Can Enterprise 2.0 Reboot Business to be the Brainyard in Cloud?

From last week’s Cloud Expo to this week’s Enterprise 2.0, the latest technology events lift up our holiday spirit by passionate vendors, disruptive technology, and progressive audience.

Especially we’ve just been through the Great Recession, for many middle-class families, businesses, and industries, the lost decade is painful and educational, we can’t afford to waste the crisis, timely technologies such as Enterprise 2.0 and Cloud computing will become the effective platform and tools to shape up the new way of thinking, new process of doing and new benchmark to evaluate. Here are the five takeaway from the conference:                                                        

1.Lead the Charge for Change

·  Crowdsourcing is a attitude:  New generation of social business empowered by enterprise 2.0 tools such as collaboration platform, web 2.0 technology (video, audio, blog., etc) and analytics will extend organization’s physical boundary, enhance employees’ participation and engage customers’ feedback, crowdsourcing becomes the new attitude and reality, it also stimulates creative side of our brain and  agility of our business  to find better solutions. 

                 

·  Open Leadership + Open Culture: The traditional hierarchical corporate structure may have no choice but defensively select command style leadership to control, however, control only is no longer effective enough to do the right things, make the sound judgment & decision, or recognize the right talent.  Enterprise  2.0 enables flatter organization framework, to encourage open leadership style and open culture environment, in order to adapt to the exponential changing the economic environment and business uncertainty, open leadership inspires the democratic culture, collective wisdom, and analytic decision process. 

·  Leverage point for Changes: The only constant is change today, however, 70% of change management effort failed statistically, the leverage point of change is all about the good alignment of people, process, and technology, the enterprise 2.0 provides the great platform to leverage the changes, to encourage the knowledge sharing, multi-dimensional thinking & communication, and multi-facet process management.

2. You Can’t Fix a Business without Fixing an Industry

·   From Shareholder’s enterprise to Share Value business: From lessons of economic meltdown in recent years, both academia and industry research discover the business only focusing on shareholders’ benefit may not sufficient enough to share the prosperity with our community and society, enterprise 2.0 can help business to get more interconnect and interdependent with its macro-environment by engaging conversation with partners, customers, community group, industry experts, only the business which can share the common social value and take leadership & responsibility to reboot economy are the true innovation engine for our society.

·   Co-petitor: both as partner and competitor: The information-explosive, hyper-competitive economic environment make the world more complex than ever, business can no longer perform better without partnering enough, the industrial competitors may need to collaborate with each other more frequently to solve many common challenges together, the businesses can only be re-invented right after their struggling industry being rebooted, the whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate and corporate with each other to re-invent  the full value chain.

         

·   From Wikinomics to Macrowikinomics: Mr. Don Tapscott’s series of book: Wikinomic and Macrowikinomics well reflect the social economic trend, the business cannot succeed in a world that is failing, we’ve been just living in such an emerging networked era, to call all of us to proactively influence the change and step up as a leader, the new characteristics of business and society are participation, collaboration, transparency, discipline, and governance. 

3. Communication is Oxygen of Organization

· Communication is Oxygen: The beauty of social platform and enterprise is all about communication, if culture is DNA of business, then communication is the air, the positive conversation is the oxygen to nourish innovation,  it’s human’s nature to communicate and participate, to share and brainstorm, communication enabled by enterprise 2.0 may reach the touch points to overcome change inertia and enhance management best practices. 

· Cognitive Diversity: Human may already know long time ago, our difference is deeper than the skin, the cognitive difference has more impact than the other difference such as gender, ethnic or culture, enterprise 2.0 tools not only help us bridge the gap, but also provides the platform for us to appreciate the cognitive diversity,  to team up the like-minded professionals and complement the collective thinking and skills.

· Get Bolder, to shape up the new box of thinking: “Out-of-box thinker” may not always be the compliment in traditional working environment, which more rewards the conventional thinking and compliance.However, social platform will groom the “odd” or “tough” raw talent to speak up as the thought leaders, change the things, pull the world together, and push the world forward, enterprise 2.0 can also shape up the new box for life learner to explore the cross-disciplined challenges, from out of box thinker to new box thinker, those are the superior talent for every visionary business to pursue. 

4. Gamification, for Talent Management

·  Signal of Trust--Social with Goal: Traditional pyramidal management more focus on control, the social business is the signal of trust, every technology has its purpose, social is no exception, social without goal is distraction, the goal of social is communication, sharing, purpose-finding, it’s the platform or tool to ignite staff’s creativity, and calculate the brand value or reputation

·  Self-Service & Self-Management: Social computing is going beyond the trust, it will shape the new organizational model for self-service or self-management, the future of business will be the hybrid of decentralized team or project management with centralized governance and resource support.

·  Incentive for Thought Leadership & Social Influence: Gamification concept is not just for gaming, now becomes the interesting enterprise 2.0 tool which has been embedded into enterprise platform for rewarding the innovation, thought leadership and influence. The next generation of talent management will develop the right incentives to inspire diversified talent to take extra miles, to learn the new things, to solve the problems with creative thinking, to become the organization’s brand evangelist, instead of playing politics or taking the negative competition.

5.  Journey the Road Less Traveled      

·  Blue Ocean Strategy: Social is a strategy, then the best practices, strategy is the set of choices to compete for the future, social platform helps business to listen to the customer and partners, to optimize customer satisfaction, also explore the blue ocean strategy for the potential new revenue stream or emerging business trends. 

· From Taxonomy to Folksonomy: Enterprise 2.0 as the emerging technology, is not just about the buzzword, the taxonomy, or the new fashion easily to fade away, it’s the new era of folksonomy; it’s not the IT for technology’s sake, it’s the technology for people, it is the convergence of enterprise IT with consumer IT, it creates the synergy by taking advantage of collective thinking and doing

• From KPI to KAI: Being agile is every business’s strategic imperative regardless of size today, social computing as the effective communication tools intent to enhance the information flow and adapt to the change, also as the open platform to experiment the innovation.Traditional KPI (Key Performance Indicator) may not sufficient enough to benchmark the business results the executive need acknowledge, KAI (Key Agility Indicator) with new sets of metrics will help business to re-imagine the growth and re-invent the management. Some enterprise 2.0 analytics tools may help fill the gap and provide the most calculated perspective from a different angle.

In summary, enterprise 2.0 is the burning platform for change and culture evolution, also the effective tools to re-kindle the passion for work,  for humanity and for bigger dreams.

Posted in: Change Management,CIO Debate,Social Computing