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Why You Can't Use Personal Technology at the Office
"At the office, you've got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company's internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.
At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You've got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don't always figure out exactly what you're looking for, they're practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.
This is the double life many people lead: yesterday's technology for work, today's technology for everything else. The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace—Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter and so on—but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto."
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Companies now have an array of technologies at their disposal to give employees greater freedom without breaking the bank or laying out a welcome mat for hackers
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Some forward-thinking companies are already giving employees more freedom to pick mobile phones, computers and applications for work—in some cases, they're even giving workers allowances to spend on outfitting themselves. The result, they've found, is more-productive
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Death by Information Overload
Current research suggests that the surging volume of available information—and its interruption of people’s work—can adversely affect not only personal well-being but also decision making, innovation, and productivity. In one study, for example, people took an average of nearly 25 minutes to return to a work task after an e-mail interruption. That’s bad news for both individuals and their organizations.
There’s hope, though. Innovative tools and techniques promise relief for those of us struggling with information inundation. Some are technological solutions—software that automatically sorts and prioritizes incoming e-mail, for instance—designed to regulate or divert the deluge. Others prevent people from drowning by getting them to change the way they behave and think. Who knows: Maybe someday even I will enjoy swimming in the powerful currents of information that now threaten to pull me under.
What is the Real Value of Pilots to Technology Adoption?
The majority of respondents were positive about the value of pilots because they are culturally and functionally useful. One of the most important benefits of running a pilot is that it gives you an opportunity to discover and fix any technical issues before a tool is made available to thousands or tens of thousands of people. Fixing those problems while they’re small and you’re working with a pilot group that’s empathetic makes it much easier to refine the system for a smooth rollout and adoption.
Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
Salesforce launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?
Salesforce’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks a pre-determined way to identify the profiles of Twitter profiles and primary keys within the CRM database. Secondly, the system doesn’t provide a default setting to prioritize the influence (such as more followers) vs a profile with few followers –limiting the ability for brands to prioritize their support offerings.
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Despite Salesforce’s technical announcement, this doesn’t mean success for their customers. Technology is only 20% of any enterprise change, the other 80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change –key requirements that Salesforce is not equipped to provide.
Balancing Technology and Culture During a Social Business Implementation
The topic of corporate culture and social computing has been done to death but still seems to rumble on as an undercurrent for many blog posts. Views range from the suggestion that corporate culture needs to be right for social computing to succeed all the way through to suggestions that social computing can act as a catalyst for cultural change. Of course its never as clear as either of those academic stances and when you listen to people in workshops saying, "it's not about the technology, it's about the people," in the same breath as, "the platform has to be perfect," it becomes very apparent very quickly that there is confusion over where the optimum balance lies.
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Let me start by saying the final aim of any social business program shouldn't be to find balance between technology and culture.
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In a company with a good culture they'd see the benefit of sharing and make the best of the tools they have. In a poor culture, one where there is fear or dislike of sharing, it's easy for people to use the drawbacks of the technology or process as an excuse not to share. "It's too cumbersome to upload a document," "It's too difficult to find a time when everyone is available for a meeting." In this case an answer would be to set-up a blog platform. Make the blog platform easy to use. Make the process of posting to the blog wonderfully simple. Those people who didn't share simple because the ways of sharing in the past weren't good enough will now be able to share. Those who used technology as an excuse will still not share.
Sanity check: Is IT no longer about technology?
It’s become horribly cliche to talk about the importance of IT-business alignment and the need for IT professionals to become much more business-savvy, but Gartner’s Tom Austin (right) takes it to the next level. He believes that the IT professional of the future will be less of an engineer and more of a social scientist.
What? Yes, you heard that right — the word “social” will become a key part of the IT professional’s job description. It flies in the face of most of the stereotypes about techies and it sounds a little corny, but Austin does draw some interesting conclusions that are worth a look, if only because they are so unconventional.
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“Too often, we have measurement and reward systems that are focused on how many transactions did you process, how many orders did you ship, and how many deals did you close — rather than who helped these other people succeed.”
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“There are still people in IT who’ll have to worry about keeping the systems running, but now we’re going to think more about how to exploit the things we can do with social networking, expertise location, and all of the other higher-level social ordered phenomenon we can facilitate using technology.”
How to Use Interns In Your Social Programs
While they’re certainly heavy adopters (our data proves this) –it’s not limited to the youth only, take for example this report I did on the active Boomers. Using low cost interns are critical in getting an often unfunded skunk-works project is a good way to get the program up to speed in house –but relying on them for strategic corporate communications is a risk.
Tackling Enterprise 2.0 Resistance
There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.
1) Internal factors to the person or group - where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors - if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors - where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.
The Clash Of Ages: How Technology Divides Workers
If you're a boss, what do you do about employees who love to tweet, text and social network throughout the day? It's a question companies are grappling with as the generation gap threatens to create a communications divide.
Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0
I’m dividing my 2.0 vs. 1.0 comparisons into two groups. First is a set of patterns where 2.0 is just better than 1.0 – where the old should, I believe, just be replaced with the new. Second is a set in which 2.0 is an alternative or addition to 1.0, not a replacement for it. This second group of patterns, in other words, shows two alternatives, both of them valuable and viable, for how computers are used to get work done.
