Synergise IT

PBWiki created a ROI calculator on their website. Even though its not the most accurate and best ROI calculation method, I do think its a good start. =)

I am in a love-hate situation now. I love my RSS reader because it delivers news, blogs and rss updates from work. Its great! But every hour, I get hundreds of notifications. I read selectively. However, its just too much.

Alrite, if I sign up to a RSS feeds from say, NY Times World news, I am bound to get quite alot of updates because somehow people are constantly interested in people killing each other. However, for my work related RSS feeds, I get a whole lot of unrelated feeds too. However, within the work related feeds, there are a few feed updates that I need to action on. At the moment, I am pretty flat out at work and I still have to go through the feeds to get my action items - that was a pain in the butt.

I then thought wouldn’t it be good to have intelligent feeds? The RSS feeds can organise and tell you which feeds are more important than the rest from analysing the content/tags, where it came from, time line associated with it (work related and if available), who wrote it and rank all of them.

With Enterprise 2.0, more and more people are working across boundaries, teams and projects and currently there is no good way to sort out the feeds / information / emails that comes from all these various places. I am truely suffering from information overload.

First things first, no one gets smart just by sitting around doing nothing. Learn and explore is the key.

I spoke to a Norman online recently and I thought it was so funny. First of all, this dude is from Asia and being an Asian and personally, I do not think that the culture and mindset in Asia is conducive for open collaboration, sharing and enterprise social networking. Feel free to comment if you think I am wrong or you have any good or bad experiences implementing Enterprise 2.0 in Asia. Let me continue with my conversation.

So he said this “Why would I wanna share my knowledge? I do not want to share my excellent ideas!” First of all, if anyone think that they are the smartest around, think twice. Even Professor Andrew McAfee asks for public contribution on his work. Well, he’s got a PhD and is the guy who coined Enterprise 2.0. I would think he is smart but he stills contribute to the knowledge.

As a Enterprise 2.0 implementer, I constantly think of various roadblocks and speed humps organisations might face and when I think of it, I blog about it most of the time. I will research and make sense of the problem and try to come out with a solution. I must say, I never have the final answer. I write about it and my friends read it, my colleagues read it, my peers read it and people online read it. Regularly, I get people dropping by my desk and say “Great post! I had a similar experience…” or “Mate, I don’t agree because…” I learn from whatever they say, even though I might not agree at that point of time, I will always take it with me and think about it from their point of view. Most of the time, I learn something new, a new perspective, a new idea.

So how does it make me smarter?
1) Thinking of a problem, framing the problem, researching and coming out with an initial solution makes me think and find out something I didn’t know before. I learnt one new thing.

2) From researching, more often than not, you will come across something not related but interesting (hopefully useful, but nevermind if its not). I learnt another new thing.

3) After writing and posting on my blog, I get feedback and comments. I might learn nothing here if not comments but if there are 10, I will learn 10 things.

So from here, you can see that everytime you contribute, you will surely learn something - at least one thing. Continuously, I learn more.

I am extremely fascinated by Andrew McAfee’s paper on “Investing in IT that makes a competitive difference“. As I wrote previously, I believe that IT can only be an enabler in terms of providing competitive advantage and I believe this is the same for innovation. The reason why they are the same is that after all, the computers can only perform whatever we feed it. Yes to a certain extent a computer can “think” and calculate however, ultimately humans are the ones who controls it and, at the moment at least, its only as good as the person who operates it.

By the way, Susan Cramm wrote a good post on the Harvard Business Publishing blog titled “Meet the Challeneges of Consistent Innovation“

I believe that there are some problems organisations need to solve before encouraging constant innovation.

1) Information asymmetry - what my boss knows is not what I know. This is a constant problem within organisations and even though Enterprise 2.0 hopes to solve this problem, it will always be there. Tacit knowledge is not easy to capture. Human emotions and relationships is even harder to document. Not understanding the full picture can make some kinds of innovation very difficult and the recommendation might not be very good.

