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 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 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 Thursday, 24 September, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Web 2.0, social media, software |
Aardvark is a fantastic system. I have been a user since its early days and I guess I have been helping people around the world almost on a daily basis. Aardvark is a system that allows users to ask questions on their favourite instant messenger and it discovers the perfect person to help with any question.
However, a question is not always answerable just by writing a line in an instant messenger. For example, “Should I accept a job offer in a large bank in NYC?” or “how can I increase the performance of my sharepoint server?” Some might argue that these are badly framed questions and others would argue that these are harder questions to answer as compared to “are all apples red?” Whichever the case, there are some pretty tough questions in the world that requires contextual and environmental information in order to be answered.
At the moment, just from my personal experience, aardvark is extremely powerful to answer simple questions and mid level questions. However, the more advance questions doesn’t seem to be answered as efficiently. It could be because there are lesser experts in the area or users could not be bothered to go back and forth to clarify, analyse and answer a complex question or the user could just be busy at that point of time.
I think what Aardvark could benefit from advance questions is to build up a paid service where difficult questions could be answered by paying and users with experience in that area has a greater incentive to answer the question. By matching the “buyer” and “seller”, both parties benefits and aardvark could take a cut of the price and make some money.
What do you think?
Posted by Sean Lew on Saturday, 5 September, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Incentives, Web 2.0 |
I have been discussing incentives in for a Web 2.0 environment quite abit recently. Incentives comes in many forms, shapes and sizes. I would like to discuss more about the incentives that could be used in such an environment to improve adoption and usage. I will provide some high level case studies as well.
1) Solving a personal problem
Many social networking tools like Facebook and Aardvark help solve a personal problem. Users could connect with their friends online, check out their photos and status and communicate on Facebook. The functionality provided by Facebook was something that could not be done previously via emails. In Aardvark’s case, if you have a question that could not be answered, a user can ask aardvark and they will search for someone who they think could know the answer and help the user. This solves a real issue. There are certain things that could be quite difficult to find on the web or getting real recommendations for people living in a specific country. Solving a personal problem for a user delivers the highest incentive for the user. If a tool could make their life easier and better, users would move quickly onto the platform to leverage the benefit.
2) Financial incentive
We will look at Innocentive, Innocentive is a collaboration site which allows companies to post questions regarding a specific problem like, formulating a new shampoo formula. These are relatively difficult questions to answer and requires deep specific knowledge in the problem. R & D departments cannot answer all the questions an organisation have and if they could “outsource” it to the pool of talent out there in the world, it was shown that this could help reduce the cost and R&D. Innocentive provides users with a monetary reward for the question that has been picked by the company. The reward could vary and its been known that researchers on Innocentive could get thousands of dollars or a small cut of the revenue. With a good amount of money in discussion here, people could possibly be interested in making a few thousand more.
3) Recognition and satisfaction
Just like contributing to a Wiki or a open source software project, there is seldom a monetary reward nor it could help solve a personal problem directly. However, there are people in the world who are highly passionate about something that they are willing to give up their time and contribute to a cause that is close to their hearts. In return if they do a good job, they will get public recognition (in many varous ways) from their contribution, be seen as a leader in that space and also be satisfied with their achievements. This form of incentive is somewhat unstable as there is a number of dependencies that is required for it to happen effectively. And I would like to note that there are alot of small open source projects out there that is driven by less than four contributors and I suspect that many of them are real life friends as well (just my observation).
Web 2.0 was never about some mindless people who has alot of time on their hands who just decides to do something. Humans have never worked this way and possibly never will. We live in a competitive environment and require some sort of return on investment and time. The above is just some of the high level incentives that should be considered while designing a new platform.
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 Tuesday, 28 April, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Web 2.0, social media |
I spoke to an Asian friend recently regarding social networking in the Asian region and I am pretty surprised that places like China where internet is being censored and freedom of speech is unheard of, there are approximately 220 million just on the QQ’s network. These statistics are for early 2008. TechCruch also reported that there were 376 million QQ users as of April 2009 and just over a year it grew about 70%.
In Korea, with a population of approximately 47 million people, Cyworld, a Korean based social networking site has 22million registered users. This is quite a shocking number of people. In Japan, its a similar case too.
Even though the penetration rates are not as high as Western countries, the dynamics of using social networking in each culture and sub groups can be quite different. For example, mobile phone usage is much higher in Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Singapore and I suspect that there will be more users that would be accessing social networking sites via their mobiles. This changes the way people use such tools for communication. Also in these countries, wireless broadband speeds (3G or free wifi in most parts of the city) are extremely high and streaming videos into mobile devices is a common thing.
I am sure we can learn alot from these countries just by understanding the infrastructure differences, cultural differences and tools differences.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 5 March, 2009 under Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy, Web 2.0 |
Interesting question Where should Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 Sit Within an Organisation? Many Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 experts would argue that this should be a standalone unit with their own budget and resources. I agree too. Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 is cross functional and cross verticals – almost like HR, marketing… However, during such times its not easy to fork out money for a new team of people which could easily cost half a million dollars just in salary, workspace and other standard overheads for a team. This does not even include the cost of software, software maintenance and IT infrastructure.
To be very pragmatic, its not easy to convince senior management to get onboard this funky bandwagon. Cost is a huge issue in such times. So, who should own this work? IT, Marketing, Human Resources or no one (just install the software and let people run “wild”)? Should Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 be split up and handled by different teams like IT, Marketing, Human Resources or no one?
