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The Clash Of Ages: How Technology Divides Workers
If you’re a boss, what do you do about employees who love to tweet, text and social network throughout the day? It’s a question companies are grappling with as the generation gap threatens to create a communications divide.
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Today, Cisco announced the findings of its Teleworker Survey, an in-depth study of almost 2,000 company employees. The study, conducted to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with telecommuting at Cisco, revealed that a majority of respondents experienced a significant increase in work-life flexibility, productivity and overall satisfaction as a result of their ability to work remotely.
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The Evolving Web In 2009: Web Squared Emerges To Refine Web 2.0
At first glance this can seem to be an impersonal and inhuman concept as the network expands to surround everything and dominate the participation that so far at least is still driven (for a little bit longer anyway) by what people do and contribute online. However, this bleak vision is tempered by the realization that far from being pushed to the side, we collectively must be the feedback loop that guides Web Squared through billions of daily interactions that makes it possible in the first place. It’s the full environment, including us, which makes it all work.
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Value Chain Approach to Web 2.0 For Enterprises
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The Value Chain 2.0: Bringing In The Consumer
Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.
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Product Development 2.0
What is Product Development 2.0 exactly? It’s an informal term I’m applying to something that online startups and traditional businesses both are increasingly doing: leveraging of mass user contributions, providing open architectures for others to build on as they like, and even handing control over key product decisions directly to users. The reasoning behind doing this is simple: Satisfied customers have always been essential to having the most successful business, both online and offline. But how best can you ensure that they get exactly what they want from you, as customized and quickly as possible? This is where the scale, new tools, and business models of Web 2.0 have stepped in, giving us the potential to provide our customers with better, rich products, much more quickly, and with more of what they want. Taken as a whole, it’s increasingly clear that there are new business models afoot that are just now being well understood.
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Google Gets Serious about Innovation
So when the company says it’s missing out on good ideas, this is both surprising, and perhaps somewhat expected. Surprising, because how does a company consistently ranked at the top of innovation surveys miss good ideas? Expected, because Google now employs 20,000. With that many people, how does a company stay on top of all those ideas?
What I’m seeing is a company that is is progressively systematizing its innovation practice. Google is following the path of its large enterprise brethren, adapting its internal processes to account for its size and its need to grow across multiple fronts. It really has to. It’s no longer the small company where ideas get tossed around on a white board, and everyone knows what’s going on. I mean, there are 20,000 people employed there.
Google is getting serious about innovation.
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What kills startups
Most closures, however — even those that do not end in bankruptcy — are the result of unforeseen circumstances. It seems that Murphy’s Law affects entrepreneurs disproportionately. Often, these disasters could have been avoided if company management had paid more heed to the principles of risk management.
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Disney Crowdsources Its Own Company
I know what you’re asking: “How can you crowdsource your own company?” Well, in this case I’m referring to the fact that once a year, Disney (DIS) puts out a call for product ideas to its entire consumer products division of 12,532 employees, which includes Fashion & Home, Toys & Electronics, Food, Health & Beauty, Stationery and Publishing. That means sales, communications, and other non-inventing divisions get to participate. It’s what they call the “Big Idears” contest. For the first time, one of these ideas is coming to the mass market€¦
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Business Strategy Expert Gary Hamel: Ten Tips from the Top
Recognized by Fortune magazine as “the world’s leading strategy expert in business today”,
Gary Hamel has outlined ten design rules for innovation for companies intent on generating sustained wealth in the future: -
Is the Corporate Structure Obsolete?
We have also seen social media form communities that increase productivity in manufacturing processes, software development, and project management. We have seen people self manage in social media to segregate and elevate good information away from bad information. We have seen communities act with logic, tact, and precision previously thought to be the province of top management guidance.
In short, we have seen social media replace or duplicate almost every structural element of the traditional corporation outside of the construct of corporations. Can social media provide a corporate structure in and among itself?
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Increasingly, access to the community knowledge inventory is becoming a means be which people can convert productivity to money.
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The next paradigm of economic development will reside almost entirely on a statistical game of managing risk and return, matching surplus to deficit, and increasing human productivity in the operating system of Social Media.
