On change or staying the same

Firstly, an apology. I had promised to give some detail and comments about the papers from the RMAA Convention yesterday. However, I took my notes to work this morning and left them there with the records management plan I am working on! I promise to blog about the conference papers and add my comments tomorrow.

But for now, I want to touch on a topic that has always interested me and was triggered in part yesterday from the convention theme on adopting and adapting – change. And I want to begin with an evocative scene from a particular television show I watched when I was a child. The television series was Planet of the Apes. One scene from one of the episodes remains a clear and distinct memory that often comes to mind when I am thinking about things staying the same or changing.

Planet of the Apes is set on Earth in the year 3085. Entering this future world from 1980 is a NASA spacecraft that crashes, with two surviving astronauts. The humans take the astronauts to safety and look after them. The scene that remains with me is where the Planet of the Apes’ humans have cattle in a corral. The corral consists of tall, thick wooden posts that have been pushed into the ground and lined vertically in a circle. The upright posts have gaps between each, the gaps of course being too narrow for cattle to walk through. However, after a while the cattle lazily push against the vertical posts and the posts are pushed over and the cattle walk through. The humans round the cattle up, dig the vertical posts into the ground again in a narrow-gapped circle, and the cycle continues.

One of the astronauts asks why the posts in the corral have been set up only as vertical posts and the cattle allowed to eventually escape. The farmers respond by saying that they have always built the corral that way and it’s expected that after a while the cattle will escape! Our 1980 human suggests that building the corral with both vertical and horizontal posts for rigidity and permanence will prevent the cattle from escaping. The rest of the scene has our two astronaut humans and the farmers building a new corral that can’t be knocked down by the cattle.

I always see this scene from Planet of the Apes as a metaphor about organisations and how responsive they may or may not be to new ideas. If we accept the current way of doing things because it has always been done that way, then we may keep repeating poor practices over and over. Believe me, I have seen plenty of examples of this type of thinking. Even past successful practices need review and analysis.

And sometimes organisations need someone from “outside” to recognise and suggest that there might be a better way to do things that bring about improved results. At the same time, new ideas need to be couched in terms of the organisational context. Likewise, new ideas need to have some chance of being listened to and acted upon. Timing often becomes a critical factor in whether new ideas are ready for adoption or adaption. New ideas don’t convert to benefits automatically – there is usually a lot of hard work (like building a proper corral).

There must be a reason to initiate change. The reason for change needs to be positive and acceptable for the people who are being asked to change. As a knowledge management professional, my role has often involved getting people to change the way they do things or suggest improvements via a new tool or an adaption to a work process. I often say that knowledge management is about getting other people to do stuff, and as such, we deal with change and change management all the time.

Like the scene from Planet of the Apes, we must be able to identify needs and initiate change. And, most importantly, we must be active participants in the change process ourselves. Change is just part of our personal and organisational evolution.

On the Sydney records management convention – Day 1

I attended the first day of the Records Management Association of Australia (RMAA) Convention at Darling Harbour in Sydney. It’s the only day I could have attended out of a three day program. I also took advantage of the extensive trade exhibition to talk with a number of vendors and records managment service providers.

I took a stack of notes in my usual hurried writing scrawl. And I am hopeful of getting access to all the presentations from today via the RMAA web site to ensure my notes are complete. I will provide more detail about the presentations I saw today, plus comments, in my next blog post. But some brief notes from today…

The keynote speaker was Dr Julie McLeod from Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. Dr McLeod spoke about three projects she and her research team were working on looking at records management standards and methodologies. The talk was particularly relevant to the convention theme – adopting and adapting – a theme that has been, and remains, of critical importance to me in my working experiences.

The next speaker I heard was the seminar presentation from Jo Stephenson from the Victorian State Department of Transport. Jo told us about the EDRMS implementation at the Department. Jo said the implementation was “all about the people” and how the people-focused approach took shape throughout the project. For me, that pretty much goes without saying – the people are certainly high on my list of considerations when implementing any information and knowledge management systems or processes.

After Jo, back in the auditorium, was the presentation by New Zealander Matt O’Mara. I have seen and heard Matt present before (at IIM in Canberra last year) so I was pleased to hear again about his EDRMS experiences at Wellington City Council. Matt spoke on implementing an information management strategy and this was naturally of real relevance to me in my current workplace context.

