Recently in Collaboration Category

Earlier today I spoke on a live webcast on the Future of Workplace Communication as part of Viocorp’s Future Forum series.

I took notes during the panel session and posted these live on my blog right after the event. I took notes while the other panellists were speaking: Nicky Wakefield, head of human capital at Deloitte, Philip Cronin, general manager of Intel Australia, and Oscar Trimboli, head of the information workers group at Microsoft.

I wasn’t able to take notes while I was speaking myself, so having had a look at the panel discussion which is now archived and can be viewed at the Viocorp site (requires registration), I’ve written out some of what I said during the discussion.

10:50 – 14:00
Workplace is not a good term to refer to the future – people will be working from anywhere so workplaces will have less impact than they have today. In the bigger context we also have to question whether organizations as we know them today will exist. Transaction costs are going down, meaning that moving forward, organizations will have to justify why they exist. There will be many business models bringing together loosely coupled talent and processes.

Big news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a 'growth equity' round.

Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft's CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn't need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company's success.

Tele-commuting has shifted from something that prognosticators talk about to an everyday work practice for many. More and more companies are happy for their staff to spend some or all of their time working from home, facilitated by a profusion of cloud software as well as familiarity with collaboration tools such as instant messaging, screen sharing, and video chat.

At IBM, for example, 46,000 out of its 115,000 workers in the US were reported to be working at "alternative workplaces" including home. Many companies large and small are following this lead. Moreover, in the free agent economy a rising proportion people global headquarters IS their home office.

There are of course pointed upsides to working from home, not least forgoing frustrating commutes, as well as greater personal flexibility. But some people find it hard to get themselves motivated, and many miss the daily banter and social interactions of the office. This is not a trivial issue - the vagaries of working from home will be a shaping force on society and how companies operate.

One of the approaches more and more freelancers and home workers are taking is to regularly meet locally to work together, creating a pleasant, sociable, collaborative work environment.

MyCustomer.com has just published a nice article based on an interview with me, titled Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy.

After beginning with some background on the topicality of crowdsourcing, the article goes on:

But suddenly crowdsourcing seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass. From reports that Microsoft crowdsourced the making of Office 2010, to David Cameron asking the UK’s civil servants for money-saving ideas via the Government’s Spending Challenge, it’s not just that interest in it is peaking, it’s that organisations are already bringing crowdsourcing plans to fruition.

This all comes as no surprise to Ross Dawson, a globally recognised futurist, strategy advisor and best-selling author – and at last month’s Creative Sydney event he delivered a keynote entitled ‘The Future is Crowdsourcing’.

"We are now at the opening phases of what is a global talent economy," he explains. "Talent is now everywhere and far more available. We’re seeing professionals increasingly working independently rather than necessarily in large corporations; we are seeing retired people who are interesting in continuing to be engaged and entrusted to projects. And clearly we have access to people around the world. So we are moving from a world where the talent was all inside big organisations to a very fluid world where the talent is available globally. And there is now a whole host of tools and platforms to be able to access all of this talent in a wide variety of ways."

A just got an email from Tiffany Schlain, who had just seen my post on how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life. I know of Tiffany as the Founder of the very influential Webby Awards. What I didn't know is that she is also a filmmaker. Tiffany pointed me to the film she's currently working on: Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence. The awesome trailer is below - well worth watching. It simply poses the question we are all facing.

On Saturday I spoke at Creative Sydney’s Crowds + Collaboration event. I had just been invited to on Thursday to fill in for a speaker who couldn’t make it, but it was pretty easy to do given last week we launched our Crowdsourcing Landscape and I gave two keynotes largely about crowdsourcing (to Cisco and at a regional futures conference in WA). As such I addressed the topic The Future is Crowdsourcing, largely supported by the Crowdsourcing Landscape, as you can see at the bottom of this post.

The other speakers were excellent. In particular the story of Detours and Destinations was extremely inspiring. Highly disadvanted youth were given the opportunity to spend time at the Sydney Opera House creating their own performance. One of their many creations is below.

Earlier this week I gave a keynote speech to Cisco Insight 2010, the conference for its top-tier partners, with the title Innovation Beyond Boundaries. I’ve always thought it anomalous that I had never done any work for Cisco, given its messages such as the Human Network are so aligned with mine, so I’m glad that connection has been made.

While I spent much of my presentation looking at some of the more interesting implications of a hyperconnected world, suitable for an audience well used to these ideas, I also explored the critical role of knowledge-based relationships in effectively innovating beyond boundaries.

The spectrum of relationship styles

We have been busy working on a number of major initiatives this year. One of the most important directions for Advanced Human Technologies is creating communities in which we provide useful content and a place for sharing and discussion.

Our first community is SME Technology Forum, which brings together community insights on leveraging tech for small and mid-sized companies. Check it out. And when you’re there please participate if you have anything to add to the discussions or comments.

