Official: Give staff Facebook ‘or risk losing them’

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The other day I wrote a post titled Implementing Web 2.0 is critical for attracting talent.

I just saw this newspaper article titled: Give staff Facebook ‘or risk losing them’

CONSTRUCTION giant John Holland says allowing employees to access social networking site Facebook can play a role in attracting and keeping young workers.

The building company has been hit hard by the current skills shortage, with group managing director David Stewart highlighting engineering as a profession experiencing an “extreme” shortage.

…and goes on to describe why John Holland decided banning Facebook was dumb.

Thanks for the pointer from James Dellow. Yes, you’re right James, I love it!

Delivering Tomorrow’s Newspaper: The view from 2020

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This is something you just have to see. Richard Watson of Future Exploration Network has created a fabulous article on the future of newspapers titled Delivering Tomorrow’s Newspaper, written from the perspective of 2020.

The article, dated October 18, 2020, appears in Changing Times, an “Initiative of the Indo-China European Union”, in its “Marginally Leftist version”. Click on the image below for the complete article (1MB pdf).

changingtimes.jpg

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This is just the beginning of social networking for professionals

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The current issue of BOSS magazine has an article titled “MyWorkSpace” (unfortunately not available online), with an intro: “They’re the new places to see and be seen, and the hottest social networking sites are also places to forge business”.

It quotes me as follows:

Ross Dawson, chairman of the research group Future Exploration Network, says social networks are becoming an important vehicle for engaging with employees and customers. “If appropriately harnessed and designed, they can be extraordinarily valuable tools, both within organisations and for engagement externally,” he says. “Facebook has become as much a professional networking tool as it has a personal networking tool.”

Reuters, for example, has released its own social networking platform for financial professionals, while software companies such as IBM and BEA have developed their own social media software so that these same tools can be used internally by enterprises.

“We’ve reach the point where professionals will find it harder if they are not on these networks,” Dawson says. “These are where people are spending time, and it is an easy place to reach out and build relationships. If we think five to 10 years fowrard we can’t say what it is going to be like, but we do know that social networking tools will be central to our professional lives.”

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Microsoft teams up to improve its Enterprise 2.0 offering

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Microsoft has just announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that it is partnering with Atlassian on its enterprise wiki product Confluence and Newsgator on its newly released Newsgator Social sites, which is “a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware”. Both products will be integrated into Sharepoint.

This is a very interesting announcement on a number of fronts. It shows that Microsoft recognizes that its Enterprise 2.0 offering (what Microsoft calls “social computing”) needs bolstering. Sharepoint is fundamentally a collaboration and document management system, and in fact provides both the underlying capabilities and many of the functionalities required in applying Web 2.0 approaches inside the enterprise. However these are not always easy to set up and use, which is a requisite of Web 2.0 technologies. For example, since Sharepoint is among other things a richly-featured document management system, wiki-style functionality is a core part of the offering. However it is not an out-of-the-box capability, meaning administrators usually need to configure the setup, at least in the first case. RSS, another staple of Enterprise 2.0, can be enabled in any Sharepoint document. However again this is not an intuitive end-user function.

In this case, Microsoft is choosing to partner with leading companies in the space. Atlassian was featured as one of our five showcased companies at our Web 2.0 in Australia event, and ranked second on my list of top 60 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia earlier this year. Atlassian is the leader in enterprise wikis, saying 4,000 organizations globally using their wiki product. Its ease of use is one of the major advantages over the current Sharepoint wiki offering.

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Professional services are the future of the economy

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When I was in Singapore recently to deliver a keynote for a client, I was interviewed by Radio Singapore International.

Click here for the transcript and podcast of the interview on the Radio Singapore website – the complete interview is also below.

While it was a brief interview focused on professional services, a few themes emerged. One is that the economy is shifting to be predominantly based on professional services. Products and technology-based services are increasingly commoditized, however specialist expertise is becoming more valuable. If a professional has truly world class expertise, it doesn’t matter where he or she is located. However collaboration – or what I term knowledge-based relationships – is what makes that professional expertise valuable.

In short, the future of the global economy will increasingly be focused on professional services, not in the narrow sense of law, accounting, consulting and so on, but in the broader sense of deep specialist expertise applied to create value. The art and science of managing professional services firms and economies is a critical domain.

Here is the interview transcript:

Join me, Melanie Yip in Business Ideas this week as I speak with Ross Dawson, CEO of international consulting firm Advanced Human Technologies to find out.

RD: Traditionally, professional services have been what we think of as professions – law, accounting, consulting and so on. Yet, more and more professional services are becoming a larger part of the economy. Today, 82% of the US economy is professional services. It is also a wide variety of other services. But what professional services are about nowadays is the application of specialist knowledge. As the economy advances, and more information is available, a professional is one who has deep specialist knowledge. And it helps their clients as a result of that.

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Implementing Web 2.0 is critical for attracting talent to legal and professional firms

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A recent article in Lawyers Weekly magazine titled Firms warned to embrace Web 2.0 opens as follows:

AUSTRALIAN LAW firms risk losing clients as well as talent if they don’t make use of Web 2.0 technologies, an expert warns.

Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, said that Australian firms are lagging far behind their US and UK counterparts, which are leading the way when it comes to adopting new web technologies.

“If you look at the corporate sector globally, the industry that has been one of the first to take up blogs has been the legal industry, primarily in the US and UK. So you’ve had a proliferation of blogs that are both external in terms of providing clients with information and internal ones used for a wide variety of means including project management, knowledge management, and effective internal communication,” Dawson said.

“One of the fundamental issues is that organisations in Australia tend to be conservative. And while it’s arguable the legal industry is also quite conservative in other countries, that can certainly be said about the Australian legal industry.”

Dawson, who specialises in assisting major global organisations to develop future strategies and innovation capabilities, said technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS feeds and social bookmarking are of most direct relevance to information- and knowledge-centric organisations such as law firms.

“Ultimately [if you don’t embrace these technologies] you’ll lose to competitors in terms of their use of these tools and their ability to bring people together and collaborate. There is now a whole suite of technologies and tools and approaches for this purpose and if organisations don’t take that up they are not as competitive or effective as others.

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Newsgator implements APML: the value of standards in an open world

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Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), the standard for sharing attention profiles that I wrote about recently, has received a major boost today. The prominent RSS aggregator Newsgator has announced that it is implementing APML, while Engagd reports that a range of significant players are joining the APML working group, including social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia, feed reader Bloglines, online application provider Peepel, social recommendation tool Me.dium, and the semantic content platform Talis.

The diversity of the new participants in APML points to some of the value of the standard. Starting from the more obvious applications, APML can be implemented by any news aggregator or feed reader to provide personalized, relevant information to the user. Those aggregators that provide this extra level of value will be more useful. One of the most interesting emerging spaces at the moment is that of social browsing recommendations. I wrote a few months ago about Cluztr, a website that gathers complete data about everything that users do online, including every site that they click on and how long they spend there. One of the most valuable things that emerges is the ability to find what is most interesting to people with similar interest (or attention) profiles to yourself. Clearly appropriate security and boundaries to the use of the data are required, but given that, extremely personalized recommendations can be made. Me.dium provides a related service, overlaying the browsing recommendations with a social network that enables users to link to people with similar interest profiles.

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Extinction Timeline: what will disappear from our lives before 2050

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When people talk about the future, they usually point to all the new things that will come to pass. However the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing. This means it is particularly useful to consider everything in our lives that is likely to become extinct.

Below is the Extinction Timeline created jointly by What’s Next and Future Exploration Network – click on the image for the detailed timeline as a pdf (1.2MB).

For those who want a quick summary of a few of the things that we anticipate will become extinct in coming years:

2009: Mending things

2014: Getting lost

2016: Retirement

2019: Libraries

2020: Copyright

2022: Blogging, Speleeng, The Maldives

2030: Keys

2033: Coins

2036: Petrol engined vehicles

2037: Glaciers

2038: Peace & Quiet

2049: Physical newspapers, Google

Beyond 2050: Uglyness, Nation States, Death

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Online bringing people together: Brooklyn Bridge Photowalk

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While I was spending some time in New York recently, Dave Sifry, until recently CEO of Technorati, just happened to organize a photowalk on Brooklyn Bridge of a Saturday morning. He was in new York for a few days, so decided to organize it, posted it on his blog, got some other bloggers to mention it, and he mentioned it on his Facebook page. Around 10 of us saw it and decided to go along. At lunch in a restaurant in Chinatown after the event, we all told of how we came to be there. David had only met two of the people on the walk – I’ve known David for quite a few years now and have previously been to one of his photo exhibitions in San Francisco – while the rest had come across the gathering in other ways through blogs, social networks, or personal connections. It was a great example of how the online world easily enables people to get together to do fun things in the real live world away from screens. Get an idea to do something interesting, and you’ll likely find similarly inclined people to do it with you.

Below are a few of my photos from the day, including some of my wife Victoria and daughter Leda, who came along for the fun. It’s also well worth having a look at the complete set of David’s photos from the day.

new york

Manhattan through the wires

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Bill Amelio, CEO of Lenovo, and Ross Dawson interviewed on global sourcing

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Mark Jones of The Scoop, a recently launched podcast series from the Australian Financial Review and MIS Magazine, recently interviewed Bill Amelio, CEO of PC manufacturer Lenovo (formerly the PC division of IBM), and myself in a discussion on global sourcing.

Click here to go to The Scoop podcast page.

Amelio has been a strong proponent of what he calls “worldsourcing,” laying out the ideas in a recent article in Forbes titled Worldsource or Perish. Some have seen this stance as a way of diverting attention from the significant Chinese ownership of the company. A more relevant perspective is that Lenovo is a harbinger of the truly global corporations of the future, which will be very different animals from the companies of today. Currently almost all large companies have very distinct single national identities (primarily American) that are spread across many countries, despite the common rhetoric of global organizational cultures.

In the podcast Amelio discusses Lenovo’s perspective on sourcing design and products from wherever they’re best found around the planet, and Lenovo’s current challenges.

Some of the issues I raise in the interview include:

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