Keynote at Gartner: Driving Business Results Through Personal Networks

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A little while ago I gave a keynote at the Gartner Symposium. Gartner looks to its analysts to share their deep research at their events. It also invites a handful of external speakers to bring a lighter and more entertaining – though still pragmatic – approach and style.

I suggested the topic of Driving Business Results Through Personal Network, which can readily be made fun and interesting, but is also extremely practical for senior technology executives. It was a broad-ranging keynote, ranging across topics including why we need to understand the Bacon number, why boundary spanners are so critical for organizations, the long tail of sexual activity, how to enhance serendipity, and steps to being an energizing leader.

Inset into the presentation were two sets of recommendations, on building personal online networks and on enhancing organizational networks. At the risk of taking them out of the supporting context, here they are:

BuildingOnlineNetworks.jpg

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What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department

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Our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is intended as a practical guide to how to create business value with web technologies inside the organization.

One of the key issues is the implications of these approaches for the organization and its key functional areas. Not surprisingly, there are a particular set of pressing issues for the IT department. These are covered in the report – we have excerpted Chapter 19 on the implications for IT below.

WHAT ENTERPRISE 2.0 MEANS FOR IT

Enterprise 2.0 has significant implications for the IT function of organizations. It is of course generally the responsibility of the IT function to facilitate the adoption of technologies that create value for the enterprise. However Enterprise 2.0 technologies both have significant cultural aspects to their use and uptake, and can have a significant impact on the underlying business processes and even value creation inside the organization.

Following are the primary issues that need to be understood and addressed, both by the CIO and his or her team, and the senior executive team and board of the organization.

1. Increased user expectations

One of the most important implications of Web 2.0 for organizations is that staff are increasingly exposed to very useful and well designed applications on the open web. The contrast with existing enterprise applications is usually stark.

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Australian Open Innovation Competition: how about complete corporate transparency?

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My good friends and network experts Laurie Lock Lee and Cai Kjaer are the founders of Optimice, which has recently acquired Australian rights to the Enterprise 2.0 ideas management software Spigit. The platform is used to power, among other initiatives, the Cisco i-Prize, which gives prizes of up to $250,000 to external teams for generating ideas for Cisco’s next billion-dollar business, and Pfizer’s internal innnovation initiatives.

Features of the platform include reputation scores for contributors, ideas trading markets to buy and sell ideas, and participation-based currency with redemptions, all of which can create a real marketplace for ideas inside organisations.

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Creating competitive differentiation with Enterprise 2.0

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 effectively is extremely challenging, as many organizations have discovered. However that is precisely why succeeding can create real and lasting competitive differentiation. In fact I believe that the ability to use collaborative technologies to enhance organizational performance will be one of the most critical competences for companies in years to come. This is not least because this ability reflects on the culture and implicit organizational structure far more than it does on technology.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0, providing some of the basic arguments as to why Enterprise 2.0 is a key management issue.

CREATING DIFFERENTIATION

Nicholas Carr’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter created massive controversy and debate by affirming that information technology was now a commodity and no longer provided competitive advantage to companies.

IT Doesn’t Matter, Nicholas Carr, Harvard Business Review, May 2003

Does IT Matter? An IT Debate – Letters to the Editor, Harvard Business Review, June 2003

Since then, numerous articles and research studies have shown that the degree and effectiveness of investment in information technology does drive competitive differentiation within industries.

Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008

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6 Steps in Enterprise 2.0 Governance Projects

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I believe that governance is at the heart of effective Enterprise 2.0 implementation. While many shy away at the term, mainly because governance is usually focused on risk and limitations, I see it differently. True governance is just as much about ensuring that opportunities are taken as it is as about containing risk. Governance, done well, is an enabler of innovation, providing parameters, guidelines and policies that address risks, and allow the greatest possible scope for experimentation and value creation.

As such most of my client work on Enterprise 2.0 is helping executives to frame governance and develop effective strategies. Advanced Human Technologies doesn’t do implementation; we work with partners for the nitty-gritty of larger projects. We believe that the greatest value creation is getting the frame right. Everything else flows from that.

The chapter on governance in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is available for free download from the book website. However I thought it was also worth excerpting the chapter, as below. This section describes a typical Enterprise 2.0 governance process. Of course projects must be always tailored to the situation, addressing issues including organizational culture and existing processes.

