Synergise IT

If anyone who doesn’t quite understand the business impacts of the long tail, please go through the slides below. Its awesome!

Gartner has coined the term Generation Virtual (Generation V) and it determines how marketing gurus can engage us in the online world. It is used to describe the blending of behavior, attitudes and interests in an online environment.

Source: Marketing Charts

I was just looking at the diagram and was trying to understand what can each quadrant bring to the table from a community perspective. If one is a contributor, creator or an opportunist, its all good, in some way or another, contribution is made. However, if one is a lurker (and I am guilty of being one in some communities), then what is the value of that? Would you want lurkers to hang around?

I would say yes but the proportion must be correct. Why? Obviously the best would be that everyone comes together to contribute and share, but in the real world it doesn’t happen that way. Some people really only wanna take stuff from people and not return a “favor”. However, as I said previously one of the reasons I write on a blog is to think through and express my ideas (whether if its right or not). Its a breeding ground of new knowledge and exploration with others. It would be the same in an online community, the more you share, the more you receive. Remember, what comes around goes around.

Incentives are important for your top contributors and they ensure the success of the community. Let lurkers do what they do.

I have research extensively on IT outsourcing during my honours year and one of the guidelines of selecting what to outsource within an organisation is to outsource stuff that is not in your strategic path (or stuff that you are not competing on) and keep the rest in house.

Today in the news, Proctor & Gamble outsources security to IBM ISS managed services to save money, boost security. In this particular case, should P&G outsource its IT security to IBM? Well, enterprise IT security is not something you cannot really compete on, but you can’t live without it (think of it as payroll within an organisation).

IT security is a sensitive issue. The thought that came to my head shortly after I read the news is an image of a DBA stealing all of the banks customers’ details and somehow I feel that P&G might be giving IBM a chance to do that. I am exaggerating here for sure. But you never know, IBM wouldn’t want something like this to happen for sure but on the flip side, a P&G “DBA” can do the same too, so worrying about this issue is pointless. IBM could boost P&G’s security but giving security to another person is like giving them your house keys to live with you.

What do you think? Or do you think I am just blabbering rubbish here?

Check out this link. It presents some really good links to Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”

Really worth checking it out.

I was speaking to a colleague today and was talking about innovation and enterprise 2.0. “At a high level, one of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is constant innovation” I said. He looked confused straight away.

He asked “what do you mean by constant?”

“Well, on a daily basis.” I replied.

He couldn’t understand how innovation can happen on a daily basis (alrite, I might be exaggerating abit here) but I believe its achievable. He said that innovation requires approval to do things in a new way or just doing new things requires business plans, stakeholder analysis, Porter’s 5 forces analysis and the list goes on and on and on. He is right. Big innovation plans requires such forms of analysis. However, heaps of little innovation idea goes a long way too. For example, if a company’s word/powerpoint template has a page that is extremely ink “hungry” as the whole page is filled with the colour blue, for example. No one really notices how much ink it consumes, from the financial perspective, colour inks are expensive, from the environmental perspective, using too much ink is bad for the environment. If this can be picked up quickly just by ONE employee and this employee has a channel to express this idea (Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration platform) and the company takes a new approach to display the same information then the company immediately 1) save money, 2) save the earth.

The above example is also innovation, does it require business plans, stakeholder analysis and Porter’s 5 forces analysis. I believe not. But it has the same outcome, save money. Innovation can come in many kinds. As long as you can save money, increase revenue, improve morale and efficiency, then it meets its purpose. Lets take baby steps and make the world a better place and make your company a better place to be in. Let’s innovate everyday!

Have you heard of this term before?? Nomadic Information Systems is defined when users have access to his / her personal information space from all places independent from specific devices. Some people call it mobile convergence too - similar ideas.

Interesting enough, everything is moving towards a unified view of all data / information. Previously, different devices does different stuff, different software does different stuff, different country uses different standards and the list goes on and on. However, with the birth of smart phones and with the recent and very prominent entrance of the iPhone, one could get everything in one device. GPS, emails, surf the web (which is the whole world in your hands), calendar and entertainment - all achievable as long as you have network connection and battery power.

So what has this gotta do with Enterprise 2.0 and the organisation? I can be quite sure that most companies have different systems doing different things and getting a consolidated view of all the stuff that is going on can be a nightmare, getting a streamlined business process is a nightmare and support for a large number of disparate systems is way to expensive. That’s why IT transformation projects gets approved by the board of directors and some companies spend billions of dollars on it.

Enterprise 2.0 aims to do something similar as well - for a piece of the puzzle. Enterprise 2.0 aims to organise unstructured data. Document manager, wiki, blogs, bookmarks, people, resume, project tasks, timelines and so on. As you can see previously many of the above functions have a specific system that handles it. Now, Enterprise 2.0 can do everything in one place for you (unstructured data convergence). What enterprise 2.0 vendors needs to do is to quickly move on and integrate unstructured data convergence into their toolset. Whether it may be a SAP / salesforce / oracle connector or a business mashup, unstructured data and structured data must work hand in hand.

Well, if you are a vendor and thinking - that’s impossible or its too hard to do, hang on. I know its hard to do and would take a long time. I am just putting up a wish list at the moment. =)

CIO wrote a great article on “Five Great Ways to Drive Your Best Workers Out the Door” Please note that this article talks about your TOP employees and not just the average ones. These are the people you must treasure and try to keep them beside you as best as you could.

Check out the five things that drive top employees up the wall:

Mistake No. 1: Keep the creative juices bottled up.
Mistake No. 2: Micromanage your staff.
Mistake No. 3: Deny new opportunities and challenges.
Mistake No. 4: Don’t listen to your employees.
Mistake No. 5: Change the work environment without considering the impact on employees.

Enterprise 2.0 enables creativity, innovation and improve communication across boundaries and hierarchy. However it does mean that with Enterprise 2.0, the problem is solved, managers need to listen, act on stuff and react accordingly. Its a perspective change or an attitude change and technology is one of the factors in this change.

I told this to a colleague recently. I am NOT evangelising on a enterprise 2.0 software, I am evangelising a new way of working and management. I just happen to be in an IT company so I have to talk about the software to get people interested.

My brother asked me this a couple of months back and I have been wanting to get him an excellent answer. Not just the definition but also the impacts for organisations. Here you go!

Something that is close to Aussie’s heart. One of the largest banks in Australia’s approach to Enterprise 2.0. Pretty interesting. Check it out.