infoarch

Why don't we ask more questions? Or maybe you do, but I should ask more questions. Recently I encountered a problem I couldn't solved. So I reached out to colleagues to understand if they had answers. They didn't. Then I thought: should I post my question on Yammer or Twitter ? Yammer could work but I had basically already asked the relevant experts within the company so I thought that would be a waste of time. Then Twitter maybe? To be honest, I find the engagement on Twitter pretty low. When I started using Twitter asking a question could get you lots of answers. Now Twitter is more of an update platform and less of a question platform. At least that's how I see myself and others using it. Well, then I thought I'd post my question on Quora . Good 'old' Quora. I've always loved Quora. A very focused and smart platform with lots of people just waiting to answer your question. And Quora suggests potentially relevant people from your network and ...

Just before the weekend I wanted to share this interesting 10 minute talk with you about hierarchies and networks. For one because it's just fascinating to watch how RSA visualizes this talk. Secondly because of the talk itself. Manual Lima's talk about "The power of networks" is fascinating. He gives an overview of how we used to try to structure everything in hierarchies and trees, because we like order and simplicity. And how we now shift to using networks more because trees simply can't describe reality. Knowledge, species, bacteria, our brain, our body, societies, etc. are highly connected. He wraps up his talk by asking if there is a universal structure? Well, do you think there is one? Of course there has been lots of thinking and talking about what this means for organizations, people and technology. The shift Lima describes is the shift 'social business' and 'enterprise 2.0' is describing. And it's the shift social technology is...

I listen to the HBR Ideacast regularly. Recently Gary Hamel was interviewed about his HBR article 'First, Let's Fire all the Managers' . As you may know Hamel has devoted a large part of his life to thinking about better ways to organize and manage companies. What kind of management (if any) does this time period need. Of course, Hamel goes into why he wrote an article about this topic. But to me the most interesting part was that Hamel provides examples of companies that don't have management. When I was listening I caught myself thinking: Yeah, less management would be great, but can we really live without them? Hamel shows it can be done. He points to one company called Morningstar for instance. Very interesting and thought-provoking! What do you think? Can your company or could you live without management?

Recently I blogged about why intranet is so hard . This struck a cord, it seems, because it received several good comments! At the end of that post I promised to write about the easiness of intranets as well. My post about intranets being hard didn't want to imply it's impossible or frustrating to develop, implement and maintain an intranet. The fact that it's hard intrigues me and keeps me interested in intranet. However, intranet can also be easy I think. I'll explain why here. I'm really curious if you agree/disagree. Intranet deployment is usually a complex exercise. Lots and lots of requirements from different people and roles are collected. And these are squeezed into one overall intranet concept. Then building and deployment begins. But what is an intranet? It's a collection of webpages, containing content, linked together. Sometimes added with a couple of web applications, like a people finder. Yes, the Digital Workplace. So, why don't we j...

Back to work after a wonderful vacation in the US! Really enjoyed being there. My sister lives there. We went to the Gulf of Mexico with them and stayed there for a week. And we also travelled to Washington D.C. Went to the Museums in D.C. (we had already 'done' the monuments in a previous trip), went hiking in Shenadoah National Park, etc. Now back to work. Worked through my email, feeds and tweets. One post I saved to read was  this interesting post by prof. John Kotter, Hierarchy and Network: Two Structures, One Organization . A must-read for all social media and social business people! Lots of discussion there. I also commented on the post. I wrote: Wow, lots of discussion here. I liked the post as well. I blogged about this topic a couple of times. I agree with some of the comments made stating the hierarchy and business is older than the 19th century. I do think you can say the 19th century made hierarchy the way to go. I think this is one of the reasons social media is...