Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 29 December, 2007 under General Ranting |
I know this is extremely off the topic of IT, enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 but I wanna share my happiness with everyone in the cyber world.
Today I went for gown fitting with my fiance and she looked soooooo good in her gown. I am totally stoked and it has finally hit me that wedding preparation is well and truely on its way. Therefore forgive for the lack of post in the next few weeks as I will be busy sorting things out before my holiday ends.
Have a great NYE 2007 and hope that 2008 will be great for everyone!
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 20 December, 2007 under Collaboration |
I just remembered an ad I watch when I was a kid. The ad was from a clothing store and the tagline for the ad is “A world without strangers”. With facebook, there are surely lesser strangers in the world nowadays.. but what about a world without boundaries where geographical boundaries are broken down and with the advancement of video conferencing and IP telephony, global collaboration is so much easier nowadays. Content driven adverts would find people around the world and provide information at the right time at the right place. Maps would be overlaid with information that we need and addresses of your friends and calling a cab might just be a click on your GPS enabled mobile phone.
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 16 December, 2007 under General Ranting |
Tom Davenport wrote an blog post recently titled “Enterprise 2.0: Boo Hoo?” He basically wrote
Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations ? power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today ? won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone.
I must say I disagree with him. Many a times, such problems exist due to poor communication. With regards to trust, as I always believe, trust is earned not given. If communication across the organisation is good and open, alot of these problems would be solved and people can understand each other much better and easier. I am not saying that enterprise 2.0 would solved all the problems that Tom had listed but it will surely reduce it by a fair amount.
Considering all the benefits that enterprise 2.0 software can achieve, it would be more beneficial than harm to implement it. Design and requirements is paramount to the success of enterprise 2.0.
Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 10 December, 2007 under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
I have been discussing alot about how organisations can use enterprise 2.0 within the organisation. But enterprise 2.0 / web2.0 can be used to connect with your customers/clients, reach out to new markets and to some extent marketing as well.
campaignforrealbeauty.com has been highly successful in connecting with customers, delivered important messages and increase brand awareness (in the case for Dove). A browse on their website and you would find that there is a community within it where women participate in giving advises, mentoring and also various activities like quizzes and fashion tips.
What Dove has done was creating a community with an aim to improve the self esteem of women and a social network for women to support each other and provide a platform for women to communicate across the world.
This is not a new idea at all and many other organisations have been trying to do this as well. Robert Hillard wrote an interesting post with regards to using Facebook as a CDI. Organisations can bring marketing to the next level by analysing the customers online and providing customised data for the consumer.
Organisations should try to connect with customers at a deeper level, provide a sense of community and listen to feedback from customers. Constant improving of an organisations products and/or services can provide some level of competitive advantage to an oragnisation.
Posted by Sean Lew on under Web 2.0 |
I was asked a question by a non tech savvy friend: “is facebook a passing fad?”
Personally, I do not think that online social networking is a passing fad. What I am sure about is that some of the inane applications on facebook will be a passing fad. Applications like “X me” and “Send a drink” are absolutely non-beneficial to the community. X me is an application where you can perform a selected action on your friends like “wave”, “kiss”, “slap”, “lick” and so on. Send a drink is a application where you can send drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) to your friends.Seriously, I would love to catch up with my friends online and have a chat and share photos but if I want to wave to them or buy them a drink, I rather do it in person.
I believe Facebook is evolving. Soon applications would surface where people can conduct some form of transaction online. For example, network gaming between friends, buying wishlist items when your friends birthday is coming up, understanding the individual consumer via the data posted on Facebook and recommending items to buy and displaying information from other sites. Technically and fundamentally, the idea of facebook is very powerful. With the wide variety of applications, anything can happen and at the same time you are interacting with friends.
However, everyone wants to be quiet and alone once in a while and especially when you are working. You have tasks to complete and deadlines to adhere to. You have no time to check out what is the latest “Hi, how is it going” message sent from a friend 3000 miles away or a colleague who is 2 cubicles away. Its not urgent and you can reply that at a later stage.
What we need at work is information when we request for it, real time collaboration between staff members across various office locations and any sort of assistance that can make our work more efficient and more effective.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 6 December, 2007 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
Andrew McAfee wrote an interesting article asking people about the viability on using social networking software as the foundation of Intranets. He has asked “what are the good reasons for continuing to invest in and forge ahead with 1.0 Intranets?
