Where is this going? Well, let’s first consider that a significant portion of a knowledge worker’s value to an organization is tied to his or her tacit experience. Historically, it’s been difficult to capture and transfer this type of knowledge. Traditional knowledge management systems were never widely adopted, and even if they were, they probably wouldn’t have been a good conduit for this. Second, let’s postulate for a moment that Enterprise 2.0 tools (e.g., social networking, wikis) will be widely adopted (which increasingly looks likely). As employees use these tools to get work done, real-time knowledge capture will become a reality. As a result, I believe that the employee value proposition will be even further adjusted. Just as a new employee could be onboarded into an organization more rapidly (and at a lower cost) utilizing Enterprise 2.0 systems, companies will also be tempted to let people go at a more rapid pace in difficult times (cost of re-hire is lower, and loss of tacit knowledge could be somewhat mitigated). I don’t mean to suggest that Enterprise 2.0 tools will render everyone disposable – after all, someone still needs to do work, to innovate, communicate…etc… but these tools will certainly continue to shift the balance of power, and help make the concept of institutional knowledge more real than ever.

Here’s a link to the full article, it’s worth a read.

Oh and after two hours on the phone, I managed to cancel my flight. After a $100 change fee, I have a $3.00 credit toward my next JetBlue flight. Awesome.

click here to view it

click here to download a pdf

I’ll comment on it once I read it.

I opened with this comic strip at a recent speech I did at a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland.  The point of the session was to help the firm’s top 70 HR executives gain an understanding of why social media is important for the enterprise, and the role HR has to play in it.  I think these types of educational session are important because secretly, everyone in the corporate world is a little scared to be Dilbert’s boss – “embracing it” but NOT GETTING IT.  The best way to get it and embrace it is by taking some time to learn about companies who are implementing it.  Do so, and you won’t look like Dilbert’s boss*, I promise.

*[at least not for reasons related to social media]

I think the security risk argument for closing access to these sites is growing in relevance (unlike the employee productivity one). I just came across a new study from an IT security firm called Sophos which identifies attacks on Facebook as a growing threat:

“[O]ver 72% of firms believe that employees’ behavior on social networking sites could endanger their business’s security. This has increased from 66% in the previous study. The number of businesses that were targets for spam, phishing and malware via social networking sites increased dramatically, with spam showing the sharpest rise from 33.4% in April to 57% in December. This highlights a surge in exploitation of such sites by spammers.”

The study suggests that the perception of the risk posed by social networks is increasing.  I think the most striking part of the report is the following:

“72 percent of the firms surveyed said they’re concerned that employee behavior on these sites puts their infrastructures and sensitive data at risk. Yet, 49 percent of these firms allow their staff unfettered access to Facebook, up 13 percent from a year ago.” (Sam Diez blog)

This aligns with what I’m hearing in the marketplace: Companies are increasingly viewing Facebook as the new email and opening access to it.  Of course, this approach differs by industry (for example, financial services organizations are stricter than professional services), but the genie is out of the bottle. Blocking access after granting it is much tougher than never granting it at all.

Where is this going? I think ultimately, just as we’ve learned to be a bit smarter about recognizing spam emails, we will become smarter about identifying when we’re being attacked on social media.  The burden will be on employers to increase employee education of these threats, beyond re-stating plain old policies.

Link to the full report

via zdnet

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

Wikipedia contributors have been debating widely what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe — particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

The article has a negative spin, but it’s not surprising that Wikipedia had to eventually take steps to protect existing content by installing more controls, and that some people wouldn’t like that.  What I take away from the story is a reminder that as organizations mature, hierarchy has value.  Certainly not a new trend… a start-up company functions much differently from a General Electric…but it’s an interesting trend to witness in the context of Wikipedia, and a reminder that as traditional enterprises adopt lessons from consumer Web 2.0 tools, tried and true methods of organizational management have their place as well.

Direct Link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

This is an interesting article in the WSJ that explains the evolution of how scientists share and collaborate, and quantifies the trend over the last century.   

“Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.
To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. “We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork,” says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.”

My takeaway: Much like research, business is a team sport — how effectively organizations are able to collaborate will have a clear linkage to business outcomes.

Link to wsj article

IMG Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshb/501449588/in/set-72157600222688443/