Collaboratory
The Collaboratory is our Social Business collaborative lab where we engage and explore an ongoing discussion, share thoughts, opinions, and ideas on Social Business.
Sky News Technology Behind Business panel on Knowledge Management
Blog Post, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, The Connected CompanyLast week I was invited by Nigel Freitas to participate in a panel discussion about Knowledge Management (KM) for Sky News Australia’s Technology Behind Business show. Technology Behind Business examines trends and analyses key IT concepts. Each week an expert panel focuses on one type of technology or strategy, explaining its use without the jargon,
Defining Social Business Design
Blog PostOn Tuesday morning I presented at the Get Social Roadshow in Cardiff under the title of “Social Business Design in Business Today.” The bulk of the conversation was around examples and case studies of good social business design. Starbucks, RedBull and RPC all featured.
Facebook is giving users means, motive, and opportunity. What are you going to do next?
Blog PostIt wasn’t that long ago I was presenting an introduction to social media and warned people that Facebook wasn’t something you could approach with a one off strategy for their organisation. Not just because a Facebook presence requires constant gardening (and like any social channel it does), but because Facebook is a constantly evolving entity. However, the current wave of changes announced at Facebook’s F8 conference are something significant and quite exciting.
Gen Y for Social Business
Blog PostSlightly adapting Gandhi’s famous words, I would assert, Gen Y will fuel the change we are in the world; particularly in the world of business. I’m not alone in my feeling – 82% of Gen Y worldwide believe “[Our] generation has the power to change the world” (EURO RSCG). Such optimism, I understand, is characteristic of many generations before us, and their contributions to the world of business should not be underestimated. However, now it is Gen Y’s time to shine and we are introducing new expectations and skills to the workplace. Our general drive to learn, rejection of the status quo, and desire to connect, if enthusiastically embraced by businesses, will fuel the cultural and systematic changes fundamental for businesses to become more social businesses.
Adoption Strategies for Social Software
Blog PostThis post deals with adoption of social software in enterprises. It might echo with people that have faced problems in getting others to believe that their approach works. It promotes how to “get a feel” for success; rather than a measure of adoption. It’s in-house employees and veterans of the company that know how dispersed a deployment really is. Whilst many things have been written about aficionados and early adopters, it’s critical to involve non-power-users for their insight into the maturity of a deployment. It’s those people that offer the most valuable and realistic view of adoption. Like slow-burning logs in a fire, they take some time to get going but eventually beam us through to a mature roll-out.
What makes for longevity in a large company or a city?
Blog PostMy colleague Dave Gray has written a wonderfully insightful and important post about the decreasing lifespan of companies and their apparently declining productivity at scale. The piece is getting some much-deserved attention – it is not every post that Tim O’Reilly offers to turn into a book o/ – and it is great to see an idea he shared with me on the back of a bus a few weeks ago take shape as a cogent blog post.
Internal Social Business – 2.0 Adoption: People in Progress
Blog Post, Case StudyThe 2.0 Adoption Council has been researching what’s happening on the ground inside of large organizations in the process of internal social business transformation. Along with IBM and MIT’s Center for Digital Business, we've created a series of short vignettes and company narratives on how large organizations are finding opportunities and challenges reinventing themselves. These initiatives are often led by a small team, sometimes a single individual who is driven to help the company work a better way — a more connected, dynamic and socially calibrated way of interacting for business.
Becoming a Compliant Social Business
Blog PostFINRA, FDA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR, are regarded as curse words in social media and workforce collaboration circles. People don’t want to say them. They don’t want to hear them and they really really don’t want the regulators to swing by for a “chat.” The outcomes created by this mentality are predictable: hesitancy when approaching new technology, over-engineered solutions that inhibit adoption and the pursuit of risky grassroots experimentation.
Communication as Work: In Real Life
Blog PostIn my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making. I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I'd write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night. The setup here isn't that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order. We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.
Communication as Work
Blog PostA knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating - meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks. Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done. And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.