Biznology

Photo credit: Wikipedia

As organizations progress through their social business journey, for every believer who had drunk the Kool-Aid and thinks social is the solution for everything, you’ll find a skeptic, who is typically less eloquent, but is probably asking things along the lines of:

Why do I need to learn this “social business” platform? I can’t see the business motivation behind it, it’s all hype and no meat. Our current toolset – email, phone, meetings, SharePoint and intranet – is more than enough for our needs. We don’t need yet another tool to make our work life even more complex.

I confess that, between the two groups, I like the skeptics better, as their questions – when vocalized – keep us all honest and make us think about the actual value of introducing “social” to the workplace. It’s easy to understand why a significant number of people don’t see anything wrong with the conventional ways of handling information and knowledge at the workplace. Ultimately, because information is not visible or tangible, it makes it much more challenging to notice the inefficiencies in processing it.

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Credit: Wikipedia

You have probably been there a few times already: after a one-week vacation or a short business trip, you come back to the office and suddenly 1,000 unread emails are waiting for you in your inbox. And, as you likely promised in your out-of-office message to get back to people emailing you “as soon as possible” upon your return, you just find yourself in that now more-familiar-than-we-dare-to-admit territory of email bankruptcy. You feel guilty that you are not keeping up your word, but the email stream fire hose is oblivious to that: more keeps coming your way, and at some point you just wonder if the email nightmare will ever go away. Read the remainder of this entry »

Image via Wikipedia

As Social Business Platforms make their headway into corporate environments, many people start asking why we are trying to change something that served us so well for many years. After all, face-to-face meetings, emails, telephone and shared files have all proven their value, and are alive and well in most enterprises. The answer may not seem obvious now, but it will be in a few years. Keep reading, and find out why.

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Image via Wikipedia

You go to a conference, watch in awe the keynote speaker making a very convincing case that the-world-has-completely-changed-and-nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again and leave energized, certain that we are all just witnessing the dawn of a brave new business world where you will never have to deal with email and endless meetings, hierarchy is replaced by a flat organizational structure and any knowledge you need is within close reach–all you have to do is to Google it. Then, you go back to your cubicle or home office, and realize that your inbox and calendars are still full, you still have 10 people between you and the CEO, and getting the information you need to do your job still feels like pulling teeth. Where did all that promise go? Wasn’t the world supposed to be changing? Have you just been trapped in a really bad Groundhog Day joke? Read the remainder of this entry »

Image by Octavio Rojas via Flickr

Back in 2006, when the hype around the then-called Web 2.0 “thing” was reaching its peak of inflated expectations, much was said about an article published by Nature the year before, which boldly stated:

“Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds. “

Many organizations then started placing high hopes that all their knowledge management woes would have found their savior. If Wikipedia can be as good as Britannica, we could replace all our outdated corporate knowledge repositories with wikis. The wisdom of crowds would run its magic, and we’d have high quality and up-to-date content we can rely upon. Read the remainder of this entry »