culture

community software applications

The Power of Microtrends by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalense

jim wilde — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:12:54 +0000

Just 1% of people can create a new market for business, spark a social movement, or effect a political change. Here, Penn (one of the world's most highly regarded pollster) and Zalense (social-change expert) introduce you to this compelling idea of microtrends, and their assertion that the culture is formed by the push and pull of small trends that are often invisible or ignored. Just think of a Soccer Mom and you'll know the power wielded by these small, but strong groups.

Click here to visit the site.

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groups

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future market orientation

Radical Innovation Requirements

jim wilde — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:02:14 +0000

The following article is from MIT Sloan "Measuring the Culture of Innovation" A brief synopsis of Innovation in Firms Across Nations: New Metrics and Drivers for Radical Innovation (University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Working Paper No. MKT 03-07, February 2007) by Gerard J. Tellis, Jaideep C. Prabhu and Rajesh K. Chandy Rather, the most important factor driving innovation is the internal culture of the company. Specifically, the researchers found that a future market orientation, a willingness to cannibalize and a tolerance for risk are three cultural elements that have a particularly strong relationship with radical innovation. Organizational tools such as incentives and product champions are also important, though less so. The only other factor that the authors found to be significant is R&D spending, but even that is not as strong as company culture.

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cannibalize

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knowledge management

collaborative software

Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)

jim wilde — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 08:12:46 +0000

John Hagel - Edge Perspectives, has a great post about, "...the relationship between Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)?"

"SOA Versus Web 2.0?"

Mr. Hagel, "...a cultural chasm separates these two technology communities, despite the fact that they both rely heavily on the same foundational standard - XML. The evangelists for SOA tend to dismiss Web 2.0 technologies as light-weight “toys” not suitable for the “real” work of enterprises. The champions of Web 2.0 technologies, on the other hand, make fun of the “bloated” standards and architectural drawings generated by enterprise architects, skeptically asking whether SOAs will ever do real work.

Connection of resources

When you talk to SOA proponents today, you will hear a lot about connecting applications and databases, but not a lot about connecting people together and helping to support their interactions with each other. In contrast, Web 2.0 advocates put a lot more emphasis on the opportunity to connect people together and to support their collaborative efforts. Web 2.0 certainly also addresses issues of connecting applications and data, but Web 2.0 is distinctive in the social dimension that it explicitly addresses.

The next wave of innovation by enterprises will depend on the ability to connect people together more effectively, [social networking software] especially at the edge of enterprises, and provide them with tools to support collaborative creation."

Mr. Hagel goes on to say that business line execs are increasing "...frustrated with the escalating hype around SOAs, the growing spending over SOA design initiatives and the relatively limited business impact achieved by SOA deployments. In contrast, Web 2.0 initiatives are leading to a proliferation of mashups (one form of composition), as described by Dion Hinchcliffe in "The Web 2.0 Mashup Ecosystem Ramps Up" and "Some Predictions for the Coming 'Mashosphere' " "

What's missing here is that most of the web 2.0 technology is not coming from traditional software businesses with spiffy brochures, fancy websites, polished sales reps, and a gigantic marketing budget but from small open source communities or individuals (hackers.)

"Running a business on Web-based software", Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe - ZDNET

"Social vs. Technical Aspects of Enterprise Web 2.0

The tenets of Web 2.0 can be exhibited in a variety of ways that range across a spectrum with social aspects at one end to primarily technical ones at the other (see diagram left). Web 2.0 software for the enterprise can effectively demonstrate aspects across part of this range, most of it, or just a snippet of it. But the generally idea is that Web 2.0 software is online, open, made of pieces, encourages constructive social interaction, and is driven sightly more by its users and data than specific features. Wikis are a great example of this latter concept; their biggest two features are the edit and save
buttons, with the data and people gathering there being far more important."

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connecting applications

data

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Social Media Tools

The new resource: social bookmarks, tagging or something else?

Web 2.0 Managers

jim wilde — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:08:41 +0000

"Manager 2.0", by Kathy Sierra from headrush. Interesting how Kathy's management ideas overlap with the contrarian management ideas of John Hagel, edgeperspectives.com.

"One dramatic difference between mature tech companies and the Web 2.0 startups is the way employees are managed. Or rather, the fact that they are not "managed." Most Web 1.0 companies (like, say, my former employer Sun... they put the dot in dotcom, remember?) are not only too big, but their management practices are just too old school (and not in a retro hip way) to foster a company culture that matches the culture of the new community/user-centric Web 2.0."

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orchestrating resources

knowledge

management practices

manager 2.0

Viva la tagging

jim wilde — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 18:02:49 +0000

Hey, I'm an "aboutness" tagger, you?

Great coversations about tagging:

The tagging culture war by Dave Weinberger gets jump started with a thread from Tom Coates - "Two cultures of fauxonomies collide..",

tag-only blogware etc. etc.. from gapingvoid and,

Updates on new post - here.

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sharing

You can't manage knowledge?

jim wilde — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 13:38:24 +0000

Knowledge Management by Euan Semple from his blog The Obvious sez, "You can increase the likelihood of connections, you can increase the chances that such connections will result in one person helping another and you can help create a culture in which helping each other is a good thing but you sure as hell can't manage knowledge." Bang! Euan shoud know since he walks the talk at the BBC.

For the avid KM fans, here is how wikipedia describes knowledge management.

Dave Weinberger, "Knowledge is literally a matter of conversation. It's disagreement with people who stretch you. Knowledge is the continuing conversation, not the result of it". I agree with Dave and Euan, read my post on Employee plots to Corporate Scenarios to learn more about connecting conversations via social network applications and about people working together using community applications to accomplish complex tasks.

