My secret is a dashboard for each side of the firewall
One of the biggest questions I get is how I manage to do my job and seem to stay on top of the blogosphere, Twitter, employees, breaking news, and competitors. Assuming you believe I’m actually doing my job, I thought I’d share how I stay on top of all the rest.
Personality-wise, I have big-time ADD so I use some tricks to maximize my attention so I can stay on top of tons of massive amounts of scattered information across the market. Specifically, a custom dashboard that that works on each side of the 
firewall to surface relevant movement from those two worlds.
Interestingly, given social software’s increase in content types and fast cadence of interactions, it can sometimes result in a flood of unstructured, conversational content. That’s exactly why focus, also called “attention” in the tech world, is a very important component to staying productive. Increasingly, it will be critical to not only wrangle content streams from both within and outside a company, but to make all that information digestible and actionable. So, if you can algorithmically process those streams to direct your focus in order to maximize your attention, you’re way ahead of the pack. And, that is exactly what I am doing.
Within Jive, I use Clearspace to keep me plugged into the company. But my attention needs to be just as plugged into the market. To do that, I am currently using a mashed up widget dashboard powered by Netvibes, Yahoo Pipes, AideRSS, Dapper, and a few others (Justin will be posting about some of geeky details on his blog today). I used to use NetNewsWire, which is a great feed reader. However, I have outgrown a tool that simply displays feeds as a list. I needed something that would process the incoming data to help prioritize and direct my focus where it should be.
The big idea is not the specific technologies I’m using, but rather the notion of using “conceptual programming” tools that allow me to rewire the web to work for me. Instead of bouncing around like a pinball, I pull all of the information streams I need into a single source. Then, I take one step further and algorithmically process my sources to uncover high priority information, which saves me time and catches things I might otherwise have overlooked. Besides using Clearspace as my single collaboration platform, nothing has made me more productive than my dashboard. Now…wouldn’t it be nice to have both my dashboard and Clearspace mashed into one thing. Hmmm. 
There. Now you know. Back to work!
Things people have said about this post
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tina Russell
This is just crazy good stuff. I’ve gotta check out Clearspace at some point soon. I think it might be one of those “missing tools” that I talk about all the time.
Thanks for the pointer.
Hot stuff! I want!
I’ll echo Marshall’s comments. I’ve been personally thinking about this sort of thing coupled with a bunch of visualization features: lava lamps for topic velocity, topic maps for volume, etc.. yeah I’m an info junkie.
So my own personal RSS-based Bloomberg terminal. buhwahahaha
[…] today, Sam shared his executive dashboard that keeps him on top of our market’s information flow. I thought I would share some of the […]
AideRSS is great! Question for you: how to subscribe to RSS feeds from Brewspace? Do you use NetNewsWire via VPN?
[…] My secret is a dashboard for each side of the firewall Jive Software’s Sam Lawrence shares a secret: “One of the biggest questions I get is how I manage to do my job and seem to stay on top of the blogosphere, Twitter, employees, breaking news, and competitors. Assuming you believe I’m actually doing my job, I thought I’d share how I stay on top of all the rest.” […]
Very Interesting. Any other practical tip ?
Hey guys, thanks for the comments.
@Dan- I subscribe to Clearspace’s RSS feeds via NetNewsWire (VPN). I mainly subscribe to people I work with (so people, vs the other gobs of RSS options). That said, I’m moving those feeds to my dashboard, too.
@Jeff- I’m *very* visual-oriented so the next few iterations will be to make the information as visualized as possible. Don’t know about a lava-lamp but perhaps those beaded curtains with the hula girl on it.
Please keep the comments coming. Good to know there’s a pulse out there.
How are you going to access your internal Clearspace feeds via Netvibes? Won’t VPN block them?
@Dan: Feed authentication.
[…] been meaning to write about my personal technology toolkit for a few weeks. Reading about executive dashboards at Jive reminded me […]
[…] Go Big Always - My secret is a dashboard for each side of the firewall Sam Lawrence describes the dashboard he uses to aggregate feeds (tags: feeds rss dashboard) […]
[…] Kistner’s Integrating Netvibes, Pipes, AideRSS, Dapper for an intelligence dashboard. (Thanks Sam.) Login or register to post […]
[…] today, Sam shared his executive dashboard that keeps him on top of our market’s information flow. I thought I would share some of the […]