Change Management Software - Drag and Drop Workflow Editor

Hello!  We at SLAM Energy Software wanted to share a few more new features that are in version 6.5 of our Change Management Software. Among the many new features in the system is a complete redesign of our Workflow Builder.  Custom workflows can easily be built using simple drag and drop; but, it doesn’t stop there.  Powerful options let you preselect approval methods, select default assignees at a certain stage.

The Workflow Builder has been completely redesigned to be extremely easy to use; but, very powerful in creating different workflow settings and flows.  First off - easy to use.  To create any basic workflow all you really need to do is drag and drop.

And the final result is a clean, easy to follow workflow diagram that gives your team a clear roadmap of any change issue.  Check out the quick video clip below.

Improve Your Change Management Strategy

Came across a great article entitled "Four Ways to Improve Your Change Management Strategy" on techtarget. Useful article calling for automating change management where it can be automated.  SES's Change Management Software lets you automate approvals and notifications to keep those regular/repeatable changes moving.  Check out our features page at http://www.slam-energy-software.com/change-management-software/features-new/ to see more.

Four ways to improve your change management strategy - TotalCIO

Daily Quote from Bruce Lee

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.

Bruce Lee

How to Manage Time With 10 Tips That Work

Chances are good that, at some time in your life, you've taken a time management class, read about it in books, and tried to use an electronic or paper-based day planner to organize, prioritize and schedule your day. "Why, with this knowledge and these gadgets," you may ask, "do I still feel like I can't get everything done I need to?"

The answer is simple. Everything you ever learned about managing time is a complete waste of time because it doesn't work.

Before you can even begin to manage time, you must learn what time is. A dictionary defines time as "the point or period at which things occur." Put simply, time is when stuff happens.

There are two types of time: clock time and real time. In clock time, there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. All time passes equally. When someone turns 50, they are exactly 50 years old, no more or no less.

In real time, all time is relative. Time flies or drags depending on what you're doing. Two hours at the department of motor vehicles can feel like 12 years. And yet our 12-year-old children seem to have grown up in only two hours.

Which time describes the world in which you really live, real time or clock time?

The reason time management gadgets and systems don't work is that these systems are designed to manage clock time. Clock time is irrelevant. You don't live in or even have access to clock time. You live in real time, a world in which all time flies when you are having fun or drags when you are doing your taxes.

The good news is that real time is mental. It exists between your ears. You create it. Anything you create, you can manage. It's time to remove any self-sabotage or self-limitation you have around "not having enough time," or today not being "the right time" to start a business or manage your current business properly.

There are only three ways to spend time: thoughts, conversations and actions. Regardless of the type of business you own, your work will be composed of those three items.

As an entrepreneur, you may be frequently interrupted or pulled in different directions. While you cannot eliminate interruptions, you do get a say on how much time you will spend on them and how much time you will spend on the thoughts, conversations and actions that will lead you to success. 

Practice the following techniques to become the master of your own time:

1. Carry a schedule and record all your thoughts, conversations and activities for a week. This will help you understand how much you can get done during the course of a day and where your precious moments are going. You'll see how much time is actually spent producing results and how much time is wasted on unproductive thoughts, conversations and actions.
2. Any activity or conversation that's important to your success should have a time assigned to it. To-do lists get longer and longer to the point where they're unworkable. Appointment books work. Schedule appointments with yourself and create time blocks for high-priority thoughts, conversations, and actions. Schedule when they will begin and end. Have the discipline to keep these appointments.
3. Plan to spend at least 50 percent of your time engaged in the thoughts, activities and conversations that produce most of your results.
4. Schedule time for interruptions. Plan time to be pulled away from what you're doing. Take, for instance, the concept of having "office hours." Isn't "office hours" another way of saying "planned interruptions?"
5. Take the first 30 minutes of every day to plan your day. Don't start your day until you complete your time plan. The most important time of your day is the time you schedule to schedule time.
6. Take five minutes before every call and task to decide what result you want to attain. This will help you know what success looks like before you start. And it will also slow time down. Take five minutes after each call and activity to determine whether your desired result was achieved. If not, what was missing? How do you put what's missing in your next call or activity?
7. Put up a "Do not disturb" sign when you absolutely have to get work done.
8. Practice not answering the phone just because it's ringing and e-mails just because they show up. Disconnect instant messaging. Don't instantly give people your attention unless it's absolutely crucial in your business to offer an immediate human response. Instead, schedule a time to answer email and return phone calls.
9. Block out other distractions like Facebook and other forms of social media unless you use these tools to generate business.
10. Remember that it's impossible to get everything done. Also remember that odds are good that 20 percent of your thoughts, conversations and activities produce 80 percent of your results.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219553

Daily Quote from Albert Einstein

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

The One Mistake That's Killing Your Business

In business school we’re shown case studies about Apple, Starbucks, and those other big guys – but the idea that their marketing methods are "best" is the biggest lie in business.

