infoarch

If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn you've probably seen I changed jobs as of Jan. 1 of this year. After 6 great years at Entopic and Bildung I decided to join Teva Pharmaceuticals as senior director external digital channels. I've been at Teva now for about 10 weeks and must say I enjoy it. There's lots going on in the pharmaceutical industry and the intersection of digital and pharma is very interesting, I find. In short, there's lots and lots to do. So, why change? As mentioned I enjoyed working at Entopic and Bildung. Great working environment, great team, dito customers. But I also found I was looking for new challenges. In leadership development and in digital. If possible I wanted to get more experience with leadership in a large, international organization. And I was looking for new areas in digital to learn about. Teva contacted me and gave me this opportunity. After quite some talks and lots of thinking, I decided to go for it. And I'm happy to s...

The first practice panel about ' Social as Enabler for Strategic Business Excellence ' by Joachim Heinz  and Martial Tardy . First Tardy of Solvay about the Solvay and Rhodia merger facilitated by means of an Enterprise Social Network. Learnings: don't fear misconduct, fear a ghost town reverse the communication streams get in gear with a new editorial tempo get on top of social technologies Next Heinz about Bosch's social business initiatives. Bosch has 300.000 employees. Why social business at Bosch? Because of the network society and to tap into the potential of the huge number of employees. They want to develop to an agile, open and transparent business system in a highly connected environment. Steps they distinguish are ( top-down approach): guidelines and principle (e.g. only 20% closed communities, open/transparent by default) technology and processes (developed an entirely new onboarding wizard developed jointly by Bosch and IBM - helps newcomer...

Wired is my favorite work-related magazine by far. I read all editions from cover to cover (almost). Recently Wired celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special edition . Reading through that edition is a fascinating trip through history. And it's only been 20 years! For their anniversary Wired also collected some of their most popular articles and bundled them into an ebook. One of the articles struck me. The article is titled:  The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 and is written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden. I'm a sucker for these kind of articles. But I found this one intriguing because it was written some time ago. I was curious how well they predicted what was going to happen in the time we are living in now. Of course they got things wrong, but many predictions are quite correct. Go ahead, read the article and see for yourself. But there's one part in this article that I wanted to share with you. It relates to all the posts that have bee...

This breakout (track 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Mastering the social work mindset'. Breakout speakers are Anthony Poncier and Ellen Trude . Anthony kicks off with a sort presentation about HR and Enterprise 2.0. (Last year there was only one participant from the HR department at this Summit. This year there are many more.) HR should be on the wagon because people are the core of organizations. McKinsey recently stressed that the role of HR in E2.0 is essential. Why? Because of the inter-generational cultures (millenials, etc.), new job descriptions (like the community manager), talent management, impact on visibility and mobility (career development, L&D), etc. It's important to look at and change the tradition HR processes for E2.0 success. Ellen doesn't like the word training relating to social media and enterprise 2.0. Training is too much a one-way lecture. At Ellen's company they developed a social learning environment. The courses a...

I read ‘TheTipping Point’ a long time ago. Then I wrote a short, boring blogpost telling you I read it. Recently I thought: I’m going to write a longer book review about Malcolm Gladwell’s book. In this way I can remember its contents more easily and, if you haven’t read it, inspire you to read it. Concepts ‘The Tipping Point’ was my first Gladwell book. I wanted to read it because of my interest in social media and social networking (- later his take on the effect of social media in revolutions was highly debated …). The book is not about social media and social networking (tools). It’s about the underlying concepts of social media and networking. And, as I’ve said before , those concepts are important to understand. Tipping What is the book about? The subtitle of the book is: ‘How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference’. In his own words: “ The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. … Ideas and products and messages and behaviors s...

Why is intranet so hard to get right? It's one of the things I keep wondering about. Especially after reading the Global Intranet Trend reports , following discussions on LinkedIn groups and listening to talks at conferences . There definitely is progress in intranet deployment, but the steps are small. I'd like to share my thoughts on why intranet is hard. As in all (my) blogposts I don't not claim to have all the answers and reasons. I'd love to hear from you why you think intranet is hard (or maybe I'm getting it all wrong: intranet is easy). Right With 'get right' I mean having an intranet that really fits the needs and processes of a company, truly supports employee in their daily work, etc. It's an intranet with which the company is happy. It's a business critical 'tool'. Reason 1: People and technology To me the most important reason why it's hard to get intranet right is: people and technology don't fit . An organizat...

