IBM's new Global Innovation Outlook 2005 report has be posted at the IBM web site in PDF format. You can also access to Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s blog for a summary in his post, The Global Innovation Outlook: What is Going On Out There? Irving is the Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM and I have heard him speak before at an IBM event on IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More. He has a good perspective on the changes within the internet and their effect on business.
Here are a few highlights from what Irving wrote…”the rise of social networks, enabled by the Internet and related tools and platforms which are making it possible for people to connect and work together in unprecedented ways within and outside the boundaries of organizations and countries. GIO participants observed that increasingly the organizing principle for work is no longer the enterprise but the endeavor and that it may soon be time to redefine what we mean by enterprise, employer and employee, as looser aggregations of collaborators form and disband opportunity by opportunity.”
I recently attended a KM Forum where Bob Wolf talked about the Open Source community around Linux and how it responds quickly to crisis, taking days to fix security issues instead of the months that most software companies might take. This occurs even though most people have day jobs and they do not get paid for their Linux related work. He wrote in more depth about this in the HBR article “Collaboration Rules” but there is no free link to this. I have also seen this in action in response to the Katrina crisis. A few volunteers in Cambridge connected to the Berkman Center set up the Katrina People Finder Project to provide a consolidated single source for people to find their family and friends from the hundreds of ad hoc missing person data bases set up. They accomplished what no government organization had been able to do. They also got over 20,000 volunteers within 24 hours to provide virtual assistance transferring data into the system they set up.
The full IBM report goes into this in more detail. It also said the following about the increasingly connected world. “Harnessing the wealth of Data and information available from increasingly distributed and disparate sources could represent the next huge opportunity for societal and business innovation.” This is the focus of the software tool, iQuest, as I wrote about yesterday. It can show who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations are taking place. More later on this.
The IBM report also talked about the concept of “flipping the equation” or turning business problems on their head. I can see this working many places such as the “pull” rather “push” approach to content distribution allowed by RSS. Another example, is the use of blogs behind the firewall for project management so everyone can see what everyone is doing instead of complaining about silos. A classic one was the switch from training away from the job to providing knowledge management aligned to work processes allowing you to learn on the job at the point you needed it. I am sure there be will be more.
Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for the links connected to the IBM Report.
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