Just because it works for them doesn’t mean it will work for the rest of us who work at small or medium sized businesses.

What you should be learning in business school is that you should not be focused on brand marketing like Apple or Starbucks – but rather on direct marketing.

Every dollar you spend on marketing should be tracked and expected to produce a return. Billboards and Super Bowl commercials only work for the 1%.

So if you’re serious about upping your marketing game, you need to refocus on learning what the best direct marketers do to build successful businesses. And one of the best resources on this subject is Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. 

1. Always Include An Offer

As Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of marketing is to create a customer.” If you don’t include an offer, you’re creating more awareness instead of more customers – a poor result when you have dollars on the line. Make the call to action clear and direct.

2. Give A Reason To Respond Right Now

With everything going on in our busy lives, we’re either going to take advantage of an offer now – or not at all. Put a time limit. Make it a limited quantity offer. Put a sense of urgency. Grab the attention of the people who see your ads and give them a reason to act right now.

Related: 3 Career Mistakes You Can't Afford To Make (LinkedIn)

3. Give Clear Instructions

Don’t assume people will know what to do when they see your marketing material. Tell them exactly what step you want them to take next. You’ll be amazed how this skyrockets your conversions.

4. Focus on Tracking, Measurement, and Accountability

If you’re not testing and tweaking your marketing continuously, you are guaranteed it won’t be as effective as it could be. And the only way to test is to track and measure everything. In fact, if it can’t be tracked and measured – don’t do it.

5. Only Do No-Cost Brand Building

There’s nothing wrong with brand building. It’s only wrong when you pay for it. Jack Trout (author of Positioning) said it best when he said that unless you have a billion dollars, don’t start a brand building campaign. Instead, focus on direct marketing. Enjoy any brand building you get as a bonus of your marketing – not as the goal.

6. Always Follow-Up

Dan Kennedy once asked a room of business owners which battery company ran ads with the bunny that kept “going and going”. Half the room thought it was Duracell. So if Energizer spent billions of dollars on advertising and still couldn’t get people to remember their brand – do you really think just one ad or marketing effort is enough to sway people to your cause? You need to follow up – follow up with your prospects, follow up with your customers.

7. Make It Look Like Mail-Order Advertising

Most people think mail-order advertising is ineffective. But the truth is, it works big time. The point is that mail-order advertisements are some of the most tested marketing pieces that exist. So study them. Use them as role models for all your campaigns.

8. Strengthen Your Copy

Most marketing we see in the digital age is made of nice pictures and cute catch phrases – seems that the people behind those ads forgot that those things don’t make people buy. And remember our goal: to make people buy your product. So focus on writing in a way that sells – focus on strong copy. (I highly recommend the book How To Write An Advertisement as a great guide for that).

9. Focus On Results. Period.

It doesn’t matter what image or copy you like, or which ad you think you should use. As a marketer, you need to listen and act only on results.

10. Put Your Business On A Strict Direct Marketing Diet

Next time your local newspaper calls about putting your logo on the fourth page – say “no” – unless you’re ready to use the above 9 points in there as well. Forget about awareness marketing and go on the diet of business champions: direct marketing.

What Did You Think?

How many of those rules did you “get”? Which one was spot on? Which ones did you already know? And more interestingly—which do you disagree with?

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237901

Daily Quote from John F. Kennedy

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

John F. Kennedy

Why Fear Is Your Ally in Business

In business, good decision making is critical to the bottom line. The challenge for every business professional, however, is that decisions of consequence summon fear.

But fear, although overwhelmingly characterized as a negative experience, is not all bad. When positioned as an adversary, fear frustrates progress. Yet, when recognized as an ally, it can offer incredible insight. Here’s the thing: How you decide to navigate fear will affect your success in business. Why not make it a powerful weapon in your arsenal?

