• Thinking about “Design Thinking” | Manage by Designing | Fast Company

  tags: no_tag

  • I grow more bothered by the week with the phrase “design thinking.” I know full well that I am fighting a losing battle, but I think it is an unfortunate term for describing what designers have to offer to other disciplines, which seems the most common reason for using the term. As is a way of talking about what designers can contribute to areas beyond the domains in which they have traditionally worked, about how they can improve the tasks of structuring interactions, organizations, strategies and societies, it is a weak term.
  • For it is not in the modes of thought that designers most distinguish themselves, but in their actions. Designers act differently than analysts or decision-makers. Design is an extreme activity. It tends to call on all of the faculties of those engaged in it. It is contextual. It is embodied. It uses the whole person’s mind and body, left brain and right, hand and heart, analysis and taste. And it never gets enough of any of them.
  • I think it is so much more powerful, demanding, and relevant to invite lawyers, doctors, politicians and business people to design rather than to engage in design thinking.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Being at reboot made me miss out not only the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston but also Kongressmedia’s Intranet Summit 2009. Sad thing, normally I would have been there for meeting other consultants like Saim or Stephan and above all meeting practitioners and getting to know more about their intranet projects and approaches.

Good then to have fellow bloggers Frank Hamm and Saim Alkan compile extensive documentation on the talks (to be found in the documentation wiki open to the attendees), write up their learnings and impressions (Saim: Der Wert eines Inranets - live vom Intranet-Summit 09 #its09 and 2. Tag: “Der Wert eines Inranets” - live vom Intranet-Summit 09 #its09, Frank: Review zum Intranet Summit with links to nine (!) further blog posts, all german posts alas).

In my mind this blogger-generated extra content is a definite added value to being at a conference, it’s a mark of excellence that separates good from very good conferences. That said, “excellent conference” may mean different things to different people, but I am sure that “blogger relations” (some hold that installing a “blogger hub” is the way to go, like Braden Kelly expands upon in Conferences 3.0) make a difference. And for the things to avoid see Gerald’s list - things that make conferences less attractive.

What’s on your mind - are there other things of importance for the upcoming E20SUMMIT and the ECM World?

Well, a lot of interesting stuff happened last week - and some very lucky people like Lee Bryant, Stowe Boyd or JP Rangaswamy were experiencing both the Enterprise 2.0 conference and reboot, while I only managed to go to Copenhagen, some of my write-ups are here and here.

So it’s playing catch up a bit, which is easy as some good content is distributed as video. Like here I blogged about a video interview with IBMs Suzanne Minassian on the new Lotus Connections and more. I will add some more posts and observations from the E2Conf either at frogpond or (probably as crosspost) here.

And there are more additions to the video backlog, like the recording of the dinner talk with Dion Hinchcliffe we arranged at CeBIT in preparation of the E20SUMMIT. You can see me sitting in the back, listening in on closely to what Dion says (although I met him already at the hotel and accompanied him to the restaurant, chatting) - this was an intimate setting and lots of good questions got asked. Sound quality isn’t that good (and you can hear the restaurant staff shuffling around) but Dion is coming across quite clearly (”RoI is famously hard to measure on Enterprise 2.0“)

1.) What is your name?

James Dellow

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I’m a consultant working in the field of social computing. I work for Headshift, a specialist social media and enterprise social computing consulting company. Headshift was founded in the UK, but has been operating in Australasia since 2008.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

Many people mistake me for a ‘techie’, but I have never worked in an IT department. During the early part of my career I found myself in the position where I was the person who was the go-between for business and IT. I became interested in Enterprise 2.0 through my experiences in knowledge management (formed at Ernst & Young), and then later as a consultant working with a range large organisations (particularly with CSC) - as a result I have an appreciation for both the organisational and technology challenges that Enterprise 2.0 aims to change.

I also completed a Master of Business & Technology at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) in 2005 - so my feet are firmly planted in the grey area between social and computing.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

I approach Enterprise 2.0 with a management perspective - heavily influenced by systems thinking - that takes into account the relationship between the social and technology aspects of applying Web 2.0 inside an organisation. This means results will vary between organisations because of the complexity of those relationships and the environment where they exist.

In practice this means I don’t believe simply installing a blog or a wiki makes you ‘Enterprise 2.0’. But equally, without the technology its doesn’t work (at least at the scale we need - Andrew McAfee captured this well in his SLATES model). In my own thinking I’ve tried to distinguish between Enterprise 2.0 and other applications of Web 2.0 inspired information management technologies under the theme of Intranet 2.0.