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Finally, look for the threats that can corrupt an innovation economy. Social Media is currently responsible for trillions of dollars of productivity gains €“ all this money is still on the table for social entrepreneurs to monetize once the integration reaches a tipping point.
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The home page is dominated by the activity stream, which includes links to tasks, blog posts, documents and other systems that are relevant to this person’s work. It’s not just the usual social network stuff; it also includes information from enterprise systems such as ECM and BPM systems. There would be rules to set priorities on what’s in any given user’s activity stream.
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Process Discipline and Creativity
I’ve recently been asked a couple of questions I used to hear all the time. The questions are:
1. Doesn’t process discipline add overhead and cost?
2. Doesn’t process discipline stifle creativity?-
So, process discipline makes the most sense for activities that are routine and sequential €“
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Juran argued that you can manage for control (process discipline, incremental and continuous improvement) or you can manage for breakthrough performance (step change, creativity, process reengineering). He further argues that each require different organization and management approaches, and you had better be clear on which you need and are trying to achieve €“ control or breakthrough, and then ensure you are managing and motivating appropriately.
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Know where you need creativity, and where you don’t, and where the nature of the work lends itself to excellent processes, follow a strong process discipline.
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Microsoft Reinvents Its Global R&D Model
Undoubtedly Microsoft is pioneering the R&D 2.0 model that I discussed in my last post €” an organizational model that relies on anthropologists and development economists to first decipher the socio-cultural needs of users in emerging markets like India and then use these deep insights to develop appropriate technology solutions. And it’s telling that Microsoft picked India as the epicentre of its global R&D transformation.
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Social Business Design = Web 2.0 + Médias sociaux + Entreprise 2.0
En ce moment c’est la saison des conférences et l’actualité est particulièrement riche cette semaine avec la 140 Characters Conference à New York et l’Enterprise 2.0 Conference à Boston. Médias sociaux et entreprise 2.0€¦ deux domaines qui suscitent beaucoup de bruit et de créativité mais qui ne se mélangent pas. Une des raisons principale qui fait que ces deux domaines sont jusqu’à présent restés hermétiques est parce qu’ils répondent à des objectifs différents et surtout fonctionnent différemment (notamment dans la motivation et les dynamiques sociales sui régissent les interactions).
C’est dans ce contexte que le Social Business Design fait son apparition avec l’ambition d’unifier ces deux pratiques en une sorte de Théorie du Tout : From Social Media To Social Business Design.
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How Companies Increase Innovation
hose ideas, however, don’t really come from nowhere. Instead, they are typically at the edge of a company’s radar screen, and sometimes a bit beyond: trends in peripheral industries, unserved needs in foreign markets, activities that aren’t part of the company’s core business. To be truly innovative, companies sometimes have to change their frames of reference, extend their search space. New ways of thinking and organization can be required as well.
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Problem solvers can be professionals, retired scientists, students or anyone who can answer a problem that has stumped a company’s own researchers. InnoCentive, based in Waltham, Mass., says the site gives solutions to about 40% of the problems posed.
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Many companies set up so-called communities of practice, which are typically internal Web sites where employees are encouraged to share knowledge and skills important to the company.
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From Social Media To Social Business Design
While I can’t go into the full vision of what we’re thinking about yet€”we’re realizing that the bigger picture goes beyond how you can be a great tweeter, blogger or social media evangelist for your organization. It’s time to think beyond marketing and building personal brands and time to think about how participation through social technologies can lead to emergent outcomes for any organization. Can « social media » save GM? It’s unlikely that media can save any organization grappling with changes in their business environment. But what if organizations of that size were able to act preemptively before market conditions forced them into similar predicaments?
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If the big picture is business transformation, it’s going to take more than a few tweets to get there.
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Enterprise 2.0 Flourishes When You Understand The Business Side Of The Enterprise
My point, with emphasis, is that we all need to a better job of understanding how our customers operate. Everyone needs to tell product managers that customers don’t care about your widget unless it can be tied to something larger that can transform business. It’s the classic technology silo. If your widget isn’t tied to a larger architecture that can be used to reconstruct a process, it’s just a widget that will rest on a digital shelf instead of a wooden one. (for you shrink-wrap folks)
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When vendors press for big picture questions early, they quickly have an opportunity to brand themselves as strategic instead of the tool company.
