There is, quite frankly, an awful lot of guff talked about social networks. Top of the list of guff for me at the moment is "An enterprise social network will make people connect with lots of new people." Why do I see this as marketing flatulence? Well, because it just doesn't map to the ways … Continue reading A Tinder for business
Category: #sharingorg
What follows is pure conjecture, based on a bit of guesswork and some circumstantial evidence, but here goes... Within the #sharingorg research a common theme emerging is the necessity for senior leadership to both support and live the values of any organisation-wide collaboration initiative. It's also clear that there is a level of technological disassociation amongst … Continue reading The last of the PA generation
Ten years ago when I was working in the world of management training, I had the opportunity over the course of a couple of years to ask a large number (100s) of people a question: what's the single thing that most gets in the way of you getting your job done? Unsurprisingly the most popular … Continue reading Five hurdles between us and the death of email
There are some impressive numbers being bandied about in the recent announcement that RBS is the first bank to sign up for Facebook at Work, the social network's fledgeling business offering. By the end of March they aim to have the service available to 30,000 users, and all 100,000 employees will be "using the tool" by … Continue reading No need for training
In my Cloud-based, multiple device world of work, skipping freely from one software as a service to another, it's sometimes difficult to remember that most people's working life simply isn't like this. In the past seven days I've had conversations with people from two organisations where the default position for access to online services (including … Continue reading Issues of trust, competence and a nailgun
I'm quite often heard calling a distinction between social media and social networks. The two terms seem to be used interchangeably, but for me there is an important difference: social media is what organisations do, based on traditional mass media models of communication around primarily broadcasting; social networks are what we as individuals do, following the long tradition … Continue reading Enterprise Social Media
One of the themes that is recurring in my #sharingorg research project is that of there being two distinct modes for collaboration within organisations. The Optimisation mode is the one that comes most naturally to big organisations - it's the direct descendent of Adam Smith's thinking, and is about delivering improvement through process and (continual) … Continue reading Three reasons for open plan offices not working
This morning I received some key facts and figures from one of the emerging major players in the world of collaboration. What is striking to me is how much they look like the key facts and figures of a traditional media company: active users (read: readers); paid subscriptions (read: circulation minus comps); some stuff about … Continue reading Mass media collaboration
There is a peculiar phenomenon that I seem to be identifying in the research for the #sharingorg project - something that I'm provisionally calling the "Instant Messaging tipping point of functional uselessness". It goes a little something like this... A new tool or service is developed to address a particular need or niche. That tool is then … Continue reading Less is more
About ten years ago I found myself running a team building session for a software development team that was building online telephone directories for a telecoms company. For those of you under 23 a telephone directory was a... oh, forget it. It was a "sit and talk about how we work" type of session, rather … Continue reading The solution to solve all solutions
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