Links for this week (weekly)

  • If you understand human and relationship capital, you can start a business. If your business creates value for your customers, you can earn a good living. But you will never grow large or particularly rich with just these two kinds of knowledge assets. This is because the real promise of the knowledge economy comes in the creation of structural capital, that is, knowledge that gets captured and institutionalized in an organization.”

    tags: knowledgeeconomy structuralcapital intangibleassets knowledge

    • knowledge that has been captured and becomes part of the organization. It is the infrastructure of the knowledge factory that is your intangible capital.
    •  

      Because the truth is that structural capital is the Holy Grail of knowledge economy. It is the way that your organization captures knowledge and makes it re-usable

  • “One of the great strengths of the intangible capital (IC) perspective is the lessons it gives around business model and organizational sustainability. The IC Value Drivers Report for this services company provides a great example of this.

    By way of background, IC Value Drivers include ten categories of the intangibles that are create the unique competitive advantage of companies today.”

    tags: intangibleassets knowledge monetization structuralcapital reuse

    • Structural Capital is the way that organizations operationalize their capabilities and turn them into repeatable, scalable processes and technologies
    • The promise of the knowledge era is the scalability of structural capital. When the knowledge of your people and your network are operationalized into re-usable information and tools, everyone is smarter when they come to work in the morning.
  • “How does your intranet help your customers? I mean your external customers. The ones who buy and use your services and products.

    The ultimate purpose of an intranet

    The ultimate purpose of an intranet is to help an organization better serve its customers or the public in the case of governments.”

    tags: intraner customerservice backoffice knowledgework knowledgeworkers alignment workforce goals

    •  

      But times are changing and the results from this year’s Digital Workplace Trends survey will hopefully provide 2 things:

       

         

      1. A sense of progress in aligning intranets to business needs, be it business towards customers or services for users
      2. Ammunition for those who need to push internally to go further in this direction
    • Some enterprises are clarifying the business alignment of their intranet. A large bank recently told me how they broke their workforce into 3 groups:

       

         

      1. Front line workforce with customer contact (talking to many customers, selling products, following an organized process with some individual interpretation)
      2. Back office workforce (limited task area, very defined processes, high efficiency is king)
      3. Analytical work (experts, no defined processes, high need for knowledge networks)
      4.  

       

      These 3 groups will have very different expectations from the intranet. The bank intranet team have just begun to develop a strategy for each of these groups.

  • “Une approche, plutôt une méthode pertinente (en quatre étapes)et documentée (interviews) présentée par InSites Consulting.”

    tags: socialdynamics methodology adoption socialbusiness enterprise2.0 pilot

  • “Enterprise 2.0 has always been a closely knit community but at this event in particular it felt as though it needed a testosterone shot or two. As I discussed in my previous post, the enterprise world is predominantly a sea of cubicles, Windows XP, old browsers and Blackberries which is struggling with arteriosclerosis of the veins due to clogging with email and documents. I feel for the Enterprise 2.0 sales people who have to prove the value of their products (and frequently set up ‘pilot program’ tire kicking exercises) often against both waves of indifference and confusion about what the business value actually is”

    tags: enterprise2.0 competition value adoption goals

    • I sometimes have to swim upstream with clients in order to first flush out any bum information they think all this ’stuff’ is about and then get them dialed in to where the value is for them in the context of their business goals, and sometimes this includes software vendor philosophy and hyperbole
    • The volume of debate, crystal ball gazing, conceptualizing, buzz words and names creation is increasing around Enterprise 2.0 just as it is on all other topics, because it is so easy to publish your thoughts – or more frequently republish someone else’s – online
    • Most business users will consider Enterprise 2.0 thinking and technology if there is a compelling, urgent value in their deploying it in the context of the competitive aspects of their business.
    • As I’ve said before adoption is for kittens, and I typically have to adopt a more forceful and less tentative approach to achieve clarity around productive, effective deployments aligned against agreed client goals.
    • A senior executive at a global company told me he considers it the Woodstock of the enterprise conference world – that’s fine as long as there is an underlying understanding of the competitive business value of this type of thinking, otherwise the fashion forward and humanitarian aspects of the movement are interesting ideas but unlikely to take root in the real business world.
  • “We’ve gathered 10 amazing infographics, which are still quite fresh and contain very relevant info. We hope you enjoy them! Let us know which ones you find most insightful in the comments below.”

    tags: socialmedia infographics

  • “Though the real challenge in the collaboration space is process related rather than technology, better integration capabilities will provide incentives for employees to complete any due diligence with respect to ticket resolution. These would be incentives from using a uniform interface to the system rather than logging into different systems. “

    tags: API integration collaboration openAPI

  • “we had a few moments to talk about her topic of revising how organizations and employees look at performance management. In particular, how we keep a record of what we actually do over a year of work, and get feedback on our efforts from those we engage in our work.”

    tags: performancemanagement observablework feedback humanresources recognition performancereview