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what I plan to do is look at enterprise 2.o not from a toolset lens but from my customer’s lens. The disparity between the two is what frustrates me. I’ve seen some of the best technology around with a bunch of folks sitting around a table unable to produce more than one use case for the how it can impact the business.
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Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives
However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.
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Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.
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There are many aspects to service delivery innovation, notably the integration of internal, external and online resources to create efficient and differentiated value creation for clients.
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Effective innovation in this space enables offers that create value for both clients and their service providers
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Launching Social Networks for the Enterprise
Anne said that when a social network is deployed internally separate from the workflow, it does not tend to drive productivity, as employees do not engage. There needs to be a compelling reason apart from the technology to make it work. It cannot be implemented as a utility without a specific value proposition tied to work processes. I am in strong agreement here as it correlates with my own experiences with knowledge management.
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Companies who are interested in implementing the new social networking solutions need to start by identifying a business problem. This premise is almost as old as people but it so often ignored that we need to keep raising it. Every time there is a new hot technology, it can step on its own toes if we are not careful.
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Four Value Network Patterns to Accelerate Time from Ideation to Commercialization | ValueNetworks.com
Value network analysis as applied to innovation from ideation to commercialization provides a possible solution to one of the most challenging business issues in the intangibles economy: describing exactly how intangible assets such as intellectual capital are converted into ideas and other deliverables deployed in purposeful networks to create economic or social value. The ability to visualize, analyze and optimize innovation networks is of great value to both government bodies responsible for regional development and for commercial businesses seeking to bring innovations to market. Specifically making the transition from one phase or « state » of the innovation network to another is often problematic. As additional roles come into play the nature of the interactions change across the entire network. Innovation networks are increasingly complex and relationships must be maintained in some cases for several years. Supporting the integrity and continuity of an innovation network is critical to success.
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Enterprise 2.0 Reflects the Culture
Why are Enterprise 2.0 implementations of blogs, wikis, or forums not living up to the expectations of the technology?
The primary reason is because social media tools reflect the culture of the organization €“ they can’t change the culture of the organization by themselves. If the “social” part of social media doesn’t exist within your organization or is corrupted, all you’re going to end up with is “media” €“ a blog with no readers or a wiki with no edits.
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Does Self-Censorship Help Innovation? The Enterprise 2.0 Approach
The next time someone tells you that you need lots of ideas, stop, think and work out the outcomes you want before you go collecting thousands, and thousands, and potentially more thousands of fluffy, non-relevant ideas that go nowhere.
The gist of Mark’s post is that encouraging the contribution of ideas from all quarters is actually counterproductive. He prescribes the concept of an “appropriate” number of ideas.
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- Emergence
- Filters
- Culture
This perspective is quite different from the tenets that are driving the Enterprise 2.0 movement. There are three elements of Enterprise 2.0 that are relevant here:
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The Importance of Cultivating Interdisciplinary Relationships
The result is that a lot of people in the workforce have a pretty narrow view of what the word “colleague” means. It’s important to broaden that definition and cultivate relationships with people in other fields. Here’s why.
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Expanding your definition of who you count as a colleague is not just a petty semantics game. It will help shape the way you interact with people, and could lead to more meaningful relationships where none would otherwise exist
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But by sticking to familiar ground you’re only doing yourself a disservice in the end.
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If you happen to be successful at learning about things beyond your usual sphere, you may start to get ideas for strange and unusual projects that bridge disciplines or industries.
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Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring?
It is critically important that Enterprise 2.0 tools get adopted by the risk takers and in-the-line-of-fire people actually driving the business. If we speculate that 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the results, we need that proportion reflected in online activity. The people who don’t pull their punches. The ones who dare to call a spade a spade. The ones who know how to tell the truth without unnecessary collateral damage. Without them, the revolution that Enterprise 2.0 thinking is capable of triggering will not happen.
