Enterprise 2.0: What’s Next for Social Business?
Posted on 30. Jun, 2011 by tom in New Ways to Work
Would you like some process with your social business? And just to be clear before we dive in, I come not to bury the E 2.0 movement, but rather to suggest where we need to do more.
Ger and I spent some time last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, and we had an extremely productive three days. The energy was great, and candidly, the Hynes was full of smart people who are passionate about making their organizations and themselves more productive and better able to take action on the information with which we’re surrounded today.
If you want a recap of the conference, please visit the blog of Cecil Dijoux. You won’t find a better recap – thank you Cecil and thanks to all who tweeted out his work. While there is plenty of skepticism surrounding the E2.0 movement, Cecil’s summary provides some real data points that indicate a real and grounded revolution.
Please remember this positive recap as you read on. Again, I’m not here to bury E 2.0, but I do think some important issues are still barely being surfaced. Namely, there’s such a focus on information – wikis, chats, document repositories, social media listening and data – that we sometimes forget that we actually have work to do. We have tasks, goals and objectives, and deliverables owed to our colleagues, our partners, and our customers.
This is not a technology challenge. In fact, one exhibiting vendor’s “social dashboard” looked like the modular (“widgets” anyone?) web dashboards we were offering consumers in 1996.
This is not a category challenge. The issue isn’t whether the focus needs to be aimed at CRM, KM, ECM, etc. Work today requires cross-functional dependencies more than ever, so a premium on communication and adaptive work processes is by definition critical. Denis Pombriant had a nice posting last week that touched on this issue.
I believe we have a perception challenge. There’s still a gulf between the tools and data we have at our disposal right now, and the processes by which organizations and people are going to use those tools and data. IBM or Oracle saying that they have social business covered through the use of repurposed command and control tools doesn’t mean that they do. And saying that we’re going to self organize and ignore structure and process isn’t going to work either.
It’s our humble view here at Goshido that we need a sharper focus on doing. And one way to sharpen this focus is to think about how we can make guided collaboration a reality. We need to be more agile too. Not agile with a capital “A” and a manifesto, but agile as it’s defined in the dictionary.
Enterprise 2.0 is here to stay, but we have a lot of work to do. I guess that’s not a bad thing, right?!
Try Goshido, a new cloud-platform, which helps people: focus, communicate, and do their best work. Goshido applies new principles for how work can be organized; the perfect blend of Agile, Lean, Productivity and Attention Management.
Goshido Product Update
Posted on 02. Mar, 2011 by tom in New Ways to Work
Last week the Goshido product team delivered an exciting new release, and I’d like to share a few of the new features here. We keep working to make it easier for you to get to the actions and updates most important to you.
- One click to all updates: from any action, you’re now one click away from all of the updates on not just that action, but updates on all subactions too.
- Better work plans: we’ve made some changes to how plans work in Goshido, and you can learn more and watch a video in our Help center.
- More information about a person’s activities: in addition to the actions you’re authorized to see, with one click you can now see a person’s updates across all of the actions and projects to which you’re subscribed.
- Goshido bookmarklet: also new in our Help center, you can now grab a Goshido bookmarklet to add to your browser. Just select and bookmark things in your browser bar and it will create actions in Goshido.
As always, let us know what we can do to help you work better together. That’s our mission.
Organization Structure and Working
Posted on 17. Feb, 2011 by tom in New Ways to Work
We talk a lot at Goshido about new ways of working. And not only do we talk about what might be considered best practices – we actually put many of these concepts to the test every day in both our activities and our product development efforts. With this in mind, two blog postings last week caught my eye on the themes of organization structure and getting work done.
The first posting was actually a rather lengthy and thought-provoking article by Dave Gray of XPLANE ⎟ Dachis Group. Titled The Connected Company, Dave posits some well-considered arguments comparing long-lived companies to cities, which are in turn a metaphor for complex organisms. I’m a firm believer that building and maintaining a company’s distinct culture is step one in building a successful enterprise. Dave provides some much-appreciated depth on this topic.
The second posting focuses on Agile, and the challenges large development organizations face when it comes to release planning. While I’m probably not qualified to state that Release Planning is Evil, I’m enough of a common sense guy to buy into Erik Huddleston’s notion that planning methods need to better reflect the flexible and organic nature of work and teams in today’s company. Sometimes work involves 400 people on 1 project, but more likely, work involves 4 people on 100 projects, with those 4 person teams shifting dynamically based on the specific problems at hand.
Let us know what you think. We want Goshido to help empower you to work more effectively.