YNNO studytrip 2008

Stockholm school of economics

2008-10-01T01:42:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we were at the stockholm school of economics. Two guys from
this great school did two workshops with us. The first was about the
GLOBE research on cultural differences between nations. It gave some
great insights in the swedish ways of doing things. The natural
extension of this subject was viking management. General consensus is
that viking management is a great way to manage knowledge intensive
companies. The focus is on teamcollaboration to make this happen and
setting goals and creating a good environment for work. The second
workshop was about innovation. We discussed some factors in making
innovation a companywide attention point and the cultural web. The
cultural web is al great way to dusscribe the actual behavior to make
innovation happen. Using the web we looked at IDEO, a very well known
innovation company. Every aspect of this company is aimed at
innovation. Open management, no jobtitles, open spaces, freedom and
trust to act and discuss about everything.

Akershus and HP

2008-09-29T11:26:00.001-07:00

> Today we visited akershus and the HP health center of excellence in
> Oslo. We started at HP with the vision of HP, Cisco and Imatiss on the
> digital hospital. Two main drivers are Business Intelligence and
> Unified Communications. BI is used to measure performance and help
> business making it better. In healthcare the pressure on staff is
> getting bigger due to the aging population. UC will make collaboration
> and evertday tasks more easy! The akeshus is al new hospital that will
> open this week. It uses soms of the technologies we saw earlier. The
> building is brand new which makes it easier to make a new it
> infrastructure without the burden of the old stuff. It was great to
> see this stuff in action!

We are almost leaving for studytrip 2008!

2008-09-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

Only one nights sleep and then we are off! Tomorrow we are leaving in two groups: one is heading for Oslo and the other to Stockholm. We will be united again in Stockholm and then moving to Helsinki. companies we will be visiting are HP Centre of Excellence Healthcare Technology, Nye Ahus Hospital, Cordial, SEB, VTT, Arabianranta, Finland Prime Ministers office, Soland Nokia Research Center in Helsinki. Beside theses companies we are visiting the Stockholm School of Economics and Helsinki Technology University.

Another packed but promising programme with a lot of learning (and some fun of course) ahead of us! Follow our findings here!

E2.0 Conference 2008 day 3

2008-06-12T03:52:00.000-07:00

Today started of with a great session with Carl Frappaolo from AIIM. We talked a lot about Knowledge Management and Enterprise 2.0. We agreed that defining E2.0 or KM is a useless task. There are no definitions for IT or HR so wht bother for these two. Knowledge Management should be about aligning Business Strategy, People (or culture), Business process and Technology. Technology is last but not least. Enterprise 2.0 is not a fundamental shift in business since we still essentially do the same stuff, it is just the next good move! Again we concluded that rapid adpotion by Gen Y is a myth but we did agree that they work differently with E2.0.

The Wachovia bank talked about their Sharepoint implementation. Going enterprise wide and chosing to be big and bold! Business rationale being about working effective across time and place, better connect and engage employees, mitigating the impact of an aging workforce and engaging gen Y into work. They concluded that Gen Y got at the bank full of energy and engagement and this tended to disappear in the first year getting lower that corporate average!

The Phizer case was again great. They are trying to get conversations back in the company. They are doing some great stuff to promote adoption like Wiki Wednesdays were people can come around and get used to working with wiki's. Blogging is a very difficult part of E2.0 since it appears to be a frivuous act of non-business activity. The act of blogging is percieved as dificult and time consuming.

Sony is using Wiki's for game design and actually argued that game design is impossible without wiki's. They are having an 'easy' adoption plan because of the tech savvy naturing to the people making the games. They had some big challenges in reliability and had to re-architect the whole platform what put them back for about a year! So people, get this right the first time, it saves energy!

The panel with Andrew McAfee and the business users from CIA, Wachovia, Pfizer and Sony talked about adoption. Less than 10% at these companies were using the stuff. the biggest challenge is about getting E2.0 in the daily flow of work. Another challenge is about middle management as their goals are about kepping the train running and everything that gets in the way is a bad thing. E2.0 is about giving people multiple apps to get their jobs done, bacause one size does not fit all. Enteprises have to be big and bold and stay away from small initiatives! The projectteams should fight against closed spaces where knowledge does not flow as quoted by the CIA!

