The Workplace Blog

The International Herald Tribune published an online article comparing the responses to creative productivity of different countries. In this article we learn, for example, that last year China filed more patents than Britain, France and Germany combined. We also learn that World Intellectual Property Day was celebrated around the world to pay tribute to the role that intellectual property plays, turning ideas to products.

What is true of countries is true of companies. Siloed creativity within a company depletes its overall impact and value. It also loses out on synergies between and across departments. Technological advances as well as sociological realities create such an environment that ideas can be shared over the corporate intranet, portal, wiki or blog building the company’s intellectual capital. As creatures of habit, however, we are quite protective of our ideas in the workplace. It is therefore through the strength of the network, physical and virtual, that an environment can be cultivated to capture the creative productivity and synergies across a business enterprise.

Now its News.com’s turn to spin the Web 2.0 mantra. In an article discussing how the corporate world is waking up to Web 2.0, writer Martin LaMonica explains that light-weight and simple Web systems are more likely to be used by end users than more structured content management systems. The article cites collaboration examples from Ernst & Young, IBM and Microsoft.

Interestingly there is little discussion about how successful these collaborative solutions are. I’d be interested in learning about the metrics. How many people are using the wiki or the blog and how often and with what business benefit?

Needless to say, I believe that web 2.0 collaborative solutions are going to change Corporate America. The only open question is how quickly and how dramatically. Can anyone answer that question? To learn more about Web 2.0 visit O’Reilly for the official definition.

Microsoft may not have web 2.0 versions of Microsoft Office to compete with the Google Spreadsheet and other online applications. However, they’re allowing the public to preview Microsoft Office 2007 online. The only downside? You need Internet Explorer to test the new version with its new features and user interface.

Maybe, we’ll soon have a web light version of Office. Imagine if Microsoft created a light version of Office specifically for intranets - accessible via the intranet leveraging a hosted, application service provider model.

Michael Schrage has written an excellent editorial for CIO Magazine in which he encourages companies to share more with their customers and suppliers. Gifts that Keep on Giving explains how by giving away code, testing tools, frameworks and other similar tools companies are making their whole supply chains more efficient. Everyone wins when companies are willing to share more of their inner workings.

He’s not talking about code from your mission critical applications or tools that are used to differentiate your product offerings but rather the ones that are more informal and basic. The tools that employees have built themselves to make their jobs easier. Whether they are nifty pieces of code or excel macros, companies may derive greater value if they are willing to share them for free with their partners so that they too can benefit from the efficiences created.

In a nutshell, I see this as the future. Knowledge management will be less a function of the corporate boundaries within which an employee exchanges information but instead a necessity that extends beyond a company’s walls to the large ecosystem within which it functions. In other words, companies will win when their employees create knowledge communities with the outside world and share generously.

Most of the conversations about iPods in the workplace have centered around training and how employees can stay abreast with industry and company news on their way to work every morning. Well, here’s another away that your iPod can change your workplace setting. Rather than helping the company more, this alternative may truly help employees. Visit MicroMemo to learn you can make your work life easier.

If you’re looking for a Social Media conference to attend, you may want to take a look at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media that will be held in the Spring of 2007 in Boulder, Colorado. This academic oriented conference will address ethnographic analysis through social media, human computer interaction, unstructured knowledge management, social network analysis and visualization among other topics.

In reading the conference description, I particularly liked the phrase, “people at once act as creators, observers and influences of the space in which they participate.” Companies themselves play these roles in real time too. But alas, we do not have social media tools that capture the aggregate behavior of employees to depict how a company truly functions.

Recently I’ve been working on our intranet wiki, an open/collaborative and communication platform that is quickly becoming one of the emerging technologies. The ease and speed with which a wiki page can be created offers not only a virtual collaborative workspace that Michael Schrage wrote of in his book Serious Play (1999), but also a platform for “hyperinnovation”. The capability of the wiki to allow users to compare and keep track of each revision made, as well as providing opportunities for discussion, demonstrates what the Schrage has called “iterative capital”. He defines iterative capital as “the resource that gives companies the ability to play seriously with more and more versions of various ideas in less and less time” (“Here Comes Hyperinnovation” from Strategy + Business First Quarter 2001 issue by Michael Schrage).

Of course, hyperinnovation is not limited to the use of wikis, nor does their use ensure it, anymore than a collaborative workspace can guarantee collaboration. However, hyperinnovation does move us to think and act differently as opportunities and risks are redefined and as the rate of innovation continues to increase.

Keith Ferrazzi’s recent thoughts from FastCompany is as timely as ever. It reminds me of an article from the Gallup Management Journal, referenced below.

Our clients can shop around for the best price, or we can be so involved with their thinking, processes and values that they wouldn’t think for a second of going anywhere else because of the relationship/partnership we’ve cultivated over time based on trust. What we’ve done as service providers is migrate from the place of “price” to “advice”.

Suddenly, our strategic alliance is less hampered by the hype of competitive pricing or fads. This is not to say of course that we can rest on our laurels in complacency, nor do we depend on this as a leverage to keep from being competitive in the marketspace. No, it’s just to say that the advice will be so valuable because it’s motivated by “what clients really want”. And as with anything, this valuable asset of trust, cultivated over time, can be easily lost in a split second if we lose focus of what is at the core of client’s needs and desires. When we have succeeded in sustaining this partnership, the result is growth that is organic and long-lived.

Gallup Management Journal article

Looks like Bill’s energies are heading toward the Philanthropic side of life at this point. Imagine what he can do in that area, given the success he has had in the enterprise software world. This is very exciting, especially when we consider that Ray Ozzie will be taking over as Chief Software Architect. I think this is a fantastic turn for Microsoft especially consider the strong focus in the industry on web 2.0 style technologies like wikis, blogs, tagging, and user generated content. Having cut his teeth creating the ‘groupware’ industry, Ray certainly has the focus on the right place. Getting enterprise workers to come together.

My fascination with predictive markets and what they can do for companies and industries continues to grow. Recently, I stumbled upon an article by a co-worker, Alex Kirtland that discusses public predictive markets and how they can be used to simplify concepts about the buying and selling of events and ideas.

I believe prediction markets have the potential to be the next killer applications on intranets and extranets. Imagine a company with 20,000 employees needing to make strategic bets around the launch of a specific product. What if it opened up the decision making to its employees via an internal prediction market? Or maybe, what if it opened up the decision making to its business partners or even select customers via the prediction market?

The insights gained in this manner can beat any single individual’s perspective. They can be used to make decisions or validate existing ones. The excitement, empowerment and competitiveness of the prediction market will bring users back to the intranet or extranet again and again to bet and argue competing strategies.