Alex im Interview mit Hallo Welt – “über seine Vorstellungen des Arbeitsplatzes der Zukunft, wie der Generationenwechsel miteinspielt und was Unternehmen tun sollten, um den Startschuss nicht zu verpassen”
Das Podcast-Format gefällt mir – gefunden via dem neuen Twitter-(Corporate)-Account von HalloWelt.
Technology pundit Mike Elgan says we’re evolving a new paradigm for the workplace as technology makes it easier for white collar workers to engage in location-independent employment. These “digital nomads” will be able to travel the world or go to locations where there are partners or customers for both personal reasons and on behalf of the company.
Found via Experientia (“Technology will allow us to become digital nomads“)
Yes, the online, networked generation, working in geographically dispersed teams must and will make broad use of collaboration tools for work purposes. And as these tools are becoming cheaper it helps too (now, I doubt whether we will really see low-cost web conferencing as soon as Mike Elgan says – yet it’s no problem, teamworking with fellow digital nomads is probably a bit easier than regular corporate collaborative work …)
Just a short note – check out Heidi Gardner’s Harvard Business School working paper Feeling the heat: The effects of performance pressure on teams’ knowledge use and performance (pdf)
Why do some teams fail to use their members’ knowledge effectively, even after they have correctly identified each other’s expertise? This paper identifies performance pressure as a critical barrier to effective knowledge utilization. Performance pressure creates threat rigidity effects in teams, meaning that they default to using the expertise of high-status members while becoming less effective at using team members with deep client knowledge. Using a multimethod field study across two professional service firms to refine and test the proposed model, I lso find that only the use of client-specific expertise (not the expertise of high-status members) enhances client-rated performance. This paper thus reveals a paradox affecting teams’ use of members’ knowledge: the more important the project, the less effective the team. This paper contributes to the emerging literature linking team-level expertise utilization (instead of just recognition) with performance outcomes and also adds a novel, team-level perspective to the literature on inter-firm relations.
This is close to being an organizational collaboration pathology – huh? Now, it’s clear that having some slack time to build up social capital is essential (for building up trust and more – we’re talking of forming, norming, storming phases in teams) while in reality teams don’t always get that time (it’s a fast-paced multi-project world after all).
But putting on the heat on teams with an overblown performance focus seems to aggravate effects we know by the name of group think (and the related fall-back to well-established patterns when the going gets rough). And group norms kill creativity:
Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group ‘are’ and how they ‘ought’ to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations…the unwritten rules of the group, therefore, determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity.
Now what role may social software play in this situation? I agree that just mimicking Xing or LinkedIn in the hope of supporting and facilitation intra-company knowledge networks is bound to fail (and more, it’s following a flawed paradigm, social networks in companies should be understood as emergent properties of this complex social system we call organization). Designing the knowledge environments (and tools) for smart and action-oriented workers tasked with creative jobs is not easy (and very dependent of actual context too), letting the connections between interdependent teams simply emerge is a challenge. Just think of the various relations we entertain to people not in our actual company network (freelancers, alumni, competitors and complementors, partners, …), these are complex systems too:
Why is Google Wave important? Well, the toys of today are the tools of tomorrow, a compelling keynote for a developer conference is cool and all, but there’s more on the upside:
– A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
– A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
– A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
And as we’re moving onto more real-timeness and collaboration already (think Friendfeed lifestreams, real social bookmarking and annotation, social news and more), this is much more than another Google service:
At last, one more thing, something that explains why Google is such a remarkable company – it’s the story behind Wave. Starting from the question “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?” they have achieved a lot. And Google’s introductory blog post has the innovation story, ie. why it must have been Google to say yes to this idea and on the early days of Wave (more on Google innovation culture, ie. a company whose unique culture shows through in small ways):
When Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn’t impressed. “He came to me and he said ‘This may sound kinda crazy, but we’re going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we’ll get back to you after a couple of years,'” Brin remembers. “It was not a very compelling proposal.”
