frogpond

Wie lernen Manager?

Das ist die Ausgangsfrage des Vortrags von Jochen Robes in einem Vortrag bei der Learntec Karlsruhe – interessant weil er den Bogen vom E-(Blended-)Learning zu zwei Themenkomplexen zieht, die mir auch sehr am Herzen liegen. Zum einen natürlich Enterprise 2.0 (und es ist sicher kein Zufall dass er Frank Roebers, CEO 2.0 von Synaxon als Kronzeugen anführt), zum anderen (Geschäftsmodell- und) Managementinnovationen am Beispiel von Gary Hamel, der in “The Future of Management” einen radikalen Kurswechsel fordert:

Schön dass Jochen Robes auch fünf Designfehler von Management 1.0 in seine Präsentation aufnimmt. Das sind in der Tat “Webfehler”, die belasten (und es heißt nicht umsonst Business Model Innovation & Design):

3. Hierarchie dominiert die Kommunikation
4. Kreative Diskriminierung
5. Uninformierte Entscheidungen
6. Monopol auf Innovationen
7. Auseinanderlaufen von Macht und Kompetenz

PS. spätestens zur CeBIT kann ich den Volltext des Gesprächs, das ich mit Frank Roebers und Prof. Dr. Niemeier geführt habe veröffentlichen – sowohl hier als auch im Enterprise 2.0 Open Blog. Die Dokumentation unseres Gesprächs über den CEO 2.0 wird Teil des DNA digital Buchs, als “Appetitanreger” der Entwurf des Covers:

Building Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results

This wednesday I got interviewed by a master student who’s writing a thesis on the cultural implications of Enterprise 2.0 (he promised to share his findings with me, so stay tuned …). Whatever, during our talk I argued with this late McKinsey survey (“Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise“) about reasons and traits that make Enterprise 2.0 projects and corporate implementations successful. Reason enough to examine it again, even when the survey doesn’t tell us much about methodology, nor about who got selected into the round of participants. But hey, actual numbers are always interesting, and the underlying models and assumptions are even more so. And as McKinsey is known for being heard in corporate boardrooms, it’s relevant (and you notice the pattern …)

One interesting point is the prevalence of knowledge management as area for enterprise 2.0 usage. I said this before, Enterprise 2.0 can breathe new life into a field that once seemed so out of date.

Another thing that I noticed is that organizations that are satisfied with their Enterprise 2.0 efforts are overall effecting more changes to organizational structures and processes than those that aren’t satisfied. This is something that Bertrand Duperrin notes too:

This is what to conclude from this McKinsey Survey (by the way, it confirms what I’ve been thinking for years) that tries to bring us a view of the state of the art in enterprise 2.0 adoption. At first sight I really didn’t like the title “building the web 2.0″ enterprise because it would suggest tools are central in organization. Fortunately, their survey shows it’s really the opposite.

First conclusion : bringing web 2.0 within the enteprise is not a fad but a heavy wide-range trend : internal, external, various tools, wide perimeters of experiment. Second conclusion : promises are not as easy to be delivered than many thought.

It’s not a suprise for me and it matches what I observed. Two kind of companies are emerging : those who had a tool-centric view and thought the rest will follow, and those who used tools as pieces of an organization change process.

[…]

Well, you need to change, and please don’t just see it as an add-on. The willingness to change the organisation, mind-set, processes and culture is the key factor. Scary, soft, social stuff that needs to be understood when trying to improve collaboration. And companies should learn a lot from their own “Intranet 1.0″ (and knowledge management) failures (and successes) before setting out for an Enterprise 2.0 journey …

The digital company – freedom to collaborate

I am closing down some of the open tabs, cleaning up draft versions and stuff I always wanted to blog about. Not all drafts stand the test of time, but some do. On the topic of good organization the report Digital company 2013: Freedom to collaborate written by Kim Thomas for the Economist Intelligence Unit stays interesting. Some of the key themes explored by the report are

Technology knowledge will permeate the enterprise.
Social networks will be common in the workplace, like it or not.
Beware information paralysis.
Digital tools will democratise access to information.
Digital tools provide employees with greater control over the information they can access.
IT will also need to loosen the reins.
Ceding technology control will be good medicine.

