17. Quick change can be lasting… …if there is leadership & cultural fit “ Most people are quite autonomous… Yeah, not a great deal of hand holding” “ There was massive growth…I guess it was because it was easy to use” “ Don’t complain…about the procedure being bad. You just go and re-write it until you think it is sufficiently good”
Have you ever noticed we call ourselves a Global Village, and we refer to the business and trade done around the world as the Global Marketplace, but nobody has seemed to recognise the inherent threats and opportunities when the two concepts converge?
In times gone by, we used to live very social lives. We depended on each other to survive and we interacted in central places like plazas and marketplaces. Everybody knew each other or at least knew of each other most people were both producers and consumers at some level and stories, opinions and ideas travelled quickly throughout the community. As the population grew, we started to industrialise and separate communities formed. - Cities grew larger and less personal, - Distances grew larger as society spread beyond the local community. Social stayed local, but business become distributed and divided.
In times gone by, we used to live very social lives. We depended on each other to survive and we interacted in central places like plazas and marketplaces. Everybody knew each other or at least knew of each other most people were both producers and consumers at some level and stories, opinions and ideas travelled quickly throughout the community. As the population grew, we started to industrialise and separate communities formed. - Cities grew larger and less personal, - Distances grew larger as society spread beyond the local community. Social stayed local, but business become distributed and divided.
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html “ The moment our generation is living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” That’s a big statement and to back it up he explains the amazing part the internet is playing in our global communications:
Starting with mail, then telegraph and later telephones, people found ways to communicate between one another over longer distances with shorter and shorter latency. If you wanted to real a larger audience you had a hard time. The printing press changed that and broad distribution of information and ideas was possible. The high frequency publication of newspapers allowed more timely information to be spread, and television upped the ante again, both all of these broadcast media had two things in common: They are one-way only, and They go from a single professional to a broad audience. The history of media has been split into two separate streams, inter-personal and broadcasting. What the internet has brought us is the capability of social media. At first, many of the internet communications solutions were just electronic versions of older technologies. Email and IM worked 1:1 just like Snail mail and SMS Internet databases and Intranet sites work 1:many just like books and television. But with Web 2.0, a fundamental shift has occurred. For the first time many people are able to connect with many people to generate content. More than just forums where people can discuss topics in online conversations, Web 2.0 allows for collaborative participation and production that is unheard of in its size and scope. Instead of the size of the group growing as the number of people do, Social networks are based on the relationships and connections. This grows as the square of the number of the people involved. Of course one other forum did develop – talk-back radio – which has the ability of many:many communications, however with very limited bandwidth both on the part of the airwaves and the available listening time of the participant.
Its one thing to say we are naturally social animals, but our culture has evolved to handle these two major streams. There is a delay as we become used to having the ability to communicate as a community again.
We are starting to think at a society level like those sailors on the ship.
In times gone by, we used to live very social lives. We depended on each other to survive and we interacted in central places like plazas and marketplaces. Everybody knew each other or at least knew of each other most people were both producers and consumers at some level and stories, opinions and ideas travelled quickly throughout the community. As the population grew, we started to industrialise and separate communities formed. - Cities grew larger and less personal, - Distances grew larger as society spread beyond the local community. Social stayed local, but business become distributed and divided.
So maybe new networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are changing the world on the international scale like Shirky claims, but how does all this effect the business world.
