Emanuele Quintarelli's Library tagged headshift → View Popular

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

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

21 May 09

Second-wave adopters are coming. Are you prepared? Part 1 / 3

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headshift adoption adoption waves barriers christoph schmaltz 2009

11 Jan 08

Sharepoint, Confluence and Newsgator: towards the social stack

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2007 confluence enterprise 2.0 headshift newsgator ross mayfield sharepoint social stack

18 Dec 07

Cogenz - Headshift

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case studies cogenz enterprise 2.0 headshift knowledge management research social bookmarking

24 Aug 07

(Non) Adoption of social computing in organisations: busyness or laziness?

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adoption enterprise 2.0 headshift roi

Because social tools differ from traditional IT solutions. In what sense? Most traditional IT solutions are designed to address one and only one issue. E.g. if one wants to improve its customer relations, it will go for a CRM solution. One problem, one solution. From there is it pretty easy to analyse and measure the variation and consequently provide a priori answers on ROI. Traditional software vendors sell "solutions".
The trick (and beauty) with social computing is that one tool can address many issues and provide a diversity of solutions.
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- As a result, it is very difficult to provide an answer to the ROI query. In fact it is difficult a priori. Software vendors and consultants can only provide estimates that are ultimately pointless. Hence my above mentioned preference. But when social computing enters the organisational arena, measurement is a key element in the decision making process. And some people won't go for a solution they can't financially justify it to their sponsor or board. That's fair.
- The ROI question does have an answer. Measurement is possible, but context is king. It is only when in context, where the issue to address is well defined, where tools are correctly customised to processes and credentials, that the impact of social computing can be measured. Measurement is possible when implemented, a posteriori.
- The role of a consultant or a software vendor in social computing is not to provide an off-the-shelf solution and the scorecard that goes along with it
- Their role is to define issues that social computing can tackle better than traditional corporate software, and help integrate that smoothly in the ecosystem.
- The real issue is not about busyness, as Andrew McAfee writes, but rather laziness.
  
  Why? Because the adoption of social computing in organisations - some call this Enterprise 2.0 - is a major evolution of both the knowledge economy and organisational development. It is meant to create a better way of sharing knowledge in organisations, which is a key intangible asset. It is meant to create more sustainable businesses. It is about delivering the right info to the right people at the right time, rather than focussing on storing data (a major activity of IT). As Martin Roulleaux Dugage says: enough of building sky-scrapers, let's build bridges. A smart and profitable company is made out of informed employees, simply because a well informed employee is more efficient in his/her role. Implementing social-computing in organisations is serious business.
- There is no standard recipe to encapsulate the new, social, way of doing things: we are all experimenting in different contexts. Experience shows that a good method is bottom-up, such as a small pilot group with defined needs, a collaboratively designed prototype, a test phase and eventually diffusion more widely within the organisation.
- I do think ROI for Enterprise 2.0 can be measured, or at least described. Firstly, the 'I' should be quite small, at least in terms of software. The 'R' would seem to consist of (in descending order of quantifiability):
  
  - time not wasted searching
  
  - reduced iterations in eg project processes
  
  - wheels not reinvented
  
  - innovation (and other desirable outcomes of collaboration) that would not otherwise have happened.