Journal LinkedIn & Innovation – My visit to LinkedIn’s Corporate HQ – Part I
LinkedIn & Innovation – My visit to LinkedIn’s Corporate HQ – Part I
14 October 2012Last week I had the opportunity to pay a visit to the LinkedIn's Headquarter in Mountain View, CA. This visit was part of the CIOs Innovation Tour on the West Coast of the US, an event organized for a few selected French CIOs in conjunction with the Oracle's Open World 2012 conference.
Here are my key findings, based upon the exchanges we’ve had with Jon Traupman of LinkedIn, who kindly shared with us his insights for approx one hour.
Today I have reported primarily what one may call collateral elements Jon had related to us re. LinkedIn.
As soon as I find the time to re-elaborate my notes, i.e., by this coming Tuesday, I'll be also posting the lessons he and his company have learned on innovation.
1) Information Technology is at LinkedIn's core--To no one’s surprise, they are Big
Data heavy users: 5 years of large investments which have resulted in a number of their
most familiar apps such as “people you may know”, “people you may connect with”,
“skills catalogue”, etc. Approx 30% of their efforts go into Big Data. Their IT is
predominantly made up of standard components, but customized for LinkedId. They
have multiple Data Centers, o/w a primary and secondary in US, and hubs around the
globe.
2) Talents war--You bet this is a daily issue in Silicon Valley. The current LinkedIn’s
turnover is still very limited though, and this is thanks to the culture of the company,
which is playing a major role in retaining their talents. How to get the best external
talents? Jon’s answer is that the LinkedIn's culture - extremely attractive - is again their
main differentiator.
3) What’s happening to their relationship with Twitter?--This was something I personally
wanted to find out, as I was caught by surprise when Twitter had recently announced
the impossibility to make one’s tweets visible to his/her LinkedIn’s network. To my
specific question, Jon’s answer was that this decision had been taken unilaterally by
Twitter, as they wanted to maintain their great end-user experience, which is
fundamentally the same across all the devices. In fact, when the tweets were accessed
through LinkedIn, it wasn’t truly possible to preserve that seamless experience. Most
likely, LinkedIn has then been trying to turn this problem into an opportunity:
“accidentally”, LinkedIn’s “connections” were already there for messages across their
community, and the “followers” functionality was released just a couple of weeks ago.
By the way, I have recently found out that the link between Twitter and LinkedIn is still
working the other way around: when you post something on LinkedIn, you may decide
to make it visible through Twitter.
4) New things in the industry--It's now faster to create sw apps, and this may
create opportunity for new companies, as much as increase the IT adoption. The
problems which don't have an easy solution are the distribution costs and the cost of the
salesforce necessary to sell to enterprise customers. Another interesting trend is the
consumerization with the most recent BYOD (Buy Your Own Device) spin.
5) Data points--Already at yearly revenue of 900M$, LinkedIn can count on a large
community of 175m professionals (2 x second).
Leave a comment
Profile
After many years in the ICT business, I thought I'd seen 'em all. But I'm still learning... I'm trying to collect some ideas for a brand new digital agenda.
No comments