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.
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.
No surprise here. Of all the major Internet giants, Yahoo! has always appeared to be the most socially minded, and their new corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, is a real treat -- nicely designed, easy to navigate, integrating text, photos, audio, video. Most of all, it's consistent with Yahoo's brand, which to some extent, has always been about emergence.
Says the site's editor, Nick Dugan:
"We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We'll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you ... you get to listen). You'll hear from interns to executives. Some days we'll be light and airy, others we'll get serious."
The not to "anecdotal" information, by the way, strikes the right note. Often, I am asked what a blog can do that a corporate Web site cannot. It's more then function than the tool that matters here. By providing visitors a more candid peek into the inner workings at Yahoo!, Yodel Anecdotal is promoting and supporting a more spontaneous, authentic way for staff to interact internally and externally.
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.
When people hear the name Robert Scoble, many think about the groundbreaking blog he wrote for Microsoft before his recent departure for Podtech. From our perspectve, his work for a Microsoft interactive portal called Channel 9 is just as noteworthy. An early innovator in DIY, off-the-cuff video, Scoble trolled the Microsoft campus, capturing scores of staffers in their real-work environments, unscripted, sans handlers, and it was really effective. If Scoble's blog put a human face on the company, Channel 9 presented many others.
That effort continues today on Channel 9, which has developed into a really impressive forum -- incorporating blogs, wikis, videos and polls -- for all sorts of Microsoft watchers. And by tapping so many staffers to participate in this open forum, Channel 9 has enabled Microsoft to support emergence in a really interesting way. Many people you see on Channel 9 are the new, emergent leaders at Microsoft, who now have a direct channel for connecting to the outside world.
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.
Note: To be fair to the other organizations that we are surveying in this series, I did not consult my Future Tense colleague, Dave Desforges -- a manager at SUN -- for this week's entry. Of course, I hope that Dave will contribute to what we know about Sun's ambitious blogging initiative:
--CEO Jonathan Schwartz is perhaps the best known and most visible CEP blogger today, and he got there the emergent way (he began blogging as COO).
--More than 2,000 SUN employees are blogging today, and you can track some of that activity here.
--The blogging initiative closely resembles I.B.M.'s -- a "inside-out" approach where the company provides a company-wide platform for blogging.
As a recent article in USA Today observed, "businesses talk a lot about becoming more open and transparent, but they will be watching Schwartz's experiment to see how much transparency is feasible in business, where trade secrets are protected and warts hidden." We'll be watching, too, as SUN, IBM and a few others in the technology world conduct the first experiments in large-scale, company-supported blogging.
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.
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.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
