Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e2.0, Collaboration Technologies, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Communities, Learning, Tom Davenport, Andrew McAfee, Innovation, Org. Change, Business Transformation, Knowledge Enterprise, Knowledge Corporation, Talent Management, Leadership, Passion

Goodness! What is this obsession with knowledge and collaboration tools? I was actually disappointed how part of the debate was about the traditional KM tools and the next gen. of social software tools. If there is anything that we should have very clear, is that social computing is about everything, but tools. It is an attitude, a way of life that you breathe and embrace, a voice that knowledge workers are entitled to have so that they can connect with others and exchange their knowledge and experiences with others, who may have similar interests or are passionate about similar subjects. Where are the tools in there? They are just enablers, as far I am concerned, and nothing representative of the tools landscape that we have seen all over the place.

Moving on in the debate, and while on the subject of  "What is it going to take to change culture?" there were a couple of answers provided: Enlightened leadership. Top execs? But then Tom mentioned something that resonated quite closely with something that I have been mentioning over here again and again: "[It is] Unrealistic to suggest that people who have got a lot of power within organisations will surrender it to people who are doing a bad job and blog about it [...]"

Two key things in here. First one, that command-and-control attitude I have mentioned before, which I think is going to be the key differentiator between those companies that will survive in the knowledge economy and those that won’t. And second key thing coming out of that quote. If you business currently has got people doing a bad job and blogging about it, then you have got the wrong people in their jobs in the first place! There is a huge amount of incredible talent out there and certainly state that people do bad jobs is just not a fair statement for most of that great talent.

I have always thought that people don’t do bad jobs per se, it is just that their talent is wasted in doing something they never wanted to do in the first place. And here is the case where blogging can certainly help re-focus and place the emphasis on talent where it should have been in the first place. How many times have we been told that weblogging is all about writing on stuff you are passionate about. I bet that for those folks out there doing a bad job and weblogging along, you would be able to find out what they excel at and re-channel through their strengths into what they would really want to do. Because, after all, who wants to do a bad job nowadays? Any one out there? I doubt it. I doubt that even companies would hire people who do a bad job. They shouldn’t. They should instead find the talent and nurture it, before it is too late.

(To be continued …)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e2.0, Collaboration Technologies, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Communities, Learning, Tom Davenport, Andrew McAfee, Innovation, Org. Change, Business Transformation, Knowledge Economy, Knowledge Enterprise, Knowledge Corporation

From there onwards, and quite surprisingly, I must admit, Andrew kind of agreed with Tom’s comments mentioned in previous weblog posts, and, while I was listening to the replay, I just thought to myself: there it goes my expectation for a good debate! Pity.

"The potential to be transformative?" Excuse me? Those were the words mentioned by Andrew and I got to think: what about all of the work that a whole bunch of us have been doing in various corporations; introducing those different technologies in such a way that, over the course of the years, have helped transform organisations into becoming much more open, democratic, conversational (With business partners and customers), non-hierarchical, bottom-up, knowledge worker empowering, etc? What about that? Is that all potential? I am not sure how you would feel, but I certainly disagree with that statement. It may have well been a few years ago, but not now. Definitely, not now. And if not, take a look around and see how many, for instance, from the Fortune 500 companies have been tuning in already into social computing within the enterprise and beyond.

Andrew had a good point though, with the fact that all of these social computing technologies for the enterprise have got the potential of meeting a whole bunch of different needs from businesses. Yes, that is right, But again I wouldn’t call that potential, but more a reality. Those companies that are ready to transition from a labour based model to a knowledge based model (Yes, that knowledge economy that plenty of folks have been talking about) are the ones which are most receptive towards the adoption of those social software tools, and the ones that over time (Already starting, by the way) would have their needs not only met, but exceeded. And big time!

Yes, the bureaucracy in a whole bunch of businesses is right there. I am not going to deny it. We have seen it, we have experienced it, we have suffered from it. Yet, it is a well known fact that most of those businesses are the ones which are having a hard time letting go that command-and-control attitude and therefore not very keen on promoting social computing within the corporation. Those businesses will continue to exist for some time, I am sure but will they survive in the long run? Would a labour-based company survive in a knowledge economy where knowledge can travel way way faster than people and goods? I doubt it.

(To be continued …)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e2.0, Collaboration Technologies, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Communities, Learning, Tom Davenport, Andrew McAfee, Innovation, Social Capital, KM 2.0

WOW! There we go again! Continuing further with the second weblog post from a series of seven, this time around regarding Tom’s commentary on the social computing value for corporations, that I have just mentioned earlier on… This is exactly one of the many reasons why traditional Knowledge Management failed over the course of the years. The fact that most businesses tried to make money by applying different KM strategies is what actually got KM into trouble in the first place and why, still today, it hasn’t recovered.

Pretty similarly, if we would want Enterprise 2.0 to survive in the current business environment, we should stop thinking in those same terms. Enterprise 2.0 will never be about the business, or about making a bunch of money, or about lots and lots of value add. All the other way around: Enterprise 2.0 is all about helping and empowering knowledge workers share their knowledge, collaborate with their peers and keep innovating as a result of those interactions!

