On Thursday, a few enterprise / web 2.0 enthusiasts / experts spoke at the Inspecht HR Futures Conference in Melbourne. It was a fantastic day with great discussions that went on from using Enterprise 2.0 to learn, professional development, usage of it in HR, general web 2.0 usage and Enterprise 2.0 for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
I had the luxury to meet some extremely smart people from around Australia and I had a great time discussing about Enterprise 2.0 in general. Kudos to Trib, WonderWebby, AnneBB, Joris and Matt from Atlassian. Thanks for the great presentations and wonderful discussions. (If you are wondering why some of the names are more like nicks, its because these are their twitterIDs)
I spoke about how BearingPoint used Wikis internally and externally, our approach and our results. I know some people are waiting for my presentation to be put online. Yes its coming. BearingPoint is putting it up on our corporate blog – NewThinking. Until then, hang in there. Below are slides from Trib and WonderWebby
Interesting enough the sub prime crisis which lead to the economic crisis we are experiencing now is somewhat an act of the wisdom of crowds. Issac Garcia pointed it our correctly over here. If this is the case, how can we prevent from such crap happening again? Rules and incentives as pointed out by Barry Schwartz can’t fix the problem. We need strong virtues and morals. However, if its that easy to get there, we won’t have that many wars going around in the world for many centuries. Web 2.0 is changing the mindset of people but can we get to utopia? I hope we can and I hope I can live to see such a day.
HBR List 2009 (See the Feb 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review for full details) is really interesting. HBR list is an annual list of breakthrough ideas for the year and ideas that would impact businesses. Out of the 20 ideas presented there were two ideas that is linked closely to social networks (How social networks network best; Harnessing social pressure) and another on semantic web (What you need to know about semantic web). Interesting enough, there were only 2 articles on the credit crisis. If you think Web 2.0 is small, think again.
I believe that most business leaders are really scratching their heads when it comes to social networking, collaboration, sharing, instant messengers, collective intelligence, wisdom of crowds and so on. On top of all these terms there are examples like facebook, digg, youtube, flickr and thousands of other examples to understand. My goodness, even when I have studied this for two years now, sometimes I still feel like its a word game and everyone has their own take on different terms.
Rising above the confusion of terms, look at it from the fundamentals – connecting people together will lead to communication, sharing and supporting each other – this what communities have done since early human existence. With all these communication and sharing done of the web, the information is stored and reusable. Web 2.0 at an extremely high level is that simple.
So to convert it to business sense at a high level as well would mean that if you can connect the most people together and get them communicate and share effectively that would mean the platform is successful. If search and reusing of information is easy for users then collective intelligence and knowledge sharing has been achieved.
Get into this really really cool phenomena. You’ll enjoy it.
Last week, I had a really interesting and enjoyable chat with an ex-colleague of mine about Enterprise 2.0 and one of the comments he made that really struck me was that Web 2.0 is an attitude. Well, we all know that. The changing face of Gen Y and the advent of facebook and youtube has changed it all. However, he went on to give an example of web 2.0 as an attitude.
There are “Pay what you want” restaurants around town and I have personally been to one. The one listed on the link believes that customers are paying 20% above the original price and the one that I have been to in Singapore gives all its proceeds to a Indian dance school just next door and the dance school is HUGE!
So the concept is simple. You and your mates grab lunch/dinner/food at the restaurant and depending on what you feel like, you pay what you want. In Singapore, where food is very cheap and an average decent dinner in a similar type restaurant would set you back approx $15, however, because I did not know how much to give and because its for charity as well, I gave $40. They have clearly made a profit from this and I have helped the kids next door learning how to dance for free.
The owners of the restaurant clearly practices some traits of web 2.0 specifically in the trust area. Its business and you allow people to give what they want. They run a risk of people paying too little. If a family of four paid 10 cents for the dinner, they would have alot of catching up just to break even. This is pure trust that people will pay what they feel.
I totally agree that Web 2.0 is an attitude but it doesn’t mean that we need technology to bring this idea forward. Well, this is alittle ironic coz Web 2.0 is about the new generation of the web and its all about technology but you get what I mean – I do not have a name for this changing attitude. This is a changing attitude in the world and we must understand how this will impact all aspects of life and business.
