Around this time last year, I was asked to help some colleagues who were contributing to a book by IBM VP Maria Azua about innovation and collaboration in the workplace. In particular I spent some time reviewing a chapter by Laurisa Rodriguez, who I’d been working with for several years and had met up with along with many of the other contributors at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin a month or so earlier.

I was aware that the book was due to be published during 2009 but I’d been so busy with the day job that it had dropped off my radar. Then I noticed a couple of incoming links from others who were writing about it (and found Laurisa’s blog post about it)… and realised that it had hit the shelves. The book, The Social Factor (Amazon link), is published by IBM Press and features contributions from many of the IBMers I’ve come to know through our internal social networks and tools over the past five years. It contains perspectives which reflect many of our experiences adopting tools and techniques such as tagging, blogging, wikis and social bookmarking inside the enterprise. It also discusses something I’ve frequently referred to in my speaking engagements – IBM’s highly successful Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which Maria herself established, and which continues to drive a lot of innovations inside the organisation that feed out into software products and service offerings. There’s a good Redbook about TAP available, of course, but it’s worth reading more in chapter 10 of this book.

It’s always nice to see one’s name in print… despite being a blogger I’m not sure I’ve got an entire book to write, so this may be as much as I get… so for those interested, you’ll find a small quotation from Laurisa’s interview with me – about Twitter, of all things, imagine that! – on page 105.

So, if you’re interested in the impact of social media, crowdsourcing and technology on innovation in a large enterprise, check out The Social Factor. I may be biased because I’m mentioned and several of my friends contributed to it, but I purchased my own copy, I’m making nothing from the book myself, and I believe that it is a great read!

Lexiconic Foreplay
A .Mase Da Rula. and .Archaic.Bliss. Collaboration

.Archaic.Bliss.

His

premeditated
deep {pen}etration
alliterated flirtatious
foreplay

pens
became frisky

fondling

dirty
action verbs

performing
perfected
oral {dic}tation
by way of
tracing poetic outlines
with tongues
saturating
many

{un}spoken
words

I
lost
my
will
to
speak

…as…

similes
shimmied

our foreshadows
fornicated

predicting throats to echo improper nouns
as run on sentences began to excrete
our bodies drowned in vowels
rapidly running down cheeks

literally
soaking
sheets

after this

we gonna have
to flip
the page

.Mase Da Rula.

and
go and
set the stage

of
our
…lexiconic foreplay

allow
me to
portray

ardent
action
upon your
love contraption

seemingly
sensing
your profound
reaction

to my
metaphoric adaption
collapsing lungs
with my
sensual syntax

…and…

allowing
our souls
mend

becoming synonymous
with consonants

words
that go unspoken
suddenly become dominant

digging
deeper
&
deeper

deliciously
delving into the
dark
delectables
delicately
drilling
desires that
drench upon
the distinguish canvas
of our sensual stage play

where
the performance
guaranteed
will echo
through time
for all eternity

Just the other day, while reading the news online, I ran into this cool website called Spot.Us. It’s a very interesting project of the Center for Media Change, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, California.

As they describe themselves:

We are an open source project, to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics. Contributions are tax-deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available through a Creative Commons license. It’s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate.

Good news, a couple of weeks ago The New York Times used for the first time a research partly funded through Spot.Us (full article here).

Spot.Us is a good example of innovative project, successful for its transparency and relevancy, which proves there are many ways to achieve success in your business when you think from the audience perspective and delivers relevant content. It also shows that people are willing to pay for information.

Guess it’s time for change. Starting in our so-many-times-short minds.

Unified Communications (UC), ip-telefonie,  conferencing,  collaboration en andere vormen van geïntegreerde communicatie en informatie-uitwisseling worden in rap tempo door bedrijven geadopteerd. Uit een nieuwe studie van ABI Research blijkt dat de wereldwijde markt hiervoor in 2008 nog $302 miljoen dollar vertegenwoordigde. In 2014 zal dit $4,2 miljard zijn, schat het onderzoeksbureau.