After lunch I went to the presentation from Jo Golding from Eraring Energy. I worked with Jo in the mid-1990′s at Parliament House in Canberra so it was great to catch up with her later. Jo spoke about implementing an information and change management strategy, based on her experiences at Eraring Energy. Once again, I had some more relevant content.

The last presentation I attended for the day was from Trevor and Adele from Sutherland Shire Council. They spoke about their EDRMS experiences within a local government context.

During the remainder of the afternoon I chatted to vendors and records management service providers. Whether it’s records management, knowledge management or content management, I really love keeping up to date with what’s on offer in the broad information industry and this afternoon at the trade exhibition was no different. I also caught up with the people from InfoXpert, a company I have had some positive dealings with in the past.

I still have plenty of brochureware and web sites to chase up, not to mention people whom I met with today. My notes are a scrawl, as usual, but I won’t have any trouble rewriting them and adding my notations. My next blog post will have more detail, so if that sounds of interest, check back in to my blog tomorrow.

I do have an endnote from today’s convention: to the EDRMS vendor who thinks promoting it’s exhibitor stand with hard rock virtual guitar-playing animated computer simulation. It’s probably not a good idea to have the thrashing guitar music up so loud when you’re trying to give a product demonstration less than a metre away. Not the greatest customer experience I had today…perhaps some headphones for the Angus Young wannabes might help solve the problem!

On complexity and strategic planning

A couple of weeks ago I organised a half-day workshop for my team and our key internal stakeholders as part of the planning process for next year. I wanted to hear from my stakeholders what they thought about my team and the work we do, as well as to tease out themes and priorities for my team to look at doing in the future. But I wanted to find out this information within the different workplace contexts in which we do things. I also wanted to use the Cynefin framework from Cognitive Edge that I had learned about when I did the accreditation course in July.

I asked Viv and Chris from Emerging Options to conduct the workshop. Both Viv and Chris are exponents of the Cognitive Edge way and are the authorised Australian trainers for the Cognitive Edge accreditation course.

The workshop went better than I had expected. I had excellent participation from the highest levels. The feedback I received afterwards was very positive, especially how the workshop was conducted.

We were also commended for our willingness to encourage such open dialogue with the rest of the organistion. It was certainly my intention to flag very clearly our intention to be seen as an integrated part of the business, and not an isolated organisational silo. Part of that process is openness and facilitating organisational dialogue and collaboration.

For me and my team, the themes that emerged give us some scope to review what we do, re-establish priorities, and give us new opportunities moving forward.

We looked at our work in terms of the simple, complicated and complex domains used within the Cynefin framework.

In simple domains, performing a particular activity or process will bring about a defined result. Basically, if you do A, you will get B. Process-driven activities often fall into this domain.

In complicated domains you analyse the problem called A, and by bringing in expertise or resources, you can identify the solution and solve the problem. There is no new thinking here, just the application of expert knowledge to deal with the problem.

In complex domains, there is uncertainty as to what outcome will occur (if any) by performing a particular action or process. This is what is often called, “the intractable problem”. Generally, it is risky and expensive to try a range of actions in order to test which action might yield the better result. Usually a decision is made to take one action, spend resources on it, and if it fails to meet expectations, the project is dumped all together. Many a pilot project ends up like this!

Complex domains are particularly sensitive to context. What one action in one context brings need not be the same outcome in another context. Basing a decision on what someone has done in a different context (replication) is dangerous if context is not given due consideration.

Similarly, complex problems should not rely on past events to determine future outcomes. Cognitive Edge describes this phenomenon as “the problem of retrospective coherence” which means that all becomes obvious after the event has occurred (but before the event, these signals were not obvious). One of the strategic outcomes from working in the complex space is to try and identify (bring to the surface) “weak signals” and amplify them so that they can be considered in the decision-making process.

In the complex space, one needs to use probes to test to see what works in your own context.

So what did we learn from the whole experience?

It was clear that we had an identity problem – a change of name was offered as a potential solution. We will mull over this problem because identity is something that brings meaning to what we do in the eyes of the organisation.

In a similar vein, there was some ambiguity as to what work we did, what we should be responsible for, and how we communicate that to the wider organisation. Our response to this (our probe) is to launch an internal e-zine and see what reaction we will get from that. We will also use a cartoon, something I alluded to in a previous post, and develop the cartoon story as we progress. While we have a reasonable claim to extenuating circumstances on this one (both historical, and as a consequence of a very new team), we are already working on ways to overcome this problem.

There was also an expectation to do some things that we are either not equipped to do (for example, a lack of resources), or that we don’t yet have the formal authority to proceed.

And, some themes emerged around things we should not be doing.

Now what was really successful about the workshop was the way in which we were able to aggregate and prioritise responses based on activities within the three domains. Identifying the issues in each domain will help us develop improvements and interventions most appropriate to those particular contexts. Knowing that improves our chances of success, particularly in using probes for some of the problems and issues identified in the complex space.

In addition, the participatory and collaborative nature of the exercise within our workplace context means that we have information we can really work with. And we have introduced to the organisation a new way of  looking at problems and finding solutions by using the Cynefin framework.

Our strategic planning is continuing. The workshop using the Cognitive Edge approach has been a rewarding and helpful experience. Not only will the material help in our planning, but it will also help in our execution – and that’s the real nub of the matter!

On records, information and knowledge management strategy

Lately, I have been giving a great deal of thought with respect to information and knowledge management strategy. This is partly because I am working on an electronic document and records management business case and implementation plan at my current work, but also because I want to place the records management case within an organisational knowledge and information framework.

Traditionally, records management has been a stand alone discipline focused purely on documents and records. That was my early experience in that field! But of course, electronic document and records management systems have grown to significant levels of sophistication, as any of the major EDRMS vendors will tell you! At the same time, we also have digital library management systems and web-content management systems.

But the landscape is changing fast as the explosion in information, particularly user-generated content, gathers even greater volumes of information to capture, store and access across a range of different media and repositories. We have seen the physical information world become the digital information world and now the social digital world – Web 2.0.

The transformation is really very obvious in photography, for example. The modern evolution looks like this: a photographic print in physical storage, a digital image stored in a personal computer file, and a digital image stored on a shared global internet platform, like Flickr, for potentially unlimited distribution and comment.

As information has exploded exponentially, across a range of media and via a plethora of channels, organisations are looking at ways that provide a whole-of-enterprise approach to information and knowledge management. And I believe that records management is becoming less an independent arm in the information landscape, and more an integrated process and functional system within a whole-of- enterprise information and knowledge management environment.

I am less interested in discussing turf wars between records managers, librarians, and knowledge managers these days. It seems to me that there are significant benefits of information convergence by utilising a range of information tools and processes for enterprise advantage.

What I am really interested in is how whole-of-enterprise information and knowledge systems can work for organisations utilising specific records, information and knowledge management tools and processes. I can see that to achieve such a whole-of-enterprise solution will depend on a greater degree of co-operation and collaboration at the broad information management level than what often happens now, especially in large organisations. Ironically, as a knowledge manager myself, I can see that information professionals need to collaborate more and to lose the defensiveness that comes with our historical traditions. Moreover, I see human resource management playing a greater role in the discussion about human and social capital, all of which fits the domain of information and knowledge management very nicely.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence, based on my experience and observations, that whole-of-enterprise records management, information and knowledge solutions will become more the norm than the exception. Organisations will look to leverage the complete suite of operational knowledge and information practices and procedures in a completely integrated and almost seamless architecture. These systems and processes will support the organisation’s explicit knowledge needs.

In addition, these systems and processes can contribute to social capital by making information visible across a range of formats – creating network links between people as well as documents and artefacts, and facilitating collaboration spaces and communities within and across organisational boundaries.

In looking at a strategic approach for organisational information management, I believe that we now need to leverage an integrated (or even federated) suite of record, information and knowledge management practices and processes for operational excellence.

Our strategic thinking should therefore be focused on determining how best to utilise our records management, information management and knowledge management practices and processes for whole-of-enterprise advantage. And as I have noted before, we need to keep the dialogue happening with human resources to maximise the intellectual and social capital of the organisation’s people – a resource that needs operational integration as much as systems.

On Cognitive Edge (2)

I have finished tidying up my notes from the Cognitive Edge accreditation course I did in Sydney last week. There was plenty to go through but I feel the notes only just scratched the surface! Dave Snowden certainly covered a lot of territory!

