Six steps to success in a world driven by cloud computing

By

I recently gave the keynote for an event series on cloud computing run by Telstra Business across five Australian cities. My keynote was followed by a presentation by Telstra’s Chief Technology Officer Hugh Bradlow.

In the current issue of Telstra’s customer magazine Business Insights the feature article is based on Hugh and myself. The article is here, with the full text of my quoted ‘Six Steps to Success’ is below.

Cloud computing: Interview with Ross Dawson and Hugh Bradlow

SIX STEPS TO SUCCESS

For businesses, the challenge is understanding the new technology and realising they’ll have to make significant shifts in the way they think and work to take full advantage of it all. Ross Dawson describes this process in his six steps to success, which covers everything from more flexible approaches to working, to new technology strategies.

Read more →

Australia’s top 25 business blogs ranked by traffic

By

SmartCompany has released a nice list of Australia’s 25 top business blogs, created by Brad Howarth.

With the list is a useful article running through the highlights of the blogs on the list, including why these leading businesses blog, the value they get from it, how they go about it, and far more. There is also a number of good points on the keys to running a success blog.

From the article it sounds like I was the first of the 25 bloggers featured to start blogging, kicking off in 2002. Next month I’ll be celebrating 8 years of blogging. Many more have joined in since then.

Below I have put the list of the 25 business blogs together with their authors, ranked by their web traffic from Alexa as of today. A couple of cautions to sound here: This list is about the top business blogs, which is more about business impact than traffic. Also Alexa figures are pretty unreliable, though at the moment there unfortunately aren’t many better tools to rank blogs, with Technorati rankings changed and Wikio not comprehensive.

My blog comes up at rank 7, though most of the ones ahead of me are professional blogs while I get to this when I can (unfortunately this is my second post in over two weeks now :-( ).

See the article in SmartCompany for the full review and to see descriptions of each blog. Brad has added some other blogs that just missed the cut this year on his blog.

1. Problogger (Darren Rouse): 2,069

2. Telstra Exchange: 8,771

3. Just Creative Design (Jacob Cass): 21,866

Read more →

7 Shifts: The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

By

Melcrum recently released a report on How to use social media to solve critical communication issues, with as usual some great case studies and many practical insights. Go to the report website for a full overview and executive summary.

I was asked to write the closing section in the report, on The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications. Below is my article in full. If you’re interested in the topic also see my recent Thoughts on the future of workplace communications.

The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

Organisations achieve their objectives by bringing together the talent and energy of many people. As such, the raft of emerging communications platforms today have the potential to literally transform how organizations work. From the 1990s, email fundamentally changed how most jobs were done. Now a wealth of new communication tools are being used to create sometimes dramatically different ways of working.

Based on the rapid emergence of social media and other new communication platforms, there are seven key aspects to how organisational communication will change.

Read more →

Thoughts on the future of workplace communication

By

Earlier today I spoke on a live webcast on the Future of Workplace Communication as part of Viocorp’s Future Forum series.

I took notes during the panel session and posted these live on my blog right after the event. I took notes while the other panellists were speaking: Nicky Wakefield, head of human capital at Deloitte, Philip Cronin, general manager of Intel Australia, and Oscar Trimboli, head of the information workers group at Microsoft.

I wasn’t able to take notes while I was speaking myself, so having had a look at the panel discussion which is now archived and can be viewed at the Viocorp site (requires registration), I’ve written out some of what I said during the discussion.

10:50 – 14:00

Workplace is not a good term to refer to the future – people will be working from anywhere so workplaces will have less impact than they have today. In the bigger context we also have to question whether organizations as we know them today will exist. Transaction costs are going down, meaning that moving forward, organizations will have to justify why they exist. There will be many business models bringing together loosely coupled talent and processes.

Read more →

Breathe in the cloud! Keynote for Telstra Business

By

This morning in Adelaide I delivered the first of five keynotes I’m doing as part of a Telstra Business national roadshow on cloud computing. I am giving the opening keynote at the breakfast series, followed by Telstra Chief Technology Officer Hugh Bradlow or his key staff.

