Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 7 2010

"Repeat after me, this is not an information revolution, it is a relationship revolution"
Tweet by John Hagel (@jhagel)
The cool technologies that are transforming the competitive landscape and how companies operate are not prototypes in some electronic giant's lab. They're in the marketplace, and affordable. You don't have to overhaul your IT architectures to implement them. If anything, they improve the value of that architecture that you spent gillions putting in place.

And, as a bonus, these technologies promise to, in the words of one CIO, "make IT fun again!" The promise of new, cool technology depends on IT-smart business leaders, who discover the potential in them through experimentation and application. These are learn-by-doing technologies that are not programmable by IT. Employees will "reprogram" how their companies operate based on how they use these technology. IT's job is to teach, coach, observe, and scale. Imagine the impact of having everyone in the business 10% smarter about IT? It'd do a lot more good than making everyone in IT 100% smarter about the business.
Paul Sloane: "Empowering Innovation"
Often the best source for innovation is the team within your business. A great leader can turn them into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. By empowering people you enable them to achieve goals through their own ideas and efforts. The leader sets the destination, but the team chooses the route.
...crowdsourcing is the asking of a large group for their contributions. Just because individuals in the community post original contributions, doesn't mean other employees can't collaborate around them. In fact, that's an incredibly valuable basis for getting top ideas...If traditional collaboration is the process of executing on a known objective, crowdsourced collaboration is the process of discovering and building ideas that are not yet known...Crowdsourced collaboration creates new opportunities, and traditional collaboration executes on them.
Of course not. For years, the prevailing practices for productivity were project and process management. Now that we’ve begun to recognize the critical role of collaboration, and collaborative software for improving productivity....(Good) Collaboration software helps connect geographically dispersed teams, dramatically improves communication, and creates a shared workspace where team members can contribute, aggregate and iterate information and work. Shared workspaces help the team create and maintain a shared view and understanding of their problem space – the military calls this a “common operating picture”. The logical (and critical) next step is to enable this team to plan, track and execute with the same level of ease and convenience as they can now communicate and aggregate work.
Keith Errington: "Web 2.0 – Collaboration vs. Control"
...this leads us to the more fundamental problem behind Web 2.0 adoption. The people making the decisions at a strategic level, need to understand these technologies, what they mean and what they can and cannot do. Then they have to see how they can be used to meet their organizational objectives. And then they need to implement them to the depth appropriate to the proposed strategy and with the right level of control. They need to understand the implications of the success of such projects to both the budget and the corporate culture. But one of the strengths of these technologies is that often their effect adds up to much more than the sum of the parts – that they generate new paradigms and evolve into systems that defy strategy and planning. They cross departmental boundaries and break down barriers between the organization, its customers, and its suppliers. And once users get the taste of openness and collaboration, they generally want more – it’s difficult to get that genie back in the bottle.
Oscar BergCollaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation