Image credit: "True Cost" from "Source to Shelf"
1. Who Knows What? - Business Insight
Wall Street Journal - MIT Sloan Management Review
By Dorit Nevo, Izak Benbasat and Yair Wand, October 20, 2009
Finding in-house experts isn’t easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be.
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Social Skills
| The Problem: | Workers in search of expertise within their own corporation often don’t know where to turn. |
| Insight: | While IT has made inroads into identifying in-house experts and making them easier to contact, few systems currently offer any clues about an expert’s trustworthiness, communication skills or willingness to help. |
| Solution: | Search systems that apply social-computing tools such as internal blogs, wikis and social networks can fill in these critical gaps in various ways. Posted comments and communication between users help reveal not only who knows what, but who is approachable. |
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Every company has in-house experts. So why don't they use them more?
In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don't even know they exist.
Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate. Which is why so-called expertise-locator systems have become a hot topic in corporate IT.
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Keywords: project, personnel, performance, resource management, it planning, strategy
2. Seven Ways To Cut Costs with Enterprise 2.0
Wednesday, May 13, 2009; Posted: 4:36 PM- by Social Computing News Desk
Enterprise social computing makes sense even in a down market given the hard cost reductions associated with even a modest investment, reports NewsGator.
"Despite, or even because of, the current economic difficulties, enterprise companies should see innovative social computing solutions as ever more important," NewsGator, the social computing company, asserts in a new white paper that the firm released recently.
NewsGator's first-hand experience working with Fortune 500 executives on Enterprise 2.0 projects has revealed seven ways, many it says are far from obvious, to more than recoup the cost of a social computing initiative. They include reducing the costs of email storage, content, printing, enterprise software, travel, employee on-boarding and enterprise application integration.
Excerpt
1. Reducing email volume.
2. Reducing premium content costs.
3. Lower printing budgets.
4. Reducing expensive seats of enterprise software.
5. Trimming travel budgets.
6. Increasing talent management ROI.
7. Reducing enterprise application integration costs.
Straight to the Source.
3. Enterprise 2.0: How a Connected Workforce Innovates
Harvard Business Review 2009 December
An Interview with Andrew P. McAfee by Anand Raman
Enterprise 2.0 tools—wikis, tags, Twitter and other microblogs, Google-style searches, and the like—are transforming companies’ innovation processes, according to Andrew P. McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the author of the forthcoming book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business Press, 2009). McAfee explains why in a recent conversation with HBR senior editor Anand P. Raman.
How do the new social technologies transform innovation efforts?
Companies have traditionally been very specific about who’s going to do the innovating: their designers, engineers, scientists...Those people have the credentials—the right combination of education, experience, success, failure, and so on. More recently, companies have allowed major users of their products to participate in the product-development process.
4. Why IBM Could Be Bigger Than Facebook in Social Media
Fast Company - By FC Expert Blogger Drew Neisser, Thu Sep 23, 2010
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.
Last week IBM announced a new software portfolio that is the clearest indication yet that social media has truly changed the business landscape.
Fathoming a new product from IBM via a launch event is like trying to understand the ocean by watching a wave. Nonetheless that was my task, swimming through the presentations and ultimately landing an interview with Jeffrey Schick, IBM's VP of Social Software. Drenched in the vision Schick shared for the IBM Customer Experience Suite, it occurred to me that IBM could end up being more important to the business use and monetization of social media than Facebook.
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Social software is not a new idea at IBM
Long before Mark Zuckerberg aggregated his Harvard friends online, IBM'ers could find their colleagues in a similar manner. According to Schick, "at IBM 15 years ago, we had a way to look up people to create a globally connected enterprise." "Today we have approximately 500,000 people within IBM and we do about 6 million look ups a day on pages that look strikingly similar to other social network profile pages with features like blogging and photo posting," added Schick.
IBM's internal network served as both an incubator and torture test for its latest offering. "The idea of getting the right person over the right time at the right opportunity and yield the right result was really important," explained Schick. So while Schick and his team watched the rise of Facebook with interest, they took greater inspiration from the technology they were already using to deliver "an exceptional work experience for employees" which also translated into better client service.
5. European Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management
CWA 14924-1:2004 (E) Part 1: Knowledge Management Framework
Introduction - Why KM?
As organizations strive to improve their business performance and capacity for innovation, their attention is increasingly focused on how they manage knowledge. Experience has shown that successful KM implementations in business settings prioritize attention on soft issues - including human and cultural aspects, personal motivations, change management methodologies, new and improved business processes enabling multidisciplinary knowledge sharing, communication and collaboration - and see technology as an enabler.
Despite this, most efforts so far at addressing the challenge of KM in business environments have typically taken a "technology-push" approach, concentrating major effort on putting in place IT tools that will "solve the knowledge creation, sharing and reuse problem".
Given this, it has been the objective of this guide to investigate those soft areas related to KM which can be the subject of common approaches, good practice identification or standardization initiatives, and to situate and describe these in the wider organizational context. The overall intention has been to provide meaningful and useful guidelines to companies, and notably SMEs (see below), as to how they might align their organizations culturally and socially to take advantage of the opportunities of knowledge sharing within and beyond their organizational boundaries.
More: CWA 14924-1:2004 (E)
6. What's next? Enterprise 3.0: "Real Time" Redefines Collaboration Tools
Posted by Kevin O'Neil on Mon, 2010 Mar 01
dna13 Real Time Reputation Management
... steps must be taken within organizations to eliminate inefficiencies that still exist from the "analog" times of yore. For example:
* Share the love-and the data: Failure to share data among Sales, Marketing and PR departments has been an age-old problem. Should it continue, it will be one of the biggest impediments to the degree of strategic alignment required to fully leverage the power of "real time".
* Make the workflow solution part of your daily routine: One of the most commonly heard complaints regarding social media adoption within corporations was that executives, "didn't have the time." That excuse has lost steam as it became clear that social media had the ability to save time when implemented strategically, but it continues to be heard during conversations about workflow solutions. While there is an initial time investment up front to learn the system, these platforms actually save time by eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies. However, if they aren't used widely within the enterprise, they don't do the job they're intended for.
Source is no more ...
Your turn
So, what do you think, or know, that works well in the shape-shifting practice of "Knowledge Management" and "Innovation"?
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