And they note that in order to realise the benefits of improved collaboration business leaders must come to terms with autonomy: “for employees, in how they access information and spend their work time; and for business units, in what technologies they purchase and how they use them. Above all, it will require from executives a great deal of courage—to allow technology to bring customers and other third parties into the company’s operations—and trust in their employees to access and use information freely.”

In Auto industry and Enterprise 2.0 Andrew McAfee speculated what he would do if appointed “Detroit CIO”. While the set of 10 principles he’s applying is good, I am not too convinced that technology, i.e. rolling out emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company, starting internal CXO blogs etc. would do the trick. The car industry is a heavy user of IT already, adding to the pile of tools won’t help in overcoming resistance. And that’s where the rub is: implementing Enterprise 2.0 concepts must cope with the people, processes and the tools they employ in these processes (I specifically doubt that Six Sigma or Lean Production processes can benefit much from Enterprise 2.0 concepts, these are repeatbale and highly automated processes, i.e. they don’t need no flexibility, adaptivity or emergence). But some other advanced (knowledge work) processes might benefit a lot – hey, collaboration and social software might even help in turning around a basically flawed business model, so Andrew’s thought experiment is very welcome.

Then, IBM Research is looking at adoption, usage patterns, motivations, and overall impact of Social Software in the Workplace (pdf). The paper focuses on the internal usage of social networking (Beehive) and examines the individual goals people have when utilizing these platforms (like interacting with colleagues, career advancement, convincing and informing others about ideas and projects).

Via Stewart I found Gerard Tellis & Ashish Sood‘s article “How to Back the Right Technology” in the Wall Street Journals and MIT Sloan’s Business Insight – dealing with mistakes organizations often make when choosing which technologies to adopt:

They fail to distinguish among different levels of technology, with the result that they focus too much on one level and get tripped up by changes in another level.
They assume technological performance follows a standard path — from innovation to obsolescence. It often doesn’t.
They fail to recognize that technological innovations shape consumers’ tastes, not mere whims.

Good advice included, like e.g. try multiple things at once and don’t bet too heavily on one choice, on picking a winner:

[…] Technologies, and the competition among them, evolve in more-complex ways than conventional wisdom suggests. To make the right choices, managers need to understand these patterns of evolution.
[so that] executives can avoid some common mistakes: missing a market-changing technological breakthrough, embracing a hot technology too eagerly or abandoning another one too quickly, and underestimating the effect of new technologies on consumers’ tastes.

And if you’re in doubt what technologies to evaluate for 2009 EDS’ Charlie Bess gives you something to think about, see his predictions for 2009 (granted, a mixed bag of IT technologies and/or approaches). To me, most important and most interesting is his starting point:

In this [financial et al. crisis] situation, the investments in technology can actually have more impact than at any other time, since your competitors may be in a purely cost cutting mode. In 2009 organizations must maintain a balance between the new/strategic and the immediate return, between operational cost-cutting and operational excellence. Anytime there is this level of conflict, the situation is ripe for innovation

Well, basically looks like a good situation for social software in the enterprise aka Enterprise 2.0 …

Outlook on collaboration in 2009

Besides playing experimenting with some new (sometimes cloudy) collaboration services and technologies (and I didn’t even make it halfway here), battling a nasty cold and family time I’ve been reading my share of Enterprise 2.0 outlooks for 2009 lately, starting off with Gil Yehuda of Forrester (“Predicting the battle over collaboration infrastructure in 2009“) who answers short questions with good long analysis.

Gil, do you think companies will cut back on Enterprise Web 2.0 in light of the economy?

First reaction – it depends. I’m an analyst, that’s always our first answer. […]

That’s not all for sure, he goes on to ponder what lies behind all this, i.e. he delves into the relation between IT department and business units, diagnoses an increased need for collaboration functionality as a result of “layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners)”, and sees a slowdown of IT-driven collaboration projects in 2009 compensated by more business-driven collaboration projects. A good read.

