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Sun, Dec 9, 2007 16:07 EST

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Posted by: Abbie Lundberg in Soapbox Topic: Enterprise ManagementBlog: Difference Engine
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Business technology leaders should be all over social networking as a means of creating real value from the intellectual assets of the enterprise. The biggest barriers aren’t technical or even organizational – they’re cultural.
I stumbled upon an interesting presentation last week from Roo Reynolds, a smart and ardent Brit who works in IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the U.K. and sports one of those crazy titles (metaverse evangelist) that make regular businesspeople feel chronically unhip.
As an aside: I’m happy IBM has a metaverse evangelist because virtual worlds hold tremendous promise for collaboration and work of all kinds, and IBM’s got lots of bright people and plenty of money to put into a) figuring out how to make that work and b) communicating that to the aforementioned chronically unhip businesspeople.
Anyway… Reynolds was giving the presentation, titled “the IBM 2010 CIO Outlook” (which of course caught my attention) in Zurich last week. You can view the slides, complete with speaker notes, on Slideshare.
Now that he’s actually given the talk, he’s added the audio to the preso too. How cool is that?
The presentation identifies critical trends and provides a kind of roadmap for the CIOs’ office at IBM. The fourth slide shows the six trends IBM leaders believe will have the greatest impact on their organization and employees in the next few years.
Here’s the list:
Global integration: Companies of all sizes are now doing business globally. The ability to create new relationships and discover new capabilities will be a critical differentiator.
Participatory internet: Employees increasingly live online. Value is created by capturing and re-using the interactions of loosely connected people. (This aligns with Andrew McAfee’s model of the strength of weak ties.)
Workforce demographics: The boomers are retiring, taking all their knowledge with them unless you capture it somehow – and traditional knowledge management sure didn’t work. At the same time, younger workers expect to be connected to all information and all people anywhere, anytime.
Virtualized data and devices: With applications and data moving online, “the user’s computing platform can be anything that supports a web browser – a car, a cell phone, an airplane backrest or a virtual wall display. In addition, communication devices (and browsers) will be able to jump from wireless to cellular to wireless without dropping a session, thus opening up more flexibility and convenience.”
The list also includes software as a service and siimplicity from design.
Slide six gets to the crux of why social networking is not just relevant but crucial for businesspeople to embrace:
Reynolds aludes here to the challenges of social networking in the enterprise. Some of them, like data quality, security management and compliance, can be worked out with
There is a lot of talk about employees having to open up and not hoarding information, but sharing it. I believe in many cases it is management that needs to do this in the first place, i.e. lead by example.
Transparancy starts from the top.
Technology and distributed teams yield a less personal and more costly alternative to collocated team members. The culture gap the author points out stems from these forces. Our teams communicate less effectively.
“Over the wall” learning preceded the WEB and virtual teams. When we lost physical presence to virtual teams, we cut significant links where socializing, project news, and knowledge trickled through the walls, across cubicles.
To compensate, WEB tools provide an incomplete responses with chat rooms, shared calendars and instant messaging providing a limited “over the wall” effect. With it, our self censoring on WEB tools limit information shared more than its predecessors. We lose contributions from the person who is not as organized. And WEB tool upgrades for operating systems, email, and other communications disrupt our work flows. Impromptu graphics emanating from a meeting hamstring teams today.
One personal example of over the wall, I stepped in for 2 people after they resigned to finish a key business application implementation. My credentials included that I sat next to them for 6 months, hearing the misery and pain they experienced. I was not consciously listening but I became aware of the team, the technology, business dilemmas, personalities and vendor issues. I succeeded as a fresh face and some depth of understanding.
Culturally we sacrificed team effectiveness for the convenience of working from home. The WEB tools compensate at a significant expense. As a manager, I understand the trade offs.
I come into the office almost every day, even though I could often work from home. I am a strong believer in "over the wall" interactions, and I find that the value from casual and unplanned interactions with colleagues more than compensates for my 30-minute commute. However, "over the wall" interaction only works for people who are within commuting distance of my office. I work for a global company, and many of the people with whom I work most closely are thousands of miles away in different countries and time zones. For my interactions with these people, I find that IM provides an essential channel for informal networking that can in some cases be as close a relationship as "popping a head round the door" in a physically collocated environment.
It's not easy to make this work effectively. It takes considerable time and many face-to-face interactions to build the depth of relationship that can be sustained through remote electronic communication, and with some people, you never quite get there. When things do "click" and close relationships are built, I'm very grateful for the electronic tools that have enabled me to develop close and valuable relationships with people that I could otherwise never have got to know so well because of physical collocation constraints.
Simon - it sounds like your situation is perfect for using more social networking tools. IM is great for those quick hit questions and answers, but it only goes so far. Have you tried Facebook or any other true social networking platforms - even on a personal basis? I'd be curious to know if you think that has application to your work experience.
As a city-planner/urban designer, this discussion is especially interesting when "local government" replaces "enterprise" and one then considers the implications for the entire sustainable development debate. It is increasingly apparent that should the public (client) not be given a more important role in determining the evolution of the urban environment (through making the development process much more transparent and open) well, the public just might take the decision-making back!
A very stimulating train of thought for my profession.