Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 29 July, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
Traditionally, organisations hide information from the public to maintian their competitive advantage, secure trade secrets and a whole lot of various reasons. This is logical and I understand. However, within organisations, people also try to hide to improve their position, power and importance. The enterprise 2.0 idea reflects a total opposite of this. People are asked to collaborate, exchange information and share. I call it the “love all, serve all” model.
Let’s face it, within organisations there are always a bunch of people that are like that – love to hide stuff. They do not see the benefit in sharing. Is it true that hiding can propel someone’s career? Can the enterprise 2.0 way propel it even further? These are questions that I can’t answer for sure but I do believe the Enterprise 2.0 can propel someone’s career in a great way.
In any case, how can we change a politically intense environment and get users to share and contribute? First of all, senior management needs to acknowledge that its a problem and it needs to change. There will also be some changes that needs to be made to the company culture, team bonding and common understanding. They can start by doing it themselves and setting an example. One must know that in a politically intense environment, sucking up to senior management is generally one of the traits.
Next, middle management needs to provide a reason for everyone lower in the food chain to come onbaord and use it. I always believe this – if there is no reason for me to do something, why do it?
I think alot of people underestimate the importance of a quality enterprise 2.0 tool. Personally, my team and myself use it daily and posts hepas of information and comment of truck loads of stuff. If its something of such importance, make sure its a good tool and fantastic and pretty tools are pretty cheap too! We cannot just look at the functional requirements but also the look and feel of it. There are plenty of people in the world who are not techies and look at things very differently.
What’s your experience in implementing Enterprise 2.0 in a political sensitive environment? Would be interested to hear your side of the story.
Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 20 July, 2009 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, social media |
We have heard of various resistance stories when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration initiatives. There are also many blog posts regarding this topic. Today, I would like to approach this topic from an academic perspective.
I was reading Lynne Markus paper on Power, Politics and MIS implementation and it drove a really good message on the various types of resistance and theories that could help explain some of them.
There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.
1) Internal factors to the person or group – where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors – if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors – where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.
In the Enterprise 2.0 world, I believe that all three factors can cause resistance but I feel that the third factor is probably the most problematic factor. How can we go about managing this?
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 8 July, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Gov2.0, Innovation, Web 2.0, social media |
The whole idea of Government 2.0 is changing the way government works. Traditionally, the government is the master of the country. They could say and do alot of stuff that can affect the economy and society in general. Good governments make life better and bad ones just create a whole lot of rubbish. However, the concept of Government 2.0 passes some of these powers back to people and allow citizens to speak and do more.
In Australia, we have the Gov2.0 taskforce and the government is looking at ways on how they can get people to contribute and collaborate more. Obama is one of the famous advocates of Gov 2.0, the Americans are a fair way ahead of other countries on this with many initiatives in this space. Other countries like Denmark, UK and Singapore have started some initiatives in this space as well.
First and foremost Government 2.0 is defined by Wikipedia as:
Government 2.0 is neologism for attempts to apply the social networking and integration advantages of Web 2.0 to the practice of government. Government 2.0 is an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses.
I would say there are three key components to Gov2.0, 1) social media, 2) collaboration and 3) innovation. These three components are similar to that of Web 2.0.
Social media in Governments
This is a strong area in which governments can easily do. Look at how Obama connected with his voters during his presidential campaign. He has effectively use social media to create and mobilise his army of voters to donate and create awarness for his campaign. Governments can also use social media during disasters, examples of this are Australian CFA’s use of Twitter and facebook the deadly Victorian bushfires early this year. The ideas in this space are endless. Governments could use the army of connected individuals via their computers and mobile phones to provide information, help each other and aggregate information.
Collaboration
Collaboration in Governments is still relatively new. There are some reasons behind this. Political information is generally quite sensitive and secretive so collaboration in any form would generally be more in-house as compared to public collaboration. However, this is not stopping interested individuals from joining publicly created groups to discuss about political issues and in some cases, people within the government agencies have joined in the conversation to listen and discuss what these folks have to say. One of this example is the Gov2.0 Google groups.
I can see this space growing as the government is making decisions on behalf of their citizens who voted for them. In some way or another they need to listen to them and what they say. This could make the decision making process easier or harder but for sure it would be a more informed decision. Could we even have citizens voting on every single bill, law and jury that takes place in the country? Maybe, I do see some problems with that though. We could have the government having the final veto in all matters and controls the relationships with other countries and the agency that has the top talents and analysts to help citizens make the right and informed decision. (Having said all these, I am taking the assumption that government and their staff for virtuous and honest).
Innovation
Innovation is a way in which government can engage with experts in various fields. Tapping into the larger network of experts in or outside of the country allows a greater flow of idea contribution and hopefully these ideas is worth it thus providing a better solution. I really do not see much activity in this space so far. However, I do believe as points 1 and 2 evolve, Innovation in government will evolve as well.
Government 2.0 will change the way people work. Doing this well can help retain top talents in the country, improved satisfaction ratings, improve the economy and a better society in general. Government 2.0 is not without its challenges and we have to study and work through each of them.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 2 July, 2009 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
First of all, I apologize that I have been quiet for almost a month. Some unpleasant things happened and I had to attend to them.
I have been having alot of chats with various parties on collaboration and its really funny how this buzzword has a different meaning to different people. First up, there is no way you can implement a platform and tell people to “collaborate”. A successful collaboration platform is very difficult to achieve however, its failure is generally not well publicised as collaboration platforms generally starts of as a pilot and if it fails, its canned. No pain to the company at all, few thousands dollars went down the drain but a lesson well learnt.
Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more parties to achieve common goals. The relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards. With this, collaboration is not just technological platform – its just a means to an end.
Interesting enough that one of my close colleague and friend brought up the case that alot of collaboration platforms have failed and its unable to engage the community. This is due to the lack of understanding of the concepts and a overly strong focus on the technology. Technology is important, but just like building ERP solutions and SCM solutions, requirements must be understood! Business culture must be understood! Human behaviour must be understood! Personally, I feel that understanding the specific requirements of collaboration is extremely difficult as its not just the business needs but the individual needs and fit into the overall culture and environment.
Sometimes, collaboration might not be the best option and even if its the best option, we need to understand why various parties would like to participate. Freak success stories like Wikipedia is not going to happen again. That is a Excellent success story but you can create another Wikipedia now and expect it to work with the same success rate. We need to understand the incentives for each party, the responsibilities of each party and many other minor details.
I have reviewed the Enterprise 2.0 implementation success factors post I wrote a while back and I still think the model is extremely very valid. I hope this will help improve the success rates of collaboration platforms across the world.