Ship story. 1980 USS Pulao – Steam powered Aircraft Carrier. The idea of distributed cognition (shared task solutions)…shows how complex routines need several actors, inanimate tools and an organized mode of cooperation. We learn that often knowledge lies in their overall configuration, an cannot be isolated in anybody’s head. - http://www.michaelkimmel.at/liste.html
SME Example: Sydney IT company hired a documentation specialist using a specialised editing language (LaTeX) to capture and publish the teams knowledge and information about their hosting business. They made the decision to move to a wiki and a project was started to migrate all the existing documentation over which took about 6 weeks. The critical goal to allow everybody to update the knowledge-base was achieved, but the results surprised even the manager who had suggested the wiki: Unlike the slow uptake of other systems, within 2 months the system was at full use as the graph shows, with around 12,000 views a month. More importantly, despite the documentation employee now being used on other projects, a system that had taken 5 years to create and maintain 150 pages took just 2 years to move to 2500, and the usage remained steady over the following two years. Why? The manager said “Most people are quite autonomous…Yeah, not a great deal of hand holding”
SME Example: Sydney IT company hired a documentation specialist using a specialised editing language (LaTeX) to capture and publish the teams knowledge and information about their hosting business. They made the decision to move to a wiki and a project was started to migrate all the existing documentation over which took about 6 weeks. The critical goal to allow everybody to update the knowledge-base was achieved, but the results surprised even the manager who had suggested the wiki: Unlike the slow uptake of other systems, within 2 months the system was at full use as the graph shows, with around 12,000 views a month. More importantly, despite the documentation employee now being used on other projects, a system that had taken 5 years to create and maintain 150 pages took just 2 years to move to 2500, and the usage remained steady over the following two years. Why? The manager said “Most people are quite autonomous…Yeah, not a great deal of hand holding”
SME Example: Sydney IT company hired a documentation specialist using a specialised editing language (LaTeX) to capture and publish the teams knowledge and information about their hosting business. They made the decision to move to a wiki and a project was started to migrate all the existing documentation over which took about 6 weeks. The critical goal to allow everybody to update the knowledge-base was achieved, but the results surprised even the manager who had suggested the wiki: Unlike the slow uptake of other systems, within 2 months the system was at full use as the graph shows, with around 12,000 views a month. More importantly, despite the documentation employee now being used on other projects, a system that had taken 5 years to create and maintain 150 pages took just 2 years to move to 2500, and the usage remained steady over the following two years. Why? The manager said “Most people are quite autonomous…Yeah, not a great deal of hand holding”
SME Example: Sydney IT company hired a documentation specialist using a specialised editing language (LaTeX) to capture and publish the teams knowledge and information about their hosting business. They made the decision to move to a wiki and a project was started to migrate all the existing documentation over which took about 6 weeks. The critical goal to allow everybody to update the knowledge-base was achieved, but the results surprised even the manager who had suggested the wiki: Unlike the slow uptake of other systems, within 2 months the system was at full use as the graph shows, with around 12,000 views a month. More importantly, despite the documentation employee now being used on other projects, a system that had taken 5 years to create and maintain 150 pages took just 2 years to move to 2500, and the usage remained steady over the following two years. Why? The users said the ease of use of the wiki was a good match to a time-poor environment. The manager said about the culture “Most people are quite autonomous…Yeah, not a great deal of hand holding” The system was developed by the users themselves. Strong leadership was provided in two areas: Ensuring there was a culture of quality. The leader constantly insisted on good content. Insistence that the tool was the channel and must be used, but how they used it was up to them.
Lisa Clack is talking about connecting with changing target groups. Bronwyn is showing us how to use it for promotion. James is going to talk about using it for customer service. Andrew McAfee tells the story about how Verizon is one example of consumers becoming part of the business. http://andrewmcafee.org/blog/?p=789
Nick is focusing on improving buy-in to these technologies, and Simon will be leading a discussion on some of the resistance you will find to these technologies
Nick is focusing on improving buy-in to these technologies, and Simon will be leading a discussion on some of the resistance you will find to these technologies
It’s about seeing the new marketplace and understanding our place within it. Review how we do business now Review what opportunities the new marketplace holds for us Review what threats exist if we continue our current course Review what tools will match our culture for the quickest participation
The success of Web 2.0 tools in your business is heavily tied to your culture and the tasks you are trying to undertake.
Different group cultures will gravitate towards tools that most suit their communications preferences. While other groups may be using the same tool, it may be for: Different reasons In a different manner
Wiki highly successful in one section of the business, but failed to work in other parts where the forum and intranet better suited the culture of those groups.