More general are FastCompany’s predictions that 8 experts have for Web 2.0 in 2009, even with Charlene Li among them who holds

“[that] the biggest innovation will be the opening of social networks so that they can exchange profiles, social relationships, and applications. As such, companies need to think about how they will “open” up their businesses.”

Read-write web compiles a list of enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and are poised success in 2009, nice that there’s a subcategory of Wiki++ (oh, this geeky humour):

We added “++” to “wiki” because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Yes, said that before, think “middleware for humans” – one might even argue that wikis are archetypical infrastructure, and being flexible enough to cater for diverse and changing needs.

Then Craig Roth of the Burton Group presents their views of the 2009 landscape for communication, collaboration and content and warns

It’s also important to note the cyclical nature of organizational dynamics, which underlies everything we talk about related to communication, collaboration, and content. Rather than just disappearing, terms like “knowledge management” fade from view only to be rediscovered when their time is right. Governance has been on the tip of the tongue for at least five years now in our space, but it may fade only to be rediscovered under a new name ten years from now.

That is why it is so important to understand the basic concepts and dynamics behind communication, collaboration, and content before delving into the specifics of any specific technology. If you don’t understand your history, for example, social networking can be felled by the same issues that caused collaborative workspaces to fail before them.

Craig also blogged about the implications of the tough economic conditions on the collaboration (and IT) market, something on which I will post a follow-up soon as well. Actually I think that the economic crisis might even turn out good for collaboration initiatives, open source and Enterprise 2.0 …:

Companies that come out of recessions in a stronger position than they went in are those that judiciously invest in technology and related processes that let more work get done with less resources as well as reducing costly delays and red herrings when making decisions. And when the market downturn ends – and it will – opportunistic organizations will be in a better position to succeed than those that had hunkered down during the recession.

Some more quotes and notables:

– Mike Gotta thinks about some acquisition possibilities (or dangers) in the Enterprise 2.0 market, triggered by an article in CIO magazine “Web 2.0, Social Networks in ’09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation” that puts Lotus Connections and Sharepoint in perspective (btw, I don’t buy the article’s argument that consolidation in the enterprise Web 2.0 market could hamper innovation around those tools, I guess the innovators in this space have set high standards already, plus the real issues aren’t with nifty tools et al.). Yet, the triggered reasoning by Mike on “strategic fits” is good, and I can’t help wondering if some of these M&As might turn reality in 2009. Besides he’s done a great rundown of various Enterprise 2.0 issues too …

– Robert Scoble sees a fight coming between the collaborative web and Microsoft, besides being busy talking to Socialtext and Jive Software (during his Enterprise disruption week), while David Coleman examines the underlying thinking (in “The Evolution of Collaboration Technologies“): “Most of these organizations are betwixt and between. It is safer to go with what you know (IBM or Microsoft) but also can be expensive in a recessionary period. Or phase out the aging collaborative infrastructure for something a bit more up to date, with more collaborative functionality. So far most of them seem to be playing it safe, a few are looking for new tools that will meet their collaborative needs both today (with the Millenials) and tomorrow.” and Kevin Mullins offers some Technology Predictions for 2009 (“I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 becoming feature sets in new products and services in the Enterprise, however they will not become feature sets in all Enterprise products”). Well, fair chance and clever arguing 😉

– At last, CBC had a feature interview with Clay Shirky on the pros and cons of social media, new online business models online, and how big change comes from human motivation, not shiny new technologies. Well, yes, don’t blame the web intranet when it’s filter failure, yes, the ability to pay attention in the Web 2.0 age is the “work smarter, not harder” version 2.0

So now I wish all my readers, friends, colleagues, partners and clients a happy and successful 2009. I hope you all had time and rest to enjoy some quiet days with friends and family before the rat race starts again. Oh, again it’s making-fun-of-rats-time – I really must look out lest this turns out a standard operating procedure …?

