by Joe McKendrick
June 11, 2009 at 9:53 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, User Revolution
Enterprise 2.0 adoption is on the rise, with a majority of companies in a new survey planning to increase their funding of E2.0 projects. These are the results of a survey conducted by organizers of the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. (Details provided in a white paper available at the E2.0 site.)
The survey also found organizations are slow to change to E2.0-style thinking. The leading impediments to E2.0 include the following:
| Resistance to change |
52% |
| Difficulty in measuring ROI |
42% |
| Integrating with existing technologies . |
41% |
| Security concerns |
32% |
| Budget |
25% |
| Product knowledge |
23% |
| Tools not enterprise ready |
22% |
Note that two out of five respondents are concerned about measuring return on investment. This is a matter that’s being hotly debated amomg E2.0 proponents.
by Joe McKendrick
June 11, 2009 at 9:25 pm · Filed under
Social Networking, Twitter
Jack Welch, former GE chairman and the leading role model for best practices in the corporate world, says he and Suzy Welch are tweeting:
“Over the past few months, we’ve come to love Twitter. We’re not saying it’s going to transform humanity—as some of its proponents will tell you—but we certainly get its incipient power. Indeed, if Twitter continues to expand at its current rate, it may well become a high-value way for companies to help brand themselves and microtarget consumer groups, as well as another tool for managers to interact with their people, and vice versa.”
It all began when Suzy Welch began tweeting to promote her book, resulting in interviews and getting the word out about book signings. Jack Welch tried it out of curiosity, and found it to be a great way to communicate and debate.
The practice became addictive. “We tweet because we can’t stop ourselves.”
By the way, Jack Welch’s address is at @jack_welch on Twitter.
by Bill Ives
June 10, 2009 at 8:00 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Social networking predates people. It is not a new idea but it is getting increased focus in business and our personal lives because of the capabilities that the Web provides. However, on the business side the emphasis on technology can provide obstacles to adoption. I recently spoke with Anne Berkowitch, CEO at SelectMinds, a provider of corporate social networking solutions about her experiences in creating and hosting online social networks for large brands such as IBM, Dow Chemical and Deloitte.
SelectMinds has provided social networking platforms for employees to support innovation and engagement, and for former employees to enhance recruiting and business development. It began in 2000 as a recruiting solution through networking with company alumni before the current advances in social networking technology. This has given the company an opportunity to grow up with the field and experience what works and what fails.
Anne said that when a social network is deployed internally separate from the workflow, it does not tend to drive productivity, as employees do not engage. There needs to be a compelling reason apart from the technology to make it work. It cannot be implemented as a utility without a specific value proposition tied to work processes. I am in strong agreement here as it correlates with my own experiences with knowledge management.
The same issue applies for alumni networks, as there needs to be a strong alumni culture as a backdrop to an online network. Often the two are developed simultaneously. The organization must view employee relationships as “lifelong” relationships – ones that don’t end the day an employee leaves to pursue other opportunities. The online network needs to be seen as a benefit by former employees. The technology alone cannot create this culture; it can only support and better enable the culture. There needs to be a sense of trust between former employees and the enterprise if the enterprise is to become the sponsor and benefit from the interaction. This issue should be addressed before the technology is brought out.
Anne said that she has seen some exceptions to the workflow recently with the economic downturn. Two of her clients have created social networks across their enterprise to serve as broad “water coolers’ to foster greater employee engagement to help weather difficult times. However, once again we see a strong need that is supported by the technology and not the technology creating the need.
Companies who are interested in implementing the new social networking solutions need to start by identifying a business problem. This premise is almost as old as people but it so often ignored that we need to keep raising it. Every time there is a new hot technology, it can step on its own toes if we are not careful.
We also discussed the possibility of a Chief Social Networking Officer emerging. Anne said that while she had not yet seen this role in a formal sense someone at the C level should become the sponsor of any significant networking efforts and some one just below this level, outside of IT, should be assigned to manage it full time. Again, this correlates with my knowledge management experience.
