Archive for August, 2007
by Joe McKendrick
August 30, 2007 at 5:30 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Readers of this blog may be aware of my writings on the burst economy coming to fruition through the miracles of online technology. In a burst economy, bursts of productivity deliver far more value than merely showing your face 9 to 5 everyday.
In this context, I don’t know what to make of this report of a New York City School System carpenter who was caught ducking out early on many occasions, thanks to GPS tracking of an employer-issued cellphone.
Burst may be fine for some, but it looks like technology delivers a different impact for many average Working Joes (let’s include Knowledge Worker Joes in that mix). And let’s not forget that time-clock technology has also advanced well beyond punch clocks and cards as well. Technology can be a liberator and an instrument of control — it depends on how enlightened management can be.
by Rob Paterson
August 29, 2007 at 8:36 am · Filed under
Charles Handy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0
Why is collaboration so hard in organizations? Every organization that I know tells me that it is hard. Hard – all but impossible! Why? Why? Can Social Media help improve collaboration? I have had no success with just the introduction of the technology. Is there something missing?
I think that I stumbled upon the something that may be missing this week as I was struggling with this question of why it is so hard for organizations to collaborate and to adopt social media. I think that the missing link is having the right context. Throughout history, technology has changed before the prevailing context. Two examples:
- In 1941, the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. But they were decisively beaten in days. Why? Because the French’s context for using tanks was still based in static defensive warfare – Tanks to them were mobile pill boxes. The Germans saw them as a raging offensive torrent. Same technology – different context – different result!
- All airlines except one – use the traditional model of mechanical “efficiency” – usually by playing off pilots with flight attendants versus ground staff versus check in staff. All airlines except one – thought that fleet unification or better use of technology – would save them money. Only one understood that the key to the single most important factor in keeping costs low – having the highest fleet utilization rate (Planes in the air versus on the ground – was not through efficiency but through collaboration on the ramp. Their entire organization is deigned to promote cross fertilization and collaboration. A host of rewards and penalties reinforce this aim. That airline makes more money that all the rest of the industry. None have been able to change their context to follow it – of course that airline is Souhwest.
My aha was this – If you introduce Social Media into your organization without thinking about the new context for enterprise – you will fail as did the French and the other airlines
So then what context?
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When we use the word “Organization” we default to this model. An organization that breaks up work and people naturally into separate and competing parts. I say competing – because this is also how we allocate capital and resources – the parts compete for the attention of the “father” as kids do for the car keys. At the centre of this context is Budget and the idea that everyone and everything inside the department is “Property” that has to be owned by the Head. Hence my Feudal analogy.
This model excludes all externalities such as suppliers and customers. Departments will rather die that share resources with another department. Of course the people inside cannot collaborate – it is logical and wise that they don’t. For the real aim of the department is not the customer or even the larger good of the whole enterprise but the expansion and or the protection of the department itself. Hence the reason why most organizations in the end default into being self serving. They are designed to be so.
So what is the new organizational context?
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I think it looks like the logo for Ross Mayfield’s Social Text. It’s intellectual father is Charles Handy. It is his Shamrock idea made real by Social Software.
In The Age of Unreason (1989) he proposed the Shamrock organisation as a business model. Many have tied the symbol to his Irish background. The shamrock has long been powerful in the Anglican Church of Ireland because of its apocryphal use by St Patrick as a symbol of the Holy Trinity.
For Handy the first of the three leaves represented the professional managers and administrators � the organisational core. This leaf is shrinking in size. The second leaf contained the contractual fringe. Its contributors to the organisation were vital, but they were outsiders. In the third leaf were those including the portfolio workers, as well as temporary workers and part-timers. They contributed much, but they could never be considered part of the organisation. Many didn�t want to be. They wanted jobs but not careers. They frequently worked for a number of disparate organisations. In Handy�s language they were like fleas feeding off elephants. The latter were the large organisations. This was an analogy he pursued in the autobiographical The Elephant and the Flea (2001).
Social Text’s logo sheds for me new light on Handy’s idea or an organic structure whose role id to get a lot of resources for much less cost that by having to own them all like a Feudal Lord.
Let’s briefly explore this idea in practice.
You are the president of a small Public TV station. Your staff is already maxed out with putting the existing world on air. How are you going to make the transition to being a public media company? You have no spare resources. You have only modest internal expertise in the new. You have no way of having God suddenly give you the money to create the new. But you know that if you don’t – you will be dead in maybe 5 years?
In part 2 – I will offer up how such a President could solve this paradox by using the Handy Model and Ross’s Pentogram as a guide. In the mean time – give this paradox a whirl yourself
by Joe McKendrick
August 28, 2007 at 9:58 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
In the old days, IBMers used to joke that the company’s initials stood for “I’ve Been Moved.” Now, in the era of telecommuting and virtual workplaces, the joke has been changed to “I’m By Myself.”
The burst economy is arriving. A couple of months back, I cited Anne Zelenka’s definitions of what constitutes “burstyness” (bursts of productivity anywhere, anyplace, anytime, as enabled by collaborative technology) versus “busyness” (showing your face 9 to 5, trying to look busy for the boss).
