I am trying hard to stay on the information diet. Today I worked like crazy to work through a couple of MB of data to give a good representation of sitevisits for a client. Whole day long I only checked email two times and stayed away from internet all together! Missing out on email, news and twitter surely made working more efficient. Got to keep this up at home, by trying to stay away from TV. Now busy cleening up my bookshelve and needing a solution for my magazines…
Inspired by Luis Suarez, I am going to give up email for the most part. First step is getting rid of my newsletter subscriptions. Either unsubscribing or better adding the RSS feed to my personal homepage! The next step will be using other media go motivate coworkers and clients to start using other tools. This will be a lot harder than the newsletter stuff… But we will see what will happen!
Luis experiment even got some attention from Andrew McAfee in a recent blogpost! It seems that getting rid of the email overflow is a genuine topic in business these days.
This week I am at the enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, read all about it in our Studytrip blog at http://www.ynnostudytrip.com!
After a discussion friday with two collegues I wanted have my own wiki and blog up and running on my laptop. I wanted to show interested people how easy this is and tell from my own experience how easy installation was. On saturday I started downloading WordPress (a blog), on sunday I installed Apache (a webserver), MySQL (a database) and PHP (a scipting engine) and got WordPress up and running. While I was busy I downloaded and installed MediaWiki (the same wiki software as wikipedia). I guess I spent 8 hours this weekend to get everything up and running. The most part was searching for some help online to solve some issues but I tackled them all. Total cost in cash for this setup was 0 euro’s.
The only thing holding you back will be an IT manager concerned with company standards, security policy or open source problems. These issues can be very true and maybe hard to tackle. Some other products are around at a cost to get you started but the most simple way is the one I described above. Sharepoint Services is for free if you have a windows server, which gets you blogs, wiki’s and teamsites!
This stuff is out there for free and support is online. Documentation and source code is for free so you can adapt to your wishes. A small server and a very small amount of IT knowledge is needed to get it roling.
If you cannot convince your boss, give me a call (tweet, email or something like that) and we will figure it out!
Tomorrow is the second E2.0 conference in The Netherlands. A great line-up with Andrew McAfee and Ross Mayfield among others will bring some great insights! A number of cases are on the menu and we will get an idea about the adoption in The Netherlands. I will be talking about a project we did at Alfa-college in Groningen. Together with a colleague, we will discuss this project from initial thought by the board until the technology hit the floor. Trying to figure out which part of the day is most interesting is actually useless, every topic from keynote to case study seems very interesting.
Will we be able to get more understanding on adoption of E2.0? What will be the mayor trends in The Netherlands in E2.0 the next years? Which technologies will succeed and which will fail (don’t worry about failure, it is the only way to knowledge!).
To get into the mood I already published my slides for tomorrow!
What do you do? Choose a adhoc approach to enterprise 2.0 and just let it happen in your company or choose a more strategic approach and build an enterprise wide platform? The AIIM report is very clear, an enteprise wide approach will get the best results. Because everybody uses the same platform it is far more easier to find your stuff and collaborate with everyone. Think about the problems you get using three project collaboration platforms inside your company. Due to the three platforms your projects will be set in silo’s and projectteams will be formed by the platform and not the capabilities of each teammember.
But do you have to roll out to every part of your organization. When you truely believe in the wisdom of the crowds you have to give everybody access to the enterprise 2.0 platform. But enterprise 2.0 will only be used by knowledge and collaboration intensive parts of your comapny. Not everybody will use it so why give them access? These other parts just need other platforms and applications to do their jobs.
Another thought on this is that the adhoc approach is the ultimate user control. Everybody in the enteprise can just start an enterprise 2.0 application and look what happens. The need for integration will come eventually and then it will get done.
In rolling out culture is a very important factor. Digital work and enteprise 2.0 is more culture then technology. Almost everybody uses office applications and stores documents on a network drive, but is this digital working and are you ready to really use an enterprise 2.0 platform?
I think a strategic approach to the right parts of your organization will yield the most benefits. Culture must be ready to even start with this enterprise wide!
What do you think? Let me know and lets discuss this!
I just want to take a moment to look at the definition of Enterprise 2.0. At the moment I am reading the AIIM report on Enterprise 2.0 and the first section is about defining Enterprise 2.0. The definition they come up with is:
A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise
The definition is the product of the surveyresults and the discussion with the advisory panel. The survey gave people a choice to select the best definition out of a range. In that range no single definition got a clear lead over the other. One of the choices was the definition Andrew McAfee gave in his article in SMR, whitch only got 12& of the votes. The two top definitions do not really give an idea about what Enterprise 2.0 is. The top definition was
the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise
This definition only focusses on technology and leaves the big question what Web 2.0 is! The number two definition is
The next generation of Enterprise Content Management
This is not true since ECM will be a part of the whole platform and has a great and sustainable function in the architecture of enterprise IT.
