The AppGap» Jon Husband

McKinsey – How Web 2.0 Usage Is Changing Over Time

Jon Husband — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:52:47 +0000

McKinsey, a leading organizational consulting firm, has just released its most recent study regarding the usage of Web 2.0.

From a read of the announcement, it appears that collectively we are still on the path towards social computing becoming a fixture in the knowledge-based workplace … hardly a surprise.

Across all categories, the use of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal purposes has increased from 53% in 2007 to 65% of respondents in 2009.

The largest components of growth have come from using Web 2.0 to develop new products / services internally, to manage internal knowledge and to reinforce the company culture via tools such as internal social networking applications.

The companies who have embedded these tools in their day-to-day activities and processes have seen the largest impact by improving communication across silos to reduce duplicate work and leverage experts in other areas.

The report goes on to say that enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies to connect and interact with business partners and suppliers has slowed down or stagnated … again, not much of a surprise given the often transactional nature of those relationships and the fact that electronic connections between those parties have existed in one form or another for quite some time now.

Finally, the McKinsey report outlines what for many has become an item of faith about social computing in / by the enterprise.

The momentum we see in the growth of Web 2.0 technologies implies we will see higher penetration in 2010 for using these technologies for employees to collaborate and to facilitate interactions with customers.

To drive increased usage for managing interactions with suppliers and partners, companies will need to find ways use these technologies to augment the formal relationships between business entities and not substitute formal interactions with more ad hoc ones.

Nonetheless, it is clear that expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.

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How Things Are Supposed To Work …

Jon Husband — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:25:14 +0000

The title of the blog post (excerpt below) says it all.

Kudos where kudos due, this short story show how customer support is supposed to work today.

A Grateful Customer

24 August, 2009 (19:28)

This weekend my laptop had a total meltdown on the drive and I lost all my data (may still find a way to get it back – yet to be determined) due to a combination of a Windows update gone bad (first one in 14 years) and the incomplete removal of Linux (Grub boot loader remained.) For whatever reason the .net framework update completely munged on my computer and in doing so it wiped out the MBR (master boot record). Now normally that’s not a big deal you simply …

[ Snip ...]

Now I need a Windows computer for work and I needed to be at work this morning so I thought well screw the data I’ll go buy a copy of Vista and install it. Off to the only local store open on a Sunday …

[Snip ...]

Enter my new HP G60-439CA

Well I’m back up and running and if I can get XP installed on the old one I might still retrieve my data as I have XP backups on an external USB drive but Vista does not know what to do with them.

[ Snip ...]

Anyway to the title of this post. The one thing that had me sweating bullets was the loss of Quicken.

Now I regularly back it up to an external USB drive and when I bought Quicken 2009 I saved the downloaded install file to that same drive. So after I got my new laptop up and running I went to reinstall Quicken from the saved file and uh oh I got file corruption errors.

After buying the laptop I have no funds left to buy yet another copy of Quicken – especially since they forced me to upgrade just two months ago when they expired online banking in my 2006 version. So I visited their site and contacted their email support team, explained my problem, used all the same contact info I had used when buying from them and waited hopefully for a positive response.

That was late yesterday afternoon and this morning I received an email from them with a link to download a fresh version of the install file, no questions asked. It installed perfectly and I was able to import my data from the 2 day old backup with no problems at all. So I want to take this opportunity to really thank Intuit software and the Quicken team for coming to my rescue like that.

I’ve been a Quicken customer since the mid 90’s and I will stay one for as long as I can now. It’s the best money manager out there and that was tremendous customer service.

(Disclosure: Intuit is the spnsor of this blog)

The moment where the customer gets real and satisfying service .. what hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in a single company strive for.

It’s a real, and randon, blog post from a guy I know who has no incentive whatsoever to post this story on his blog. That’s why I noticed it, and why it’s such a good example of doing things the right way, the customer-centred way. Well done.

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“Social Learning” Will Be a Core Design Element in the Knowledge Workplace

Jon Husband — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:48:07 +0000

As many of you will know, there’s been a debate going on for some time now about the relative effectiveness and the ROI of formal and informal learning (formal learning being structured-and-scheduled courses and other measurable forms of content delivery, informal learning being the myriad ways people exchange information that becomes incorporated into one’s perspective or ways of doing things).

This debate has been intensified by the growing presence and uptake of collaborative platforms which seek to engage peoples’ social tendencies and mimic the ways they interact with information and each other to get things done.