Position fear as your ally and capture these three levels of insight:

1. Heightened awareness.

It’s true that the devil is in the details. But people often miss them. Distractions are everywhere. In the midst of chaos and confusion, however, fear sends this powerful message: Pay closer attention. If you submit, you are rewarded with new avenues of perception. With an expanded vision of what’s possible, you can literally and figuratively see things more clearly.

Solid decision making is inspired by heightened awareness. Heightened awareness arouses curiosity. It also encourages a businessperson to be proactive, connect the dots and develop new alternatives. Clearly, the ability to identify nuances is vital at every level in business. When you recognize fear as a delivery system for clear thinking and enhanced focus, you will capture an extraordinary opportunity to produce results at the highest level.

2. Strategic preparation.

The motivation to dig deep and prepare is fear's way of protecting you against failure. In business, the goal is always the same: success. Therefore, strategic behavior that ensures competency, competitive advantage and scalability is fundamental for every business professional. Preparation is simply par for the course.

Because complacency is a mind-set that wreaks havoc in business, fear reminds an individual that without taking critical steps to produce results, missteps and failure may be more likely than not. To avoid these negative outcomes, fear inspires a person to plan in advance, which then triggers confidence when results matter the most.

3. Manage the crisis.

By directing a person to fight or take flight, fear urges someone to confront paralysis. Fear’s tip-of-the-spear message for business professionals is: Think on your feet and take appropriate action when conflict occurs. Mastering this concept is critical, if not urgent, in successfully navigating every business transaction.

Highly charged scenarios can happen at a moment’s notice. Careless handling can negatively affect business relationships and cripple the bottom line. Are you prepared to handle crises when they occur?

Or will you shut down and become a casualty of fear? The choice is yours. Courage is simply taking action in spite of fear. Ernest Hemingway famously described it as “grace under pressure.” Got grace?

Business leaders take heed: Turn fear on its head and let “grace under pressure” be your guide. Elevate your commitment to excellence by taking action in spite of fear. Harness the power of heightened awareness. Prepare. Confront paralysis and reach for success with fear as your ally, one good decision at a time. Then watch your results soar.  

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238028

Daily Quote from John Wayne

Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.

John Wayne

7 Secrets of the Most Productive Meetings

During a busy workweek, the last thing any manager needs is a wasted hour due to an unproductive meeting.

Managers need to make every minute count. According to a March 2012 survey by Salary.com, 47 percent of workers say their biggest waste of time at work is attending too many meetings.

When done well, meetings can be extremely productive and accomplish a lot in a limited amount of time. Here are seven secrets of highly productive meetings:

1. Understand the needs, behaviors and schedules of employees.Meetings often take away valuable time from workers, decreasing their productivity. When planning meetings, understand employees' schedules and workload for the week.

According to research done in 2009 by WhenIsGood.net, a service that aids in choosing optimum event times, the best time of the week for a meeting is 3 p.m. on Tuesdays. That's early enough in the week that the meeting won't interfere with deadlines.

2. Create an agenda, and stick to it. Agendas should include step-by-step details for the meeting -- including specifying the time for questions. Even if a detail seems obvious, include it on the agenda so that every attendee can be on the same page. Make sure each item on the agenda is clearly described and allotted a time frame. Skipping an item on the agenda is OK; adding to the agenda during the meeting is not.

Related: A Smarter Calendar: How Tempo Can Help You Rule Your Next Meeting

3. Make everyone responsible. Successful Fortune 500 companies such as Apple and Google have the mechanics of running a productive meeting down to a science. How so? These employers assign every employee a responsibility at a given meeting.

Adam Lashinsky, author of Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired -- and Secretive -- Company Really Works, discovered that Apple builds accountability during meetings by creating a "directly responsible individual." This person is tasked with items on the agenda that he or she is responsible for during the meeting.

Apply a similar concept: For example, the meeting chair should require employees to report on their accomplishments for the week, no matter how big or small. This way, each employee is involved and more accountable for their work.

4. Implement the "two pizza" rule. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos developed a strategy for making sure the right people attendance meetings. For managers to build productive teams, the team should be small enough where it only takes two pizzas to feed every person involved.

Managers can apply this theory to pinpoint the right people to invite to meetings. Instead of holding one large meeting every week for the entire staff, set up smaller groups to meet (perhaps determined by departments) and invite only key employees to attend.

5. Create consequences (and rewards) for meeting attendance. When employees show up late for meetings, it can make the meeting last longer than needed and increase distractions. To ensure everyone shows up on time for meetings, enforce consequences for attendance.

First, create a strict start time for the meeting. For example, let's say the meeting takes place every Tuesday at 3 p.m. If employees arrive exactly at 3 p.m., they will be marked tardy. Any employee who is marked tardy will have to stay after the meeting to clean up.

Employees who show up early can be rewarded with having the first choice on a new project, for example.

6. Make the meeting actionable. At the end of the meeting, require every attendee to share what they learned and their new goals in a 30-second recap. This helps the meeting chair find out what information attendees retained and whether a certain topic needs more clarification.

Meeting leaders can also ask a series of questions at the end of each meeting to find out what each attendee learned. Here are some examples:

"What do you plan to accomplish in the next week?"

"What information from this meeting will you relay to your team?"

"Name one valuable thing you learned from this meeting."

7. Put bookends on the meeting. Every meeting should have a clear start and end time to ensure the meeting doesn't stray from its goals. Start and end times allow meeting chairs to keep attendees on track and decrease room for unnecessary chatter or long-winded, repetitive discussions.

Ultimately, productive meetings must be well-planned and focused on a goal. By getting the right people on board and promoting timely yet engaging discussions, the productivity of meetings will be greatly improved.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234430

Daily Quote from Nelson Mandela

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Nelson Mandela

5 Ways Google Is Changing SEO

Just a few years ago, search-engine optimization was widely considered a specialized knowledge of how to manipulate Google’s search rankings with clever, secret tactics. While that was an accurate assessment then, the SEO industry has matured. It is now a dynamic, multifaceted online-marketing discipline that transcends clever trickery, and has become an essential requirement of expertise for every online marketer.

Google has facilitated and accelerated this shift by changing the game in ways that help users find information faster and in a manner that emphasizes the giant's own products. So how is SEO evolving, and what is Google’s goal? What can online-marketing professionals learn about the future best practices of the SEO industry by studying Google’s present pattern of changes? Read on.

1. Seo is now more about building a brand than manipulation or trickery.

Changes over the past two years already have shifted our perception of search-engine optimization. We're no longer talking about just links, keywords and PageRank. Instead, we're discussing branding and content strategy. But building a brand and publishing high-quality content are not new concepts, they’ve always been key parts of inbound marketing. So why the sudden shift in buzz within the SEO industry?

Google’s launch of its Penguin and Panda algorithm updates sent a clear message to webmasters and marketing professionals: Google will not tolerate manipulative tactics or low-quality content in its search results. The result? A strategic, quality content strategy became the only option to achieve visibility in search results.

A content strategy is only effective, however, when executed by a strong brand, otherwise, that content achieves little reach, viewership or audience. Simultaneously, an effective content strategy is the road to building a brand. As a result, the focus is now on content and branding rather than manipulation and trickery.

2. Google is no longer just a search engine.

Yes, Google started as a search engine and it continues to serve that function. But Google has also become the leader in consumer-facing, data-oriented projects. Knowledge Graph, which attempts to figure out what searchers want, quickly supply the information and anticipate the next questions, is one example.

Many searches are location-based. “Vegan restaurants in Brooklyn”, “Spas in Brisbane”, “Where do I get designer shoes in Milan?” All these queries return search results that are peppered with extra information, from reviews to price ranges to maps. Throw in paid ads, which dominate the top spots in the rankings, and the top-ranking organic search result now appears a few hundred pixels down the page. That number-one ranking has lost a significant amount of value and visibility.

3. Links are key, but for a different reason.

Currently, it’s widely thought that the quantity and quality of inbound links to your domain and individual pages on your site are the primary factors in the ranking algorithm. Because of the resulting market for link buying and selling (which Google hates), Google might be tweaking its algorithms to give lower algorithmic weight to inbound links. However, even if links become irrelevant for SEO purposes, that doesn’t mean they won’t still be vital for your online-marketing campaign.

Before anyone knew what SEO was, they tried to get other websites to link to theirs for a different reason: referral traffic. How does John Doe discover your website if not via Google? Maybe he sees it mentioned on a blog. Maybe he found you on Twitter or Facebook. Or maybe he saw a sign you put up in the offline world. In every case, he arrived at your website through a “link.”

