The 2020 Summit

February 4, 2008 – 2:44 pm

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Over the weekend, Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced the 2020 Summit to address challenges facing Australia. In an encouraging move, Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson has thrown his party’s support behind the summit. It appears that in 2008, bipartisanship has a chance of functioning! At least on this issue.

This would appear to be an amazing opportunity for some of our leading thinkers and doers to take part in something that could really mess with inertia and the status quo. But there will need to be action out of the summit.

Policy areas to be discussed are (my emphasis):

  • Future directions for the economy, including education, skills, training, science and innovation
  • Economic infrastructure, the digital economy and the future of Australia’s cities
  • Population, sustainability, climate change, water
  • Rural industries and communities
  • National health strategy
  • Families, communities and social inclusion
  • Indigenous Australia
  • The future of Australia’s arts, film and design
  • Democracy, open government, the role of the media, the structure of federation, citizens’ rights and responsibilities
  • Future security and prosperity

The Australian Tech community, and its practitioners working in the Internet and Web industries in particular think this is a great idea and have launched a blog to host discussion about our concerns and issues. 2020summit.org will be a place for the community to host that discussion, bring forward our thought leaders and hopefully, get them in the eye of the 2020 Summit organisers and get them on the panel for the event.

The fabulous Laurel Papworth has already kicked off discussion on the summit and hopefully we’ll get some real activity going in the blogosphere.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Engagement

January 27, 2008 – 6:40 pm

Thanks to my Melbourne-based compatriot, Michael Specht, I have seen this video from McDaniel Partners on the issue of employee engagement.

Riffing off the incredible Miniature Earth, it delves richly and poignantly into the lives of the people you work with every day.

It’s an unfortunate fact that most organisations simply have no idea how to engage their staff, treating them largely as cogs in some Industrial Age dark Satanic Mill. The idea of an engaged, enthusiastic and loyal workforce is anathema to them and is blamed on Gen Y or lack of loyalty in some other area rather than a long, hard look into the corporate soul, which often has a black nothingness in the place where the bright, beating heart of a star should be.

It’s an unfortunately too frequent fact that companies and organisations spend little time on really engaging employees; giving them interesting and meaningful work, providing a workplace where staff can enjoy what they do, adopting a culture and philosophy that treats people as humans and work as having meaning and most importantly providing managers who will lead staff on a journey to something better rather than just put ducks in a row.

Managers and leaders in your organisation would do well to have this video shown to them and examine their role in its light. Oh, and if they haven’t yet read it, put a copy of Fish! on their desk. It’s one of the best business books I read in 2007.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in Hints and Tips | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Who’s going to E2EF on acidlabs?

January 22, 2008 – 1:31 pm

Well, I didn’t get a huge number of entries for the free pass to the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 19 February, but those we got were pretty good and sometimes funny. I’ve decided that the winner is Jodie Miners. Here’s her entry (submitted via Twitter):

I’d love to go because I believe I’m an E2.0 specialist and would love to know more but don’t have a job atm so can’t afford to go.

Jodie wins predominantly because she’s the one person (sorry Markus, Stil and Martin) who can least afford to go and has the most motivation to get something out of attending - a new job! I expect that she’ll be researching and blogging on Enterprise 2.0 like a mad woman for the next few weeks to prove she deserves the win.

For those who entered and didn’t win, email me and I’ll provide you with a discount code that gets you a ticket at around 15 per cent off - $429 instead of $495

By Stephen Collins | Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Want to go to E2EF for free?

January 21, 2008 – 1:54 pm

E2EF bannerThrough a little serendipity, acidlabs has ended up as a partner for the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 19 February 2008. In the words of the Future Exploration Network, who are hosting the conference, it is:

An intensive half-day summit giving detailed executive perspectives on how Web 2.0 technologies can create value inside organisations. Speakers include Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, Euan Semple, who implemented these approaches at the BBC, and Australia’s top experts and practitioners in the field. Case studies will feature how leading Australian organisations have benefited, and identify key success factors for implementation.

