New ideas: Building the organizations of tomorrow

By

I recently spoke at an event organised by Building the Organisation of Tomorrow, a group created by alumni of University of Technology Sydney’s Master of Business in IT Management program.

The format was very stimulating, with three 15 minute presentations, each followed by 15 minutes Q&A and then a ‘disruptive event’, including some awesome satirical musical performances and a planted heckler in the audience. Below are notes from the three speakers.
Read more →

In the global talent economy over 50% will be mobile workers

By

[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

Research firm IDC has forecast that there will be 1.3 billion ‘mobile workers’ in the world by 2015, representing 37.2% of the global workforce. This points to the massive explosion of what I call the ‘global talent economy’, in which talent can be and will be anywhere.

The forecasts suggest that the bulk of the growth will be in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), which will see 838 million mobile workers in 2015, up 237 million from 2010, representing well over half the global mobile workforce.
Read more →

Making social media happen in government: case study of NSW Department of Education

By

I’m at the launch meeting of the social media community of practice set up by Institute of Public Administration NSW (IPAA).

Earlier this year I gave the opening keynote on The Transformation of Government at IPAA’s annual conference, where I was encouraged to see the interest and appetite for new and more open approaches to government here. 

At the conference I wrote about the case study of Queensland Police, which is a great example of government bodies creating value through social media.

At today’s event Tracey Sen of the NSW Department of Education & Training (DET), which has 110,000 employees, presented on the Department’s social media initiatives. Here are a few live notes from the event. 
Read more →

Tear the walls down: Jericho and the future of enterprise tech

By

Yesterday I gave the keynote on The Future of Information Technology at the Local Government IT2011 conference in Coffs Harbour, which this year had the theme of mobility.

Given the ambitious scope of my keynote title, I covered a lot of territory including fundamental technology shifts and the evolving shape of organizational technology. In looking at how to respond to the forces of the ‘consumerization’ of IT, power to the user, and mobility I raised the ideas put forward by the Jericho Forum. I asked for a show of hands, and no-one had heard of it, which I hope is not representative.

Jericho Forum, as the name implies, is intent on bringinging down the walls that surrounds enterprise technology. The key concept is “de-perimeterization“, which is basically a multi-syllabic way of saying tear down the walls. In a world in which users are anywhere, connecting from any device, it is crazy to try to put up and defend walls. The boundaries of organizations are blurring beyond recognition, which I and others have been saying for over a decade, so it is completely dysfunctional for technology to try to maintain boundaries. As Jericho Forum puts it:
Read more →

5 facets of employees’ increasing technology expectations

By

Earlier this week I spoke at an excellent event organized by Canon for the CIOs of major organizations. During an extended lunch, a diverse range of ‘celebrities’ including TV personalities, authors, and musicians gave short presentations. I spoke about how the evolving intersection of technology and society is shaping employees’ expectations, particularly in the technology they can use. I wove a broader story about social change and its implications, though I briefly brought out five points on what employees expect from technology.

1. Excellence.
When people go into organizations, they have extremely high expectations of the technology they are given to use. This has been honed by extensive use of intuitive, responsive, flexible consumer technologies, and the reasonable view that organizations should be able to provide technologies that are at least as good as those consumers have access to.
Read more →

The future of Chief Marketing Officers and leadership

By

Last week I attended a breakfast organized by IBM for a small group of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and influencers, hosted by its Australian CMO Mark Willson.

IBM had recently launched its global CMO study, showing what CMOs are thinking about marketing today and in the future. At the breakfast it gave us a sneak preview of the results from the Australian respondents to the study.

We were shown four infographics that highlighted the results as a starting point for a robust breakfast conversation. It was a very interesting and useful conversation; I thought I’d highlight just two of the many issues we discussed.


Read more →

Using social media to track and drive organizational success metrics

By

This week I was MC for the AHRI HR Technology conference, and ran one of the workshops on the following day, on Creating Results Using Social Media.

A real highlight of the conference was the Social Media: Risks and Rewards panel, which I chaired, with the participation of a fantastic cast of Peter Williams of Deloitte, Steve Barham of LinkedIn, Laurel Papworth of The Community Crew, and Sam Mutimer of ThinkTank Media.

It was a fabulous discussion, and we covered a lot of territory in the conversation.

One of the many topics discussed was the use of social media to track metrics and correlate these with organizational success metrics.
Read more →

Workshop content: Creating results using social media – the HR perspective

By

Tomorrow is the Australian Human Resources Institute HR Technology conference. I will be MC for the conference day, and will also run a half-day workshop on Creating Results Using Social Media on the following day.

I thought I would share the visual content we will be using during the workshop. As usual, the slides are not intended to be useful by themselves, but to provide supporting content for the activities and discussions of the session.

Workshop: Creating Results With Social Media in HR

View more presentations from rossdawson

Read more →

Creating the future of local government

By

I recently gave the opening keynote at Local Government Association of Tasmania‘s annual conference. On the occasion of their 100th anniversary, they wanted to look forward to the future as well as to their past.

Incidentally, the event was just two days after I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW’s annual conference on the Transformation of Government. My presentations at the two events were reasonably similar, but many issues differ across state and local government. One of the key issues is that in a world driven by community, local government is (or at least should be) closer to the community than any other level of government.

For the local government conference my topic was Creating the Future of Local Government. The current issue of the association’s magazine, LGAT News, contains a write-up of my keynote:

In a defining era for government globally, councils are in the front-line of changes and challenges and are best placed to take the lead in turning these challenges into opportunities. This was the message to Tasmanian councils from leading business futurist, Ross Dawson, in his keynote address to conference delegates.

Read more →

Compulsory viewing: A CEO perspective on the business value of internal social networks

By

A few days ago Arie Goldshlager pointed me to the fantastic video below of Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia, talking about the company’s use of micro-blogging. Shortly after Forrester announced that Deloitte Australia’s Yammer network had won its 2011 Forrester Groundswell award in the category of Collaboration Systems.

Undoubtedly a major factor in Deloitte Australia’s success in internal social networks is the unreserved support of its CEO. However, as the video below clearly shows, Swiegers is not a man who likes social media for its own sake.

He simply recognizes that it can help lead to outstanding business outcomes. As an accountant and business leader, he sees the business value of using social networks well, and has helped Deloitte Australia to tap that value.


Here are some of the things that Swiegers says in the video:
Read more →