I have listed some key knowledge fragments from the course that I particularly liked:

• correlation is not causality
• a complex system is always different from its parts
• retrospective coherence gives us the benefit of hindsight but not the benefit of future-telling
• with complexity, one can replicate starting conditions but not outcomes
• using safe-fail in the complex domain, “go forward, probe and experiment”, because we don’t know the answer
• amplify “good” weak signals
• we use “ritual” to trigger identity (and we each have multiple identities)
• archetypes are collective representations, not caricatures
• metaphors are good for human understanding
• humans use pattern recognition intelligence; we are not an information processing machine
• any time a measure becomes a target it is no longer a measure
• and my favourite line, “cynics are people who care”, since they are the ones looking for a better way to improve their organisations (hear, hear!).

There was much more from the course, and plenty to reflect upon. I will do some more reading, thinking and writing. For now, I am chasing up some of the author references in my notes (Sutcliffe, Thom, Kaufmann, and Klein, among others).

On cognitive edge

I have been very busy of late so my blogging has suffered. I start the new financial year here a tad late, but afresh with some key insights from recent educational learnings.

Most recently, I have just completed the Cognitive Edge accreditation course with Dave Snowden in Sydney. The three days were intellectually intense and fascinating. Whilst I have seen Dave perform at a number of conferences before, and read many of Dave’s research papers and Dave’s blog (now added to my blogroll), I have a far better understanding of his work and his personality than I did before.

As an aside, whilst I don’t doubt his passion for his beloved Wales rugby side, I do doubt his judgement on their abilities! I guess we will have to wait and see how the Australians go in the rugby Tri-Nations (against New Zealand and Rugby World Cup holders, South Africa) to see if the Wallabies can show some top tier talent.

I have to complete the rewriting of my notes (they are a scrawl!) and chase up some references before making comment here about my Cognitive Edge experience. I expect to make some observations about the learning from the course next week. Suffice to say, the course was well worth the effort and the money!

On demographic change and the social

Jeremiah writes a great blog post about the way in which organisations (employers) will need to deal with the entry of socially-connected Gen Yers into the workforce, and the problem employers face with the loss of corporate knowledge with the exiting of the baby boomers.

There is little doubt in my mind that employers should make use of the networked Gen Yers as much as possible. Networking can provide a pool of intelligence beyond the internal reach of an organisation. At the same time, Gen Yers are adept at using their peer networks for both social and workplace connectivity. Being connected is the norm for Gen Yers, and part of their identity and skill set they bring to a job.

As to the potential loss of corporate knowledge as baby boomers retire, this is a more fundamental problem. It is true that alumnis provide a way of establishing a connection between a former employee and the organisation. The question is: are alumnis effective and do they really make a difference?

I suspect that alumnis have a range of outcomes, from practically zero to the occasional peaks, depending on how the alumni is set up and how members choose to make themselves available.

The key to keeping your exiting baby boomers connected, to my mind, is not just the business connection, but the social connection. The social connection is more likely to keep ex-employees interested, especially in the retirement years when additional time is available. Social relations occur at work all the time, perhaps under-appreciated by employers, but nevertheless important to employees. Tap into these social networks with your alumni or some other social-business model. The chances of keeping the exiting baby boomers connected with the organisation and its people will be all the more likely.

As you can see, the common element that organisations need to embrace is social: both the Gen Yers and the exiting baby boomers can be of most use when they stay socially connected as well as business-connected.

 

On management read-in

Patrick Lambe’s blog post about getting management read-in is very timely for me.

Patrick discusses how we might tackle an organisational audit across information management, records management, and knowledge management. The usual response is to write a report, perhaps do a presentation to senior management after the report has been read, and then establish the level of buy-in and commitment to the proposed project. Often, these types of projects are couched in terms of managing risk, particularly in document and records management.

I am about to embark on a range of activities at work, and partly for the same reason: the first project is to develop a business case for records and document management (including an assessment of risk). In addition, I will be developing a knowledge management strategy, and my team will be undertaking a content inventory of the intranet site.

Now I happen to think that senior management buy-in actually comes before the “reading-in”, as Patrick calls the report-reading stage. The work leading up to the actual report is just as important as the report itself, and must include conversations and discussions with (and between) senior management and all stakeholders.

Conversation, as highlighted in this book I’ve just read by Patricia Shaw, is critical. Yet conversation is often underrated because somehow everyone thinks that the right conversations happen automatically!

