Archive for Enterprise Social Computing
by Jon Husband
December 11, 2009 at 3:31 am · Filed under
3.0, Change, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Control, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory, Organizational Design, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trust
Ed Lawler is a reknowned management thinker I have studied for years.
He was just interviewed (by Karl Moore, a management professor at McGill University) for the Toronto Globe and Mail on the need for new management models in the Interconnected Era.
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New World Needs New Management Model
Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak with Ed Lawler, who is a professor at the Marshall School [of Business] at USC [University of Southern California] and the director of the Center for Effective Organizations. Good morning, Ed.
Ed Lawler: Good morning.
KM: Ed, you told me earlier that you are thinking about a book on Management 3.0. What do you mean by Management 3.0?
EL: Fundamentally, we need to think of a whole new approach to managing complex, large organizations. We certainly have the “command and control” era, which started way back with scientific management, and progressed over decades, really, to greater and greater levels of sophistication and expertise in how to make it run. That seemed to fit a certain kind of production-driven economy.
Clearly, starting in the 1950s, we began to say it has its limits, we have to use our workers differently, our employees differently, and I think that generated Management 2.0, which was around employee involvement, participation and moving more knowledge and information and power downward in the organization so people could add more value. And I think generally, it did impact the way most corporations operate.
The problem, of course, is that I think we are yet in another era. The economy has changed radically since then, the work force has changed radically since the sixties and seventies, and of course the economy has changed … globally, and everybody knows all those points.
So it’s kind of surprising, in many ways, that Management 1.0: command and control, or Management 2.0: high involvement or high performance, and various names for it, were [still considered] suitable.
I think we do need a Management 3.0, which recognizes the impact of information technology, different work forces, diversity in the workplace, and so forth.
So what I have been trying to do in a new book is say what that looks like, and yes, I have incorporated certainly some of the things that we did in Management 1.0 and Management 2.0. I think it really has to have a different philosophy and a different orientation with respect to both organizational design, how we treat the work force, how we think about the work force and basically how we lead in this kind of economy and in this kind of competitive environment.
KM: Ed, that is very interesting, but I need to know more about 3.0. What is it? Tell us about it so that we can begin thinking about it as managers.
EL: In many ways, to zero in on it, you can pick particular areas on how you would do that differently, or how you would manage, or general philosophy. Let me just pick one and carry it out: leadership, for example.
With the movement away from command and control management to high involvement management, we became fascinated with leaders and ascribed a lot of the effectiveness of organizations to the behaviour of leaders and so forth, and I think that has gone way too far.
We have lost a lot of the managerial blocking and tackling that people in supervisory positions have to do in order to make organizations effective. It seems to me that, if you are going to have a valid, viable 3.0, it has to include the right blend of leadership behaviours. Yes, where you inspire people by a sense of mission, sustainability, accountability – but also have a valid management approach which deals with fundamentals like goal setting and work specifications and product evaluation produced by employees. So we do not want to lose some of the key managerial skills as we have, I think, in searching for these magical leaders who are going to inspire and direct people.
KM: It is kind of a balance between leadership and management in these people: You have to be a leader but also, if you are not a manager at the same time, I think it’s Henry Mintzberg who talks about it, it’s dispiriting.
EL: Yes, I think that is exactly right, it is the balance. We have spent a lot of time training people on leadership, which some people learn and some people don’t, to be frank, and we have lost a lot of the fundamental manager skills or [they] were never developed. We still see managers doing terrible basic management – like performance reviews are done just awfully and the answer seems to be, “Well, let’s just eliminate them.” Well, to me, that is just insane. How are you going to direct and control behaviour if you do not have some kind of accountability and some sort of reviews that look at people and give them feedback and give them a sense of direction?
Just knowing that we are going to [have] sustainability as a major thrust of the company does not translate into day-to-day behaviour very easily. You need to be able to make that translation from the sense of vision and mission and so forth, to actual behaviours, and that is the managerial part of being an effective manager and leader.
KM: How about how we design organizations? How would that be different under 3.0?
EL: I think it depends substantially on what business you are in, how sophisticated the business is, and how complex it is, but I see much more self organizing, much more use of information technology, social networks, and perhaps even internal markets to create the forum and allocate financial resources within organizations, and that’s an area where there would be enormous differences.
In a book that Chris Worley and I did called Built to Change , we emphasized very strongly structures that would give people external interface with the market so that nobody is more than 2 or 3 degrees separate from the external market. I think that’s the right emphasis and we need to build on that kind of thinking because touching the market, being interfaced with the market, helps direct peoples’ behaviour internally and gives them a sense of how the business is doing and certainly motivates them to perform well.