Also, despite my background in knowledge management, I don’t treat Enterprise 2.0 as the next iteration of knowledge management although its is very complementary.

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

I’ll answer this in a round about way. When we look at the evolution of our modern industrial society (embodied in the classic organisational structure), information and communication technologies (ICT) have been at work in the background supporting and shaping this evolution. Critically they have allowed organisations to scale, while also extending their organisational span of control so they can achieve their objectives in at least a semi-cohesive way.

However, with this growth and globalisation the actual environment for organisations has become more complex. As a result the command and control approach that ICT supported in the past is failing to keep up.

To operate effectively, we need systems that allow people to work in a way where social controls direct action and allow problem solving, not fixed hierarchical processes that are inflexible and often out of date. The experience of Web 2.0 on the Internet is already demonstrating that there is a better way for organisations to learn from.

This doesn’t mean the future won’t be transactional either - Amazon and eBay are all examples at one end of the Web 2.0 spectrum that mix efficient high volume transactions with social controls.

But as we move towards Enterprise 2.0 we need to remember that its not just about changing technology, at the same time society and the shape of organisations will also be changing. As a result, the workplace might also become a little more fun and interesting because of Enterprise 2.0.

6.) What are the main challenges, threads and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

To quote Clay Shirky,

“Every story in [Here Comes Everybody] relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users”

This gets back to the point that there are set of complex interactions at work that determine how successful any organisation can be with adopting Enterprise 2.0 as a way of organising. However, many people choose to only focus one aspect. This is a recipe for failure.

On the organisational side, Enterprise 2.0 is a clear challenge to existing organisational power structures. Information is power only if information access and flow can be controlled - but Enterprise 2.0 changes that rule and some people will be threatened by it.

On the technology side many of the strengths of the Web 2.0 model are hidden from the average Internet user - however, when we move Web 2.0 into organisations much of that hidden Web 2.0 infrastructure (both technology and people) is missing. Unfortunately, traditional enterprise IT management often works at a tangent to the Web 2.0 approach, so there is some ‘pain’ associated with this change.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

business-and-technology, systems thinking, collaborative

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

You’ll also find more articles here, but three selected are

• Intranet 2.0
• Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0
• Error! This Enterprise upgrade requires Change Management 2.0 is installed

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

• Jon Mell
• Kim Sbarcea
• Cai Kjaer

• You Can’t Build a Business Case for Social Software

  Anthony Bradley of Gartner on being asked for social software metrics, how it’s difficult and what are the reasons …

  Good discussion gets triggered, ie. Sameer Patel notes that “E2.0 is a state the enterprise achieves.” and Lawrence Liu of Telligent adds that the title of Anthony’s post should rather be ““You Can’t Build a Business Case for Social Software, …Unless Unless You Can Define & Justify the Applications.”

  Snip: “There is a good reason why it is so difficult to build a generic, universal business case for social software. You can’t do it. Social software is a set of mass collaboration principles and technologies that apply to the construction of a solution, not the solution itself. Social software business value can and does vary widely from one solution to the next. Trying to build a business case for social software is similar to building a business case for a toolbox. In establishing the justification for purchasing a toolbox, you can talk only in generalities. You can build things better, faster and maybe with fewer accidents. This is the same situation when trying to justify an investment in social software. You can’t get concrete unless you know what you are building.”

  tags: enterprise2.0, roi, usage, implementation

  • You can’t do it

• What Is Execution 2.0? | The Relationship Economy……

  Jay Deragon on ACTION! …

  Snip: ”Will Management Buy Into The Plan?
  In management, the ultimate measure of performance is the metric of management effectiveness which includes execution, or how well management’s plans are carried out by members of the organization. Execution is not a singular or silo process rather it encompasses the following attributes:
  * leadership, or how effectively management communicates and translates the vision and strategy of the organization to the members
  * delegation, or how well management gives assignments and communicates instructions to members of the organization
  * return on investment, or how well management utilizes the resources (financial, physical, and human) of the organization to bring an acceptable return to shareholders
  * conflict management, or how well management is able to utilize confrontation and collaboration skills; management’s ability to be flexible and appeal to common interests.
  * motivation, how management attempts to understand the needs of others and inspires them to perform. Motivation focuses on how performance is rewarded rather than how failure is punished.
  * consideration, or how well managers seek to understand and appreciate others’ values; and not merely as a means to a business goal.”

  tags: enterprise20, implementation

• What Is Strategy 2.0?

  starting from the Cluetrain Manifesto, Jay Deragon goes on about strategy 2.0 and shortened cycles of strategic conversation - I highlighted a passage and added some notes, check them out and tell me what you think

  tags: strategy, adaptivity

• Again, What Is The ROI From Social media? | The Relationship Economy……

  addition to the RoI discussion, playing with an alternative notion of options. I like this for its focus on adaptivity, fuzzy and evolving goals et al.

