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Indiana University has saved nearly $20 million by joining with other universities to reduce administrative costs for essential financial software systems. The Kuali Financial System is open source software that was created to fit the needs of colleges and universities. By definition, open source software is free to use, distribute and modify, meaning IU avoids the costs of licensing expensive commercial systems that often cost tens of millions of dollars to buy and install. IU fully implemented and transitioned to the Kuali System in February.

Should you start Eric Decker or Demaryius Thomas? Those types of decisions, if made during the work day, could cost employers $6.5 billion in lost productivity, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Where did Flickr's vaunted platform fail? What design wisdom can we derive from this object lesson? When can we expect the salient code-review article to be posted to Hacker News? Never, because it wasn't a design flaw or programming error that cost Mirco Wilhelm his 4000 photos. It was plain, old-fashioned user error.

"Climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades, a major new report said."

Strapped for time and cash, small local businesses are increasingly turning to free and low-cost social media tools for their marketing efforts. Not surprisingly, the world's biggest social networking site tops of the list of preferred tools. Seventy percent of local businesses use Facebook for marketing, according to a new report from Merchant Circle, a network of U.S. local business owners. This represents a 20% increase over the previous year. The report notes that for the first time, Facebook is being used more than Google by local businesses for online marketing.

One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways? An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

The researchers argue that as design and communication costs decline, single user and open collaborative innovation models will be viable for a steadily wider range of design. These two models will present an increasing challenge to the traditional paradigm of producer-based design-but, when open, they are good for social welfare and should be encouraged by policymakers.

The best managers know how to frame work as a problem that is a lot of work to complete and a small amount of work to check. Mediocre managers spend too much time checking and revising their employees' work, and begin to approach the cost of just doing it themselves. (The worst managers hire incompetent people.) Wolfram Alpha made me this cute Venn diagram of the sweet spot: Competent (C) and not Micromanaged (M). Teams led by good managers reside in the shaded area of the diagram.

After Local Motors won the XC2V competition, they were given a mere 14 weeks to build a prototype of their "FLYPMODE" concept, a vehicle built on a common chassis capable of performing both combat resupply and medical evacuation missions. As it turns out, they didn't even need all 14 weeks, and were able to complete the prototype ahead of schedule, no problem. Check out a bunch of pics of the not yet armed but otherwise fully operational XC2V vehicle in the gallery below. Part of the point of this whole exercise was to see how effectively crowd-sourcing through private industry could be used to design, develop, and build a new vehicle. In a result that will shock nobody at all, the XC2V went from concept to prototype some five times faster than it normally takes our ponderously bloated war machine to come up with something similar. While DARPA hasn't commented on cost, I imagine that it was exponentially cheaper, too.

"Pathbreaking research by a group of scholars including Eric A. von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, suggests that the traditional division of labor between innovators and customers is breaking down. Financed by the British government, Mr. von Hippel and his colleagues last year completed the first representative large-scale survey of consumer innovation ever conducted. What the team discovered, described in a paper that is under review for publication, was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period. "We've been missing the dark matter of innovation," Mr. von Hippel said from his office in Cambridge, Mass. "This is a new pattern for how innovations come about." "

von Hippel and Baldwin also produced a related, intriguing paper in 2009 that can be found here http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6325.html entitled "Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation." The conclusion of the paper reads: "We conclude by observing again that we belive we are in the midst of a major paradigm shift: technological trends are causing a change in the way innovation gets done in advanced market economies. As design and communication costs exogenously decline, single user and open collaborative innovation models will be viable for a steadily wider range of design. They will present an increasing challenge to the traditional paradigm of producer-based design - but, when open, they are good for social welfare and should be encouraged."

"No executive can afford to be a Luddite and dismiss all new media. Sometimes it's exactly the right way for you to spend your time (especially if you're "on the way up" and need to build your profile). But too many leaders dive in without thinking through the costs of social media (what else could you be doing with your time?). After all, in this crowded media landscape, sometimes what matters most isn't your use of 21st century technologies. Instead, it's the forgotten 19th century arts (handwritten notes, personal phone calls, and high-quality personal meetings) that can have the greatest impact." Dorie's article misses two important reasons that leaders might need to include social media as part of their activities: 1) Good leaders understand culture, and social media are an important part of culture 2) Good leaders understand media and their effects on how humans organize. Understanding, especially where media are concerned, is best gained through participation. If they were to take Dorie's advice, Napoleon probably wouldn't have read newspapers, Winston Churchill wouldn't have listened to radio, and JFK wouldn't have watched television.

According to an article that appeared in the Tennessean, two members of the Perry County Vikings - brothers Rodney and Ryan Belasic - were ruled ineligible by the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association because of residency issues. The reason questions about where the two brothers' eligibility came about from Facebook posts made by their mother. To play football for a county high school in Tennessee, the entire family must reside within the county lines, and thanks to complaints about the brothers not cleaning their room while visiting their mother in Henry County, something she complained about on Facebook. This, naturally, caught the eye of interested parties, opening the door for the TSSAA's eligibility investigation. It was believed that entire family had moved counties, but the mother's Facebook chatter revealed that wasn't the case