What is the future of the Learning & Development department?

By

Last Friday I gave the keynote for the first breakfast seminar run by CADRE, a leading elearning design company, for senior executives of its clients. The topic of my presentation was The Future of Learning, giving a big picture view to kick off their series.

This is a brief description of my presentation:

Challenges for organizations are mounting from intense global competition, empowered consumers, and generational shifts. At the same time, building more effective learning is becoming central to achieving organizational success. This session will use a rich array of examples to look at:
• The driving forces shaping learning in organizations
• What the successful organizations of the future will look like
• Learning in a social network world: the new opportunities
• The context of learning: personalized, mobile, relevant
• Creating the future of learning: key action steps

At the conclusion of my presentation I got the audience to break into groups of 5-6 and assigned them discussion questions.

One of the questions I posed was ‘What is the future of the L&D department?’
Read more →

11 recommendations to create the future of government

By

The Institute of Public Affairs of Australia (IPAA), the professional association supporting senior Australian public service executives, is not prone to rash statements.

Thus it is very encouraging to see its new policy paper, The Future Course of Modern Government, provide some pointed insights and recommendations on how to create the government of the future.

I have put the 11 recommendations provided at the end of the report at the bottom of this post. The full policy paper is absolutely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.
Read more →

Reflections on the early days of social networking as LinkedIn reaches 100 million users

By

Last week LinkedIn reached a significant milestone: 100 million users. On the occasion LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman sent out an email to the first 100,000 users thanking them for being early adopters.

The email included the recipient’s member number, which are given in order of signing up. You can look it up yourself in your LinkedIn profile URL; it is the number after “id=”. I had no idea, but it turned out I am member 9,822, in the first 0.01% of users.

While I closely followed the social networking space at the time, I didn’t join many. LinkedIn seemed to me to be one of the most promising newcomers.

When I was writing Living Networks in 2002 there were no true social networking applications in existence. I had eagerly joined SixDegrees.com, the very first social networking application, not long after it was founded in 1997, highly excited by its potential. The basic principle was inviting friends to connect, and using that to find the quickest social path to people you wanted to meet. As it happens this model closer to LinkedIn than any of the other major social networking platforms of today.
Read more →

Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations

By

I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly.

I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study. Below are the notes I managed to catch on my iPad as we spoke..

The panellists were:
Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Jacob Murray-White, Head of Salmat’s Customer Solutions at Home Programme
Fernanda Afonso, National Chair of Australian Psychological Society and Specialist, Freehills.
Ross Dawson, Futurist

Les Williamson, Managing Director of Cisco Australia, told the story of how Cisco was born from love. Two academics at Stanford University were in a relationship, but worked on opposite sides of the campus. They created a multi-protocol router to communicate, started building them commercially in a garage, got funded, and grown spectacularly since then.

Below are live notes from the panel. I haven’t attributed them as they sometimes bring together comments from several people or my interpretation. It was a fascinating discussion.
Read more →

Insights into effective social media policies

By

Last week I was part of a panel on the SkyBusiness Technology Behind Business program discussing corporate social media policies, comprised of Peter Williams of Deloitte, Adrienne Unkovitch of Workplace Guardian, and myself.

Here are some of the key points made during our discussion.

* Example of Commonwealth Bank which introduced social media policies that impinged on staff’s personal rights, and quickly reversed them based on the response.
Read more →

7 critical aspects of Tibbr’s big step forward for enterprise social software

By

Earlier this week I gave the opening keynote at the Sydney launch of Tibbr, the new social enterprise offering from TIBCO. I hope to have the video of my presentation up before long.

Before the event I summarized some of the very positive commentary on Tibbr since the San Francisco launch two weeks ago.

It’s now time to offer my own thoughts. Here is what I think is most interesting and important about Tibbr.

 

Social media-style interface.
As many have commented, the Tibbr interface looks very much like Facebook. The familiarity of the interface makes it immediately easy to use and understand for almost anyone. Marc Benioff of Salesforce once asked “why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?”. If you agree, your time has come, given Tibbr provides exactly that style of front end to virtually all corporate activity.
Read more →

What is possible: how the social enterprise drives differentiation

By

I recently gave a presentation to an internal team tasked with re-envisaging the intranet for a large corporation. I was impressed that they had brought together around 40 managers and executives from across the company to spend two days thinking in a very open format about what internal communication could and should be like, and how to create that.

I was brought in at the start of their workshop to provide a compelling vision, being given the title of “The Art of the Possible”. As such I gave a big picture view of how our increasingly networked world is changing organizations, spent some time on the vision of what a better-connected company can be and can achieve, and wrapped up with some of the realities to recognize in achieving the grand vision.

While there are many perspectives on the specific benefits possible from building the social enterprise (see for example my chapter on Key Benefits and Risks in Implementing Enterprise 2.0), at the highest level this is about the ability to differentiate your organization.
Read more →

Review of Tibbr social enterprise platform – keynote at Sydney launch on February 8

By

The launch last week in San Francisco of Tibbr, the social enterprise computing platform from TIBCO, attracted an immense amount of attention from the leading commentators in the space. The offering is not directly comparable to any existing enterprise social software suites, and draws on TIBCO’s strong integration heritage to create an offering that works fully across an organization’s activities.

Tibbr global launch events follow in London (yesterday) and in Sydney on February 8 at the Opera House, where I will give the opening keynote on Why social computing will drive organisational success. Here are registration details for the Sydney launch of Tibbr next week.

I hope to offer some personal thoughts on the Tibbr platform after the launch event. For now I thought it would be most appropriate simply to review some of the more interesting comments on Tibbr since the launch.

To start, here is an interview by Dennis Howlett of TIBCO’s CEO, Vivek Ranadive. Vivek begins by saying that Tibbr is an extension of the vision he had since he started TIBCO (in 1985).


Read more →

What is the future of the IT department?

By

The future of enterprise technology is a massively important theme, which impacts organizations, vendors, governments, and indeed society at large. Taking each of these perspectives provides a different view on how the space is evolving.

One of the most interesting perspectives is from the very center of the fray: the IT department itself. It needs to deal with the minutiae of technological change as well as the macrotrends shaping organizations and their shifting place in the global economy.

I’ve teamed up with the outstanding strategist Greg Rippon of NetFocus, who I first worked with back in 1999 on a broad-ranging scenario project for a major bank, to create a one-day workshop for IT departments who want to take a structured look at the future and what it implies for their current strategy.

Click on the image for the flyer for the workshop on the future of the IT department.


Read more →

Australian government releases Government 2.0 Primer

By

The Australian government is gaining momentum in its Government 2.0 initiatives, marked today by the launch by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) of a handy Government 2.0 Primer.

The Report of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce was submitted in December 2009. Although the Taskforce chairman Nicholas Gruen had earlier noted that Australian Government 2.0 initiatives were significantly behind countries such as the US and UK, the report and the government response impressed Gartner sufficiently to say “if the Aussies walk the talk, they have a very good chance to be the real leaders in the Gov 2.0 / Open Government race.”

Since then, the Declaration of Open Government by the Finance Minister (with comments enabled!) has pushed the ante up.

The primer is exactly what it says, a compact guide to Government 2.0 for neophytes, in the spirit of Gov 2 released early to be subsequently refined.

Gov2_PSI-dataflow.png

Source: Department of Finance and Deregulation

Read more →