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Hunting around for more on the Cisco approach, I came across this lecture (can’t embed the video, please follow the link) John Chambers gave at MIT in January. It’s very, very good indeed – my ears pricked up especially at about 18 minutes in when he started talking about managing the 65.000 person business via social netowrks.
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Does Social Media really destroy hierarchies or silos?
In an organisation built upon traditional management structures with departments and the like, rigid reporting lines often make for poor communication channels and awkward cross department interactions. Those very structures designed to provide human resource control actually prevent humans from doing what humans do best €“ connecting. How on Earth does one quickly & easily connect to the right person in another area of the company for help when constrained into following hierarchical chains of reporting? This has been long recognised and working groups, committees and project focussed groups containing staff from across a number of departments or skill bases are commonplace nowadays.
Dr Karen Stephenson, a corporate anthropologist and lauded as a pioneer and « leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants” (Business 2.0 2006), and her company NetForm have been publishing work on social network (think social graph web peoples) analysis for years which quite clearly shows that no matter how one tries to enforce structure on people informal networks of people will emerge €“ normally based around a specific context. Yet the structure, the hierarchy prevails
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Enterprise 2.0 or Department 2.0? Discuss.
It’s a shame that no one spoke to the Intranet Portal team though, since they are evaluating Vignette and Liferay. After all, it’s time to refresh the Intranet portal, and it would be great to get some social capabilities supported to. Oh €“ the database team mentioned something about Oracle. And someone over in the SharePoint group is talking with Telligent too. Cool, it looks like everyone is jazzed up about Enterprise 2.0.
In each corner of the organization, someone is looking at, and probably installing Community Server, Twiki, MediaWiki, or some obscure wiki that a developer heard about at a local Ruby Users group. In each case, the individual feels they are bringing new hope to their organization €“ or actually, just to their little group.
What if each succeeds? What if you have 15 wikis, 4 profile tools, 7 blog server, a couple of forums servers, and a brewing fight between the SharePoint team and the Java guys? This is hardly success either. But this happens all the time. -
Management ? [fr]
Le mode de management devient du type « do & report », se rapproche de l’hyper-temps-réel des militaires (voir la guerre du Golfe)€¦ définition des missions critiques et des domaines de validité des critères de réussite + autonomie des expertises + échanges multilatéraux engagés€¦
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la professionnalisation de tous les métiers conduit à la démultiplication des expertises; prendre la parole n’est plus un droit, c’est un devoir, une urgence absolue.
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Le mode de management devient du type « do & report », se rapproche de l’hyper-temps-réel des militaires (voir la guerre du Golfe)€¦ définition des missions critiques et des domaines de validité des critères de réussite + autonomie des expertises + échanges multilatéraux engagés€¦
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It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?
Some might say there’s no way of doing so without sharply increasing the cost of complexity. New institutional practices can reduce these costs, however, as companies become:
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Less transactional and more relational.
Less « hardwired » and more « loosely coupled. »
Less focused on merely accessing external capabilities and more focused on rapid capability building for every participant.
Less focused on the firm and internal silos and more supportive of richer cross-enterprise interactions and collaborations among workers. -
Companies must also participate in (and sometimes orchestrate) new organizational forms and structures called global process and practice networks.
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Rather than providing designers with detailed product blueprints, assemblers supply them with rough sketches accompanied by tightly specified performance requirements.
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Global practice networks, by contrast, are even looser forms of collaboration that involve participants from similar skill areas working on common performance issues. Global practice networks are emerging in such diverse areas as open source software and extreme sports.
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First, organize the right environments to generate productive friction. In part, this requires:
1. Bringing together people with diverse experiences.
2. Investing the time required for them to develop shared understanding.
3. Defining aggressive performance requirements.
4. Providing employees with tools that help them negotiate the most promising approaches for achieving results.
5. Specifying action points that force participants to produce a solution meeting the performance requirements within a certain period of time.
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Enterprise 2.0: Chance or Fool’s Paradise for Business Transformation in Economic Crisis
The last two Enterprise 2.0 FORUMs have shown that there are some reoccuring characteristics of sucessful perceived E2.0 projects that – from a qualitative perspective – might turn out to be the critical success factors. In regards to our on-going discussions about the topics of the Enterprise 2.0 programm I would therefore like to make some summing-up on these aspects:
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IT organizations usually follow a Plan-Build-Run framework that often means Plan-Build-Runaway after the system is deployed. But since many social applications are not transactional or process-specific in a traditional sense [.
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It structures the benefits of feedback on five levels (from the more concrete to less concrete) : “social creation” (benefits from the collective intelligence and actions in creating information, cross-links etc), direct feedback (benefits from cross-linking people and information by trackbacks, comments, bookmarks and feed subscriptions), systemic feedback (benefits from new relations/interconnections between people and information) and social feedback (benefits from gaining positive feedback, authority and acknowledgement).
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The focal point of the discussion led to new organizational patterns (more remote, open and collaborative, project-based, interdisciplinary working) that have to be created within the enterprises to lever the potentials of Enterprise 2.0.
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No one can run a business only with social applications – social applications are a supplement and enhancement for existing information technology. Therefore it needs to be integrate at some point with business applications to be business-critical in the long run.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
