Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

In following-up on the Office2.0 conference, I just remembered that I neglected to link to Chris Matthew’s excellent write up on one of the better blogs/wikis sessions. Chris rounds up of some of the tips and advice that were shared for how to encourage traction of the existing tools like wiki’s and blogs within the enterprise. These notes stem from the learning that simply giving users a blank page to start with is not likely to be sufficient to gain traction with these new tools. example tips:

Adoption tricks

1. Leave obvious errrrors in wikis, and then let people fix them. They’ll immediately see how it works.
2. Corporate blogs can grow fast if you hold content contests. Ask for anything, and then let the good stuff bubble up. And let the good stuff be determined by the users.
3. Find the connectors and experts in your office and get them involved. Think of the people that have networks within the company, and who are often consulted voluntarily.

One thing though, I believe chris may have gotten backwards however was his first sentence implying that social media reduces tacit interactions. In fact, I believe the value proposition for social media not about reducing, but rather accelerating and enabling more powerful tacit interactions. Tacit work is defined as all those decisions and actions that rely on experience, judgment and context rather than simple procedure or routine.

As more and more routine work in business is automated or outsourced, tacit work is becoming an ever larger and more important proportion of average daily working activity. Furthermore, I’d argue that the efficiency and execution of these tacit interactions become increasingly key to the competitiveness of both individual employees and the firm is a whole — and this is where “social” media has the greatest potential to be transformative to enterprise.

More on this topic of Enterprise2.0 and Tacit interactions to come…

meanwhile read chris’ post here

A certain business partner of mine just posted this shareable slide deck on our internal Firestoker tool. Of course, my first thought is wow, we should add to our list some feature or process to immediately post through this sort of great+publicly-sharable stuff from the internal discussion space to our external blog/site as well. But for now, the manual approach. Anyway, this deck by Paul Kedrosky is both entertaining and quite prescient. And, as the deck is visuals only, it’s also fun fill-in-the-blanks sport to imagine what Paul would have been saying to each point.

Point #2 You are learning from a deck presented just 4 days ago, at a conference you were probably didn’t know about, from an important thinker you may not have been aware of before (a. isn’t social media great?) and now b. I’m doing my best/bit to help propagate these meme through the blogosphere. To get this chain of events started, Paul must have uploaded it to “SlideSharebeta” which is clearly a YouTube for Powerpoints (I hadn’t seen this service it before). And in turn slideshare is excellent example of Enterprise2.0, a powerful idea (YouTube) proven out in the consumer web and now jumping the shark fence to become a completely new (and pretty cool) application in a business context.

Jevon convinced me today to sign up for VOIP with VBuzzer. My understanding is that it’s like vonage but ( preposterously) $2/month rather than $24/month (or whatever vonage is). I can sign-up for a local (416) phone number, buy a subsidized (by vonage!) $10 broadband adapter thingy from future shop, unlock it using some free utility (good thing we have no DMCA law in canada?), plug in a plain old telephone and bob’s my uncle. A $2/mo landline.

Only trouble is I don’t own a telephone. I’ll have to go out buy one this weekend. went mobile + skype a long time ago.

this reminds me of a conversation I had visiting my parents for dinner the other day

Parents: have you seen that annoying commercial on the television?

me: I haven’t seen a commercial on the television in a few years (downloaded tv doesn’t have commercials)

well what about the radio commercial?

I don’t listen to commercial radio (just CBC and/or podcasts)

So what else do you listen to when you drive, just CDs?

I don’t own any CDs (switched to exclusively mp3, vinyl years ago)

So you just plug in your iPod when you’re driving?

Oh, I don’t drive anywhere (except in summer. To get where I need to go I take bikes, taxis, transit or airplanes not my own car)

parents: [no small skepticism] hmmm

Do you get the feeling the world is changing. Do you get the feeling that it’s not yet affecting everyone equally? am I an oddity or the prototypical future consumer? (I suppose I could be more-than-a-little of both)

song of the day: Bad Religion 21st Century Digital Boy, (a clasic Punk Rock lament for the digital future). click to play: