Structuring and Building Enterprise Collaboration Teams
In developing enterprise collaboration teams it is common to find that some employees are more involved than others. David Straus developed a concept called “rings of involvement” that applies to how involved relevant stakeholders are in collaboration. That concept inspired the chart shown below and I talk about it in much greater depth in my book, The Collaborative Organization. [...]
Connect to Work
Last week I wrote about one of the key themes that I believe are going to make up the future work, I encourage you to read that post titled: The Future of Work is About Customized Work. There are several of these themes that I’m going to be exploring in the near future and the [...]
Enterprise Collaboration Technology Deployment Scenarios
I’m seeing a few trends around how organizations are deploying enterprise collaboration platforms. Typically one of four paths are taken which are: a unified solution, multiple solutions (not connected), an aggregator solution, or multiple solutions which are integrated together. These are explained in more detail in the table below. What is it Pros Cons When [...]
The Future of Work is NOT About Replacing Sharepoint and Email
Some still believe that the whole point of investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies is simply to replace existing systems that organizations are currently using such as Sharepoint and/or email. Let me be clear that it is about far more than that. At the core; we are talking about the future of work. Technology [...]
The Gap Between the Consumer Web and the Enterprise
Much of what we are seeing in the enterprise is being fueled by the consumer web. For example if there would have been no Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, chances are there would be no Jive, Yammer, Chatter, or any other enterprise collaboration platform. The behaviors we exhibit on social media channels are also making [...]
Announcing The Future of Work Survey; Take it and Share it!
Today Chess Media Group is launching a new survey; The Future of Work: Collaboration and Flexible Work Solutions for Today and Tomorrow. The goal of the survey to is to uncover a few things around: the usage of social and collaborative tools within the enterprise the state of flexible work arrangements BYOD policies and approaches [...]
Investing in Enterprise Collaboration Can Help You Attract and Retain Top Talent
According to a Forbes article by Jeanne Meister: “The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that. Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between [...]
The Five-Step Maturity Model for Building a Collaborative Organization
In my book, The Collaborative Organization, I featured a maturity model that Chess Media Group created based on our client experience and research. The purpose of the maturity model is to help organizations where they are today, where they should go in the future and the value of doing so, and how to get there. [...]
The Future Employee Must Posses the Skill and Will to Learn
Thomas Friedman recently wrote an article for the NYT titled, “Need a Job? Invent It” which addresses how our educational institutions are not teaching students the skills that value most. He goes on to point out that in today’s economy there is no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job. Things are changing quickly and by time [...]
The Evolution of the Networked Enterprise: New McKinsey Research
McKinsey just released some more research on the use of social and collaborative technologies within the enterprise. Not surprisingly they found that adoption levels are continuing to climb and are almost double what they were in 2009. The more important finding from the research they conducted was that organizations are moving beyond the experimentation phase with many [...]
ING Direct CEO Gives Employees “The Right to Bitch”
While I was speaking at the Newsgator conference in Amsterdam I learned of a very interesting story at ING Direct (Canada). For those of you not familiar with ING Direct, it has around 1,200 employees and is based in Canada and operates things such as savings accounts, retirement plans, mortgages, and mutual funds. Their CEO [...]
The Future of Work
A lot of companies are interested in what the future of work looks like and what direction companies are going to be heading towards. However, this means looking beyond just technology. Based on a lot of conversations that I and my team at Chess Media Group have been having with clients and other companies, I [...]
How Would You Work Without Email?
Sometimes when I speak with clients or companies interested in understanding the future of work and collaboration it helps to put things into an interesting perspective. There are many people (including business leaders) out there who are still not up to speed on what is happening in the world of enterprise social software, collaboration, and the future [...]
Humans are Taking Jobs Away From Robots, Not Vice Versa
First let me set the stage. I’m a big fan of Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson who are the authors of Race Against the Machine, a book which explore how technological innovation is impacting our jobs, skills, and wages- more specifically how technology is taking our jobs. Andrew McAfee was featured in my book, The [...]
Why Did Yahoo! Ban Telecommuting for Employees?
If you haven’t heard the recent news, Yahoo! decided to ban telecommuting and is now forcing all employees to physically come into the office to work and if they can’t or won’t then they can find a job elsewhere. At first glance this seems a bit counter intuitive to what many other companies are doing. [...]
