Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
Our entry this week is IBM. We will write about it tomorrow. But for now, take a look at their "Hitchikers's Guide."
UPDATE: 7/1/2006
Over the course of one year, we will be conducting a survey of organizations that are supporting emergent behavior in the enterprise using social-media tools. The organizations do not need to use wikis per se, but they must be supportive of emergent behavior at the management level. To nominate an organization for this series, please comment here.
Apologies for the delay on this one -- it was an unusually busy week -- but here's our continuation of our mini-profile of the I.B.M. blogging initiative. A few key facts:
--with more than 5,000 internal and 100 internal blogs, this may be the world's largest corporate blogging project.
--it is also perhaps one of the greatest examples of developing a social media platform "from the inside out," a theme we will be exploring in greater detail here at Future Tense.
--as blogger-in-chief Christopher Barger noted in article earlier this year, "any time you can make a company of 329,000 people feel smaller, that's a good thing."
The sheer size and scope of this initiative will compel many other companies -- not just technology, though they happen to be leading the way (no surprise) -- should compel many other companies to look at this experiment. They might also want to check out I.B.M.'s excellent blogging policy, which encourages everyone at the company to write so long as they follow general communication policies (especially important at a public company) and clearly indicate that their opinions are their own, not I.B.M.'s. I recently met with an internal communications manager for a another large technology company, and we discussed the idea of developing a "community of communicators." The I.B.M. project provides excellent guidance to companies interested in developing that kind of culture.
Over the course of one year, we will be conducting a survey of organizations that are supporting emergent behavior in the enterprise using social-media tools. The organizations do not need to use wikis per se, but they must be supportive of emergent behavior at the management level. Today marks the beginning of our survey. To nominate an organization for this series, please comment here.
We wrote about this terrific project on 33 Wikis. Here's a paraphrased version:
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), the international investment bank, is operating what we believe is the largest internal corporate wiki in existence. As the Financial Times observed this Spring, this wiki, with more than 2,000 pages edited by more than a quarter of its workforce, has traffic well exceeding the company's intranet. Employees today are using the wiki for a wide variety of activities, including training, project management, and sales support. With this wide and far-reaching agenda -- driven only by the imagination of employees -- this wiki has been dubbed the DrKWpedia, a nod to the largest wiki of all, Wikipedia.
The scope of this project -- and the reputation of the company -- should help to evangelize the way wikis can be used to make businesses more efficient, nimble, and creative. It helps that one of the leading proponents of the DrKW wiki is CIO JP Rangaswami. But as Socialtext-consultant Suw Charman observes, the widespread adoption of the DrKW wiki also has a lot to do with folks at lower tiers -- the "supernodes" who are so well connected and so influential among their peers.
There are other corporate "pedias" in the works, but to date this is the leading case study. If an organization wants to explore the business benefits of launching a wiki, the public documentation of this wiki project can be a great help.
Why community? That's the topic at tonight's edition of Third Thursday, a monthly Silicon Valley meet-up for PR and marketing professionals. We're interviewing folks from SAP Labs, Linden Lab (Second Life) and Vyatta for a talk about why businesses are so keen on communities. In short, it's a little thing called "wisdom of crowds" -- the increasingly well-known fact that when you have a freely organizing and sizeable community, all sorts of good things can happen. In business terms, we're talking about things like staff autonomy, business efficiencies, and "open brands." But building a community ain't easy. We'll look at the challenges that businesses face when attempting to build online communities -- political, organizational, budgetary.
There's one other thing we'll look at: online communities may be the place where we're seeing lots of innovation, but offline communities are getting a second look. In fact, we're seeing more and more interest in offline communities, and some of the innovative ideas from the online world are being replicated in the offline world. I think Third Thursday is a good example of this. For more than a year, many people in the PR world have been bumping, meeting and sometimes collaborating in the blogosphere. Then one day, a few of us got together and decided to take the conversation offline. And yes, we're experiencing some of the challenges that all groups face when building a community (political, organizational, and budgetary). But we're already experiencing the benefits from the wisdom of the crowd that has been gathering each third Thursday at Fanny & Alexander in Palo Alto. Hope to see you there.
I'm in the midst of reading John Thackara's excellent In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, which will eventually warrant a full review. Today, I want to pick up on one particular observation Thackara makes on the role of learning in organizations. He makes the point that
...the most important skills of all are so-called metacognitive skills--an understanding of guiding principles, of what really matters, and the abilility to filter out the growing flood of stuff that does not. "We need to be able to formulate new questions, " [Howard] Gardner argues..."and not just rely on tasks or problems posed by others. We need the ability to learn in new ways, to evaluate our own progress, to be able to transfer knowledge from one context to another." [pp.136-37, In the Bubble]
What makes this particularly important is that virtually no corporate training and precious little other training/education addresses these metacognitive skill issues. That's partly because developing good metacognitive learning skills diminishes the relative importance of the training department. If you become adept at identifying and monitoring your own learning, you may well conclude that the organization's curriculum bears little relationship to your needs.
