Crossposting again …

Some more posts in my Business Model Innovation and Design blog that are worthy of being noted in this blog as well, same procedure as always.

Again, only posts that relate to innovation work, web 2.0 innovations, knowledge work and consulting:

The innovation fad is over … ah, not yet.

Payback on Innovation is what we need, listen to a podcast

Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle on co-working and here on the virtual workplace

Wikinomics @ brand eins german post, pointing to a german language interview with Don Tapscott

What is wikinomics? … learn more in a podcast

Innovationsmanagement @ Yahoo! german again, but some links to english language posts of interest

Storytellers make up the skills gap on storytelling (in knowledge work)

The Greatest Innovations of All Time on innovation management (and narrow-mindedness in innovation processes)

Teqlo zum zweiten on mash-ups, pointing to a nice screencast by Rod Boothby

Craig Burton in IT conversations … on the Enterprise of One, a discussion of how new technology has stripped the old business models away

A pointer to Henry Chesbrough on open innovation business models

It’s the strength of your business process versus those of your competitors … while implementation is hard

And last but not least, Russ Ackoff interview and some f-laws …

What is a Blog? A Wiki?

Jordan Frank im Traction Software Blog mit einer Übersicht über Social Software, die u.a. auch auf die Anfänge und Vorläufer eingeht.

Seine Definition (“a baseline definition for both blogs and wikis”) gefällt mir gut, sie ist kurz und macht sehr deutlich, dass diese Werkzeuge Teil eines umfangreicheren Kontexts “Social Software” sind:

a system for posting, editing, and managing a collection of hypertext pages (generally pertaining to a certain topic or purpose)…

Blog: …displayed as a set of pages in time order…

Wiki: …displayed by page as a set of linked pages…

…and optionally including comments, tags or categories or labels, permalinks, and RSS (or other notification mechanisms) among other features.

Fragen der Definition sind meiner Erfahrung nach nur vordergründig akademisch, sondern stehen auch in der Beratung oft am Anfang.

Haben Sie Fragen zu den Möglichkeiten (und Hintergründen) von Social Software?

Sprechen Sie frogpond an! Hier ist das Kontaktformular. Antworten folgen.

Is SharePoint Scalable?

Mauro Cardarelli asks the right question, i.e. whether organizations are ready for collaboration software. He puts it like this:

I ask “Is SharePoint scalable [in this organization]?” That is, can this company set the proper governance policies and business process changes to maximize its SharePoint investment to take advantage

Well, on the one hand this is true, but do we always need to fiddle with business processes? Software should be freeform and adaptable to a variety of organizational settings, and social software in the enterprise starts with this premise. In fact I would argue that one huge advantage of e.g. wikis in the workplace is that they can adapt to a multitude of settings …

But his requirements (and best practices) for implementation projects are good:

It starts with building the right advisory team and setting the proper procedures (in writing) that define the guidelines for all users to maximize their experience as consumers AND contributors of corporate content. With that, SharePoint scales… throughout the organization… into your partner/client community… and out into the internet world.

No arguing with this, especially the right staffing of an advisory team (and perhaps also employing external specialist consultants like me, hint hint …) is important.

Does Best Practice exist?

Here comes the question that lies behind many discussions I’ve had in the last days (e.g. here) …

I have started to think about what is best practice in a complex system – can it exist? In complex systems every situation is unique. Whilst practitioners closest to the problem will find a way of solving it, does that mean that the solution to this problem can be adequately codified and be laid over a totally different situation and applied in another context? Chances are that in a small team setting you might get away with this and build models to assist in finding the best solution. But as the number of people involved, and the problems to be solved increase, you will quickly move into new territory with a different frame of reference and set of contexts – so would one “best practice” work?

Hardly, yet best practices are important, which can be used when situations, tasks and (underlying) patterns are similar. Of course best practices shouldn’t be carved in stone but be open to adaptation and tweaking – it’s a start when we don’t understand them as “products” but as processes.

In regard of Enterprise 2.0 for complex organizational systems this makes it clear, that one advantage of light-weight and freeform enterprise social software systems is that they can be constantly improved and refined, whereas (customized) packaged software can’t be tweaked and optimized this way. This follows open-source concepts such as “release early and often” or “fail fast” and puts them to use in enterprise software projects.

This calls for a small start, that is expanded constantly with new services, from which one can quickly learn from user feedback …

Adoption Success Factors

More on the marketing side of enterprise 2.0, this is interesting:

[…] enterprise software vendors [should] focus on ease of adoption, instantaneous value and a minimum IT footprint

[…]

[…] vendors need to make it easy for users to get started and provide real value to the customer before she is required to pay. The user experience should be personalized and contextualized and the product should spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict.

But unless Francois I don’t think that most Enterprise 2.0 tools will remain confined to geek-heavy groups, and this for good reason, as (again) McAfee holds:

these tools will be competitive differentiators, [not just] levelers

Collaboration Trends

This is interesting, pointing out a study and benchmark on how enterprises are supporting their virtual workforce (e.g. by shared workspaces for collaboration (real-time- and non-real time applications), some early results:

– 90% of enterprises consider themselves “virtual”, that is, they operate organizations in which team members work in separate geographic locations.
– Revenue growth and boosting employee productivity were the biggest drivers for collaboration projects.
– Demand for collaboration applications is primarily end-user driven.
– Enterprises are moving toward unifying their planning for collaboration and convergence.

and

The bottom line for enterprises and those wishing to sell into the enterprise market is that enterprises seem to understand the opportunity that collaborative applications present to improve their operations, and the demand is pull-based rather than push-based.

Lessons Learned from Social Software Implementations

Mike Stopforth collects some neat advice for social software implementation projects, but basically it is aimed at fellow social software consultants. His arguments are well put forth, nothing to argue here. I understand his critique of overly-IT-focussed consultant selling well – fortunately my boutique consultancy frogpond is in no way a IT consultancy, thus I feel no guilt.

1. Social Software is not for Everyone

Despite what us Web 2.0 enthusiasts may want to believe, not every society, community and individual can find value in 2.0-ness. Some companies do fine without it and forcing a social media inplementation on a community can only get ugly. Be as objective as you can when you draw up a strategic plan or functional specification for a project. If you’re not convinced that social software can add value, walk away from it.

2. Social Software is About People

And therefore is about culture. Certain corporate cultures find it easy to integrate social software, others kick up against it. This often has to do with change management, but sometimes i’ts impossible to force (or even encourage) change. Competitive internal environments where intellectual property is regarded a personal competitive differentiator can often be difficult to penetrate in this regard. It also depends heavily on the size of the community, […]