Image from HVargas (Creative Commons License)
Managers seem to be more reluctant to make of use tools even before the current economic crisis emerged. According to the most recent survey of Bain & Company none out of 25 tools which are relevant to senior management, topical, and measurable showed an increased usage pattern in 2008. The interesting fact, though, is that this obvious result is not even reflected in the survey report.
“Knowledge Management” still belongs to the management tools with a high satisfaction rate. However, the latest reference mentioned dates back to 2006. Five tools have been added in 2008:
Decision Rights Tools
Downsizing
Online Communities
Price Optimization Models
Voice of the Customer Innovation
March, 2009
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Loose sight of management tools
Monday, March 30th, 2009Collaboration = Speed + Scale
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
MITWorld is another good place to explore latest thinking. So, e.g. the excellent presentation of John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) on “Building the Next Generation Company”. Thanks a lot to Jon Husband, whose blog Wirearchy (BTW: good KM blog) has pointed me to the MITWorld videos.
John Chambers is an eloquent presenter and introduces his audience at MIT to the change Cisco has undertaken in the last 2-3 years during the first 30 minutes of the talk. The enterprise-wide collaboration which has been set up at Cisco has enabled the company to now drive 26 strategic priorities in parallel in 2009 (instead of 2 three years ago).
It may not come as a surprise to a knowledge manager that John Chambers outlined the importance of a threefold approach to be successful with the transition to a collaborative company: process (CEO lead, tied to market transition goals, working groups…), technology (enable innovation, collaborative tools, …), and culture (viral, accountability, reward, enforce common processes, adopt or eliminate,…). John also talks about his personal change management experience while implementing collaboration at Cisco: from command + control to listen + trust.
Contextual information is the sixth sense
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from the MIT Media Lab demonstrate a new way to access, manage and create information in daily life with a portable device. The sixth sense project shows how powerful a combination of off-the-shelf devices, smart software, and mobile information will be in the near future. Once again, a wonderful TED presentation.
Collaborative innovation powered by a tool?
Monday, March 2nd, 2009I’ve been invited to take part in the OpenTeams group at LinkedIn. OpenTeams is a SaaS collaborative software that offers a pretty ambitious value proposition. The strange thing is that at first glance OpenTeams offers just a tool (a kind of improved wiki), nothing else. So, how will this value be delivered? I assume that it will not be delivered: there is no indication of success stories on “enabled innovative enterpreneurial organizations” or similar examples on the website.
At second glance (and to be fair) there is not only the tool but a new management model which has been implemented at OpenTeams LLC. Tory Gattis, the founder and president of OpenTeams, calls himself a social system architect, a role which he plays e.g. in his hometown Houston (Texas) and describes in his blog Houston Strategies.
