Web 2.0 Survey
I came across an interesting survey about Web 2.0 conducted by McKinsey in January this year: “How businesses are using Web 2.0”. Nearly 3000 executives from all over the world replied.
Web 2.0 is seen to consist of the following elements/technologies (referring to the article):
Blogs like this one, online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below).
Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.
Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example would be a program that pulls apartment listings from one site and displays them on a Google map to show where the apartments are located.
Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos, or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. Unlike the traditional method of storing a file on one machine—which can become a bottleneck if many people try to access it at once—P2P distributes files across many machines, often those of the users themselves. Some systems retrieve files by gathering and assembling pieces of them from many machines.
Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.
Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and LinkedIn. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.
Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.
Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.
By far the biggest investment is done or has been done in web services, then follows collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking. For the rest more companies are planning to invest than have actually invested. The difference to companies already engaged is generally rather low in this segment with the exception of blogs and mash-ups which are currently not so much favored. 54% of respondents though plan to invest in mash-ups so this looks like the trend of the near future.
I also found the regional analysis interesting. China is the most advanced region to use (or plan to use) peer-to-peer networks, collective intelligence and social networks! North America is leading with blogs and RSS, wikis and mash-ups are most used in India.
The industry that will invest most in Web 2.0 technologies in the next 3 years is the retail industry followed by high tech. Technology is mostly used to interact with customers, suppliers and partners but to the biggest extent to manage internal collaboration with the two main areas knowledge management and product design & development.
Proof that Web 2.0 has a benefit to companies fostering multiple relationships. As Web 2.0 gets increasingly important HR needs to get familiar with the benefits of those technologies for employee engagement.
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Posted at
01:23PM Apr 16, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Web 2.0! Enterprise 2.0! HR 2.0?
Peter Reiser is really working on interesting stuff which he lays out in his blog “Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity”. He is using the case of Sun's internal Customer Engineering Web to describe how effectively set up a community or formal network within an enterprise. Let me pick this up and give some thoughts on why I think Human Resources needs to embrace Web 2.0 more. I even believe HR's involvement is crucial on a company's path to Enterprise 2.0. The article “The 21st-century organization” gives a lot of evidence on this and I will use parts of it in this entry.
I actually see 4 different benefits to using Web 2.0 mechanisms in and beyond the enterprise:
Knowledge Management: Employees contribute and share content via a network platform or portal that has all Web 2.0 features like tagging (which creates a folksonomy), wikis, search engines and voting in order to systemize the content and make finding content as well as contributing it really easy minimizing search and coordination cost.
“Knowledge workers” (also referred to as “tacit employees”) in many industries (e.g. high tech industry) account for 25 percent or more of the workforce. They undertake key line activities and are the innovators of new business ideas. Therefor it is key for the productivity and even innovation capabilities of a company to create an environment that motivates them to give the best.
HR can play a major role initiating these communities and platforms and implement the recognition model around it to secure motivation of employees to contribute high value content. Employees who are main contributors and highly valued could be voted by the community to become a member in a special group of employees who will have access to a set of benefits like being part of management teams as advisor, or have the possibility to pursue specific career paths.
Skill Management: Through active participation in the community employees will make their reputation as experts for specific areas. In addition every employee could be asked to establish a personal page which describes his/her experience in the form of tags. Then employees with specific experience could be found easily via search.
On the other hand the company would have the possibility to know if there were only one or two experts in a high demand area and could start initiatives building those missing skills.
Learning departments in most companies belong to HR, so this area is a key HR topic. HR and the learning organization should be the driver of implementing innovative Web 2.0 models to do skills management in an enterprise.
Communication: The most obvious element of Web 2.0 benefits for communication are probably blogs. Internally they can be used for information sharing and as discussion boards for new ideas. The web based communities foster communication amongst their participants integrating remote working employees and teams. They facilitate communication across organization boundaries. In times of an increasing matrix environment it becomes more and more critical to provide an environment for employees to gain more easy and comfortable access to information in order to participate in business processes.
HR has a crucial interest in good internal communication to create an open company culture, overcome organizational barriers and keep employee morale and motivation high. The internal communication function is mostly tied to HR.
Partner Relationships: It may not be obvious why internal communities should be expanded to external partners like customers, suppliers or resellers. There are multiple benefits: tie them to the company, keep them informed and give access to crucial information but also receive the benefit of more members participating to the community and sharing contents.
All of the above benefits are based on a community of actively participating employees or simply the benefit of established formal networks. HR can initiate these networks, can help formalize the role of the network within the organization, can make sure that an owner of a network is found and established, can develop incentives for membership, can create frameworks with standards and protocols that makes the network flourish.
A formal network with specific areas of economic accountability can be used instead of a matrix structure as it often serves to attain the same goals with the difference (and benefit) of having to manage a community of self directed employees instead of a hierarchy. It makes working horizontally far more cost effective and takes tension out of the system. The performance management of self directed employees on the other hand is critical. To motivate behavior, measuring performance is more important than providing financial incentives to reward it. Metrics must be established and tailored to individual roles and people.