Enterprise 2.0 Boston Day 2 wrap-up

2008-06-11T12:46:00.001-07:00

Generation Y is an illusion. This became apparent at the CIA and AIIM talks. In discussions at the end of the day the same idea came up! Adoption is depending on the situation users are in and which business process they are doing. Age does not matter! Youngsters can get more conservative in weeks by the pressure to align with corporate culture.

Privacy is a big issue. The openness in Enterprise 2.0 is a big trap, you need to have some form of rights management. CIA has three wikis aligned with level of secrecy. Google talked about cloud computing what is a great way to take use of Google's tremendous efforts to provide the reliability and speed of Google search. A big issue for companies is to put all data and functionality in Google systems. But then again where is the risk? People taking USB sticks home or using personal email to get documents out!

Business process are key also in Enterprise 2.0. During the Ross Mayfield of Socialtext presentation and the enterprise2.0 open space session it became apparent that adoption will be bigger if these tools make regular business processes more efficient. Talking with business people about their daily work is a key input in giving them a great E2.0 alternative. Often being unaware about these E2.0 apps they will not be able to conceive ways to make their work easier. This is where evangelists form inside or outside the company needs to get into the picture.

At the end of the day a general thought was that we should stop talking tools and stuff and start talking culture, change and adoption! The value proposition for the business users of E2.0 stuff is the most important question at the moment. No one really has the answers yet!

A great insight about why IT was moving faster in the consumer world today was the third party involved in the enterprise: the IT department! Consumers have direct relations with vendors and the ability to change vendors quick. Vendors are in greater competition in the consumer world and that is the reason innovation is faster. In the enterprise world the vendors are only talking to the IT department and not with users. The IT department will not switch vendors fast for obvious reasons and thus making competition and innovation less!

Enterprise 2.0 conference day 1: social software platforms, implementations and cloudcomputing

2008-06-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

After a sunday where Boston turned green to support the Celtics in Game 2 in the NBA Filals, I attended three sessions at the enterprise 2.0 conference: Social Computingplatforms eg IBM vs Micorsoft, Implementing e2.0 by Dion Hinchcliffe and An evening in the cloud.

The first session was introduced by Mike Gotta, analyst at the burton group. He stated that social computing consisted of three aspects: devices, user experiences and social relations. IBM and Microsoft demonstrated a use case and the core functionality of their products. The main difference between the Lotus Connections and the Sharepoint platforms is that the first has finished functionality whereas the latter is more customizable. Microsoft depends on third party vendors to add functions to the platform. It was a pity that both did not have any real cases to show. The new Connections platform will launch at the end of this week and looks really promising. The next version of Sharepoint will surely have an update on the UI. IBM showed a pretty cool social networking feature wich displays a nice grafical realtime network graph for people and topics. It still is a pity this feature did not make it in Sharepoint after the beta testing was through!

After lunch Dion Hinchcliffe took the stage and updated us on Enteprise 2.0. The theme is clearly making ground. Last year only 3 people from the public could start a blog or a wiki on the intranet, today over 60% could! Google analytics showed more attention to wikis and blogs over the last two years then on phones and emails! Once more the concept that E2.0 tools are not replacing existing tools was evident. Enteprise Search and Linking (the first two letters en SLATES) are really bothered by the fact that corporate content is not centralized and webbased! So not all content can be discovered and linked! This is putting a drag on these two important features of an E2.0 platform. Authorship and tagging are for providing content and structure. Extensions and signals are for leveraging the E2.0 platform.

Dion argues the cluetrain manifesto is still a groundbreaking book and sets the standard on enterprise 2.0. I have already putt it on my to-read-list, if you read the first few theses in the book you will understand! One other insight that came up during this session was the fast that coporate taxonomy and folksonomy can go hand in hand! The taxonomy to provide some upfront structure and the folksonomy to explain the taxonomy in plain language. E2.0 makes the conversations in your organization reusable for the future and in effect making implicit knowledge explicit, only by capturing the content in a very natural way for the enduser.

The third session was about cloud computing. Google, Amazon and Salesforce argued with a couple of CxO's about the question whether it would be possible to run a company purely in the cloud. These company have an IT infrastructure in place that is second to none. The way Google makes it possible to have a blobal marketshare around 70% in search is compelling. Your company can make use if this infrastructure on a moments notice. The idea is that is more effective to outsource this function as well! The risk in doing this is the same in the choice between driving and flying. Where flying seems to be more dangereous but driving actually is. One other contra-argument should be that cloudcomputing is not enterprise class, but only listen to what google got in place and this is no argument. The privacy issue seems a big one but you have to figure this out anyhow and has nothing to dot with the choice for cloud computing. One other issue was the patriot act! Google stores all content in servers in the US and are subject to the partiot act, thus everything can be read by the US Government...

