Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 25 February, 2011 under Collaboration |
I am proposing that there are two kinds of collaboration. Active and passive.
Active collaboration refers to people actively going to a portal or a tool to contribute and share information willingly about new ideas, products and help others. Passive on the other hand is where people would only collaborate if they were asked to – answer the question and collaboration stops as well (unless there is a follow up question)
Active collaboration
There is an inherent problem with this which is called information overload. When an active community is out there contributing and sharing stuff, there is alot of information flowing around. With a busy schedule, some of the right people to respond to the right information can be missed. Active collaboration relies on people to correctly and effectively identify the information that is relevant to them and respond accordingly. Some may argue that there is RSS, notification and stuff like that to help with this problem. However if there are multiple workspaces for different teams with different focus and currently natural language business intelligence hasn’t been effectively developed yet, there will surely be information that is missed out.
Passive collaboration
Passive collaboration on the other hand is seeking help on a specific problem with a specific person or group of people. It is targeted, focused, short and sweet. With our busy schedule, we do not have time to go through a ton of non relevant information. However, the issue with this is to identify the right person or groups of people that can help with the problem. For passive collaboration to work, all that is required is to have a up to date directory of employees and every employee’s skills are listed and maybe even rated against a capability maturity matrix. Employees can then search on the database for potentially right person or team to answer a specific quesiton and a response is mandatory – even if the answer is “Sorry I am not sure”.
What do you think? Would passive collaboration work better? What the pros and cons for each of the different types of collaboration? Where is active collaboration more useful than passive (and vice versa)?
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 26 January, 2011 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Information management, social media |
Social media within an organisation is not about being a social butterfly. Its not about posting your latest drunken moments and what you did last weekend. These stuff has minimal returns on investment. However, if I can have a system that allows me to be a people, data and process butterfly, that will increase my productivity, efficiency and accuracy.
Think about this – a self serve BI platform that links back to the business processes / supply chain setup and the people who are related to the data. You can now get the information that you need to run your business unit and ensure that it runs perfectly with the changes that are happening with other business units and ensuring that if something wrong happens you know who to look for right away.
This is how I see a corporate social media platform should work. Call it whatever you want. 
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 6 January, 2011 under Blue Sky Thinking, Strategy |
Recently, Australian retailers launched an advertising campaign urging the government to impose GST on all goods bought over the internet. First of all, this has many issues from logistics to fraud detection.
Besides the obvious issues executing this proposal, I would like to specifically look at a long term solution for Australian retailers. Online sales no doubt are eating into the revenues of physical retailers and this will only continue to grow in the near future. However, physical stores and online stores are vastly different and can compete in very different ways.
Physical stores have the luxury to offer their customers to try out goods, advise on purchases, provide after sales support, allow buyers to feel the products and provide value added services to customers. However, this comes at a higher cost structure in terms of real estate, facilities and staffing costs. Online stores, on the other hand, offers lower cost structures leading to cheaper products, delivery to door step, shopping from home and time saving. Depending on the product and personal preferences, consumers will elude to the channel that suits them better.
Yes, government regulation on GST could help but the price savings online is normally more than 10%. I feel that this proposal is a short term tactical solution. I feel that Australian retailers can do a few things to improve their competitiveness in the market.
1) Increase their value added services in their physical stores. Services like pre-sales advice, shopping/customer experience and after sales support can help to increase the desire to shop in a physical store as compare to some of the online shopping nightmare.
2) Multi channel retail. With a trusted brand name, physical retailers can extend the experience to the comfort of consumer’s home. As of today, none of the major retailers in Australia have a massive online presence and ecommerce capability. They are losing the online retail battle to cheaper overseas alternatives. Such big name local physical retailers could also then reach out to consumers around the world as well.
