Enterprise 2.0 – Innovation through Aquisition No comments yet

Great spot by Mike Gotta over at Collaborative Thinking. He picks up on an article in CIO magazine by CG Lynch, “Web 2.0, Social Networks in ‘09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation“, originally spotted by the The Connections Blog. This quote puts it all into perspective quite nicely:

IBM, for its part, has more aggressively shown willingness to move forward with Lotus Connections, which right now has a better design than the social software features in SharePoint, which is largely still a document management system.

I think most people would agree with that – well at least those that are struggling to implement Sharepoint as a social software solution.

The CIO article goes on to say:

But both companies are further removed from innovation than the enterprise 2.0 vendors. While enterprise 2.0 vendors mimic what they see in the consumer market, thus keeping them a degree of separation away from where the innovation actually occurs, the incumbents are even further removed; they simply copy the enterprise 2.0 vendors.

This isn’t a sustainable model for innovation in the enterprise Web 2.0 market. With shrinking access to venture capital, there’s reason to believe some of the enterprise 2.0 start-ups will fail or struggle to make money in 2009. When this happens, they’ll either fold or be purchased by IBM or Microsoft.

Web 2.0, Social Networks in ‘09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation – CIO – Blogs and Discussion

Mike goes on to say:

Sure, Connections is ahead of SharePoint when it comes to some of the key aspects of social software – but I find “Enterprise 2.0 vendors” to be ahead of Microsoft and IBM when it comes to certain technical capabilities or user experience aspects. Sometimes I think that Microsoft and IBM are so intent on stealing away the install base of the other, that they are not paying attention to other market signals regarding what customers are looking for in social platforms. Still, the economic downturn will make it difficult for smaller vendors to survive so IT strategists should expect some vendors to fail and others to be acquired (which really is not anything terribly insightful based on past downturns and bubble bursts).

So, on reflection, I’d say that Google are pretty well placed to just get on with mopping up the Social Computing space that the ‘Enterprise’ boys are ignoring.  The key differentiator (and potential weakness) between enterprise vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and their erstwhile nemesis Google is the very fact that they only know ‘enterprise-speak’, i.e. negotiating and selling at a corporate level, whereas Google’s market is the end user, a market they they know far better than their competitors in the social computing stakes.  So, whilst users wait for their organisations to provide what they really want, Google is out there delivering it, e.g. Google Groups, Google Apps, Google Sites, Google Friends Connect etc.

Yes, we know that the likes of IBM and Microsoft will survive the credit crunch, and that consolidation is a natural consequence of a recession, but I know which horse I’m putting my money on to flourish in these difficult times!

Communities of Practice in Local Government No comments yet

I was interviewed recently by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) about the work I’ve been doing for them in developing Communities of Practice (CoPs) to support efficiency improvements and knowledge sharing in the local government sector in the UK. The original article was published on the IDeA’s Knowledge website, and is reproduced here.  The technology platform for suppoting these virtual communities was launched in December 2007, and currently supports over 20,000 registered users and over 580 CoPs, dealing with issues from ‘Healthy Communities’ to ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (and much much more).

Steve Dale is the Associate Consultant for the Improvement and Development Agency’s community of practice (CoP) platform. He talks to Juno Baker about the work he is doing to promote knowledge management and CoPs in local government.

“Life is an opportunity to learn from the moment you’re born right until, well hopefully, the moment you die.”

Steve Dale is talking about knowledge management (KM) and the work he is doing to promote KM tools and techniques in local government.

Dale started his career in anti-submarine warfare for the Royal Navy, which he describes as “not a very friendly way of learning about technology”. But after 17 years at Reuters looking after stock-exchange feeds, he set up his own company. He was still focusing on how to organise data but then discovered a fascination for how people use and look for information and knowledge.

“I found I was far more interested in the softer side of things – the people and the issues that they were facing – than I was in the process-driven side.”

In 2005 Dale came to the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) to develop a three-year KM strategy for local government.

CoPs and websites

The agency already had the Knowledge website publishing case studies for councils to share good practice. But, as Dale explains, communities of practice (CoPs) perform a different function.

“You’ve got a reputational risk behind [a website] so you make sure that everything that you’re publishing for public consumption has been properly vetted, [and is] accurate, in the right format and accessible.”

He describes a CoP as a “semi-informal network of people having conversations”. He says they encourage information sharing and communication and are part of a more rigorous process to discover knowledge.

“All of that is unofficial and the community itself believes it’s unofficial… CoPs are unofficial, unvalidated – there might be a whole host of lies going on in there!”

He is of course being facetious. Users of the many CoPs on the IDeA’s platform cite countless benefits of membership, including saving time and money, help and support, and learning from others’ experience.

Dale also wants to clear up any confusion about the part CoPs play in knowledge management.

“They’re all the same thing, the same continuum. Things like peer assists, and after-action reviews and a whole host of other tools and facilities can be used by CoPs to encourage information flow and knowledge sharing.”

In the same way, he says, CoPs can be part of any knowledge management strategy, adding that he doesn’t like the term, ‘knowledge management’.

“To me knowledge management is nothing secret, it’s not smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, all it is is a process for learning and sharing”

Technology in our time

Dale compares the technological changes of the last 20 years with the invention of printing. He believes that the internet – and particularly web 2.0 – are affecting the way we work as dramatically as Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type. He talks about opportunities for people to self-publish, to write blogs – he himself writes two. He says the changes are developing so rapidly that there is confusion about how to manage it all.

“On one end of the spectrum you’ve got people who are still into the control processes. ‘Staff can only see this, we can’t trust them to go out and look at these other websites. They’re going to be wasting their time if they do all this.’ At the other end of the spectrum we’ve got more enlightened managers who see the opportunities.”

Dale worries that the first type of manager might put off young talent from joining the local government workforce.

“People who have just left university are used to working with all of these tools. You’re trying to attract the best of these graduates. If you say to them, ‘You can’t do any of that, you’ve got a locked-down pc. You can only access these sites and this is your work’, then they’ll leave and go somewhere else that does have an open environment.”

Working with the sector

Dale says that councils’ feedback on the CoPs has been “generally very positive”. But he would like more engagement from the sector.

“If there isn’t a community out there of any interest to the people then we’ve made it very simple for them to create one.”

He also talks about the IDeA’s role, saying there are two things the agency needs to do. First, make sure people understand the benefits of working this way, and secondly provide all of the necessary support to make the CoPs work

“There are about two million people working in local government and I’d like to see a good hundred thousand being fully represented.”

So what does he say to people who say they haven’t got time to be in a community of practice? Dale recalls a recent conversation with someone else about this.

“She was the leader or facilitator of this CoP and she hadn’t got time to be in it. Her job was directly related to this community so my response was: ‘If it’s something to do with your job, what you’re doing in there is actually part of your job. And when you’re not in there you’re potentially doing something frivolous. As a facilitator you need to keep in touch with your community and not an occasional observer.’”

Article published in November 2008.

Enterprises urged to pay staff to use their own kit 6 comments

According to analyst group Gartner, enterprises could make significant savings by paying staff to use their own laptops. The report suggested that a monthly payment of £47 per employee would be cost effective and attractive to staff. Gartner said that schemes that encourage staff to use their own laptops would reduce maintenance and support costs and improve productivity.

“The costs go down for the enterprise if the notebook is provided by the employee because the employee takes more responsibility fixing the computer I their own time”

the Gartner analyst is reported as saying.

This touched a sensitive nerve for me, given my own experience as a consultant. More often than not I’m compelled to use the ‘corporately approved’ hardware and software build for PC and laptops when I’m working at a client’s site, which usually means – at best – IE6 with no plug-ins, 3 versions back of Flash player and an obscure version of PDF reader. The only plus point is that Vista is not yet widely deployed. The transition from my personal laptop configuration to these corporate versions is like stepping back to medieval times (though in reality it’s probably no more 5 – 10 years). No more one-click access via my Firefox plug-in to my del.icio.us account for tagging useful web pages; no more one-click social bookmarking to Digg or Stumble; no more one-click saves to Google Notebook.

