Lee Bryant (11 posts)

If I could wave my magic wand and make one major change to accelerate our work in the social business design field, it would be to improve the often fraught relationship between ‘the business’ and IT departments.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the relative merits of starting social business technology projects with pilots versus jumping right in an building solutions at scale. This post covers some thoughts from the experts, as well as our recommendations.

I was disappointed not to make it over to New York for Stowe Boyd’s Social Business Edge conference yesterday, due to the ashpocalypse. When it became clear travel was impossible, I agreed with Stowe to record a video of my talk instead, which is embedded below (21mins) minus a couple of late night editing mistakes from the original that was shown yesterday.

Later this week, the Sydney Social Business Summit will complete the cycle of three events in three continents that began in Austin on March 11th. I am intrigued to see what sort of event our Headshift colleagues put together down under, and I suspect it will be quite distinct from the two that have come before.

Our Social Business Summit on March 18 is starting to come together nicely, with some great participants and sponsors joining up to make it a great day. With only 100 places available in total, I would urge you to sign up sooner rather than later. Also, if you are in the USA or Australia, there is still time to sign up for those summits too.

On March 18, SOMESSO and Headshift/Dachis Group will host Europe’s first Social Business Summit; an invitation-only event in the city of London, which is aimed at business and technology thought leaders interested in the future of social business design.

Last week, I gave a talk in Frankfurt at the impressive E20 Summit about leadership in devolved organisations. My starting point was the myth that leadership is somehow less important in new, networked organisations. Not so. If anything, it is more important than ever, but the focus and practice of leadership is changing; and if we are to engage leaders and involve them in the development of social business structures, then we need to be able to understand and address their challenges and issues using language that resonates with them.

The Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco event ended last week, handing over the baton to Europe for the E2.0 Summit in Frankfurt, which starts today. It looks like Kongress media have put together a good lineup and a very practical agenda, so I am looking forward to some intelligent discussions about the practice of enterprise social computing in Europe, rather than the kind of navel gazing, ideological debates that seemed to dominate in San Francisco.

This post by Lee Bryant originally appeared on the Headshift blog, and contains Lee’s talk at SOMESSO on Social Business Design for the Finance sector. Lee discusses workforce collaboration, customer participation, and service innovation in the finance industry, as well as the importance of measurable outcomes and connecting to business goals and objectives.

This is a post from Lee Bryant that was originally posted on the Headshift blog. He was invited to give a presentation at the Amsterdam Social Strategy Talk, hosted by Creative Crowds and ViNT. Lee and Tom Steinberg (mySociety) were the closing speakers, talking about the issue of public participation and open data in relation to government innovation. The talk was a very simple introduction to why this topic matters, plus a consideration of some recent critiques of transparency initiatives, decorated by a lovely data visualisation of world population growth from the G-Econ project.