Technology

First published to Gigaom Research . Our customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms. This is how Google introduces the findings of its recent survey of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (PDF of full report .) The primary conclusion is presented up front: … collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line. This is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects. Simply complex If there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity and do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that complexity and complication are different things.) ...

First published to Gigaom Research . Cast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion. You may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation. We’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done. It’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness. ...

Updated 16th September, embedding the videos of the session below. The Global Commission on Internet Governance (ourinternet.org) was established in January 2014 to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. With work commencing in May 2014, the two-year project is conducting and supporting independent research on Internet-related dimensions of global public policy, culminating in an official commission report. ...

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman: Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up. He adds: … No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network. Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right? ...

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business: What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker Debating the purpose of business Talking garbage and the purpose of business Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time. The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker’s heuristic. ...

[Originally posted to the hi:project blog .] In an article in the Guardian last week , Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland mooted the potential for Google to cleave in two, with one part dedicated to providing a regulated bank-like service for data. Pentland directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, and I’m surprised how often his name crops up in my hi:project related research, yet I find it difficult to reconcile his observation here with his fluency in the power of decentralized networks : Social physics strongly suggest that the [Adam Smith’s] invisible hand is more due to trust, cooperation and robustness properties of the person-to-person network of exchanges than it is due to any magic in the workings of the market. If we want to have a fair, stable society, we need to look to the network of exchanges between people, and not to market competition. Pentland continues under the heading: How can we move from a market-centric to a human-centric society? ...

I have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening’s London meeting of the Change Management Institute . I’m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa . The image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine? ...

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in. The quantified self The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).” And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”. That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls : We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket. The quantified organization Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ : … a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state. ...

I help organisations work better, so how on Earth is that connected to the hi:project ? Given I dedicate not a small fraction of my time to this non-profit endeavour, I’m asked on occasion to explain how the two are related. The ‘HI’ of the hi:project stands for human interface. It’s our way of describing the technology we think should and will largely supplant the user interface, the UI. Here’s how I’ve begun to explain it of late … When we approach digital, we have a natural propensity to digitize the pre-digital; after all, that is all we know. That’s how we ended up sticking an ’e’ in front of mail for example, and went from having desktops, files and folders to, well, desktops, files and folders. Yet digital has unprecedented qualities – it just takes us a while to discover and exploit them. It’s only with the passing of decades for example that organisations can now explore alternatives to email. And filing stuff looks increasingly anachronistic with the power of near-instant search at our fingertips. In the same way, the UI is attached to the digital machine / service today because pre-digital physical machines had a physical interface. ...

The hi:project launches today. It’s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who’s monitoring our every action. I believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization’s success. The creation of mutual value begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story : ...