The points made by these three executives from T Rowe Price, Sun Microsystems and Booz Allen Hamilton aren’t new to those of us who have been following and facilitating the uptake of this new generation of knowledge work tools and methods.

They do, however, underscore how clear it is that the dynamics spawned by a half-decade’s experience with social computing and social networks will undergo a massive migration into the knowledge workplace of the near future.

Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at the ASTD 2009 International Conference

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Tim O’Reilly Dissects Implications of Google Wave for (by extrapolation) the Knowledge Workplace

Jon Husband — Sat, 30 May 2009 19:11:35 +0000

Basically he takes it apart and discusses how and why Google Wave could be an order-of-magnitude leap forward in enabling effective collaboration.

In other news, I’ve heard this past week that Microsoft will plug in, or layer over, Sharepoint with the old Lotus collaboration application Groove that helped bring Ray Ozzie to Microsoft.

Given these developments, one could not be blamed for assuming that collaboration will be THE fundamental core design principle for the knowledge workplace of the (near) future.

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?

Yesterday’s Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application – still very much in the early stages of development – that represents a profound advance in the state of the art.

Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, “We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?”

That is exactly the right question, and one that every developer should be asking him or herself. The world of computing has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our applications bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the tools we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Google’s Sydney office over the past two years, had the code name Walkabout. That’s the Australian aboriginal tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the songlines and learn the world anew.

.At the moment I don’t have anything to add to Tim O’reilly’s analysis. Read the rest of his comprehensive exploration of Groove Google Wave here …

Implementation 2.0

Jon Husband — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:06:33 +0000

(cross-posted on the author’s Wirearchy blog)

After a recent discussion with a wish-they-were-a-client, an interesting and stimulating conversation yesterday with Dr. Anne Marie McEwan of The Smart Work Company in the UK, and reading this comprehensive blog post this morning by Dave Pollard, I settled in for a bit of think and now some writing.

In writing about the emergence of both wirearchy and Enterprise 2.0, I have often commented on and called for the re-design of the ways we carry out knowledge work. I still think it’s useful if not necessary, but I am no longer convinced (I think) that it need be approached in apprehensive ways as potentially traumatic or wrenching for a given organization.

Here’s why.

I, and many others, have made this essential point often:

What Intranet designers and managers fail to appreciate is that the principal way people share information and build useful knowledge (italics my addition) hasn’t changed in centuries — people get it through real-time conversation with people they respect and trust. This gives them comfort that the content they’re given is current and authoritative, and through the conversation they can also appreciate the context behind that content, and ask questions to make it more useful to them.

The principles of organizational development (OD) recognized long ago that most people like working and want to make their contributions to purposeful getting-things-done … and also recognized that one of the critical issues in helping organized social systems of on-purpose people (organizations, enterprises, etc.) was going beyond the strictures of over-rigid organizational structures and management methods towards treating with the essential human component of organized activity exactly as if “most people like working and want to make their contributions to purposeful getting-things-done … “.

Even after 3 years or so of discussion about Enterprise 2.0 challenges (often focused on obstacles presented by organizational structure and culture, a plethora of calls for ROI justifications and case studies showing that there’s real and tangible value, worry about loss of efficiency and so on), I remain surprised that there hasn’t been more enthusiastic take-up.

After all, I think it’s clear that now the tools, services and understanding of the dynamics are advanced to the point where it’s apparent that people connected online can and are mimicking closely the way(s) people have always exchanged information and built knowledge. If I were an organizational leader, I’d make it a priority to experiment with, implement and embed in an organization’s regular practices this now-accessible new way of working.

However, many organizational leaders remain skeptical, having been weaned on efficiency-driven objectives, measurement and micromanagement techniques. These controlmeisters are missing the point, I think. After business processes have had the bejesus engineered out of them and all the objectives, measurements and milestones are in place, the people and how they work … individually and together in groups … remain as the most important, and most complex, variable.

I think knowledge-workplace guru (deservedly so-labelled) Dave Pollard has done us a great service by clarifying that the tools and services know available are there to support more effectively how people have always (and will always) exchange information and build useful knowledge. He tends to build lists and decision grids (with every other blog post, it seems .. thanks, Dave, for doing what few of us can, at least consistently). With this most recent presentation (A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING WEB 2.0 (AKA SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS) IN YOUR ORGANIZATION ) he offers a path to clarifying and understanding what might best support a given organization’s quest for greater effectiveness. At the end of today’s blog post Dave states:

Conclusion

This presentation has suggested an approach you can use to gently move your organization from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, without a lot of expenditure, other than in energy to actually talk to the users (not the suppliers) of information and connectivity tools in your enterprise. In the process, I think you’ll find some ways to reduce the cost of maintaining legacy sites and systems that no longer provide value, get yourself some recognition as a shrewd and focused innovator, and have a lot of fun helping the people in your organization to work a little bit smarter.