Ask yourself: If Google were not in the picture, would marketers still need to build links? If you’re in it for the long term, the answer is yes.

4. The future is “Now.”

Google Now is more than a mobile voice search challenging Apple’s Siri. It’s an entirely different mindset that pulls answers from geolocation, search history and preferences, as well as recent activity on Google products and other places.

It can search your calendar for birthday reminders. It can find your travel itinerary in your Gmail and spit out a weather report for where you’re headed. The emphasis is on serving answers, not webpage results. The challenge is making yourself relevant enough in people’s lives so that you show up in search results.

Because most of this takes place on mobile devices, SEO also means optimizing websites to be mobile-friendly.

5. Approach online marketing with a “product” perspective.

If you have a bad product, you can sell a few units through excellent marketing. But this strategy not only won’t last long -- it’ll kill your brand as the word spreads. This is why you should treat every aspect of your inbound marketing campaign as a product.

Consider content as your chief product. Content can be a blog post, an ebook, a video, an email newsletter, an infographic or just about anything that's going to be consumed by an audience.

As marketers and advertisers, we tend to value campaigns (the process) over the product. But the opposite philosophy is your ticket to long-lasting success. Apple has created great marketing campaigns, but their focus is always on creating the best products.

Conclusion.

The irony is that many folks who try hard to get that number-one ranking in the search results often fail, while brands and marketers who patiently and systematically follow these steps not only reach their goals, but stay there over the long haul.

Google has carefully crafted its strategy to encourage strong, quality content publication so its users don’t have to see the spammy content that used to litter its search results. Google’s future moves will be to further encourage this trend of quality and branding instead of manipulation and trickery.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238040

Hey! We just updated our Workflow Management software's feature list. Check this out!

We love your feedback! :)

Click Here:
http://www.slam-energy-software.com/worfklow-management-software/features/

Yves Morieux: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify

Why do people feel so miserable and disengaged at work? Because today's businesses are increasingly and dizzyingly complex — and traditional pillars of management are obsolete, says Yves Morieux. So, he says, it falls to individual employees to navigate the rabbit's warren of interdependencies. In this energetic talk, Morieux offers six rules for "smart simplicity." (Rule One: Understand what your colleagues actually do.)

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_morieux_as_work_gets_more_complex_6_rules_to_simplify

3 Surprising Skills All Leaders Should Have

Question: When is a bird in the hand worth less than two in the bush?

Answer: When a company is more interested in hiring the best person who applies, not the best person available.

I've been on a kick of late — about 30 years or so — making the contention that most company leaders inadvertently set up their hiring practices to weed out the weak rather than attract the best. For an entrepreneurial company that wants to grow, this strategy limits how big the company can become.

To overcome the natural tendency to hire for the short term rather than the long term, I suggest company leaders learn how to drive buses, figure out how to put square pegs into round holes, and then find out how to train fleas. These are key leadership traits every company leader should master.

1. Learn to drive buses.

Most of us recall Jim Collins' theme from his bestseller "Good to Great": "In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with "where" but with "who." They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats."

Which brings me to my rather superficial Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting. The quick summary goes something like this: Imagine your bus is a big job posting with compelling titles, flashy neon lights, a cool horn, etc. It's a big bus with enough space for all types of people, although some routes would just be for sales folks, or engineers, or accountants, or whomever. The recruiting idea is to have top people who want to get on the bus and drive it around the city. This is what sourcing passive candidates is all about. Good recruiting is about putting the person in the passenger seat as soon as the person gets on board, with a clever phrase like, "Would you be open to go for a drive if this job represented a true career move?" This is inviting enough for just about everyone to go for the drive.

Once on board you need to conduct a quick screen to see if the person qualifies to be on the bus and possesses the "Achiever Pattern." This means the person has accomplished something significant in comparison to his or her peers. If so, describe the job in broad terms, highlighting the employee value proposition and why the job has the potential to represent a significant career move for the right person. Then ask the person to describe a major accomplishment most comparable to your needs. If your job offers some stretch and growth, the person will then begin to sell you as to why he or she is qualified. This is how you put the person in the back seat.