So, I think that piece of the design is critical. What I don’t think we did enough with, in the Build to Change book, is to emphasize how organizations can be built out [using] social networks and how money can be allocated to innovations and start-up operations and how they can be converted from ideas to actual operating businesses.
KM: Is that something like the Wikipedia-tion, the LinkedIn, the Facebook-ization, if you would, of the world?
EL: Yes, I think it is, and that certainly relates to why I think it’s viable now and has not been in the past, and it has to do with a lot of people coming into organizations, partly the younger group, of course, but also more senior people are now much more familiar with those technologies and it is much more viable to use those technologies to organize.
So you are starting to see large companies, like the Ciscos and the IBMs, trying to take that technology which they have sold to consumers and say “How do we use it internally to create a more adaptable and flexible organization?” The one thing we clearly know is that Management 3.0 has to leave room for very adaptable and flexible organizations so that yesterday’s competitive advantage is ready to be today’s, yesterday’s business model is going to have to be pretty radically changed quickly, in order to keep up with the rate of change that exists today in the environment.
If there is a new normal coming out of the recession, I think it is one of change and one of innovation that companies have to be able to do that. Particularly if they are in knowledge work or situations where intellectual property and technology is the key to their business.
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Read the rest of the interview here …
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by Jon Husband
December 8, 2009 at 12:51 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Innovation, Jevon MacDonald, Measurement, Organizational Design, Social Computing
Ever since hearing of "Social Business Design" – a term associated with the Dachis Group’s positioning as a blue-chip expertise-and-experience based consulting firm focusing on helping enterprises operate more effectively in an interconnected business environment, I have been struggling to clarify for myself what is meant by the term ’socially calibrated’ as used in the Group’s tag line.
"Social business design helps companies reinvent themselves into dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections"
Please do not get me wrong … when I say I am struggling, I am not seeking to criticize. I think the firm is on the right track, and I think parsing the syntax and vocabulary we are all bringing to this new party is an important exercise … mission-critical, in fact.
Here’s what I find on the Dachis Group’s web site that addresses ’social calibration’:
Hivemind
A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating. The social business hivemind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals. Physicists refer to this as “synchronous lateral excitation.”
Distributed governance
The social business hivemind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions: a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output. Employees approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.
Measurement and cultivation
Hivemindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions – analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on. The goal is always to gain insight into constituents’ attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and remeasured to move the dial.
The explanations on the site continue, explaining the importance of Dynamic Signals and Metafiltering, and culminate in analyzing the various elements of a connected enterprise-customer-employee ecosystem for meaning, and thus the co-creation of economic value for all parties in the ecosystem.
I like this. I think that it’s becoming clear to many that we are into a world of increased and dynamic complexity, and that we need design principles and implementable practices that are based on the constant presence of flows of information and feedback loops within connected eco-systems of purpose and value.
This new environent has been building in scope, reach and intensity for years now. I think that the Dachis Group has thought this through quite well. But … I am still wondering about ’social calibration’.
As I read the site’s explanation of the Dachis Group approach, it brought to mind the "sense-making" approach that is being promoted and taught by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge Network, and other leading-edge thinkers and practitioners (and I have opined previously on the similarities to socio-technical systems theory and leading-edge OD (organizational development) principles and practices).
It was about three weeks ago that I started noodling on this. Back then I made a few notes to myself regarding what I thought ’social calibration’ might mean. Here are those notes:
Social Calibration ?
I think it means that you look at the social ‘architecture’ of an enterprise, including its markets, customers and employees and how they interact with the organization’s business processes.
I think it means that (initially) based on observation and some knowledge of current patterns of behaviour in networks of people operating ‘on purpose’, you experiment with and implement
- new work designs
- hyperlinked productivity platforms for exchange and collaboration
- the aggregation and use of collective intelligence using tagging, enterprise search and other collaborative processes.
Before this, however, you set baselines or thresholds of organizational performance and productivity from which to measure forward performance,
And then you work at understanding what works, why it works and in what conditions it works really well or may not work.
From there you clarify where changes need to be made in leadership style, management practices, work design and organizational structure(s), internal and external communications and engagement, and performance measurement and support.
With an initial framework in place for watching and ‘nudging’ the ecosystem, you begin to show and publicize in realistic ways why these ways of working are important for both future organizational success and personal work satisfaction and enrichment.
How’s that for consultant-speak ?
I think that’s what I inferred, off the cuff, from the term ’socially calibrated’.
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Please bear in mind that the above points were just rough notes I made to myself before I went looking at the Group’s web site.