Grote ondernemingen profiteren waarschijnlijk het snelst van geïntegreerde communicatie, denkt ABI. De marktvorser verwachten dat de adoptie hiervan zal leiden tot een groei van managed services. Hoewel grote bedrijven over een grote in-house expertise beschikken,  kan UC veel beslag leggen op tijd en ressources. Uitbesteden biedt in dat geval uitkomst.

ABI ziet ook nog genoeg uitdagingen. Systemen van verschillende leveranciers bijvoorbeeld zijn nog verre van gestandaardiseerd. Het belang van partnerships in de waardeketen van UC zal om die reden voorlopig nog groot zijn.

Hoewel UC een glansrijke toekomst tegemoet gaat, moeten bedrijven wel hun uiterste best blijven doen om scepsis ten aanzien van businesscases te overwinnen, waarschuwt ABI.

Australia has been quietly developing its post-bureaucratic government credentials. A Government 2.0 Taskforce has been established. This is openly based upon Obama’s Transparency and Open Government Announcement, and Gordon Brown’s Power of Information Taskforce. A number of initiatives have taken place at a state level, and there are signs that the central government is keen to take up the mantle.

We may well see numerous copy-cat initiatives springing up: not so much pressure groups as quasi- think tanks. Whether they manage to push power into the post-bureaucratic arena remains to be seen.

The Google Wave invites pushed to the community for the last 1-2 months are starting to bring some fruitful results. The number of pilots, prototype, demos and other activities related to Google Wave started to growth. I already posted on very interesting, in my view, business process building collaboration tool from SAP. In addition, you can see few more examples of Google Wave in “almost real life” here.

Looking on all these examples I wanted to figure out few possible PLM related scenarios that in my view can get real benefits from using Google Wave.

1. ECO Collaboration. It will be great to have an ability to mix formal process and not formal collaboration around planned or requested change. Most of the today systems implement a formal process that allows to run change approval. The level of flexibility can vary to depend on the system you have, but in my view, none of them can provide an ability to merge of a free mail collaboration and at the same time host formal control on ECO process definition and status. I think, potential of Google Wave robots can unlock and provide such capability to engineering and manufacturing teams.

2. Collaborative Documentation Release. To have high level quality of your product is very important these days. However, to organize efficient collaboration between engineering, manufacturing and documentation team is a not simple effort. They usually have different tools and communicate in a very weak manner. Google Wave can be a collaborative tool that bridge them and allow to have a documentation effort started very early in the process of product development. 3D and non-3D documentation can be embedded into Waves and provide up-to-date information to document writes. This information can be updated and documentation writes can collaborate with people they need in other organizations.

3. Design Discussion and Brainstorming. Design activities can be hardly formalized. Many people in the organization can be involved into this activity almost on demand. At the same time, conferencing and other collaboration tools are not allowing to engineers do it in the asynchronous way. Google Wave can help. Mixing discussion threads and 3D information in Waves we’ll be able to support designers and engineers.

I think, Google Wave will have a huge potential in the future of collaboration. Email and other collaboration tools will be affected and will require to make their transformation to survive. It will be interesting in ride in my view. In my today’s examples, I was looking mostly on use cases when an email is heavily involved today. However, I’m sure, other examples will come as well.

Best, Oleg

Werk bevindt zich momenteel in een overgangsfase. Martijn van der Woude van PiCompany en Adjiedj Bakas, Trendwatcher of the Year 2009, definiëren acht megatrends die de toekomst van werk zullen bepalen.

1. Het traditionele onderwijs maakt plaats voor lifelong learning. Onderwijs en bedrijfsleven raken meer verweven. Multitasking combineert e-learning met andere digitale activiteiten en spelend leren via games wordt belangrijker.
2. Zzp`ers zijn de toekomstige werkenden, alleen of in groepsverband, zoals verpleegkundigen in ziekenhuizen. De grens tussen werkgever en –nemer vervaagt.
3. Bij zowel hoog- als laagopgeleiden treedt talentmanagement op. Er ontstaat zo een diversiteit aan werkinvulling, dagindeling en work-life balance.
4. Werk technologiseert, waardoor vervelende klussen geautomatiseerd worden en de werkomgeving gepersonaliseerd kan worden.
5. Betrokkenheid bij en toewijding aan de organisatie maakt plaats voor nieuwe zingeving en een andere ethiek, waarbij de persoonlijke groei centraal staat.
6. Zelfmarketing zorgt ervoor dat mensen eerder passend werk vinden en werken vanuit `family hubs` van collega`s.
7. Er ontstaat een nieuw leiderschap, waarbij het aantal leiders afneemt en nieuwe managementstijlen ontstaan.
8. De nieuwe wereldorde zal door Azië gedomineerd worden, maar het Westen behoudt een grote creatieve macht.

