- About |
- Contributors |
- Contact us |
- Subscribe: via RSS,
- via Twitter +
- sponsored by QuickBase
.
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.
.
.
Powered by Qumana
.. 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 SchonfeldMarch 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.
.
Powered by Qumana
This post is the first in a series we’ll be running over the coming weeks on “shareable databases.”
I have written about QuickBase on this blog before (most recently see - QuickBase’s New Developer Program: Going the Next Step to Support Its Developers and Their Mutual Clients) and as you know they are the sponsor of The AppGap. QuickBase is an Enterprise 2.0 shareable database that lets you select ready-made online workgroup applications or templates designed to solve common business problems, customize them to suit individual processes, and share within a team or an enterprise. I recently had a chance to talk with Peter Fearey and Liz McCann, who wanted to update me on QuickBase since we last spoke, about some of their latest initiatives, as well as their progress over 2008. Peter began with some of Intuit’s moves across the product line.
Brad Smith CEO at Intuit, has set a focus on “connected services.” There is both an increase in cloud offerings to enhance connectivity and an increased connectivity between desktop applications and web services. In addition, Intuit is promoting ways for customers to be connected with each other as well as the many experts within the broader Intuit community. This provides greater access to professional services for Intuit users by Intuit users.
Within QuickBase they are building on this broader theme by reaching out to users of siloed desktop databases and spreadsheets to bring them into the increased connectivity that the QuickBase SaaS platform provides. Last year they did a user survey that indicated their happiest and most supportive users were ones who migrated from desktop databases and spreadsheets to QuickBase. Liz mentioned one non-profit that kept track of their events on a desktop database hosted on a single laptop. This laptop was hand carried to events. When there were two or more events on the same night the extra sessions were covered through pen and paper. Then the notes were added to the laptop later. The multi-channel access that a hosted solution, such as QuickBase, offers eliminated this bottleneck.
Here is a more extensive example reported earlier on this blog, Out of this Galaxy – Delivering Premium Customer Service Has Never Been So Easy. For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information. It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all. Since January 2008 they have been using QuickBase for their customer service management needs – tracking customer status, their inventory status and location, what product they carry, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. They also have a solution that can scale to their rapid growth projections.
Encouraged by the survey results, QuickBase has gone after more desktop database users to bring them into Enterprise 2.0. They focused their product to meet both the needs of individual users, project teams, IT, and senior management. Most enterprises have thousands of critical databases siloed on individual computers, out of sight from IT and senior management, and difficult for team members to share efficiently. With QuickBase now everyone who needs to have access can see what is happening in thousands of operations critical to the business. With this enterprise strategy, QuickBase has seen significant growth both in the number and size of accounts. Like Galaxy Granola, and the famous potato chip commercial, once you try it, you cannot resist more. One client has 50,000 users. Here is a view of a workgroup administration screen. You can see that multiple databases can be managed through one interface.
You can also easily manage users as shown below.
…and manage groups through a consistent interface.
The press has been receptive. PC Magazine named them as an Editors’ Choice. The review said that “QuickBase puts your company’s database applications online, so that anyone in your organization can get customized, secure Web access to anything from inventory to contact lists to product management.” This choice selection was literally the case as the editor says that the PC Magazine editors use QuickBase to keep track of previews, reviews, and other features.
I think QuickBase is an excellent example of how Enterprise 2.0 can open up the organization. The market has looked favorably on this group of applications. Like many others in this niche I have interviewed for AppGap, QuickBase has seen significant growth despite a down market. Companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity.
As we have discussed, SaaS is an important component of this move to Enterprise 2.0 and IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets. With experiences like those reported by QuickBase, I can see why this is happening.
The QuickBase Team Collaboration Blog is carrying more of these stories, as well as ways to get increased productivity from the application.
Stay tuned for more coverage of “shareable database” apps in the next month or two and feel free to write to us if your company’s offering should be included in this survey.
With thanks to Luis Suarez of IBM Spain for pointing to Laurie Buczek of Intel outlining the company’s reasons and path towards the large-scale adoption of social computing
.
.