Patrick rightly identifies the difficulty of getting the attention and comprehension from senior management for a project. Senior management often does not understand what the project is actually about. However, it is up to us to start the conversation with these people as early as possible, defining the purpose and using appropriate language to enhance understanding. And sometimes, these senior managers may not even realise that the conversation they are having with you is actually more than just an informal chat.

If you can achieve that, your report will have a much better chance of getting both read-in and buy-in.

On purpose and language

I want to emphasise the importance of defining and understanding purpose, as I touched upon in my blog post from yesterday. Defining and understanding purpose is critical for information architecture, communication strategies, knowledge management and communities of practice.

One of the difficulties in looking at purpose – the reason why – is from whose perspective one looks. And here, purpose is what will identify that perspective.

When designing a communication strategy, for example, you need to know your audience. Your audience is who you define to be the people you want to communicate the message to, or interact with. No good trying to communicate to vegetarians that a T-bone steak is a hearty meal! Define your target or market segment.

Sometimes the target market selects itself. When I established communities of practice at Rabobank Australia I recognised the target market very quickly from establishing a good understanding of the business and the people who worked in the business. I could see that there was enormous potential to leverage the intellectual capital of the organisation throughout its disaggregated office network and three internal organisational pillars. But now what?

In establishing communities of practice I needed to define the purpose in terms of my target market. What do they need and what would they get out of a community of practice? From the perspective of the target group (and with whom I actively communicated and participated with), it was clear that there was a need, there was a culture of support and helpfulness, and there was a strong interest in particular subject knowledge corresponding to business and client needs. The purpose was therefore to connect knowledge and knowledge needs within specific business domains through the use of communities of practice.

At the same time, I had to make sure I was using the language of my target market when discussing their knowledge and information practices and needs. The term “communities of practice” was not going to work. Instead, I used a metaphor that was easily understood and represented the social and conversational context that was at the heart of my communities.

By defining purpose and using a language the target groups could understand, the establishment and early adoption of communities of practice by a critical mass of participants meant that we were on track from the start for a successful knowledge management initiative.

Purpose should be at the heart of our knowledge management and information architecture conversations, as it should be in most things.

On the four rings of enterprise social tools

This a short post to alert people to an interesting item from Thomas Venderwal on enterprise social tools.

One of the difficulties of applying social tools in the organisation relates to how well they mesh together. Vanderwal illustrates the issue with his four rings of enterprise social tools: the tools themselves, interface and ease of use, sociality, and encouraging use. Where these four elements overlap is what provides the greatest interest – check out the post and we will come back to the discussion later in the week.

On the ties that don’t bind

This article from the Australian Financial Review(subscription required) discusses a recent book by human resource management academic, Lynda Gratton, on the power of weak ties in the network. Having read Gratton’s Living strategy, I was intrigued to learn more about the new book, Hot spots, albeit written for a more mass market audience.

Weak ties are people who are generally acquaintances or people you bump into occasionally. They are not good friends but may be friends of friends. Granovetter’s 1973 article was one of the first to examine weak ties and much work has been done since refining the concept in relation to a range of networks. One of the first papers I read on the topic was Hansen’s 1999 paper on weak ties in knowledge transfer in organisations. Over the past 10-15 years there has been a far greater interest in discovering and mapping social networks, often using social network analysis (SNA) and sensemaking software.

The gist of the new Gratton book is that “innovation comes from people who cross boundaries (and) talk to people in all areas of the business and outside and bring foreign ideas into their own work”. Gratton rightly points out that most organisations don’t even realise the capacity and power of potential networks inside their own organisation – an untapped and relatively inexpensive resource.

At the individual level, people need to take up the challenge of boundary spanning – the capacity to move outside the central node of friendships and social contacts into the more ambiguous and uncertain domain where they don’t really know people very well. With some curiosity and interest, these weak ties will form.

At the organisational level, there is often the fear that individuals need permission to meet and discuss issues outside their immediate working relationships. An open and collegiate workplace culture certainly helps dispel such fears, but where this culture doesn’t exist, encouraging co-operation and boundary spanning from senior management is a good start.

One example of boundary spanning inside an organisation can occur naturally. A new employee often brings new insights and ideas to a new organisation because they have not been corralled into like-minded teams inside the organisation. Once people become ensconced with people of similar ideas and contexts, the opportunity for innovative ideas tends to break down. As the article today says: “in order to get something unusual, you need to put people together who are different from each other”.