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Le Personal Branding au service de l’entreprise 2.0
L’entreprise 2.0, ce n’est pas « une entreprise + du Web 2.0 ». L’objectif n’est pas la création d’une entreprise technophile mais d’une « entreprise intelligente » dont les salariés ont un vouloir coopérer (une culture, des croyances qui favorisent les coopérations intellectuelles), un savoir coopérer (un mode de management adapté à l’entraide sur les activités très intellectuelles) et enfin un pouvoir coopérer (une organisation et un fonctionnement qui favorisent la transversalité et le partage des bonnes pratiques). Les technologies Web 2.0 font partie du pouvoir coopérer, elles viennent en support de la culture, des compétences et du fonctionnement de l’organisation.
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Compte tenu du principe de la dissonance cognitive, si un individu fonctionne dans une logique de réseau et d’entraide pour gérer sa carrière, il est fort probable qu’il finira par fonctionner dans la même logique dans ses activités professionnelles. Bien sûr, la transition se fera progressivement.
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Hal Varian (chef économiste Google): “L’heure est venue des micromultinationales” : Entreprise Globale
La démocratisation totale des moyens de communication, l’explosion du volume d’information disponible – et son organisation, bien sûr, par Google – ne manquent pas de rappeler les responsables du moteur de recherche – auront un impact aussi important, estime Hal Varian, que l’introduction de la chaîne d’assemblage dans l’industrie, voici un siècle. “On optimise ainsi les flux d’information et d’idées pour l’économie de la connaissance. A l’instar de l’optimisation, jadis, du flux de production de biens physiques, dans l’industrie, d’Henry Ford à aujourd’hui.
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The State of Intangibles Measurement – KPI’s Are An Imperfect Answer
In the industrial economy, we had lots of ways of measuring our work. It was a mostly physical process so we could literally see what was going on. Our financial systems were built around this industrial model and we could also put dollar values on products as they progressed through factories and machines, converting raw materials into finished goods.
The shift to a knowledge economy has changed that. A lot of the value created today happens inside peoples’ heads or their computers. This is the case in service and technology businesses but even in manufacturing settings where it is the process, not the product, that creates so much of the value.
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Well here’s what worries me. KPI’s are by definition a small number of indicators. There is no guarantee that KPI’s are the right metrics. And they can be manipulated.
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I’ve previously pondered over how we could possibly work with HR to ensure success for KM and can perhaps summarize some of the key points as follows: (I am assuming that the points below represent key components in HR strategies)
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Hire people with at least an average KM quotient
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Encourage informal learning mechanisms
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including the employee’s KM quotient as one of the objectives/competencies in the appraisal process
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visibility/recognition/appreciation being more important than monetary gestures
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I firmly believe that one of the critical aspects that contribute to employee satisfaction, delight and engagement is an environment that enables and celebrates knowledge sharing and collaboration.
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We need to understand the links between various roles and how rotation of employees (knowledge) would help the organization get more efficient/innovative.
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Réseaux sociaux et réputation, l’étude du cabinet conseil Deloitte LLP
Le cabinet conseil Deloitte LLP vient de publier une enquête sur l’impact des réseaux sociaux sur la réputation et l’image des entreprises. L’introduction de cette étude par son président, Sharon L Allen est sans équivoque: “Si la décision de publier des videos, des images des réflexions, expériences ou observations sur des sites de réseaux sociaux est un acte personnel, un seul d’entre eux peut avoir d’importantes conséquences éthique pour les individus comme les entreprises. Par conséquent il est important pour les dirigeants d’être conscient des implications et d’élever la discussion au sujet des risques et cela en association avec le plus haut niveau d’encadrement.”
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The Toyota Way is not the Toyota Production System (TPS) . The 14 Principles of the Toyota Way is a management philosophy used by the Toyota corporation that includes TPS, also known as lean manufacturing. TPS is the most systematic and highly developed example of what the principles of the Toyota Way can accomplish. The Toyota Way consists of the foundational principles of the Toyota culture, which allows the TPS to function so effectively.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
