Monday, August 23, 2010

The business case for social intranets

As I argued in my previous post "Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers" (originally named “Serving the long tail of information needs”) there’s a long tail of information needs to be served within knowledge intensive enterprises, and which can't be served with the use of traditional intranets.

Organizations typically try to serve their employee's information needs by producing varying types of content (text, images, video…) which is intended to communicate a message to, inform, the employees. Due to limited resources, all information needs cannot possibly be served. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it’s usually drawn where the cost of providing a certain kind of content exceeds the potential value of the information that the receivers can gain when extracting information from the content (assuming that the value is created when the content is actually consumed, i.e. transforming into information by the receiver). This is illustrated by the dashed horizontal link in the Long Tail power law graph for information needs illustrated below.


Although sometimes blunt and misguiding (as when there is information which is supposed to be never be used, but yet is absolutely critical to provide access to - such as a Standard Operating Procedures for emergency situations in a power plant), content usage rate (or popularity, if you like) is the easiest way to estimate the value of a certain piece of content, and thereby the information extracted from it. The reasoning is simple; if many people request a certain kind of information, it is likely they see value in it. So if many employees request a certain kind of information, it is likely to be valuable enough for the organization to supply that information to them.

Then what’s the cost of information? Well, a simple way to define it is to define it as the sum of all activities that it takes to supply an audience with a certain kind of information. The lower the cost, the more information needs we can serve. That’s basically why we use media and information technology – to lower the supply costs of information.



Assuming this is true for a lot of the information needs that exists over time in an organization, then the organization have two major challenges to address concerning all the information needs that make the cut (has a value / cost above 1):

1. Make sure the information is, if possible, captured into some content and made accessible.
2. Make sure the content is as easy to access and consume (interpret and understand) as possible

The second challenge usually presents great potential for improvements in most organizations. You might be familiar with the now classic the IDC report from 2001 by analyst Susan Feldman, "The high cost of not finding information" (which you can read about in this whitepaper). Feldman’s research showed that average knowledge workers spent 15% to 35% of their workday searching for information. 15% of the time was spent on duplicating existing information and searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less. Even though 10 years have passed since the findings of the research was presented, I’m pretty sure it holds true also today. As an example, Laurie Buczek,Social Media Strategist and Platform Vision Team Manager at Intel, partly motivated Intel's investment in social computing in the following way:
"The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity and opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action."
Although the costs of not being able to find and access information fast enough are typically high, the costs of not being able to find a certain piece of information at all is potentially even greater. Rework, delays, suffering customer service, bad decision-making…you name it. All of these things happen frequently due to the lack of access to the right information in the right time - and quite often due to the fact that the information isn't accessible in the first place.

These problems can partly be addressed by making sure all information that has been captured and encoded into content can be accessed and found by anyone who needs it. Yet, it is safe to say that the vast majority of all information and knowledge we have haven’t been captured and encoded into content. Sometimes because it can’t be, but as often as not it’s not been captured due to the high cost of capturing, storing, organizing, managing and delivering it.

The thing is that many orgs don't bother much with the first challenge if they have just been able to produce and provide access to information that is worth managing. The problem is that there are lots and lots of valuable information which does not make the cut. Information that either never becomes accessible, or where access is very limited because it resides in email inboxes, in collaboration spaces that people won't find or access unless they knows about it already and either has access or asks for it, on user desktops, on file servers not indexed by the intranet search engine, and do forth.

So what makes a certain piece of info worth managing? Well, if the value / cost quote is higher than 1, we'll produce, store, organize, manage and distribute it to the users. Given that most of this content will be found in the long neck, that’s where we will focus most of our efforts and resources.


For content where the value / cost quote is equal to or lower than 1, we're likely not going to manage it. We'll much rather not produce or capture it. We'll even delete it if already exists, so that it does not get in the way of other content that we need to manage.


Now, we should ask ourselves what would happen if the following was to become true:

  • The cost of producing, storing, managing and distributing information decreases radically due to new practices and technologies
  • The resources we have available to do this are not longer limited to a fraction of the workforce, but the entire workforce can be used, even resources from the outside - for free?