As individuals, we need to assess whether our learning mix includes sufficient attention to the metacognitive. Do we have a good sense of how we learn? How well can we identify gaps in our skills or knowledge and map those to useful learning opportunities? How accurately can we monitor our level of mastery of a new skill?
If we have the appropriate organizational influence, we should be asking similar questions of our organizational training and development programs.
Over the course of one year, we will be conducting a survey of organizations that are supporting emergent behavior in the enterprise using social-media tools. The organizations do not need to use wikis per se, but they must be supportive of emergent behavior at the management level. Today marks the beginning of our survey.To nominate an organization for this series, please comment here.
The SAP Apollo Project. Our first entry in this series is a social media project dubbed "Apollo."
Led by former VC Jeff Nolan, Apollo is a competitive strategy group at SAP Labs, the enterprise-software giant. As we noted a while back on 33 Wikis, Nolan and his group are using a mix of social media tools -- blogs, RSS, and of course, wikis -- to better compete with Oracle, SAP's chief rival. .
There are many reasons why like this project. The gathering of competitive intelligence, and the management of that intelligence, are two of the most critical areas of activity for the strategy, marketing, and sales functions of an enterprise, and Nolan's group has found a way to approach these activities in ways that are better suited to how employees actually work. In addition to helping SAP in its effort to compete with Oracle, the Apollo Wiki is enabling the Apollo Group to perform more nimbly and efficiently by reducing the amount of email, status reports, and other unneccessary paperwork. The wiki -- in tandem with other social-media technologies -- could very well emerge as the competitive tool of the future.
If you want to learn more about this project -- and the larger goals that Nolan has for social media within SAP Labs -- check out this month's installment of Third Thursday, a monthly meet-up in Palo Alto for communications professionals. I'm moderating a panel that includes Nolan; Robin Harper, the VP of Community for Linden Lab (creators of Second Life); and Dave Roberts, Community Cruise Director for Vyatta, a SIlicon Valley start-up (and Eastwick client) that has created a community of software developers to build an open-source alternative to traditional routing software. To sign up, go here.
As I mentioned in my last post, I recently ran a 33-day survey on best practices in the wiki world. The project consumed a lot more time than I originally expected but it was well worth the effort. Not only did we -- my agency -- achieve what we set out to do (a catalog of best practices), but we also learned several things about the medium that are now helping to set the stage for a deeper investigation on emergence.
What did we learn? At least three things:
The wiki world has become a living laboratory on emergent behavior. Many reasons for this, but perhaps the biggest is that the simplicity of this DIY medium is enabling so many people, with so many different interests, to run experiments on ad hoc group formation. In our survey, we saw clear behavioral patterns among leaders and contributors, echoing what folks like Suw Charman and other students of wiki have said about successful communities (e.g., the prevalence of super-nodes, the well-connected folks in online communities that may or may not have an honored place in the official corporate hierarchy.) If an organization wants to learn about emergence, or how to support it, existing wiki communities provide a good open classroom.
Wikis today are being used to tackle lost or forgotten challenges. Again, perhaps the biggest reason for this is the DIY nature of the medium. Almost anyone can launch a wiki for almost any kind problem, as long as it lends itself to the kind "wisdom of crowds" that wikis can create. In our survey we got to see lots of problem-solving, from the sublime to the sublimely absurd. What's really encouraging: as more people learn about the problem-solving capabilities, more of the sublime will be put to the test. And people will not need to wait for institutional powers (say businesses or government) to sanction a cause.
Institutional powers are only beginning to understand the potential of the medium. In fact , we learned that very few wiki sites today are officially sanctioned or sposored by any organization. The exceptions were notable (a tax wiki sposored by Intuit, for example). But during the course of our survey, a number of wikis with great commercial potential emerged (one wiki was actually acquired during the course of our survey). Our bet: businesses will very soon seize upon this simple medium and begin experimenting on a larger scale.
Which brings us to the subject of a new survey -- something I will call Wikiwise. Each Monday, beginning next Monday, I will use the eastwikkers and Future Tense blogs to feature an organization that is officially supporting social media inside the enterprise to promote values associated with emergence -- staff autonomy, business efficiencies, and open culture. And as with 33 wikis, I will run the new survey with the help of the community. If you have a recommendation, please comment below. Your nominee does not need to use wikis per se, but it must be committed to a social media tool that is supporting emergence.
And yes, we are running this survey for one year, with two weeks off for vacation. There will be rest for the wikked.
Starting Monday, we'll be running an informal survey on how businesses are using social media to facilitate or support emergent organizations. Stay tuned for details, but in the meantime let us know if you have any leads on businesses that are experiimenting with social media inside the enterprise. Early leads: SAP, IBM, Sun -- yep, leaders in technology. We'd like to hear more about those, but we are even more interested in hearing about organizations outside the technology sphere.
Sound familiar -- well, I did something similar on the eastwikkers blog called 33 wikis. It was a 33-day survey of the wiki world, where we profiled one wiki each day, describing what the wiki was for, why we liked it, and what we all can learn from it. We'll will follow a similar numerical scheme and timeline here -- it really helped to organize a larger group of people to contribute.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
