“I’m fed up with our IT department. Why does it take 4 months to deliver a small project if I can have it right now and much cheaper as a hosted service?”
“Why are those IT guys spending three years on an SAP roll out? I want them to focus on projects that has a direct [...]
In Steven Pinker’s eloquent review of Gladwell’s new collection of essays, he coins a new calamity – “the Igon Value Problem,” mocking Gladwell for his misunderstanding/misspelling of the term “eigenvalue” as igon value. The Problem, as defined by Pinker is,
when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to [...]
The fundamentals of social business design can be applied to many different sectors and to many different business processes. Whilst, by definition, those fundamentals remain constant, or at least relatively stable, the application of them can vary widely. What follows are just three quick, high-level, examples of how the pharmaceutical industry could use social business design to its advantage.
Data integration company SnapLogic recently announced $2.3M in its first institutional funding from noted venture investors Mike Maples, Jr. and Naval Ravikant. Data integration is going to be a key technology, as enterprises try to make sense of the tidal wave of data that routinely increases in size. Integrating data from legacy structures and the [...]
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.
Andrew McAfee is known as the father of Enterprise 2.0. In 2006 he wrote the paper “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” which for many of us gave a single point of reference for the work being done in enterprise social software and “Office 2.0″ until then. Since then Enterprise 2.0 has started to come of age, and I thought the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco would be a perfect opportunity to sit down and discuss the past and future of collaboration, social software and business strategy.
From a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems such as Twitter are beginning to deliver here.
Judging from the number of invites I’m getting for FourSquare these days, its slope of new users must be getting more vertical every day. After using FourSquare for a while, I’ve been thinking about its implications for business – and they’re deeper than you might think, extending far beyond happy hours and local advertising opportunities.
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.
While social media often commands favorable media attention, the less often told story is that successful initiatives are rare to come by and that there are still a number of organizational roadblocks that managers need to overcome in order to make progress.