In the preparation phase I wrote up a brief description of my keynote on Tapping the Forces of Change for use in Telstra’s promotion of the event to their clients and prospects. In doing so I came up with the concept of ‘Breathe in the Cloud‘ as a useful metaphor. Companies need to breathe in the resources of cloud computing in order to give them the vitality to grow and prosper.

Here is a video of the opening for my keynote, talking about why it is so important for companies to Breathe in the Cloud.

Thought leadership in technology – five key services to influence clients and increase sales

By

It is sometimes difficult to describe what my companies do. That is now a little bit easier, as we have created a flyer describing the key services of Advanced Human Technologies, focused on clients in the technology and media sector. The flyer does not mention our publishing and ventures activities, but covers the kind of consulting we do for vendors. Our Enterprise 2.0 flyer describes our work for corporate clients on implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Thought Leadership in Technology – Advanced Human Technologies

I hope it’s useful for those that want to know more about what we do (or may even want to engage us!).

I will later share some snapshots of what Future Exploration Network and The Insight Exchange are up to, to give a better picture of the group and how it fits together.

Revisiting the Web 2.0 Framework for insights on the web landscape today

By

I have just been requested permission by London School of Economics to use my Web 2.0 Framework in their Management and Innovation of eBusiness program for the next four years. The first part of the framework is below, and the industry landscape further down the page.

Web 2.0 Framework

Click on the image for the original description and full pdf

I’m delighted that the framework is still seen as relevant and useful over 3 years after it was created in May 2007. Certainly the original post continues to get plenty of traffic, not least because an image from the framework still appears on the front page of a Google search for ‘Web 2.0’. The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ has been largely replaced with ‘social media’, ‘cloud’ and similar terms, but the underlying concepts remain valid in understanding what is going on today.

I thought it would be worth reviewing the framework today to see what is still current and what I would change.

Read more →

Atlassian makes its Enterprise 2.0 ambitions clear – raises $60 million in first ever external funding

By

Big news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a ‘growth equity’ round.

Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft’s CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn’t need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company’s success.

Read more →

The Six Mindsets of Adaptive Leadership

By

Madston Black, a top-tier leadership development consultancy, recently engaged me to do some executive briefings on the future of business as part of some of leadership programs they are running for major Australian organizations.

For two of their major client leadership development programs, Madston Black also brought out Professor Ron Heifetz, Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, to run workshops. They also organized two very well-attended public presentations for Ron in Sydney and Melbourne, and kindly invited me along.

Here is the video of Ron Heifetz’s Sydney presentation – while it’s an hour long it’s well worth watching for the rich insights and examples he offered on adaptive leadership (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is his latest book).

Professor Ronald Heifetz Adaptive Leadership Presentation from Jimmy Tsang on Vimeo.

Read more →

Inmagic interview on Enterprise 2.0 and chance to win an Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report

By

‘Social Knowledge Network’ vendor Inmagic recently spoke to me for their interview series. Unfortunately there were problems with the audio recording, so they’ve provided a transcript of the interview on issues including uptake of Enterprise 2.0, the Enterprise 2.0 vendor landscape, the future of work, and what I enjoy about my own work.

The full interview is worth a read, but here is a quick excerpt. I recently wrote what turned out to be a very popular post on What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department offering six key issues. Inmagic took a couple of these points and discussed them on their blog. Here is the follow-up on that during the interview.

Janelle: I want to talk about your latest book, which is “Implementing Enterprise 2.0.” It’s something that we covered on our blog at Inmagic and there was an excerpt that you had on your blog where you talked about six implications of Enterprise 2.0 for IT. And a couple that drew our attention were your points about how it enables end users and how the requirements for IT security and archiving have gone up. Do you see either of these as an impediment to E2.0 adoption or do you think they are necessary ways to help organizations operate?

Read more →