Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 28 October, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
I have been thinking alot about how Enterprise 2.0 can be applied to politically intense environments. Let’s face it, to get global teams to work together is not the easiest thing. Not everyone share the same objective and in a highly competitive environment, it could be quite challenging. Some teams could think, why should I help in your division’s bottom line?
I will not discuss in detail game theory. However, it is widely known that game theory consist of five elements – Players, Added values, Rules, Tactics and Scope, PARTS in short.
Players
If there were a situation where two teams would not collaborate together, it could be wise to introduce another team to the collaborative platform or even changing one of the teams and replacing it with another team that is more interested. There is no point pushing and trying, if the team is not interested, it would be too much pain and effort to change the culture.
Added values
When two teams are collaborating and one slacks away, this could be sign that there is not enough incentive for the team that is slacking away. This calls for more added value to be provided to the team that is slacking away. For example, if a car product innovation team is collaborating with the tyre department and the product innovation team is just sucking information out of the tyre department and not contributing back, this would not provide any incentive for the tyre department to collaborate anymore. However, if the product innovation team is to provide feedback and ideas for the tyre department to improve on their operations, design and efficiency, this could improve the collaboration.
Rules
Within an organisation, rules could always be used to force people to collaborate. However, I have never been the sort of person who will try to force something down someone else’s throat.
Tactics
In Game Theory, tactics refer to changing the way players perceive the game and thus changing the way they compete. In the context of this post, an organisation could use other success stories within the organisation that has delivered high growth and efficiency and present it to teams who are against collaboration. Changing the perception of losing control and power and providing these teams with greater benefits could be a way to go.
Scope
Finally, scope refers to the boundary of the game. I have seen some team collaborate only on certain things and not others. By increasing (or decreasing) the scope of the collaboration, it could ultimately improve the net benefit of collaboration. The last thing management would want is to over collaborate and start discussing things that are not to the point and doesn’t provide any benefits to the organisation.
What do you think of the methods I have presented above? Is this something you would consider when performing Enterprise 2.0 change management?
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 25 October, 2009 under General Ranting |
I have received my Amazon Kindle a few days back and I am totally in love with it. I read a fair bit of books and one of my biggest headache is what book should I bring on the road? I normally have two to three books that is in progress at any one point of time, 1) a business/management books 2) something technological 3) every other genre but generally biographies, interior design or history books. Whenever I travel I can’t seem to be able to decide what I feel like and even if I feel like something when I am packing, I might change my mind when I am at the destination. Normally, I just suck it up and read whatever I have which isn’t a bad thing. However, now I have an option. I have held back buying some books until I received my Kindle and I bought two books over the weekend. Its great. All the reviews of Amazon’s Kindle for the American version applies to the Australian version. For those Aussies who are interested, both the books I bought downloads just within 60 secs!
Alot of my friends asked me to wait for other ebook readers to be released. But after I checked out the price, it didn’t make sense to wait. Based on the two books I bought over the weekend, I save approximately $15 – $20 per book. Let’s say on average I save $20 per physical hardcover/paperback book (inclusive of shipping), for me to break-even the cost of my kindle, I will need to buy approximately 14 books. For me, 14 books will take me anything between 6 months to 9 months to read. However, if you check out the prices of other ebook readers, they are generally double the price of the Kindle and my break-even point will double as well. I think the Kindle is very well priced and despite some features that it lacks, I am sure for an average reader like me, its fit for purpose.
I totally recommend Kindle to anyone who reads a fair bit of books and you get magazines delivered to your kindle as well! Woo hoo!
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 24 October, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
Enterprise 2.0 is a very interesting concept. It includes a large variety of tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, microblogging, social networking sites and a whole lot of other stuff. Some also suggest that enterprise 2.0 is the usage of web 2.0 within organisations. However for someone who is not well read in the enterprise 2.0 literature, it could prove to be something quite overwhelming – let alone trying to convince organisations to buy into enterprise 2.0 technology.
Let’s forget about all the tools of Enterprise 2.0 for one moment. What are we trying to achieve with Enterprise 2.0? Innovation, communication, connecting people together, coordination and knowledge management are the few high level aims I can think of. However, all these can be sumed up easily into the concept of collaboration.
Collaboration is not about team building. Collaboration is about getting a whole organisation to work together and connecting teams with other teams within the organisation (read: connecting people together and communication). Collaboration is also about getting teams to work together to think about new ways to create new products and/or strategies to provide a sustainable future of an organisation (read: innovation). Collaboration is also about ensuring cross geographical teams to communication and achieve production goals efficiently and effectively (read: communication and coordination). With all these activities performed online, knowledge management and retention is achieved as a by-product of collaboration.