3) Get into an arrangement with manufacturers. Manufacturers have only one aim which is to move as much of their products out to consumers as possible. Many products in the market requires some kind of touch and feel before making a purchase. Physical retailers can negotiate a lower price for products that are sold at a physical store as they provide a better service for the end consumer. They could even go into a special agreement for a specific period where heavier promotional emphasis is placed on a specific product. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter if a consumer goes into a shop for advice and buys online after that. Manufacturers have the incentive to do this if they are interested in controlling the price of their product as part of their pricing strategy.
I feel that such steps will improve the position of local retailers and they need to pull up their socks and fight this battle. Even though price is a big factor in a buying decision, there are many other very important factors as well.
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 21 December, 2010 under Information management |
Its been a year since I last wrote anything on this blog. Work has been absolutely crazy and school work hasn’t quite helped as well. I am now on my Christmas break and have abit more time to do the stuff I enjoy.
One of the technologies I am following this year is called in memory analytics. This is really an extension of Business Intelligence (BI). Let’s discuss BI before moving into in memory analytics.
BI is synonymous with data warehouse, data cubes, dashboards and reporting.
First of all, data warehouses do not provide full real time data of all your transactional databases. There are issues with performance of the legacy systems, integration, costs and hardware limitations. Therefore, reports that business users receive are 15mins late or a week old (depending on the type of data).
Moreover, data cubes require developers to build it, test it and deploy it. This takes time, effort and money. Most companies nowadays can get the top 20% of the long tail of reports right. However, the rest of the 80% is not met.
There are then reporting dashboards that try to do two things.
1) Provide a pretty front end graphs and charts to the data
2) Allow user manipulation of data and try to meet some of the unmet business reporting requirements. This generally requires a good understanding of the data, a comprehensive data dictionary and some technical skills. I am not sure how many people in businesses have such a skill.
Additionally, once a report is generated and the contents have been verified to be correct, analysis of the data, discussion/collaboration and actions needs to be taken based on what the report says. I have told a few people this: data sits in the database, information is in the report and wisdom is the outcome of the analysis and actions taken because of the report. Information management tackles the reporting side of things but getting people to take appropriate actions on the data in the report that is aligned to the overall business strategy and actions of other teams within the firm is not easy. Deriving cooperative wisdom is important but difficult.
In memory analytics aims to solve some of the current BI problems. Using a combination of better multi core processing, advanced multi threading technologies, 64 bit architecture and cost/speed of memory, it is technically possible to store all data in the memory (RAM) of the computer instead of the harddrive. What this means is that data will be real time and possibly a reduction of costs as only one database is required (instead of the transactional database and data warehouse).
The benefits of this is enormous in some industries like airline, retail, national security and banking. Real time data and analysis is critical for the optimisation of yield management, profits and identifying any arbitrage.
However, this still does not solve the issue of converting data into wisdom. Businesses need to create a culture of measuring the data in the reports to the performance metrics. Businesses track earnings and spending against budgets but tracking budgets are the result of operational performance and tracking. This is where the next step of BI should be focused on. Businesses have to encourage business units to be agile and nimble to react to the constantly changing business environments.
I do foresee that:
1) improving the technology around in-memory analytics and
2) improving processes around BI and reporting
to be the two key focus areas of organisations in the next couple of years.
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 5 December, 2009 under Enterprise 2.0 |
First of all, I really enjoyed reading Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book. It concisely describes the problem at hand and provide four case studies to help illustrate his point. He went on to provide a strong definition of Enterprise 2.0 and what it consists of. Additionally, he provided some theoretical background to Enterprise 2.0 which I found extremely refreshing. Finally, he went on to describe in some detail how to succeed with Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0 is something that is fairly new in the commercial and academic world. It is not a rocket science technology however, it brings together many past concepts and technologies like advance web technologies, collaboration concepts, knowledge management, social networking concepts, groupware technologies and many more under one technology platform. Additionally, Enterprise 2.0 adds new ways of doing things like freeform editing, self organisation, mobile integration and so on. Andrew McAfee did a very good job in summarising these tools and concepts into a book. I specifically like the chapter of “New approaches to old problems”
Probably being half an academic at heart, I found lacking in this book is the strong research data that could help substantiate some of his points. I guess Enterprise 2.0 being fairly new in this industry, there is a lack of research data in the field and I feel that research on the usage and development of Enterprise 2.0 over a period of time would provide very interesting insights.
