Paris - a model for IT Arrchitecture

I notices this article from the McKinsey Quarterly http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/Infrastructure/The_Paris_guide_to_IT_architecture_853 . I blogged nearly a year ago now on this topic after a visit to Paris. Clearly there are many other thought leaders appreciating the foresight of the Paris city planners!

European Sojourn

Just getting to the end of my European Sojourn. The Conference in Milan on Enterprise 2.0 was a huge success .... over-subscribed with over 500 attendees. Not bad for a recession. Even better the talks are all on-line here http://enterprise2forum.it/cms/pages/home-en-2009/agenda.php .... though for some talks you need to understand Italian.... but not mine :)

Just came back from an SNA/ONA project workshop with a progressive UK council who want to change the way public programs are delivered from the current "project office" approach which is not working well, toward a more peer to peer partnership model. Challenging but will be game changing if we pull it off.

A brief break in Morocco reminded me as to how powerful the human network can be, especially when the participants are as strongly motivated to sell you something as these enthsiastic Africans. The speed with which your needs are communicated to the "partner/relative" at the next corner is mind boggling. Made me think about the ubiquitous call centre. Even the best technology in the hands of unmotivated staff will still result in a lousy service. Just think how powerful a third world country would be if they had the same technology matched with their exceptional enthusuiasm to serve/sell.

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 - Milan

I'm on my way to speak at http://enterprise2forum.it/cms/pages/home-en-2009.php?lang=EN this time in Milan, Italy. There was a big crowd last year in Varese and apparently the numbers will exceed 500 this year so the event appears to be recession proof! And what better way to survive a recession than to collaborate more with E2.0 tools. My talk is less technical though and more on the underpinning corporate social capital theme. We will also be doing an affinity sociogram for the attendees (c/- Cai Kjaer). More on this after (and during) the event.

Death of the corporate portal?

Maybe thats a bit harsh ... but as a former corporate KM person I know how hard it is to encourage staff to participate in collaborative corporate portals. A couple of years ago I met a lady from a global portal software provider who was dispairing about how someone had set up a Linkedin group for their firm which attacted in a matter of days hundreds of members. In contrast getting people to join up with the corporate portal was like pulling teeth. We don't have to speculate long to understand why this is so. Just this past week I was speaking with my Italian partners Open Knowledge who have a project with another vendor to help them understand the nature of their LinkedIn groups and how they might be able to influence the members.

Just scouting the LinkedIn groups of some major portal software companies who no doubt have excellent internal portals (at least from a software perspective) I can see lots of informal groups with many members: e.g. Oracle (78 coporate groups; biggest with 1,000+ members); SAP (105; 3,000+); Microsoft (150; 5,000+); EMC (13; 2,000+); IBM (91;10,000+). Obviously not all are current employees but where is the corporate knowledge going to reside in the future?

Two very different publishing experiences!

It will probably never happen again (at least for me) but having never published a book before I had two books hit the market in the same month! My book on IT Governance in the Networked World http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=33275&v=tableOfContents went down the traditional route ... 6 months to write and then 12 months from final manuscript to book on my shelf. Several editing and reviewing stages, marketing etc etc.. The second book was unplanned. A German academic publisher found my PhD thesis on-line and offered to publish it in book form at no cost. All I had to do is upload it with some additonal information and select some cover designs and press the button. All in all about 6 weeks from submission to book on my shelf (actually beating the conventional book by 2 weeks, not to mention the conventional book being sent not to my home address, but to the address of an old employer of more than 2 years ago ... you would think a simple email confirming an address might be more effective than I suspect googling me!). Both books now sit proudly together on the Amazon site http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Laurence+Lock+Lee&x=14&y=17 showing publications dates just 7 days apart, making me look a far more prolific a writer than I really am. Now I'd have to say that the traditional path book is of a much superior quality, hard covered and very professional looking. But you can't tell that on Amazon :)

One can't help but think that there has to be a middle ground and I think it will be through the use of social media. I had a conversation with Wiki evangelist Stuart Mader http://www.ikiw.org/stewart/ in a cafe in San Fancisco last year where we chatted, amongst other things, about our book publishing experiences. He managed to convince his traditional publisher to use a wiki to develop his book on wikipatterns. His time to market was similar to my second experience, though with a superior editing process happening concurrently as the book was being written. I'll definitely be trying this path next time!

Paper makes Social Science Research Network's top 10 downloads

My co-author of a paper I presented at an Intellectual capital conference in Matera, Italy last year posted the paper up on the SSRN web site last week. I haven't had a paper posted there before so I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email to say it was in the top 10 downloads. The paper is entitled "The Role of Corporate Social Capital on Business Innovation Networks" and is available for free download here.

Hargraves Innovation Conference 2009

The Hargraves Institute is a think tank comprised of member organisations committed to success through innovation. I was fortunate enough to be invited to provide a keynote speech at their conference this year. The conference was well attended with over 200 registrants, demonstrating that despite the current financial climate, innovation is seen as critical to both survival and thriving longer term. In fact as Optimice we played a more active role than previously. My business partner, Cai Kjaer, conducted a short interest profile of the registrants and then created a large affinity map showing how the registrants were related to each other via common interests. The map was a huge success and a real conversation piece. We intend to replicate this for other events now.

On the conference itself I was pleased to see that networks figured prominantly and that many of the 1st day speakers provided an excellent entre to my own opening speech for day 2. Narelle Kennedy from the Australian Business Foundation reported on a significant research study on common attributes of a successful innovation. The critical elements like being people centric, people networks, tacit knowledge flows etc.. aligned wonderfully with my own topic on trust networks and the speed of trust in innovation.

Daryl Mann from Systematic Innovations spoke of innovations occurring at the point of contradiction i.e. solutions that solve contradictions tend to be the most successful innovations. Daryl noted that the ipod had demonstrated this and did not require major market research to achieve this. I view organisational network analysis as solving the contradiction between top down and peer to peer management.

John Russell from Russell Mineral Equipment gave a very earthy (excuse the pun) talk on how his company had achieved award winning innovations. Of note to me was the critical innovation brokering role that his chief engineer played. The chief engineer has no direct reports yet is one of the highest paid employees that he has. Congratulations to John for recognising the value of the broker/bridge.

This is just a snippet of all the good talks and discussion had. Congratulations to Hargraves for anothe wonderful conference and learning experience. We should have both my own and Cai's presentations up on our web site shortly. The talks were all filmed by Hargraves so perhaps you will also have access to this online soon.