From the above, I would like to propose that Enterprise 2.0 is an organisational collaboration platform that aims to help organisations innovate, communication, connect and coordinate more efficiently and effectively.
What do you think?
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 21 October, 2009 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
Enterprise 2.0 has never been about the technology. In simplistic terms, its just a web application and its not rocket science. The concept of getting groups of people to collaborate, share, communicate and connect however, is extremely powerful. The most difficult part about an Enterprise 2.0 implementation is change management. Good consulting firms can implement the technical aspects of an Enterprise 2.0 platform easily. I have done a few myself. However, getting people on board to use it is a long, tedious and complex process. This is where consulting firms comes in.
Consulting firms must be able to formulate a rigorous methodology to approach Enterprise 2.0 change management effectively. Potential areas that needs to be covered are like strategy, communication plan, C-level adoption, integration of current business process and many more. This is where consulting firms can make money as quite a substantial amount of time needs to be spent at the client side to work things through with the client. Consulting firms have a presence in many firms and that’s the best place to start.
Consulting firms should formulate a strategy, business plan, objectives and impact analysis of the Enterprise 2.0 platform for their clients. They can then do a technical product selection based on the requirements, implement the solution and move the change team into the organisation. Pilot teams could potentially start with the combined team between the consulting firm and the client, however, this could not be ideal depending on the situation and environment.
Selling Enterprise 2.0 to existing clients has a few benefits.
1) Since consulting firms have a presence within the client, there is a better understanding of the issues the client is facing and there are some levels of trust that is already established. Trust within a Enterprise 2.0 platform is critical for its success. Consultants can then show the client teams how to use it and demonstrate the many benefits of Enterprise 2.0.
2) With a presence within the client firm has another advantage where change consultants can act as champions and provide initial support for the clients.
3) Consultants on the ground also have the ability to identify areas where the platform needs to be modified and changed so that the platform constantly evolves to meet the client changing needs.
4) Lastly, when the implementation is successful, there will be greater rapport and trust built between the two parties.
Since Enterprise 2.0 is a rather new technology and concept within the organisational context, many clients do not understand what they can have and what they can’t. Many clients also do not know what and how to do stuff on the platform (i.e. when should I write a write a wiki page versus a blog?). I feel that that professional advice needs to be provided for the successful implementation of such projects. The last thing that should happen is the misuse of the platform (i.e. using the wiki as a document repository and a dumping ground). Consultants on the ground has the power to walk to most of the different scenarios that the client organisation is facing and tackle them one by one.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 15 October, 2009 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Speaking, Web 2.0, Wiki, software |
I just finished an introductory Enterprise 2.0 lecture with approximately 80 undergraduate students at The University of Melbourne. I asked a question to the class at the end of the lesson – Would prefer to work with an organisation with or without these tools?
The response were as follows:
1) An organisation with these tools – approx 75% of students raised their hands
2) An organisation without these tool – no one raised their hands
I guess just this simple 1 minute survey with the future of working generation says alot about what organisations need to do to improve their internal systems.
Anyway, the presentation as below:
Posted by Sean Lew on under Blue Sky Thinking, social media |
Clay Shirky and Steven Brill were discussing the above question on Mckinsey. Please have a read.
I think both Clay and Steven have made excellent points and I do think there is a fine line as to when a user would or wouldn’t pay. In simple economics, when there is a demand, there is a supply. I feel that online content will be the same too. Let me give some examples 1) Movies, 2) Books, 3) News / magazines. I will describe when consumers would pay for content and when they wouldn’t. I believe these are popular content types that are used by the average internet user.
1) Movies. Would you pay of it online?
Yes and no. Its becoming slightly harder to download from illegal sources. Even though its still rampant, laws are been erected to protect media companies. Its only fair that way, they make good movies, someone pays for it. Some people are also watching these shows being streamed online in places like Hulu. Since there are quite a few channels for free movies, why would anyone buy? I would for sure.
Movies from other sources are not fully trust-worthy, troublesome to get and potentially of a lower quality. With a media device like Apple TV, you rock up at home after work, really tired and feel like a movie and a beer. Switch on the TV, select the movie you want to watch and buy it. At the same time, whip up a simple dinner and movie is ready to be watched. There is a demand here – a demand for the latest blockbuster which is easily accessed, high quality movies with no security risks and almost real time. I would pay in this instance.
