Luis Suarez, IBM Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist keynoting at Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Berlin 2008.
Let’s free ourselves from the email grip! Use social tools for more efficient knowledge sharing.
See link for NY Times article titled I Freed Myself From E-mail’s Grip:
I’m watching a Twitter exchange right now (will keep it nameless) where folks are trying to figure out who owns the twitter name for their company. I did a quick search on a number of well known companies by going to “http://www.twitter.com/companyname” only to find that many of the names have already been taken by others who obviously aren’t part of the organization who’s name they are using. Obviously this is reminiscent of the early days of the Internet when legal battles ensued over domain names.
I hope Twitter has staffed up its legal department to handle the probable actions by those seeking to reclaim their names.
Over on NoJitter Eric Krapf discusses a recent Economist article and uses the points in that article as a discussion point for how the change in the economy might affect collaboration tools such as social networking, noting that while access to social networking tools might no longer be used as an incentive to lure young college graduates in a competitive job market, social networking tools now play perhaps a larger role in fostering communication and collaboration than ever before.
Let’s recap. In Part I we introduced the idea of a capability maturity model (CMM), and noted that creating a CMM for social media is difficult because the entity that is “acquiring” the capability, the twentieth-century firm, might not even represent the right way to organize your economic activities. Anything from a nonprofit to a self-organizing crowd with no legal status might be the right organizational form for your sector, not just “enterprise 2.0.” This is the sort of change Chris Anderson is talking about in Free: Why $0.00 is the future of business, and what Kevin Kelly is talking about in his recent essay “Better than owning.” This is not gentle evolutionary “keep-up” pressure. It is a mega-speciation event of new organization forms. So a CMM for social media must go well beyond telling you how and when to adopt social media and what “stage” you are at. It must also tell you what sort of species you ought to morph into. So, in Part II, let’s now zoom down to the extremely detailed level. I’ll show you how you can get a sense of where you are now. Get out your favorite spreadsheet program and your organization chart. Identify the functional organization of your enterprise (roughly, the major clusters of the lowest level of your org chart), and create a matrix with each function listed along both the rows and columns, like so (try to get adjacent functions on the org chart, which traditionally interact a lot, next to each other in the matrix; so sales ought to be next to marketing):
Figure 1: Basic matrix, functional
I promised in December that I would share a social media capability maturity model that I’ve been sketching out, so here goes. Capability maturity models (CMMs) are a standard part of our conceptual vocabulary when talking about organizational change, but applying the idea to social media presents some special problems which I need to discuss first. It is not a simple matter of drawing a little evolution curve and labeling some arbitrarily chosen levels of competence. In other words, if you are thinking in terms of a diagram like this (with indicators like “Level 1.2: some employees blog; Level 1.8: many employees blog, most people twitter”), STOP!
If you’re an avid twitterer or just a friendly lurker, please add your Twitter ID to this handy Enterprise 2.0 Twitter ID spreadsheet. It makes it easier to track folks with similar interests.
Thanks!
Find the spreadsheet here. It’s open to the public.
President Obama won a small victory this week, getting to keep his Blackberry, but it’s not your standard-issue Curve or Storm that will hang from the President’s hip, rather he will use a Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, and NSA approved at a cost of several thousand dollars. The Obama administration, ripe with 20-somethings, with the first Presidential blog, and masters of Facebook, has also been told that instant messaging is no longer allowed. How can arguably the most important distributed organization in the world function effectively in today’s world with out access to even the most basic collaboration tools? Marc Ambinder notes that Obama’s aides have been advised to use the telephone for important communications. Will they at least have access to a unified communications dashboard that displays availability?
Two quotes immediately flashed across my mind as I started reading Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus, a key soothsayer at Microsoft, and Rob Salkowitz, a free ranger in the Microsoft ecosystem who occasionally wanders further afield. The first is a Kant quote: we see not what is, but who we are. The second is due to Alan Kay, a big name in the hoary past of my employer, Xerox: the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. Looking out and ahead at the future is as much a synthetic and introspective act as it is a predictive act, even if you don’t explicitly set out to introspect or synthesize. Microsoft’s visions of the future merit some belief simply because the vast energies of that 600 lb gorilla, channeled by those visions, might be sufficient to bring them about. Goliaths win more often than we suspect, because Goliath beating David doesn’t make the news. For you and me, this book is vastly more interesting for what it reveals about the strategic culture at Microsoft than for what it reveals about the future (which is interesting enough in its own right though). If Rasmus’ views are representative, and I believe they are, here’s the radar with which Microsoft is operating (this is a rough copy of a figure in the book):
Lotusphere 2009 kicked off this morning with the Blue Man Group and Dan Akroyd setting the stage for a flurry of announcements around Notes, Sametime, Quickr, Connections, and Websphere Portal. Most of the announcements were evolutionary enhancements to products announced in the last two years with two notable exceptions – the launch of LotusLive and new options for BlackBerry users.
@e2conf on Twitter
Jan 30th, 2009 |
