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.
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