SIX STEPS IN A TYPICAL GOVERNANCE PROCESS

1. Nominate a project leader and project sponsor

Creating a governance framework is a significant initiative that requires access to key stakeholders. A senior executive project sponsor should be named who will facilitate access to resources and people where required. The project leader can be either an internal manager with the appropriate skills and understanding of the organization, or an external consultant who has the benefit of independence from organizational politics.

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Social CRM and disrupting analyst business models

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I recently had a chat with R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group about what we’re up to and our respective business models. Among other things, Ray said that Altimeter wants to work in new spaces that others aren’t covering. ERP is boring. But Social CRM, for example, is on the leading edge of where value is being created, but traditional analyst firms are not working.

As a recent entrant to the market (the firm was founded in July 2008 by Charlene Li and now has 7 partners), Altimeter has the flexibility to use different approaches to the existing large firms. In this case, instead of charging in the thousands of dollars for a cutting-edge analyst report, it has launched Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management for free, enabling anyone to embed it on their own site, as I have below.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

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Five key characteristics of great pilot team members

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I recently posted an excerpt from Chapter 17 of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 titled 8 Guiding Principles for Pilot Programs: A Key for Enterprise 2.0.

To follow up, here is an additional excerpt from Chapter 17 on pilots.

CHARACTERISTICS OF GREAT PILOT TEAM MEMBERS

The selection of pilot team members is a major factor not just in the success of the pilots, but also whether useful lessons are learned and the successful migration of the pilots into other parts of the business.

The reality is that there is usually limited choice in selecting pilot team members. However since it is such an important driver of success, it is important to understand the characteristics of great pilot team members, and to apply this to the degree possible in bringing the right people on board.

There are five key aspects to a great pilot team member.

1. Enthusiasm

There is no substitute for enthusiasm in a pilot. As such, in most cases the best pilot team members are those who are clamoring to try something because they think it will make them more effective in their work.

Enthusiastic team members will:

• Want to be involved in the pilot!

• Think there are better ways to do things than current approaches

• Be happy to try new things

• Put up with immature systems

• Put in extra time and energy now for the potential of worthwhile results later

• Actively suggest and try new ideas to make the pilot work better

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The Evolution and Key Success Factors of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

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This morning I did the opening keynote at IBM’s Collective Intelligence BusinessSphere conference in Melbourne. It was designed as a brief and punchy opener to provide a big-picture context to what collective intelligence means for organizations and the key success factors.

Below are the slides. As always the slides are intended to provide visual support to my presentation, not to be useful by themselves. However there are a few visuals there that may be of interest even to those who didn’t attend.

Keynote: The Evolution and Key Success Factors of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

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Keynote on Web 2.0 in the enterprise at IBM Collective Intelligence

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IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference is held each January, bringing together customers of IBM’s enterprise collaboration suite. While many associate Lotus with its long-established product Notes, since the launch of Lotus Connections in 2007 Lotus is centered on Web 2.0 tools such as social networks, mash-ups and micro-blogging. After Lotussphere local events are run in countries around the world, usually dubbed Lotusphere Comes To You.

This year IBM Australia is calling its enterprise collaboration conference Collective Intelligence, running this in 9 cities around the country. In Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra they are dividing the program into technology and business streams. I will be doing the opening keynote for the BusinessSphere stream as below in Sydney and Melbourne, though I will be in Asia at the time of the Canberra event next week.

The event is free to attend for “IBM customers and prospects” – you can register at the website. Maybe see you there!

The evolution and future of Social Networking and Web 2.0 technologies

Web and social technologies, having already had a massive social impact, are now being applied extensively in business and government. Many of the most successful organisations globally are implementing social software and web tools to increase productivity, tap expertise, improve staff engagement and streamline processes.

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Australia is becoming a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms: Freelancer.com, 99designs, DesignCrowd

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Crowdsourcing in the broadest sense will be one of the fundamental platforms of the emerging network economy. As such it’s pleasing to see that Australia is becoming a hub for a number of the most significant crowdsourcing platforms globally.

I caught up with Alec Lynch of DesignCrowd yesterday for an interesting conversation about the crowdsourcing space and thought it was worth giving a quick pointer to the three main platforms run out of Australia (though all are global in scope).

freelancer.jpgFreelancer.com, was founded in Sweden as getafreelancer.com in 2004. I first wrote about it in 2005 in an overview of the space. For many years it was the dominant online services exchange in Europe, and one of the top three globally. In May 2009 it was bought by Australian company Ignition Networks, which also acquired the domain Freelancer.com. The company is run by veteran tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, who most recently founded and ran specialty processor firm Sensory Networks Inc.

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