This week in links - week 12, 2009

"Trust is the killer app" by Leon Benjamin:

Research produced by IBM concludes; "Individuals in higher-trust societies spend less to protect themselves from being exploited in economic transactions. Trust is an economical substitute for extensive contracts, litigation, and monitoring in transactions and thus economizes on transaction costs."

Organisations (of every size) pay for a lack of trust over and over again and it is the absence of trust that is choking innovation and productivity...

William Davies at the Institute for Public Policy Research...say that “out of nowhere trust has become the most talked about abstractions of our times” and notes that online communities have an unusual propensity to create environments of trust.

One of the most comprehensive studies of the open source community was conducted by Yochai Benkler to understand how Linux...have come from nowhere to challenge mainstream, paid for products from Microsoft, IBM and others. Benkler concludes:

“Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators.”

Trust is the killer app.

"Field Research Study: Social Networking Within the Enterprise" by Mike Gotta:

The media, blogs, and vendors are all abuzz about social networking tools, and some enterprises have started to roll them out...Given this large-scale uncertainty, Burton Group initiated an in-depth field research study to help clients understand the business, organizational, and technical factors to consider when formulating social networking strategies and initiating internal projects.

"Enterprise 2.0 Tools Align with McKinsey Steps for Making Good Business Decisions" by Bill Ives:

Here are the four approaches McKinsey mentioned and some comments on how enterprise 2.0 tools relate to each...

1. Ensuring that people with the right skills and experience are included in decision making - Social media can be very helpful in finding the right people with the right skills within a large organization, or even a small one
   
2. Making decisions based on transparent criteria and a robust fact base - The necessary robust fact base can be augmented by the many eDiscovery tools that go beyond standard search criteria
   
3. Ensuring that the person who will be responsible for implementing a decision is involved in making that decision - This is critical and the one of the four that social media will not play a direct role. However, the many enterprise 2.0 platforms for managing efforts can certainly help the person and team implement the decisions
   
4. Some types of consensus-building and alliances apparently can help create good outcomes - Social media tools can be very helpful in building consensus and support alliances through enhanced collaboration

"Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work" by Raj Sheelvant:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top
2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets
5. The right solution comes from the right participants
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk