Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 50 2009

"The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations" by Seth Godin:

It's a process, not an event.

Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company and building a brand.

On the other hand, putting up a trade show booth is an event. So are going public and having surgery.

Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul.

"Networks and 2.0 corporate strategies" by Andreas Garcia:

“Often described as the organizational grapevine, informal networks actually extend much deeper into the organization. They include not just social connections, but also the interactions used to solve problems, gain expertise, innovate, strategize, and share information. Every organization has informal networks, yet few know how to understand their dynamics and harness their abilities. This study, one of the first in the HR community, examined the impact of informal networks on change initiatives.” NEHRA, May 2009

Some results of the NEHRA study:

• 93% of successful change initiatives were led by leaders with strong or very strong personal networks
• 73% of less successful change initiatives were led by people described as having moderate or weak personal networks

In the case of informal networks, making the invisible visible will help in any enterprise initiative. Mapping networks can help to identify organizational silos, key links and knowledge hubs.

The organizational architecture and incentives affect the shape of informal networks in the organization, but also informal networks shape organizations (either in a positive or negative way) because they tend to be organized by similarity and common interests, crossing organizational boundaries (geographic, hierarchical, functional, divisional, even organizational, leveraging external contacts). Managers can influence formal and informal networks at all levels, but first they need to accept their existence and recognize its influential power. Formal and informal networks are closely interrelated and work in parallel, sometimes supporting the company objectives and strategy, but sometimes going exactly in the opposite direction.

"The Evolution of A New Trust Economy" by Brian Solis:

We’re no longer limiting relationships to friends, family and associates. As our comfort and interaction increase in social networks, the relationships we forge within each reflect our interests and aspirations.

The curated micro networks we forge within each respective social network serves as a trusted community. Those who can participate or permeate these trust communities must first earn the prominence of what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith call Trust Agents – those individuals who are deserving of your time and attention as demonstrated through their actions and words.

It is these concentrated communities that ultimately form the premise for a much larger and more meaningful human network – a collection of trust networks that represent the market and exchanges for your focus, investment, participation and ultimately your actions.

With time, our contribution to the state of the social, attention, and trust economies is measured by reciprocity, recognition, value, and benefaction.

Trust is earned and its stature is representative of our collaboration and contribution over time. If the Social Web is an ocean, trust funnels into distinctive and distinguishable rivers.

"Next Generation Knowledge Management With Web 2.0" by Pablo Bermejo García (PDF Report):

A new collaboration culture has been conceived and must truly be embraced by the enterprise in order to improve current knowledge management (KM) systems. Traditional knowledge management is more about capturing knowledge through document repositories, sharing that knowledge with groupware tools, and making it accessible via corporate portals, which are fragile environments that can frustrate users. There is no time to lose; companies need to mitigate this demise of knowledge management by taking advantage of emerging Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, building a new strategy focused on social networks and the flow of knowledge between the people in them. Web 2.0 tools solve all this by means of sharing, pulling, subscribing to, and publishing knowledge, and—above all—by connecting knowledge workers, who are more willing to share their knowledge, collaborate, and innovate using tools they already know and like. These new enterprise strategies based on Web 2.0 technologies synthesize into what today is known as Enterprise Web 2.0.

The main objective of this investigation is to (1) analyze the business values, benefits, and risks of adopting an Enterprise Web 2.0 solution for knowledge management, giving a list of recommendations in terms of security, governance, legal regulations, and best practices, and (2) design a solution for how this Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy can be embraced by CSC, including a specific road map for deployment.