IBM continues to impress me. Via twitter and Dennis I came across Roo Reynolds’ presentation , and it is well worth a look.
This presentation cleverly brings together the SOA stuff and enterprise 2.0. For the HR folks check out slides 13-18 and ask yourself how can this impact organisation design, skills management, career planning and so on? Employees are deploying powerful tools to self-manage and self-organise. The opportunity for HR to use these tools is there too, but HR’s absence from the picture is all too typical. Perhaps it is time to work on an HR 2010 presentation….(the workshop this week in Stockholm may help)
Also via Twitter, I noticed that Elsua will be at the same gig. I’ve never met either of these gents, but I read them regularly. Some day we may meet in the real world. Next time I’m in Barcelona I’ll be looking Elsua up.
The tools though, are not just about connecting, they are about fostering new ways of innovating. A recent paper by IDEO gurus Rodriguez and Solomon explores “the singular insight of many minds”
Until this decade, the ability to use technology to enable networked innovation was very limited. The primary technologies used to facilitate group innovation were paper and, more recently, the whiteboard and dry erase marker. Certainly telephones and faxes helped link people, but the utility of a live call diminishes quite rapidly as the number of participants grow. However, a great deal has happened
in the past decade that is revolutionizing collaborative innovation. New communication and collaboration platforms, media, and tools now allow many-to-many collaboration at a scale and cost that could never have been achieved in the past. The Internet, an overnight success three decades in the making, along with its younger cousin the Web, really does change everything. For the first time, we now have tools that enable the free exchange of information across many individuals with remarkably low friction. As a thought experiment,imagine a single person or nonnetworked organization answering hundreds of inquiries per day in a productive and effective fashion. In the industrial-world paradigm, this would require dozens, even thousands, of customer support representatives. It would probably feel a lot
like calling an airline. And yet a technology-enabled organization like Google responds to over 200 million search queries per day with sub-second response time: new technologies can change our sense of what can be done at scale.
Looking from the outside, it seems that IBM is rapidly embracing these new ways of working. This links in rather nicely to what Andy Grove had to say recently.
Forget about startups, says Intel’s co-founder. It’s large companies that generate real change. Apple upended the music industry. Wal-Mart may reinvent health care. Now if only G.E. would build an electric car
Those that constantly moan about inability of big companies to innovate miss the point. Yes, guys in a garage is the romantic image of innovation, but lots of it happens in big organisations too. IBM continues to reinvent itself, and as collective innovation processes and technology become more mainstream and sophisticated, this will help the larger organisations exploit their massive human and financial capital more effectively.
Technorati tags: IBM, innovation, CIO 2010
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