What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution daddy

This particular blog is writing some valedictory notes as it feels that it's work on Enterprise 2.0 is done. It has these notes on what it thinks where the social networking revolution has taken us.

Do you agree?

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executivesfrom around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

Is Gen Y the Next Baby Boomer Generation? « ChangingWinds

Is Gen Y the Next Baby Boomer Generation? « ChangingWinds:

Interesting article on demographics and generations in the workplace echoes some of my earlier themes. One quote sticks out.

Gen Xers are rapidly assuming the levers of senior leadership, whether in business or government. More attention needs to be paid to how this age cohort will lead organizations and governments through the turbulence of an inter-connected world. A huge amount is at stake for Canada and the United States, two countries with a neurotic love-hate relationship, where escalating competition from newly industrialized countries and emerging economies is threatening our long-term standard of living.

Gen X will increasingly play a pivotal role in leading companies and government organizations towards what must be shared visions. And they’ll be doing this sandwiched between the Baby Boom Generation, as it slowly exits the labor market, and GenY, confused as heck over how their situation changed so drastically in just a few years.

So my advice to Gen Y is to get over it. Shit happens in life – a lot! Building change adaptability is the most important skill you can acquire. It’s time to get on with it.

Ron young on the importance of 80/20 time for knowledge sharing and reflective time.

f | KM Consulting ★ 4: The great thing about doing this update, which I do religiously every year, is that this very process always triggers new creative and innovative thoughts. In fact, I get so excited by these new revelations that I sometimes forget the original purpose.

This makes me realise, once again, that the creative process of knowledge creation is often a function of time, to reflect, analyse, consolidate, synthesize, and update new thoughts and ideas with established thoughts and concepts.

Imagine how much more creative individuals and organisations could become, if only they gave more time and value to learning, reflecting, creating and applying knowledge?

I was told that Google demand that their employees spend 20% of their work time to learning, reflecting, creating and innovating. I am told that 3M were pioneers in doing this 80/20 time week.

I wonder how many of the really valuable, and maybe even radical,innovations come from this 20% usage of time for more effective knowledge working?

When will management understand and properly value knowledge creation against performance?

Meanwhile, another cafe latte? a glass of wine? 4 hours to go. I need some 80/20 time.

R&D strategies in emerging economies: Survey results - McKinsey Quarterly - Operations - and the use of knowledge management

R&D strategies in emerging economies: Survey results - McKinsey Quarterly - Operations - Product Development

The interesting piece in this article by McKinsey is the following statements

Another area that respondents agree about is the difficulty of knowledge sharing: 64 percent say their companies are no better than “somewhat effective” at it. The most commonly used collaboration tools are relatively old-fashioned, such as frequent telephone and video conferences (65 percent) and travel for face-to-face meetings (62 percent).

Respondents at companies that are high-performing innovators are somewhat more likely to use central knowledge databases and global communities of practice to share information, in addition to telephones, video, and travel.

The key challenge is that companies in this area are struggling to share knowledge effectively within the organisation to meet the challenges of the new BRIC and other markets. The aim might be to help countries to maximise what they have and look at previous KM practices without social media etc and see what worked well there. The power of story would seem to be a good way of sharing knowledge.

Looking ahead

For companies contemplating a more global R&D footprint, the perceived differences in skills between R&D managers in emerging economies and developed ones should underscore the importance of not overlooking talent and organizational development at the expense of operational best practices during expansion. In our experience, the best innovators in emerging economies excel at both.

Why do we help each other out

I am always interested in why people help each other out and have used the concept of reciprocal altruism in my talks on knowledge management.
I've been reading over my lunch today an article by Martin Nowak about co-operation. He views co-operation as interesting as it means that you help someone who is a possible competitor and that you reduce your own success in order to increase the success of someone else.

He highlights some types of reciprocity that knowledge managers might find interesting.

1. Direct reciprocity - individuals interact repeatedly - if I help now you may help me later.
2. Reputational (my phrase) Indirect reciprocity which takes place in groups - where people see you interact with another person and reach the conclusion that you are a helpful person.
3. Spatial selection - where neighbours help each other - they survive by being in clusters this could be of interest in communities of practice but also in organisations especially departments which consider themselves in danger.
4. Finally Group selection and he says' it maybe that our group of co-operators is better off than another group of defectors, here selection acts on two levels because in our group there is more co-operation

Got Hype? You need POST | Forrester Blogs

POST applies extremely well to internal-facing collaboration and Information Workplace discussions, which he described in “POST: A Systematic Way To Define Your Collaboration Strategy.”
In the context of collaboration the four step POST methodology consists of:
1. People. Start by understanding what employees actually use and need today. Don’t guess and don’t rely on anecdotal interviews. Instead, start with a quantitative assessment.
2. Objectives. With that baseline of understanding in place, next decide what your business goals are. You will need to build a decision council that includes IT and business to help you do this.
3. Strategy. The strategy part of this planning process means mapping the business goals to specific collaboration scenarios that you can actually improve — no tools yet.
4. Technology. The last step is to figure out which technologies improve your most important collaboration scenarios. Choose cloud services if they make sense; on-premises if not.
IT struggles with a new form of hype. As one Content and Collaboration professional recently told us, “I used to hate constantly meeting with vendors trying to sell me stuff. But now the vendors go directly to the users, convince them they need the tools, and I end up with my own colleagues demanding I buy this “great” stuff that is “exactly what they need.” It’s even worse!”
POST deflects this kind of demand. “You think it’s just what you need? Ok, let’s run the POST methodology and see if this technology is appropriate for our people, objectives, and strategies.” If the answer is yes, you’ve cut through the hype and verified real business benefits. If the answer is no, you’ve demonstrated precisely why, rather than just refusing to give users what they want.
This is a helpful concept to utilise if someone wants you to use something new - run it past this concept and tweak as you need - say in re-designing your intranet to buying iPads for the business. I've been there and worn the T shirt from vendors in the past.

Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse? - Knowledge@Wharton

Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse? - Knowledge@Wharton

An interesting article to read on the subject, as the jury is out on this one for a lot of companies. I hear a lot of claims for this and wonder if it is just part of the normal technological hype that you see from time to time or does it have a role in business helping people to go across silos.

Do we need this or could something like Instant Messenger which is part of most organisations capabilities as part of their office suite be just as effective as say Yammer.

It could be that it just becomes part of the plumbing to businesses as the Internet has become since it's introduction and that the technology will evolve into standard enterprise software and become standards.

I think for a lot of companies they will try it as an experiment so long as it is done on a reasonable scale and see how it impacts on peoples day to day performance and also how it has helped the business to deliver real value to the end client. (I can remember trying Google Wave as a test and we soon found out it's limitations)

Anyway, please read the article and post any comments you might like to.

Energy—our buildings are wasting it and a lesson for knowledge managers

From a recent HBR panel meeting - talking about the need for change. What is interesting is that the lessons that they have learnt also relates to knowledge management - ie to show people the effects of the actions that they take on a monthly basis.

In a panel on energy entrepreneurship and demand management, moderated by Professor Forest Reinhardt, experts focused on two main problems: buildings in general are far too inefficient, and people in general are clueless about their individual electricity usage. The sole investor on the panel, Craig Huff (HBS MBA 1993), co-CEO and co-founder of Reservoir Capital Group, said that rather than focusing on brand-new energy sources, his firm often focuses on companies that make current energy sources more efficient.

Urban buildings consume 40 percent of the world's electricity, said Andreas Schierenbeck (HBS AMP 176, 2009), president of Siemens Industry's Building Technologies Division. Fortunately, for most of those buildings, there's the potential to cut down electricity usage by up to 75 percent via various readily available energy-saving measures, noted Philippe Delorme, EVP of strategy and innovation at Schneider Electric, which is based in France, but does a third of its business in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Unfortunately, it's hard to persuade people to institute those energy-saving measures.


"Human beings don't like to change, and everything involving energy management does imply the need to change," Delorme said, adding that electricity demand will double in 20 years if we maintain status quo practices.
This raised an important question: "How do we connect the energy consumers with a value proposition that makes it worth their while?" asked Gregg Dixon, SVP of marketing at EnerNOC USA, which helps large organizations in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom track their electricity use.
Dixon noted that while many consumers would jump at the chance to save 25 percent on their monthly mortgages, even if it meant paying some financing fees up front, they seem less apt to invest in energy-saving measures that will save them money in the long run, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, air-sealing services, and tools that help customers measure energy expenditures.

Schierenbeck supposed that electricity customers might be more apt to conserve energy if their utility bills reflected exactly how they were using that energy from month to month—giving them a better idea of how and where they could save money. "Right now, people can't tell you where they're expending energy but they can tell you what their monthly bill is," he said

Delorme agreed. "We don't know how much we spend because it's not visible enough," he said.

UC Irvine Feature: Wang Feng

UC Irvine Feature: Wang Feng

The number of Chinese workers in their twenties dropped by nearly 15% between 2000 and 2010, but the government's one-child policy isn't the main culprit. Declining fertility is a global trend, says Wang Feng of the University of California Irvine. In areas of China that are exempt from the government's one-child policy, population growth has been no faster than in areas where the rule is in effect, he says. For all knowledge managers an essential read as demographics will be one of the strategic drivers why knowledge management rises to the top of managers to do list. I also heard that KM is one of the growing trends in mainland China and maybe it is to cover this play.

Incredibly Dull: What Knowledge Management Can Learn from Small Groups

Incredibly Dull: What Knowledge Management Can Learn from Small Groups

The Social Intranet - presentation by Oscar Berg.

A useful presentation by Oscar Berg on the Social Intranet. I partcularly like the slide which shows that 71% of employees use the web rather than their internal systems. A good primer for managers to read and absorb as the new decade begins.

The Social Intranet

View more presentations from Acando Consulting.

The New Next: Social Media Influencers Predictions by TrendsSpotting

Hat tip to Steve Dale - particularly like the one on citizen activism and Charlene Li's on interest based networks - maybe the next step for COP's

The New Next: Social Media Influencers Predictions by TrendsSpotting

View more presentations from Taly Weiss.

Bringing Open Innovation to Services - The Magazine - MIT Sloan Management Review

Bringing Open Innovation to Services - The Magazine - MIT Sloan Management Review

RSA Animate – Drive - Something for all knowledge managers everywhere

RSA Animate – Drive This is one of my favourite videos and having had the pleasure of seeing Dan Pink live as a fellow of the RSA, I can highly commend this to all knowledge managers everywhere in terms of thinking how to encourage people to share knowledge.

A thoughtful piece for people to watch over the Xmas break. If only for 10 minutes - got to be better than X factor meests strictly come dancing follow by a re run of some old movie.