More wave information at the usual places, like Techcrunch, Tim O’Reilly (Open Source, Open Protocol, and Federated Wave Clouds), Forrester, Mashable
And yes, you can sign up for Google Wave updates
Hmmm, preview of the real next Google, leaving email as we know it in the dust of time. Rather long presentation of Google Wave. This is ambitious, and technically impressive. And to explain what it may turn out to be – when my friend Daniel Hartmann alerted me to Google Wave and the other outcoming of Google-I/O-Conference, we were discussing the implications in a longish Skype Chat – in the future we’ll dig into a wave, collaborating with others, adding links and snippets to the conversation, overall collaborating seamlessly with an hybrid that integrates E-Mail, Chat, Instant Messaging, File-Sharing, Task- and Project-Management and whoknowswhat (collaborative editing functionality will be everywhere of course, “wiki as a verb” wins big time).
Ein kleiner Rückblick auf meine Veranstaltungen der letzten Woche (Teil 1 jetzt, Teil 2 folgt sogleich), angefangen mit der DNUG Konferenz in Düsseldorf. Das Motto war “The Innovation Enterprise: Generating Value in a Smarter World”, ich habe eine Reihe der Keynotes, Workshops und Diskussionsrunden wie geplant besucht und im Rahmen der Veranstaltung viele gute Gespräche geführt. Klar, es ging mir vorrangig um Enterprise 2.0, insbesondere die damit zusammenhängenden Implementierungs- und Change Management Aufgaben. Besonders interessant war hier der “trilaterale Austausch” – Praktiker, Berater und Wissenschaftler (u.a. Philip Räth von der EBS, Stefan Taing von der LMU oder auch Prof. Koch von der Forschungsgruppe Kooperationssysteme) gehen das Thema doch sehr unterschiedlich an. Das ist natürlich verständlich, meine Beobachtung ist aber schon dass es die Berater als Bindeglied zwischen “(manchmal) visionärer Innovationsbegeisterung & datenlastiger Analysefokussierung” und “(manchmal) Fokussierung auf ganz eigene unternehmensspezifische Probleme und Herausforderungen” braucht … umso schöner dass IBM bzw. die DNUG ein “Ticket gegen Vortrag”-Programm für Studenten anbot, und so die Mischung der Teilnehmer heterogen und damit interessant gestaltete.
Alle drei Gruppen konnten zudem von den Keynotes profitieren, einfach deshalb weil in diesen (bspw. von Bob Picciano oder auch von Martin Jetter, dem Deutschland Chef der IBM) die wichtigen Themen und Agendas gesetzt werden, Einschätzungen zum Markt deutlich werden und man auch sehr schön “zwischen den Zeilen lesen kann”. Gerade Bob hat sich sehr optimistisch zum Standing von IBM bzw. Lotus im Bereich Collaboration gezeigt, das Business ist “Growing, Innovating, Expanding, doing Alliances“. Er zog hier Parallelen zum größeren IBM Thema “Smarter Planet”, und dem speziellen Teil “Smarter Work” für das die integrierte Social Software Lösung Lotus gut aufgestellt ist. Interessant darin die “Nine Predictions for Collaboration in 2009″.
Diese Trends flankieren natürlich den Smarter Work-Business Case für Social Software aus Sicht von IBM:
Hmm, noch eines zum Sinn und Zweck von solchen Konferenzen (das oben erwähnte “zwischen den Zeilen lesen” kann man ja auch nachträglich, bspw. bei Twitter, man suche bspw. nach DNUG). Es geht darum Leute zu treffen, gemeinsam Spaß zu haben und von- und miteinander zu lernen, die DNUG hat all das erfüllt. Markus hat das hier sehr schön auf den Punkt gebracht:
PS. Weitere Videos auch im IBM Lotus Deutschland Youtube-Channel, via BlueBlog
Not much blogging so far (yes, there’s more twittering, you may also search for the #DNUG hashtag), but I having a lot of fun here, see what was part of the first presentation on Lotus Live today:
Anyway, I will post some more meaty notes later on, this is just a starter …