by Joe McKendrick
August 8, 2011 at 11:37 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media
As we’ve been discussing here at this site for some time, there are tangible business benefits being realized from adoption of social media platforms as part of a comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 strategy.
However, this is a message that is not getting through to small businesses.
Hiscox, an insurance company. recently surveyed US small business leaders on their social media usage and found that many weren’t using these important channels to promote their businesses and products. Only 12% of businesses described social media promotion as a must and nearly 50% of respondents aren’t using social media at all.
For those that did use social media for their business, 19% use Facebook, 15% use LinkedIn, and 4% use Twitter.
Traditional modes dominate small business communication. Nearly two in five respondents said word-of-mouth was the main way they got business, and another 42% cited word-of-mouth in combination with other marketing promotions.
When all respondents were asked about how they felt about using social media for their business: 12% describe it as a must, they do it all the time; 24% do it when they have the time; and 14% indicated they don’t know enough about it.
by Bill Ives
August 8, 2011 at 3:35 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, IT Department, State Street Bank
State Street Corporation is known for banking and one of the reasons that Boston is a financial services hub on global scale. They are also looking ahead to predict how technology will impact their industry and released its Vision Report. The report, “The Evolving Role of Technology in Financial Services,” looks at the impact of forthcoming advances in three specific areas: analytics, electronic trading and regulation, as well as portfolio allocation and modeling.
The report looks at the impact that next generation technology such as cloud computing is expected to have on the industry. According to the report, investors will obtain significant benefits through greater automation and capacity on demand, accelerated time to market of innovative new products — including custom analytics and data — greater security and strengthened client service.
It opens with this statement: “Technology has long played a key role in the financial services industry. Today, however, a number of new and rapidly accelerating trends are emerging that promise to usher in an entirely new paradigm. Information technology can no longer simply be an “add on” at the periphery of the business, but rather must be deeply embedded at its core.” It has come a long way from simply counting beans.
State Street’s Vision report also explains that, unlike today, the financial services industry will soon deploy increasingly sophisticated, forward-looking technology tools and analytics that will enable investors to understand and model actual precursors of performance. For example, instead of today’s simple descriptions related to risk position and market stability, investors will soon be able to see more acute and intricate insights and the actual factors that contribute to those risk positions. These factors alone, the report states, will have reverberating impacts on the habits, business processes and decision-making of institutional investors around the globe.
The report is divided into three main sections:
Technology with a Purpose: The Next Generation Today section discusses the integration of risk and return technology by investment service providers to address asset managers and asset owners’ growing need for more detailed portfolio analytics, process transparency, risk management and dashboards to improve the speed and kind of information they are receiving and their access to it.
Using Technology to Adapt to the New Regulatory Environment section examines the review of electronic trading by regulators following the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Technology has been at the forefront in enabling the exponential growth of electronic trading and has become the only solution to effectively meet the challenges inherent in new trading regulations.
Portfolio Allocation and Modeling — Look at the question: Technological Arms Race? And explores technology’s solutions to meet today’s leading global asset management challenges, including market crowding, pricing inefficiencies, risk and rebalancing.
The report states the drivers of the changes they cover include several factors. One is clients’ demand for more and faster information, greater transparency, and improved risk management. We can certainly use all of these, especially the last one. Another is that the perceived value of data has fundamentally shifted. This was the theme of several session sat the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference (for example see: My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Big Data Analytics for Social Media).
In addition, the globalization of the workforce, which has led to around-the-clock schedules, the acceptance of open source-based strategies and the use of multiple procurement partners, is also an important factor. Taken together, these changes have set the groundwork for the emergence of a new business and IT model that will likely disrupt conventional thinking about the roles and capabilities of IT systems within financial services.
by Bill Ives
August 2, 2011 at 3:10 am · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter
I read an interesting article in the Neiman Labs blog, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms. It asked the question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? It clarified the reason for this question as we treated these two forms of expression quite differently. Text is seen as stable and more permanent and this has legal implications.
