Synergising People and Technology
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 30 November, 2008 under Collaboration, Web 2.0 |
Be the First to Comment
Check out Honda’s InterNavi (only for Japanese market). Traffic details and other information are collected directly from each user’s GPS unit the information is then aggregated and sent to other users GPS systems.
Check out more details here, here and here.
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 29 November, 2008 under General Ranting |
Be the First to Comment
One of the best advice I have ever received was from my managers is to be nice. These managers did not actually tell me anything but they have shown me something that I will take with me for the rest of my life.
I have managers that are incredibly nice. They are truly concern for one’s well being and they show that they care. They are in the business of making things happen, not in the business to spend time outside of work to spend time, interact and care. Good managers have a strong personal relationship with their subordinates and support them in times of need – during a big presentation, during maternity, during a divorce and anything else in between. Employees think twice about leaving the company when such relationships exist.
IT industry has a bad reputation of high attrition rates and I believe one of the reasons might be due to the fact that many people in IT are not good communicators thus not being able to build that relationship with their colleagues.
What I have been seeing is that managers are the ones taking the big step out to be nice. However, I believe that this is something anyone and everyone should do. Being nice doesn’t mean being a push over. It just means that treating people with respect and integrity even during a conflict. Being nice is generally not something one can “fake it” as the tone and body language says alot.
Have a nice weekend everyone. =)
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 26 November, 2008 under General Ranting, social media |
Be the First to Comment
Its been a while since I last saw a presentation that I was impressed with. Just found one today. Enjoy!
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 23 November, 2008 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
Be the First to Comment
To understand social networking in the enterprise, one would need to know what are the key ingredients for social networking to exist. I will try to explain this using the social capital theory (SCT).
Social capital theory consists of variety of components and personally I believe that most of them can be applied to making a social networking platform successful. The diagram below shows a breakdown of the key ideas in the social capital theory (click to image enlarge).
I would not go into all aspects of this theory but I would want to highlight some aspects of it that might be of interest to social networking practitioners.
1) Generalised Norms refers to a degree of consensus in the social system. It could refer to many different things from a cooperation norm (meaning its normal for people to cooperate and help each other online [read: volunteerism]) or a selfish norm or a trusting norm or a supportive norm. This is really derived from the workplace culture and unknowingly it is brought over to the social networking platform. Note that norms are also derived from the society norms, therefore employees in different countries may have a different view of the norm.
2) Neighbourhood connections refers to the network configuration of the platform. Moving away from SCT, social networking within the enterprise can be split into two main categories 1) access, timing and referrals and 2) density, connectivity and hierarchy. This is strongly related to SCT as this theory is all about providing access to information through the network.
Access – how useful is the information acquired from the network.
Timing – how fast does it take to acquire that piece of information.
Referrals – Connections in the network available to help improve the quality of the information.
Density – how many people are participating
Connectivity – how easy is it to create connections
Hierarchy – Are there roadblocks that prevent connections and sharing?
3) Volunteerism is pretty straightforward. There are three main questions in my head at the moment which is 1) Are people willing to volunteer? 2) What is the quality of the output expected by the volunteers and 3) Do people have time to volunteer? One can argue that if this is about social networking in an organisation, why is there a need to volunteer and help someone which is unlikely to impact on the end of year performance review outcomes? I totally agree, however, the more you volunteer (assuming the outout is good), news travels and it will finally come back to you and make the volunteer look like someone who not only does well in the day to day work but also stepping up and out to help others.
4) Trust is possibly the most important factor in a social network. People are generally more willing to engage in social activity when there is trust. Its a simple logic, why do you share more information about yourself with a close friend than with someone you just met? Sharing opens someone up to vulnerability and it requires some levels of trust and incentive for people to do so.
The above are some of the interesting aspects of SCT that will affect social networking in organisations and it shows some of the key ingredients for a social network to be successful.
Part of this article is adapted from Nahapiet, J. and S. Ghoshal (1998). “Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage.” The Academy of Management Review 23(2): 242-266.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 21 November, 2008 under General Ranting, Innovation, Web 2.0 |
Be the First to Comment
Google search engine has started allowing users to tweak its search engine so that users can get the search results they would like to get. This is highly impressive and it will make searching in a specific domain much more accurate (e.g. Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0). However, I would say one of the pitfalls is that similar words but not related to the topic (Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0) might not return the results users might be looking for. I haven’t tested the new functionality extensively and I am not sure if Google has done something to tackle this potential issue.
Another big thing Google has done is to allow commenting on search results. This is a basic feature of many web 2.0 applications and even though the straight forward benefits of this might not be known now and there could potentially be abuse on such a tool, however, time will tell. Within weeks we could possibly get the initial results on how successful commenting on search results are.
This is very exciting.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 19 November, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Web 2.0 |
Be the First to Comment
In recent times, selling technology solutions can be quite a challenge. Nothing to do with the technology nor the team delivering it. It has something to do with the credit crisis. With the banking sector hit pretty hard, it snowballs to the rest of the industries. You might have read that IT spending is down and employment rate is climbing and the government is cutting interest rates like no tomorrow.
Its difficult times for sure. However, it doesn’t mean NO ONE is spending. As long as there is a dime out in the market, its up for grabs – survivor of the fittest. There are still heaps of opportunities out there. So how can you sell Enterprise 2.0 in such a time?
Enterprise 2.0 has been traditionally sold in various ways – document management focused or collaboration focused, social networking focused and there are many different ways vendors position their product. Many vendors have also used the term Web 2.0 very loosely – sometimes it doesn’t even mean a thing.
1) Try not to use the word Enterprise 2.0. Its a buzz word. Sell the underlying concepts – collaboration, connectivity, knowledge sharing, global teams, cost reduction in travel and phone cost, talent management. These are all key benefits of an Enterprise 2.0 platform.