Wrapping the day up, IBM Connections was really great. Implementation of enteprise 2.0 is still searching for the design principles and cloud computing looks nice but has a lot of evangelism to get it started!

Tomorrow the keynotes get underway and a lot of casestudyies get underway! And of course game 3 in the Finals ;-)

History of the YNNO studytrip

2008-06-05T06:41:00.001-07:00

Since the founding of YNNO (formerly known as Twynstra Work Innovation) we organize a studytrip every 2 years for the entire company (secretaries and management assistents included!). The first in 2002 to the Sillicon Valley region (San Francisco area) and Seattle where we have visited among other things Stanford University, Cisco, Documentum and Microsoft. In 2004 we went to Japan and Korea and visited the Dutch Embassy (including a lecture from Prof. Konno, a well known professor in knowledge management), University of Tokyo (RFID technology), NTT DoCoMo and the National Computerization Agency of Korea. The last trip has been to Boston an New York where we visited Babson College (including lectures from Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak), Bloomberg, NY Times Building, lecture from Franklin Becker and Lenox Hill Hospital. In 2008 we are aiming at the Scandinavia area and Germany.

The YNNO studytrip has become a phenomenan within the company. When founding the company, we have discussed the principles of overperformance and decided that overperformance was not just good for the company itself and its shareholders, but should also be a driver for all employees. Therefor we have decided to use 50% of our overperformance for collective learning and team building. And since we do not have a high turnoverpercentage of our personnel, this seems to be one of good organisation values we have!

Final preparations for Enterprise 2.0

2008-06-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

Next week I will be in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference 2008! This week I took a look at the schedule and made my own choices! You can read all about my schedule at the E2 open wiki! At this blog I will post my daily reports about the conference.

One of the cool parts in the conference is the E2.0 open tuesday afternoon which is like an unconference, barcamp or open space event where people just get around and have conversations with eachother. I think this will be very interesting!

Hope to see you here at the blog or in Boston

Enterprise 2.0 conference Boston

2008-05-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

Next june I will attend the enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. During this conference I hope to hear about the newest insights on enterprise 2.0. Amoungst the speakers Prof. Andrew McAfee, Dion Hinchcliffe and Stowe Boyd are the ones I have the highest expectations about.

During the conference there will be some very nice cases. The best seem to include Intellipedia, Lockheed Martin, Phizer and Sony. I hope to learn about the best ways to use enterprise 2.0 and the biggest challenges and how to cope with them. Besides that I hope some people will share their failures because these are the best to learn!

In the conference there is a track about leadership and enterprise 2.0. This tracks seems really interesting about the new ways to lead your company using 2.0 principles. I finished reading The Future of Management by Gary Hamel last week and I hope to see some of mr. Hamels insights back in this track.

If you are/were going what would you be interested in?

2006 Boston and New York City

2008-04-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

In 2006 our third study trip went to Boston and New York. We arrived in Boston to just to used to being away. Some of us went to Harvard for a quick visit and we took a tour of the city. On Monday we travelled to Babson College, Wellesley. We enjoyed two days of lecturing and discussing our trade with Tom Davenport and Laurence Prusak. We talked about knowledge management and processes within organizations being the basis for knowledge management segmentation. Laurence told us about storytelling and a project manager from Partners Health came along to tell us about their prescription management system. The third day we were out and about. We went to the Cambridge Innovation Centre were small startups got a chance to start renting small office spaces on a monthly bases.

After three days in Boston we went to New York. There we met with Franklin Becker and watched the construction of the new building of the New York Times. We talked about change-management in new office spaces and talked about some other big projects in Manhattan.

The good thing about being on a study trip is that we hear people talking very engaging about their work and new challenges. In the bus everybody is getting more and more excited and having more and more ideas. The energy everybody is feeling is enormous, and just talking to each other and to the people we meet is making the energy grow exponentially. Back in The Netherlands everybody was feeling very energized and ready to get back to work, putting our ideas into practice!

Welcome

2008-03-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

This blog will be a place to talk about our studytrip in october 2008. We are going to the nordic countries to see about our line of business! I will come back here and talk about who are going, what we want to learn, who we are going to meet and many other things!