The discussion about the definition was very nice to read and really ads to the understanding about why this definition came up. This way you get the sense you actually listen to those guys talking and brainstorming.
I think it is a pity the term social (or something like that) did not make it to the definition. I guess it is hidden in the collaboration, emergence and integration capabilities. Another thing about the definition is the focus on technology. The report also stresses that culture is a factor in E2.0. Maybee it is still true that E2.0 is a technology that is part of a larger movement. This movement could be a digital workstyle that is being adopted be a larger growing number of people.
In this lifestyle people are always connected and the difference between work and life is blurring. Being part of social networks is very important and collaboration is king. Syndication of communication channels is imperative to get the grip on all the relevant content. Leadership and management are transparant, democratic and about cultivating and coordinating.
In short the Enteprise 2.0 defintion at the moment is great and I think it has to be part of a larger digital workstyle. Technology is just one part of the puzzle and there are many parts of the puzzle.
In this months WIRED magazine Chris Anderson answers the question ‘why $0.00 is the future of business’. His new book is going to be ‘FREE’ and will be published in 2009. This article is the introduction of the book.
In the article Chris talks about the way business is going to give away their products to customers. He outlines a big difference between free and cheap. When a product is cheap the buyer still has to make a decision to buy. When a product is free no decision is made and the buyer just starts using the product. One of the bigger models at the moment in the webbased world is the regular versus the premium product. The regular product is free to everyone and the premium product is available at a cost. Only 1% buys the premium but that is enough to make a profit for the company. The total operating costs of a company are realy low. Today in the online world storage and distribution are virtually free. The time it takes to start a product is almost nothing. You can make a new website or application is one day or two weeks. This is nothing compared to traditional software development cycles of more than 6 months. These companies do not employ hunderds of people. In the same issue of wired there is example, 37signals, who only employ 10 people and serve 1.000.000 customers!
If your company is going to give away some products, every strategy in your company has to be revised. You have to start using cheap production methods and knowledge management tools (eg. Enterprise 2.0 platforms). Make decisions about what products to give away and what products to sell at which price. Where are my people going to work, do I need an office? There are so many questions rising about this theme. I think it is going to set the trend for business the next years. At least in the webbased business, media and entertainment and other types of business who profit from free distribution and storage!
I already got a copy of ‘The Future of Management’ by Gary Hamel. I think this book and FREE are going to be complementary! The combination is going to set the standards for marketing and management in the future.
When I finished Gary Hamel’s book, I will talk about the combination some more. Do you agree? What do you think about the FREE article? I would like to read your comments.
In our last post Robbert and I ended with the conclusion that:
“we realized that E2.0 and current mechanisms that are present in the digital world of working, aren’t competing, but are complementary”
Yesterday I read an AIIM post on the “SharePoint Effect“. This effect is in my opinion a perfect example of organisations not seeing this complementary nature of Digital Order and Digital Freedom. In an earlier post I made I pointed out that E2.0 and it’s mechanisms is a perfect “Add on” for the Current Information Architecture.
So, the taxonomy is alive and kicking?
Yes, but differently. With mechanisms to help you structure (or, I’d rather say, facilitate) unstructured knowledge intensive processes, Information managers, Enterprise Architects and others experts in the field, don’t have to “Engineer The World” in advance into a repository. Parts of the organisation processes are fuzzy, messy. My opinion: don’t try to make it otherwise. There’s nothing wrong with Chaos. As long as it emerges within a well established framework. The result: Control AND Collaboration
Knowing who has the knowledge is more important then have the knowledge yourself. This businessrule we often hear in our interviews with customers. An the other hand we see that networkingplatforms are growing every day outside the companies (linkedin, xing ed.).
But how can we use both trends useful for our organisations so that we achieve a sort of knowledge network in the organisation? So that employees are knowing from each other which knowledge is available in the organisation. Who knows what?
An other trend that we observe is that people more and more working in networks. When people are working for your organisation they use their own network to get the job done, but they also enlarge their netwerk with new contacts outside of your organisation. So it seems also important to keep also the network alive when employee’s leaving the organisation? The people who leave the organisation have specific knowlegde, they also are a part of the network of the employees who are still working for you and the leaving employee has a network that is interesting for the organisation (a part of the network is build up in your organisation).
We think that twitter can help the organisation to combine the trends in a positive way for the organisation. Twitter can help to:
Is it hard to get above avantage? We think it is not, the implementation of the twitter-technology is a small change on your intranet. The most work will be to explain the value of the knowlegde network and the reason to twitter to your employees. But the most of them are using networkplatforms outside the company, so why would the change be big?
In the above situation, twitter is used as a social software but then applied in a business context. What are your thoughts on this subject? We would love to hear!
This post was made by @hendri_ende and @robberthomburg