Now you have to find the right seat for the person, but don't let them off until you get them to the right stop. Unfortunately, most companies have predesigned bus routes and too many filters to even get the right people on the bus in the first place. Worse, it takes an act of God (in this case, the compensation and legal departments) to change bus routes. That's why we need another leadership lesson.

2. Learn to change the shape of round holes.

To get great people onto the bus to begin with, you can't use job descriptions. That's why these must be banished as boarding passes. To take this idea one step further, I'm going to suggest that once you have the right person on the bus, create a job that offers the person a true career move, not a lateral transfer. In HR speak — don't be afraid to modify the job description after you've found the person, not before. Rather than try to fit a square peg (the person) into a round hole, modify the shape of the hole (the job requisition).

Now comes the hard part, since you're already thinking this is not possible. That's why you first need to understand the nature of fleas.

3. Learn to train fleas.

Zig Ziglar used to tell a story about how fleas can be trained to jump lower (not a typo). Before any training, fleas can naturally jump 20 inches or so unless you put them in a 5-inch mason jar with a lid on top. After 20 minutes or so, the fleas get tired of bumping their heads on the top and "learn" to jump only 4.9 inches. When you take the top off of the jar, none can get out since they've mentally put a limit on their jumping ability. The point of this is to suggest that too many leaders sometimes act like trained fleas seeing only the restraints preventing them from implementing change, rather than the opportunity in doing so.

Of course, banishing skills-based job descriptions and writing the job spec after you've chosen the person raises legal compliance excuses ( a top labor attorney indicates there are none), impacts the ATS and workflow design, affects recruitment advertising, requires better workforce planning, changes the role of the hiring manager, requires flexible budgeting, and even requires figuring out who should be driving the bus. I call this the hiring Catch-22 which as the video shows is an easy trap to fall into, but not that hard to climb out.

Despite these challenges, the benefits are enormous compared to the issues to be overcome. At a minimum, you'll hire more talented people, and increase on-the-job performance, job satisfaction and retention. Your new found job design flexibility will allow you to structure work to better meet the needs of a demographically changing workforce, and your hiring productivity will soar by eliminating all of the self-imposed bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Of course, to pull this off you'll first need to recognize there's no lid on the jar.

Read more: http://www.inc.com/lou-adler/3-unlikely-skills-that-great-hiring-managers-need-to-possess.html#ixzz3ElIMoIhH

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity — and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work

Google Reboots Its Business Software Operation as ‘Google for Work’

Google is best known for the online services and software it offers to everyday consumers—things like Google Search, Gmail, and the Android mobile operating system that runs so many smartphones and tablets—but for more than a decade, the tech giant has also offered services, software, and even hardware to the world’s businesses, including everything from online applications such as Google Docs to sweeping cloud computing services such as Google Compute Engine. Today, the company unveiled a new identity for this growing part of its operation. It will now be known as Google for Work.

This group—which operates across Google’s larger organization, essentially turning existing consumer products into business tools—was previously known as Google Enterprise. Meant to provide a shot in the arm for Google’s efforts in the workplace, the new name reflects a larger change across the world of business software and hardware, where so many tools are finding their way into businesses through individual employees rather than dedicated IT workers. It’s known as the “consumerization of IT.”

“In many ways, work itself has changed in the last five years,” Amit Singh, the president of the re-christened group, said this morning during a briefing with reporters at Google’s San Francisco offices. “Mobile has come into play, and users are making choices, not just enterprise IT.”

The name may take a while to stick, even inside Google. Rajen Sheth, the “father of Google Apps,” who has worked with the group for a good ten years, mistakenly used the group’s old name during the press briefing in San Francisco. But the ultimate aim is to make it easier for the average person to understand Google’s efforts in this area.

All of the group’s products will be tagged with the “for Work” moniker. Earlier this year, the company introduced Google Drive for Work, a version of its online file storage service that’s intended for businesses, and now, all other Google business tools will follow suit. Google Apps, for instance, will become Google Apps for Work.

According to Singh, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 now paying for what are now called Google for Work services, and more than 1,800 customers are signing up for its latest product, Google drive for Work, each week. But the company believes its business tools provide a much larger opportunity for growth, and that’s one of the reasons it’s rolling out this new moniker. “We are in a very important phase of growth,” Singh said of Google as a whole.