Now, it appears that the mainstream media is discovering elements of this new, emerging burst economy as well, as shown in a new ABC News report on the future workplace. “Some companies don’t care where workers are as long as they get the job done,” the report states. (Stop making sense!)
ABC News correspondent Betsy Stark reported on three workplaces that operate fairly virtually — IBM, Accenture, and Crayon Consulting.
At IBM, 42 percent of its workforce of 350,000 employees rarely comes into an IBM office.
Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM’s global health care and life sciences business, made this bursty comment: “We don’t care where and how you get your work done. We care that you get your work done.” IBM says it saves $100 million a year in real estate costs because it doesn’t need the offices…. There’s a direct cost savings attributable to burstyness.
At on-the-go Accenture, mobility rules. The company has no corporate headquarters, and not even the CEO has an office with his name on the door. Workspaces are reserved and used on a day-to-fay basis, like a hotel room. “Having a big desk as a sign of status with lots of family photos and you know, carpeting that’s fluffy and nice, that is a vision of the past,” said Janet Hoffman, executive vice president of Accenture. Well, in a bursty economy, all those nice accouterments can be part of your home office, if you like.
Next, ABC reported on a funky consulting firm, called Crayon, reporting that its workers rarely meet in the physical world, but meet once a week on a virtual basis.We never met Crayon’s CEO in person but we spent a couple of hours together in cyberspace. “Our belief is if we bring like minds together no matter where they are in the world we can actually create that connectedness as if we’re actually at the same place at the same time,” said Joseph Jaffe, Crayon’s CEO. And, likely, there’s far more connectedness (and a lot less politics) than if employees were bunched together in cubicles at some corporate site somewhere.
by Bill Ives
August 27, 2007 at 9:17 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
IBM has been doing work in the Enterprise 2.0 space for several years. Some IBMers call it “Info 2.0” as seen in these videos but it is web 2.0 inside the enterprise. David Barnes of IBM Internet Emerging Technology recently posted some videos on YouTube using QEDWiki and DAMIA. Starting with QEDWiki, these videos provide a nice introduction to enterprise mashups and how you can integrate multiple data sources. IBM describes QEDWiki as a “browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mashups.” In the first example, you can see how multiple data sources around nautical shipping can provide complex information in one integrated source. There is a clip on adding widgets, another on getting information from the web.
I saw the predecessor of QEDwiki in 2005, Appliki, which was more externally focused, as well as their early enterprise applications. I especially liked the Unified Activity Management. As the IBM web site stated, “The goal of the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project is to recast collaboration technologies in terms of the meaningful business activities in which people are engaged, both to support the work of each individual person and team and — more significantly — the enterprise. This includes both formal elements such as workflows and structured documents, as well as informal collaboration such as chats and emails that is so critical to getting the work done.” It looks at work from an activity perspective and lets you chart business process (e.g. responding to an RFP) and associated best practices. You drag in documented sub-steps from other processes to improve your process. This goal of this research effort sounds quite similar to the goals of several of the enterprise 2.0 tools that I have mentioned this month.
DAMIA is a newer tool in the videos. As the IBM site mentions, working through a web interface (Firefox not Internet Explorer) , “IBM® DAMIA provides easy-to-use tools that developers and IT users can use to quickly assemble data feeds from the Internet and a variety of enterprise data sources. The benefits of this service include the ability to aggregate and transform a wide variety of data or content feeds, which can be used in enterprise mashups.” It allows you to assemble, modify, and preview mashups. It works with Internet feeds, as well as data from tools like Excel. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for sharing these videos.
by Rob Paterson
August 26, 2007 at 11:27 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Videos, Web 2.0
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Here is a new experimental site of mine. Rob’s War Stories. My purpose is to find out how to draw on the almost infinite amount of information on the web and see if creating context in a niche might help.
I am a huge fan of the history of war – my poor wife!! – I have found that YouTube has a ton of great material and of course there are all the books to be read and all the articles to be read. Much of my recent leisure time has been spent watching and surfing. It is very time consuming and I wondered what it would be like to find a War Web Channel that had a personal view and that could put much of the disparate material together and in context.
So this in 3 posts is my first step.
The larger issue for me is how my clients in Public TV will handle a video world where the content is free and is easily found on the web. How will they find value. So linked into this is our work on The War and how we are collecting material from our viewers on their war stories.
KETC will have over 50 6 minute epics by the launch of the Burns series in September and they plan to make these stories and these men and women the centre of their pledge week then. Here is the Living St Louis Team with their 9 minute epic of the local hero Omar Bradley – they can fill 9 minutes like no one else can.
WOSU is working with the other Ohio PBS stations on collecting and playing back their own stories as well. Here is Paul Harris talking about his experience as he entered the previous all white workforce. We take it for granted today – then it was a novelty and he had to prove that he too was a man like all others.
Somewhere here is the future of TV I think – rather than the networks – I think that mavens will create their own channels. The more niche the better.
What do you think of this?
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