  Snip: “The value of social media is counted in options - not ROI. Social media is dynamic, not static. Therefore “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT)” are also highly dynamic moving targets that are highly contagious in social media and cannot be foretold in the next 5 days let alone 5 years. The cardinal rule of business is to collect assets and reduce liabilities. An option is an asset and an obligation is a liability.”

  tags: roi, socialmedia, enterprise20

• Web 2.0 from an ECM Perspective

  The collection of techniques and technologies known as Web 2.0 is only just beginning to have an affect on the enterprise. Join Dr. Ian Howells, Alfresco Chief Marketing Officer, and Jeff Potts, ECM Practice Lead for Optaros, as they explain the significance of these trends to the enterprise, what Web 2.0 really is and how to best leverage it to support content management strategies.

  tags: ecm, video, opensource, web20

• Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 - Dion Hinchcliffe

  Given that we’re talking a lot about RoI of Enterprise 2.0 this is a concise posting by Dion Hinchcliffe (and you know there’s gotta be cute visualizations in there) making things a lot clearer for people pondering RoI et al.\n\nAnd while he’s linking to a post of mine as well - right next to Hutch Carpenter (blush …), I bookmark this especially for his point that Enterprise 2.0 usage is emergent in nature …

  tags: roi, enterprise2.0, dionhinchcliffe

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I had a very nice surprise today when I returned to the home office, two free mags waiting in the inbox:

Yes, both are german language titles, to the left it’s t3n, published by yeebase media- a magazine that runs the tagline “Open Source & Web” (did I say that these are german language publications …), and that deals a lot with content management, web development and Web 2.0 overall. Reason for me getting an issue for free is an article Björn and me are having in this issue, on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 myths.

To the right it’s DOK. - published by good source publishing. This is a bit more heavy and (E 2.0-)industry related (tagline is “technologies, strategies & services for digital documents”) stuff, a mix of best practices reports, smart articles (like when in the current issue my friend and co-Skype-Chatter Siegfried Hirsch is writing about Enterprise RSS or when Willms Buhse is explaining Enterprise 2.0 in easy answers to tricky questions), technology stuff and even research-minded pieces. And if you wonder what entitles me to a free copy - well I guess it has to do with me meeting DOK. editor Uwe Hentschel at this year’s CeBIT, ie. specifically the E20SUMMIT dinner meetup KongressMedia organized. Social capital …

Now onto the more to come, as I am collecting and refining a lot of bookmarks in the space of Enterprise 2.0 I think it’s a good idea to share some of the better ones with you. Besides filling my regular delicious-account (things tagged Enterprise 2.0 get spliced into the enterprise2open feed already) and the regular diigo-frogpond account I installed an additional diigo account called e20summitenterprise2open, whose bookmarks will get automagically posted into this blog from now on.

Diigo is cute (yes, I learned a lot from Bertrand Duperrin in using Diigo) and offers a bit more than delicious, namely the opportunity to annotate and to expand bookmarks in a community. That said, the bookmarks posted will have some kind of short analysis (and probably highlighting and/or comments), and can also be further annotated and refined by you. And last thing to note, while certainly the topic of collaborative performance will seem to be prevalent (after all it’s the tagline for the SUMMIT), all things enterprise 2.0 might show up in the links. I guess this is no real problem, after all the bookmarks get tagged and are thus easy to digest anyway (I wonder if all my comments will be like that …).

1.) What is your name?

Henriette Weber

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I tell people that I am a social marketing rebel extraordinaire - which means that I use social marketing to transform businesses inside out. My tagline is that I make companies not look like asses online and make companies into thrustworthy, remarkable and authentic players in the world of both the social web - but also offline.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

I got into E2.0 because I can see there’s a lot of things about 2.0 that companies haven’t grasped yet. It breaks my heart. Basically I think that the companies who are not succesful in enterprise 2.0 will probably not survive in the long run - there’s so much out there that companies need to embrace to follow the demand of their clients. Which they don’t do because they can’t measure it (and how stupid is that ?). I followed up by creating an ebook on “why every company should be a rockband” which evolves the rockbandism that is needed for companies to become different kinds of companies. I really firmly believe that rockbandism is putting Enterprise 2.0 on the map and mind for a lot of companies that haven’t been thinking about it before.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

My understanding is that Enterprise 2.0 is the answer to the transformation we need companies to do these days. We can’t keep building companies on structures that date back to the industrial revolution. Whatever Enterprise 2.0 may be for you - it makes you more human and likable - and how cool is that?

