Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.

Another Generation Y (Generation Next) in the workforce has been written.  This time the article is at Infoworld and titled, The Generation Gap Challenges IT Managers.

The gap is widening, with more workers stacked at both ends of the age spectrum. There are approximately 80 million Baby Boomers, those born roughly between the years of 1946 and 1964, and 70 million in Generation Y, born 1978 through the present, but only 60 million in the middle in Generation X, those born 1965 to 1977.

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That creates a cultural divide, as workers of different ages will generally hold different views of technology use and adoption.

To be honest, I still like my old paper on the subject, The New Workforce.

I make it a habit not to post community squabbles that often take place in any IT project (whether open source or not).  When people have the best intentions and respect the opinions of others, I don't believe it is right for me or anyone else to publicly exploit discussions that are meant to remain within the community.  However, the conflicts going on at XOOPS.org have been made so public that it's hard for me to put a lot of faith in a project that treats its own people so poorly.

"What's disturbing about these numbers isn't just that one group is more or less represented than another in IT, but how the IT workforce got to these numbers. Over the past 6-1/2 years, while the IT ranks swelled by 1 million to 3.6 million, the number of women in IT fell by nearly 8 percent and the number of African-Americans in IT plunged by more than 25 percent."

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"Also remarkable is the fact that a high CI [collaboration index] score clearly translates into business performance. Overall, the research found, 36% of a company’s performance was due to its Collaboration Index, compared to 16% for the company’s strategic orientation, and 7% for market turbulence."

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The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before.  Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table.  I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology.  How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization?  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organization that innovates too much.

In "How Innovation Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing", George Anders writes about how companies and business consultants are rediscovering that less innovation can produce better business results.  Companies that used to push the limit in efficiency are finding that they're "jamming too many new ideas into a product pipeline, without enough slack time to ensure that critical tasks stayed on schedule".

Similar insights have been standard wisdom on the manufacturing floor for decades. Factory managers learn about bottlenecks through the formal discipline of queuing theory. That teaches them to keep a little slack in the system to handle the unpredictable -- but inevitable -- crunch times.

"I was a freelance web developer once (both full- and part-time.) I remember my 1-person thing being exceptionally uncomplicated. Project work was easy to find, and money wasn’t my key motivator. I did it because I enjoyed it.

Eight years later (today,) I co-own a 10-person thing called Electric Pulp. As much as I prefer the new thing to the old, it’s far less uncomplicated (that was a double negative for anyone keeping count.)

A recent conversation has me thinking just how different the two efforts really are. EP is far more ambitious than anything I ever did as a freelancer. But while the business aspects of what we do seem to scale really well, there are other aspects that have gotten a little crazy.

How so, you ask? Let’s count…"

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"A while back I wrote a post speculating about the collaboration technologies today’s college students will expect to use when they enter the workforce. I guessed that today’s collegians will want to continue their use of social networking tools on the job—that they won’t consider these tools to be only suitable for ‘play time,’ but rather as important (integral?) parts of their day. More recently, I wrote a couple posts about Facebook, the social networking site that’s become wildly popular on many college campuses and is now penetrating the rest of society. "

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