Would this change the game plan?


YES.

By coincidence, these things have now happened.

Thanks to the (technological) development during recent years, we now have technologies available which allow us to communicate and share information with other people, across time and space, in a variety of ways. If you need to have a rich, two-way and real-time conversation with an audience you do not know in advance and want anyone to be able to join, you can do that. If you only need to send a small text message to one specific recipient while you are out on a run in the park, you can do that. If you want to be able to discover, connect and collaborate with like-minded people across the globe who you don’t yet know, you can do that.

The access to these communication tools is also being democratized as virtually anyone who possesses basic computer skills and a device that can access the Internet can get access to and use the tools anytime and from anywhere they want. For free. No education or training required.

Until quite recently, the only way to reach a large audience with a message was to broadcast it via print (newspapers, books…), tv or radio. Now you can be a one-man media corporation and reach as many people as any of the big old media corporations. The great power than comes with mass-communication, which for long have been restricted to those who could afford to buy and own the production means and whp had the education and training required to operate the tools, that power is now available to anyone. That’s a really big shift which has lead to a sort of new Renaissance – one that is not restricted to an intellectual class, but which anyone can join by engaging with other people in the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook.



As a result of these changes, more and more of the conversations where we exchange information and knowledge with each other are taking place online instead of face-to-face or via telephony. Content is produced as a bi-product of our conversations. With virtual collaboration becoming the norm even when we meet face-to-face or just need to talk to each other, the things we say and do are being captured and encoded into various forms of content such as voice, video, photos and text. The dark matter of the business universe is becoming visible and accessible as our business conversations are being captured instead of being transient and passing by without a notice, only touching a those individuals who participated in a specific conversation.

In short, the cost of communicating has collapsed.

What is interesting is how the information and knowledge exchanged through these various kinds of conversations now is easily captured and can be made available to people who did not participate in the conversation. Content is increasingly being created as a bi-product of conversations. This is to be contrasted with the typical approach where we capture and encode the information into content (documents etc) before it is communicated. For information that is encoded into content this way, one can definitely say that the cost of producing content has collapsed. And here lies the great opportunity when it comes to being able to serve the long tail of information needs; if the information exchanged in our conversations can easily be captured and shared, then some of this information is likely.


To do this we must first make it possible for people to find/discover, connect and communicate with each other in various ways (blogs, web conferencing, micro-blogging, IM/chat) so that the information can be captured into content (text, video, sound…). We must have a platform that empowers and a culture that encourages people to communicate and collaborate with each other.

We must also find ways to store and collectively organize the content so that it can be found or discovered and used by anyone who might need it. Here we can learn a lot from the social web and the use of Web 2.0 technologies and how search, tagging, links, and metadata created from explicit and implicit user activities to make information findable even when there is an abundance of information available to us.


Again, just as I argued in “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers”, we need to focus more on creating filters to handle the abundance of information than trying to stop the inflow of information. We need to stop seeing information supply as a problem to be solved (by trying to delimit it) and instead focus on how to satisfy information demand. By using information about our own social connections, the exchange we have with them, and the activities they do, we can employ social filtering techniques to “pull” relevant information. By letting not only any systems you use but also your friends and colleagues become aware of what you’re interested in, currently working on, planning to do, and so on, you can create an attraction to yourself that will “pull” relevant information to you, even information you didn't know existed or you didn’t know you where looking for. Instead of having to spend a lot of time and effort on searching for information, you will get more of your information needs served by social filtering; manual and automatic recommendations on what information might be relevant for you.



To me it's clear that most enterprises, especially knowledge intensive, need a platform that provides the capabilities which I have mentioned above. There are many reasons as it can help them make better use of shared knowledge, improve decision-making, increase agility and responsiveness, and facilitate innovation. If innovation, like Idris Motee says, “is like ping-pong", it is because ideas need to be bounced back and forth before they mature and can attract the right people who can bring it to the market. If an organization really considers innovation to be important, it should engage everyone and make innovation everybody's business. It should provide a ping-pong table, give every coworker, partner and customer a racket to play with, and invite them to play.