I am left with my struggles with the term ’social calibration’, which I do not doubt the Dachis Group has chosen carefully and wisely.
I think my struggle is with the question of "calibrate against what?", given that there are no real models of success against which to calibrate (which in my opinion is a large part of the ongoing frustration with the difficulty of calculating the ROI of implementing social computing in organizations).
Anyway … I don’t have any real answers to my questions, other than I think that if you compare my notes to the Dachis Group’s more complete explanation (on their web site) there are parallels and the general direction of thinking is aligned.
That said, I am sure we are all going to learn a lot about what works and what does not work in the coming decade.
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by Jon Husband
November 14, 2009 at 12:24 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory
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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.
We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.
As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology. Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.
The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.
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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.
In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.
Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles. It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations
Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:
- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.
Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory
Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.
[ Snip ... ]
The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.
In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.
Adaptability
“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.
Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”
In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.
Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.
Whole tasks
Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.” The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”
The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.
This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”
Meaningfulness of tasks
Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.
This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.
In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.
The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.
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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia). Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity and the need for concentration on setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.
It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.
The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.
The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:
Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.
Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.
Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development. A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.
Motivation – stimulating and enhancing the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.
Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.
Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished - information which can be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation. Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.
Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.
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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.
The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.
I’ll be glad to learn what you think.
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by Rob Paterson
September 16, 2009 at 12:35 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Bryant Park Project, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, NPR, PBS, Platforms, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, Relationships
I was talking yesterday to a CIO of a major financial services firm. He and his colleagues have been wracking their brains over how a 2.0 view would make a difference. Of course a lot of their discussion revolved around technology and the social aspects both in the organization and outside it.
I bet that many organizations are also having the same internal conversations and being as frustrated as he is.
Looking at where the death threats are is a more productive area of discussion.
For public media Death lurks here – We have to have a much wider based and much larger public that thinks that we are not merely important but VITAL to them. If we don’t we wont make it.
“Wider based” means that we have to break out of our current demographic – of on TV being over 50, mainly white middle class and well educated – on radio of being over 40 and the same.
The challenge of doing this has been the restrictions of our “Air”. We have only 24 hours and one place on the dial.
So to change programming enough to bring in a very different demographic is to piss off the existing foundation with no real chance of adding the new. Example, the CBC have quite good show on the Native Canadian world – my bet is that most of the traditional audience switch off immediately and that First Nation’s people are not going to be tempted to become enthusiastic listeners of the CBC based on one program. This type of programming is lose lose. For NPR it was a new hip morning show called Bryant Park. What station in its right mind will drop Morning Edition for a new entrant aimed away from its main audience?
So long as Public Radio and TV have a secure foundation on their Air – they cannot expand their audience.
Also loyalty and more important financial and voting support merely based on liking content is no longer enough. When I came to Canada in 1972, I was used to the BBC and became a fanatic PBS watcher. There was no other source of good content then. Now there is tons of great content elsewhere. The old tie to content is much weaker.
So how then can Public Media avoid DEATH? How can it expand its reach to a much wider and diverse public? How can it deepen the connection beyond the relatively weak one of content?
An answer is appearing in the work of 70 plus stations working in the 32 worst hit markets in the US where the Economy is destroying the middle and lower classes. In this project – called Facing the Mortgage Crisis – stations are working with each other to pull together/convene groups of community support into a platform that can help people cope with this the greatest crisis to hit most Americans since the 30’s.
This is where the DEATH threat can be answered and this is where Social Media and the whole 2.0 perspective is invaluable.
Here stations are helping people who do not and will NEVER watch our mainstream Air. BUT they do interact with our specialty Web Sites that are focused on this issue and hence on them. More we do a lot face to face. Sometime at the station and many times in libraries and other places of trust such as churches. More, we give the community partners a face and a voice too.
It is the 2.0 web that is at the heart of this ability to offer something meaningful to people who will not connect to our traditional content on our traditional air. Ironically, as the crisis affects all, many of the white middle class are now in the same boat. They too use our 2.0 world as a new resource. In time a common crisis, as in war, brings all together. All people share a common fear and grief. All wonder what to do and how to keep going? All worry about their kids.
I predict that something great can emerge from our web – but it is not about getting more people to watch Nova or listen to All Things Considered.
So what then was my CIO’s Death fear?
I offered up this to chew on. They are in the mutual fund business. Their funds are sold by brokers who do not work for them.
Trust in Brokers, in the market and even in the idea of getting rich by punting in the markets has been weakened. Fund managers still tout their ability to realize performance that can only be achieved by taking huge risk.
