My links of the week (weekly)

• Engaged employees key to building a lucrative base of loyal customers | The Social Workplace

  “Any organization that provides any type of service can see sales decline if employee performance lags. Just as a customer will be unhappy if a service agent can’t answer a simple question, a company involved in a business-to-business relationship would likely be unsatisfied if a PR partner is unable to contain a negative story.”

  tags: engagement

• Communities of Practice – What I’ve Learnt | Communities and Collaboration

  “I  was recently asked  by a colleague to share some “words of wisdom” about what I’d learnt from 9 years of consultancy projects that involved setting up Communities of Practice. I could have written an essay on this topic (and maybe one day I will) but I thought I’d distill it down to the key points as follows:”

  tags: community_management

  • We don’t know what we don’t know.

• Your organization is already a wirearchy … ? | Wirearchy

  “The productivity platforms for organization are no longer Microsoft Office and ‘home-grown’ patchwork information management systems but large integrated ERP systems (like SAP) and collaboration-oriented platforms like Sharepoint or IBM Connections or one of a number of other lesser-known platforms (often integrated via APIs with a number of other SaaS-based capabilities). There are many ways for employees to connect with each other, as intranet solutions become more ‘social’. It’s likely that the executives and managers in your organization will have been hearing and reading about this networked world of work for at least 3 or 4 years now.”

  tags: enterprise_social_networks

  • The organization in which you work has probably involved everyone in using computers for at least 15 years now. People sit behind laptop or desktop screens, and increasingly are on the move or working remotely, using laptops, tablets and smartphones
  •  Wirearchy – a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology; knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results.
  • today it’s very likely that in your organization people are interconnected and are using their exchanges with each other and their participation in information flows to get work done and achieve objectives.
  • knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on achieving results .
  • Start with “why” – why should these new capabilities be used, and what for
  • more often than not people are operating in the psychological infrastructure of the traditional not-interconnected hierarchy.
  • Yes, I am over-simplifying here. But it is not an exaggeration to state that there has been anticipatory anxiety, trepidation or indifference by the organization’s C-Suite with regard to addressing the deep changes (both possible and imagined) that are generated by social computing.
  • . It was coined by members of the Dachis Group to denote business activities taking place in connected eco-systems of information.
  • the term « social business » arrived
  • the concept of « social business » as articulated by the Dachis Group borrowed heavily from the social science domain known as socio-technical systems theory.
  • But .. most organizations are still structured as classic traditional hierarchies, and the well-known « command-and-control » models of management (though now often structurally ‘softened’ by 2 decades of continuous change) are still in operation almost everywhere.

  • I’d like to suggest that it is critical to recognize, explicitly, that …

     

     
    1. networks are here to stay,

     

    2. future generations of knowledge workers accept these tools and dynamicss as a regular part of their lives

     

    3. the conditions are at hand for growing flexible and responsive learning organizations comprised of engaged people, and

     

    4. adaptation is fundamentally necessary; there are and will be significant payoffs from investments in social tools, collaborative platforms and engaged people
  • Almost everybody in the western world who would be considered a knowledge worker works daily behind a screen (desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone) and functions to some degree or other in a range of now well-known social networks.
  • The people and the information in and of your organization are already networked. Increasingly there’s a mis-match between the way an organization has been structured (wherein access to information and permission and freedom to act were arranged vertically through reporting relationships) and the way(s) it can be structured to operate more effectively and more ‘holistically’ in ubiquitous networked conditions.
  • The people in your organization are connected, whether to each other or to flows of information and knowledge.
  • The primary useful approach, I believe, is ONA (organizational network analysis) pioneered by Valdis Krebs, Rob Cross, Verna Allee, Jessical Lipnack, Patti Anklam and others. ONA is a derivative or sister concept of SNA (social network analysis) and now has established principles, practices, metrics, known challenges, etc.

• Tapping the potential of social media analytics tools

  “while the potential is there for achieving payback from social media analytics tools, their effectiveness isn’t always a given. Analysts and experienced users cite complexity and lack of a tangible return on investment among social media monitoring program challenges. While companies can use the software to collect customer data, they aren’t always sure what to do with the information once they have it.”

  tags: SNA

• The Evolution of Communities – Social Design and Key Metrics for Every Stage « The Community Manager

  “Ligaya Tichy joins us from early stage communities of Yelp and Airbnb; without hyperbole, she is legendary. Thankfully, she led us on a step by step guide on building community from Day 1 to Market Leader, calling upon her many years of experience to color a fantastic bible of community for us.”

  tags: community_management

• The State and Future of Enterprise Collaboration Zyncro Blog: the blog of the Enterprise 2.0

  “I think this pretty much sums up where a lot of corporations are today; they have implemented new communication and collaboration tools, but they still have a lot of work to do ahead to figure out how to use them to develop better ways of working, as well as how to create good conditions for information workers that supports the change process.”

  tags: collaboration

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.