The article compares the two as follows: “Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final. And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual.”
The article concludes: “The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It’s its own thing, a new category. Our language, however, doesn’t yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn’t yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.”
I find it interesting that this debate occurred when text as we know it was first introduced through the Greek phonetic alphabet. Plato commented on this latest information technology breakthrough of his time. He said in The Republic that text is a better means, than the oral tradition, to convey and store information. Then he cautioned the limits of text in Phaedrus that meaning is better derived from the dialog of viewpoints.
When blogs first appeared similar discussions about the hybrid nature of social media arose. The researcher Alexander Halavais said that blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” They can give greater context and connection.
Blogs took the conversational aspects part way through their informal style and the opportunity for comments. Now Twitter moves the dialog much further through its real time ease of use. The Neiman article noted and interesting twist in this direction. It commented that, “Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet’s news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.” Now the Web talks back at you through Twitter, more so and faster than with blogs.
The article notes that text has been “considered an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds.” But now this could be changing as it becomes more dynamic.
They note that Twitter is not very good at the archival part yet but it should improve. This is one reason that I post my favorite tweets on this blog every two weeks so I can go back to them. I also find it an interesting recap of what I found useful in the past two weeks when I set up the post. One thing that is needed is better curation tools and they mentioned, Storify. It allows you to create stories using social media.
The article concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter.
by Rob Paterson
July 31, 2011 at 6:31 am · Filed under
Adoption
Joe wrote this week about how Iceland is using the web to Open up its democracy and then asks the big question – what about corporate life? Will corporations follow?
Geoffrey West’s research suggests that they had better – because it shows that the ultra controlled approach that is the Command and Control Normal now – kills corporations early. They are dying sooner and sooner.
Are corporations more like animals or more like cities? They want to be like cities, with ever increasing productivity as they grow and potentially unbounded lifespans. Unfortunately, West et al.’s research on 22,000 companies shows that as they increase in size from 100 to 1,000,000 employees, their net income and assets (and 23 other metrics) per person increase only at a 4/5 ratio. Like animals and cities they do grow more efficient with size, but unlike cities, their innovation cannot keep pace as their systems gradually decay, requiring ever more costly repair until a fluctuation sinks them. Like animals, companies are sublinear and doomed to die.
The issue is that using a machine model – is that friction builds as well as cost as the corporation scales. The costs rise with revenue. So in the mature part of the cycle, you cannot innovate – you can only manage the numbers/ratios. For example, 10 years ago, Shell set up Shell Renewables. Shell was going to become a leader in non oil energy. Makes sense right? The top people know about Peak Oil better than most and wanted to find a place in the next energy sector. What ruined this experiment was its success. Being a very large organization, Shell did new projects at scale. With two of the largest new Wind Farms online – the CFO and the CEO saw the trap – saw why they had to retreat back into OIL ONLY. Shell had to make the numbers even if by doing so meant that Shell could not position itself to be a leader in New Energy.
Wind farms that do well have an ROI of about 8% they are a utility – like owning a bond. But the Oil business has embedded costs that are linked to the returns on OIL that are much higher than wind. So if Shell did a lot more of these mega wind projects, the ROI of Shell would be reduced and Shell would have an earnings problem. The more wind farms they installed, the more their earnings would drop but their costs could not. They were trapped!
This dooms Shell and all mature companies. We saw that is Big Steel when smaller local mini mills ate into the lower ROI parts of the business until there was nothing left? We see this now with media.
The costs of a press or a studio – are so great that all the majors can do is to defend their existing platform. The New York Times can only hide behind the paywall for a period of time. The studios can only hold off web distribution of video for so long. But their battle to keep the status quo is not stupid – they are stuck with the costs. It is the model of how we do business that is the problem. For in the mature phase, the CEO has to make the ratios and the costs are embedded. In the final phase all the CEO can do is to milk the system.