Key themes of the executive forum will include governance and policies to enable Enterprise 2.0, how to get business value from blogs and wikis, corporate policies on Facebook and social networks, giving power to end-users through online applications and mash-ups, how to improve access the best resources of the enterprise, and the change processes required to create the organisation of the future.

I’m very excited about this opportunity and am really looking forward to being there. There will be some great speakers! If you are coming, let me know so we can meet up.

In the meantime, I have a free ticket to give away to the person that sends me the best reason why I should give them the ticket. I will be deciding at lunchtime tomorrow, so you have about 24 hours.

My decision will be totally arbitrary, but I’ll give points for brevity (a Twitter direct message as an entry will get bonus points), strong reasoning (other than it being an opportunity for you to make money) and early entries. You can enter just one time, and can enter via Twitter direct message, or here as a comment. And you must be available and in Sydney on the 19th, otherwise you’re wasting your time.

Enter away!

By Stephen Collins | Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

50 reasons not to change

January 9, 2008 – 12:45 pm

Change for change’s sake is bad. But some change can be good. The Biocultural Science & Management blog has published this great graphic on resistance to change.
50 reasons not to change
I want this as a poster!

Via Patrick Lambe.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in Hints and Tips | Tagged , | Comments (0)

And the “what is a knowledge worker” battle continues to rage

January 6, 2008 – 10:56 pm

I’ve read Matthew’s response to Shawn’s response to Matthew’s response to Shawn’s original post. Plus Dave Snowden’s mind-blowing response to both Shawn and Matthew.

I have to say, I still agree with Matthew. Identifying both knowledge work and workers is and remains crucial. I think Shawn’s false dichotomy argument is spurious; he seems to want to have a situation where those that identify as knowledge workers in whatever way are framing themselves as some form of elite with a non-knowledge worker underclass. It’s simply not the case.

Especially given Shawn’s argument about the ubiquity of knowledge work, there is only us. If we need information and knowledge and communication in our work, we are all knowledge workers - butcher, baker, candlestick maker.

And yes, the definitions, as grey as they can be, are necessary to communicate meaning to those who do not identify knowledge work and knowledge workers, yet are dealing with the attendant issues. And thewre are many, many organisations that Matthew and I encounter that have huge issues with KM, knowledge work (and what it is or isn’t) and knowledge workers (and who they are or aren’t).

My personal view is that if, and I’ve said this in both my Knowledge Worker 2.0 talks this year (at the IIM National Conference and at Office 2.0), you create, consume or leverage knowledge or information in the course of your work each day, you are a knowledge worker. This absolutely gels with Shawn’s identification of non-traditional roles as having a knowledge component just as much as it agrees with Matthew’s reframing of JJG’s IA Recon thus:

Knowledge work is an activity that can be practiced by people in a wide variety of roles. Knowledge work can be designed to achieve a wide variety of goals, not just information retrieval. The single most important factor in the success of knowledge work is the skill of the knowledge worker. This skill is applied through a combination of experienced professional judgment, thoughtful consideration of research findings, and disciplined creativity. This skill can be developed and applied by specialist knowledge workers and non-specialists alike.

Matthew also mentions the struggle going on in the BA world where the definition of what a BA is and does is also the subject of much debate and conjecture. Matthew and I work with people who self identify or do so professionally as either IAs or BAs, yet we encounter with ever-increasing frequency a set of roles, tasks and disciplines that when done well, look very similar.

I think actually that Matthew and Shawn agree on a large number of points, it’s just that they are viewing the concept through differently colored lenses.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in Workers | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Knowledge worker - NOT a redundant term

January 4, 2008 – 1:04 pm

Shawn Callahan of Anecdote argues that the need for the term knowledge worker is redundant now that technology is ubiquitous in the developed world and that almost every worker trades in knowledge of some sort. He sees its use as a way to discriminate between identified knowledge workers and those whose roles are not traditionally viewed this way:

It’s an dark undercurrent and tacitly becomes a basis for discrimination. “Our salespeople are knowledge workers but our gas fitters are not.” I suspect this feeling of superiority comes from the erroneous data-information-knowledge model where knowledge (and even more ridiculously, wisdom) sits at the pinnacle of the pyramid.

