chieftech's blog - Filed under 'social business design'

May 22, 2010

People with broken toilets use the Internet too

I know this might come as a surprise to some, but you know, people with broken toilets also use the Internet too.

Unfortunately, this point is lost on some because I spent most of my Saturday trying to answer a relatively simply question: Can I stop my Caroma toilet from leaking, without needing to call a plumber. And if I do need help or have to seek assistance at the local hardware store for a Caroma part, what do I need to tell them about what is broken?

Now, I should point out that Caroma Australia have spent a decent amount of time and effort on creating a couple of a nice looking Websites and have even created a presence on flickr, YouTube and Facebook. However, if you are looking for some simple instructions on how to fix the most basic of problems you might encounter, then don't bother. A google search eventually threw up some buried technical specs, but they didn't really help me with my issue.

This doesn't mean that they haven't done this in the past - its just hard to find, although in at least one person's opinion, it still doesn't actually provide enough detail so they ended up making their own video. Unfortunately for me, these instruction cover an old model anyway as there aren't any tabs to!

Now, in order to save you some time and effort if you are faced with this same problem, I thought I would share what I eventually found out. Changing the rubber washer didn't take long, but I spent a far bit of time working out how to do it!

Firstly, does you Caroma dual flush look like this? If not, check the other video link above.

I believe this is a called an M5 or Mark 5 or possibly a Whisper Quiet Inlet Valve. If this looks your model, then watch the video listed here called, Mark 5 valve seal replacement (in .avi format). Note that this video was created not by Caroma but by a Canadian company called Sustainable Solutions International. Now, unfortunately, this video still makes it look really easy - their unit just clicks out with a simple twist.

I was getting really frustrated after watching the video until I read this:

I read everything on the web and a video (all useless) that avoids the hard parts and things just miraculously appear or disappear!!
Finally after trying in vein on my own for ages I got mad at the whole f'ing thing and pulled so hard it feels like you are going to break it and presto, it is just designed to be pulled out.
There are NO TABS just locking notches on some models.
Next you have to lever off the slot off the middle plunger. Then after trying to lever off the bottom centre of the plunger to replace the washer one realises this isn't going to work you need to pull the old one off and stretch the new one on.
Simple when you know but no one tells you..... Companies like Caroma should web publish simple instructions for all their different products and save us all some grief. Simply retarded that they don't.

(Emphasis added)

So, I persisted and hey presto... I discovered that it does come out with a twist and a pull:

Click here to download:

People_with_broken_toilets_use.zip (276 KB)

If you look at this picture of the rubber washer, you can see it is has some odd bumps on the edges:

The replacement washer (which again, provides very little information about it being a suitable replacement part - but looks the same at least) is nice and smooth.

Now, you might have noticed that this isn't a DIY or plumbing blog. But that's kind of the point isn't it? Because social media isn't just for marketing.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // customer participation customer service social business design social media social media marketing

Comments [3]

May 13, 2010

My conference workshops coming up in May & July

Just to let you know that I have a couple of conferences coming up this month and in July where I'll be running workshops:

Knowledge Transfer and Retention, 24th-25th May, Sydney

On the second day of this conference, I'll be running a workshop on designing a simpler, smarter, social knowledge transfer and retention approach. In this workshop I will be using our Social Business Design framework to explain how to tap into collective intelligence, improve productivity through in-the-flow knowledge transfer and do more with less.

Public Sector Marketing, 28th-30th July, Canberra

I will be running a full-day masterclass on the last day of this conference, to provide an A-Z guide to implementing a social media marketing strategy. This will be based on Gov 2.0 Taskforce Project 8 guidelines, developed by Headshift, however I'll also be providing an overview of current current Web trends and their impact on policy setting and public sector marketing.

As always, come along to either of these workshops ready to participate!

via headshift.com

Cross-posted from the Headshift Australasia blog.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // canberra conferences events government 2.0 knowledge management social business design sydney

Comments [0]

March 25, 2010

Extending the scope and scale of operational command #sbs2010

As part of my presentation yesterday, I shared some questions (again, based on content from the Government 2.0 guidelines we created) for people to consider as they think about engaging online:

Where are the skills and resources located in your organisation that you need?
Where are the internal stakeholders located in your organisation?
Is there any overlap between the skills and resources and the internal stakeholders?
How complex or sensitive is your organisational or industry environment?
How mature is your organisation's capability to operate as a social business overall?

The first three questions in particular aim at the heart of my arguments about the constraints of current organisational structures. i.e. while a co-ordinated structure is the easiest form to adopt, you end up with people, resources and key internal stakeholders scattered around the organisation.

However, reflecting on the maturity question I was reading Dachis Group colleague, Caroline Dangson's post on command versus control leadership this morning. She concludes:

Unlike operational control, operational command requires trust. In fact, trust often eliminates the desire to control. Building and maintaining trusting relationships with employees, customers and partners is critical for business leaders. This is why I believe that trust is the key element of social business. Once a leader trusts his or her people to do the right thing (assuming people will do good most of the time with proper incentives), he or she can establish command by guiding and supporting behaviors that will bring desirable results.

How is the trust level in your organization? Is your leadership about control, or are they in command?

Back to my presentation, where I discussed the history of management and information and communication technologies, the issue of command versus control is of course a central issue. The pre-management structures were all about operational control. As organisations grew, we used information technology to extend the scope and scale of that operational control (and if possible, bake it in with automation). Rarely has it been about extending the scope and scale of operation command.

Photo credit: Control! CC-BY

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // enterprise 2.0 management social business design workforce collaboration

Comments [0]

March 25, 2010

Co-ordinated, Integrated and Embedded #sbs2010

I'm not going to upload all my slides from the Social Business Summit because some of my story today was told before at BarCamp Canberra - you can listen to my entire presentation from BarCamp on SlideShare already to get a feel for the first half at least of my Social Business Summit presentation.

However, I thought I would share this slide, which is based on our work for the Government 2.0 Taskforce but slightly amended to be more broadly applicable beyond government. In fact part of my message today was that the changes and challenges to the organisational structures relate to every large organisation, in every industry. I also talked about our experience of working with the Australian Law Reform Commission as an example of what is involved in helping an organisation to develop its own capability to engage online. It also highlights why moving from an ad hoc or co-ordinated organisational model needs to be supported, to avoid what I call 'online industrial accidents' (a reference to my opening comments about the pain and suffering caused by the industrial revolution).

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // events headshift management presentations social business design sydney

Comments [0]

March 19, 2010

Social Business Design - its not your children's Friendface

I was watching the Friendface episode of the IT Crowd the other day. At one point, Roy, Jen and Moss are all sitting in the office together but end up talking to each other on 'Friendface'.

It made me think for a moment that this is probably what many people fear their workplace will turn into if they open the floodgates to social computing. I don't mean the FUD about time wasting online with the real Facebook and Youtube etc, but the fear that face-to-face interaction will be replaced unnecessarily with chat boxes. Not everyone is a technophile after all.

The situation in the IT Crowd isn't as silly as it sounds. When we talk about management or organisational design issues, we have a tendency to separate out the technology (particularly the information technology) from the human aspects. In my opinion technology is always socially situated... and we see this playing out in the workplace when we notice that people actually exist in a hybrid environment of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (even more so, if we included telecommunications in that definition). The task switching issue between physical and online can be real, particularly when we experience it through the paradigm of the older style collaboration tools.

However, another side of this argument is that what is bad for one person or group of people in the workplace, isn't necessarily bad for another. For example, if Roy, Jen and Moss weren't sitting together in the same office then chatting online actually becomes a positive and potentially productive mechanism.

I would actually argue that there is definitely a step change in the value proposition for using communication and collaboration technologies that takes place between different organisational compositions with different orders of magnitude, although it is hard to pin-point when exactly that happens. It is not necessarily about small versus large organisations, although clearly a small co-location work group may find less direct value than a similarly sized geographically or time-zone dispersed team. Increasingly social software is also allowing computer-mediated collaboration to extend organically beyond the the normal organisational boundaries - in fact, remove the arbitrary organisational boundaries (which are really simply intangible legal and social constructs anyway) and we find that everyone is part of a network.

The issue of using social computing in the workplace then becomes one of:

Understanding where different people sit in the network and how they add value to work flows;
Understanding the barriers to participating productively in that network that social computing technology could improve*; and
Designing social computing solutions that minimise the effect of task swapping between interacting with the physical and online worlds.

Call this the Social Business Design process if you want. But its certainly not you children's Friendface.

*BTW the best way to achieve this is through a combination of analysis and participatory design, leading to solutions that support further refinement of those solutions through an emergent design process. You see why I added this point as a foot note ;-)

A version of this post has also been cross-posted to the Headshift Australasia blog.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // enterprise 2.0 enterprise social computing social business design social networking social software

Comments [0]

March 16, 2010

Hello. My name is, Social Business Design - now with audio track

via slideshare.net

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!

