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Culture change, collaberation and elephants

by | May 28, 2005 | blogging, Uncategorized

A colleague from the Novell European Support Centre sent me an interesting article from IBM research.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/442/neus.pdf

Interesting in many respects – especially seeing the ‘team drawn elephant’ exercise brought into a discussion about collaberation methods.

The key piece that I was interested in was in the culture change required to bring about such changes in communication:

1. Keep it simple. We used a few simple methods in
assessment and intervention that were accessible
to the client’s employees. We did not overload
them with methodology or jargon.

2. Find passionate people. To drive change, you
need passion. You need people who understand
and are excited about the change.

3. Do the ‘‘emperor’s clothes’’ test on the organization.
Don’t require the novice to ask the
emperor’s advisor for permission to spread the
word about change.

4. Involve me, and I will understand. Cultural
change cannot be forced; it can only be facilitated.
Nothing is as powerful a teacher as firsthand
experience. We allowed people to experience
what open-source collaboration could mean
for them in their working environment.

5. Start small, grow fast. Start small with a limited
scope and the mission to solve a concrete
problem. Demonstrate value; then grow.

A really interesting idea – that may be difficult to implement in a corporate structure – is letting individuals find out about open-source collaberation for themselves.

I agree fully that to drive change you need passionate people; my open-ended response is ‘what happens if the enthused change-agents alienate the broader population?’

Is Blogging now a mainstream activity?

by | May 24, 2005 | blogging, Uncategorized

I’ve been collecting articles and information about how the blogging phenomena has started to change the relationship between Product Management and our customers. This is a more specific niche than how blogging is changing marketing for example – but still lots of data.

One article that caught my eye this morning was on the front page of CNN of all things. “Marketers Take A Shine to Blogs” basically stating that blogging is becoming mainstream. There is even the (now passe?) reference to ClueTrain Manifesto.

(more…)

More on Corporate Blogging

by | Apr 18, 2005 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’m in Toronto for LinuxWorld – and I’m looking at more relevant articles on blogging in a semi-closed corporate world. Next thing I find a very apt summary of this at Claire’s Alternate Version of Reality. Seems like Sun has a pretty pragmatic and open policy on employee blogging.

So in the words of Claire Giordano – who worked on the OpenSolaris project:

This conversation made me wonder – if you work for a company that doesn’t yet encourage employee blogging, and you’re wondering about whether you should influence your company to start blogging, where do you go from there? How do you go from wondering about whether to encourage blogging to articulating the benefits to the business to assessing cultural compatibility to persuading key influencers – and finally, to working the logistics?

Next thing I noticed was that all of the seminal blogging and disruptive marketing sources are noted – the Cluetrain Manifesto; as well as Tim Brays more recent posts on blogging.

The post is worth a read – it is certainly informative about the approach that Sun takes to blogging and the benefits they get from it.

Even Robert Scoble gets a mention..