To me, it is a feasible (pragmatic) strategy to extend and transform the traditional intranet into a social intranet that incorporates these new capabilities. With the risk that using the term “intranet” adds terminology baggage that might cause problems, I have chosen to accept that the expression “social intranet” seems to stick to people’s minds. Using an existing term will likely help people learn about the new things faster than "Enterprise Social Software Platform" (ESSP) possibly could - at least during a transitional phase. There will certainly be a few who will just put lipstick on a pig and call it a "social intranet", but I don’t expect that many people to be fooled to believe that adding some features such as commenting for corporate news stories and profile pages will really transform a traditional intranet into social intranet.

Most people will, if they' don't already, come to understand that a social intranet is not just about adding features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds, social bookmarking and micro-blogging on top of a traditional intranet; it's about rethinking the purpose of intranets with the intention of bringing the paradigm shift in how we communicate and collaborate that is taking place on the web to the very core of how enterprises are operated and managed. A social intranet needs to be seen as a strategic component when trying to do this.
Although the notion of social intranets is quite new, the business case for social intranets is anything but new. In fact, it has existed as long as there have been enterprises, and it’s growing stronger and stronger the more vital timely access to the right information and knowledge becomes for an enterprise in order to compete and thrive. The business case can easily be summarized, as in this quote from the 2001 IDC whitepaper mentioned above:
“While the costs of not finding information are enormous, they are hidden within the enterprise, and therefore they are rarely perceived as having an impact on the bottom line. Decisions are usually information problems. If they are made with poor or erroneous information, then they put the life of the enterprise at stake. Therefore, it behooves the enterprise to provide the best information-finding tools available and to ensure that all of its intellectual assets have access to them, no matter where they reside.”
It’s high time to start serving the long tail of information needs.
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

What some managers like to do most

(I was obviously inspired by Jessica Hagy.)
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Monday, August 16, 2010

Be good

The increasing transparency that follows the digitalization of our lives and work is a delicate and complex matter.

At work, the increasing transparency poses an immediate threat to people who repeatedly make bad decisions because they’re not competent enough for their jobs, who hide from their responsibilities, who conspire and intrigue against others to defend or strengthen their positions, or who hoard information and censor information flows hoping to gain personal competitive advantages. For obvious reasons they don’t want to have these - often socially and morally - unacceptable decisions and actions (or lack thereof) put on display.

In tomorrow’s business environment, transparency will be the new black. Traits such as honesty, directness, authenticity, openness, and respectfulness will not just look good in the age of transparency – they will be necessary for staying in business.

I guess there’s a simple advice to all of us... 

Be good.

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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers

“Flexible access to people and resources can be enormously powerful in a world driven by changes that, more often than not, lead us in unanticipated directions…we need to become more adept at ‘capability leverage’ – finding and accessing complementary capabilities, wherever they reside in the world, to deliver more value.”  
- From “The Power of Pull” by J Hagel, J S Brown, L Davidson 
Businesses, in particular in the Western world, are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work. A study by The Work Foundation has estimated that we have a 30-30-40 workforce - 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content.

Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work – which is information and knowledge – vary from time to time, from situation to situation. So does the purpose, activities, roles and resources involved in knowledge work. Knowledge work is also less structured and the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work proceeds.

In a knowledge-intensive business environment, it is often very hard or even impossible to anticipate in advance what information is needed. You simply cannot know what information will be relevant before the moment you need it. The information might not exist until the moment you need it, or you are simply unaware of its existence. That’s why more is better (“more is more”) when it comes to information supply in a knowledge-intensive business environment. If there is more to choose from, chances are there will be something for (almost) any need. That’s also why it has become critical for knowledge workers to access to the information abundance on the Internet. We also need to have immediate access to anyone who might possess the knowledge and information we need but which is not captured – often because it is hard to capture or simply does not allow itself to be captured (tacit knowledge) and exchanged.

