The role of informal social networks in building organizational creativity and innovation

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For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications.

The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident the power of these approaches. In particular for high-performing organizations, applying social network analysis is one of the most useful tools in pushing value creation to the next level. This is evident in the California Management Review paper I co-authored on Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective, in which we examined how to improve performance in sales, innovation, and execution.

Innovation is of course a particularly pointed issue today, with the increasing pace of external and industry change driving the necessity of effective, applied creativity. However this is often difficult in large, complex organizations.

To this point, the IBM Institute for Business Value has released a report on Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity.

The report has some interesting insights and findings, including this chart of the opposites needing resolution in a creative organization.


Source: IBM Creative Leadership Report
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Where Google+ needs to go: Why we need to be able to follow parts of people’s personas

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The centrality and ease of use of the Circles feature means Google+ is a significant step forward in social networking. It has been a key platform in its initial success.

The Circles feature enables people to selectively share content. Someone can send work-related discussions to their public stream, photos of their children to their family, and information about a boating event to their yacht club friends.

This effectively addresses privacy issues in allowing us to share both public and private information on the one platform, and not have to divide ourselves across different profiles.

However even our public personas have many facets. One person can be a leading software developer, music enthusiast, food lover, skier, and overall a lovable person. All of that is public – there are no constraints on sharing in any of those spaces.

Some people will want to follow everything that person shares. Many may be only interested in their thoughts on software development, and not care about the rest. Yet they have no choice – either they follow everything that person shares or nothing.

Gartner analyst and VP Brian Prentice brought this into focus in a recent Google+ post:
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Futurist conversations: Thoughts on the future of television

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Continuing our series of conversations between fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here is our session on the future of television.

Here are a few of the ideas we share in the session:
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Reality mining, pervasive data capture, and how Big Data can create value

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On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium.

CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It says:

Speaking at the event, co-hosted by Storage Networking Industry Association A/NZ and Computerworld Australia, strategy advisor, author and futurist, Ross Dawson, said “reality mining” — the gathering of data based on the activities of people in a given environment — was a major trend to emerge out of, and contributor to, Big Data.

“If you look at an office environment there is an extraordinary amount of data to look at. For example, what gestures people are making, where are they looking, what conversations are they having, how much are they smiling when they speak to each other?” he said.

“You can literally get terabytes of data out of just a few hours of this. That data is being collected to drive productivity; to design new ways to enhance collaboration and create value inside organisations.”

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DARPA offers $42 million for ‘revolutionary’ research on social media analysis

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (slogan: Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise) is offering $42 million in funding for “revolutionary” research into social media in strategic communication.

The DARPA announcement states:

The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media]sharing technology (such as YouTube), and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology. Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potential to help the Armed Forces better understand the environment in which it operates and to allow more agile use of information in support of operations.

The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi]automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

The New York Times comments:
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Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on Open vs Closed Systems

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Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.

Here are a few of the points we make in the video:
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Governance as opportunity: Governance, risk, and compliance in the cloud

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One of my key themes is that of governance as enabler. As I proposed in my keynote on the transformation of business at the recent AICD conference, ‘Governance should focus as much on enabling innovation and taking useful risks as about managing and mitigating risk’. Over 93% of the 600 or so company directors present agreed with me. 

Today I’m at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, where I earlier gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure. Looking at governance from the perspective of information technologies is very instructive. Governance is a top priority for CIOs and IT departments, not least because there is so much that can go wrong in information management, notably from losing or exposing valuable data.

GRC is the acronym used by industry hands describe Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Compliance is becoming increasingly prominent – arguably even dominant – in technology, because government agencies are legislating on how consumer data should be protected, what information needs to be kept, the audit trails required, and even where physically data can be stored. The US SEC has sufficient expectations of companies’ data storage and retrieval capabilities to mandate hefty fines for every day taken to respond to requests for data.
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Steve Duplessie on information infrastructure and shifts in data storage

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Directly following my opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium was Steve Duplessie, who is recognized as one of the top people in the world on information infrastructure. 

Here are some notes taken from his excellent keynote:
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Keynote slides: The Future of Information Infrastructure

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This morning I am giving the opening keynote at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, organized by the Storage Network Industry Association and Computerworld.

Here are the slides to my keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure.

My usual warning applies: these slides are intended as visual support to my keynote, not as stand-alone slides. In this case they are even more than usually epigrammatic. However I share them for attendees and anyone else who might enjoy them. I will try to write more about some of my key points later.

Keynote: The Future of Information Infrastructure

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The evidence is in: we believe technology will create a better future but not better environment

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The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050.

Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version.


Image source: Good

The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation from the results.

Here are some of what the American people believe will (or is likely to) happen by 2050:
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