At the tail end of my previous mainstream management consulting I found myself caught in a paradox more-or-less of my own making. I loved the opportunities to act as a skilled tailor or architect, helping client organizations to understand issues from within their own context and that of competitive external markets, and designing a path to addressing those issues effectively. At the same time, I loathed working with the same tool-kit and the same rapidly-getting-tired methodologies that were by and large derived from the core industrial era assumptions about efficiency and the structure of work. I thought too much and too hard about the bind that placed me in, and so had to move on … deciding I wanted to belong to the future and not to the past.

However, today as a recovering mainstream management consultant (you’re always recovering from addiction, they say) I’m inclined to suggest that we do not look for recipes or checklists or established homogenous models of how to carry out Implementation 2.0. I’m inclined to say “let’s get on with it”, we still need to address a business purpose or organizational mandate and mission, set objectives, make intelligent decisions about what to measure and how, but for goodness sake let’s use the tools, services and dynamics of purposeful exchange that are available and on offer.

Another deservedly-labelled knowledge-workplace guru put it thus:

The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?

DO NOTHING

GET OUT OF THE WAY

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

Yeah, you have to read the whole blog post, not just the section headlines above, to grok what Euan’s on about.

But .. Dave and Euan’s points are similar. The way(s) of working on offer today are more “natural” than ever, because people can share more easily and effectively.

By and large, adult people will stay on purpose and will want to get things done so as to contribute more effectively to goals and mission. A leader or manager’s job is to make the goals and missions clear, help them resonate with why people are doing them, and treat that complex variable called people as responsible adults who want to be effective and get things done.

As they say in Quebec with that charming no-”th” accent … that’s it, that’s all.

Future Exploration Network Report … “Enterprise Social Network Strategy”

Jon Husband — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:45:16 +0000

Fellow networked-world thinker, theorist and author Ross Dawson and colleagues carried out research sponsored by IBM about the views of australian executives regarding the use of social networks and social computing in the enterprise.

The report titled “Enterprise Social Network Strategy” was released in November 2008. That seems like forever-ago in today’s world … hardly fresh news, but it had not come to my attention until now, and I think it’s still quite germane given that we’re somewhere in the early stages of a massive shift in the way organizations carry out work and deal with ongoing change.

Here, excerpted from his blog post announcing the release of the report, are some quoted views from the Australian executives.

Quotes from senior Australian executives in the report include:

“Our trial of social networks is going exceptionally well – there is very positive feedback from employees. They see it as a personal touch that improves their enjoyment of the work environment.”

“What if I have one of my best performers spending an hour a day on Facebook – do I really want to stop them?”

“We’ve pretty much taken the view that most people come to work to do a good job.”

“The whole organisation is about collaboration. So the area of social networks is really critical for us, particularly if we want to provide a seamless service delivery to the client.”

“The credit crunch has been a good thing. In good times it takes organisations a long time to look at new things but in times of difficult business we are more ready to see that we need to consider change. The way we market our products is going to be different.”

“For Gen Y, social networking is much more open than traditional computing. Look at gaming. They have a collective mindset – achieving common goals is more important to them. They either win together or they don’t win. ”

“We don’t have a single employee that is not highly computer literate. Everyone is on Facebook.”

“We are serious about finding ways to engage people. We have to compete for talent.”

“The way products and services are sold in our industry will be vastly different to how it is done today”

“We have an evolving strategy. Fail fast and cheap. We’re finding that’s the best strategy.”

.

The report can be freely downloaded from:
rossdawsonblog.com/Enterprise_Social_Network_Strategy_Report.pdf

Yet Another Glimpse At the Future of Work

Jon Husband — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:52:44 +0000

About a month ago the summary of McKinsey’s research on the use of the Web and social computing tools in the knowledge-based workplace made the rounds of the blogosphere and the Web. It brought to mind an article from the January 2006 survey “Knowledge and the Company” in The Economist titled “The New Organisation” to which I have pointed several times over the past two years.

Why did that particular article come to mind ? In the context of McKinsey’s research summary, for two reasons.

The first because the article started out with several paragraphs that took us back to the 50’s and William H. Whyte’s famous “The Organization Man“, noting that basically organizational structures and basic management techniques haven’t changed much since then, whilst juxtaposing that with the increasingly obvious facts that with the Web, web services and tools and mobile devices many (if not most) knowledge workers are continuously connected and ever-more densely interlinked … today we euphemistically call it ‘networked’.

The second because towards the end of the article The New Organisation McKinsey and Mercer (two high-end blue-ribbon management consulting firms) were cited as demonstrating rapidly growing interest in, and awareness of, the emerging new landscape for networked knowledge work.

In my previous posts pointing to the Economist article I have somewhat sarcastically noted that these firms knew a good market space to grow into when they smelled it (sarcastically because I have been aware of and following practitioners who have been talking and writing about this for almost ten years now) … the granddaddy of them all Stafford Beer, and people like Bill Ives, Euan Semple, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Stan Davis, Verna Allee, Chris Meyer, Jim Ware, Arie de Geus, Tom Stewart, Hubert St. Onge, Tom Davenport, Jim McGee, Dion Hinchcliffe, Gary Hamel, Larry Prusak, Dave Snowden, Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, Niall Cook, Lee Bryant, Matthew Hodgson, Patti Anklam, Jenny Ambrozek, Anne Marie McEwan, Ross Dawson, Cindy Gordon, Marc Prensky, Karen Stephenson, Valdis Krebs, Michel Bauwens, Nancy White, Dan Rasmus, Robert Johansen, Michael Schrage, Tom Malone, Jessica Lipnack, Luis Suarez, and on and on and on. If I know you and I’ve left you out, please forgive me; there’s so many it will get boring if I keep thinking of and listing them (it probably already has). Shameful egotistical plug … I count myself as one of them, albeit probably on the farm team.

So … given the arrival and settling into place of what’s called Web 2.0, I think that the McKinsey summary mirrors what many leading thinkers have been saying for some time about the impact of the interactive participative Web on the workplace. It’s useful, as it offers a fairly concise overview of the core issues associated with the shifts in leadership, management and basic organizational effectiveness management; and because it’s McKinsey, it provides an imprimatur of legitimacy to the ongoing discussion of and refinement of strategic and practical implementation issues related to this massive era-defining shift in the way work is perceived, designed and carried out.

To be fair, people at McKinsey have also been paying attention to knowledge work for quite a while now. Anyone remember the name Brooks Manville – closely associated with McKinsey’s knowledge management practice back in the day ?

To help us all understand even more clearly, here’s a video clip explaining McKinsey’s Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.

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I’m a Customer and I Have a Question … Should I …

Jon Husband — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:06:01 +0000

… 1) send an email, 2) try to call ( into the hell of “Press 1 for …, Press 2 for …” ) or should I just 3) put it out on Twitter ?

Well, it seems that Salesforce.com is getting ready to bet on Door #3 above.

It’s not too much of a stretch to wonder how quickly this will affect the call-center work force of the future.

Here’s the direct quote from Salesforce.com’s SVP of customer service and support:

“While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else,” he said.”

Salesforce jumps on the Twitter-for-CRM bandwagon

By Caroline McCarthy

“Twitter customer service: It’s the hot new thing that all the kids are doing! Salesforce has added a new application to its “app exchange” so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It’ll be available this summer.

With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.

Read the whole CNET article here …

The PersonAll-ization of Knowledge Work … On Your Work Screen

Jon Husband — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:53:28 +0000

In November of 2008 I spent several weeks in Paris, France speaking at a conference and with several Enterprise 2.0 startups, and was pleasantly surprised at some of the sophisticated concepts and capabilities I discovered.

One of the ongoing (and growing) trends in the workplace is the personalization of work … how you, the individual knowledge worker, carry out the work, choose and use the tools with which it is carried out, and fit yourself into the attendant rhythms of collaboration and co-creation built up from processing constant flows of information. I have written about what I call the “mass customization of work” before … I’ll Do It My Way – The Mass Customization of Knowledge Work, and Personalizing Collaborative Work … Individuals and Co-Creation. I am about to add this post, which may be the beginning of a series on the personalization-of-work theme.

One of the interesting startups I encountered is PersonAll, being developed by a couple of young French entrepreneurs, Jeremy Grinbaum (President, previously of Google Enterprise search) and Jean-Patrice Glafkides (CTO, previously of HP Software).

PersonAll provides organizations with the means of offering its workers a fully personalized knowledge work portal. It allows each and every employee of an organization to integrate external information (from RSS feeds and other sources) to create always-on sources of information on markets, customers, industries, issues, topics, etc. of interest and utility to the worker) and all pertinent internal information (work team, departmental and organizational objectives, the organization’s news, new policies, access to databases and archives, internal collaboration platforms, etc.). It also enables each and every employee to publish information to destinations where they are involved in the activities of a given community or group.