There’s a long tail of information needs that still needs to be served

Assuming we have a long tail of diverse, constantly changing and virtually unlimited amount of information needs, we need to do what can be done to serve these needs in some way or another. The problem is that the information resources that most businesses choose to produce and provide access are not aimed at serving these infrequent, uncertain and constantly changing information needs. Let’s use the Long Tail power graph below to illustrate and further expand this reasoning.



In the left end of the power graph we have the information resources which are most frequently used because they are serving frequently recurring information needs. The information which is needed for transformational and transactional activities - but also administrative knowledge work - is likely to be served by information resources in the left part of the Long Tail power graph. This information does not change very often and thus can be quite easily reused. It’s the kind of information used for commonly performed activities, which means that the information needs are predictable. An information need that has occurred once will for certain occur again. This allows us to define, design and produce the type and structure of the information as well as the actual information before the next time the information need arises (the activity is performed).

Knowledge work is often a completely different story. While the information used us input to an activity or process is likely to be found in the left part of the Long Tail power graph, the information needed for a knowledge work activity is likely to be found in the long tail. There you have information resources which are used infrequently or maybe even once. The information which is needed varies from time to time, from situation to situation. Not only the actual information varies; often the type and structure of the information resource varies too. This makes it virtually impossible to define a reusable information resource in advance before it is needed.

The unpredictable nature of knowledge work is why we need to give knowledge workers access to all information that exists and that might be relevant. Since we don’t know what might be relevant until a certain need arises (which we never might be aware of until we discover certain information), we can’t really put the relevant information in one “for keeps” pile and all other information in another “to be trashed” pile. We also need to provide them with tools so they can create or capture information with each other, or else there will not be enough information available to serve the knowledge workers’ information needs. To help people find and discover information that is relevant to their tasks when they need it, we also need to create powerful pull mechanisms which allow relevant information to automatically surface and be placed at the fingertips of knowledge workers just when they need it.

Traditional intranets are not designed for knowledge work

This leads me to the changing role of intranets in knowledge-intensive businesses. These intranets need to provide flexible access to both information and people by employing pull models for serving as many knowledge worker information needs as possible, including unanticipated information needs. Information supply needs to be maximized by supporting the creation and access to user-generated content as well as by allowing for easy integration of external information sources. The intranet needs to be turned into an “information broker platform” where information is freely and easily created, aggregated, shared, found and discovered at minimal effort.  Such an intranet gives everybody access to all information which is available and make room for virtually infinite amounts of information.

However, most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks. These intranets are push platforms. As such they might work well for repeatable routine work where the information needs can be defined in advanced, but they are quite dysfunctional for knowledge work. It’s not a coincidence that many knowledge workers find it much easier to find information on the web than in their internal systems and that the intranet plays a marginal role in their daily work.

The information that knowledge workers need can often not be anticipated and served by a push-based intranet. It is also critical that they have access to ALL information that is available, including collaborative content produced by teams, content produced by external resources, tacit knowledge captured in conversations, and so forth. Since the information artifacts on an intranet typically are produced by a relatively small part of the organization’s total workforce, the resources available for producing these information resources are limited. A line needs to be drawn between information needs which can be served and those which cannot be served. A common approach is to identify the most common information needs and focus available resources on serving these needs as good as possible. Assuming that the resources for producing and maintaining information resources are scarce, this is a seemingly feasible approach. But it’s not a feasible approach for an intranet that needs to serve the highly varying, extensive and unpredictable information needs of knowledge workers.

To conclude: a major reason why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers is that all information they provide access to is produced with a push-based production model. This model assumes that all information resources on the intranet must be produced in advance (only serving information needs which can be anticipated) by a small subset of all available resources (employees) and that the entire body of information needs to be supervised by a few people for the purpose of controlling the message, format and/or organization of the information resources.

Knowledge workers need a social intranet 

There are plenty of definitions trying to define what a social intranet is, but most of the ones I’ve seen have not been able to see beyond tools and technologies. They don't succeed in describing the paradigm change that is transforming intranets into something completely different from what they are today.


