Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 17 November, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking |
I have been very passionate about this topic since I was young. It struck me when I was a five year old boy traveling to the depths of China and I experienced first hand what is the meaning of poverty and trying to survive in the cold, harsh winter. The people (especially kids) did not even had enough to eat, let alone study or learn a skill. I remember I had a chocolate bar and some lollies. I gave it to a kid and the smile on his face is just incredible.
I had a crazy idea a while back. I thought of building a computer community centre in the poorest areas of the world. This is based on a few concepts, one laptop per child, web 2.0 and IT outsourcing. The following are a few reasons why and how to deliver this idea.
1) Kids can learn from the best teachers around the world. One good example is MIT’s Open CourseWare. Something can also be worked out for the younger children. Its not easy to get quality teachers to these areas and instead of trying to get more teachers into these poor areas, why not bring the kids to the teachers?
2) Outsourcing has seen tremendous growth in the last decade and as we all know, there are many kinds of outsourcing. I was thinking that some of the low level tasks can be outsourced to the adults of these areas or work out an arrangement like the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. It could even be that an organisation can “adopt a community” and train them to do the work necessary for that organisation?
By keeping people occupied, learning and producing something, they can make their own living. We must remember that many of the poorest people in the world do not even make a dollar a day. If they can make some money out of it, even $2 a day doing some monotonous work, it will really help the community to grow and develop into something better. I am not looking for a solution that can give them thousands a month, just something to help them along and progress.
I also understand that many of these people have never seen a computer before and I won’t blame anyone who is skeptical that people would not know how to use computers. Interesting enough, TechCrunch had a blog post about how children in India’s slums could work out computers without assistance and training extremely quickly.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 12 November, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
There has been alot of talk about creating enterprise 2.0 pilot test groups before a full fledged implementation across an organisation. However, I haven’t read much about how one can go about identifying teams that will succeed in the pilot test groups. So what are the requirements of an Enterprise 2.0 pilot test groups?
1) Must be tech savvy enough to know how to use the Enterprise 2.0 platform. This doesn’t necessary have to be the IT department.
2) Managers and team members involved have a history of collaborating with other teams/business units, i.e. helping other business units and contributing time and resources to support other business objectives other than their own.
3) High performing teams. These teams are very good at what they are supposed to do within their job scope and business objectives.
4) There are reasons and incentives for the teams to collaborate both internally within the team and external with other teams/suppliers and/or clients.
Do you think there are enough factors to select a team that will be highly effective and produce the right results in an Enterprise 2.0 pilot test group?
*Hint* think about this from a corporate level, if these are factors for a successful pilot team, what about a successful collaborative organisation?
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 6 November, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 |
When I first started researching Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, I had the impression that its going to be really easy to implement a technology platform that can help enable Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 within an organisation. I was wrong.
As I discussed in my previous post, in every collaboration instance, the returns on collaboration must be greater than opportunity costs + collaboration costs.The cost involved in such an implementation is not just a social business software or purchasing some SaaS product online and get people to use it. I believe its more than that. In many large organisations, they do not have a central ERP, CRM, Data warehouse and so on. Enterprise 2.0 is not just about getting people to social network together or work on documents together or “tweet” each other. We need to strategically think about why we need employees to collaborate and share information.
Let me provide you with a simple case study. A large company with multiple units across the world would like to get two business units to collaborate to cross sell products to both business unit’s customers. Both business units have their own CRM and ERP systems running. A social business software was introduced hoping to achieve the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. It didn’t work. The following points were attributed to its failure:
1) Teams didn’t trust each other.
2) Performance review of teams was still focus on the individual business units. They were not judge on how effective the collaboration arrangement was
3) They didn’t had a common CRM system to track who did what to which customer. Data was inconsistent, errors were plentiful.
The above three points tells me there are three areas that needs to be targeted.
1) Change in organisational culture
2) Change in organisational performance management and structure.
3) Change in technology systems.
If you are an seasoned profession in the IT industry, you can roughly figure out that just accomplishing these three objectives will not be cheap and would take time.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 5 November, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Web 2.0 |
Generally, overdoing anything is not good. For example, humans have to drink water to survive, however, if one drinks way too much, the water would wash away the nutrients in the body and its bad for one’s health. Collaboration is the same. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies promotes collaboration across groups of people and there has been alot of buzz about it.
My experience with such implementation is that many leaders do not know when to collaborate and when not to. One classic example is when teams can’t decide on a specific problem or find the best route of advancement. I do not think the relationship works this way – the more people collaborating, the better result is achieved. Just like a 2 hour meeting with 20 people in the room is generally a waste of time. Leaders must target collaboration strategically.
Collaboration takes time and effort of employees and teams and this translates to opportunity cost. Employees from both sides of the team could have spend doing something more useful. The exact time spent on collaborating could be translated to a cost (based on salary of employees). Employers needs to ensure that employees are using their time effectively and help their organisation make money.
Collaboration between teams also cost money. There is a cost for the technology platform, telephone calls, traveling to other sites and so on. These costs should not be under estimated – small amounts can roll up to be a substantial amount.
Based on this, the returns of a collaboration arrangement between teams should be greater than the sum of opportunity costs + collaboration costs.
Returns on collaboration > opportunity costs + collaboration costs
If a collaboration arrangement does not fulfill this model, then it would be better to stay status quo or find another way to maximise the returns on other investments.