I see where Shawn is going with his argument, particularly in developed nations. But I agree with Matthew Hodgson, who puts forth an alternative position that Shawn’s views are misplaced. Matthew argues that Shawn misses an opportunity to communicate an understanding of knowledge work outward from the insider community to the larger workforce and organisational management who don’t necessarily label themselves as knowledge workers - “Oh, no! I work in marketing/HR/finance/logistics/whatever.”

I have massive respect for both Shawn and Matthew. They are both thought leaders in the KM community and I think it’s good for us as a group to have robust differences of opinion as we try to take the knowledge management community into the 21st Century and out of traditional KM spaces such as records management.

There’s still a massive disconnect between what people who work in knowledge management and other knowledge-centric roles, and identify as such, and those who don’t.

Matthew, you’ve hit the nail on the head.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in News, Workers | Tagged , | Comments (0)

How I Find Blogging Ideas

January 4, 2008 – 1:03 pm

Like a lot of bloggers I know, my head is full of ideas that I never get around to committing to words. There are a number of reasons for this - work-life balance, client requirements, yada yada. Frankly though, it’s not actually that hard to blog pretty regularly. Not every post needs to be a cornerstone.

I draw inspiration from the world around me - online and offline. I try to add depth to conversations my colleagues and peers are having, I try to generate original content and sometimes, something totally lightweight takes my fancy. If you poke around this blog, you’ll see that evidenced in spades.

Back in mid-September, social media expert Chris Brogan published a post entitled 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write. I foolishly Twittered back at him that he had given me a bunch of inspiration and that I was going to tackle his list. Chris laid the challenge back, noting he wanted to read what I had to say.

So, now that I’m back from my USA holiday and fully back into the swing of work, I guess it’s time to put my reputation on the line and tackle Chris’ list. This post is the first, matching #9 on the list. Over the next few weeks, I plan to tackle several of Chris’ ideas, along with a bunch of my own. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy my efforts.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in Hints and Tips | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Where is my continuous partial attention?

January 4, 2008 – 12:58 pm

AttentionThose of us involved in social media spend a good deal of our time rabbiting on about continuous partial attention, the ambient intimacy afforded to us and the social capital generated by use of the tools we leverage such as Facebook and Twitter as well as the real, human communities these actually represent.

In a time poor existence, the sheer load that staying in touch with these communities and people represents is pretty significant - alongside using all my social tools, I try to keep abreast of almost 300 feeds. It’s a daunting task, and one that sometimes gets the better of me. That said, I do have a list of must read blogs. This list represents a mix of friends, colleagues, industry peers and informative sites that are the fire hose of information that drives my online life. This group represents the best (in a totally subjective way) in information architecture, user experience, social media, online culture, community building and knowledge management.

If any of this interests you, take a look at the public page and see whether there’s something there that can add value for you.

Original picture by gordonr. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs license.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in Hints and Tips | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

On the inside, the roses grow - value in corporate blogging

January 4, 2008 – 12:58 pm

While the title is a reference to a line in a song that was the theme of one of the mainstays of 1980s Australian television, it’s also strongly reflective of my opinion on corporate blogging. Smart corporate blogging adoption is something that can have a marked effect in a number of areas in your organisation:

  • perception of and actual corporate openness, particularly when the blogging is done across all levels of your organisation
  • the degree to which a culture of knowledge sharing is adopted
  • the feeling of connectedness and fraternity of staff at all levels with each other
  • the ability of the organisation to recall context around decisions and events

Corporate blogging can have a significant hand in the success of business when done right.

Over last weekend, both Seth Godin and AT&T’s Todd Stephens had useful and important contributions to the corporate blogging conversation. Seth’s short post particularly highlights my point about context, saying:

Perspective is worth a lot more than it costs.

Dr Stephens’ post is more of a conversation starter on the subject of corporate blogging, canvassing a wide range of ideas from startup to measuring success. It’s a smart, business-focussed piece, as you’d rightly expect from someone in Todd’s position.

Both posts are very much worth reading, even if the idea of corporate blogging hasn’t crossed your thoughts yet.

By Stephen Collins | Posted in Managers, Workers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
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