The social intranet is not just about adding a layer of social collaboration tools; it is a platform that combines the powers of push with the powers of pull to supply anyone who participates and contributes within an extended enterprise with the information, knowledge and connections they need to make the right decisions and act to fulfill their objectives. It equips everyone with the tools that allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate. It connects information demand with information supply in knowledge-intensive businesses, something which can only be done by involving all employees in the information supply, removing bottle-necks created by the production model (such as approval workflows and that everything must fit in a central taxonomy) and enabling employee-to-employee information exchange.

When it comes to information supply, the previously dominating "less is more" paradigm is being replaced by a "more is more" paradigm. A social intranet must necessarily be designed for information abundance. The increasing volume of information resources needs to be seen as opportunity to be embraced rather than as a problem – a problem which can only be solved by reducing the body of information down to an amount which can be managed by a few people (relatively to the entire population of the extended enterprise).

Although too many options can decrease your performance and create stress, information abundance does not equal an abundance of choice; the social intranet is a pull platform with mechanisms for automatically attracting relevant information and people to you. What’s important is that the options you are presented with are relevant and usable. But that’s another issue. The point is that the information you need is not there in the first place, chances are that none of the options you will be presented with will do. That’s of course an unwanted situation as you might not be able to perform your task or you might make an incorrect decision that can have serious consequences. Deliberately hindering information to reach people is not the way to avoid the sensation commonly called information overload, because as Clay Shirky argues the problem is not the amount of information but rather that the filters we have fail to sort it properly for us. We need to get the filters in place instead of blaming and demonizing ("Tsunami of data", "firehose of information" etc) information supply and arguing that the only way to solve this "problem" is to limit supply.

The social intranet also has an important part to play when it comes to supporting serendipity; enabling people to find both information and people they didn’t know they were looking for. To do so it must have mechanisms that allow information and people that might be useful to us to be pulled to us. Spending time and effort searching for relevant information and people where there is information abundance just won’t pay off. We must have ways that “automagically” attract useful information and connections to us. We just need to implicitly and explicitly share what do and know to other people in our networks, to people who share our interests, or to people who happen to pass us by at any other kind of cross-road.

Needless to say, the push-based production model used for most intranets will still have an important role to play - but only as a component within a social intranet. It will continue to serve the most common, stable and predictable information needs. Even though it is important and sometimes critical that these can be served efficiently and effectively, the greatest value that can be created with the use of an intranet relies on the long tail of information. This is because the long tail of information supports the core of a knowledge-intensive modern business: the knowledge work.
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Monday, June 28, 2010

It's not about Facebook, stupid!

Every time I read about or hear someone use the expression "Facebook for the enterprise" when trying to explain how social software and social networking in particular can be used within an enterprise context, I scream inside my head; "Damn you, you're pouring gasoline on a fire! It's partly your fault I often have to spend 20 valuable minutes explaining that Enterprise 2.0 is NOT about bringing Facebook to the enterprise when I meet with potential new customers to talk about Enterprise 2.0."

If there is one analogy you should avoid when trying to explain the potential uses of social software for enterprises, it is the Facebook analogy. In my experience, there is no better way to scare an executive or social media skeptic than to use the words "Facebook" and "enterprise" in the same sentence.

Why? Well, because most people who hear the word "Facebook" do not see beyond Facebook (which is not that strange if you think about it). What most of them see is likely a web site where they can connect with friends, tell them what they're up to, and share photos, links and video clips with each other. Some - still a minority I hope - see it as a place where they play Farmville. Social media sceptics (a.k.a. non-Facebook users) see it as a site where people seem to spend a lot of time doing private stuff at work. The typical executive or manager sees it as a productivity drainer.

What is true or not does not matter. What matters is people's perceptions of Facebook.

The point here is that most users don't think about what's under the hood of Facebook and how that technology can be used for other purposes in other contexts, such as for professional networking or knowledge sharing within an enterprise context. It's just too abstract. That's why the "Facebook for the enterprise" expression does more damage than good to Enterprise 2.0.

So stop using the Facebook analogy right away! If you feel a desperate need to make an analogy between an external social networking site and enterprise social networking, then show good judgement by choosing LinkedIn instead of Facebook. In contrast to Facebook, LinkedIn is at least something most people associate with professional use.

