Last Summer I published a Social Business Maturity Model that we developed to help companies understand their level of adoption of social business. The idea is that you can identify a set of criteria to use to evaluate the progress a company is making on it's rollout and adoption of social tools and the accompanying process and culture change that enable the business transformation. Companies could then take that criteria and use it to benchmark their own progress and also plan out a strategy to accelerate adoption and build more momentum. We looked at culture, organization, technology and barriers to change across five maturity... Read the article

This is a term that Dave Weinberger used in his KM World article, Letting data out of its box, that my friend, Geoff Bock, pointed out to me.  Dave is talking about open data, which is data that has metadata that is open to link to other data. Then interesting things can happen, As Dave writes, “Once you let data out of its box—out of its cell—it immediately links up with everything it can, because that's how meaning works: One thing leads to another, and if it doesn't, it's non-sense.”

He adds that open data has value because of its links, “and links—the frisky little devils—just want to go forth and multiply.” Dave was writing these... Read the article

I think one of the most valuable aspects of our newly-launched book Getting Results From Crowds is the analysis of Crowd Business Models. While crowdsourcing is clearly a fantastic way for organizations large and small to get access to unparalleled resources and scale their operations, it is also increasingly central to many companies’ business models.

We have created a framework that identifies 7 fundamental crowd business models (plus non-profits), and done an analysis of the monetization mechanisms and success factors behind each one. These provide a broader framework for the 22 categories in...

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Towards the end of each year I share some thoughts on what awaits in the year ahead.

It is actually a lot easier to look years into the future than just a single year, as while we can readily discern broad trends, the major events in a year are usually unforeseeable, though they may express the longer-term directions. However as the pace of change accelerates, it is becoming a little easier to see the themes, if not the specifics, of the year ahead. My Map of the Decade shows the 14 ExaTrends that are shaping this 10-year period. Today I launch my 12 Themes for 2012, in conjunction with Future Exploration Network. ...

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The approaches of industrial management have given us remarkable material well-being over the last few centuries, but are increasingly being criticized for not being suited to handling the needs of today. Organizations need to excel in innovation. Companies also need to embrace rapid change and uncertainty. Some of the most creative ones have even gone so far as to take a “let’s just do cool things and see what happens” approach, trying to avoid traditional governance systems. Is this yet another sign that... Read the article

Dion Hitchcliffe makes some useful points in his post, The enterprise opportunity of Big Data: Closing the "clue gap."  After a comprehensive look at the possible architectures to effectively look at big data to mine insights, Dion notes that this capability needs to be put into the hands of as many workers as possible. He writes, “The organizations that figure out this part will reap corresponding rewards. In order to have enough impact, Big Data capabilities must be as easy to use as Google search.”

Dion goes on to add, “To close the “clue gap”, wise organizations will seek to get out of the Big Data shallows with all three aspects of Big Data while simultaneously delivering capabilities usable and within reach of... Read the article

I titled the post "Innovation Management", but I intend to focus as much on the activity as on the underlying system. While innovation management is the name we use in our just released Social Business Taxonomy (IDC Doc #230541, currently subscription required, but shortly will be posted here). I'm a little wary of using "management" as a part of a market name. I think we maybe need less  "manage" innovation and more "doing" innovation. It's like content management, while management is what most of the systems end up doing, what we're really trying to do is "share" the content. We should have called the systems content sharing or maybe content liberation software instead. The same is true of knowledge management. Traditionally people "managed" information (and its flow), which... Read the article

Every week I’m going to be reviewing a vendor in the emergent collaboration space and will provide an overview on that vendor which includes everything from leadership and vision to technology and market focus. If you are vendor that would like to participate, please contact me (email is in the sidebar as is twitter link). The goal of these posts is not to bash or praise vendors but to simply offer an objective view on what various vendors offer so that YOU can decide if they are a good fit for your business. Every post will cover the same elements for different vendors. If you have ideas or recommendations for other items to be covered in these posts then please let me...  Read the article

Many of us will have by now seen Steve Jobs’ inspirational address to the Stamford University graduates, where he talks about “connecting dots backwards”. This is what I have been doing for the past 18 months. I am now at last, and very thankfully, ready to move into the next phase of the business. This blog posts summarises the toolkit I have just finished creating as a result of all that dot-joining.

Zhou Enlai was supposed to have given as his assessment of the French Revolution of 1789 that “It is too early to tell”. As the evidence on the transformation of Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 working practices emerge slowly through time, I have been looking back at ... Read the article

As a result of John Tropea’s wonderful blog post from yesterday, which I have blogged about over here, there has been also quite an interesting and rather refreshing conversationdeveloping on the side over at Google Plus around the topics of business processes, BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes), the role of traditional hierarchies and structures in today’s work environment while mixing and mingling with a networked organisation and where learning fits in there altogether. Some fascinating stuff in there, for sure! And one of the various reasons why I keep digging quite a bit G+ over other social networking sites. The depth of the conversations has been like no other so far! And it’s thanks to those conversations themselves how one keeps bumping into golden nuggets like the one shared yesterday byDennis Callahan on that very... Read the article