2) Rejection of innovation. So employees put in the hard yards and went above and beyond to innovate on something. Something they are passionate about. However, if the boss doesn’t like it or its just not good enough, they were rejected and told to either improve on it or in the worst case, to bugger off. Such kinds of employees are valuable as they have went over and beyond and the last thing any company would want is to piss them off.

3) Quality of employees. For innovation to happen, generally, employees needs to be enthusiastic, motivated and generally being happy at work. Why is Google getting much more innovation as compared to the average Joe company? Other than having 20% of the time to work on innovative ideas, you can say that employees are happy working at Google. Its easy to say make people happy at work but getting there is a nightmare.

I am sure there are more work organisations needs to get to before constant innovation can happen. Constant innovation has benefits that can lead to higher employee satisfaction, job satisfaction and loyalty. Its something organisations must look at.

Andrew McAfee wrote about the most important factors for Enterprise 2.0 and one of the points is “Tools are egalitarian and freeform”. I totally agree with him and in the ideal world, it would be the best that everyone on the platform is equal, respected and treated the same way. Sounds great doesn’t it - communism in theory is a great idea too but it will never ever work in real life.

How can we ensure or promote such kinds of behaviour within the organisation? Also, can the tool have any features to prevent “bullying” from happening?

In Australia, baby boomers are classified as people born between 1946 and 1961, therefore, the oldest member of the baby boomers are 62 and the youngest is 47 this year. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) survey also found that around 76% of men had retired before 63 and 76% of women had retired before the age of 60. If this this the case, baby boomers have started leaving the work force and the amount of knowledge and skills that they carry would be lost.

Employees, by age group. Source: ABS

With the massive skill shortage in Australia at the moment and employers need to keep whatever knowledge and skill they have even when employees leave the company. I believe this is a big problem in many large organisations in Australia and Enterprise 2.0 is needed to solve this problem NOW! I am not saying that Enterprise 2.0 once implemented, this problem would be solved but the earlier you do it, the earlier people use it, the earlier people store their knowledge, the more benefits the company reaps. Timing is of essence in this issue.

The aim of Enterprise 2.0 is the single point of truth for the whole organisation. However, we all know that large organisations have many systems and its not easy to achieve the single point of truth nirvana. As far as I can see, organisations tends to change such reference systems quickly as its cheap to do so (this is especially true for project based reference systems).

Recently, I heard a story of how a project changed the reference tool (read: knowledgebase / resource inventory) three times in 10 months. Everytime it moved over, new information was added, some were lost and it changed the way people did their work tremendously. This is disruptive.

Enterprise 2.0 is disruptive as well. It not only changes the way people execute their work on a daily basis, it also changes the culture and mindset of people. Having experience such forms of changes, I would say that an organisation can only go through it once and it must be successful.

Fixing a cultural bug is not as easy as fixing it on Java. Humans are complicated creatures.

Its the FireFox 3 Download Day today! I have never been part of a world record event and this shall be my first and a extremely simple one too - just download a file! Come and pool in your bandwidth and create a world record for the sake of open source software!

Download Day starts at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, June 17th. For local times see here.

Google and Yahoo just signed a search ad agreement deal! Its the end of Micro-hoo!

I wrote an email today at work - no surprises here. Its a 100+ word email that really needed 15 words to get the main message across.

The next thing I did once I completed this was to check out my new twits and everything I read was less than 160 characters but told me everything I needed to know. From new blog posts to dinner pictures from complaining about work to constructive discussions about work - everything was recorded in less than 160 characters. What a beauty.

That set me thinking is there a place for Twitter type software within the organisation? I would say yes absolutely. I think there are so many people who write long emails and lose the whole context of the email within those words. (I am guilty too!). However, with only 160 characters, you get the main message across effectively and the reader saves alot of time reading the formalities and explanation. So I thought Twitter has a place in the organisation!

Few hours later, I was sitting with a colleague discussing something and my twitter bell went off and my client was interested to know what it was. I explained to him what twitter was. He (Gen-Y) then thought it was really cool and I asked if he would use it in the office? His reply was - “Aren’t there enough work coming in from emails? Now you want Twitter? You must be crazy”

So do you think there is a place for Twitter within the organisation?