Zusammenfassungen …

… meiner Recherchen und Analysen u.a. zu Themen wie Cloud Computing, SaaS, Enterprise Microsharing, ECM, MOSS 2007 und Sharepoint sind normale (und tägliche) (Beratungs-)Arbeit. Nicht alles wird hier (oder als Bookmark bei delicious) öffentlich geteilt. Anderes durchaus, ein paar Notizen und Anmerkungen zu Fundstücken der letzten Zeit

Mit dem Google Search Wiki (gefunden via TQU und netzwertig) können angemeldete Benutzer die Reihenfolge ihrer Suchergebnisse für eine bestimmte Suchanfrage verschieben, löschen, hinzufügen und Ergebnisseiten mit Notizen versehen können (ähnlich wie es Wikia und Mahalo mit Social Search anstreben). Interessant – kollaborative Entdeckung und Empfehlung (digg-like) als erweiterte Suche? Ja, analog wird auch für RSS mehr Personalisierung gefordert:

As Web content becomes more granular, compositional, and personalizable (not to mention more perishable), subscribability becomes a design consideration. Users want to be able to opt into dynamic content. […] it’s no longer enough just to let users save queries; they now need to be able to subscribe to their queries (or the content generated by them).

Via Stewart Mader habe ich den neuesten Forrester Report zu Enterprise 2.0 (Enterprise Web 2.0) gefunden. Die vollständige Analyse ist umfangreich und kostenpflichtig (ja, wie oben gesagt) – aber einen wichtigen Punkt fasst Stewart schon ganz gut zusammen: “wikis are transforming collaboration“:

[…] One of the more promising of the Web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise, wikis show good evidence of helping transform collaboration in the enterprise. Users report success with many wiki endeavors when they’re sponsored by business leaders and connected to business processes.

Und um wieder mit Forrester zu argumentieren: Verteilte Teams profitieren besonders von (Real-Time) Collaboration Tools – auch wenn sicher nicht alle Kommunikation in real-time geschehen muss. Aber die Unterstützung reichhaltiger, kontextgerechter Interaktionen (Ted Schadler spricht von pervasiveness, aus meiner Sicht bestehen zudem weitere Anknüpfungspunkte wie “reach” und “ambient intimacy”) ergänzt die Zusammenarbeit in Wikis ideal. Es ist also schlüssig dass Micro-Sharing und -Blogging, sowie “federated, cloud-based collaboration platforms” wie Forrester schreibt an Interesse gewinnen.

Teaming up for innovation (and integration) …

Via Oliver Marks I found an article (free download at nGenera) who appeared in the November issue of Harvard Business Review (“Teaming Up to Crack Innovation and Enterprise Integration”) by Robert Morison of nGenera (yes, Don Tapscott is involved …), James Cash and Michael Earl of Oxford and Harvard respectively.

Picture to the left by Idris Motee who understands the need for interdisciplinary creative thinkers

Morison et al.s “idea in brief”:

Your company is continuously creating new generations of products, services, and business processes. These innovations require seamless collaboration across your firm’s different parts. But in most large corporations, innovation and integration are unnatural acts. Resistance stifles new ideas, and silos block cross-functional cooperation.

[…] explore how some companies are overcoming these boundaries […] establishing two new types of cross-organizational teams:

– Distributed innovation groups (DIGs) – foster innovation throughout the company.
For example, they deploy intranet based forums and wikis to scout for promising ideas.

– Enterprise integration groups (EIGs) – establish the architecture and management practices essential for business integration. For instance, they identify
integration opportunities, channel resources to them, and reconfigure Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to support ever-tighter crossbusiness collaboration.

To establish each of these groups, select a small number of talented people who combine broad business knowledge, technology expertise, and the social skills needed to build relationships both within and outside your company.

Yes, establishing tools and protocols is only the start. People and their skills (that includes leadership, being trustworthy and good at team building) are essential, especially when dealing with innovative tasks. And it’s more challenging when dealing with scattered (or even rivaling) business units.

