I’m regularly trying to do two things: explore mobile capabilities, and get folks to think more broadly about how we can support performance in the organization.  I was asked to flesh out a proposed title for a stage at the upcoming mLearnCon, and thought about trying to map the 4C’s of mobile to the major categories of mobile work opportunities.  It’s a slightly different take than my previous meta-mobile post where I looked at performance support, formal learning, and meta-learning...

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Mayra Aixa Avilar (who I hope to meet someday, maybe at mLearnCon?) pointed to this post saying “mLearning is starting to diverge from eLearning not only in specific meaning, but in approach and design as well”, and I want to politely disagree.   Depends, of course, on what you mean by elearning, to start with.

The clear implication is that elearning is about courses on the desktop.  As I’ve discussed before, when I’m talking about ‘big L‘ learning, I’m covering research, performance, innovation, creativity as well as more typical execution. As a consequence, I’m talking performance support, social networks, portals, and more, as well as ...  Read the article

Products that are manufactured the same way with the same product features are often used differently by different customers. Just because a product is a commodity doesn’t mean that customers can’t be diverse in their needs and uses of the product.

Companies used to have no mechanisms for connecting with the end users in order to understand and influence this. Social media and mobile technologies are now changing the model.

A relationship between a customer and an enterprise can get smarter with every interaction. Consider a service as routine as grocery shopping. Suppose that you could turn to your mobile phone and come up with a graph of last month’s or last year’s grocery purchases. Every time a customer buys her groceries, she is not only showing herself and the firm the products she buys, but also teaching the firm the pattern at which she consumes/uses them and implicitly the complementary products she does not yet perhaps know of. The service is creating a history of this particular customer that is virtually impossible for a competing shopping service to replicate.

Interactive value creation is about two new capabilities: the firm needs to be capable of networking with individual customers, and behaving ... Read the article

Ceci est le premier billet de blog que j’écris en français. Je suis Australien, né à Canberra, mais mon père travaillais pour l’ONU et j’ai passé presque tout ma jeunesse à Genève. Je vivais ainsi à quelques kilomètres de la France et j’y allais tous les samedis pour skier. Cela fait bien longtemps que je n’ai pas vécu dans un pays francophone, mais heureusement je n’ai pas trop oublié mon français.

Je vais passer de la fin avril à la fin mai en Europe, commençant avec...

 

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Eric Schmidt’s speech in the Mobile World Congress 2012 inspired me to think for a second what it means that we have the chance to communicate, share and read information online. Due to the fact that the infrastructure around us is as well developed as it is and we can afford to buy a lap top or a mobile phone, in most cases the both, we represent the group of the people that are hyper connected.

There are 7 billion people in the world and about a little more than 2 billion of them have an online access. The latest newsspread around the globe in a matter of seconds and the latest information ... Read the article

Although work today is primarily digital, most organizations still have a spatial dimension, and most of those spaces have a designed organizational role. Even in the digital age we still think in terms of space. The key thing is that both the organizational structure and space greatly influence the patterns of work. A few years ago, the typical organization design meant that work was divided into multiple parts that were simply added together to create the product. Individual workers did not need to know much more than what was specific to their individual tasks to complete their jobs.

Today, the results of work are not brought together in the end but are communicated throughput the process. A growing number of people are involved in generating ideas and information and bringing those ideas together in collaborative sense making. Work is interaction. Communication is not talking about work. Communication is work.

There are three archetypes of communication in firms: The first type is communication for responsiveness and coordination. This creates the need for transparency. The right hand knows what the... Read the article

[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

Research firm IDC has forecastthat there will be 1.3 billion ‘mobile workers’ in the world by 2015, representing 37.2% of the global workforce. This points to the massive explosion of what I call the ‘global talent economy’, in which talent can be and will be anywhere.

The forecasts suggest that the bulk of the growth will be in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), which will see 838 million mobile workers in 2015, up 237 million from 2010, representing well over half the global mobile workforce. ...

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We're putting the finishing touches on our 2012 predictions, so look for that post in the next week or so, but in the mean time, and in the spirit of accountability and openness, I decided to take a few minutes to look back at our predictions for 2011 and see how we did. Here's the original post, if you want to refer to it, but I'll go through each one here again:

1. Social profiles become the Internet fingerprint - I'd say we get a B+ on this one. While profiles are an essential part of your online persona, the proliferation of profiles is still something of a problem. Certainly more sites are using Facebook connect or Twitter as a de facto "standard" to help... Read the article

It’s the time of year once again to reflect and predict. It’s sort of like being the weatherman; you don’t get a lot of credit for getting it right, nor do you get a lot of disdain if you get it wrong. So, have fun with my predictions and make sure to bring your umbrella, just in case.

1. We still won’t agree what to call it

This debate really started in 2010, but has continued to a point where people have stopped debating it and just call it different things. Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Enterprise Social, Social Media for...

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2011 is history, but before we start to focus on what will happen in enterprise tech in 2012, let's take a short look back at some of the events that make it a very big,  important year in a lot of ways. The tech world continued to go through a settling process that is the fall out of the great recession and the rapid intersection of a few key trends. We have often referred to this as the new normal and I think that we are starting to have a much clearer picture of what that really means for tech, for software and most importantly for businesses. Four key trends, or pillars as my IDC colleagues like to call them, are the underpinnings of change in IT. These four trends are also... Read the article