Recently in Enterprise 2.0 Category

New Scientist has published an interesting article titled Email patterns can predict impending doom, which reviews findings by researchers at Florida Institute of Technology. They, as many researchers, used the email logs from Enron, which have been made available for analysis by federal investigators.

The key finding from the research was that the number of active email cliques, in which groups exchanged emails between each other but not outside, went from 100 to 800 a month before the collapse of the company. This appeared to reflect decreasing trust across the broader organization and increasing stress. This indicates that very strong indicators of organizational health can be gleaned from network analysis.

Network analysis by Advanced Human Technologies of top executives in global corporation

Over the last years I have spent significant time assisting professional services firms to drive innovation. This year I am finding that the economic climate is intensifying the focus on these issues rather than pushing them to the background.

The pressures that commoditize services are intensifying, local and global competition is increasing, and clients are seeking value in different forms than they have in the past. Another critical driver is the war for talent. Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.

However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.

I’ve written before about innovation in professional services, including the White Paper I wrote for SAP on Service Delivery Innovation and in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.

Here are some reflections on where I see the greatest potential for value-creation in the space.

DOMAINS FOR INNOVATION

There are several key domains for innovation for professional firms:

Services and products. In a rapidly changing business environment, providing the services that are most relevant to clients’ needs can provide real competitive advantage. The issue is not just in quickly generating new offerings, but also in packaging these so they can be readily communicated to clients by front-line professionals.

We finally have video of my presentation on Future of the Enterprise at the TEDx event in San Francisco on May 5. The video is a nice production, very kindly done by Denis Mars to pull in the slides and Flash that supported my presentation.

Read more about the TEDxAdvance event, organized by Advance San Francisco. The best description is Andrew Mager's excellent review of the evening.

The TEDx presentation format is strictly 20 minutes, so my presentation fits into two 9 minute YouTube videos below. Feel free to start at Part 2 if you want a sampler of the content - the story pretty much hangs together from there too.

In the presentation I discuss:
* Origins of organizations, from pre-agricultural through pyramid building, the guild, and modern companies
* Enterprise vs. Corporation. The critical distinction that means the "enterprise" will be more important than the "corporation" moving forward
* My personal work journey, through distributed computing, financial markets, Japan, information broking and NLP formed my thinking on organizations
* Knowledge and relationships are the only resources that matter in today's economy
* Living networks of people, organizations and industry emerge
* Organizations are media entities - the flow of information defines its functioning
* Three driving forces today: Connectivity, Expectations and Commoditization
* Enterprise 2.0 is about creating the next phase of organizations - it is done by creating parameters for experimentation
* In the Heuristic Age structured trial and error is the only viable path to responsiveness
* Five questions: I end with five key questions we must answer to create the future of the enterprise:

What structures will emerge for allocating capital to enterprise?

What models will best turn participation into value creation?

How do we best tap the global talent economy in a virtual world?

What role will reputation play?

How will we make work meaningful?

There is some great content on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference blog, including video interviews with J.B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator and Stowe Boyd. These give a flavor of some of the great content we can expect at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 22-25.

I’m due to have a call with J.B. Holston soon in which I will be very interested to hear his views on what I call the ‘RSS Enterprise’. He has some great insights in this video, including on the current pace of uptake of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and the legal issues relating to privacy in different countries. A summary of some of the points he makes in the interview is available here.

While our annual Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is the biggest Enterprise 2.0 event in Australasia and Asia, the global landmark event for Enterprise 2.0 is definitely the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, coming up on June 22-25. As I am a blogger partner of the conference, you can get a 30% discount by registering through the button on the right of this post.

Notable keynote speakers at the conference include Andrew McAfee of HBS and Matthew Fraser, co-author of Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, as well as a host of senior executives from companies that are implementing Enterprise 2.0.

The White Paper produced for the event has some interesting statistics from a very recent survey, as below. The other key statistic, not surprising but certainly gratifying to vendors, is that 65% of respondents expect spending on Enterprise 2.0 by corporates to increase in 2009 compared to last year.

Here continuing our series of visual representations of social media tools inside organizations, taken from our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report.

The diagram below was used in the chapter on RSS in the enterprise, to illustrate how RSS can support effective information flows in the organization.

Go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 downloads page for several free chapters.

More Enterprise 2.0 visualizations coming soon.

Continuing our series of free chapters from Implementing Enterprise 2.0, here is Chapter 7 on Governance. For full details on the report and all the sample chapters go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website.

Within the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework above, governance is an absolutely critical and central issue, as I have written about many times before. I have included the chapter on governance because it is so central both to implementing Enterprise 2.0, and to generating business value in a fast-paced environment. Change entails risk and opportunity - governance provides a structure to enable this.

Chapter 4 on Key Risks and Benefits , also available as a free download, examines the risks and benefits that must be considered in the governance process.

The Governance chapter contains:
* Definition of governance
* The importance of the governance
* Six steps in a typical governance process
* Worksheet on stakeholder interests
* Professional service firm case study

You can also just download the pdf of Chapter 7.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Chapter 7 - Governance

On Tuesday I spoke at the TEDxAdvance event in San Francisco on Future of the Enterprise.

Photo credit: Andrew Mager, magerleagues

In short, it was a great event, with close to 80 very interesting people in attendance, and excellent energy during the presentations and ensuing conversation over drinks.

I won't replicate the fantastic write up of the event by Andrew Mager on ZDNet's The Web Life blog - check it out for a great overview of the proceedings and some of the ideas that flowed through the evening.

A video of my presentation was taken - I hope to post it up here soon.

I caught up with Laurie Lock Lee yesterday and we compared notes on our recent launched books – my Implementing Enterprise 2.0 and his IT Governance in a Networked World. I haven’t read his book yet but it looks great and I’ll report on it soon.