Powered by Qumana
Via Hylton Jolliffe of Beeline Labs, a link to this May 2008 gabfest. Actually, I remember writing something about it at the time … perhaps The Wisdom of the Organization Crowd ?
It seems clear to me that most of these "25 Stretch Goals For Management" can arguably be informed by the emergent organizing principle I call "wirearchy". For example, all of the following are elements of management that are addressed in the article "Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?".
It also seems clear that we will, collectively, not go back to the existing models of management, although the process of transition to these new goals is really only still in the early days. As I re-read the list of stretch goals I am reminded of Peter Vaill’s book "Learning as a Way of Being - Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent Whitewater" and I end up thinking that any competent OD (organizational development) practitioner will have been talking to organization / management clients about these issues for at least the last decade. That is the core message of "Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?" … that the transformation of management is available and accessible from organizational development principles but probably needs some re-framing.
By the way, I don’t like the implications of the term "moonshots" used in Hamel’s post. I do not see these issues as "moonshots" but rather as an intensification and amplification of changes that have been underway for some time now but that many or most organizations are struggling with because of legacy structures and the accompanying assumptions about how activities are and should be managed.
What do you think ? Are networks here to stay and will their impact on traditional management continue to accumulate ? Will social computing be the medium that helps these necessary changes take place, or will the changes be forced onto traditional management whilst they go kicking and screaming, full of resistance, into the future ?
.
25 Stretch Goals For Management
In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century.
The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge; distinguished social commentators including Kevin Kelly, James Surowiecki and Shoshana Zuboff; and a number of progressive CEOs, including Terri Kelly from WL Gore, Vineet Nayar from HCL Technologies, and John Mackey from Whole Foods.
Before arriving, each of the 35 attendees participated in an hour-long interview. The double-barreled question:
What is it about the way large organizations are currently managed that will most imperil their ability to thrive in the decades ahead; and given this, what fundamental changes will be needed in management principles, processes and practices?
[ Snip ... ]
First, that "management" — the tools and methods we use to mobilize resources to productive ends — is one of humankind’s most important social technologies.
Second, that the "management model" that predominates in most large organizations is now seriously out-of-date. This model has its roots in the late 19th century, and was invented to solve one overriding problem: how to get semi-skilled human beings to do the same things over and over again, with perfect replicability and ever-increasing efficiency. This was, and is, an important problem, but it is not the most important challenge for today’s organizations.
Third, that we must, therefore, reinvent management in ways that will make large organizations fundamentally more adaptable, more innovative and more inspiring places to work — that will, in short, make them as human as the individuals who work within them.
After two days of sometimes contentious deliberations, a set of "moonshots for management" began to emerge. These challenges are described in full in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, and are summarized below:
1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.
6. Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.
12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.
15. Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.
22. Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company’s boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.
25. Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.
.
Tags: wirearchy, learning, management 2.0, organizational change
Powered by Qumana
For at least the past decade Wim Veen of the Technical University of Delft has been exploring learning and the educational process over the first 10 - 15 years of a kid’s life by delving into the behaviours involved in interacting with screen, software, hyperlinks and other people and the neuro-plasticity of the brains of these young people. He published Homo Zappiens - Growing Up in a Digital Age. in January 2007.
More recently and with a different emphasis on the emergence into adult society Don Tapscott published Growing Up Digital - The Rise of the Net Generation. A decade ago Douglas Rushkoff wrote and published Children of Chaos - Surviving the End of the World As We Know It and Playing the Future - What We Can Learn From Digital Kids. There are other books that touch on core areas of this once-in-history shift to being digital, like coiner-of-the-terms digital natives and digital immigrants Marc Prensky’s books Digital Game-Based Learning and Don’t Bother Me Mom - I’m Learning, Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You and Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind - Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future.
Here via the Guardian (excerpt below) is more evidence that the massive transformation to culture generally and our ways of working, learning and playing is well underway and involves creating or having a physical and a social infrastructure for continuous connection and communication. It’s easy to assume that this is becoming the case all over North America, Europe and parts of Asia. Of course there are many less affluent who cannot own such a personal infrastructure, but as I have observed on numerous travels over the last several years there’s heavy and growing use of (for example) access in libraries or in Internet cafes or via mobile phones / devices in other places in the world.