In short, Enterprise 2.0 is all about empowering those knowledge workers to connect with one another, to build up trustworthy and lasting relationships, to facilitate multiple conversations between peers in order to facilitate their sharing of knowledge with others, and to help improve their already deteriorated social capital skills so that they can continue working being a lot smarter, without not necessarily making it harder for themselves. Where is the money in that? Whoever is thinking that Enterprise 2.0 is going to help generate lots of revenue is just wasting their time, pretty much like most businesses did when they tried to incorporate the traditional KM strategies into the corporate world. It didn’t work then, it is not going to work now either.

Remember, all of this so-called revolution is about the people, not about the tools, nor about the processes, and definitely not about the money! Never about the money. If we would have stopped KM from falling into that same trap of helping businesses make money as a result of it, I bet we would be talking about a completely different perception for KM as we have today, where it currently is everything, but positive. On the contrary. Sadly (And unfortunately!)

(To be continued…)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e2.0, Collaboration Technologies, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Communities, Learning, Tom Davenport, Andrew McAfee, Innovation, Dan Farber

I know that I may be coming a bit too late on to this one, but I must say that I couldn’t ignore it just like that, since I have been weblogging in the past about it and thought I would be sharing further a couple of thoughts after finally watching one of the main highlight events during the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, held in Boston in June.

Yes, indeed, I am talking about the long awaited debate between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport where they got to discuss the value of Enterprise 2.0 within organisations. Dan Farber, the moderator of the debate, created, not so long ago, quite an interesting and relevant weblog post that I would strongly recommend everyone to read as well as it sets out, quite nicely, the overall background behind the actual debate.

I am sure that by now most of you folks out there may have listened to the replay of the debate which was video recorded and streamed live, but just in case you may not have had the chance to go through it, here is the link to the live recording. It lasts for about 49 minutes and it surely is worth while the time, to say the least.

From here onwards, I would like to spend some time going through some of the major key points that I thought would be worth while mentioning over here. I thought about creating a single weblog post on the subject, but then, while I was making different annotations, as I got through the replay, I thought that there is just too much stuff for a single weblog post, so instead, I am just going to split up the article in seven different articles which, I hope, would provide you a good sense about how I see this particular subject.

At the same time, and just realised about it, as I am writing the first article, it would allow me to provide you with some extended content while I am heading to Somers tomorrow morning to attend IBM’s Academy of Technology Collaboration 2.0 conference. I am not sure what my availability would be during the course of the next few days. I don’t even know if I would have the opportunity to be much online and do some live con-blogging, so, just in case, here is a series of seven weblog entries to keep you going. I have tried to keep them as short as possible and, hopefully, should not take too long to go through them. I will probably be publishing two at a time and see how that goes.

With them it would give me a good opportunity to indicate how I think that transformation of the workplace is well way under way! It has been for the last couple of years, at least! To get you going, my overall impression is that I was hoping the debate would have been much more of a debate. I mean, how can you have a debate if both parties agree to some extent on the main argument? I am not sure about you, but that is not the essence of a debate, is it? But let’s see some of that and how it paves out over the course of the next few articles. Here are some further thoughts on the event itself:

To get the debate going, Dan pointed out the main definition of Enterprise 2.0 that Andrew put together some time ago as the following one: "[Enterprise 2.0 is] the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers [...]". From there onwards, he introduced Tom as being quite opposite, or skeptic, to the value of Enterprise 2.0 within the corporate world, since he feels it would not change drastically the way organisations still operate nowadays. If you would remember, this is some of what I have been talking about as well in the past. So we are now ready to debate.

Tom started mentioning something that I found quite enlightening and telling about blogs in general: "Blogs are well suited to opinion and are fun to read, socially interesting and perhaps useful". But from there onwards he mentioned how he doesn’t believe Enterprise 2.0 would change organisations, because he doesn’t know of any large business out there making a huge amount of money from it …

(To be continued…)

Tags: IBM, Academy of Technology, AoT, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Collaboration 2.0, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Lotus Connections, Connection, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Lotus Sametime, Second Life, Learning, Social Learning, eLearning, Wiki Central, Somers, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Innovation, Communities, Online Communities, Virtual Teams, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Technology Adoption Program, TAP, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Metaverse, IBM Research

A good number of folks have been contacting me through IM and e-mail in the last couple of days asking me if I could share some further details about a recent weblog post that I shared over here around the subject of the upcoming IBM Academy of Technology Collaboration 2.0, taking place next week in Somers, Monday to Wednesday. If you remember, this is a conference event that deals with the subject of social computing within the Enterprise, specially within IBM. So I thought I would spend a few minutes today sharing with you some of the different ideas, concepts and tools that would be part of the actual agenda.

Yes, I do realise that I will not be able to share with you the specific details of the agenda itself, but I have been commenting offline with those folks that the main theme of the conference would have to do with a whole bunch of initiatives where IBM is getting involved with the Web 2.0 field. As a starter, you could certainly have a look into the article Web 2.0 Goes to Work, that a whole bunch of people have been commenting on already (And which I will be sharing my thoughts on it very shortly), and which will explain some of the exciting stuff that is taking place with Web 2.0 both inside and outside of IBM.

