Micro-blogging in the enterprise: an idea whose time has come?

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Over the last few months there has been increasing discussion of how micro-blogging tools such as Twitter could be used in organizations.

Twitter is now frequently used in external communication, with organizations as diverse as @SouthwestAir, @Comcastcares, @BigPondTeam, @SEC_Investor_Ed, and @mosmancouncil using Twitter to communicate to stakeholders and for customer service. Given the rapid rise of Twitter and how influential comments can be, this clearly needs to be on the radar for any major organization.

However there are significant constraints in using public micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku, or identi.ca for internal communication. Even with the ability to protect people’s updates to being viewed only by approved followers, few organizations would like to have this kind of information hosted externally.

As such they often look at internal tools to see how yet another consumer technology can be adapted to create value for the enterprise.

At our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in February, Australian pharmaceutical company Janssen-Cilag described how it was implementing an internal version of Twitter.

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CIO Magazine interview: Six key points for CIOs in creating value from Enterprise 2.0

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A little earlier in the year CIO Magazine published an excellent feature article titled Enterprise 2.0 – What is it good for? In the print and online articles they included a sidebar: The Organization As Media Entity: Enterprise 2.0 is about making mass participation valuable, which reported on my views (that I’ve written and spoken about on many occasions before) that organizations should start thinking of themselves as media entities. The piece, shown in its entirety below, also includes six key points for CIOs to consider in implementing Enterprise 2.0.

The Organization As Media Entity

Enterprise 2.0 is about making mass participation valuable

Increasingly, the best way to understand how any organization works is to think of it as a media entity, says Ross Dawson CEO, Advanced Human Technologies and Chairman, Future Exploration Network. Organizations create messages and information, take inputs from external media sources, and edit and publish content in an increasing diversity of formats, with e-mail and the intranet often predominant. Their employees are typical media consumers (and creators), deluged by choice, and often ineffective at cutting through with their own communication. As such, the current state of the media industry offers many lessons for organizations seeking to be more effective and productive.

Dawson says it’s important for CIOs trying to come to terms with Enterprise 2.0 to realize it is less about a collection of new technologies and much more about shifting organizations into the next phase of work.

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Effective governance unleashes the creative potential of Web 2.0 in the business

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IT Business Edge has just published an interview with me on IT governance for Web 2.0 technologies, a topic I’m spending considerable time on in my consulting work with major organizations. The complete article, Set Policies to Unleash Creativity with Web 2.0 Tools, is available on their website, and the interview is reproduced below.

Hall: Just to make sure we’re on the same page, how do you define Web 2.0 technologies?

Dawson: Basically, they’re technologies that use mass participation to create value for the business. They can be wikis, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups and other tools, but [the term] also involves the underlying architecture behind those tools.

Hall: So what would IT governance for those tools look like?

Dawson: I look at governance in a broader context as having a full understanding of potential risks, potential benefits and having set-off structured policies and procedures where any risks are minimized and benefits are maximized, with a high degree of transparency and accountability for executives and other people in the organization.

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Fast growing companies are more likely to use social networking tools

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The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research has recently released research on the use of social media by the Inc 500, which are the 500 fastest growing privately owned companies in the US as ranked by Inc. magazine. This is one of the first longitudinal studies, showing changes in adoption of social media tools from one year ago. The topline results are shown below.

socialmediaInc500.jpg

The researchers point to the significantly higher usage of social media by these companies compared to the Fortune 500. A few thoughts on this point and the research findings generally:

Fast growth vs large companies. Fast growing companies by necessity are open to new tools and approaches, and tend to have a culture of adoption and innovation, meaning they’re more likely to experiment with social media tools. There are no studies I’m aware of comparing growth rates of companies and their use of social media, and the causality would be very difficult to unpick, but I believe that consistent rapid growth will be hard to achieve without social media tools to facilitate effective collaboration in the organization.

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Web 2.0 and human resources – who should drive Web 2.0 initiatives in the organization?

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The UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has recently launched a discussion paper titled Web 2.0 and human resources, designed to help HR professionals to understand what Web 2.0 is and to contribute to organization’s activities in the space.

The paper is built around the key elements of my Web 2.0 Framework, which they nicely attribute me for, though also brings in a number of new elements, and wraps up with three case studies, including Pfizer’s Pfizerpedia, UK government departments’ use of forums, and T-mobile’s use of social networks for recruitment.

As I see and work with many organizations grappling with how to respond to and take advantage of Web 2.0, one of the challenges is that there is no one obvious place in the organization where these initiatives should reside. IT, HR, marketing, strategy, risk management and other functions all need to be involved, and the reality is usually none of them individually have the capabilities to successfully drive the full breadth of the potential across the firm. In successful organizations, often individuals who implicitly understand the issues help to define activities, and very importantly communicate across the wide variety of stakeholders.

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Jay Cross in Australia on Making Informal Learning Work

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Jay Cross, who has been on the leading edge of learning for well over a decade, will be running one-day workshops on Making Informal Learning Work in Melbourne on 17 June and Sydney on 19 June. Jay has been a leading light of elearning since the outset, was CEO of eLearning Forum for five years, and has more recently been driving the informal learning movement, recently publishing a book titled Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance, in which he says that ‘Most corporations invest their training budget where it will have the least impact.’ I’m sure these will be great workshops (but don’t overlook our Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications Launch Event on the same day as Jay’s Sydney workshop :-) )

I first met Jay many years ago, probably when we were both speakers at KMWorld, and we’ve kept in touch and regularly bounced ideas around. He is one of a handful of people in the world who are consistently pushing learning into new spaces. I still refer to his ideas on workflow learning, while he is now integrating the lessons of Web 2.0 into how organizations support learning.

Jay and I will catch up for a drink on the evening of 19th – I may post details here for others to join us if they’re interested.

Enterprise 2.0 in Financial Services: upcoming keynote

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I have long been interested in how collaboration technologies are applied in financial services, having come from a career largely at Merrill Lynch and Thomson Financial, and spent much time consulting to the instittutional financial services sector.

A few years ago now I ran the Collaboration in Financial Services conferences in New York and London, and wrote a white paper on How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services. Since then I’ve been heavily involved in the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 spaces, and I’m finding that these are extremely relevant to the financial services sector.

I will be doing the opening keynote at this year’s annual Financial Services Technology forum on Enterprise & Web 2.0 for Financial Services in Sydney on 29 May. In my presentation I will look at the big picture of the history and relevance of these technologies in the sector, and drawing on my recent work helping organizations with the governance issues of Enterprise 2.0.

Financial services are certainly very diverse, however many of the sectors within it handily illustrate the themes I have been discussing for some time: there is a deep layer of highly process-driven work, supplemented by a layer of connecting expertise to make highly time-sensitive decisions. Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches are outstanding in supporting the latter, which is where there is the most potential for competitive differentiation – which can be very fleeting in the world of money.

I’ll provide more details later on what I cover in my keynote.

Interview on SkyBusiness: Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations

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Here is an old (November 2, 2007) interview I did on SkyBusiness about social networks, examining both the industry landscape and how social networks can be valuable inside organizations. What I like best about this is that for much of the interview they had up a banner reading “Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations”, a message that business audiences, especially at the time, hadn’t heard much before.

Some of the things I discuss in the interview:

* The role of advertising networks in social networks

* The upcoming launch of Google’s Open Social and what it means for the sector

* The value to organizations of encouraging strong social networks

* Examples of companies using Facebook and other social networks internally

* How Enterprise 2.0 takes social media tools to apply to organizational productivity

Thoughts from the Walkley Public Affairs conference

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Today I spoke at the Walkley Public Affairs conference, organized by the MEAA, the peak body representing workers in the Australian media industry. I spoke on the Enterprise 2.0 panel, running through many of the issues I’ve raised on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum blog.

Here are a few summarized comments and reflections on what I heard while I was at the event from late morning to the end of the first day.

As I walked in, Sam Mostyn of IAG was saying, reflecting on what she’d seen at the insurer, that ‘what builds loyalty and commitment is trust’. That is a fundamentally important point. Corporate loyalty is evanescent today, particularly with younger workers. The only potential source of loyalty is trusting your employees. Not trusting them automatically results in zero loyalty. This is deeply relevant to the issue of blocking or allowing social networks in the enterprise.

On the next panel, Mark Pesce commented that social networks in Australia are extremely shallow. Outrageous news travels very fast. At the Future of Journalism conference comments that Roy Greenslade made about Andrew Jaspan, editor of The Age, were immediately heard. Messages propagate ubiquitously, in this case enabled by journalists in the audience live-blogging the event. Those who were interested in what Greenslade said heard about it almost instantaneously. Mark describes Twitter as his twenty-first century brain trust, extending his capabilities by giving him access to many with complementary knowledge. He describes this as ‘hyperempowerment’.

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Keynote at Tandberg Summit: weaving together Enterprise 2.0 and videoconferencing

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I recently did the opening keynote on The Future of Business at the Tandberg Summit 2008, which brings together the clients, distributors and partners of the global videoconferencing firm, and stayed for most of the first day. I found it extremely interesting being among a large people who were concerned with implementing video in organizations, as these are almost entirely different people to those concerned with Enterprise 2.0 approaches, though their objectives and issues are very similar. More thoughts on that in a moment. It’s probably worth setting the scene with a review of the conference by CRN Magazine, titled Tandberg Summit 2008: Video killed the radio star. The entire article is worth a read – I’ve excerpted below the section covering my presentation:

A highlight of the conference was a keynote by Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, who provided insight into the dynamics within an organisation and the video communications market. Referring to internal business practices, Dawson stressed the importance of collaboration between employees and identifying personal qualities that may help foster growth.

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