    • Ms. Wilson was careful to distinguish keeping a record of what we do versus the annual or semi-annual performance reviews with management. The latter usually results in recordkeeping just for the sake of maintaining a system of record, but is rarely used. Instead what we were discussing is storing collective knowledge about the particulars of any project or task so that we as employees may refer to it for our own, or even shared recall of activities.
    • Observable work is a practice to turn what we do in our daily tasks actions, knowledge and insight into recorded information that we can lookup or reuse later if we need to, or in the case of social business be able to share this view of our work with others of our choosing.
    • The subtler psychological point is that it is easier to document and track a project or activity if you can do it in the flow of what you are doing, rather than returning after the activity is complete
    • Beyond recording one’s work, Ms Wilson also noted the need to get feedback on our work tasks and quality.
    • The point of having reviews in observable work is to develop self-awareness and reflection. A good manager understands that self-directed improvement goes further than anything they might say.
    • What we achieve out of this is a better understanding of the work we each do across the organization, what people think of the results, and our abilities and reputation.
  • “Most managers agree that you need different kinds of leaders in lean and fat times, to preside over growth or retrenchment, to lead organizations out of crisis, or to steer a steady course in an ocean of calm. As a CEO visiting one of our classes put it, “If you have time, you can be infinitely collaborative, but if you have to fix things in a significant way and you’re in a hurry, you’ve got to be more directive.””

    tags: management collaboration commandandcontrol responsibility

    • “with the market exploding now, there is a need for a simpler, leaner organization. We hope the organizational change will result in faster growth.
    • John’s Chambers’ recent announcement about simplifying lines of authority is another case in point. Explaining changes in the company’s elaborate system of boards and councils, a structure designed to turbo-charge collaboration, Chambers said, “Many say that in the face of this expansion, Cisco needs more discipline. I agree. It’s time to focus.”
    • While companies can easily lose focus and accountability when they overdo collaboration (see our last blog), the temptation to revert to command and control when the market demands speed and laser-like focus can be just as dangerous.
    • 1. Have a clear DRI on any and all collaborations. According to a Business Week feature on Apple, a strong accountability mindset is reflected in a formally designated role: the DRI or Directly Responsible Individual.
  • “In other words, we are at a point where businesses are going to have to start thinking about how they can accelerate their response to the changes going on because the changes are going on whether or not the business responds at all or quick enough.

    So, two things. What are the changes I’m talking about and how did it manifest itself at the conference.”

    tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness socialcrm customer marketing

    • But the one thing, all of these individuals are in any role they may assume at any time is self-interested. They pursue their own lives and interact with others in ways that one way or the other benefit them personally.
    • The expectations are that these interactions will have high velocity, rapid response times, will surface the kind of information they need, and will get some quickly redeemable value from its outcome – either directly or indirectly, internal or external.
    • t businesses, which are made of these people in these institutions, need to respond with a coherent combined internal and external strategy because they are being compelled to by pressure from the ground up as their customers and employees increasingly use these new channels to interact.
    • The business responsibility is now how to create a commonwealth of self-interest while being able to satisfy its own goals
    • Internal collaboration, called Enterprise 2.0, thanks to Andrew McAfee, addressed the need in the workplace to improve productivity, increase efficiencies, and acknowledge the new set of expectations that the contemporary workforce has.  It has been driven by the use of collaborative workspaces and other appropriate tools and a culture of collaboration, which is leading to the evolution of E20 to the empowering of employees to take action on behalf of the business, superseding the traditional hierarchies that have been required to get anything done.
    • The second component has been Social CRM, which followed on the heels of Enterprise 2.0 and is still somewhat less mature in execution.  While created on the back of traditional CRM, it demands a significant change by businesses because its foundation is customer engagement rather than management. The implications mean greater transparency so that the customer can have access to the information that he or she needs to make an intelligent decision on how they want to interact with a business. It involves, in more advanced stages, collaboration with the customer to either improve the products being sold or fix problems or something through feedback mechanisms. 
    • What makes social business greater than the sum of its part is also why it needs both parts to work seamlessly inside out and outside in.
    • What that means is that not only do we now need not just an enterprise value chain, but a collaborative value chain that engages customers who we know enough about to keep engaged, but that the employees of the companies that are trying to reform and restructure what they do are empowered to act both internally and externally to do something about it
    • So the issues of productivity of the workforce, cultural transformation, partner ecosystems, supplier/vendors as collaborators not just clientele and of course, customers interacting with the organization, all are part of social businesses driven by customer experience.
    • The changes we see in the institution of business, where employees who are work are also customers who buy and the pressure to understand the consumerization of business, are also bringing this conference into alignment with the new reality that companies like IBM and Procter and Gamble are acting on.
  • “The attached white paper is an overview of the two main components that make up IBM’s technical strategy for social business — the Social Business Framework and the Social Business Toolkit. It covers the social capabilities that are being developed for the Framework as well as the standards-based mechanisms the Toolkit provides for integrating with the Framework. “

    tags: ibm socialbusiness technology roadmap socialbusinessframework socialbusinesstoolkit

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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