I pretty much agree that new thinking and new ways of looking at problems and opportunities are enhanced by diverse teams and weak ties. I also happen to be a fan of networks generally, believing much can be done by tapping the power of both information and social networks.

However, at my own new workplace, I must also become aware of the environmental context in which people are working. Plenty of fresh ideas are wonderful, and I like to think that I have a few ideas myself, but a scatter-gun approach may not be the most effective initial strategy. Nevertheless, I think it is still important to consider those fresh ideas within the existing workplace framework, as well as to frame those fresh ideas into new and potential workplace frameworks.

Certainly, as the new boy on the block, I am already forming loose ties across the organisation. I can have plenty of conversations within this organisational context, enabling a better understanding of the current workplace environment, while at the same time working through and generating new ideas for the future.

On conversations

Well, my first day in my new job at the Fred Hollows Foundation was really very good. The travel time to work was better than I expected (so that was a great start!) and I met some wonderful and committed people. The feature of the day was conversation – the largely informal conversations with people in the organisation about things that are going on and things that matter.

Now, I am also reading Patricia Shaw’s book, Changing conversations in organizations (thanks, Chris, I have nearly finished it). The book is somewhat hard going to read. Yet I can see how important conversations are within organisations to extract real meaning and real contextual understanding. I can certainly see how established hierarchies often make conversations difficult or prevent them from even occurring.

Shaw says: “we are daily involved with others in forming and being formed by the evolving ‘situations’ which we experience as the sensible interweaving of our actions with another” (p.72). In other words, our personal context is dynamic and evolving within the context of our conversations and relations with others. These features lead to behaviours and actions that affect the organisation.

To my mind, conversation (communication) seems like common sense if one wants to discover any meaning about anything. My experiences today have only sought to reinforce that view to me.

On my new job

I start my new full-time job at the Fred Hollows Foundation tomorrow. I will be in charge of the information, knowledge management and education unit of the organisation. I am really looking forward to working back in the NGO sector and in international development. It will also make my involvement in KM4dev and Society for International Development more relevant.

It’s sort of a full circle for me since my first full-time job was working for an international development NGO, Australian Freedom From Hunger Campaign (AFFHC). That was quite some ago, but it feels like yesterday!

There will be some differences for me though, having worked in the Sydney CBD for most of my working life, and now working out in the suburbs. The organisation will also be different to me, having working in the banking and finance industry for almost twenty years.

The new position combines my personal interests and professional skills very well and this match really appealed to me when considering my working options. I look forward to the new challenges with the Fred Hollows Foundation and helping to make a real difference beyond just the organisational borders.

I hope to relate some of my experiences and observations in this new workplace context through more regular blog postings – so stay tuned!

On participation

I was listening to the radio this week when I heard an interview with a film producer on triple j. Of special note was the comment by the female dj that perhaps casting for movies should be done the same way as decisions are made in those reality tv shows. Just sms your vote! The film producer was aghast at such a thought! In contrast, the dj’s suggestion was just an obvious manifestation of what is already happening within her demographic’s frame of reference.

And this is where the demographic fundamentals will be working in businesses today. Participation isn’t something the management requests when it suits them, oh no! In a culture where participatory decision-making and social networking are becoming second nature, the workplace will need to adapt as well.

At the same time, the very same set of younger generations have not only been brought up with a hefty dose of reality tv but they have also been participants in the internet revolution. To them, the web and all it can do is as normal as a mobile phone.

Enter web 2.0 (the term web 2.0 was actually born in 2004) and add gen x, y and z.

The web-savvy generations with their penchant for personal networks and participatory decision-making are gradually working their way now (and in the future) into the very dna of organisations across the globe. The norms of organisational decision-making in those post-Fordist managerial hierarchies are looking a tad less secure in the 21st century.

For managers, we need to foster this connectedness and participatory zeal in our workplaces. We can assist with a suite of web 2.0 applications (RSS, blogs, wikis, social computing) that enhance the level of participation and communication among our people and our people-networks. And we can allow and actively encourage the participation, the networks and the conversations to take place inside our businesses because it is through these interactions and participation that we generate real organisational value competitive advantage.

Participation and web 2.0 are a great combination so let’s use them to the best of our advantage. [Check out this Ross Gitten's article for some more reasons to treat your employees well].

On business and social computing

This blog post pretty much sums up the benefits of social computing for business – couldn’t agree more!