Alas, I won't be in Zurich (actually, I'm heading off to Perth for the week shortly). However, if you are in the Zurich area you might like to meet up with Christoph Schmaltz and Lee Provoost from the Headshift | Dachis Group's London team at bar Andorra in Zurich on August 10 starting from 7 PM.

I've heard some mixed feedback about the recent CeBIT Government 2.0 conference, which was held in Canberra at the beginning of the month. I think part of the problem continues to be the gap between the engaged (some of whom are also more than quite immersed) and those still exploring the topic.

Read the rest over on the Headshift blog.

BTW I'll add a hat tip to Craig for giving Prezi rather than PPT a go! Always good to see someone trying something a little different.

Everyone is talking about social media, social networks, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter but not many people are discussing how to be a socially designed business.

A social business is one where we use the opportunities presented by new technologies to deliver business value - to reduce costs, increase effectiveness or mitigate risks.

Come along to this presentation to discuss a new perspective on being a socially designed business:

• Customer Participation: Engaging with customers in ways that traditional one-way communication cannot support.
• Workforce Collaboration: Meeting your workforce's need to collaborate and coordinate efforts to effectively meet business goals.
• Business Partner Optimisation: Rethinking value chain relationships, including connections like suppliers, distribution networks, and vendors/delivery partners.

During the presentation, the Headshift team will facilitate discussion and lead a brainstorming activity to help you understand the opportunities and think about next steps.

The Headshift team is running a short event on the 23rd November, here in Sydney. Hope to see you there!

The Scoop - Enterprise social media

Posted: Mon 12 Apr 2010 5:00PM

Can social networking sites really advance corporate productivity and profile? CIOs must take these services more seriously if they're to capitalise on this booming industry. The Scoop is joined by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, MD of Headshift Australia and Mike Handes, Innovation Lead for Collaboration Software, IBM.

I've updated my slides from BarCamp Canberra 2010 with the audio recording to turn them into a 'slidecast'.

This is also very similiar to my presentation for the Hargraves Institute's Innovation 2010 conference last week, although I also talked there about Social Innovation Camp and a client case study (about a private social network we recreated) as examples of Social Business Design in action.

BTW I'll also be adding an audio track to my Project 8 presentation from BarCamp as soon as it has uploaded!

We are taking advantage of the fact that Robin Hamman will be here in Sydney for our Social Business Summit to run a special half-day masterclass in Canberra on Monday 22nd March.

Featuring Robin and facilitated by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, the masterclass will address:

• How existing government activities can be undertaken with more impact, wider reach, and effectiveness using social media;
• Who should do it (and who shouldn't);
• The guidelines and roles a government agency will need; and
• Measuring success for different stake holders.

Please contact me at james.dellow@headshift.com or call 0414 233711 for more information or if you would like to register for the masterclass.

I'll be taking a bit of back seat at this event, but it will give you the chance to hear from two other very experienced people from the Headshift team. Robin's profile speaks for itself, meanwhile you may not be aware that Anne was the other primary author to the Project 8 guidelines I've been talking about a lot recently :-)

Anne was also the lead consultant for Taskforce Project 15, to assist the Australian Law Reform Commission to run an online engagement pilot with their stakeholders.

On March 25, Headshift/Dachis Group will host Asia/Pacific's first Social Business Summit, an invitation only event in Sydney, designed for business and technology thought leaders interested in the future of social business.

Currently, the implementation of social tools in business are advancing from experimental pilot initiatives towards mainstream adoption spanning a diverse range of organisational contexts. As with all transformational technology developments, organisational culture change and technology adoption are closely related, with both influencing the other in subtle yet important ways.
We intend to consider and address the impact of social tools on the way we organise, structure and manage knowledge and people in businesses, both internally and externally.

This event is by invitation only and admittance is limited.
If you'd like to request an invitation, please email australia@headshift.com

This is one of a series of global Social Business Summits taking place during March this year - Austin, Texas on the 11th and London on the 18th, followed by Sydney on the 25th.

Also, see Lee's great post announcing the London summit, where he positions the big picture for the Social Business Summit by saying:

The relationship between technology and culture is an interesting one, and it plays out differently in the short-run and the long-run. We can see the increasing speed with which technological change bleeds into mainstream culture through the impact of printing, radio, the telephone, television and, most recently, the internet and social networking. Whether it is Time's person of the year, or the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year, the influence of recent online developments is inescapable. But at a deeper level, more fundamental change is also happening, though less immediately visible, and over a longer time period.

In business, our use of technology is influenced by the way we work; but the way we work, and indeed the way we structure our companies and organisations, is also very much influenced by technology. The Twentieth Century corporation was partly a product of technological innovations in logistics, transport and communications. Those who could afford to exploit these expensive innovations were able to reap the benefits of scale associated with large-scale co-ordination of human and material resources.

But institutions can give longevity to ideas through codification into practice. So as the technological or economic constraints associated with our means of organisation fell away, companies did not always change their structure or practice in response. Fast-forward to the early Twenty-first Century and we face a mis-match between the affordances of the day-to-day technology most people use and the organisational structures they operate within, which have yet to adapt to take advantage of the way new technology changes how people interact and co-operate. This gap represents a huge business opportunity for those companies able and willing to adapt.

If, as Clay Shirky argues, the cost of collaboration is close to zero thanks to social tools, what does this mean for organisational design? Can we dramatically reduce internal cost structures by making better use of emergent behaviour inside the firm? If real-time data has the potential to transform service delivery, then how should organisations be structured to take advantage of it? These are just some of the questions that the adoption of social tools inside the enterprise are raising about the future of the firm. They touch on various aspects of technology, from enterprise architecture to user experience design; but they are also informed by economic theory, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology and organisational design.

Headshift is currently completing a project for the Government 2.0 Taskforce, to develop online engagement guidelines and a Web 2.0 toolkit for Australian government agencies (see the brief - PDF or RTF format).

Our approach for this project involves creating use cases for online engagement that will underpin and connect the two main outputs from this project into something that will give some practical guidance to people working in the public service.

We've already been reaching out to people about these use cases, both in person and online through forums like the Gov 2.0 Australia mailing list, to get feedback and ideas. So if you are working in government and would like to provide feedback or have information to share, please get in touch.

A big personal thank you to everyone who has contributed feedback so far on our online engagement framework and model use cases.