I recently spoke at an event organised by Building the Organisation of Tomorrow, a group created by alumni of University of Technology Sydney’s Master of Business in IT Management program.

The format was very stimulating, with three 15 minute presentations, each followed by 15 minutes QA and then a ‘disruptive event’, including some awesome satirical musical performances and a planted heckler in the audience. Below are notes from the three speakers.

Bryan Fenech spoke about what the organisation of tomorrow will...

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It’s no secret that I’m an advocate for the voice of the employee and for the necessity of emergent collaboration in the workplace.  I don’t like it when my friends or acquaintances (or anyone else for that matter) tell me that they don’t like their jobs, that their bosses hate them, that they don’t feel inspired, or that work takes up so much of their time that they can’t do anything else.  I genuinely feel bad when people tell me these things, it’s sad.

However, I’m still grounded in reality (or I like to think I am).  This means that while I believe that collaboration can make the world a better place I certainly ... Read the article

I’m sure you all know one. That person that’s always trying to poke holes in your work, the one that never seems to be satisfied, the one that you get frustrated with because it seems like things are never good enough to escape their critique. Well, believe it or not, this person is a very important role inside of your company and more importantly inside your social networks to avoid a phenomenon called “Groupthink”.  Groupthink is a mode that a group of people gets into when they desire harmony in decision making without a realistic appraisal of alternatives and where there is a desire to minimize conflict.

Sure, we all want harmony in decision making, that makes our...

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I was recently approached by IBM to me write a white paperdiscussing the future of email. They came to me, in part because of my work with social business software but also because of this post from last April, where I talked about the current problems with email, the proliferation of social tools and how using the "right" tool for the job it was designed for could go a long way towards getting email under control. The premise is fairly simple, email is out of control and is becoming a less effective communication tool because its use has expanded far outside the limits of its designed use. Frankly I often go on a rant about email, which for me has exploded to the point that I have a serious issue getting to the things I actually need because of ... Read the article

The change towards the creative economy has major implications for the nature of what we have called assets. In the industrial age, the assets were physical resources, plant and equipment. Most of the resources were traded in markets and could thus be valued. Taking care of the value of an organization could be understood as managing physical assets and resources.

Now knowledge and people are seen as the major assets. But since neither of them are efficiently traded in markets, their value cannot easily be measured. Knowledge can neither be understood as an asset that can be managed like a physical asset. This is what many people within the ... Read the article

The quest for uncovering internal knowledge within an organization has been around for a very long time and was one of the early goals of knowledge management. Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne address this issue again through their MIT Sloan article, How to Find Answers Within Your Company. As they write, the challenge of locating internal knowledge on a specialized topic exists in any large organization. The larger and more segmented the company, the harder it gets to match people to problems. They go on to quite Lewis Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, “If only HP knew... Read the article

For many who come across the idea of crowdsourcing in its many forms, their first thoughts are about the ethical issues. As such, in writing Getting Results From Crowds, it was important to address the ethical domain rather than ignoring or glossing it.

We address the ethical issues of crowdsourcing in Chapter 5 on Relationship Value, offering Points and Counterpoints on a number of the major ethical issues in the field.

To bring the debate to life we have created a video providing some of the arguments on each side. ...

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Original source: The Sad State of Social Media Privacy [Infographic], MDG Advertising

The relationship between social media and privacy has long been a controversial one, but with recent privacy breaches, ever-changing privacy settings and an overall increase in the things we share in social media, there is now renewed attention to the troublesome topic. To shed some light on where consumers stand on social media privacy issues, MDG Advertising created an enlightening infographic that shows consumers’ levels of trust, feelings of control, and attitudes toward online privacy and protection. It also offers insight on what consumers ultimately want in terms of social media and privacy. With consumers becoming more and more concerned about protecting their privacy in the social media era, social networks must make privacy a priority in order to keep consumers as fans and followers. ...  Read the article

Working in the technology industry means I am constantly subjected to a barrage of assaults on the English language. But few make me shudder as much as “gamification”. 

“That’s not a real word!”, I hear you protest. And I’m with you on that (and so is my spell-checker). Unfortunately, many leading lights of the social networking scene don’t agree. 

Wikipedia describes gamification as the use of game design technique and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to ...

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Last week I wrote an article on “designing for collaboration” and this got me thinking a lot about serendipity which is the unexpected occurrence of events in a beneficial way.  Within organizations this can be something such as an employee finding another employee to connect with to help on a project, ideas being shared which then turn into revenue generating or cost cutting projects, finding some piece of useful but perhaps unexpected information, and a host of other things.

This made me think that serendipity within the organization should be more than this unexpected “happy” thing we hope will happen.  Instead we should plan... Read the article