I have been preaching the goodness of Enterprise 2.0 for a while. However, we must understand that nothing is perfect in this world and hardly anything is. There is always a downside to any great thing. I would like to explore more in this space.
First of all, let me recap some of the key fundamentals of Enterprise 2.0 – social networking with friends, colleagues and business partners, collaboration on job specific tasks (possibly on the same platform), sharing and trusting people in the network. So what are the potential problems people might face?
1) As social networking grows, it gets integrated into someone’s life – friends, family, colleagues and business partners are networking on the same platform and communicating constantly. As technology moves forward, we get status updates, notifications, emails and updates from mobile phones. Such advancement in technology would mean that there is a very blurred line between work, family and social life. The problem of work life balance comes into play. Without control, for example, someone might be responding to emails on their honeymoon because a server crash and he saw a SOS on the wiki. We can’t be working all the time. We need to know when to stop. (I’m still learning!)
2) Collaboration would mean that teams come together and try to get something done. However, some teams can never decide on the proper cause of action or agree on certain things. This can pose as a problem as collaboration might increase the chances of such things happening (this is from my 3rd party observation of a project)
3) Sharing – free rider problem will always be a problem. “Free riders” are those who consume more than their fair share of a resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production. However, I feel that the younger generation is quite ethical in this space. They will normally reference the work done by others. Technology has also played a part in this. For example, if you copy/embed a youtube video, the creator / uploader of the video will always be referenced on the youtube site.
4) Trust – when one join a social community and put trust in their network, its like opening the front door of your house to the people in the neighbourhood. One can choose not to open the bedroom door or the secret cabinet in the basement but the front door is still open. Someone can always come in to attack. (Hopefully this is a good analogy)
This talk by Barry Schwartz is excellent! I absolutely enjoyed this.
Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.
I have just read Kaplan and Norton’s – The Execution Premium. This book is an extension of their previous books Balanced Scorecard and Strategy maps. This book provides a great overview of how to manage the organisational management life cycle from strategy to operations. It is broken down into six key steps as shown below.
By looking at the diagram, enterprise 2.0 fits in two ways.
1) Use the execution premium to manage an Enterprise 2.0 project / initiative. This is pretty straight forward. Follow the steps outlined in the book.
2) Within your organisational strategy and operations, you can use it to identify your pain points and figure out how Enterprise 2.0 could help.
I really recommend everyone to read this book. However, before you start, you should have a good understanding of balanced scorecard and strategy maps.
Last night after gym, I was watching Bloomberg and it was depressing – economy was down yet again, GDP fell, exports fell and after the third sentence said by the newscaster, my brain shut down. In fact, it was just bad news all the way. It got me thinking – How can we (the people of the world) save the world? Can the wisdom of crowds pitch in to do something? Can we consolidate the best ideas in one place?
I am sure the answer to all of the above is YES. But how can we deliver such a capability? Anyone interested in exploring more on this idea?
Alot of us have a certain way of how sharing and collaboration works – the way Wikipedia, facebook and Linux works. However, there are really alot more to such kinds of sharing and collaboration. If you look the nature of a firm, a firm is a social network and teams share and collaborate. The only difference now is that we are moving online! So there is a place for Web 2.0 in organisations – its a matter of identifying it.
Social networking and collaboration exist since the stone age. Web 2.0 is just moving into the technological age. If we hope that a Wikipedia or Linux initiative would exist within an organisation, well all the best. It might happen, in fact I have seen it happen quite a number of times within the organisation I work for. However, these are for the highly driven and enthusiastic bunch. Not all employees are like that. In fact many employees are not like that. Thats where the 90 – 9 – 1 rule comes in. Do not expect people to contribute.
If Web 2.0 is to work within an organisation, it has to be integrated into their work. Make it part of the process, the business, the strategy, the vision, the infrastructure and the people!
BuzzGain is an online service for discovering and engaging with the people who will help your business thrive in today’s social economy – where attention is a precious commodity. It empowers businesses to identify the previously hidden communities who are actively defining and shaping its future, including blogs, Flickr, youtube, Twitter, and traditional media. (excerpt from here)
Well, people have been doing this for ages and now there is an integrated tool to monitor all the buzz from multiple locations. Pretty cool. (Thanks Jeremy for the Delicious link)
Okie to test if it really works, let’s see if BuzzGain would post a comment here. =)
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.
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