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // barcamp canberra headshift presentations slidecast social business design

Comments [0]

February 24, 2010

No one said user participation would be easy

User participation is now an established feature of the economy, spreading from product development and software to a much broader base of activities, such as marketing and manufacturing, and sectors, including social media, automotives and cosmetics, among others. Early analyses of user participation pointed to the importance of building large communities, creating effective incentives for participation and implementing more flexible forms of organization. Looking back a few years later, the good news is that active participation continues to spread. The bad news is that harnessing participation is more difficult than we thought. Stimulating a continuous flow of high-quality contributions should be the focus of companies that want to take advantage of user participation.

via businesstechnology.mckinseydigital.com

Well, actually, if you've been hanging around knowledge management and collaboration for a while you wouldn't expect it to be easy :-)

I still think Clay Shirky sums this up best - you need:

"a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users"

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // collaboration participation service design social business design web 2.0

Comments [1]

February 16, 2010

'Social' means understanding information is socially situated, socially constructed. Now do you get it?

A couple of blog conversations by James Robertson, Jane McConnell and Toby Ward (who all run an intranet competition or survey of some sort) have been touching on the change role of intranets and the meaning of the word intranet. Toby Ward kicks off by declaring:

"more organizations that are sleeping through the social media revolution will jump on the bandwagon. 2010 will be the year of the social intranet."

However, Jane isn't quite convinced that the social intranet is really here, well not just yet anyway. Meanwhile, James take this conversation a little further by proposing a shift from talking about 'intranets' to the 'Enterprise experience':

"Within organisations, we should start to talk about the “enterprise experience”. What experience do we want to provide to staff in their working lives? What systems should they be using, and how? How do they interact with the information and tools they need to do their jobs?"

If you see my comment on James' post, you'll see that I'm supportive of the direction James is taking this conversation. However, I think Mark Morrell's comment is more to the point:

BT has an intranet. It’s called the BT Intranet. It’s what it does that has created the reputation it now has rather than what it is called.
It’s what an intranet does that it important – not what it is called.
I feel you should go further than you have. In BT we use internet tools as well as intranet tools including Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds of internal and external news for business purposeshttp://markmorrell.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/i-now-receive-only-the-information-i-need/.
I also feel work and personal lives are blurring in being separate distinctive things we do and we are doing more of these using intranet/internet tools.
As this evolves intranets could well become a redundant term and something far more embracing takes hold.
This will because of what people are doing rather than calling an intranet by another name.

Rather than asking, "Is the social intranet really here?", we should be asking, "When are we going to start recognising that intranets are social?"

The Social Life of Information (pictured above) was published in 2000. One (Amazon) reviewer summarised the thesis of the book as follows:

"most interesting information is socially situated, socially constructed, or otherwise impossible to tear from its human roots and package into transferrable units of "knowledge". This has major implications for the viability of certain kinds of information systems, educational programs, and the evolution of an "information society". Yet, most information workers and information products appear to be oblivious to these implications."

Finally, is the intranet community taking notice? :-)

BTW While you are over on James' blog, check out his 2009 Intranet Innovation awards video interview with NYK, about its wiki-based internal news aggregator. NYK's approach is pretty rudimentary - you can find some other examples of organisations using wiki-based intranet platforms for achieving the same goal in Headshift's project files (check out the Legal and Professional Services case studies).

Photo Credit: The Social Life of Information

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // information management intranets knowledge management social business design social computing socio-technical

Comments [1]

February 10, 2010

Is it time Government 2.0 + Enterprise 2.0 got together?

In the aftermath of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce that wrapped up in December, I've been watching the sudden realisation by people that achieving Government 2.0 will take more than just a veneer of social media on the outside and 'culture change' within the public service.

This is a good thing, as I actually think some of the definitions of Government 2.0 have been too restrictive in terms of reaching the longer term outcome. They have (quite rightly in many respects) been very focused on the outward open government agenda, the need for online engagement and the benefits of access to public sector information. This missing ingredient for me is about actually changing how people inside the agencies work together and how they are organised, so they can meet the new demands of Government 2.0. And of course all without changing some of the fundamental principles that good government is based on.

Now to me this is all about Social Business Design, although you might prefer to think of it as combining Government 2.0 with Enterprise 2.0. Perhaps someone can come up with a nicer word for that?

Photo credit: Out of Office

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // enterprise 2.0 government 2.0 social business design

Comments [0]

January 18, 2010

From NYTimes.com: Interview with Cristóbal Conde, president & CEO of SunGard

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?
A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.
Q. Why did that shift occur?
A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.
But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.
You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?
The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.
Q. How do you create that culture?
A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

via nytimes.com

Timely interview considering my comments about virtual teams just now, although there is more to this that just enterprise microblogging!

Hat tip to Andrew McAfee, who also highlights some key points if you want the abridged version of this interview.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // enterprise 2.0 enterprise microblogging enterprise social computing globalisation leadership management organisational design social business design

Comments [2]

Tags

social business design