PersonAll accomplishes this through what Jeremy and Jean-Patrice call a “strategy of constraints”, wherein peoples’ configurations and activities are managed by permissions. Users can access a catalogue of portlets (modular pre-packaged / designed content). There are two types of modules; 1) generic modules which users can customize within certain constraints (such as an RSS reader) and 2) specific modules selected from the previously-mentioned catalogue.

Here’s a quick look at a personalized work screen (though I suspect that the picture is not sufficiently large for you to get a decent sense of the different personalized components).

Effectively, PersonAll lets you, the user, configure the screen you always have in front of your eyes and ears with the combinations and configurations of flows of information and information-processing services that are the most useful to YOU, that help you be your most productive according to your cognitive and collaborative styles.

An extensive use of tags is at the heart of PersonAll’s design and functionality. This serves two key aspects:

1. the classification of “objects” (profiles, articles, modules, etc.), and

2. the management of users’ rights and permissions.

Essentially, this enables the easy and rapid formation, sustenance and (self) management of work communities around topics, subjects and other items of interest and pertinence.

PersonAll’s business model is aimed at helping organizations reduce costs while improving knowledge worker productivity. This will happen through enhancing effective collaboration and at the same time providing employees with choice when it comes to the the work tools they use. For example, with their own personall-ized work portal, people can migrate easily between projects or between social computing environments.

In principle, the widespread use of PersonAll in an organization also facilitates obtaining values from latent and explicit folksonomies, as PersonAll also offers the organization a range of statistical analysis tools whereby aggregate views of the kinds of exchanges and use of information flows and services can be examined and analyzed, as catalysts for augmenting the organizations ‘collective intelligence’.

In terms of technical design and architecture, PersonAll is based on Java standards, and is optimized for the major browsers like IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Of course it is designed to plug into and sit on top of all major / common forms of integrated information systems such as those found in most major enterprises …. the “of course” at the beginning of this sentence refers to the fact that if it weren’t it would not be very useful in PersonAll’s target market, non ? Sacré bleu, zut, alors !

It is also ‘backwards compatible’ with browsers and enterprise platfroms / portals, and completely compatible with what most of us call the “Consumer Web 2.0″. As Jeremy and Jean-Patrice pointed out to me, enterprise social computing can be characterized generally as 2 to 3 years behind the consumer Web in terms of trying, using and adapting to web tools and services, and they are aiming to make it easy to try and adopt … or let’s say minimizing the reasons for any given enterprise to say ‘No’.

PersonAll has some early revenue-generating clients, a good degree of recognition and profile in the Enterprise 2.0 space in France, and some exciting plans up their sleeves for the next year or so.

As some readers may know, I think that the use of social computing tools and services combined with collaborative platforms is THE future of knowledge work and that this major trend will inexorably lead to the re-design of fundamental assumptions about the design of knowledge work.

The personalization of knowledge work and PKM (personal knowledge management) is clearly an established and tangible trend. Given a few breaks and early adoption by a few progressive organizations, I think that this small but smart French start-up has an interesting and exciting future in front of it.

Stay tuned .

Twitter Clones Will Be A Common Feature of Collaboration Platforms …

Jon Husband — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:29:17 +0000

.. and an essential tool in turning flows of information into useful and applicable knowledge.

This would not be the first time I (and many others) have said this, but here’s a new post on the TechCrunch blog that strongly reinforces that prediction.

People have been using IM in the workplace for quite a while. But the one-to-many-many-to-one capability offered by Twitter (and Yammer, and other platforms that already have Twitter clones as part of their feature repertoire) is tailor made for effective ongoing communications for project teams, value webs comprised of vendors, suppliers, clients, etc.)

We’ll see a lot more of it … the online version of popping your head around the cubicle or walking over to the next department to talk to someone for a quick update and running into other interesting people and information on the way. Happens all the time.

Socialtext Adds Twitter-like “Signals” And a Desktop AIR App
Erick Schonfeld

March 3, 2009

In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

Socialtext Signals is essentially an enterprise version of Twitter, much like Yammer. Employees within a company can micro-message each other without competitors or the rest of the world snooping. They will see only the messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition to the 140-character messaging between co-workers (the “signals”), there is also an “activity” tab. This generates a micro-message every time a person you are following takes an action inside Socialtext, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment.