Open Meeting Protocol and the structure of emergent collaboration

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Last week I had an early evening meeting set up with Indy Johar, the inspiring co-founder of Hub Westminster. When I arrived I found that Indy had invoked an ‘Open Meeting Protocol’, offering £10 to Matt Sevenoaks of KPMG to join the meeting, who in turn invited Shelley Kuipers, the CEO of Chaordix, who as it happens I had conversed with on email as reecently as a few days before but had never met in real-life. Another Hub Westminster member Pamela joined us.

To be frank I don’t completely understand the protocol, even after viewing the very interesting Prezi explanation below from David Pinto. In essence it is a structure for inviting people to join a meeting by paying them (nominally) £10, and thus participating in a value-creating structure.

eco^external on Prezi

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Every business document should be in the cloud and concurrently editable

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I’m at the Melbourne Google Enterprise Atmosphere on Tour event, the first of 25 events around the world. I am doing the keynote on The Evolution of Business at the Melbourne and Sydney events, giving an external perspective which happens to be highly aligned with the Google vision.

The event included a Google Apps demo. Since in my organizations we have used Google Apps for several years the demo initially seemed very straightforward to me, though in fact I did see a number of features that we are not yet using that would be useful.

The demo seemed to be over-emphasizing the concurrent editing and collaboration features of Google Docs, which I think of as pretty basic. However it struck me that in fact the vast majority of organizations represented in the audience still store most of their business documents on a hard disk somewhere. The number of documents being emailed between people inside companies today is still massive.

That is crazy. Emailing documents back and forth is fraught with staggering problems, not least version control.
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V&S acquired by Havas: A pivotal moment for crowdsourcing in advertising

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The purchase by Havas of a majority stake in crowdsourced ad agency Victors & Spoils is a sign of a major shift in the advertising industry.

I have written several times before about crowdsourced advertising agency Victors & Spoils. V&S Founder and CEO John Winsor spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, and I have since written about some of their lead work with Harley-Davidson and where they have taken that.

The big news today is that global advertising conglomerate Havas has taken a majority stake in V&S, also naming John Winsor as Chief Innovation Officer for the group.
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Yammer and why activity streams are a key foundation for integrated applications and organizations

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I caught up with some of the Yammer team this morning, including Chief Customer Officer David Obrand, while they are in town for the Yammer on Tour series. 

I was particularly interested in talking with them about Yammer’s shift to activity streams. In the massive convergence of enterprise social platforms that we’ve seen over the last years, one of the major emerging spaces is activity streams.

Last year I wrote about activity streams in the context of Tibbr’s launch. Tibbr put activity streams squarely on the map, by integrating status messages from people with notifications generated by enterprise software including ERP, CRM, and HR systems. Employees are able to follow their colleagues and they can also follow updates on any activity, including events, projects, or even invoices. Tibbr was very well positioned to do that given Tibco’s history in providing enterprise integration middleware.
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Case study: Using project management for effective crowdsourcing

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[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

One of the most important implications of organizations shifting to crowdsourcing and crowd work is the need for effective project management structures. We cover Project Management in Chapter 14 of Getting Results From Crowds.

The chapter opens with an excellent case study of how Nick McMenemy uses crowd platforms to drive his startup Virdium. I gained plenty of insights and new ideas in my interview of him, which I condensed into the case study, reproduced below. I’m sure you’ll find useful ideas in there.
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Open business: Sharing our group priorities for 2012 – Why not?

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A year ago I shared a visualization of our AHT Group Business Model.

Following that, I am now sharing our group 2012 Priorities. This comes from the principle of Open Business you can see in the 7 Enablers for our strategy. Our intention is to share more about the drivers of our business. The 2012 priorities document was created for our own internal use to guide our activities and use of resources through this year. However we are happy to make that open, in case anyone else finds looking at our approach is useful to them.


Click on the image for full-size pdf
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Compulsory viewing: A CEO perspective on the business value of internal social networks

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A few days ago Arie Goldshlager pointed me to the fantastic video below of Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia, talking about the company’s use of micro-blogging. Shortly after Forrester announced that Deloitte Australia’s Yammer network had won its 2011 Forrester Groundswell award in the category of Collaboration Systems.

Undoubtedly a major factor in Deloitte Australia’s success in internal social networks is the unreserved support of its CEO. However, as the video below clearly shows, Swiegers is not a man who likes social media for its own sake.

He simply recognizes that it can help lead to outstanding business outcomes. As an accountant and business leader, he sees the business value of using social networks well, and has helped Deloitte Australia to tap that value.


Here are some of the things that Swiegers says in the video:
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Keynote: Creating the future of retail shopping precincts: The Power of Community and Uniqueness

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Tomorrow morning I will give the keynote at Mainstreet Australia conference on the topic of Creating the Future of Business.

My slides are below. The usual caveat applies – the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone.

Keynote: Creating the Future of Retail Spaces

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While the title of the presentation is Creating the Future of Business, it has been tailored to the conference audience, so after a more general introduction on the driving forces of business, the presentation is really about the future of retail shopping precincts. Here are some of the points I will be making in my keynote.
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The role of informal social networks in building organizational creativity and innovation

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For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications.

The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident the power of these approaches. In particular for high-performing organizations, applying social network analysis is one of the most useful tools in pushing value creation to the next level. This is evident in the California Management Review paper I co-authored on Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective, in which we examined how to improve performance in sales, innovation, and execution.

Innovation is of course a particularly pointed issue today, with the increasing pace of external and industry change driving the necessity of effective, applied creativity. However this is often difficult in large, complex organizations.

To this point, the IBM Institute for Business Value has released a report on Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity.

The report has some interesting insights and findings, including this chart of the opposites needing resolution in a creative organization.


Source: IBM Creative Leadership Report
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Keynote slides on The Transformation of Government

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Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote at the annual conference of Institute of Public Affairs New South Wales, on the topic of The Transformation of Government.

Originally I was scheduled to follow the recently elected NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, but he has had to travel to Beijing, so he will present at the conference after the morning break via Telepresence.

It is actually quite significant for an outsider like myself to be invited to speak at the event, let alone on a big picture view of a rapidly changing world. The title of the conference is The Future Course of Modern Government, mirroring an excellent policy paper of the same name created by IPAA a few months ago. I blogged about the 11 recommendations in the report, which are well worth a read if you don’t have the opportunity to read the entire paper.

The conference is intended to be a landmark event, several months since the NSW government changed after 16 years of Labor incumbency, and anticipating potentially dramatic change in how the state government functions in the years ahead. The themes of the conference – Technology, Innovation, Services Reform, Collaboration – are now squarely on the government’s agenda, and the reason I was invited to give the keynote.

Below is my Prezi presentation to support my keynote. I will shortly release the underlying framework as a pdf.


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