We’re keen to get your contribution to the community. We’d love to post any useful articles you have. Also do let us know if you or anyone you know has learned valuable lessons on applying technology to business – we’d be happy to do an interview to write a case study. Full details on how to contribute to SME Technology Forum here.

We will be launching more communities soon, both ones dear to our hearts, as well as custom communities for companies that want to build a rich B2B community for their customers and prospects. Keep posted for more new communities - they're intended to be valuable for you!

User-contributed content is often far more up-to-date than other sources. I just stumbled across some interesting current news while browsing through Wikipedia's List of crowdsourcing projects.

The UK Conservative Party has launched Your Budget Response 2010, a website that is intended to allow anyone to identify problems, oversights and issues in the government's budget, to fuel the Conservative Party's response to the budget.

On my earlier post on Social CRM Larry Irons asked a great question about how organizations can engage effectively with their customers and partners when much of their customer support is outsourced.

While there are no easy answers, there are two organizational capabilities that are increasingly critical for success. The first is developing clear strategies for what should be done inside the organization, and what should be done outside. These are difficult decisions to make, and even harder to implement well.

The second capability is aligning business processes with your external partners. In the following excerpt from Chapter 3 of Living Networks (available for download here), I describe the approaches call center giant Convergys takes to try to align culture and process with its clients.

At 6:53pm on November 9, 1989, an official of the East German government stated in a press conference that a new policy had been instituted to allow its citizens to travel to the West. Within minutes mobs formed outside the Berlin Wall. Before long the first bold few scrambled over the Wall unscathed, unlike the 61 people shot dead trying to escape during its grim 28-year history, while others grabbed hammers and anything else they could find to begin destruction of the hated barrier to freedom. An artificial, rigid, and guarded boundary dividing a country and millions of families had succumbed to the fluidity of the times. The same sense of rigidity and boundaries were also evident in the Eastern Germany economy. The East Berlin post office, before the fall, incorporated not just a restaurant and kindergarten for its employees, but also an auto repair shop and fishery. The difficulties in getting anything done meant that managers put boundaries around their organizations and tried to do everything possible inside them, resulting in immense duplication within the economy.

I am just back from Phuket in Thailand where I facilitated the offsite session of the top 120 executives of a major professional services firm in Asia. This is staple work for me. My role at these kind of events ranges from delivering a keynote presentation that brings forcibly home the key themes of the event, for example change or innovation, to in some cases designing and facilitating the entire event, particularly when it is focused on strategy development.

While executive offsite sessions are common to business around the world, there are a few specific dynamics to take into account for organizers of retreats in Asia.

Diversity
Asian countries, economies, and cultures are far more diverse than those, for example, in Europe. There are often different priority strategic issues across country operations, and management structures need to vary between operations. Offsite objectives and structure should reflect that.

Crowdsourcing in the broadest sense will be one of the fundamental platforms of the emerging network economy. As such it’s pleasing to see that Australia is becoming a hub for a number of the most significant crowdsourcing platforms globally.

I caught up with Alec Lynch of DesignCrowd yesterday for an interesting conversation about the crowdsourcing space and thought it was worth giving a quick pointer to the three main platforms run out of Australia (though all are global in scope).

Freelancer.com, was founded in Sweden as getafreelancer.com in 2004. I first wrote about it in 2005 in an overview of the space. For many years it was the dominant online services exchange in Europe, and one of the top three globally. In May 2009 it was bought by Australian company Ignition Networks, which also acquired the domain Freelancer.com. The company is run by veteran tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, who most recently founded and ran specialty processor firm Sensory Networks Inc.

When I walked out from seeing Avatar 3D in December, I tweeted: "$300 million very well spent!"

Movie theaters can create extraordinary experiences, but the cost of production is ever greater.

On the other hand, movies can be made for extremely low cost, using HD cameras, digital editing, and volunteer labor.

At Media 2010 Suzanne Stefanac pointed to Escape to City 17, a machinima movie that had been made with a budget of less than $500, mainly for the costumes. It looks pretty good considering how little was spent.

Expect both increasing film budgets at the top end, and lowering film budgets at the bottom end.

Over the holidays Mark Fidelman launched his 2010 Enterprise 2.0 All-Star Blogger Roster. Mark says:

Now that the holiday hangover has worn off and the bills are coming due, I want to turn your attention to the individuals that are most influencing the Enterprise 2.0 space. Those of you that are early adopters or just starting to research Enterprise 2.0 can short cut the search for quality information by following and reading from these all-stars.

The list of 22 people includes Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has recently launched his book by the same name, sits at the top of the tree, with five termed "Most Influential" (where Mark has kindly placed me, presumably partly due to the success of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0), five "Highly Influential", ten "Influential", with as a special extra Dennis Howlett, who believes that Enterprise 2.0 is 'a crock', as "Enterprise 2.0 Referee".

Click on the image to see Mark's post including a larger version of the image and the data used to assess the influence of the all-stars.

I was interviewed this morning on Sky Business Tech Report. Some of the things we discussed in the interview are:

* How social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others change how companies engage with customers, become more efficient, and being competitive.