FINRA, 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.
In 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.
A 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.
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.
“Clients usually ask us how they can drill that hole in the wall. As consultants we are obsessed with finding the best drill that does it in the fastest and most cost-effective way. Sadly, we often forget to ask the client why he or she needs that hole in the first place.” (coaching advice from a VP in my previous company)
Last week, a client asked us for some help with finding a good name for their Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge platform. The internal Headshift chat was buzzing with suggestions and one person remarked that in his previous company they called it “the big black box where knowledge documents go to die.” Sound familiar? Continue reading!
Several shark species need to keep on swimming, otherwise they die. Does this hold true for companies as well? If you “stop swimming” will it cause the death of a company, as it will do for a shark?
A lot of people are dreaming about driving a Ferrari one day, unfortunately only a few are privileged. So what do you do if you are a car nut? You start with a Fiat Grande Punto, later on upgrade to an Alfa Romeo, when you get that promotion you go for a second hand Maserati and maybe one day you’ll have budget enough to buy that Ferrari.
One of the first things you learn at university in your first year of computer science is data normalisation. I don’t know about the other people out there, but I found it such an utterly boring course. Mankind has such an obsession with categorising every single piece of data that this behaviour is crammed into the minds of naïve and unknowing computer science students, just fresh from high school.
As social tools become mainstream within organisations, inevitably businesses and users and going to have to deal with multiple platforms. A classic example would be the co-existance of a niche tool (such as a blog or wiki application) with a more complete social platform (such as Jive, Connections or SharePoint).