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Emanuele Quintarelli's Library tagged benefits →  View Popular

11 Jun 09

Business 2.0

As organisations become more transparent, more open, more prepared to share we are seeing more and more intellectual capital being given away "free". There is the over-quoted example of Goldmine giving away its geological data, Sun Microsystems and IBM giving away software, and pharmaceutical companies collaborating openly on the human genome project.

These organisations haven't suddenly found a corporate conscience, they are still aggressive, quarterly driven, often American companies with shareholders to answer to. This is part of a deliberate strategy to compete in the modern world. The idea is that if you give away something that your competitors see as core business, you destabilise the market, and make what you charge for more valuable.

This trend, should it continue, is going to effect a profound change in the nature of the workplace and the type of people companies will look to employ.
Organisations will differentiate and compete on adding intellectual capital above and beyond what is publicly available, rather than try to milk a trade secret or cash-cow such as the Coca-Cola recipe. This will require more and more "knowledge workers" - people who don't follow an administrative business process to do their jobs but rely on their experiences, professionalism and networks to add value to their organisations - or, as recently described by Thomas A Stewart, "someone who gets to decide what he does each morning.." (thanks to Jessica Twentyman for finding me the source).

It won't be enough to hire knowledge workers to survive and thrive in this recession. Organisations will have to change their business practices to take advantage of their abilities, and provide them with the tools to be effective. Word, Outlook and even Sharepoint won't cut it. They will need custom built social platforms, or products such as Confluence, Jive, Socialtext and Lotus Connections.


This is not a technology driven change. These tools are a response to a new way of organising and operating companies, breaking free from 1950s m

www.headshift.com/...business-20.php - Preview

headshift business 2.0 jon mell 2009 knowledge management knowledge workers enterprise 2.0 ROI benefits business models

02 May 09

When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company

The potential benefits of collaboration are significant: innovative cross-unit product development, increased sales through cross-selling, the transfer of best practices that reduce costs.

But the conventional wisdom rests on the false assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. In fact, collaboration can just as easily undermine performance.

Too often a business leader asks, How can we get people to collaborate more? That’s the wrong question. It should be, Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value? In fact, to collaborate well is to know when not to do it.

This article offers a simple calculus for differentiating between “good” and “bad” collaboration using the concept of a collaboration premium. My aim is to ensure that groups in your organization are encouraged to work together only when doing so will produce better results than if they worked independently.

hbr.harvardbusiness.org/...1 - Preview

HBR article enterprise 2.0 Morten T.Hansen collaboration cost saving benefits 2009 sales product development toblog

21 Jan 08

Don't Fear the Wiki! Business Can Benefit

    • Other good reasons to choose wikis include:


      • Time Savings. Wiki does mean “fast,” after all. Wikis have a collaborative advantage over e-mail and better tracking functions than Microsoft Word. “They can accelerate project cycle times by cutting down on meetings, conference calls and e-mail volleyball,” notes Brainard.
      • No More Memory Loss. The ability to tag wiki pages allows users to recall those great ideas from a co-worker, the kind that used to languish in the e-mail queue and die off after 60 days. Wikis are a way to “capture group memory,” says Brainard.
      • Reduces E-mail. The ability of groups to collectively edit and develop documents can save hundreds of back-and-forth posts.
      • Better Venue for Client Collaboration. Wikis allow companies to work more directly with their clients on developing a finished product.
      • Younger Workers Already Use Them. Workers under 30 have grown up with YouTube, MySpace, and other Web 2.0 communication tools. They are used to the wiki concept, and take to it easily, notes Matt Cain, vice president and lead e-mail analyst at Gartner.

      The bottom line: it’s time to stop fearing the wiki. With today’s features, the wiki is one Web 2.0 tool that deserves a good look.

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