Web 2.0

CEMEX is fostering innovation by changing the way employees work. It is encouraging a change in practices towards more collaboration, transparency, and openness, and enabling these changes through a Social Networking platform with a business sense, called Shift. These changes are challenging existing management practices, and opening the creative and strategic arena to all levels of the company. After only 18 months of being in place, these new practices have already produced benefits in an unprecedented scale and speed. » Read more

We need to "measure what matters" as the saying goes. As we move to new payment models, we'll need to develop platforms that are designed to measure and learn from a wide array of data points about what works in keeping people healthy. Of course, we'll need health care architectures that can support big data across a wide variety of platforms to enable better algorithms and more learning. There's certainly big opportunity for connecting all these systems.

But it's not just the connection of data in and of itself that will lead to improvements in the triple aim of care, health and costs...Health IT architecture itself can improve the likelihood of cost savings.  We need to look deeper at the IT platform as a risk-reducer that can significantly reduce health care costs. Could we one day have an actuarial field of study in the network science in health care?

What do I mean by this? How do architectures reduce risk? Well, mostly by connecting problems with solutions, but in other ways as well. Let's explore this a bit. » Read more

This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed and on O'Reilly Radar.

This tweet by Steve Case (@stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most. » Read more

While the home of most corporate parents (America) worries that IT may not be helping the business enough, the home of many subsidiaries (Ireland) worries that IT is a tool that will force the closure of corporate outposts. » Read more

Last Friday, while the first true revolution of the Web 2.0 era was reaching its climax in Tahrir Square, I was watching events unfold from within the U.S. State Department in downtown Washington D.C. I had the privilege to attend the two-day Tech@State: Open Source conference, an event organized by the Office of eDiplomacy, a relatively new wing of the State Department led by one of most cutting-edge and dynamic teams in the federal government. » Read more

I don't mean to pick on these companies; they're just particularly clear examples of how all organizations talk about their people. I've never come across a modern enterprise that publicly states anything like "We want our people to put their heads down and do only the jobs that have been assigned to them. We want their thinking to stay 'inside the box.' When we want their opinions, we'll ask for them. Our machines and business processes are our most important assets; our people just keep them running." Instead, virtually all organizations stress the empowerment of their people. » Read more

So, how does an unknown anthropology professor from Kansas make a home movie on a “cheap computer” in his basement that beats out all the $3.6 million Super Bowl ads and transforms him into a Web 2.0 rock star? This story begins and ends with the free and open user-generated media-scape. » Read more