Google-hoo

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 13 June, 2008 under General Ranting |
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Google and Yahoo just signed a search ad agreement deal! Its the end of Micro-hoo!

Collaboration is important because…

Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 11 June, 2008 under Collaboration |
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“The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.”
Malcolm Gladwell

If you apply the same rule to a group of people then understandably, collaboration technologies would allow them to easily gather their ideas together and work together as an efficient source of insight.

Twitter and the organisation

Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 10 June, 2008 under General Ranting, social media, software, Web 2.0 |
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I wrote an email today at work – no surprises here. Its a 100+ word email that really needed 15 words to get the main message across.

The next thing I did once I completed this was to check out my new twits and everything I read was less than 160 characters but told me everything I needed to know. From new blog posts to dinner pictures from complaining about work to constructive discussions about work – everything was recorded in less than 160 characters. What a beauty.

That set me thinking is there a place for Twitter type software within the organisation? I would say yes absolutely. I think there are so many people who write long emails and lose the whole context of the email within those words. (I am guilty too!). However, with only 160 characters, you get the main message across effectively and the reader saves alot of time reading the formalities and explanation. So I thought Twitter has a place in the organisation!

Few hours later, I was sitting with a colleague discussing something and my twitter bell went off and my client was interested to know what it was. I explained to him what twitter was. He (Gen-Y) then thought it was really cool and I asked if he would use it in the office? His reply was – “Aren’t there enough work coming in from emails? Now you want Twitter? You must be crazy”

So do you think there is a place for Twitter within the organisation?

How organisations would look like in 5 to 10 years

Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 7 June, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, social media |
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IBM recently conducted interviews with 1,130 business and public sector leaders worldwide in 45 countries and the end result was the IBM Global CEO Study. Assuming that IBM has conducted this research with the same level of academic rigor as universities, this study would be a world changing piece of finding.

The main outcome of this research is as following:

1) Hungry for change: The Enterprise of the Future is capable of changing quickly and successfully. Instead of merely responding to trends, it shapes and leads them. Market and industry shifts are a chance to move ahead of the competitions

2) Innovate Beyond Customer Imagination: The Enterprise of the Future surpasses the expectations of increasingly demanding customers. Deep collaborative relationships allow it to surprise customers with innovations that make both its customers and its own business more successful.

3) Globally Integrated: The Enterprise of the Future is integrating to take advantage of today’s global economy. Its business is strategically designed to access the best capabilities, knowledge and assets from wherever they reside in the world and apply them wherever required in the world.

4) Disruptive by Nature: The Enterprise of the Future radically challenges its business model, disrupting the basis of competition. It shifts the value proposition, overturns traditional delivery approaches and, as soon as opportunities arise, reinvents itself and its entire industry.

5) Genuine, Not Just Generous: The Enterprise of the Future goes beyond philanthropy and compliance and reflects genuine concern for society in all actions and decisions

Enterprise 2.0 concepts fits right in the middle of the results of this report. Disruptive by Nature, Globally Integrated and Innovate Beyond Customer Imagination is the outcome of extensive collaboration, communication, sharing and collective intelligence executed internally and externally of the organisation.

Clearly this is a idealistic outcome of collaboration and enterprise social networking. To get to this point, there is alot to be changed.

1) Perception of organisation within organisations.
2) Flattening of organisation hierarchy
3) Increase organisational transparency
4) Release of control from senior management
5) Adoption of collaborative and social networking tools
6) Move away from emails to collaborative tools
7) Trusting a stranger over the internet
8 ) and many many more…

Personally, I do not think this will happen too quickly as such changes involves the entire organisation and many organisations have their own political walls and wars to get through before such ideas can even be approved to be implemented. However, I can say that things are looking good. =)

Reputation systems & bad behaviour

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 6 June, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, social media |
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This is an extension from my previous post

One thing that many enterprise 2.0 software is missing is reputation systems. Let me start by giving you a definition of reputation systems from WikiPedia.

A reputation system is a type of collaborative filtering algorithm which attempts to determine ratings for a collection of entities, given a collection of opinions that those entities hold about each other. This is similar to a recommendation system, but with the purpose of entities recommending each other, rather than some external set of entities (such as books, movies, or music).

Reputation systems are often useful in large online communities in which users may frequently have the opportunity to interact with users with whom they have no prior experience or in communities where user generated content is posted like YouTube or Flickr. In such a situation, it is often helpful to base the decision whether or not to interact with that user on the prior experiences of other users.

Reputation systems may also be coupled with an incentive system to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. For instance, users with high reputation may be granted special privileges, whereas users with low or unestablished reputation may have limited privileges.

From my previous post on political wars and Enterprise 2.0, can reputation systems prevent/reduce such acts of stupidity from happening?

Wikipedia said “Reputation systems may also be coupled with an incentive system to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.” Sounds like if a reputation system is fully extended within an organisation, bad behaviour can be punishable by a “smack on the hand”. I would think that this might be able to prevent some of the abuse on Enterprise 2.0 tools.

What do you think?