I think this book is for anyone who is interested in Enterprise 2.0. For an expert in Enterprise 2.0, this book is a good summary of the concept. For your boss who doesn’t understand Enterprise 2.0, it would be a good starting point. Excellent read. Well done Andrew.
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 17 November, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking |
I have been very passionate about this topic since I was young. It struck me when I was a five year old boy traveling to the depths of China and I experienced first hand what is the meaning of poverty and trying to survive in the cold, harsh winter. The people (especially kids) did not even had enough to eat, let alone study or learn a skill. I remember I had a chocolate bar and some lollies. I gave it to a kid and the smile on his face is just incredible.
I had a crazy idea a while back. I thought of building a computer community centre in the poorest areas of the world. This is based on a few concepts, one laptop per child, web 2.0 and IT outsourcing. The following are a few reasons why and how to deliver this idea.
1) Kids can learn from the best teachers around the world. One good example is MIT’s Open CourseWare. Something can also be worked out for the younger children. Its not easy to get quality teachers to these areas and instead of trying to get more teachers into these poor areas, why not bring the kids to the teachers?
2) Outsourcing has seen tremendous growth in the last decade and as we all know, there are many kinds of outsourcing. I was thinking that some of the low level tasks can be outsourced to the adults of these areas or work out an arrangement like the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. It could even be that an organisation can “adopt a community” and train them to do the work necessary for that organisation?
By keeping people occupied, learning and producing something, they can make their own living. We must remember that many of the poorest people in the world do not even make a dollar a day. If they can make some money out of it, even $2 a day doing some monotonous work, it will really help the community to grow and develop into something better. I am not looking for a solution that can give them thousands a month, just something to help them along and progress.
I also understand that many of these people have never seen a computer before and I won’t blame anyone who is skeptical that people would not know how to use computers. Interesting enough, TechCrunch had a blog post about how children in India’s slums could work out computers without assistance and training extremely quickly.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 12 November, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
There has been alot of talk about creating enterprise 2.0 pilot test groups before a full fledged implementation across an organisation. However, I haven’t read much about how one can go about identifying teams that will succeed in the pilot test groups. So what are the requirements of an Enterprise 2.0 pilot test groups?
1) Must be tech savvy enough to know how to use the Enterprise 2.0 platform. This doesn’t necessary have to be the IT department.
2) Managers and team members involved have a history of collaborating with other teams/business units, i.e. helping other business units and contributing time and resources to support other business objectives other than their own.
3) High performing teams. These teams are very good at what they are supposed to do within their job scope and business objectives.
4) There are reasons and incentives for the teams to collaborate both internally within the team and external with other teams/suppliers and/or clients.
Do you think there are enough factors to select a team that will be highly effective and produce the right results in an Enterprise 2.0 pilot test group?
*Hint* think about this from a corporate level, if these are factors for a successful pilot team, what about a successful collaborative organisation?
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 6 November, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
When I first started researching Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, I had the impression that its going to be really easy to implement a technology platform that can help enable Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 within an organisation. I was wrong.
As I discussed in my previous post, in every collaboration instance, the returns on collaboration must be greater than opportunity costs + collaboration costs.The cost involved in such an implementation is not just a social business software or purchasing some SaaS product online and get people to use it. I believe its more than that. In many large organisations, they do not have a central ERP, CRM, Data warehouse and so on. Enterprise 2.0 is not just about getting people to social network together or work on documents together or “tweet” each other. We need to strategically think about why we need employees to collaborate and share information.
Let me provide you with a simple case study. A large company with multiple units across the world would like to get two business units to collaborate to cross sell products to both business unit’s customers. Both business units have their own CRM and ERP systems running. A social business software was introduced hoping to achieve the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. It didn’t work. The following points were attributed to its failure:
1) Teams didn’t trust each other.