In my opinion this supports the conclusion (reached long ago by most of our world’s visionaries, people like (long ago) Stafford Beer, John Seeley Brown, Neal Stephenson, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Nicholas Negroponte, there’s so-many-others …) that as the future unfolds the basics of peoples’ behaviours and the social structures of their organizations and institutions will inevitably undergo DNA-like mutations. It has to do with fundamental change to cognitive functioning and every individual’s digital-social habits (Twitter as "grooming", for example) viewed as an eco-system of feedback (which in my opinion should lead to us being able to "see" fractal patterns of human behaviours over the long term .. and there may be some math to it.
And for all this, I confess a certain sadness.
But I must say that in my circles of friends and acquaintances, I am seeing children between the early ages and 15 that are getting some very healthy balance. Many (not all) of the kids I know (through being friends with their parents) play outdoors a fair bit, have designated media access times, don’t obsess with computer games, read books and have hobbies .. just like when I was growing up.
Though it would have been cool to have a MacBook and an iPhone and an MP3 player and BitTorrent and cheap or free digital storage when I was growing up 
.
Internet generation leave parents behind
• Change in communication creating divide, says study
• Children spend six hours a day in front of screensPolly Curtis
Children are spending increasing amounts of their lives in front of televisions, computers and games consoles, cramming in nearly six hours of screen time a day, according to research.
The online activity is building barriers between parents and children, the authors say, with a third of young people insisting they cannot live without their computer.
From the age of seven children are building multimedia hubs in their rooms, with games consoles, internet access and MP3 players, which they wake up to in the morning and fall asleep to at night, according to the study of five- to 16-year-olds.
Girls in particular are likely to chat online to their friends at night and 38% take a console to bed instead of a book.
Some parents who have stopped their children from having a TV in their bedroom for fear they will watch it too much have justified internet access on the basis that it will help with homework.
But the latest from market research agency ChildWise finds children and young teens are more likely to socialise than do homework online. Some 30% say they have a blog and 62% have a profile on a social networking site.
The report is based on an annual survey, now into its 15th year, of 1,800 children at 92 schools across the country. "This year has seen a major boost to the intensity and the independence with which children approach online activities," the report says.
Powered by Qumana
Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
Among the Web-based tools he's reviewed: Zoho, QuickBase, and TrackVia.
Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”.
The AppGap has hosted a series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers intended to illuminate how new apps and approaches are changing the way we work and help companies and individuals implement better collaboration, project management, and productivity practices and solutions. Access, via the links below, the recordings, each about an hour long, of the discussions.
- 5 Big Ideas for Getting All That Work Done
- Should Your Business be Friends with Facebook
- The Future of Work
Need help in getting organized? Want to keep things from falling through the cracks? Check out this free and simple to use online "To-Do List" called Intuit Task Manager, offered by our sponsor Intuit QuickBase. Sign-up is easy so you can get started with it right away.
Intuit's QuickBase, the sponsor of this blog, has just been named an Editor's Choice by PC Mag. Check out the review which calls QuickBase a "a surprisingly simple and elegant application."
Recent Comments
Can today's project management software be done better? What can online CRM help companies companies accomplish? Which development platform can help individuals and organizations build better online databases, Web based applications, and HR solutions? And what are the processes and best practices that help organizations large and small achieve success. Find out more.
AppGap Tips Artisan Economy Change Management Collaboration Collective intelligence Communities Culture Distributed Work Economic Development Enterprise 2.0 government 2.0 greenIT Information Architecture Intranets KM Learning Management Networks + Networking Notable + Quotable Prediction markets productivity Product Management QuickBase Reviews Scenarios Security Semantic Technologies Shareable Databases social media social networks social tools Sponsored Post Talent Management Technology Management Tips + Pointers Tips for Tough Times Videoconferencing Virtual Environments Web 2.0 Web 3.0 Web Apps Web Commuting Webinar Work Design