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

We as companies get to learn how to be close to our clients - not using scattergun techniques to talk to them, but where we have them in our backhand if we need them for something that gives value to them.

I think the potential is limitless - also because we can use Enterprise 2.0 to become better companies, in terms of user experiences and of making people become better.

6.) What are the main challenges, threads and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

The challenges are the companies themselves. My sense is that the system is the failwhale here - seriously it are the structures we have been taught as kids and as companies. That failing is bad and control is good. The web is anarchistic. The challenge is that companies can’t or won’t embrace the chaos of the internet these days.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

socialmarketing, returnoninvolvement, rockbandism

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

Uh hard - currently that would be, (but they change all the time):

• http://www.toothlesstigerpress.com/rockbands - my ebook on rockbandism
• http://henrietteweber.com/2009/04/15/thoughts-on-shared-branding/ thoughts on shared branding
• http://henrietteweber.com/category/boatworkingpan/ - my shared economy IRL startup: “coworking boat pan”

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

• Brian Solis
• Paula Marrtila
• Annika Lidne

1.) What is your name?

Bertrand Duperrin

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I live in Paris, France. I’m consultant at blueKiwi Software, in charge of helping our clients to build and implement their social networks strategy and drive results through it.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

In fact I started from E and got the 2.0 part by luck.

For years ago I was working at a leading management consultancy firm. I was involved in many projects aiming at improving leadership, making people collaborate more effectively and I realized we were stuck in old principles that prevented us from fully achieving our goals.

At the same time I launched a blog, just to discover what it was. A few weeks later I was in contact with many professionals, having very interesting discussions with them. At this moment I realized that I was achieving in my private life what I needed to do at work and that it was easier for me to share and discuss ideas, to connect with people, outside that inside my company. I thought there was something to learn from that experience and started to focus on “management 2.0″ in summer of 2005. Then I slowly got closer and closer to the Enterprise 2.0 topic. I joined blueKiwi in its early days in 2006 because it was an unique opportunity to put my ideas at work in a 2.0 minded company which goal was to empower such ways of running business.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

It’s a wide concept in which so many things were put that it’s very hard to really express the whole concept. According to me Enterprise 2.0 is two things :

• new management rules to run businesses in the current context, taking both economic issues (knowledge economy) and environment issues (social economy) into account.
• using the right technology to empower it.

I want to make it clear that in my understanding, organizational and managerial issues come far before technology.

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

The main potential is to align businesses with their environment. I mean that the way companies operate is more and more disconnected to what’s happening outside of their wall. The consequence is a systematic incapabilty to improve their internal efficency and to achieve what their environment expects from them. What means :

• Building a “pull” organization that is aligned with the market and client’s needs in order to deliver more value not by increasing pressure on people but by removing organizational constraints.

• Enable company-wide collaboration by an optimal (human) ressources sharing in adhoc processes. Each employee being a specific resource because of its own expertise and being able to deliver a specific service, this approach leads to building a Service Oriented Organization.

6.) What are the main challenges, threads and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

• Think enterprise before think 2.0
• Don’t mistake enterprise 2.0 for web 2.0
• Focus on adoption instead of deployement.
• Understand that the purpose of corporate communities is not the communities themselve but getting things done, delivering a process.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

management 2.0, alignment, systemic

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

• 20+1 reasons not to launch an Enterprise Social Software project
• Enterprise 2.0 : my predictions for 2009
• My definition of enterprise 2.0

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

• Jon Husband
• John Tropea
• Gil Yehuda

During the last few days a lot of discussing has happened behind the stage of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - and it is triggering more worthwhile posts as well. As the idea of the E2.0 SUMMIT on Oct 6-8th is to represent a community and expertise hub for the European Enterprise 2.0 community this is a great thing to have, we really want to reflect the common Enterprise 2.0 discussions (especially from an European point of view).

So as we’ve been working on the scope and concept of the SUMMIT with several members of the advisory board - who were very active in contributing ideas and overall evaluating the topic list we’ve been devising. Calling on this round of experts in the field is only natural: We want the event to be attractive for both thought-leaders and practitioners, and we want to attract all the essential players of the E 2.0 industry. So we called on our “trusted” circle of people to provide the feedback we need and add ideas.

By now we can tell you that we’re finished with putting up the structure and scope side of the agenda for the October 6-8 event in Frankfurt. You may have a sneak preview here - now we are entering the stage of staffing the panels with the right people. So from the big picture the event structures as follows:

• Day 1 / Oct 6th: WikiCamp ‘09 (besides the regular workshop day)
• Day 2 / Oct 7th: plenum sessions in the morning, then fourparallel panel sessions (each 50mins - means 4×3 panels on Day 2)
• Day 3 / Oct 8th: 3 parallel panel sessions in the morning (each 50mins - means 3×3 panels on Day 3) plus 2 plenum sessions in the afternoon

So in total we’ve got 5 plenum sessions and 21 single track sessions for the E 2.0 SUMMIT. Each of these tracks is designed to be of interest to a distinct set of people, and tries to avoid conflicts with thematically related parts. Additionally we’ve included some industry panels (telco & banks), and several open
space orientated sessions.

For the “trusted” circle of experts feedback we can say that the biggest topic of the behind the scenes discussions was the dichotomy between orderly processes (read BPM) and the fuzzy world of Social Software (read Enterprise 2.0), how to deal with it, and basically how to tackle the topic at the conference. So while we all shared understanding a nice thread evolved that covered things like:

• How do we prevent that social software works out to be just another “silo” (”build a wiki, and they will come”)?
• How can we integrate social software into existing domains, usage arenas and task specific systems?
• What are the best ways to start with social software in the enterprise?
• How do we ensure that social software implementations turn out to be “complementary and integrative”? Is it a good idea to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software

Especially the last point triggered a lively discussion, whether the structured processes that go with BPM (and its systems) are preventing collaboration. Granted, this discussion isn’t of interest to everybody, but it has an audience beyond (enterprise) information architects and systems people for sure. Especially, it’s a question that arrives sooner or later in a corporations travels towards Enterprise 2.0, and members of various departments should listen:

• people (well, hailing from companies and/or departments) that are interested in improving specific business processes (e.g. quality assurance, customer service knowledge, etc.), and IT people who need to integrate legacy systems with Web 2.0
• communications department - they are interested in improving communications (and being more conversational needs more flexible processes, not more structure and control)
• Intranet & ECM management teams - interested in enhancing existing activities with Web 2.0 elements, so they need insights into when and where to ease process policies, and when and where to control things more tightly
• knowledge management and e-learning people - interested in better knowledge sharing, like w.g. leveraging collective intelligence (which needs altered processes as well, probably more flexible ones)/actions
• business development is fundamentally interested in changing the company (for more innovation, for better/more outcome/output or for cost reduction, for innovative business models, etc.) - all with heavy process implications
• overall the management board and people dealing with strategic planning …

To cater for these needs we have structured the conference into four main parts that shall

1. facilitate visionary and forward-looking discussions about collaborative performance of Enterprise 2.0
2. support the emergence of strategic discussions, like e.g. whether open innovation is an interesting arena for Enterprise 2.0 (we think it is!)
3. provide “hands-on” best-practice discussions and
4. provide space for more technology- and tool-oriented implementation discussions.

So connecting Enterprise 2.0 towards BPM will be a part of the conference discussions, especially in the panel “Best-Practices for Process Management 2.0″ and - in a more abstract way - in the panel “New Models for the Enterprise: Being Open, Collaborative & Disruptive”. I guess we will find time and space to discuss how to make our corporations more adaptive and flexible, or as Lee Bryant said it “how can we re-design businesses and organisations around the ideas of flow, aggregation, networks and collaboration?”.

Preceeding the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT (you know, Oct 7. & 8. in Frankfurt) Björn and I are planning to host a BarCamp-style meetup of Wiki-consultants, -developers, -users and all people generally interested in enterprise wikis. Given that Oct 6 is pre-conference workshop day anyway we’ve thought that WikiCamp ‘09 is a nice and fitting name. That said, we’re organising a nice venue and will look for all the necessary gadgets like beamers, working wifi etc. (and I guess we’ll also find some sponsored catering). Ideally a diverse mix of people from the german (and international) wiki community will then get together, and take the opportunity of an idea and/or concept development day, where:

• the people behind various wiki engines can meet up, interact and network
• lessons learned can be exchanged and told, bridging the experiences of both wiki practitioners and consultants
• we’ll discuss the future role of wikis in the context of Enterprise 2.0
• we’re open for more ideas, hints, wishes and proposals, … (go ahead now, voice your ideas in the comments, what do you think?)

Update: Here’s the WikiCamp’09 wiki, to collect and systematize ideas.