Political Wars and Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Sean Lew on under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, social media, Wiki |
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I have recently experienced collaboration technologies within a politically intense situation within a large organisation (good thing I was only there for a day). I must say, whatever benefits that Enterprise 2.0 promises was threw out of the window and the Wikis and comments became a war ground. The moderators could not do anything productive as many were afraid to take sides or have already taken a side. It was a power struggle, childish fight and just absolutely retarded.

After this experience, I had been thinking hard about how can Enterprise 2.0 succeed in such an environment? Lets just put it this way – Enterprise 2.0 (social networks, collaboration, communication…) is a tool and its controlled by humans. Just like paracetamol, while it can help you reduce your headache and make you feel better, abuse of paracetamol can lead to death. My question is how can we prevent this from happening?

Guidelines can help.
Moderators can help.

What else?

Please listen to your employees

Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 4 June, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
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Andrew McAfee met Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Andrew asked the following question (please read Andrew’s post for full coverage)

“Eric, like many people here I teach at a business school, and I’ve always been disappointed with the results whenever I use Google as a case study. My executive education students always say that there’s nothing for them to learn from your company because it’s just is just too different from theirs— you’re very young, you’re in this strange online industry, and you’re full of people with 145 IQs.

I’ve been trying to push back against these arguments in the classroom, but as I listen to you here tonight I’m starting to think that my students might be right! As you’ve described it, Google seems to be a completely unique organization. So what can other companies and managers really learn from you?”

Eric’s response was response was something like this:

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

Enterprise 2.0 can help senior management listen to their employees. I believe that a group of 10 senior management eyes can’t see as much as all the employees within a large organisation. All employees should contribute for the better of the organisation and assist senior management in making the right decisions. Senior management should not look at this is losing their powers. Instead, Enterprise 2.0 would make their life easier. Everyone contributes and with that information, senior management then makes the final decision. Senior management’s job is to decide on the future of the organisation based on their extensive education, experience and good business acumen. They can use enterprise 2.0 to collect feedback and deliver the best results for the company.

We can learn from one of the success factors of Google which is to LISTEN.

The Mobile Enterprise

Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 3 June, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, General Ranting, IT strategy |
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With globalisation of companies and more employees traveling around more often, Enterprise 2.0 and its social collaborative applications surely help keep everyone connect and up-to-date with latest news, team members, documents and almost everything that matters (corporate applications) and thats online. All that is required is a laptop and internet connection. Nothing quite wrong with this in some industries like consulting or IT where computing power is important (alot of generalisation here!).

However, for some sales people in various industries, they use alot of hand held devices like Palm or BlackBerry and do need to access corporate applications to get their daily work done faster, more accurate and more responsive to growing customer demands. Gone where days where an insurance agent can say, “let me work out the sums and get back to you in three days”. Customers want in now and want it right.

We are living in a world where we want information on demand. Corporate applications must be able to deliver all the desktop applications to your little phone and conduct transactions securely, quickly and accurately. I do foresee the future of enterprise 2.0 to move towards mobile computing. Maybe in future, there might be a new term called social mobile computing? Or should it be called Mobile social computing??

Is critical mass critical for Enterprise 2.0?

Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 1 June, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Ruby On Rails, social media, software, Wiki |
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I have been thinking about this question for a long time and I have somewhat came out with an answer.

Critical mass is important for enterprise 2.0 as it can help pool in ideas/information from around the company (across departments, locations and cross hierarchy). Ultimately, collaboration techniques and social media is probably the best way to connect everyone up and provide a platform for employees to input information that is related to them. So to answer the question if critical mass is important for the success of Enterprise 2.0, let me give you a small scenario. A company of roughly 20 employees sitting in the same office. Simple enough.

Let’s assume if the company has something like Jive’s Clearspace. Its a Enterprise collaboration software and social media platform. It features some of the most exciting tools organisations are looking for like rich profiles, document management, Wikis, discussions and project management. I feel that Clearspace is a good tool to use to analyse this question that I am discussing here.

Lets look at each of the feature with regards to the short scenario above.

1) If everyone is sitting in the same office, rich profiles would not really matter as everyone would know everyone and they would probably have small talks and catchups over coffee or something like that. Human interaction is normally preferred over internet communication – at least its more personal. Online discussions is an additional channel for the 20 employees to discuss work. How that would work out would really depend on the culture and environment of the company.

2) Document management, project management tools and wikis – these tools are important for any organisation. It helps you locate, manage and store information.

From the above, it seems apparent to me that a software like ClearSpace would help a small organisation to manage their operations better through a single collaborative platform. However, the social aspects of enterprise 2.0 would probably not work so well due to the close proximity of the employees.

I can then conclude saying this. A single collaborative software would be helpful whether the company is big or small , but social media/networking would require critical mass to achieve its benefits. (edited Monday morning) Critical mass is important no matter how you look at it. Everyone should be using it or contributing to it for Enterprise2.0 to be successful. If no one uses the collaborative software, it becomes just a pile of code doing nothing. If people do not contribute to the Wiki or upload files to the document manager, it becomes useless. The more people who are actively using it, the more successful Enterprise 2.0 would be for the organisation.

Please leave your comments if you have any. I would love to discuss more about this.