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.
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 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 Thursday, 15 October, 2009 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 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?
