Notes day 3 IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2015 #iec15

As I did yesterday, I'm sharing my (rough) notes with you all. Please find them below. Others are live-blogging the conference. Please follow them as well. I pointed to their blogs yesterday.

Dave Snowden, The organization as a loosely coupled network

About systems, cognition and the patterns of those.

Three functional types of systems:

• Ordered: Order is cool, but after success we get seduced by it.
• Chaotic: no boundaries or structure
• Complex adaptive system (co-evolution): We’re moving away from content to linkages that are defined by people.

These systems work in very different ways. Illustrates this with the ‘7/8 year old children party’.

Refers to the Cynefin framework, a sense-making framework. Some remarks Dave made related to the framework:

• If you’ve done two interviews you already have a hypothesis that is hard to give up.
• Complexity requires more management than in the ordered domain, but the management is different. It’s about creating safe-to-fail experiments. It leads to a dramatic reduction in costs and managerial stress.
• Failure is better for learning than success. If you copy best-practices you will never innovate.

The future is distributed. Dave says there will be no intranets in the future. We will work with something like a bundle of apps. This fits better with how organizations work.

Snowden wraps up his talk with insights about human language (‘meaning is not found in text’), patterns (from ambigious, positive questions) and the importance of stories (collect them regularly, in real-time).

Arthur Turkstra, Bring out the best with Iris

Didn't take a lot of notes on this talk. I just listened. But, in short, Arthur shared his experience with design and his design principles for intranets.

One interesting statement I did write down is: Design for all humans. Human behavior is predictable.

David Gurteen, Conversational Leadership

The purpose of the Knowledge Café is to bring a group of people together to have a conversation on a topic of mutual interest.

The aims include:

• learning from each other
• sharing ideas and insights
• gaining a deeper understanding of the topic and the issues involved
• and exploring possibilities

It also helps:

• connect people
• improve inter-personal relationships
• breaks down organizational silo’s

The process of the Cafe:

• speaker makes a short presentation
• poses a question (what makes a good question?)
• small group conversations at tables
• 3 rounds of conversation
• whole group conversation in a circle
• approximately 2 hours in total

Conversations are the lifeblood of the organization. Some even say conversation is the organization.

There are many tools to facilitate conversation: dialogue, knowledge cafes, peer assist, De Bono’s six thinking hats, brainstorms, etc.

David thinks we should move towards conversational leadership. Conversational leaders can be described in the following way:

• modify their behavior to take a conversational approach to the way that we work and interact with each other
• help build a strong social fabric and a sense of community by connecting people and helping them build relationships with each other
• practice conversational methods daily such as peer assists, after action reviews and knowledge cafe's

Look for Conversational Architects in your organizations. David thinks managers should start with this.

Luke Mepham, Considering SharePoint in the Cloud?

Product or service, cloud vs. non-cloud, software vs service? Understanding these differences is essential when want to choose between SharePoint on premise and Office 365.

Customization was not possible for Office365 in the past. It's now possible. But MS doesn't allow anything that breaks the service. And Aviva learned to see this as a good thing. However customization is only allowed on a different server and that costs money. And don't except all requests for customization. Sometimes an extra service is better than a customization.
Upgrades, they were happy that they would always be the latest version. However... the upgrade is done whether or not it has any benefits for the organization. You cannot choose.
Security-wise Office365 is amazingly secure. It complies to ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II and EU Safe Harbor. Aviva also uses two-factor authentication to make sure the employee-side of security is covered.

Luke is also sure 'SharePoint' will move to the cloud. Some of the services (like Yammer) are cloud-based and will always be.

Final talk is by Anders Quitzau about 'Demystifying cognitive computing and putting Watson at work'. I didn't take any notes during this talk. Just listened and tweeted. You can find all the tweets by searching for 'IEC15'.