The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 30 March, 2008 under Collaboration |
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This is a great video on the power of organising without organisations. Recommended by Mike

View video here

The old dinosaurs

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 28 March, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, General Ranting |
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There has been a joke that between my colleague and myself. Across the many clients that we meet in our professional career, there are some people who are in the senior management of companies but do not even understand the basics of IT (I am sure they are really good at what they are doing though). We call them “the old dinosaurs”.

Let me define what “old dinosaurs” mean. Its a general term to refer those that do not know much about technology (even though many of them work in a technology related industry) AND are not willing / adaptive to technology changes. Many of them still rely on multi-megabytes spreadsheets that only they understand themselves and refuse to use any systems that were not developed in their times.

However, when we start to tell them about dollars and cents and how Enterprise 2.0 can help them make more $$. They generally open up and like to hear more about the approach, strategy and technology. Sometimes, they buy in to such changes but still do not use them extensively. They still prefer to go back to their good’o spreadsheet – nothing wrong with that, they are just comfortable in their comfort zone. However, I hope I do not become one in future.

The Mckinsey Mind

Posted by Sean Lew on under General Ranting, IT strategy, books |
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I am currently halfway through this book and I must say that this is extremely insightful for people who are in the consulting industry. Even though I am an IT consultant, I feel that this book is target for any kind of consultant. Its about problem solving skills and the method to go about solving an complicated and complex problem. It studies ex-Mckinsey consultants and survey them on the way a Mckinsey consultant operates.

I have gone through advanced academic research and found alot of the ideas present is very similar however with a business twist to it. For example, academic research is really about getting the stats and the information spot on. However, its written in the Mckinsey Mind that ballpark figures can be accepted. Everything makes alot of sense and it really helped me apply my academic research skills to business research and problem solving.

I do recommend this book to anyone who wishes to advance their business problem solving skills at a high level.

Enterprise 2.0 is more of an ideology

Posted by Sean Lew on under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
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  I have just completed setting up Drupal for a large project within my company. We needed a platform for the geographic disparate team to collaborate on. However, there is not much of a budget to do this. I have research this problem in detail and decided that a open source CMS tool might be able to do the job.

After heaps of configuration, downloading plugins and heaps of testing. I finally managed to get a simple collaboration site up and running. With workspace where people can discuss, work on a file, write blog post, post general information and write to each other online.

All these were achieved without hardcore development or anything like that. With the 2 main aims of Enterprise 2.0, Collective intelligence and Collaboration fulfilled, I can safely say that I have achieve a simple E2.0 site without much code crunching and all the implementation took only 1/2 a day.

Update :- Talent management

Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 24 March, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
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I just chanced upon a ComputerWorld Article on Just-in-time talent: How to develop a supply chain of people. Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School wrote in this month’s Harvard Business Review suggested that the best way to hunt for talent is through the supply chain perspective.

A supply chain framework for talent management (adapted from ComputerWorld/HBR)

‘Make’ and ‘buy’ to manage risk.

• Undershoot your estimates of the talent you need to develop.
• Make up the shortfall with outside hiring.

Adapt to the uncertainty in demand for talent.

• Break development programs into shorter units for more flexibility.
• Create an organizationwide talent pool to be allocated as needed.

Improve ROI in development.

• Ask employees to invest their own time in stretch assignments.
• Maintain relationships with former employees who may return someday.

Protect your investment by balancing employee/employer interests.

• Have employees share in advancement decisions.

Adapted from the Harvard Business Review

As much as I think this will be excellent in managing talent and using web2.0 to fill in the gaps within the organisation, somehow I do not like the feeling that organisations are treating employees as part of the supply chain. As an employee, I am a human and, preferably, I would not want to link self worth at the same level with raw materials.

Talent Management

Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 23 March, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
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Just another wondering thought would organisations treat resource/talent just like a supply chain in future – specifically a Just-In-Time supply chain?

Since Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing model has been highly successful in the market place and with enterprise 2.0 ideas, getting to JIT resource management might be possible as resource hunting can be extended to the whole world.

What do you think?

Books that I just bought

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 21 March, 2008 under General Ranting, books |
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Below are some of the books I just bought over the last couple of days from BookDepository – Free shipping worldwide and the books are roughly about half the price of what I pay in Australia after exchange rate conversion!

Sorry I can’t give any reviews on the books at the moment but once I am done, when I am done, I will post something.

1) Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

2) Naked Finance: Business Finance Pure and Simple

3) Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

4) Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

Implicit data and tacit knowledge

Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 17 March, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
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Andrew Mcafee just reminded me about implicit user generated data. After reading his entry, It reminded me on a article I read back in my university days. It was about how we can use implicit data collected by a system and analysing them to understand the tacit interaction within and beyond the system. Its hard to explain in a general idea so let me give you an example.

If something really bad happened in your company and this news was released online. Users would be reading the news and if there are links on your “related news” side bar, you can find out what is the general feel of the organisation but analysing the browsing pattern of your “related news”. i.e. more people clicked on 30 – 60 -90 plan as compared to severance package would mean employees are generally optimistic about the future of the company.

Understanding of implicit data is highly important. As actions speaks louder than words, the amount of time spent on a page would mean how interested is the user feels about the topic on the page. Excellent web design, development and planning must be done to fully experience the power of implicit data.

Web 2.0 can use some areas of implicit data and tacit knowledge sharing to improve its product offering within an organisation.

Software for the organisation

Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 16 March, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Ruby On Rails, Web 2.0, software |
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Lets face it, scope and requirements of a system changes all the time. Between requirements gathering and development or during development and testing or even after go live, the situation changes. Just an example, a couple of colleagues and myself are building a new enterprise tool for the organisation we are working with and even before the proof of concept is completed, there were request for us to increase/change the scope slightly. With so many changes in place, how can the software adapt itself to the ever changing business environment?

With SaaS, SOA, simplified programming languages like Ruby on Rails, Agile development and so on, software has been increasing adaptive to the organisation. It seems that as long as the organisation is willing to spend, developers can almost do anything. I believe the biggest challenge in IT nowadays is not delivering the the software anymore but to manage the change within the organisation and educate people on the new functionality / system.

Its not about what systems you can build now but how fast you can adapt to what you have designed.

Ignorance is bliss

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 14 March, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
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While some senior management believes that ‘ignorance is bliss’ and not letting employees have access to privately held information is seen as something that will result in less ‘trouble’ created by employees and also a way of retaining power within the senior management.

However, being an IT professional and also a knowledge worker, we are not the factory worker at Henry Ford’s factory in the early 1900s where people where told what they have to do each day and following strict instructions, lunch timings and toilet breaks. Many jobs have moved into something much more flexible and encourages employees to think out of the box and raise any concerns if it arises.

So is ‘ignorance is bliss’ better than ‘information is power’?

Personally, I believe its really up to the individual and the person’s attitude towards work and life. Surely, having lesser information and not knowing so much equates to less thinking and brain activity. While more information means more thinking.

To some degree, I believe that this applies to organisations as well.