2) Books
eBooks is pretty much a double edge sword. eBooks allows publishers to reach consumers faster and environmentally friendly. As compared to paper books, ebooks are cheaper as well. However, that allows consumers to start trading it online and uploading it to random sites. Opps, that’s a problem – free books online. However, if ebooks publishers could restrict ebooks from being shared, they could create a demand. As far as I heard, ebooks takes a long time to get “shared” online and the demand for such books online could potentially be slightly lower and since we could assume that people who buys books are slightly more educated, there is an ethical commitment to pay for it. Moreover ebook readers are still not extremely common and downloading an ebook would mean users would have to have their laptop (not everyone has one) to read their book in bed before bedtime. All these reasons could contribute to the reason why book publisher’s revenues are not as affected as media companies.
3) News / magazines
News and magazines are an interesting one. If it is straight up world news on the latest bombing or political news, I won’t pay for it. There are way too many sources to get it free. However, certain news, especially financial news and business commentary, could potentially be worth alot because of the structure and data. These information is not freely available or requires time to consolidate and for busy people in the world they could be willing to pay to reduce some redundant work load. In my opinion, people will be willing to pay for quality data and information at top tier news sites. This could potentially be a problem for regional publishing houses with a small circulation. Their revenue stream will be deeply affected.
In many magazines that are still surviving, what could be done to provide a demand is to aggregate information for readers. Let’s take the popular female magazine – Cosmopolitan (or Cosmo in short) as an example. Alot of the gossip news published on Cosmo can be found online and readers could get it free. However, what Cosmo does is rather interesting, they have articles about fashion, love, cooking, leisure, gadgets and a whole heap of other content. They aggregate content for their target readers which then allows their readers to benefit from a one-stop shop for all their feminine informational needs. Would their target audience pay for it? Well, my female friends do.
Conclusion
I guess in any case, there must be a scare resource/content for people to pay for content. Companies must create a specific demand and meet specific requirements that will convince users fork out and part with their money in exchange for the content and/or services. Content by itself is freely available and I agree with Clay but we can always bundle content up with some value added features and sell it at a premium.
What do you think?
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 13 October, 2009 under Collaboration, Web 2.0, software |
I have been playing with Google Wave for a few days now and its been a rather refreshing experience. Even though I only have seven friends I can use the platform with and it doesn’t work with traditional emails, i still found the experience pretty good.
Below are somethings I really like:
1) Playback feature. With a tool with Google Wave, version control is necessary and playback does the job very well.
2) Commenting, discussion and collaborative editing. This is quite powerful, taking the idea of collaborative editing (google docs) and discussions/commenting into one platform allows uses to all work at the same time. No more check in, check out problems.
3) Highlight changes. With any version control, sometimes it might be hard to know what really changed. Google Wave allows highlighting of changes inline.
4) Drag and drop. This might be a rich user interface feature and might not provide much value for the tech savvy, but for the average joe, drag and drop makes wave alot easier to use.
5) APIs are pretty cool and the tools that can be generated for Wave will be limitless.
However, besides all these cool stuff. I felt that many features of Wave are marginally better than emails and with emails used as the incumbent communication tool. I really wonder if Wave will take off. The biggest issue is that Wave and traditional emails are not compatible at this point of time and for Wave to be useful, it has to be compatible. Google might be big and powerful but I am not convinced that they are powerful enough to change the traditional email way. The last thing Google should do is to compete directly with traditional emails.
Also for Wave to be successful, Google needs to get people on board quick! While the iron is hot, get people to start using it and start collaborating. I can see that they are signing people up somewhat quickly and I generally have one friend added to Wave a day but this needs to be way faster. The longer the people wait, the more frustrated they become and if they do not find benefits for themselves, they could just leave the platform.
This is just a quick review of what I could see over the last few days and I am sure what I think will change soon enough when I start discovering more and understanding wave better. Please do not take this as a full final review of the product. I am sure there’s alot more to Wave than what I wrote and we shall discover and see how things pan out.
Posted by Sean Lew on Monday, 5 October, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Statistics, Web 2.0, social media |
There is a really interesting post on cnet and Informaiton Is Beautiful on the usage trends of the gender split in some of the most popular social networking sites.
I can see some kinds of trends here. According to the stats provided above, it seems like women prefer social networking sites whereas men prefer information driven sites like Digg and De.li.cious. I am not extremely surprised by the stats provided and was just wondering based on these stats, more research could be conducted to understand how gender differences could impact the usage of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. Does that mean that men will be more active in an information driven internal Enterprise 2.0 platform? Does that also mean that social networking within an organisation could potentially not be very successful if its a male dominated workplace?
More research needs to be conducted to find out more regarding usage patterns, types of activities, cultural differences and geographical differences to uncover more underlying information.