What would happen to their business if we had a 1933? After the crash in 1929, the market recovered as it is today. But like today, the market came back independent of how people lived and how the economy at the human level existed. It was a second bubble. The market crashed again and the great depression hit full force. Employment did no rebound until 1941. Stock prices and activity in the market did not return until 1954.
What if we have another 1933 in 2010? Would such a collapse end all faith in the current financial system? What is the risk of that happening – 10% – 30 % – 50% – 60% – whatever the risk is substantive and worth planning for.
My idea of his DEATH threat was that if they did not do something to show that they could be trusted, that if we had a 1933, they would disappear as did most people like them in 1933.
So how could they become legitimately trusted? How could they hold onto to a public that had lost trust in the system? My advice was this.
Most people are fiscally illiterate. Most know nothing about household economics in the Greek sense of the basics of the human financial life cycle. People know nothing about how to save and why, borrowing, cash flow, how mortgages work, compound interest. Most know nothing about the value of and how risk works. Why you can take risks early but not late in life etc. If they did most would not be in the trouble that they are in now. Most think that it is normal and to be expected that they can get Maddof returns year after year not seeing that such returns imply impossible risk.
The entire fund business is like the food business – we have been trained to seek something that is not sustainable – double digit returns for ever and cheap food forever. Can we train people to be more real? I think not but people can train each other.
Most people now are waking up to the fact that they don’t know enough about money and how it affects their life. They are hungry to learn more. To take control over their financial lives, just as many today are using the web to take control over their health.
What if this firm was to set up a foundation to act as the Trusted Place on the web where people could teach each other all these things?
Here is where all the rules of 2.0 would come into play. The web, interactivity, social groups, partners – the whole gamut of 2.0 is here. By learning how to do this here, the old firm will also then see with new eyes what else they can do back in the mainstream.
I asked in closing what would this mean in terms of the brand and the industry if they were to do this? What if they did a really authentic job of providing the trusted space where people could help each other take back their financial power?
He could see in a heart beat that this would change the relationship – just as I am seeing signs that FTMC is changing the relationship with Public radio and TV. At first the two worlds of the “Academy” and their traditional business would be separate. But over time there would be some kind of convergence. For who of us knows as much as we should and who of us does not have something to offer?
In time the very nature of the business would change too as will in the end mainstream TV and Radio – but this way the change would be shaped by the active participation of millions of people formerly known and “audience” or “Clients” who right now don’t even have a name.
For what is the label for a person who is part of the ecology that is the new wider enterprise?
So what do you think? Can you radically change your foundation offering without killing the golden goose? Think GM or the Newspapers – all their cash flow came from the old – but DEATH was waiting for sure. How could they have found another part of life where they could have added real value and so attached a much bigger group of people to them?
I am sure that there is an answer. Do you have one?
by Jon Husband
September 10, 2009 at 1:00 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Organizational Design, Social Computing, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds
McKinsey, a leading organizational consulting firm, has just released its most recent study regarding the usage of Web 2.0.
From a read of the announcement, it appears that collectively we are still on the path towards social computing becoming a fixture in the knowledge-based workplace … hardly a surprise.
I (and many others) have said here, and elsewhere, that the ubiquitous presence of the Web, the growing ease-of-use of tools and services, and the growing understanding of productivity in a networked era, are leading inexorably to a fundamental re-think of the way(s) knowledge work is carried out and the type(s) of organizational culture necessary to support that productivity.
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Across all categories, the use of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal purposes has increased from 53% in 2007 to 65% of respondents in 2009.
The largest components of growth have come from using Web 2.0 to develop new products / services internally, to manage internal knowledge and to reinforce the company culture via tools such as internal social networking applications.
The companies who have embedded these tools in their day-to-day activities and processes have seen the largest impact by improving communication across silos to reduce duplicate work and leverage experts in other areas.
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The report notes that enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies to connect and interact with business partners and suppliers has slowed down or stagnated … again, not much of a surprise given the often transactional nature of those relationships and the fact that electronic connections between those parties have existed in one form or another for quite some time now.
The final statement of this most recent McKinsey report offers, in my opinion, some clear writing on a big wall … “expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.”
When will your organization adopt, or grow its capabilities and culture with respect to, collaboration platforms and Enterprise 2.0 expertise and dynamics ?
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The momentum we see in the growth of Web 2.0 technologies implies we will see higher penetration in 2010 for using these technologies for employees to collaborate and to facilitate interactions with customers.
To drive increased usage for managing interactions with suppliers and partners, companies will need to find ways use these technologies to augment the formal relationships between business entities and not substitute formal interactions with more ad hoc ones.
Nonetheless, it is clear that expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.
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