(The great folks at NewsGator have used this expression before but now seems to have dropped it. I hope no-one takes this personal, as I'm only playing with words in order to make what I think is an important point.)
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Wednesday, June 9, 2010

There's no shortcut to the future workplace

On several occasions, on this blog and elsewhere, I've discussed why and how culture matters for Enterprise 2.0 to happen. In my most recent posts, I've specifically discussed how certain values and cultural characteristics are pre-requisites for Enterprise 2.0 to happen:


My main point is that there is no chicken or the egg situation: Sure, a culture change can be supported and accelerated by technology, but there must always be a spark somewhere - a culture or subculture (a social group that shares certain values and behaviors) - that initiates this change.

If you, like me, are interested in what makes collaboration tick and what it might take besides technologies to make Enterprise 2.0 happen, there are a few readings you should look into.

First, there's a fascinating read by Rob Paterson about the new virtual workplace at IBM. To illustrate the culture shift that is taking place at IBM, he describes how my friend Luis Suarez can control his own time and work space. Location just doesn’t matter as Luis can work from anywhere at any time -be it at an airport, at an office, or at his home in small village on the Canary Islands. This is achieved by making sure he and his fellow 200 000 coworkers at IBM can be connected to each other and any colleague at anytime from anywhere. But technology is just an enabler of the new virtual work place. The key to make the new work place happen is, as Rob puts it, to “stop measuring presence – i.e. punching the clock as at a factory – and to start measuring results and outcomes”. Such a shift requires a real change in corporate values and behaviors.

Another great read is “Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and corporate culture awareness” by Gil Yehuda in which he shares some really good examples and counter examples of supportive cultures to help him make his point:
I say, the path to Enterprise 2.0 is paved on a supportive culture. If you don’t have a supportive culture, it’s nearly impossible to find real success with any social tools (beyond small scale deployments — which may be very successful for your team, but not at the enterprise level).
If you roll it out, don’t expect “they will come”. It’s not that simple. You have to tune into the underlying culture to see if it can support Enterprise 2.0. I believe some companies have a culture unwelcoming to Enterprise 2.0 — at least now. I also believe that in time this will change as a new generation of leadership emerges in the post-recession economy.
A different but very related perspective on how culture matters is provided by Tony H in his post "Your Culture is Your Brand" which explains how companies, like it or not, are becoming more and more transparent and that their brands are shaped by the sum of all interactions customers have with anyone at the company.
The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate every possible touchpoint that could influence the perception of your company’s brand.
At Zappos.com, we decided a long time ago that we didn’t want our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing. We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience. We believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department, it should be the entire company.
So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term?
In a word: culture.

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Sunday, May 30, 2010

These are the times for explorers

In a few years from now we will see more clearly that the real paradigm shift we are experiencing right now is that we are leaving the hierarchical, static and sequential approach to designing organizations, processes and systems for more organic, dynamic and network-oriented approaches.

The currently dominating way to organize an enterprise stems from the early 20th century and is by design not well suited for today's ever changing, global and dynamic business environment. It was designed for scalability in a stable business environment, not for agility in a constantly changing and sometimes disruptive business environment. The premise on which this model was built has been the fact that the cost and complexity of communicating and thus also the cost and complexity of organizing labor and other resources has been high.

The technology development during recent decades has changed this by radically reducing the costs of communicating. As a result of this, we are also seeing new ways of communicating and collaborating emerge. This has changed the assumptions on which the industrial enterprise has been built. What we are experiencing now is a disconnect between this new emerging reality and the way we are used to designing and running enterprises. This can be seen as either a threat or an opportunity. It is a threat to enterprises which are pretending as if the old reality is still valid and choose to do nothing about it (or just redesign themselves based on the same old principles). It is an opportunity to enterprises which see this new reality as a way to design and run their operations and management in a way that will make them thrive in the new business environment.

Nobody knows what, when and how things will change. The only thing we can be sure of is that things will change, and that those of us who are able to quickly find out (or rather guess) how and how to adapt will have a clear benefit. 

These are the times for explorers. 


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