2) Performance review of teams was still focus on the individual business units. They were not judge on how effective the collaboration arrangement was
3) They didn’t had a common CRM system to track who did what to which customer. Data was inconsistent, errors were plentiful.
The above three points tells me there are three areas that needs to be targeted.
1) Change in organisational culture
2) Change in organisational performance management and structure.
3) Change in technology systems.
If you are an seasoned profession in the IT industry, you can roughly figure out that just accomplishing these three objectives will not be cheap and would take time.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 5 November, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Web 2.0 |
Generally, overdoing anything is not good. For example, humans have to drink water to survive, however, if one drinks way too much, the water would wash away the nutrients in the body and its bad for one’s health. Collaboration is the same. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies promotes collaboration across groups of people and there has been alot of buzz about it.
My experience with such implementation is that many leaders do not know when to collaborate and when not to. One classic example is when teams can’t decide on a specific problem or find the best route of advancement. I do not think the relationship works this way – the more people collaborating, the better result is achieved. Just like a 2 hour meeting with 20 people in the room is generally a waste of time. Leaders must target collaboration strategically.
Collaboration takes time and effort of employees and teams and this translates to opportunity cost. Employees from both sides of the team could have spend doing something more useful. The exact time spent on collaborating could be translated to a cost (based on salary of employees). Employers needs to ensure that employees are using their time effectively and help their organisation make money.
Collaboration between teams also cost money. There is a cost for the technology platform, telephone calls, traveling to other sites and so on. These costs should not be under estimated – small amounts can roll up to be a substantial amount.
Based on this, the returns of a collaboration arrangement between teams should be greater than the sum of opportunity costs + collaboration costs.
Returns on collaboration > opportunity costs + collaboration costs
If a collaboration arrangement does not fulfill this model, then it would be better to stay status quo or find another way to maximise the returns on other investments.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 28 October, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
I have been thinking alot about how Enterprise 2.0 can be applied to politically intense environments. Let’s face it, to get global teams to work together is not the easiest thing. Not everyone share the same objective and in a highly competitive environment, it could be quite challenging. Some teams could think, why should I help in your division’s bottom line?
I will not discuss in detail game theory. However, it is widely known that game theory consist of five elements – Players, Added values, Rules, Tactics and Scope, PARTS in short.
Players
If there were a situation where two teams would not collaborate together, it could be wise to introduce another team to the collaborative platform or even changing one of the teams and replacing it with another team that is more interested. There is no point pushing and trying, if the team is not interested, it would be too much pain and effort to change the culture.
Added values
When two teams are collaborating and one slacks away, this could be sign that there is not enough incentive for the team that is slacking away. This calls for more added value to be provided to the team that is slacking away. For example, if a car product innovation team is collaborating with the tyre department and the product innovation team is just sucking information out of the tyre department and not contributing back, this would not provide any incentive for the tyre department to collaborate anymore. However, if the product innovation team is to provide feedback and ideas for the tyre department to improve on their operations, design and efficiency, this could improve the collaboration.
Rules
Within an organisation, rules could always be used to force people to collaborate. However, I have never been the sort of person who will try to force something down someone else’s throat.
Tactics
In Game Theory, tactics refer to changing the way players perceive the game and thus changing the way they compete. In the context of this post, an organisation could use other success stories within the organisation that has delivered high growth and efficiency and present it to teams who are against collaboration. Changing the perception of losing control and power and providing these teams with greater benefits could be a way to go.
Scope
Finally, scope refers to the boundary of the game. I have seen some team collaborate only on certain things and not others. By increasing (or decreasing) the scope of the collaboration, it could ultimately improve the net benefit of collaboration. The last thing management would want is to over collaborate and start discussing things that are not to the point and doesn’t provide any benefits to the organisation.
What do you think of the methods I have presented above? Is this something you would consider when performing Enterprise 2.0 change management?
