Mark Turrell is CEO of Imaginatik, a publically listed innovation company with offices in Boston, London and Berlin. Imaginatik ‘provides unique enterprise software, processes and insights to tap into the Collective Genius for collaborative innovation and problem solving’ and works with a wide variety of clients on innovation and idea management programs.
We discuss enterprise scale programs with regulatory boundaries and complicated enterprise security requirements in multiple languages.
Mark says innovation is being decimated in the current economy… Imaginatik, using the mature tool set which grew out of the last ten years of innovation, are doing extremely well as companies lay of their core innovation teams.
We have an interesting conversation around crowdsourcing: Mark uses this example with his clients: ‘do you need to have US or Belgian style democracy in their crowd sourcing planning? The US style gives you an absolute right to vote or not vote: The Belgian style is to be fined 500 euros if you don’t vote.
Requisite volume of participants is very important to achieve your objectives- I make the point that security and scale are the two differentiators between lightweight applications and enterprise wide roll outs.
Rapidly changing leadership models are beginning to have an effect on how we engage as humans; command and control is under pressure as never before.
I had the opportunity to talk with Joe Schueller of P&G several times in the past weeks, and I found the experience extremely rewarding.
We talked about the Econolypse, and it’s impact of businesses like P&G. JOe makes some great points:
P&G had already been working to damp the cycles of oscillation, and impacts based on things like the rise in gas prices in 2008. The new downturn has just sharpened focus.
Joe believes that P&G has grown intolerant of duplicative work, for example.
He quotes the CEO of P&G who stated recently that the company has many, many networks of smart people, and the trick is to get them to find each other and dream up new ways to deliver great products.
P&G is 170 years old, so there is a long legacy: the company is deep and wide. Joe points out that the hierarchy is still relevant, but that may not be the best way to share information across the world.
Leadership at P&G is getting attuned to the horizontal spread of information through networks, and ‘close the loop’ by participating in open conversations within the company’s communities of practice.
Every word is worth listening to, since P&G is so large that nearly every issue crops up.
Stowe and I discuss progress so far on ‘Open Enterprise 2009′, taking a look at the issues people posted on our instance of UserVoice.
People are acutely aware there are different things going on in enterprises simultaneously: leadership is a high interest topic; intersection of social networking with functional software; microstreaming and exploring systemic resistance in companies.
We’re keen to continue to gather insights and questions, whether using Uservoice, other forms of communication and anon if necessary. The videos you see on this site are the more positive uncontentious discussions, Stowe and I have had many other conversations offline which provide valuable insight into things that haven’t gone so well anonymously…
Most marketers have a To Do list. Figuring out their brand’s social media strategy is undoubtedly somewhere near the top. The expansion of a marketer’s choices in media has lead to some confusion. There are no experts in this newly emerging space and trial and error won’t always create success stories.
What are the best tactics to use? How do I measure the effectiveness and ROI? What are the best sites and tools? How do I derive business prospects and leads from social media? With no metrics or analytics (yet) to measure one’s spend, who to turn to? Why, ourselves, naturally.
Instead of relying on one person to answer these questions, Michael Stelzner turned to 900 members of the marketing collective to get their feedback on how they manage their brands. By embracing this crowdsourced approach, the results of Michael Stelzner’s recent White Paper provide clarity and perspective as the push for brand strategy turns marketing on its ear. Here are a few highlights from the White Paper:
Nearly 88% of those asked are using social media to market their business, but 72% have been at for less than a few months.
64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week
Top social media tools in preferred order: Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook
These stats along with more interesting findings can be found in this engaging Social Media Marketing Industry Report; I’d also recommend checking out the below video highlighting some of the White Paper’s findings with Michael moderating.
Matt Asay is VP of Business Development at Alfresco the open source enterprise content management platform company.
Matt is also chair of the Open Source Business Conference which Matt founded in 2003 and where we recorded this conversation earlier this week. Matt also writes the open source blog on cnet.
In the first part of this conversation Matt defines Alfresco as a content services platform with deep content repository capabilities. This Alfresco core competency is a vital asset to companies wrangling large amounts of documents (ie most companies!), I asked Matt about the Microsoft Sharepoint solution to the document management issue.
The open source world is competing very effectively with the ‘old school players’ in the document management space but Sharepoint is a formidable competitor.
Balmer defines Sharepoint as the foundation of the next generation Microsoft propietary operating system and therefore repository; a ‘one way street into Microsoft…from an open collaboration perspective it’s frightening’.
The european union legal constraints on Microsoft help to perpetuate the hooks into Sharepoint that allow interoperability, and Microsoft are in most cases currently amenable to working with companies like Alfresco.
Meanwhile, Cisco’s open source collaborative strategy is an intriguing counterpoint to Microsoft’s approach.
Luis Suarez is an internal social computing evangelist at IBM – we discuss here how momentum is building around use of collaborative technologies internally at IBM as people understand the concepts and get used to working this way. The exception is the mobile workforce.
The challenge of the shift to knowledge sharing is an issue in europe, says Luis, who working worldwide is able to see cultural differences emerge. Where the US internal workforce have a well developed culture of sharing, the european perception of ‘knowledge is power’ can leads to protecting of perceived individual ip assets in some cases. This is particularly the case with sales staff.
People worldwide are definitely starting to see the benefits and are increasingly aware of reputation management – becoming recognised thought leaders by posting valuable information into knowledge centers.
Luis is a well known advocate of controlling your inbox as this New York Times story from last June describes and which Luis writes about at ‘Thinking outside the inbox‘ his personal blog, with weekly updates.
We have an interesting discussion about one to one versus one to many communication and the challenges of getting people to think before they chose to use email as an appropriate communication device. The team of collaboration evangelists within IBM communicate via Twitter for example.
This conversation will be of particular interest to those researching alternatives to email.
Drip some ink on a piece of fabric and watch what happens. Depending on the type of fabric, the blot spreads at different speeds along the warp and woof. The pattern that appears reveals as much about the fabric as it does about the ink. What does this have to do with social media? Here is a picture of a chain email diffusing through the social fabric, created by Cornell researcher Jon Kleinberg (picture taken from a Cornell University news article).
As I write, a Presidential news conference is going on, a broadcast event that I, like many of you, would have treated as ‘unmissable’ 10 years ago. Yet, today, I am happy to keep twhirl in my peripheral vision, trusting that if anything truly important is said, tweets or emails will come my way. I have let a vast, trusted crowdsourced filter descend over my eyes. My changed behavior is just one symptom of the waning of broadcasting and the waxing of diffusecasting (I hereby claim credit for the term) as the central process in mass communications. Virality and word-of-mouth are just surface characteristics. Here is a deeper X-Ray view. Mass persuaders, read this if you value your future in your profession. Continue Reading »
Guy Creese blogs about the potential impact of an IBM acquisition of Sun on open-source productivity suites. It’s an interesting aspect of the acquisition that hasn’t really gotten the attention of the issues around data center focused products. OpenOffice 3.0, IMHO, is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office though conversions are still problematic and the lack of embedded clip art presents problems for many users. Symphony trails OO 3 from a feature/usability perspective, but offers the ability to easily integrate into a Notes environment and support for 3rd party developers.
At the outset of the Open Enterprise 2009 study, I set up a UserVoice account, intending to use that tool as a way to gather thoughts and feedback from the Enterprise 2.0 community to guide out study.
I have embedded the link to the UserVoice here, and invite those reading this to participate, there. I will also spend some time walking through the ideas that people have offered up, and I will write a post in the next few days characterizing what I see there.
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Mar 30th, 2009 |