So I liked the sound strategic thinking Oliver added – namely what separates the successful collaborative enterprise from those that aren’t – even more as he pointed out usage arenas like business intelligence, internal and external environmental scanning. These are memes worth expanding upon: one of the often overlooked benefits of Enterprise Social Software like wikis is that it both puts real time information to the front-lines of a corporation and collects the wisdom that is spread at the “edges” of the company:

[…] DIG’s could include, as examples, scouting for new ideas and untapped potential in current technologies, scanning the external environment for emerging technologies, Facilitating participation in idea forums, acting as an innovation expertise center, serving as an incubator for promising innovations and publicizing promising innovations and funds.

and

[…] why there are so many sparsely populated wikis and blogs slowly twisting in the wind in the corporate world – because they were set up as tentative trial balloons with no clear utility or guidelines for expected use. It’s trivial to set up a blog or a wiki from a technical perspective – you could do it in the time it took to read this article – setting up the internal use case to ’scout for promising ideas’, for example, takes a great deal more thought and planning.

The real challenge is in finding the key people […] these are the core resources that will drive innovation, adoption of associated methodologies and their enabling technologies and the successful execution of usage models.

People issues again, but it also reminded me of this (old) article by Rob Cross, Andrew Hargadon et al. (“Together We Innovate“) on the MIT Sloan Management website (and it isn’t about scouting for ideas inside the organization alone, right). It claims “How can companies come up with new ideas? By getting employees working with one another”,

[…] problems that stifle innovation. They share a couple of common themes: the failure to effectively leverage the expertise of employees (or their peers in partner organizations) and the failure to react effectively when new ideas do arise. But we’ve also found five steps companies can take to clear those barriers and start producing big ideas.

Cross, Hargadon et al. collect some network problems (and wrangle some ideas on how to solve them too):

1. No Communication […] the structure of the company keeps people apart […]
2. Bad Gatekeepers […]
3. Insularity […]

Check out the proposed “solution takes” – and see that these are about people and leadership in the beginning but include as well adaptivity & agility, connectivity and emergence (well, they don’t name it but it’s shinig all through, like when arguing that we need systems that allow for easy collaboration, in my book that means systems that can be personalized and tweaked to my very own needs).

Notes on the Web 2.0 Expo Keynotes …

The cool C1 main conference room ceiling (they did a lightshow with these things …)

Some notes and links for the Wednesday and Thursday keynotes, wasn’t present at all of them, moreover Wifi was a bit flaky so I didn’t tweet as much as usual, i.e. I didn’t do much note taking. But others are covering things nicely (e.g. Adam blogged about Tim’s talk with Martin Varsavsky and Suw Charman-Anderson’s talk on dealing with the productivity problems around e-mail). Moreover the presentations are uploaded to Slideshare mostly by now, so check there as well. Alas, not all of the keynotes employed slides at all, like those by Luis Suarez and Ben Hammersley.

Web meets World by Tim O’Reilly:

“Web2.0 vs. the water cooler – How Web2.0 has changed the way we communicate at work” with JP Rangaswamy (Adam has a good write-up on this, video will be coming I guess – needed as the slides alone won’t take you far. Hey, you need to be in the room with JP to take full advantage, that’s the point of going at conferences):

There Goes Everybody: Focusing the Power of People and Today’s Network on Opportunity by Dion Hinchcliffe:

Dion talked about how these ideas affect what you Enterprises do. I noted some good points on business models, but got alerted much more by his assertion that „enterprise 2.0 is so viral, it’s entering the workplace very naturally“. It’s not longer “trojan mice“alone, it’s the power of the Web as a platform, together with social systems that work two-way and interactive that push this forward. Great opportunities and challenges ahead, like “how much control do we have over our businesses?” and how to cope (err, how to leverage) the great increases in transparency and openness …

I also liked the keynotes by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from tinker.it (“In Case of Turbulence: Open Source Hardware’s Next Challenges“). This made me understand Ton’s fascination, he’s also got lots of videos showing what is possible with Fablabs now. Yes, this is much more of a BMID topic, so go there if you want.

Then there were “Let All Things Be Connected” with Rafi Haladjian of Violet (spell Nabaztag, please) and Redesigning Drupal.org: An Exercise in Open Source Design with Leisa Reichelt (this one is obvious, having enjoyed her two workshops the first day, see here and here).