I believe that Enterprise 2.0 can be a strategic system to a certain extent. However this is not purely based on the IT side of enterprise 2.0 only. As I have described here and here, there is much more to E2.0 than just the tech side of things. After all, systems that deal with E2.0 is generally not very complicated.
If an organisation can make all their employees working as one and delivering the information required at the right time with clear transparency across the organisation, decisions made would be of much higher quality. However, releasing information might be seen as a power loss / threat to the senior management. After all, information is power. Personally, I do think that a person’s capability is not based on how much information the person holds but more about how the person makes full use of the information on hand.
With a strong flow of information across the organisation, people can better decide on their course of action that would fit into the larger picture of things and as this builds up, the organisation would be constantly making better decisions thus achieving competitive advantage. There would be alot of cultural change in this space that is required but I do believe it is achievable especially if the company is predominantly younger people.
Personally, I feel that even though there is not much complicated, expensive work flows behind enterprise 2.0 the cultural change part will be quite challenging. One way to slow ease employees into the whole E2.0 idea is to slowly releasing it to them and collect feedback. By using Agile development, you can continuously adapt to the requirements and expectations of the users. This way would also allow users to slowly get used to the E2.0 idea instead of doing a big bang go live and everyone would be taken by surprise and end up feeling they were being thrown into the deep end. In any case if there is a cultural conflict, technologist should devise a way to overcome that issue.
Change management in this way can be a cheaper option as it is done is a slow and iterative and incremental manner.
One thing that struck me recently was “Why would businesses implement Enterprise 2.0?” From the business perspective, spending money on a system should return one of the following:
1) Make more money 2) Save money 3) Increase efficiency (streamlining business process, reduce redundancy, capture knowledge…)
Depending on what the enterprise 2.0 project is about, it must satisfy some or all of the above, otherwise I do not see value in the project. For example, FaceBook (by itself) within a company is not quite useful. It basically just links people up so that employees have one more communication tool (or bitching channel). However, if Facebook is integrated with, assuming, wiki or KM, then it would potentially capture knowledge and increase efficiency. All these really depends on what the proposed project is all about.
No matter what we as technologist do, we must satisfy the basic premise of business – improve the bottom line (directly or indirectly).
I have recently started learning and programming a project of mine in Ruby On Rails. If you think programming is a boring thing check out the youtube video below… and funny enough it actually describes ruby quite well.
I happen to chance upon a website that gives free domain names. Well this is not new for sure. However the idea behind this is absolutely brilliant.
Have you heard of this country called Tokelau? I surely haven’t until a few moment ago. As many would know, every country has it own country domain name extension like .au, .uk and so on and Tokelau has a .tk extension and since its such a small country with a relatively low GDP, the government of Tokelau appointed a company to be the registration entity and is giving away free domain names to anyone so that the world would know about Tokelau. What an efficient way of bringing such a small country of about 1500 residents to the world map. This project has also contributed to 10% of the country’s GDP.
Just a wandering thought I had today, the internet would be a much better place if I had one ID, one login for everything I want to do. Can OpenID do this? I doubt so. Also read this.
In the ideal world, I will have one login with access to all services and if I do not want to be tracked where I am going and what I am doing, I will just surf as an anonymous entity. Well easier said than done. It will not happen anytime soon. The logistics would be absolutely crazy.
However, this is absolutely possible within an organisation however, this is not what I am seeing at the moment. We have quite a distance to cover to get there.
I have heard about this term too many times and know what its about on the surface. On Friday, I had a conversation with Michael and he was explaining to me how social graph and resource management can be implemented hand in hand.
After reading Dion Hinchcliffe post on – The Social Graph: Issues and Strategies in 2008, I am convinced the social graph is a great tool to improve the efficiency of an IT consulting firm. Let me explain.
IT consulting firms relies greatly on good resource management – delivering the correct resource to the right place at the right time. Traditionally, this is done by the senior management and also the HR team where they control staff movement across projects and geographical locations. This is hard work as to the HR team, staff members is just another name, another resume, another head they can stick into a project to earn money. Feedback is seldom received from staff members until the news is broken to them.
For resource management to work well, a collaborative effort must be used. Employee / project managers should actively plan their schedule ahead, look for projects that interest them, use the social graph to get in contact with the relevant project managers or use it to get in contact with other resources on the team to find out more. With this approach, there will be less work for the HR team, less headache for the management team and achieve greater efficiency across the organisation.
I am not saying that the social graph is the answer to great resource management, but I am saying its one of the required tools to create a great resource management process. It helps to link people up and allow people connect to each other and allowing them to search for a project that they are interested in and capable of doing. A excellent resource management tool is a strategic tool and not just a back end process.
G'day, Sean here. I am a technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and I am working on Web/Enterprise 2.0, information sharing, motivation and benefits.
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding emerging technologies in the online space, IT strategies and business strategies. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer's and/or University of Melbourne's positions, strategies or opinions. I have not been compensated in any way for the content.
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