‘Economists, said John Maynard Keynes, should think of themselves as humble specialists, on a par with dentists. But his advice has gone unheeded. Over the past 50 years, economics and its jargon have penetrated every corner of human life. Decisions to marry and inject heroin alike are explained in terms of utility maximisation. Doctors, priests and scientists are lumped together as service providers or rent seekers. Schoolteachers are urged to “add value” to their pupils. The pig philosophy, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has become all-embracing.

Of the many harms inflicted by economics on the English language, “human capital” is the most grievous. Coined by Chicago economists Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker in the 1960s, it refers to the stock of personal skills and qualities that constitutes a worker’s economic value. Such skills and qualities are often costly to acquire and yield returns only over a long period of time, so are readily thought of as a kind of capital. Mincer and Becker’s work has provided the intellectual rationale for the huge expansion of higher education in recent decades. In an economy dominated by the knowledge and service industries, with personality and expertise at a premium, “investment in human capital” is the name of the game.

The phrase “human capital” is now so thoroughly naturalised that we seldom pause to ponder its implications. What is capital anyway? Capital is not a particular kind of good, but any good viewed in relation to certain interests. A donkey is capital to the wood-carrier. A derelict church is capital to the restaurant entrepreneur. Capital, in short, is wealth viewed not as an end in itself but as a means to more wealth. The phrase “human capital” insinuates that human beings too are to be viewed in this light—as instruments of the productive process. We have all of us attained the status which Aristotle reserved for slaves, that of living tools. What a triumph for the dismal science! Keynes naively supposed that economic growth was for the sake of personal cultivation. His modern successors have put him right: personal cultivation is for the sake of economic growth.’

Brilliant. ‘Human capital’ shall not pass my lips again.

Neither will it cross my lips (I hope).

So are your employees assets? Capital? Furniture?
Are they only a means to an end? That end being making a profit for your shareholders... for you?

How you view your employees will determine how well they perform for you and how difficult a new implementation will be. If they feel valued and taken into account they will take ownership of the work and the new tools you are providing for them. If it is mobile technology... how will it help them? Will it improve their workflow? Their work-life balance?

If we see them as assets they will only perform to their stated specifications. If we see them as collaborators in our success they will give more... much more.

As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.

Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.

So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.

It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.

Yes... and no.
I agree 100% that our work needs to be optimized. Social Media is no exception to anything else that is done in an organization and as such is not exempt of falling prey to waste and inefficient processes. There are multiple tools that can help improve this. But beyond the tools we must first look at how we are organized/structured. Does our organization's design aid or hamper our productivity?

We talk so much about relationships in social media that we forget about our internal structure and relationships.

Where do I disagree? There are still ways of measuring of ROI. Everything can be measured... everything can be tracked. It's just a matter of how we do it and how we interpret that data.

RIM started publicly talking about Super Apps on Tuesday of this week, though its been an internal idea for about 4 months. The idea is that rather than having each application in App World being a separate island, that apps should have a huge level of interoperation. Mike specifically said that they don’t want a thousand apps on a phone when just the right ten apps would do.

The primary example is the currently most used app on Blackberry: the Inbox. Yes, the humble email inbox is the most wanted aspect of a RIM device. Blackberry wants to make Inbox into a Super App by by having high quality, highly integrated apps included in it. For example - apps for scheduling, IM, VoIP, mobile internet and more can be built into Inbox in the form of clickable icons along the top of the screen. Rather than having each app being a standalone “island”, Blackberry wants them to be bundled together in inter-connected ways that make using them far faster and simpler.

This is fully open, so 3rd party developers can build their own stuff into existing RIM apps - and RIM claims it won’t even wield the “banhammer” too much. It wants to leave the success or failure of a third party app up to the market (although old rules like “no gambling, no porn” still stand).

RIM showed off one example of an app it says really gets the whole idea. Poynt is a free local search app for Blackberry, which integrates other services into itself at every point. If you want to find a movie, it will pull in weather updates, location-based service and email links. It will let you add the movie to your calendar app, feed it into a mapping app to figure out the route and (of course) buy the ticket.

What we think?

The “scheduling your movie” feature should be enough to show how business oriented the whole Super App idea is. These are not apps designed to be sexy or cool - they are apps designed to be ultra-functional. RIM isn’t even going to really publicise these until it already has a very solid line up of Super Apps ready for market. After that we’ll see a lot of promo from RIM based on getting that out.

Whether or not this Super App idea is a success really depends on whether the eventual applications are good or not - but I do like the way RIM is thinking. This isn’t a mindless leap onto the app bandwagon. This is RIM looking at a massively successful mobile service, and plotting out a way in which it might be made to work for Blackberry. Because Blackberrys may run on an OS, but they ain’t your typical smartphone.

This idea definitely captures my interest like no other news coming from any device manufacturer in a long time. Although not used, the operative word for me here is 'integration.' The integration of a few select and highly desirable apps into the 'inbox' seems like a good idea to me. Of course it all depends on the actual developers and the applications they build, but I am sure something of value will come out... especially when we start thinking at the enterprise level. Apps that integrate directly into my workflow are the ones that I will go be going after.

What's the use of having hundreds of thousands of applications that are of no value to me? When 5 well integrated apps into my processes will catapult my business into the next level?

Regardless of whether it is the first time your mobile workers receive a device, or if you are deploying a new application, your people and your processes will never be the same. Mobility changes the way we work; it is transformational and because of this you need to pay very close attention to your processes. If you are not looking (and I mean really looking) at how to best integrate your new technology or application into your existing workflows you will be faced with anything from poor adoption to outright failure.

So what do I mean by process peddlers?

Process peddlers may be vendors, mobile application developers or even the junior resource in that other department on the fourth floor. These process peddlers talk about the importance of process mapping but at the end of the implementation, all they have done is connected a few boxes with some arrows (current and future state workflows) without adding value to the ultimate success of your project. Sadly enough, I have seen them far too many times. In fact I have even worked with them or had to come in and fix their mistakes to try and revive a failing implementation.

In case you don’t get  through the long post here are the two main takeaways:

1. Process peddlers are a waste of resources.
2. Real process integration experts are invaluable to the success of a mobile implementation.

This was actually our most popular post over at the Mobile Strategy Blog for 2009 and we wrote it towards the end of the year and with some frustration after seeing and hearing so many people claim their expertise in process integration. We want to turn it into a little PDF and perhaps a series. The entire post at the source.