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 3 October, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, General Ranting |
Some 15 over years back, I have been introduced dial up internet and approximately 5 years later, broadband internet was installed in my parent’s place. It really wasn’t that long ago that all these things happened. Recently, mobile internet took off and I have been extremely interested to understand the impacts of this technology in the future usage of the internet.
Mobile internet has so far done very well in the social networking, search, emails and voice communication area. Other services like GPS has also been very helpful. However, in areas where high bandwidth / computational processing power is required, the current set of handsets are not quite capable. Nothing is impossible and with the advent of netbooks, it could increase mobile internet usage but this is still unproven.
In this post, I will be looking at the following areas – network technology, network providers, handset providers, content providers and consumer usage trend. I will also be providing a brief overview of the issues and impacts on the future of mobile internet.
Network technology
3G and Wimax technology has been around for some time now and in some metropolitan areas, Wifi can be found everywhere, additionally, LTE (or 4G) is in the horizon. Speeds are increasing and as time goes by, the stability of the connections are improving. So far there hasn’t been a clear technology that is winning across the world. I believe there is still quite a distance to cover before we achieve a standard platform across the world – pretty much like GSM is quite standard in most countries. Depending on the technology chosen, the capabilities of what consumers can do on their handsets would be impacted.
With the increase of mobile usage very rapidly, backhaul stations would need to be upgraded constantly and if consumers are experiencing constant dropouts or slow speeds in a particular area, that will have an impact on usage, company image/reputation and pricing.
Network providers
Network providers are in a constant fight to win spectrum licenses from the government and that could have a drastic impact of the implementation of such technologies. Awarding these licenses not only have commercial impacts but also a technological and political one.
Network providers build the infrastructure to allow mobile internet access and so far they have also tried to play in the space of content providers by providing videos and music to their phones at a premium price. Due to the early phases of this technology on mobile phones, they are winning. However, content providers are emerging and this could change the game (this will be covered later).
Also due to the high levels of uncertainty in the technological future of mobile internet, the investments of smaller telcos have not been aggressive.
Handsets provider
Handsets in this case is not limited to mobile phones but also devices like broadband modems (3G, Wifi), netbooks, and laptops. These devices determine the types of access the user can get based on the operating system, applications, processing power, screen size and many more. The handsets at the end of the day would determine the amount of usage a user makes. It could easily be assumed that on mobile phones the amount of data that is used will be far lesser than a netbook or a laptop and the difference would even be larger is the connection was based on traditional ADSL connections. For network providers, they want more usage but for handsets providers they want to sell more products – there is a misalignment here.
Content providers
Content providers are finding it hard to play at the moment. Due to the large variety of handsets and network capability, there isn’t a clear way to deliver these content. Alot of these content at the moment is delivered via the browser which is still the platform of choice however, browsers on mobiles are not the best application to deliver content and users are expecting alot more. Content like mobile TV, real time news update, VOIP and locational social networking services. For these to be possible, there are alot of dependencies on network and handset providers.
Consumer usage trends
Consumers have so far not ventured too far with their mobile internet services. Emails and search is generally the key usage on mobile handsets. However in countries like Japan and Korea, the usage has moved alot more into videos and music. Also mobile internet usage is still mainly used by the younger generations and business people. Providers needs to target the other market segments to increase adoption and usage.
Conclusion
There are many unknowns and there are quite a number of parties that have the capability to change the market and the game. This market will constantly evolve for the next few years and as it evolves, it will impact businesses and individuals.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 1 October, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, General Ranting |
I am a strong believer of you generally get what you pay for. If one pays peanuts, they get monkeys. There has been some controversy on executives salary on TheAge recently. Now there is a move to allow shareholders to have more influence over executives salary. I think this is really interesting – I can see some benefits but also some disadvantages.
On one side, there are some levels of control over rouge executives getting a truck loads of salary when the performance of their company is not even doing well at all. Like many normal employees alot of our work is based on performance measures and I think executives should have a even larger portion of that. They are the chief of a company and they are given the power and authority to make money for investors and also supply employees with a safe, stable and enjoyable job. Shareholders needs to understand that it doesn’t mean controlling executives salary, they would make more money. It should only mean it doesn’t get out of hand. For example, executives should not be getting multimillion dollar packages when the company is losing heaps of market share, profits and missed targets by a long (negative) shot.
However, having said all these, should we just keep the executives happy by giving them what they want and let they do their job in peace? If I were an executive and I need to spend time trying to justify my salary, prepare presentations and documents, talk to shareholders and gather support. Why not spend the time to think of an updated strategy for the company or tweak something within the organisation and make it better? Their time is not cheap and it should be optimised. Remember, there is an old saying that goes like this: A hungry man is an angry man.
What do you think?
