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.
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