2) Solve a problem. Many people forget that Enterprise 2.0 is a tool to help organisation achieve some of their goals. It could be in the form of cost savings, higher efficiency or something – Tackle these goals. Tell your clients how you can get them there. If you are unsure of the goals, try to solve an immediate issue, once they can see the benefit, its easier to sell the bigger picture.
3) Enterprise 2.0 platform is strategic. Believe it and sell it.
4) Don’t sell a tool, sell a solution.
If you have anymore tips on selling, please share your thoughts.
Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 17 November, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Innovation |
Be the First to Comment
The key themes in Enterprise 2.0 is social networking and collaboration and the technologies involved in getting this done are Wikis, Social Networking, Blogs, Search, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Social Bookmarking, Mashups, Portals, Social Voting/Ranking, Web Services, Web/Videoconferencing, Bulletin Boards/Discussion Forums, Web Content Management, Workflow/BPM, Instant Messaging, Social Network Analysis, Taxonomy and Podcasting. If you look at the list, its actually alot of stuff we are dealing with. However, most of it can be broken down to some levels of social networking and collaboration.
Many people do not think that Enterprise 2.0 is the next Knowledge Management buzzword and I am one of them. Enterprise 2.0 does much more than that. However, what enterprise 2.0 does WILL change the way people look at knowledge management in future. Let me explain why.
How Knowledge is Created?
For knowledge to be created, some ingredients must be involved. For the purposes of this discussion, I will limit this to knowledge creation of one specific topic only (i.e. Java programming). First, an individual needs to have some base knowledge and through combination of new findings and materials, new knowledge is created. Combination in this case does not necessary need to come in the form of individual exploration but can be in the form of exchanging ideas and knowledge between friends, colleagues and almost anything under the sun. For an organisation, to gain new knowledge, they can either 1) invest in their employees (through the above) and 2) Hire new people with new experiences.
In this part, social networking enables unprecedented power to explore a network that allows the exchange of ideas which can lead to new knowledge creation. However, this does not mean that when you find the right person, that person would actually be willing to help.
Different types of knowledge
There are four main types of knowledge in an organisation 1) Individual explicit knowledge, 2) Individual tacit knowledge, 3) Enterprise explicit knowledge and 4) Enterprise tacit knowledge. I would assume that whoever that is reading this understands the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, if not read this or this. So what I am proposing here is that each employee knows something and some part of the organisation and its practices and processes. Collectively, through some storage system (i.e. Knowledge management systems), the organisation stores this information and make it searchable. We must understand that unless that information is stored and made searchable, the information that each individual have within the organisation is only valid for as long as the employee is valid. Also, the information that is stored would be predominately explicit knowledge and enterprise tacit knowledge would be pretty much the work habits, culture and business processes.
In this part, Enterprise 2.0 provides the collaborative platform of consolidating all the information from around the company. The collective intelligence of (hopefully but not realistic) everything that is known by all employees in the organisation would be stored on the collaborative platform and everything will be searchable.
From the above, you can see that Enterprise 2.0 changes the way an organisation collects new knowledge and how it stores the knowledge and therefore changing the way organisations would approach Knowledge Management in future.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 12 November, 2008 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Wiki, social media, software |
6 Comments to Read
2008 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software has been released recently and what is really interesting is that even though there are 38 vendors being reviewed only 5 are not in the niche category namely Atlassian, IBM, Jive, Microsoft and Socialtext.
I must say that having used all 5 products before and each of them is really fantastic. Each has its own pros and cons and depending on your requirements different software should be chosen. I am glad to see that there is a good competition in this space and that makes my life as a consultant a tad easier having the ability to pick and choose the best product for the situation.
What is really interesting is that there is no one in the category of “Leaders”. Atlassian, Jive and Socialtext barely made it into the “visionaries” quadrant (they are all sitting on the line of the quadrant). All three products are really quite revolutionary. I demo-ed Jive to a class previously and a student responded saying, “its just a web page but its so smart” and a colleague said that the Atlassian Wiki we have within BearingPoint made his life so much better.
Next, IBM / Microsoft are in the “Challengers” quadrant with a much higher ability to execute but lack in vision. I personally think that IBM and Microsoft are not “visionary” because the general business environment is not quite ready for such software as of now. Many business people still do not quite understand what is Web 2.0, collaboration, social media and buzz words like that. I believe they are taking a wait and see strategy to this area of software development.
I would love to see next year’s results and hope to see some of the players rise up to the visionary quadrant!
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 8 November, 2008 under General Ranting, IT strategy |
Be the First to Comment
Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google had a chat with James Manyika a director from McKinsey about the future of technology, business in the changing world, competition, innovation, making money in the online world and management.
There are many interesting insights he provided on the above topics and its worth to have a watch to find out what the CEO of Google is thinking.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 7 November, 2008 under General Ranting |
Be the First to Comment
Obama’s team has launched a new website change.gov which would document and inform people on the agenda items and ask people for their feedback and ideas on how to run the country (or at least some aspects of it). It has a blog with videos and you could even apply for a job.
The transparency of his team and campaign is just absolutely astonishing. He is open with his ideas and even more open to idea contribution from people in general. If what he is doing is well harnessed then he would be able to achieve the wisdom of crowds. Its probably the first time idea collaboration for political reasons at a large scale.
He is surely a very technological forward president and he has been doing all the right things to tap into this source of information, knowledge and people power. It would be interesting to see what will happen and change once he steps into office in Jan.
G'day, Sean here. I am a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and my proposed thesis title is "Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 and its Value in Organizations"
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, and IT strategies for organizations with the aim of increasing efficiency, increasing profits and reducing costs. 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.
Blue Sky Thinking by Sean Lew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
Based on a work at www.bluethots.com.