For all true innovation HAS to start with a modest revenue line. So if you have a large enterprise with high revenues you have also high costs. So a web based news alternative CANNOT earn the revenue that you need to run the Times. So you cannot go there. But of course a new competitor – Huffington? Can and will and in the end will take enough revenue off your top line to kill you.
So are corporations doomed? Well with a sample of 22,000 West makes a good case that the current model does doom you, if you are traditionally organized. So what then is the way out?
West makes the case that Cities live much much much longer. The core of why is the core idea for corporations to study and apply.
“It’s hard to kill a city,” West began, “but easy to kill a company.” The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And “cities are the crucible of civilization.” They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. “Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities.”
Cities are much more open as systems and networks. They are much closer to being alive than corporations that rely too much on command and control.
As I write this I am thinking of how Wordpress works. At the core of Wordpress is a for profit organization – but also one of the tasks of Automattic is to ensure the health of an ecosystem that is the larger Wordpress ecology in which thousands of independent developers who do not work for Automattic make a living. I think of Wikipedia. At the core of Wikipedia is a set of rules about how Wikpedia has to work and how people in Wikipedia have to behave. Surrounding this core is a cadre of “White Blood Cells” AKA editors – that ensure that this DNA is kept healthy. I see no way now that Wikipedia will not be here in 50 years.
Why my confidence?
If you look at Wordpress and Wikipedia you will see the key. In a network that really is a network – like Wordpress and Wikipedia – the costs go up in a shallow linear curve while the outcomes rise exponentially. The margin grows so that any bump in revenue along the way – which is of course natural for nothing in Nature runs on any form of straight line – does not take down the organization. But in a traditional organization, the costs rise in direct concert with the revenue and outcomes. This means that once the business approaches maturity, the leadership have to force the numbers, meaning that in the mature phase, the only real focus are the numbers themselves. Not the underlying purpose of the business. The focus becomes defence and self referential. The organization is now doomed. Doomed to suffer a bump in the market or to a new competitor. Look at the case of RIM. Can RIM come back?
This site has been a place where many of us have tried to see the future for business. We could all agree that more Command and Control would not help. We could all agree that more Social Media used to open up the organization would help. But what we are seeing now is that for an enterprise to thrive over time – it must become alive! Only a true network can enable this to take place. The few true networks that we can see now, give us a working model of the new enterprise.
Stuart Baker and I are working on what this might be and in the fall we will be posting our ideas.
Our proposition is this. In the 1800’s most business was small, local and unique. The great shift in the 20th century was to consolidate into the enterprise as we know it. This was how to create wealth then. All who stayed back in the small, local and unique died. The efficient machine had to be the model you used. Now we enter a new phase. For the limits of the efficient machine have been reached. The new winners will be those that can adopt the model of the real network.
We all know about how to organize the machine. How to organize the network is all new and mainly unknown. That then is the challenge and the opportunity. Good luck to all of us.
by Joe McKendrick
July 31, 2011 at 1:07 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking
News has just broken that the people of Iceland have just produced a draft of a new constitution – developed collaboratively via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
The Althing, Iceland's Social Media-Savvy Parliament. Photo: Wikimedia
Iceland had its share of financial debacles in recent years, and, as a result, decided it needed to re-invent its government to incorporate a better system of checks and balances. However, the new constitution isn’t being written by a group of men holed up in a room somewhere — it’s an open process involving the latest social networking tools and technology.
A 25-member Constitution Council drafted the new constitution by engaging Iceland’s 318,000 citizens through social media sites, which helped keep everyone up to date on the document’s progress, as well as solicit feedback. The Constitutional Council posted daily interviews with delegates, and meetings were broadcast live on the council’s webpage and on Facebook. There were also schedules for all meetings, all minutes from meetings of groups, the Board and the Council as well as the Council’s work procedures. The webpage also has regular news from the Council’s work as well as a weekly newsletter.
If social networking tools can help transform a nation, imagine what it can do for a company.
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