Then from there onwards there would be a number of themes that would be covered throughout the conference and here you have got some of the different highlights that I am certainly looking forward to get to know myself some more:

– Impact of Web 2.0 within the Learning environment through the usage of games, virtual worlds, Second Life, group collaborative eLearning, plus a whole bunch of social learning tools,
– Impact of IBM’s Technology Adoption Program in the evangelism of various social software tools within the corporation,
– Collaboration 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as main key drivers for Innovation, both inside and outside of the corporation, with business partners and customers,
– Lotus Connections,
– Role of online, distributed (And global) communities as major catalysts in the adoption of social computing tools to help knowledge workers share their knowledge, build up their trust levels and collaborate with others much more effectively than ever before,
– Lotus Quickr
– Impact of wikis within the corporation (With over 160,000 IBMers using them on a regular basis spread in around 11,000+ wikis from Wiki Central) as massive group collaborative tools that help drive innovation within the group and beyond,
– Lotus Sametime and an overview of its various social networking related plugins,
I. And a whole bunch of demos on different TAP and Research related social software tools.

You would have to agree with me that some of the stuff I have just mentioned above is incredibly fascinating, very enlightening and somewhat thought-provoking. As the conference begins to take place next week, I will be talking to a whole bunch of the presenters and will ask them if it would be possible to share some of the content they have been working on for those presentations over here in this weblog so that I can give you a little bit more of a taster of what the event was all about. You know already that I will not be able to share my own presentation as it has got some sensitive stuff in it that would not be suitable for an external audience, but I am hoping that I would be able to share with you some other materials to, at least, give you a quick overview of some of the initiatives that IBM has been busy with over the last few months.

Thus stay tuned for some more to come and let’s hope that I will be able to share some more further insights about the IBM internal event of events around the subject of Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration 2.0 and Social Computing. Again, if you would want some additional details, just drop me a line and I will have a look and see what I can do…

For the time being, I am getting ready for an event that I have been really looking forward to for the last two years and this time around is the good one!

Tags: del.icio.us, social bookmarks, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Metablogging, ClustrMaps, Twitter, MyBlogLog, Flickr, widgets, elsua, WordPress, Plugins, ClickComments, Blog Comments, YouTube, Screencast

A couple of weeks back I was actually browsing through the Knowledge Management related bookmarks from del.icio.us and I bumped into a couple of them from different weblog posts that I have shared over here in the past, where next to the links themselves there was also a number of different comments indicating how heavy this weblog was to load up. That got me thinking and put me into the case of finding out what was actually causing the problem. And after investigating things a bit, I found out that most of the problems were caused by a number of the widgets I have been using for a few months now.

So instead of leaving those widgets hanging around as part of the template, I have gone ahead and removed most of them, at least, the ones that were creating the most problems when loading the page. If you are reading this weblog post from my syndicated feeds, you may not have noticed the change, but I have removed everything and just left ClustrMaps, my Twitter badge, MyBlogLog and my Flickr badge. The end result is that from now on, whenever you would try to load elsua.net it should load way way faster. At least, it loads twice or three times as fast as before, when the widgets were there.

But this weblog post is not just to let you all folks know about some of the different changes taking place over here. I would also want to share something else with you. Something that I have been enjoying myself in several other weblogs that I visit on a regular basis and which has helped improve the overall user experience of WordPress blogs. Yes, that is right. I am talking about one particular WordPress plugin that I have put together a few days ago already and which if you are reading this from a syndicated feed you may not have noticed just yet.

Check out ClickComments. A fine and very helpful plugin that is not only really simple to put together, but quite effective in what it tries to achieve: help weblog commenters share their thoughts on the stuff they read without not necessarily dropping a comment. On the contrary, just with a single click! Yes, that is right. A single click.

For a few days now, every time that I get to publish a weblog post over here you would be able to see a number of different icons underneath the weblog entry that you would be able to click on to rate the content of that particular weblog post in a number of different ways: cool stuff, inspired me, entertaining, write more, creative, insightful, touched my heart and great find! So not only would it be possible to make the overall experience a bit more enjoyable, but you would also be able to participate in the kind of content that I get to share over here. And all of that without leaving a comment, if you don’t want to, that is. You know that comments are more than welcome! Always.

Finally, I should probably mention how the good thing that I like about this particular WordPress plugin is not only how simple it is to set up, but also the fact that they have made use of YouTube to share a screencast of how it actually works. You can find the link for it over here, but for the sake of showing you how it works, so that you can start participating from it right away, here is the embedded version of the clip:

Very shortly, I will be sharing some further changes that I have made into the template and the actual content of the weblog, including some minor changes of the About page, which is just about to go through some major updates in the next few days, but that would be the subject for another weblog post.

Hope you get to enjoy ClickComments just as much as I do whenever I get to visit a number of WordPress blogs where I have seen it running already… Now, who said that blogging is boring, eh?