It is no longer a surprise that as a result of globalisation, specialisation and new technologies, 80 percent of jobs now involve people participating in human interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods. Jobs involving the most complex type of collaborative knowledge interaction make up the fastest growing segment.

The reasons are clear. Leading organisations recognise that by improving collaborative knowledge building they can improve real time decision making and competitive advantage. 

The concept of “time-based competition” is driving efforts to accelerate organisational decision making and improve the quality of decisions. By removing time and space obstacles to decision making organisations develop more dynamic, responsive business behaviour. 

A fundamental requirement for collaborative knowledge building is the workgroup’s need to analyse situations, synthesise information, evaluate alternatives, make decisions in real or almost real time, regardless of geographic location. 

Real time decision making takes place in any combination of time and space – same time/same place, different time/different place, same time/different place, different time/same place. 

Early collaboration tools such as email, instant messaging and web conferencing have made the Internet a fundamental component of business.  Consider how web conferencing has forever changed the stereotypical image of today’s business “road warrior”.  This employee left home Monday morning and boarded a flight to meet with customers all week and returned Friday afternoon to recuperate over the weekend before repeating the process the following Monday.

Web conferencing technology gave sales workers back their quality of life by allowing them to rotate face-to-face customer meetings with online meetings, reducing unproductive travel time and dramatically cutting travel costs.  While webinars can be an effective alternative to face-to-face meetings, most web conferencing consists of a slide presentation with commentary, and rarely involves effective workgroup collaboration. 

Yet collaboration is a cognitive activity.  It requires willing people to think and share ideas about problems and opportunities and determine best courses of action.   Today collaboration is viewed by an increasing number of organisations as a key factor in improving enterprise-wide performance and innovation. 

Collaboration improves the way individuals (internal and external) work together on business basics such as improving decision making, reducing coordination costs, leveraging external relationships and sharing expertise.

However, the challenge for collaborative workgroups is having access to tools that enable them to replicate the way effective teams work in face-to-face planning and problem solving meetings. That means having the ability to analyse situations, synthesise information, evaluate alternatives, make decisions, create action plans and capture meeting content and actions in a formatted report. 

Beyond Web Conferencing

Analysts, Gartner, summed up web conferencing meetings this way,

“Without effective meeting discipline, Web conferencing can waste more people's time across a broader geographic range than before. Group Decision Support System (GDSS), tools can cure much of the dysfunction. …We believe most organisations will benefit from combining GDSS and Web-conferencing technologies to enhance meeting performance and to reduce the number of dysfunctional meetings, regardless of the type of meeting.” [i]

If one of the most pressing business needs is to equip knowledge workers with online technology capable of squeezing more time and value out of knowledge work, then it is Gartner’s opinion that the combination of GDSS and web conferencing provides the basis for the rapid transformation of ideas into value.

Consider the example of a global leader in wine and spirits that wanted to improve and integrate the viticulture processes of several of its acquired vineyards located in different countries.  Up to 200 people would work collaboratively in teams to complete the work in six months or less.  Employees were not permitted to travel.

Employees selected an online web collaboration technology that could support working with complex problems and planning issues.  Teams of up to 20 people worked together in real time for up to eight hours in a typical “workshop” format.  The only difference was that instead of being in a room together, team members connected to the online meeting from their office PC and joined a conference call. 

Using a business process improvement methodology, meetings started by using web conferencing tools to present in PowerPoint slides the agenda, objectives and meeting process to be followed. Other web conferencing tools displayed relevant documents and process maps for review by all. 

Once the agenda, objectives and reference materials were clearly understood by team members it was time to start using the GDSS tools to brainstorm ideas and prioritise the best ideas for evaluation.  Action plans were created for ideas that passed the evaluation stage.  At the end of each meeting a report containing the content of the meeting was downloaded to each person’s desktop for further actions after the meeting.

[i] Source: Gartner Note No. G00138101, 13/03/06

Source:

Grouputer

Source: Anne Hudson, co-Founder, Grouputer Solutions Pty Ltd

www.grouputer.com

+61 (2) 9965-3778

Source:

Total Executive

http://www.TotalExec.com.au

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Source:

Total Executive

http://www.TotalExec.com.au

By Hugo Trepant, and Martin Roets

Large corporations have long struggled to make their IT organisations more effective and more adaptable, often by reorganising the IT department itself. Yet the importance of restructuring may have been overstated. According to a recent Booz & Company survey, how your IT department is structured has little effect on how well it executes its mission and responds to changes in the business environment. Centralised, decentralised, hybrid, or federated—virtually any organisational scheme can get the job done. What does matter is the free flow of information and the proper allocation of decision rights.