Learning is an interesting topic. It's one of the main reasons I blog . Failing is also an interesting topic. I've blogged about it before. And I wondered: Is failure also one of the reasons I blog. I think so. Blogging helps me fail. I write things down, get things wrong, get corrected by comments, etc. I'm learning! Not too long ago Harvard Business Review published an interesting article about failure. It was written by Amy Edmondson and is titled ' Strategies For Learning From Failure' (April 2011). I'm not going to summarize the article for you (this time). But it's pack with great insights and learning points. For instance it explains how we are programmed to think that all failure is bad, what different types of failure there are (good and bad ones), how organizations can embrace failure and how leaders can build a safe environment for failure. I found the last point most interesting. I think embracing failure is a personal decision. In this c...

I love challenges like in this post . Andrew Winston has an interesting post about asking customers to use less of your product. So you're in the printing business: ask your customers to print less. Or you sell hamburgers or books, ask them to buy less. Thinking in this way can open you up to new opportunities and business. Sometimes you are forced to think this way. Let's make this concrete. If you were a printing company, would you advise your employees to add a footer to every email saying: Please don't print out this email! Of course many would say: Hey, but this would cannibalize my business! True, but as the above-mentioned article says: It's better to do it yourself, than that someone else is doing it to you. I think we can also flip this challenge to ourselves. Think about what you would do if your customer (member of family, friend or client) would use less of your product/service. What would you do?

There's lots of buzz about 'The Future of Work'. And quite a bit is focused on technology. I don't think that's very strange. Most technology is specific, it's concrete. You can talk about how it works, which features it has, etc. The Future of Work is about more than tools. It's also about facilities (building, furniture, colors, etc) and most importantly about organization (structure, processes and networks, culture, behavior, etc). In my opinion one of the groups with the most fundamental research on this topic is Novay , specifically the Future Workspaces or ProWork group. And they ground there research in practice. Their approach is interesting because it's broad, focusing on organizational and technology issues (not facilities). They've publish about their work regularly on their blog. One of their interesting reports is titled "Connected Professionals. Flexible working in a networked society" . It shows their way of working: deep ...

Jane McConnell raised an interesting question about the relationship between social media and culture . She asked: Will cultural differences impact adoption of social media? Will culture “eat” social media for breakfast? or will social media “eat” culture? I find social media interesting because I see the relationship between social media and culture as bi-directional. The (company) culture has to fit social media (culture) for successful adoption. But I also see culture change due to social media use. I think this has to do with the underlying concepts of social media, like relational networks, information is social and humans as social beings. These concepts fit us people very well, because they are deeply human. Tapping into these concepts when rolling out social media is a key to success (and positive cultural change). Rolling it out as technology (non-human focus) is a key to failure (and negative cultural change). Als o refer to this interesting post about cultural differences ....

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business. Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value. Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift . Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization. Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning). We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like: lower operational costs networked productivity business agility effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder) customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening) Where is business practice going...

JP Rangaswami couldn't make it... Too bad. So his talk has been turned into a discussion between Frank La Pinta, prof. Joachim Niemeier , Jamil Ouaj and Christian Wuerdemann. Don't have much to blog about this discussion. Not that it wasn't interesting for sure. One important thing to pass on is that the European companies in the panel have not changed their organizational structure based on their e2.0 implementations. The middle management does not have a new role, according to the panel. There was lots of discussion in the audience about this topic via Twitter .

Today is Blog Action Day ! If you don't know, the idea is very simple. A theme is selected and bloggers join in to right about this topic. By talking, writing and thinking about one topic for one day, hopefully more awareness will be created around this theme, hopefully leading to change. Even the White House is joining in this year. Let's prove Malcolm Gladwell is wrong ! ;-) This year's theme is 'WATER' . Coming from a country that, if it weren't for dikes, would mostly be under water, I understand the importance and the danger of water. In the previous years we've seen all kinds of disasters relating to water. Just think back to hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Or the floods in Pakistan. And now the dike that broke in Hungary. But we can also relate to the way water is being and has been polluted. Just relate to the BT oil platform that pumped huge amount of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. We can't even imagine the damage that as done to the sea (...