In our discussion of Enterprise 2.0 and the networked organization, Laurie observed that a minority of people inside organizations actually touch an ERP system. While it runs the basic business processes of a firm, it is essentially linear and doesn’t facilitate the networked connections and communication that support the everyday work of a knowledge-based organization.

Laurie proposed that it would be interesting to ask people in an organization which they would prefer to do without in doing their work: ERP or email. While finance types might immediately opt for the ERP system, the majority of people depend far more on email to do their jobs.

As I wrote back in 2007, we can consider that ERP is about automating processes while Enterprise 2.0 is about enabling knowledge work. While both are essential, as we shift into an increasingly networked world, facilitating connections matters more.

Which would you prefer to do without – email or ERP?

To further the TED conference’s mission of promoting ideas worth spreading, it has established the TEDx program of independently organized TED events.

The global Advance network is running its first TEDx event on May 5 in San Francisco, where I will speak on the future of the enterprise.

See the full invitation and registration details here.

I will be drawing on the content and ideas from my recently launched book Implementing Enterprise 2.0, but also putting this in a far broader frame of what lies ahead for organizations of all kinds.

Melissa Vaarzon-Morel of Advance Global Professionals San Francisco Committee and TEDxAdvance creator will speak about the background of the event and global networks.

Following these presentation we will have a discussion, bringing to bear the fantastic insights of:
* Verna Allee, CEO, ValueNetworks.com and author, The Future of Knowledge
* Sam Diaz, Senior Editor, CBS Interactive

The event will be held courtesy of CBS Interactive at their San Francisco offices on Second Street, with Atlassian kindly sponsoring wine and appetizers.

Click here for more information and to register. I hope to see you there!

If you can’t make it the event will be streamed live here.

About TEDxAdvance
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx.

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. This event is call TEDxAdvance, where x=independently organized TED event. At the TEDxAdvance event, live speakers will spark deep discussion and connection. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including this one, are self-organized.

For a recent boardroom presentation to a group of CEOs of large organizations I prepared ten ‘dos and donts’ on my topic of organizational change.

Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework

I drew on the core ideas in our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report and framework (as above). Enterprise 2.0 is ultimately far more about organizational change than technology, though it happens to be driven by web technologies. As such much of my focus today is on how to change organizations, to literally create the next version of the enterprise. Far more details on how to put the ideas below into practice are in the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report.

My list got an extremely positive response from the audience, so I thought I’d share it here.

DOS

1. Create a vision
The most important aspect of your vision is that it must be compelling. Unless people are drawn to it and want to help create it, it is useless. This means it needs to be focused on the benefits to everyone in the organization.

Today we are continuing our series of visual representations of social media tools inside organizations, taken from our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report.

The diagram below was used in the chapter on wikis in the enterprise, to illustrate how wikis can be used in organizational activities.

Go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 downloads page for several free chapters, including the chapter on social networking on the enterprise, with its own diagram on how social networks relate to other Enterprise 2.0 tools.

More Enterprise 2.0 visualizations coming soon.

Unfortunately posting this a bit late, but there is still time to submit your awesome intranet work to the Intranet Innovation Awards - the deadline is May 1.

The awards are run annually by StepTwo Designs, and for the last two years have featured some fantastic examples of innovation in internal web initiatives.

One of my favorites from the winners is Janssen-Cilag. Nathan Wallace, who spoke at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum both this year and last year, shares his story in this video.

Advanced Human Technologies is an awards supporter, so we'll be sharing more when the winners are announced later this year.

The latest issue of People and Strategy Journal has an extremely interesting Point/ Counterpoint feature. Download the full article and responses here.

Karen Stephenson, a leading network theorist and practitioner, wrote an article Neither Hierarchy nor Network: An Argument for Heterarchy, examining how heterarchies, that bring together elements of networks and hierarchies, are the most relevant organizational structures for our times.

Leading people in the field were invited to respond to the article, with responses from Edgar Schein of MIT, Robert Eccles of Harvard Business School, Charles Handy, Tracy Cox of Raytheon, Patti Anklam, Barry Frew of Center for Executive Education, Art Kleiner the editor-in-chief of Strategy+Business magazine, and Ross Dawson of Advanced Human Technologies (me :-) ).

My response is below. If you are interested in how organizational structures can be more effective in a connected world, I strongly recommend reading the full article and responses – this is an extremely topical issue.

Heterarchy: Technology, Trust and Culture

Stephenson is absolutely right to emphasize both the rapid rise in interconnection that individuals, organizations, and societies are currently experiencing, and the resulting interdependence that stems from that. Relatively few have yet grasped that the degree of interdependence generated in a global connected economy significantly changes the drivers of individual and collective success. Central to these drivers are the organizational structures that coalesce value from disparate participants.

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald displayed a prominent headline Telstra lays down the law on Twitter. The article began:

Telstra has become the first major Australian company to set down guidelines on the use of Facebook, Twitter and similar websites by its employees.

First? According to whom? As noted by Stephen Collins, the Australian Public Service Commission publicly announced protocols for online media participation in December. A number of major Australian companies have established guidelines for social media, they just didn’t issue press releases about it as Telstra has.

In any case, Telstra’s social media policy a solid document and it’s good that Telstra has both created it and released it publicly. (See the social media policy itself and the blog post launching it.) Companies that have not addressed these issues are essentially creating a liability out of what could be a strong positive for the organization.

The extensive background to the announcement (including all the fun and games of @fakestephenconroy) is given in an article on ITNews titled Telstra staff given rules on use of social networks. In the article I am quoted:

Ross Dawson, chairman of social networking analyst group Advanced Human Technologies, described Telstra's new policy as "solid and straightforward."