Enterprise 2.0 Isn’t a Checklist
This appears to be indicative of all emerging disciplines/practices. But for Enterprise 2.0, unlike Data Warehousing, the predominant focus is NOT technology. And yet, from where does the funding or focus from such initiatives typically come? This is a much larger issue — one related to obsolete organizational design practices. The reason IT is the most obvious choice for sponsorship is that it is the only organization not vertically challenged — it delivers (or should) only horizontal services to an enterprise — crossing all other departments. Indeed, IT is one of the few organizations that takes on the battle to find common threads across organizations to weave the horizontal lines of the tapestry that holds the business together.
And yet, the approaches needed for E2.0 initiatives are the antithesis of typical IT practices.
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An optimal E2.0 initiative evolves organically (hold that thought for further clarification).
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this is an era to shift away from the locked down binary code of repeatability (optimal for machinery) and become more comfortable with the ’squishy’ realm of the heuristic (optimal for capitalizing on human wetware).
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It’s all about the attitude: Boomers and Gen Y on technology
In other areas, however, attitudes towards technology diverge based on age. The younger workers from Gen Y tend to be more liberal than Baby Boomers on Internet usage during work hours. Around 62% of Gen Y admitted to accessing social networking sites from work whereas only 14% of Boomers did so. As for browsing Internet bulletin boards and forums, it’s 47% for Gen Y versus 27% for Boomers. Lastly, 44% of Gen Y confess to going to mutimedia sharing websites like Youtube against just 24% of Boomers.
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” Perhaps it’s not surprising that over two-thirds (68%) of Boomers decry the proliferation of PDAs and mobile phones as a contributor to the decline in workplace manners, while only less than half (46%) of Gen Y workers agree with this assessment.
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It seems that the key here is the perception of productivity. A mere 17% of Boomers say that using laptops or PDAs during in-person meetings is efficient, versus 35% for Gen Y. Blogging about work-related issues is tolerable for just 28% of Boomers, in contrast to 41% of Gen Y who are fine with it. Almost half of Gen Y workers (47%) see nothing wrong with befriending a client on a social networking site, but only 24% of Boomers feel the same way. When it comes to befriending their colleagues on these sites, 76% of Gen Y are all for it while only 38% of Boomers think that it’s appropriate.
The Rise of the Chief Performance Officer
A few weeks ago Obama nominated Jeffrey Zients, another consultant and Washington business executive, for the role. I don't know Zients, but I think the Chief Performance Officer role has a lot of potential, and it's a new wrinkle for something like this to appear first in the federal government.
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Some of the participants pointed out that if you're going to be merging things, you might as well go a bit further. They noted, for example, that if you want to align knowledge and learning with work, you need to know something about business processes and how to improve them. And if you're going to align processes with the content needed to perform them effectively, you need to know something about the technology that would deliver the content in accordance with job tasks.
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The danger, of course, is that a broad business improvement organization would have such breadth that it would lose focus, or that no individual business improver could master the broad array of tools offered. It will be interesting to see how organizations resolve this tradeoff of capability and focus.
Consumer apps in the workplace: much worse than expected
To maintain a grip on application and device security, enterprises will clearly have to work harder. Gartner, for example, predicts that by 2011, 10% of all information technology spending will reside with employees. Employees will acquire their own technology and use it for work purposes - especially in situations where no clear policy is set. Employees are also set to customize 90% of the technology they use at work by 2015.
Stay Home and Work
Workers of the world, go remote!
During this time of economic crisis and reinvention of global capitalism, one of the things crying out for reinvention is the rigid workplace of the last century. It is amazing in the digital age that most work is still associated with industrial age work rhythms and the symbolic chains that tie workers, knowledge and otherwise, to fixed locations. Flexible workplaces with flexible hours and days are long in coming.
Open Enterprise 2009 - Charlene Li Interviewed by Stowe Boyd
Head over to Open Enterprise 2009: Charlene Li Interview and hit play (Or watch it directly here with the embedded link shared below) for an entertaining exchange of some of the following ideas:
1. On Leadership
2. On Bottom-up or Top-Down (This is something I will be blogging about it, too, to share some further insights on the topic)
3. On the Power Shift as Cultural Barrier
4. On Tools
5. On Blogs
6. On 10 Years Ahead
What are the tech bloggers missing? Your business!
It’s to the point where I’m wondering if I’m missing something. Is anyone doing a good job of explaining how to bring a business into the modern age?
Where is the Business Value in Enterprise 2.0?
What we haven’t done so well is make the business value case—how does it help organizations become more productive and competitive?
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What we haven’t done so well is make the business value case—how does it help organizations become more productive and competitive?
Innovating for all the wrong reasons
My good friend and fellow TechRepublic blogger Chad Perrin suggested that I write about when clients pursue change for the wrong reasons. If your client says, “We need to implement TPD” (an abbreviation I just made up to stand for Technology/Process of the Day), you better make sure it isn’t because of any of these motivations.
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It’s buzzword compliant.
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The competition’s doing it.
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Social networking in the office
I’m seeing a pattern here. The debate over use of social network usage is simply the latest incarnation of this old debate. There were probably similar debates about the introduction of papyrus in ancient Egypt. The issue of misuse of technology is a management issue. If people are not doing their job removing a technology will not alter that fact. If they don’t want to do their work they will find other ways of not doing when we remove Facebook access.
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Businesses need to manage staff on the quality and timeliness of their output, not upon time served in the office. And, just like email has become an essential business tool, we need to discover how to use social networks for business advantage. Again, this is why I am in favour of defining rules of engagement in social media and social computing for staff to help them to use this new technology in ways that support the business.
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