Just for fun and for the weekend. :-) Have you already watch the movie Inception ? I did and loved it. I was wondering: What if inception was really possible? And you could do it. What would you do? How would you change you colleague's or manager's mind? Maybe this is something to start influencing...

Zappos is a bit far away from a Dutchman. We don't have it here, yet. But of course you hear a lot about them. Zappos is praised for its culture, very engaged workforce, use of social media in business, great profit, etc. Recently I wrote a post about 'Organizing on Passion'. Frederik Vieten , a student doing research at Océ, pointed me to Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness . I hadn't heard of it yet, so that was a great pointer. I'm going to order and read it. But I also browsed the site and found a recent talk by Hsieh at Google . Man, I watched it this talk this evening. And it's absolutely great. If you have an hour, just sit down, watch it and be inspired. What a great company and what a great leader Tony is. Here's the video: I really liked the way the importance of company culture is stressed and how it can be crafted. I also love the way they select new employees based on questions linked to their core values . One of the most ...

It's been a while ago since I read the great Shift Index 2009 report . I've been wanting to blog about it, but haven't had time yet. It's loaded with interesting insights. One big question I had is: This report is focused on the USA; how does this compare to Europe or Asia? One thing from the report that stuck with me, was the importance of 'creative talent' and getting them to engage in 'creative problem solving, often by connecting with peers inside and outside the firm' (p. 11). On page 70 the report goes on to talk about 'worker passion'. The findings are pretty saddening. Lots of workers are not passionate about their work and self-employed workers are much more passionate than the firm-employed. The larger the size of the firm the less passionate workers get... I went back to the Shift Index after reading a couple of things: Steve Denning's post about the H in HR , which also points to the Shift Index and the importance of eng...

... motivation filtered through opportunity. Recently I read this quote in an interesting interview/discussion betwee Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink . I've been thinking about this quote ever since. Is this true? Why am I thinking about this quote so much? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this quote. Its context can be found in the article, of course. Another nice quote from the article that was an eye opener to me is: I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged. As a father of kids and as an old kid, I know this is true...

A couple of months ago my student, Arzu Yucekaya Bat, started working on her Master's thesis about social bookmarking and improving our internal bookmarking tool. Her research goal is: To establish an overview for Océ Technologies B.V on motivations and barriers of the employees to adopt and contribute to the social bookmarking tool and determine possible interventions that will augment information sharing and discovery within this tool and assist to take proper incentives to increase the adoption rate. Some excerpts from the original assignment are: Within R&D an opensource social bookmarking application is being used to collect and share bookmarks. Currently the implementation of our social bookmarking application is basic. We are working wider adoption of this tool and have generated several ideas to achieve this goal. conduct a short analysis of the literature on how to increase adoption of social bookmarking design an appealing application of so...

Some time ago I read an interesting article in my Dutch newspaper ( NRC , May 1, 2010, 'Nederland bestaat voor 5 procent uit eeuwige zeuren. Negeert die frustraten') about the Law of the Travel Guide. This is how it goes: Every travel group has some notoriously dissatisfied travelers. Mostly is not more than 5% of the group. In whatever way the travel guide tries he will never satisfy them. The question is how to cope with this group. It is a potential danger for the travel guide. The biggest mistake he can make it to try to make this group feel OK. He will never succeed, because they are notoriously dissatisfied. All the more he does his best to satisfy them, the bigger his defeat will be. And that energy cannot be spent on the other 95%, dissatisfying them as well (with good reason). Every travel guide knows there is part of the group that is not dissatisfied, but can become that very easily. Spending too much time on the 5% group, can easily lead to a 25% group... A ...

If you're not from Holland, you probably don't know the largest walking event in the world is currently going on in Nijmegen , my home town. It's called the 'Vierdaagse' (in Dutch. Literally: the 4 day one) or 'the Walk of the World' . It's a great event for participants and spectators. The whole city of Nijmegen is flooded with people from all over the world (people from 67 countries participated this year!). Men and woman of 65 years and older have to walk 30 kilometers for four days to get a medal. Men younger between 16-65 have to walk 4x50 kilometers. And ladies walk 4x40 k's. Very long walks, that require lots of training, focus and determination! Yesterday I volunteered to give water to the walkers (- you may have noticed my tweets /here are some pictures ). I love doing that. It brings back lots of memories of the hardship and joy I experience walking 4x50 two years ago . It's great to see about 45.000 people walking by focused on reac...