Organisaties zouden medewerkers meer ruimte moeten geven om fouten te maken, want het cliché is waar dat mensen leren van hun fouten. Het Oogziekenhuis Rotterdam vertoont oogoperaties op beeldschermen in de wachtkamer. Daardoor kunnen artsen eventuele foutjes niet meer verdoezelen. Frans Hiddema, directeur van het Oogziekenhuis, verklaart dat artsen en verpleegkundigen worden gestimuleerd om hun fouten te melden. Ze zitten wekelijks om te tafel om de fouten te bespreken.

Begin jaren `90 stond het Oogziekenhuis slecht aangeschreven, maar nu prijkt het bovenaan de lijstjes met patiënttevredenheid. Cathy van Dyck, universitair docent `organization science` aan de VU, acht het funest als in een organisatie fouten hard worden afgestraft. Als mensen bang zijn om fouten te maken en melden, kunnen ze er geen lering uit trekken. Michael Frese, `s werelds beroemdste errormanagementgoeroe, adviseert organisaties om medewerkers te stimuleren om `aan te klooien`. Een taboecultuur rondom fouten remt de creativiteit en innovatiegerichtheid.

Psycholoog Arjan van Dam beargumenteert in zijn boek `De kunst van het falen` dat een prestatiegerichte oriëntatie op korte termijn succes heeft, maar op de lange termijn is een faal-leergerichte oriëntatie te prefereren.

Het gebruik van e-mail kent cultuurverschillen per werelddeel. Dat blijkt uit het rapport `Inside the Inbox: Trends for the Multichannel Marketer`. Het rapport is uitgegeven door Epsilon, een online marketing consultancybureau. Voor het rapport werden ruim 4.000 consumenten in Noord-Amerika, Azië en Europa ondervraagd over e-mailen.

Het rapport laat zien dat Aziaten veel minder geïnteresseerd zijn in de afzender dan in de onderwerptitel. Bij Noord-Amerikanen en Europeanen maakt de onderwerpzin van een mail juist weer niet veel uit. Voor Noord-Amerikanen is e-mail het product voor online communicatie. Voor 87% is e-mail het meest gebruikte online communicatiemiddel, terwijl dit percentage bij Europeanen en Aziaten op 74 en 63% ligt. Bij instant messaging scoren Aziaten weer hoger: 28% tegen 15% bij Europeanen en 6% bij Noord-Amerikanen.

Aziaten blijken meer gedigitaliseerd te zijn dan andere wereldburgers. Zo vinden veel Aziaten dat telefonische verkoopgesprekken, telemarketing, aanbiedingen van een retailer, rekeningen en per post verstuurd promotiemateriaal vervangen zijn door e-mail. Dat Aziaten meer digitaal werken blijkt ook uit het gebruik van pda`s of handhelds: 32% gebruikt een handheld device om te e-mailen, tegen 7% in Europa en 9% in Noord-Amerika.

While learning about lean, I came across the five S’s, which is a tool to organize a workspace with visual controls and order.
The S’s stand for five Japanese words that start with an S: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke. Translated in English this becomes Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain.

 
(image courtesy of b2b.blogsome.com)

Sort
Sort your material and get rid of all the unnecessary pieces.

Straighten
Give every item a fixed place and make it visual.

Shine
Clear up and inspect for shortcomings.

Standardize
Create standards to monitor and guard the previous 3 S’s.

Sustain
The discipline that is needed to maintain this in a process of continuous improvement.

