chieftech’s blog

While Headshift/Dachis Group's own Social Business Summit kicks off in the Austin Texas, I'll be attending the Hargraves Institute's Innovation 2010 conference to also talk about Social Business Design:

The global financial crisis exposed some very expensive, bureaucratic structures inside companies that represent a drain on productivity and a waste of human potential. Companies that emerge from this period as leaders will be more agile, network-centric and people-powered. Learn about the four Social Business Design archetypes, how Social Business Design can be applied to stimulate and support innovation with customers, the workforce and business partners.

Full details are in the conference brochure.

Responsibility for this situation is apportioned widely -- from users who lack basic ICT skills, to IT staff who can't or won't connect with the people they serve, to a tech industry which iSociety says is over-hyping its products and failing to deliver on its promises.

But the report gives particular mention to the "lost generation of low-tech managers" who don't understand what technology is about, and therefore fail to make the right strategic decisions.

"Much of UK management make up a 'lost generation' that does not understand ICT, because it did not grow up immersed in technology," the organisation said in a statement. "Technologists, who do have this knowledge, tend to be sidelined in key decision making and are disconnected from the management mainstream. In effect, low-tech managers are forcing the UK economy into a low-tech equilibrium."

The quote above is from a news story about a 2003 report that was in part the inspiration behind my consulting philosophy. The report, Getting by, not getting on: Technology in UK workplaces, was an output of the UK's Work Foundation's iSociety project but unfortunately it appears to have disappeared from the Web.

The reason I'm mentioning it again now is that I'm reflecting on the comments to my post, Enterprise 2.0: Show me the money (a spreadsheet might help).

Everything this report talks about is still true: Yes, the vendors are over-hyping Enterprise 2.0 and some of the geeks have trouble explaining it. But fundamentally, if you don't want to even try to understand the impact of this technology trend then you too are part of the problem of getting by, not getting on.

Meanwhile there are plenty of organisations that are trying to get on. I've even worked for some of them. And Headshift has its own list of clients as well.

BTW Coincidentally, Lee Bryant from Headshift blogged about this very same report back in 2003 too. :-)

It is much more usual for local government to operate from a position of, at best, indifference, or at worst active opposition to unregistered street gardens.

Yarra council, by contrast, had the prescience to totally reverse its negative stance (with the help of some popular opposition to help them change their minds), and to come out in support not merely of a single garden but of guerilla gardens across the municipality.

I've had this story about guerilla gardening sitting open for a while on my computer. What I like about it is that as much as its win for the guerilla gardeners, its also a win for all kinds of civic 'hackers' (like the GovHack'ers). I think it also says that, and speaking from the relative comfort of Australia, that perhaps what we need in this country isn't so much open government in its most radical sense, but just some 'reasonable government' that won't block innovation, experimentation and volunteer action without a really good reason. Then interesting things can happen.

Hat tip to David Gravina.

Good TED talk video about the role of design thinking today.

I'm not quite sure about the references to Isambard Brunel, as his biggest idea the Great Eastern was never commercially viable. I also think its interesting to reflect on that early industrial era that they didn't quite fully understand the technologies they were working with - the first iron bridge was built using carpentry techniques, which was neither cost effective or good engineering for that kind of material. Having said, people learnt from those mistakes.

Hat tip to Jordan Willms.

Just in case you thought augmented reality (AR) was all about marketing gimmicks involving mobile phones and barcodes, this example from some Finnish researchers shows how some people are thinking about other ways of applying augmented and virtual reality to business. Actually many of these ideas aren't new but perhaps what is more interesting is that the technological barriers are falling and in easy (or very close) reach of consumers. I suspect that the only real barrier is probably the headsets! However, these experiments all pave the way for new, innovative methods for collaborating and manipulating data to come.

Hat tip to Games Alfresco.

Personally I apply a few innovation and change management concepts in my work:

• IMA's Accelerating Change Methodology (AIM);
• James Carlopio's change management model (see Changing Gears: The Strategic Implementation of Technology), which has origins in Rogers' innovation theory (see Diffusion of Innovations if you aren't familiar with this fantastic book); and
• Nambisan W, Agarwal R & Tanniru M, 1999, ‘Organizational mechanisms for enhancing user innovation in information technology', MIS Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 365-395.

Jodie Miners was asking about this following my earlier post about WIIFM. I realised that I had already covered this before in this post on my old blog.

Incidentally (and this is probably why it was top of mind) I'm planning on attending a 2 day Accelerating Change Methodology introduction program (it will be a refresher for me and a chance to hear about the change issues being faced by other organisations) in Sydney on the 16-17 September 2009. You can find out more about the course on the AIM site.

Last week I spoke with two organizations who had “KM problems”.  In both cases they found that associates were not filling out all the information into their system of record.  What resulted was an inability to look back at older cases and extract “knowledge” about the process to help train new associates.  It’s a common problem — associates were never motivated to fill out forms and stuff SharePoint with documents.  They were motivated to bring open cases to closure efficiently. Their respective approaches to the problem was to get new tools or to figure out new ways to mandate compliance.  I told both companies that their approach will not work and I explained why.

...It’s somewhat obvious to me when I  see the problem from the outside.  But one of my clients could not understand why a management edict in the form of “Thou shalt upload all documents to SharePoint in a timely manner” would not work.

Gil was actually blogging about a TEDxBoston presentation - so go read (and watch) that for the context of this quote. However, the point he makes above I like to simplify into what I call the WIIFM ("What's In It For Me?") gap. Its critical to examine this point from all levels in an organisation - corporately, through the management levels and finally the individuals involved. This is a three way gap between what the organisation wants as a whole, what the departments or internal groups involved want and what the individuals who will be affected want.

This perspective actually dove tails neatly into a couple of different change management models I use, one based on innovation theory and another based more pragmatically on addressing sponsorship 'holes' in the organisational structure.