Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 4 2010

I'm honored to now have an "Expert Profile" on the Enterprise20pen blog. Let me just say that I'm in very good company.

Anyway, here are some interesting Enterprise 2.0 readings from this week.

We can’t control what business topics and experiences people blog about, they blog on their own terms, we are lucky that they share at all…so we have to be happy. We cannot conscript people to blog only when it’s 100% usable now and will be re-used immediately…we are dealing with people here, not robots…people don’t like the big brother feel…people blog because there is an intrinsic motivation, not because they are told to.

People blog because connecting and dialogue is what we are about, we are social creatures…it fills this need.

Blogs smash silos, nurture transparency and flatter organisational conversations. People can be heard and have impact….your bosses boss, or a boss in another team can hear what you have to say…see my post, we are more than our job title describes. Blogs are great for talent retention, and being recognised…these are all intrinsic motivators.

Therefore it’s more than just knowledge sharing, it’s about people connecting and being fulfilled at work…therefore you cannot control the "Push".

“The biggest challenge most companies are facing is that the value propositions for social networks are all soft,” explains Greg Lowe, who champions the use of Yammer and other social media at Alcatel-Lucent.

Services such as Yammer and Chatter create a more open workplace by letting people see what others are working on and encouraging sharing. The upshot is that good ideas can emerge from anywhere. This should be a reason for celebration rather than a cause for suspicion. “If you trust your employees, then you have nothing to worry about when deploying a social network,” says Eugene Lee, the chief executive of Socialtext.

The networks are also a great way to capture knowledge and identify experts on different subjects within an organisation. Mr Driessen at Océ says that many earlier knowledge-management systems were little more than boring collections of documents. Social networks are a huge improvement over them because they combine content with commentary from people whose know-how might previously not have been recognised.
The 2010 Edelman Global Trust Barometer released today might motivate you to take another look at your 2010 PR and social media strategy.

For the first time trust and transparency rank as important to corporate reputation as the quality of products and services. In fact, in the U.S. and in much of Western Europe, those two attributes rank higher than product quality—and far outrank financial returns.

“We’re seeing a vastly different set of factors driving reputation than we did 10 years ago” says Richard Edelman. “Trust is now an essential line of business to be developed and delivered.”

[I just picked one of the elevator pitches, there are four additional ones you should read]
4 – Middle Manager

Definition : Middle manager are basically in charge of the productive forces.

Role and responsibility : They are responsible for making sure that the teams produces what has been identified by top management and company strategy to make money. Quality, budget and productivity are their main concerns.

How E2.0 can help : : Knowledge Management. Technologies, process, methods : everything evolves as fast as hell and managers are bombarded with information. It is just no possible to keep up the pace.

Apprehension : Disintermediation. Losing control + command.

Strategy : Don’t talk about management radical changes but, rather, smooth shifts and how they align with standard principles of modern management. It is to show that their role may be just as important with Enterprise 2.0, but different. As Cristobal Conde puts it :

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.

Speech :

Hey how do you feel about the figures that managers spend 2 hours a day looking for data, with half the data they found is no value ? And spending 20% of the remaining time struggling with their e-mail box ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)
My ability to organize information directly impacts my success. For me, information management is the key to daily productivity from researching to learning faster to keeping my email inbox empty...Here are ten of my favorite ways to manage information:

1. Factor reference from action
2. Create lists
3. Create collections
4. Put things where you look for them
5. Keep things flat
6. Organize long lists or folders using A-Z
7. Archive old things
8. Bubble up key things to the top
9. Know whether you’re optimizing for storing or retrieving
10. Create views
Oscar BergEnterprise 2.0, Information Management