The Flow of Information

Free-flowing information is more than three times more important than structure in promoting adaptability, a critical capability in volatile times. Yet most survey respondents stated that information does not flow freely within their IT organisations. IT line managers don’t have adequate access to suitable metrics and IT staff lack the information needed to understand the impact of their day-to-day choices. CIOs should work closely with senior business executives to ensure strategic alignment, and put processes and tools in place to make available to all levels of the IT organisation the information necessary to carry out the strategic mission.

Decision Rights

Survey respondents also highlighted widespread problems in decision-making: It is often unclear who has responsibility for decisions and the actions that follow. As a result, decisions are frequently second-guessed. CIOs should collaborate with peers in the business and in IT to put clearly defined and transparent decision processes in place.

Yes, IT effectiveness can be improved—without restructuring the IT function yet again. By engaging actively with the business and not ring-fencing the IT function, CIOs can improve the most important drivers of IT organisation effectiveness—information flow and decision-making.

 

Source:

Booz & Co

Source:

Total Executive

http://www.TotalExec.com.au

LESSON#1 - How to NOT Launch YOUR WEBSITE

wE ALSO JUST SENT AN ENEWS OUT TO THOUSANDS OF EXECUTIVES LETTING THEM KNOW WE HAVE LAUNCHED...

THIS is the first page they will land on on our newly launched site... WE ARE EXCITED!!!

 Clearly, this is not the type of content a business wants at the top of the front page of their newly launched website.

Over the coming months, we can show you how it is done...

Have you ever seen a web site launched with content like this?
We have.

And we want to be clear, there is not a problem releasing a website with content like this. If you are in communication with friends, mates, your community who know you, etc - you can communicate in any way you want that you know appeals to them.

You can also be assured that executives in some areas will enjoy this style of communication, though most will not.

So, where do you start if you want to communicate with an executive that you do not know - via a written (web,email,vodcast,whatever)?

Our first recommendation is that you follow the 5 steps of introductions to communication

Self Esteem - Approach with a high personal self esteem - it shows

Personal relationships - Build personal relations

Communication - Communicate at a level you are pitching to

Leadership - Display leadership in your communication of knowledge

Action - Encourage action to be taken

Remember...

SPC in LA

As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set.

You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.

Visualization got a big boost during the political season from newspapers and networks. On March 24, CNN aired what it claimed was the largest ever tag cloud composed from President Obama's press conference that day.

If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.

Visualization has been used prominently, and to dazzling effect, at The New York Time s , where a collaboration of art directors and programmers turns masses of data into intuitive displays, like the interactive map of the swine virus shown above.

Another example: the Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system

Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnishings) and helps create efficient new forms of buildings, food distribution and transportation.

For example, it's likely that New York and other major U.S. cities will experiment with systems that monitor traffic patterns in real time and manage the use of lanes and access accordingly. A project like that would hinge on our ability to map patterns as they happen, along with the alternatives and consequences. It's a big undertaking, but the benefits are considerable: In Stockholm a system that tracks the movement of every car has reduced carbon emissions by 25%.

Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.

You might think of visualization as the antithesis of Power Point, which sometimes seems to make us dumber. Six years ago, Edward Tufte, a Big Thinker in the field of information graphics, issued a 28-page pamphlet that dumped on Power Point as "a faux analysis" that "turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Visualization does the opposite: it reflects the complexity of the world in simple terms. It is a window onto the world, in all its digital complexity. Though of course data can be skewed in deceitful and insidious ways.

Visualization isn't just for RISD graduates. You can create your own word clouds at a new site called Wordle. Paste in a piece of text or enter a URL and Wordle creates a cloud of the most frequently occurring words.

Source: Fast Company

As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set.

You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.

Visualisation got a big boost during the political season from newspapers and networks. On March 24, CNN aired what it claimed was the largest ever tag cloud composed from President Obama's press conference that day.

If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.

Visualization has been used prominently, and to dazzling effect, at The New York Time s , where a collaboration of art directors and programmers turns masses of data into intuitive displays, like the interactive map of the swine virus shown above.

Another example: the Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system.

Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnishings) and helps create efficient new forms of buildings, food distribution and transportation.

For example, it's likely that New York and other major U.S. cities will experiment with systems that monitor traffic patterns in real time and manage the use of lanes and access accordingly. A project like that would hinge on our ability to map patterns as they happen, along with the alternatives and consequences. It's a big undertaking, but the benefits are considerable: In Stockholm a system that tracks the movement of every car has reduced carbon emissions by 25%.

Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.

You might think of visualization as the antithesis of Power Point, which sometimes seems to make us dumber. Six years ago, Edward Tufte, a Big Thinker in the field of information graphics, issued a 28-page pamphlet that dumped on Power Point as "a faux analysis" that "turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Visualization does the opposite: it reflects the complexity of the world in simple terms. It is a window onto the world, in all its digital complexity. Though of course data can be skewed in deceitful and insidious ways.

Visualization isn't just for RISD graduates. You can create your own word clouds at a new site called Wordle. Paste in a piece of text or enter a URL and Wordle creates a cloud of the most frequently occurring words.

Source: Fast Company

Looking for a coach? Planning a meeting across time-zones? Hosting a conference, running a workshop or training employees? If so, an avatar may be at your service. In the not-so-distant future, virtual worlds may be the go-to technology for getting work done.

Here is some news from the Centre for Creative Leadership

It is "early pioneering days," according to Forrester Research, but "Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and more business-focused offerings are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools." Forrester predicts that, within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today. Tech consultancy Gartner, too, is predicting the growing popularity of virtual worlds: 80 percent of Internet users will be in a virtual world by 2011.

Virtual worlds open up whole new ways for people to interact. But the technologies may also influence what people communicate, how they innovate and what they learn, says CCL's Cresencio Torres. So CCL's early forays into Second Life are focused on both doing and learning.

For example, CCL's innovation group designed a campus in Second Life for coaching and feedback research. We conducted our first coaching and feedback alpha test in February. The coach and coachee spent three hours "in-world" interacting and using real world assessment data. (The picture below shows the two in the "Visual Explorer" room selecting a picture that began the feedback process.) Through the process, Torres and his colleagues learned a great deal about avatar interaction, focus and sharing of information and goal planning.

A snapshot of a CCL coaching session in Second Life.

"Unexpectedly, we realized that we needed to move beyond the limitations of our current understanding of coaching. It was a major breakthrough in thinking about the entire feedback process and the possibilities that exist once you dramatically change your experience," says Torres. "Maybe in the future, for instance, coaching isn't called coaching at all, but something else."

Millions of Second Life users will have access to a CCL Network and Commercial Island in the summer of 2009. It will be the only Second Life leadership space created for both research and commercial use. Our avatars will see you there soon!

Source: The Centre for Creative Leadership

A article earlier this month in the NYTimes talks about how Procter & Gamble has been "dipping its big toes into the vast pool of Facebook, now the world’s largest social network." Who wouldn't want a piece of P&G's ad spend, as they spend almost as much as all companies in the online direct marketing space will earn combined. If Facebook could garner just 1% of that almost $2.5 billion budget, for example, they'd effectively double their revenues.

The Times article reference above is just one on the topic of social media and advertising. Most of the articles I've been following describe the challenges that Facebook and others a) have wooing advertisers and b) have not done a great job monetizing their inventory. Facebook's meteoric growth and valuation, in particular, naturally give rise to equally substantial expectations. Mashable has a great article that tries to answer the question "How Can Facebook Crack Its Advertising Problem," and Silicon Alley Insider looks at the combination of the ad market decline, Facebook's overhead growth, and the impact on the company's value as it looks to raise more money.

As a direct marketer, though, and one that tends to focus on how emerging inventory sources have performed and their impact especially on the online direct marketing landscape, I think we should take a step and appreciate just what Facebook has accomplished. They might not have cracked the brand dollar nut (hint: offer stock to ad agency media buyers, duh), but they've done what only a handful of other companies could do, let alone those who actually executed on it. Facebook has built a functioning (and not entirely disagreeable), robust, self-service advertising platform with reach and targeting along with the appropriate levels of customization and reporting. And, they did all this during an incredibly busy year - constant press be it about the investment from Microsoft, employees trying to cash in on their illiquid options, and constant deal making speculation such as the confirmed attempt to buy Twitter. (For more on the actual mechanics of the platfom see the TechCrunch article on MySpace vs. Facebook)

What makes Facebook's self-service "flyer" advertising platform all the more impressive is that they didn't build it with actual advertisers in mind. Given their initial focus on high dollar CPMs, they didn't look at their self-service platform as their parallel to Google AdWords, an ad marketplace providing liquidity for all page views. They thought vanity (people advertising their personal or business profile pages) would drive most of the sales. Real money would come in through the "normal" sales channel, i.e., the ad sales department, and this might bring in incremental revenue much the way their virtual gifts business does. Lucky for them, the system they built has enough flexibility so that when they realized that real advertisers wanted to spend money and promote more than just their profile page or fan page, they could accommodate.

For those who haven't tested it, and there is no reason not to (what those reasons would be is another article itself that follows the Google account evolution), the Facebook program is a combination of Google and Yahoo. It contains both automated elements and a human review process. Unlike Yahoo, their human editors respond faster and their tends to be a greater level of flexibility in what you can advertise - key to a new platform. They have guidelines and will not approve ads, but they haven't set those guidelines too strictly that it would prove a disincentive to those most likely to put down money, direct marketers.

Let's first think of all that they've done well, which in itself will unfortunately not do justify to the level of work actually involved. First and foremost they have a pleasing interface, an anything but trivial endeavour in which you must think about such questions as - which columns do you show; what is the default view; what are the other views; how do you manage the picture upload process; what is the flow for setting up the ads, reviewing them, managing campaigns, modifying bids, etc. I can guarantee you they had a product document 1000's of pages long, and that's just visually before getting into the meat of coding it to match what the product team wanted to look like. The next step, not any easier, is the adserving and optimization rules. Showing ads isn't all that tough, but when you have more than one placement on a page (they show up to three as of now), you start to run into challenging questions for even one slot. For example, you must think about how you determine the number of ad impressions to allocate for each text ad along a problem that gets more complex as the total audience size changes (such as when an advertiser adds targeting).

The optimization layer is what makes them (and almost every site the real money). It is how they squeeze out the greatest yield possible from their advertiser base. Done poorly, they will show under-performing ads too frequently, not recognize good ads, and miss out on properly motivating advertisers to increase their spend - both in total dollars and per click / impressions. Done right, you pull off financial results like Google.

The optimization layers is key, and for a first pass, Facebook has done a good job. The reason I remain bullish is thinking about all the areas where they can and will improve. Think about Google and all of the tools and levers they built over the years as they evolved their system. With Google as with Facebook, the adage, "Rome wasn't built in a day," more than applies. Off the top of my head, here are but a handful of things that Facebook has yet to tackle - no advertiser only interface (must have profile on site; limits scale), no pixel tracking, no optimization by performance (all ads deliver evenly across budget; limits yield), no API for advertisers (very manual, limits scale), no notion of quality score, i.e. room to improve their minimum bid algorithm, and no option for display ads (ala Myspace) or other animated ads. If and when they start to tackle these things, we will probably find their overall earnings double if not triples at the very least... and from the same advertiser pool. When they start to perfect their targeting (better geo targeting, contextual mapping) which allow for them to service a greater pool of advertisers, the sky's the limit so to speak. The downside to all this potential on Facebook is easy. They could do the same thing that Google has done. Earn themselves a lot of money while managing to piss off the rest of us.

The recent Business Council of Australia report entitled "New Concepts in Innovation" made the point that innovation has many contexts beyond those typically attributed to activities in the fields of R&D and science. Innovation can happen every day in any organisation, if people are enabled and encouraged to innovate.

We are living in a fast changing world, where human capital and knowledge are the currency of future growth and economic prospects. Over the past twenty years the value created by people, their knowledge, relationships and the processes they create form a very large part (often more than 50 per cent) of market capitalisation.

This broader context of innovation is becoming imperative for any successful private or public sector organisation. We are looking at an increasingly constrained and ageing workforce, meaning workplaces will require a greater contribution from the people they employ. Organisations must start working smarter together, allowing their people to contribute more fully to the organisation's overall purpose with their own ideas and innovations.

Information and communications technology provides us with the ability to empower our people to do just that, through offering better tools to communicate, collaborate and innovate in the workplace. Of course the gains in productivity resulting from technology are well documented and provide an environment the "tech savvy" millennium generation will expect as they enter the workforce.

Successful business leaders in the new "knowledge economy" workplace will pull together people, tools and technology to create an environment where individuals are enabled and
encouraged to innovate, anywhere anytime.

Steve Vamos, vice president,
Microsoft Australia and New Zealand