I found his post extremely interesting and I must say it is obviously possible due to the fact that Facebook allows customised applications to running on its site and is very scalable. However, the first thought that came to my mind is Facebook is a SOCIAL NETWORKING software whereas an intranet is a “mini” internet for the organisation. So my argument is can facebook be the launch pad and foundation to the internet? Maybe… Some Facebook fanatics would do it, but I surely won’t.
Intranet is a place where people log on, search for information and conduct some form of transaction. My idea of a good intranet is a series of Mashups just like Google personalised homepage where you can access the applications that you want , a good search engine, provide news and feeds on on issues that matters to your job scope. So if Facebook is to be the intranet it would have to be setup similarly to Google personalised homepage and some attributes of social networking. Social networking will be good for an organisation but as the intranet, I think this idea is being brought too far out.
However, in large companies, Intranet is pretty much a host of different sites, applications and design. To consolidate all these information together would be mammoth task and the value in doing that might not be very high.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 5 December, 2007 under General Ranting |
Recently I have posted a post regarding the FirstPartner’s Enterprise 2.0 web. If you have gone to the link you would have seen a few other maps. The interesting thing, after browsing through some of the maps, there are so many applications, ideas and possibilities out there to achieve Enterprise 2.0 or apply Web 2.0 applications.
I have realised that alot of organisations have engaged vendors telling them this technology is good and that system can help the client achieve whatever they want. However at this stage, no detailed business analysis has been conducted but a vendor has been signed off to design and implement a multi-million dollar project. At this stage, the client doesn’t even know exactly what they need, what they want and what is nice to have.
Would you ever go off to a shopping centre to buy “mystery box of goodies” that cost thousands of dollars without know what is inside? I certainly wouldn’t.
However, this is what some organisations are doing – not just with Enterprise 2.0 technologies but with any kind of technology.
Please think, try and analyse before you buy. We are never short of good technologies but we are always short of a good strategy.
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 4 December, 2007 under Enterprise 2.0 |
Wikipedia has agreed to pay some of their “key illustrators” some money for their contribution to their site according to NY Times. Even though the end sum of this pay out might be extremely small and insignificant but from the organisation’s perspective this this an important milestone. Incentive is needed for employees to get on the enterprise 2.0 bandwagon and even Wikipedia is doing it. Employers must give their staff some kind of benefits (tangible or intangible) for contributing and this is one of the important success factors for enterprise 2.0.
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 1 December, 2007 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
Following up on my previous post regarding how Enterprise 2.0 can deliver value to an organisation.
Competitive advantage from better interactions by Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika (Mckinsey Quarterly 2006, 2) has provided very important insight to this question and might have possibly answered a large part of the question. Please try to get your hands on it.
The most interesting point the authors have made is “The old strategies for efficiency improvements don’t apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve tacit interactions; instead, company must boost these workers’ productivity by making them more effective at what they do. As a result, the company will build talent-based competitive advantages that are difficult for rivals to replicate.”
I absolutely agree with the authors on this point and by using enterprise 2.0 technologies, it would allow employees to collaborate and work more effectively. Thus gaining competitive advantage. Everyone knows the importance of gaining competitive advantage and organisations can transform their business all they want but gaining competitive advantage through technology is an expensive and frustrating experience. Unless your organisation is like Google who can constantly innovate, build and deploy innovative solutions for your workforce and customers, otherwise it would be very difficult to gain much competitive advantage.
Many would also have come across the benefits of knowledge management systems (KMS) and how it can benefit an organisation. However, KMS can be hard to build, time consuming and might be very expensive as well. Enterprise 2.0 can deliver the benefits of the KMS, provide collaboration opportunities, can be deployed using the numerous open source applications in the market, integrate publicly available information with organisation specific information and provide employees with an excellent background information to make the most informed decision. The more informed the decision is the likelihood its a better decision and this will allow organisations to gain “baby steps” towards competitive advantage.
I believe this is the spot in which organisations would buy into the idea of Enterprise 2.0 and be willing to spend money on it. Knowledge is power and enterprise 2.0 technologies is just the tool to deliver the benefit. With internet all competitors are on the same level playing ground, the only way to beat competitors is to constantly innovate new products and services, listen to what consumers have to say, feed it back to your organisation and update and upgrade your offerings. Speed is key and enterprise 2.0 delivers it – real-time.