Sheth says that this move isn’t just a change in brand. “What we’re looking at here is more than just a name change,” he said. “It’s a mindset shift.” In short, the company realizes this is quickly becoming a “user-first market,” and it wants to make an even great effort to appeal to those end users. The word “enterprise,” you see, doesn’t mean that much to the average user. But “work” means a great deal.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/google-reboots-its-business-software-operation-as-google-for-work/

Six Must-Have Cloud Management Features

From technology startups to multinationals, cloud computing has arrived, and the change is evident. According to Gartner, nearly 20% of companies are using cloud computing for most of their production applications.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is already a $6 billion market and it’s growing nearly 50% per year. The popularity of IaaS means that more applications and services are being delivered via the cloud by an ever­expanding group of business units, teams, developers, and systems administrators.

IaaS consumers are now looking to cloud management platforms to help manage their growing portfolio of cloud applications. A cloud management platform enables organizations to deploy, manage, monitor, and control applications across public and private clouds ­ ensuring that companies can achieve both agility and cost savings.

Here are six key capabilities you should look for in a cloud management platform:

1. Simplify Complexity

One of the main reasons that IaaS has been such a huge hit is flexibility. IaaS consumers can choose instance sizes, operating systems, databases, application frameworks, and a laundry list of other attributes. They can modify specific instances by altering configurations, boot sequences, and cron jobs. With all this customization comes the very complexity that many are trying to escape by moving away from traditional datacenters. Effective cloud management gives you the customization required for IaaS to be successful along with management tools versioning, source control, and configuration management ­ to keep it all under control.

2. Manage Multiple Clouds

What cloud users want is true interoperability: Applications built for one environment can be run on another without changing the underlying code or configuration. True interoperability goes beyond simple cloud API compatibility to handle different behaviors across different cloud providers. Virtual networks don’t behave the same across clouds. And neither do storage volumes. Or snapshots. A simple API translation tool doesn’t cut it. Your cloud management platform should enable this multi­cloud future, by enabling application interoperability across multiple IaaS cloud providers.

3. Build for the Future

Innovation in the IaaS market is moving fast: Witness the weekly drumroll of updates from Amazon, Rackspace, OpenStack, and CloudStack. And then there are the ever­increasing new entrants on the IaaS playing field such as Windows Azure and Google. The menu of services and the strength of vendors’ offerings will look quite different in a year. A cloud management platform should enable you to harness this innovation by supporting a wide variety of IaaS cloud providers vendors and cloud services offerings ­ both public and private.

4. Support the Application Lifecycle

Managing applications involves much more than simply getting them launched. A typical application has a lot of life events: updating code, patching security vulnerabilities, capacity management, performance optimization, backups, failover. There are many tools to help with each of these tasks. Comprehensive cloud management includes the monitoring, alerting, configuration management, auto-scaling, and disaster recovery tools necessary to take an application from source code repository through predictable updates and unpredictable service interruptions.

5. Automation: Set It and Forget It

Managing applications can involve a lot of repetitive tasks, especially for large environments. Rather than having manual processes to provision each server or push code, the cloud is built to be programmatically managed. After all, the infrastructure is managed with code via APIs. A cloud management platform delivers greatest value when it provides capacity management, support for continuous integration, and resource orchestration that reduces operational burdens and enables your team to support ever­growing computing requirements.

6. Manage and Control Costs

IaaS makes it easy to consume infrastructure — so easy that you may be concerned that your organization is consuming a lot more than you anticipated. Plus IaaS is priced by the hour, which is not something that most organizations have ever measured accurately before. And cloud pricing is often complex, a la carte, and constantly changing. This does not sit well with most IT departments and their long-­range budgets. Look for a cloud management platform that provides cost forecasting, reporting, and showback so that you can sit tight when your cloud bills come due.

Companies of all sizes are embracing cloud management platforms as a critical component of their cloud strategy. With these six capabilities at your disposal, you’ll be ready to manage cloud applications across a multi­-cloud portfolio to fully realize the cost savings and agility benefits of cloud computing.

Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/six-must-have-cloud-management-features/

Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines

As machines take on more jobs, many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed. Is this the end of growth? No, says Erik Brynjolfsson — it’s simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy. A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us … if we think of computers as our teammates. Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Robert Gordon.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/erik_brynjolfsson_the_key_to_growth_race_em_with_em_the_machines