Archive for September 2010

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Seven lessons from the KVC

I recently managed to get the Knowledge Value Chain® boiled down to an eight-minute introductory video—then had a couple of people comment that it should ideally be half that length!  So here, for you the time-challenged, the short-attention-spanned, and the just plain busy, are the key things that—if I had two minutes with you in the proverbial elevator—I’d try to make sure you came away with.

  • Creating value from data is a process. It takes time.  It has various elements that must be coordinated.  It may not be immediately obvious how to do it—it takes planning and practice.  The good news is that you can learn the process, and you can improve at it.
  • Each step in the process has a cost and benefit added. The skill is in keeping the latter higher than the former by minimizing the costs and barriers to value, and by maximizing the benefits.  If you can do that at each step of the process, then the whole process itself will have a positive ROI.

Read the rest of this entry »

| Posted in Knowledge Value Chain® | One Comment »

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

iPad math: a consumer looks at value

In a recent post Surfing the value waves I mentioned having purchased an iPad. Here’s the value calculation that drove me to buy it.  Of course it’s cool and fun—but does it make economic sense?

It first occurred to me in discussions with my wife—who wants a big, flat, thin TV like all our friends have—that we could EACH get an iPad, skip the TV, and pocket the change.  The iPad is not quite “there” in terms of programming, but for what I mainly watch (movies and sports), it’s halfway there (the movies half.)  TVs have gotten so cheap, this was actually about break-even—so there wasn’t a lot of change to pocket.

In this sense the iPad (and the Internet in general) is a textbook example of a disruptive rival to the TV—not as good in many respects, definitely cheaper—but with the future potential to knock the whole competitive game into a different orbit.

But then I started adding up the other gadgets that an iPad could replace.  I should mention that while I do not own all of these, as a “weekend warrior” musician and photographer, I own more than most people.  Your mileage will probably vary.

Read the rest of this entry »

| Posted in Value Dynamics | 2 Comments »