Overall, creating a state of the art environment will make employees feel more valued and does not only lead to higher productivity but also retains employees!
Posted at
09:41PM Mar 25, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Resiliency
In a meeting in California last week I had the chance to learn about resiliency. Liisa Välkangas from the Woodside Institute presented how companies can acquire the capacity to change in order to enable themselves to avoid turnarounds. She states in her article “The Quest for Resilience” that “a turnaround is a testament to a company's lack of resilience. A turnaround is a transformation tragically delayed.”
The article lists 4 challenges to address for a company to become change resilient. The first one is that senior managers need to overcome denial. Many changes do not come overnight, they announce themselves one way or the other. But in most cases executives do not want to see it. To keep themselves attuned to change they should visit places where changes happen first, no matter if it is a nanotechnology lab or one of London's trendiest clubs, they should surround themselves with innovators not with self-protecting bureaucrats and they should face the inevitability of strategy decay.
Secondly companies should commit themselves to broad-based, small-scale strategic experimentation. Like Sun did with Java. The start was an experiment, dedicating a handful programers to a project, keeping them away from corporate bureaucracy and see what is coming out. For this purpose they thirdly need to liberate resources. And finally companies need to embrace the paradox between the relentless pursuit of efficiency and the restless exploration of new strategic option.
If you found this interesting you might want to read how we can develop individual resiliency. There is a booklet guiding through 9 areas of development: acceptance of change, continuous learning, self empowerment, sense of purpose, personal identity, personal and professional networks, reflection, skill shifting and your relationship to money.
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Posted at
07:25PM Dec 08, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Virtual Organizations
This week-end I started reading an article from Dave Ulrich about the role of the HR Professional in the Virtual Organization which is Chapter 5 of a book about Human Resources in Virtual Organizations. I mentioned Ulrich in my blog about Our HR Organization as the provider of the organizational framework for the reorganization we did several years ago. In this article dating from 2002 Ulrich sets the stage for the HR work of the 21. century.
New organizational forms have emerged in today's economy: organizations characterized by horizontal structures, organizations that are working as alliances or networks, shared services structures etc. All of them entail a virtual organization.
Why are companies moving to these organizational forms? Through the web all players are more informed than ever. Targeting key customers, searching for the appropriate suppliers has become easier and less costly. Because of these and other transaction costs decreasing with technology the traditional organization looses it's value going from industrial age to information age.
Ronald H. Coase created the transaction cost approach to the theory of the firm. He defines three types of transaction costs:
search and information costs are the costs of finding others to do business with and determining if they could be trusted (suppliers, partners etc.)*
bargaining and decision costs or contracting costs are the costs of lawyers, time for negotiations, etc.
policing and enforcement costs or coordination costs are the costs of making the delivery process work.
*In Masood's blog you can read an interesting discussion about the search transaction costs.
It becomes evident that information technology has decreased all these costs. Through the ease of looking for suppliers worldwide and the ability to track the just in time delivery process many different suppliers nowadays contribute to manufacture a car although in former times a traditional car manufacturer would even have produced tires. Ulrich writes about the corporation in the information age:
“ In the Industrial Age, the corporation was seen primarily as a business unit and production as the business activity. In the information age, both the unit and the activity are displaced; the unit by the “business web” as the primary entity, and fulfillment as the primary business activity (i.e., not just products, but enduring relationships).”
As a result organizations will consist of many dispersed corporate entities with less bureaucratic integration moving away from hierarchical chains of commands, focussing on relationships and delivering a common customer value proposition. While traditional organizations expanded inside until the cost of performing transactions outside exceeded internal cost, virtual organizations shrink until internal transaction cost do no longer exceed external cost. The philosophy has been inverted, the default will more and more be to do work externally. Only when it can be done cheaper inside it will remain within the organization.
An important work to be mentioned is the one of Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy, authors of “Digital Capital (2000)”. I am citing out of a conversation done with the authors. On the question why outsourcing would be dead in the world of b-webs (business webs) they replied:
“ The lead firm in a b-web will want to control core elements of its digital capital - like customer relationships, the choreography of value creation and management processes, and intellectual property. Depending on the particulars, partners can take care of everything else”.
And they say on the future of the HR function:
“ As we move into the world of b-webs, the HR profession must reinvent itself. Rather than HR management, we need to think in terms of IHRM - inter-enterprise human resource management - human capital in its internetworked form. Companies must view the employees of their b-web's partners as extensions of their own capital, because competitiveness and customer value creation depend on accumulating and unleashing digital capital in all its forms. This will require a radical rethinking of traditional functions like recruiting, conflict resolution, and compensation.“
I will keep Ulrich's answer on the future shape of HR roles for one of my next blogs...
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Posted at
10:52PM Nov 19, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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