Bonus: Boiled to death!

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orchestrating resources

knowledge management

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knowledge management

community software applications

Dumping best practices & benchmarks

jim wilde — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 16:09:31 +0000

The Worst Thing About Best Practices, by Michael W. McLaughlin. I've added my own links to Mr. Mclaughlin's article to expand on his ideas.

"Here are four reasons you should dump best practices:

They rarely work. A company's best practices work in the context of its business processes, culture, systems and people. Plucking a best practice and trying to graft it onto another organization will produce unpredictable results.
It's a follower's strategy. In an era of demands for innovative products and services, why give your customers recycled answers? A company that really wants a customer order process that looks like everyone else's is likely to lose the battle of market differentiation. Relying on best practices will doom your customers to mediocrityin the long run, and hurt your reputation as well.
Change comes from within. People rarely respond well to implementing some other company's ideas. In fact, having best practices come down from on high usually causes resentment. Let people create their own solutions using their in-depth knowledge of the company's customers, suppliers, employees and processes. That will result in ownership of the ideas and determination to get results.
They don't come with a manual. Business books and benchmark reports are full of snippets about best practices, yet they rarely explain what to do with them. You may have read that it's a best practice to process a customer product return in 24 hours, but there's little guidance for meeting that objective. It's also quite possible that the organizational change necessary for your customer to achieve the goal isn't even remotely feasible."

Hat tip to Jonnie Moore for the article.

Bonus new agrencies, new clients

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The Trickle Down Effect of Blogs

jim wilde — Fri, 20 May 2005 19:43:44 +0000

Because markets are messy and changing faster than businesses... We provide Ideascape - a tool for enterprise blogging including bookmarking, forums, wikis, chat & other methods of idea discovery - which aligns employee wisdom with corporate strategy to create, innovate and adapt offerings before you miss the market and lose talent.

IBM Warns of Critical Talent Shortage posted by Jim Ware from The Future of Work Weblog, Jim says "The Talent War isn't really over, of course, it's just beginning. But it's clearly going to be a sellers' market, and organizations that don't figure out how to attract and retain the new "emergent workers" (Spherion Corporation's phrase) are going to be in deep doo-doo."

In another post, Tales from the Trenches by Charlie Granthamon, The Future of Work weblog "posts an archive of visionary articles he has co-authored with his business partner James Ware, a former faculty member of the Harvard Business School and a widely recognized expert on business leadership and staff development. They claim that organizations must become more aligned with the needs of an increasingly independent workforce in a global, networked economy."

Blogs in research: help for a speech, Stephen Baker from BusinessWeek - "The question I have is whether blogs help create the links between these various disciplines. The big breakthroughs will come from combinations from three worlds: digits, atoms and cells. So are blogs helping researchers (and financiers) bring these worlds together? I don't know, but I'm going to ask."

Yes, to Mr Baker's question, "...can blogs help create the links between these various disciplines". Ideascape is an enterprise blogging system and social networking application that delivers on open innovation, improving productivity, morale, and gets people to work together across boundaries. Corp IQ increases almost exponentially when blogs are tied together, share a common repository, and reach outside the business to services like technorati, delicious, et al.

One of the problems is that most bloggers are only familar with light-weight blogging tools that offer the basic functions of publishing for one person with in-line comments and a basic flat file structure for categories. As most of you know, some first hand since you're using Ideascape, the answers to Mr. Baker's questions can be found throughout our site. A good place to start:

Glossary of terms
Summary of the site
Ideascape
Ideascaping del.icio.us. (after you have read about it, click on the discovery tab on the top)

As more professional people use blogs to share their ideas, insights, and deep smarts; discovering and finding their information as well as putting it into a cohesive context (meshing-up with your own) takes on added urgency and importance.

Ch 6 Consultants Who Get It, by Shel Israel from Naked Conversations is actually chapter 6 in their upcoming book.

"Consultants are nearly always early in the business food chain to adopt technology change and adapt their businesses accordingly. They then take this new expertise and deliver it to other businesses... In short they are new technology enablers.

Consultants are important to blogging for two reasons:

(1) Those who blog are building reputations that make them category leaders, whether that category is defined by geography or niche, and
(2) Consultants are the experts who are now starting to bring blogging into other businesses. Consultants evangelized PCs, local computer networks and the Internet into business environments. They built up the Worldwide Web. In the case of blogging, we believe they will play key roles into a great many areas beyond two current stockpiles of technology and politics."

We know of many professional people that are not only consultants, but that blog on knowledgeable subjects from A to Z. Blogs will not replace a talented individual in any way but they can certainly help spread their knowledge across organizations to those unexpected areas/departments who can really use it. In a way, blogs will exponentially increase that consultants's worth as blogs can enable their knowledge to travel across and through organizations to find places where it will be used to develop ideas, products or processes that may not have been realized without that person's input.

What's more, blogs make ideas viral and distill information that becomes accessible to anyone (in a company). In contrast, using the consultant example, information or a plan is developed between a consultant and a VP or higher-up and a report is issued or maybe a plan is set into motion, but the essence is lost in translation as it gets filtered down to the masses. Blogs can take the information and carry it through to everyone in an organization, conversations can develop the idea, employees can bat it around until the essence of it is understood clearly by all people, all employees. What started out as a complex theory becomes clarified by the people who will be carrying it out; it becomes part of the organization's mission - it is clarified, digested, understood by all.

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