Anne’s experience is appreciated. I will be speaking with her again to learn more about the specifics of SelectMinds and will provide this conversation in a subsequent AppGap post.
by Jim McGee
June 9, 2009 at 2:21 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The Future of Management, Hamel, Gary
Gary Hamel has been an astute observer of organizations and management for several decades now. For all the reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, this book sat on my shelf for a while before I got to it. Based on the current state of the economy, I suspect a number of executives who could have benefitted from Hamel’s insights also failed to get them in a timely fashion. Hamel’s central thesis is that management is a mature technology and is ripe for disruptive innovation. Although he makes only passing reference to Clay Christensen’s work, there are important points of linkage between these two management thinkers.
The underlying rationale behind management philosophy and practices was largely laid down in the early decades of the twentieth century during the growth and ascendancy of the large multi-divisional industrial organization. In other words, most managers continue to operate with the mindset and practices originally developed to handle the problems encountered by the railroads, GM, IBM, and the other organizations making up the Dow Jones average between 1930 and 1960. While we’ve experienced multiple innovations in products, technologies, services, and strategies, the basics of management have changed little. Here’s how Hamel puts it:
While a suddenly resurrected 1960s-era CEO would undoubtedly be amazed by the flexibility of today’s real-time supply chains, and the ability to provide 24/7 customer service, he or she would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago. Hierarchies may have gotten flatter, but they haven’t disappeared. Frontline employees may be smarter and better trained, but they’re still expected to line up obediently behind executive decisions. Lower-level managers are still appointed by more senior managers. Strategy still gets set at the top. And the big calls are still made by people with big titles and even bigger salaries. there may be fewer middle managers on the payroll, but those that remain are doing what managers have always done–setting budgets, assigning tasks, reviewing performance, and cajoling their subordinates to do better. (p. 4)
Hamel sets out to explore what innovation in the practice of management would look like and how organizations and managers might tackle the problems of developing and deploying those innovations. I don’t think he gets all the way there, but the effort is worth following.
The first section of the book lays out the case for management innovation as compared to other forms. the second examines three organizations that Hamel considers worthy exemplars: Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, and Google. The last two section build a framework for how you might start doing managerial innovation within your own organization.
Hamel does a good job of extracting useful insights from the case examples he presents. Hamel’s own preference is for a managerial future that is less hierarchical and less mechanical. At the same time, he wants each of us to commit to doing managerial innovation for ourselves. This leaves him in a bit of a bind. I suspect that Hamel would like to be more prescriptive, but his position forces him to leave the prescription as an exercise for the reader. While I agree with Hamel that both individuals and organizations need to be formulating their own theories of management and experimenting on their own, this is not likely to happen in most organizations and particularly so in the current economic climate. Necessity is not the mother of invention; rather it forces us to cling to the safe and familiar. We need a degree of safety and a degree of slack to do the kinds of thinking and experimenting that will produce meaningful managerial innovations. I fear that may be hard to come by in the current environment; no matter how relevant or necessary.
What you can do in the interim is research and reflection to discover or define opportunities for possible managerial innovations. This book is one excellent starting point, but insufficient on its own.
Is this an agenda worth pursuing? What else would you recommend to move forward?
by Bill Ives
June 8, 2009 at 11:01 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
There was an interesting post by David Chartier, The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down. He focuses primarily on the consumer Web and writes, “But for the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services, their users and everything they create will have to come down.”
David then goes on to quote Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the TWiT network. Leo calls the phenomenon “the social silo,” and he does not feel it can last much longer. “People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites,” says Laporte, “but they aren’t going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next.” I could not agree more.
David then offers Google Wave as one possible solution. He writes that any user-generated content placed into a Wave-based system will be accessible by anyone that has been granted permission. The philosophies of openness and accessibility are baked right in to the tool. If Wave becomes pervasive, then the web of the future might only a need single log-in.
I will take his word on this until I can take the time to finish viewing the hour plus video on Google Wave highly recommended by Paula Thornton.
The same thing is happening inside the enterprise with many tools. Some search tools, like iQuest, can go across most, if not all, enterprise content and data systems. Many others, like SelectMinds, are providing integration between selected tools. These are both good initial steps and others are taking them. However, we need to tear down the application walls inside the enterprise, not simply build better ways to cross over them. This will require industry cooperation. I hope this can happen or enterprise 2.0 will have trouble realizing the full vision of transparency and collaboration.