Working in a clean, organized workplace is not the only goal of the 5 S’s. The biggest benefit is the prevention of errors and defects that are caused by waste. This is a reality for manufacturing, but can also be applied to software development, as you can read in the Poppendieck’s book Implementing lean software development.

Sort
Reduce the size of your codebase

Straighten
Organize the projects and packages

Shine
Clean up. Resolve failing unit tests, warnings, TODO’s, … Problems are more visible when everything is clean and tidy.

Standardize
Keep clean and refactor mercilessly to reduce complexity and improve maintainability.

Sustain
Build in regular checkpoints to control the current state (ex. Retrospectives), so actions can be taken.

I think it goes further than code. By keeping the team room clean, we

• avoid being influenced by old information which may no longer be accurate
• assure that every information we look at is still relevant
• stimulate the use of visual aids, such as whiteboards and flipcharts
• keep our stress level down
• make it easier for stakeholders to get the data they need from the information radiators

I don’t like to clean up, and probably neither do you. Fact is that I do want to have these benefits and cleaning can go fast as long as you don’t let the clutter pile up.

Invites left: 2620

Looks like Google sent out another bunch of invitations (2620) for Wave & since most of my friends are already on Wave, I thought why not give it away. So, in case you want one, just drop a comment (don’t forget to protect it against spamming by substituting @ with [at] & the likes) or mail with your name & email address. I’ll update the counter on top as I progress with the giveaway.

I’ve used Wave to collaborate on a couple of projects in the last couple of weeks. Some features are not yet functional, but it does look pretty promising. And yes, it seems that Wave is more responsive on Google Chrome than Firefox.

P.S. It wouldn’t hurt if you did your bit for the Water initiative by scrolling down to the Socialvibe widget on the sidebar & adding your signature to the cause.

Update (26/11): Sent out 6 invitations based on requests received in facebook.

An English teacher from one of our area schools used a public setting to teach her students

Coffee Shop

writing skills… but not just a public forum within the classroom or school. She literally used the public, customers at coffee shops, to teach students about collaborative journaling.

Here is how it worked. The instructor, Ellen Stackable, left the students’ journals each evening at coffee shops around town. Coffee shop customers would read the student comments, add their responses and follow-up comments… dialoguing with the students through the journals. In this particular case, the collaborative writing was physical, not virtual. The student buy-in, as well as, that of the customers was apparent in the progress of the project and the students’ comments about the experience.  The Tulsa World newspaper published an article highlighting the project, in case you are interested in reading more.

I see strong parallels between the interaction and engagement in this project and the projects involving student blogging from Christy’s post earlier this month, not just because students are developing writing skills.  More important in both examples is the conversation with an unknown public.

So, what is it about public writing that draws students (and the audience) in? Is it the conversation or topic that is so engaging? Or perhaps the recognition that someone is actually interested in what they have to say? Think how important it is to you to know you are being heard.

What a powerful message of conversation… knowing someone is “listening” and responding! I know, it works for me!

I am not a tech-toy pioneer.  It was two years before I logged onto my company’s instant message system because I thought it would create ADD symptoms (it didn’t).  I just got a Blackberry a few weeks ago (yes, Blackberry, not iPhone) because I lost my PalmPilot calendar and they don’t make them anymore.  And I resisted a Twitter account because I thought it was silly, frivolous, and seemingly narcissistic.

In each case, I found myself wrong.  Let me explain why I now Twitter. I found following a few “tweets” actually exposed me to helpful info I would not have seen otherwise.  Being selective helps.  I follow about a half dozen Tweets, including GAO (which announces its new reports daily),  Federal News Radio reporter Chris Dorobek (who posts links to timely government stories), and a new site, OhMyGov!, which highlights interesting government-related stories.

