Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 28 October, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, social media |
A Chinese saying goes this way (English translation): Three cobblers with their wits combined. Equal Zhuge Liang the master mind.
Zhuge Liang (181–234) was Chancellor of Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period of China. He is often recognised as the greatest and most accomplished strategist of his era.
Teamwork at its best can rival any top minds in the world. The wisdom of crowds clearly showed how the “crowd” can accomplish many tasks that individuals generally cannot achieve by themselves. However, having a team requires some kind of mechanism that can facilitate communication and aggregation. Traditional teams who works in the same location had face time, pantry chats, lunch breaks and all the social events that helps bond them closer allowing smooth communication and bonding to happen.
Enterprise 2.0 aims to do this via an online channel. Personally, I feel that for Enterprise 2.0 to work in organisations, there must be some levels of social events that goes on the platform. Why do I say this?
1) Enterprise 2.0 aims to allow teams (and in this case, global teams) to collaborate, share and communicate work related stuff online. For it to happen there must be some levels of understanding between both parties. Thinking about this, I actually have a “friendship” with most of the members of the global team I work with. Therefore, a social aspect of the tool is very important.
2) It makes the platform more friendly too. This makes it more approachable and usable.
3) Cost would generally not allow people from around the globe to come together to meet and socialise. As the younger employees are very comfortable with online communication providing them with a social side of things can and may help improve the team bonding and effectiveness of the team itself.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 22 October, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, software |
I was asked an extremely good question yesterday on the barriers of entry for large organisations for Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
1) Large companies (assuming global organisations too) generally have alot of different cultures to deal with due to globalized operations. Enterprise 2.0 is more about the people than the technology, dealing with many different cultures can be a challenge.
2) Software are not really mature yet. There is still no software out there that can seamlessly integrate structured and un-structured data. All companies have both types of data and its not good enough if there is no integration between them.
3) Customisation of Enterprise 2.0 software is low (possibly expensive as well). We all know that technology should be integrated into the business environment and culture and not the other way around. Currently, there is no cost effective way to customise Enterprise 2.0 software (which doesn’t have a clear ROI or TCO). With that, the willingness to pay would be lower as compared to a SAP system.
4) Change management practices for enterprise 2.0 is still not well understood. Even though change management in general is a well established field in the IT industry, Enteprise 2.0 change management requires something even bigger as it changes the underlying work culture and to some extent the business process. Such forms of changes is tricky and must be well understood before engaging in it.
5) Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is still very unclear on a large scale basis. ROI is unclear too. This makes is hard for the CFO who is traditionally money minded, to approve an investment with no clear returns.
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 5 October, 2008 under General Ranting |
I am gone for 3 weeks for a holiday and I doubt there will be any updates during this time. Good luck with everything you’re doing!
Cheerio,
Seanie
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 3 October, 2008 under IT strategy, Innovation |
I have been thinking about this topic recently. Innovation is required all the time in this highly dynamic market. After all, the market recently lost a trillion dollars in a matter of minutes. So what’s really important to organisations in down times? Well, i think everyone would have a different argument on this but let me give you mine.
Innovation is important in any period and to make innovation work, the culture of the organisation must embrace innovation. To get to this point a varying degree of investment has to be made make this happen. So in order for the board to go hard on innovation would require a cost benefit analysis. However, the returns on innovation cannot be calculated. You do not know what ideas people might have nor the dollar amount you will receive from this investment. So an investment in innovation is going to be gamble from the dollars and cents perspective because you do not know if 1) employees will contribute, 2) How good are the contributions.
In an event of a down turn, money is the most important and there is a limited supply of it. So if there is a decrease supply of money, would anyone invest on innovation unless they are sure that this investment would be a good one? I guess there will be but its gonna be lesser than when the economy is doing well.
Having said all these, if an individual employee can innovate and contribute without all these initiatives from the organisation and deliver savings, higher revenue or profits for the organisation, it will reflect well no matter if in good or bad times. Employees are on the ground and they can see certain parts of the business much clearer than the C-level folks. They should have a voice in some of the decision making within the organisation. After all, the wisdom of crowds is a powerful tool.
