza.org/ , you can find not only a directroy of all the companies that already have this trust mark, but also some other services focused on trasactions between enterprises. They offer a reclamation service for consummers as well.

I know that trust in someone (person or company) is really hard, but maybe this kind of organizations is a good starting point for those companies which want to operate online.

I can't get 'embeddedness' out of my mind

Almost one week thinking about the concept of embeddedness. I understood quite well the meaning of the word, I know to what it refers, but the thing is that I have seen this before somewhere else, the question was WHERE??.

Almost one week, and finally I found the answer in the deepest of my brain!! The main idea is to analize how changes will affect to our environment, and in some way how ready is people to change. And that's the point, that's why I have seen this before, where : Team Software Process. Is so amazing how things are related sometimes. Managing the change is one of the most important factors when you are dealing with team work. In the particular case of Software Engineering, the point comes when you are trying to create a team for any kind of project. To manage humans resources and find out the most suitable team, one of the factors you have to take in count is how ready are the team members to change, to adapt his knowledge to new technicques and ways of working. You can use the principles of Change Roles to find out the possitions that your colegues will have whenever a change is performed.

There are many studies about Change Roles or Roles in Change. I remember some kind of questionaries to study the role someone will playing in change, unfortunately I could not find any in English... Anyway here is a really good web page about the topic:

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/change-management/roles

So at least part of the embeddedness concept is used in other disciplines...

New structure, new ways of communication.

The future trend in organizations is the spherical structure for network organizations. This shows up new needs not only in the way of implementing business methods, but also in the way of communicating with colegues and employees.

Traditionaly the flow of internal information in pyramid organizations has been top-down, from the higest hierarchical positions to the lower ones, in order to keep workers and colaborators informed about those aspect that are needed to fulfil their goals. This communication method has been combined with bottom-up styles, which allows the workers in the lower hierarchical positions to inform board members or superiors about the state of their projects, their feelings and motivation and their needs, to make easier the decision making proccess.

But now, in the new spherical structures this models of communication are not enough. Since we are part of a network, we do not have the same hierarchical structure and the decision making is not any more holded by the upper positions of herarchy. That's why new models of horizontal communication are used. This new communication system between entities on the same level is more efficient when is applied in the network structures because is faster and allows entities to find quick solutions, promotes team work environment, undestanding between individuals and also the feeling of found solutions together as a team.

Another challenge for the organization of the future!!

WOW, let's blog!!

And finally, the blog is working and in English... How can I imagine that a last year student of computer science would have some many problems with just a blog ^^. I'm loosing my skills!!.

The aim of this blog is not only to give expression to what I'm learning in the lectures, but also to capture my thoughs and opinions about the main topics of "Networks for e-business". I hope you can find here another point of view, the technological one ^^