I get the impression that any whiff of user productivity is sniffed out by these ICT departments and vigorously stamped out, as a recent experience would seem to reinforce. A short time ago I managed to install the Google toolbar on my corporate PC. All was well for a couple of weeks, and then I got one or two obscure messages from the virus checking software. I made the mistake of calling the IT support desk, who soon sussed that I had installed the toolbar (shock, horror), and wanted to arrange an appointment for a techy to visit my desk and remove it. Needless to say I haven’t returned these calls, and have so far managed to dodge the IT security police. In the meantime, I can save a few seconds each time I want to do a Google search by using the toolbar. But then again, a few seconds saved for each search mounts up to a few minutes each day and maybe even a few hours each month. Multiply this across several hundred employees and you begin to wonder if the inmates are running the asylum!

Perhaps one day (but unfortunately not in my life time), these ICT departments will begin to understand the business needs of the enterprise and provide the services that will contribute towards the business and user productivity. Devolving ownership and responsibility to users for their own PCs and laptops is probably a step too far for most enterprises, but I remain hopeful that it will happen one day. On that note I will hastily finish – I think I see an IT person approaching looking for a rogue laptop!

Browsing websites costs billions in lost productivity 5 comments

I worry that some people believe this sort of rubbish. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) the average UK worker spends ninety minutes a week misusing corporate internet connections.

The CBI said that workers are spending roughly an hour and a half out of their week visiting web sites that have no relation to their work whatsoever. Cumulatively, it said, this costs UK businesses some £10.6bn in lost productivity over the course of a year.

The CBI polled some 503 businesses, who it said employed nearly one million workers between them. Two thirds of those who took part admitted that they think that their staff use work time – ie, not lunch, or formal breaks, to look at non-work sites. It identified social networking, web-based email and shopping and holiday sites as the biggest draws. Overall, they estimate the annual cost, per employee to be the region of £1000. According to the report, this costs UK businesses £10.6 billion (yes billion) a year in lost productivity.

Firstly of all, do they really expect us to believe that if there was a complete embargo on ‘non work related websites’ that we’d be saving the economy getting on for £11 billion? This assumes that these employees wouldn’t be doing other ‘wasteful’ things with their time if they weren’t surfing the web – like reading a newspaper or doing su-doku, or otherwise expanding their knowledge.

Secondly, they seem to have concluded that any serendipitous use of the internet is wasted time. What about all that information that has been both consciously and sub-consciously absorbed during this browsing experience? I wonder if they’ve quantified the times when some apparently useless nugget of information has been stored in the sub-concious and then used at some later date to contribute to the well being of the person (e.g. some health information), or maybe even applied to the workplace in a way that has improved productivity?

I’m saddened that a respected industry body such as the CBI should publish such report like this that draws some very debatable conclusions on a potentially flawed hypothesis that serendipitous use of the web is bad for business. Maybe they’d have us bring the workhouse back?

I just hope that managers will not use this report as further ammunition to restrict workers from using the web for anything other than browsing their own company’s web site. Let’s not apply 19th century working practices to 21st century workers!

Government gets to grips with social media 2 comments

For any twitter users that were not already aware, a press release advising that Gordon Brown (No10 Downing St) now has a twitter account. Not sure if I should worry but I’m one of the 472 people mentioned as being followed. I’m sure he’ll lose interest in me very soon!

Also of interest, the announcement by Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson about the creation of a “Power of Information Task Force”, which will drive forward the Government’s pledge to meet the rising aspirations of modern communications practice and improve engagement with citizens through social media. Lets just hope this initiative doesn’t get bogged down by the usual bureaucracy at the heart of Government. We live in hope!