For example, OhMyGov! editor Mark Malseed did a great story, “Social Media for Government:  Six Trends for 2010,” that I’d not have seen if I had not been on Twitter.  Malseed summarized trends from a Harvard Business website article targeted to the private sector, but it is relevant to the public sector as well:

• Individuals will become more selective about their social media connections and trim back the number of networks they belong to because of information overload.
• Organizations will look to scale up their social media efforts (and in government, this will likely be driven by the long-awaited Open Government Directive).
• Managers will be encouraging (not discouraging) their employees to participate in social media on behalf of their organizations.
• Organizations will create more formal social media policies, and begin to enforce them (I’ve seen corporate dress codes for avatars in Second Life!).
• Social media will become more mobile-device oriented.
• Sharing will no longer mean email.  As generations shift in the workplace, email is the new snail mail.

So, do I “tweet?” Well, not really, but I do follow others!  You can follow the IBM Center, though, at: BusofGovernment on Twitter. So, if you haven’t joined, you might try it out and see if it makes a difference.  It’s free!

Let me start by affirming I am in favor of democratic structures in “for-profit” organizations. I believe people should have a say in decisions, no doubts about that. In my opinion, the concept of democracy is closely related to the wisdom of crowds where diverse opinions from a larger group of people systematically leads to better decisions and solutions.

Comments from the peanut gallery

Now that’s established, I want to make a distinction between democracy (participating in the selection of the decision) and the discussions leading to decisions – which I will call the debates.

The debate is not a democratic process. Let me use an example to explain why I have an issue with opening debates to crowds.

Following another disappointing loss of our local hockey team, a few colleagues gathered in the cafeteria were loudly debating their opinion on the cause of the team’s poor performance…

• Paul: “Price [the goal tender] doesn’t deserve to play with the team, he lacks consistency…”
• Mario: “What do you mean? Price did what he could but he can’t do everything. With Markov’s and Gill’s injury our defensive line is weak and Price is too often left to himself…”
• Richard: “Did you guys watch the same game I did? We have no offensive line. We gave a lot of talent to bring Cammalleri to Montreal but he is just not the scorer we need and nobody actually has the right skills…”
• Mary: “No, no. It’s the referee who influenced the game…”

I’ll stop here but that is enough to show my point. How many of these people do you believed played in the NHL? None.

How many of these people took coaching training or even played junior hockey? None.

How many of these opinions are actually useful to make the right decision? None. That’s right!

This is what my wife calls the “comments from the peanut gallery“.

Let me use another brief example to prove my point further.

Assume a skilled people manager joins his highly technical team for a brain storming session. The team is looking to improve performance of their Java application and the tension in the room is high.  The manager – for sake of clarity, doesn’t have a clue about computer programming except maybe for a 3 hours introduction to Microsoft Excel taken 5 years ago – suggests to replace the framework and maybe the sorting method. What are the chances that his suggestion will be accepted? None.

The same situation applies when people with no management experience or training jump into a discussion about people management or organizational strategies. To take part of the discussion there needs to be a few pre-requisites. It is not enough to want to participate in the discussion, to really contribute people need: knowledge of the topic being discussed, experience, and a willingness to move the debate forward.

What is not needed is a personal opinion without facts, knowledge or experience but this is exactly what happens when a debate is open to the general public. When these conditions are met (knowledge, experience, and willingness), people should be welcomed to join the discussion so to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. When these conditions aren’t met, people should stay on the sideline waiting for the debate to end and propositions to be open for selection.

Just like in the Canadian Parliament, a selected (elected) number of people were selected to represent others in the discussion. Once options are selected, the democratic process can allow people to vote.

I have The Beatles’  ’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ rattling through my head right now, but, of course, they were only going for ‘It was 20 years ago today…’

What am I wittering on about, I can (quite justifiably) hear you cry?

It’s 24th November as I write this and I spent the morning with the wonderful year 6 class at St James CE Primary in Rusholme (the very same school who worked with us on the amazing “Museum of Me” project).

Image, the Museum's Darwin Extravaganza poster

In preparation for a visit to the Museum next week to explore the Charles Darwin: Evolution of a Scientist exhibition (more on this in a later post!), we were looking through the newspaper produced by the Museum to support the exhibition. It contains some fascinating information about Darwin’s life (and world events happening at the same time).

I was delighted when one of the class spotted that ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published exactly 150 years ago today.

See? We work with observant children here!

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