Web 2.0 Uncovered – Blogs

You are reading a blog right now, potentially if you read this blog you may read many other blogs, but do you have a blog of your own? Over on our CPA Congress blog, my colleague Alex Dalidakis discussed how blogging about your CPA Congress experience could prove to be a valuable exercise. I’d like to talk about a few other reasons to consider creating your own blog.

The blog is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool, it can be used in many different ways to achieve many different outcomes, below are a few of my favourites.

News feed / marketing tool

A blog provides you with a simple means of providing news to your clients and colleagues. The CPA Congress blog is an example of a blog being used as a news feed. Throughout the life of CPA Congress 2008 the blog will provide delegates with the latest information about CPA Congress and related events and activities. Providing news of your latest accomplishments and projects can also become a valuable marketing tool.

Learning space

There are two main ways a blog can be used as a learning tool, to learn from yourself and to learn from others. I believe the most powerful learning occurs when the two come together. I have a blog which I use to record my thoughts, challenges and things I find interesting about my work. Simply going through the process of thinking through an issue and constructing a post often leads me to inspiration I may not have found. I’m fortunate enough that there are a few very smart people who occasionally read my blog, the insight they provide through their comments and suggestions have provided ideas and resources which regularly help me to be more effective in my work.

Work log

How often have you got to the end of the month and felt like you have been incredibly busy but could not describe what you were actually doing? Taking ten minutes a couple of times a week to jot down what you have been up to can provide you with a couple of benefits. Firstly, you have a record of work that you have been doing that you can refer back to, and secondly you have a record of your work that your colleagues, staff or clients can refer back to. In this post CPA Congress presenter Keith De La Rue talks about the importance of capturing stories. Capturing and publishing stories of work, challenges, problems and solutions may open doors for collaboration that may have otherwise gone unopened.

These are just three reasons to blog, my main advice is give it a try. Start by recording a few thoughts, if you are keen to build a network around your blog comment on blogs about topics similar to yours (Google Blog Search is a good place to start looking for blogs). I started blogging after hearing several people talk about how much they had learned from the discussions they had participated in through their blogs. After blogging for 6 months I couldn’t agree more, the trick is to give it a try, be persistent and experiment. You may not realise the benefit in the first week but after 3 months you may well look at blogging in a completely different light.

Mick Leyden
CPA Australia

Creating adaptive organisational designs

Organisational structure is a fascinating topic that has been the focus of much academic and practical research over the past century. The first metaphor I was taught as a representation of how a firm is organised was the “pyramid” where the workers at the base undertook operational activities that were coordinated by the next layer of management, who were guided by business strategy developed at “pointy end” of the pyramid of executive/senior management.

There were a lot of assumptions in this design:

1. The knowledge and expertise was at the top of the pyramid
2. The information flow was upward – management needed information to control operations and executives needed information to control the business.
3. The more knowledge an employee had, the more likely they would be able to move upwards.
4. Knowledge was trapped by systems (e.g. production lines, machines, etc.) and operational workers were employed as a component that undertook defined tasks within these systems. These tasks were “isolated” from each other and therefore workers became masterful at one part of the process, with little conversion between tasks.

The next step in organisational design was based on the advent of information and communication technologies that were seen to be able to “replace” line workers and provide better quality control through “business process re-engineering.” Furthermore, less workers meant less managers and considerable downsizing and flattening occurred to create sparse organisational designs where remaining managers had larger jurisdictions of control and authority and remaining workers were closer to strategy and executive. The results of this approach were mixed. While automation provided release to workers from mundane and dull tasks, much of the innovation potential and know-how of the firm was retired early, redeployed, resigned, or retrenched. While the bureaucracy of middle management had been slashed and operations were closer to strategy, most of the managers who had traditionally operationalised strategy were mid-career unemployed, struggling to find work, or taking up home maintenance franchise opportunities!

The flat organisation is still a major design artefact in many businesses today. However, more and more organisations are starting to obtain value through a network view of the organisation. The network view builds on the benefits of the flat organisation through providing “information and knowledge marketspaces” for stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, regulators, shareholders, etc.).  The networked organisation focuses on connectivity over control, enablement over isolation, and accountability over authority. The networked organisation creates a complex sense-making network where new ideas, information, and knowledge can be readily obtained because knowledge and information is dispersed across the organisation and beyond. The organisational boundary becomes very difficult to plot in these business environments and often “customer value” is obtained through the combined capabilities and outputs of multiple business partners or service providers. Furthermore, knowledge from these new alliances filters back to the organisation through interactions and “cross-fertilisation” of ideas between companies with shared interests, but different capabilities.

All characteristics of the networked organisational design point to a far more adaptive environment where people are central to processes because collaborative relationships are central to the business objective of sustained competitive advantage in existing markets and first-mover advantage in emergent markets.

Of course, there are many trade-offs with networked organisational designs and you should consider your business environment carefully before moving towards implementing these structures. Some of these trade-offs are:

1. Greater transparency – while this may sound good, careful preparation and management needs to be undertaken to ensure stakeholder support.

2. Spill-overs – opening up the boundaries means that security policies need to be invoked to ensure information and knowledge that is proprietary or secret is retained safely.

3. Head-hunting – employees often interact more with people outside of their organisation than inside at times and “going native” is more likely.

4. Reduced management control – information asymmetries are eased and therefore workers are more knowledgeable and more capable of finding “work-arounds” in the system. Enhanced ability to communicate gives workers a greater voice in the company and its operations. While the democratisation of the workplace can be a positive aspect of networked design, there are obvious negative repercussions if these liberties are abused.

In the end, I believe that diversity leads to adaptation, therefore,  the best organisational designs represent a fluid mix of pyramid, flat, and networked structures, which are knowingly invoked to satisfy particular strategic requirements.

Enterprise 2.0 Uncovered – Wikis

What’s in a wiki? Why wiki?

The wiki is a simple concept – it is a website that contains an edit option on each page. A visitor to the website can click on the edit button, change the content on the page, or link to another page on the web or within the wiki.

The wiki is a core tool in the growing suite of applications described as ‘Enterprise 2.0’: a phrase coined by Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in March of 2006. It describes the use of social media tools by organisations as part of their work practice.

Earlier this year blogger Toby Ward, posted this item that discusses some Enterprise 2.0 success stories. He does use the term ‘Intranet 2.0’ rather than Enterprise 2.0 but in this context they are interchangeable (Thanks to Melbourne KM’er Andrew Mitchell for the link).

CPA Australia recently re-launched CPA Good Practice Guide – in a wiki platform.  Here is the official description:

“The CPA Good Practice Guide is a collaborative initiative between CPA Australia and its members. The online guide provides members with a comprehensive collection of tools, procedures, templates and checklists that can be used in day-to-day business situations.”

The Good Practice Guide itself is a useful KM tool. But, you may now be wondering, why have you put it into a wiki?

The main reason is the flexibility it offers. CPA Australia has adopted an enterprise wiki. That is, a wiki which along with the standard wiki features such as simple editing, tagging and cross-referencing, also integrates with the CPA Australia website and provides us with detailed access control options.

As a result of this flexibility we are able to rapidly add new content and enhance existing content. We are also now able to encourage contribution from users. The CPA Good Practice Guide has always been created and driven by members, it seems a natural extension to encourage direct contribution.

Currently the CPA Good Practice Guide is private and in ‘Comment Only’ mode, meaning only CPA Australia members or GPG contributors can view the guide and provide feedback using the comment function.

At this stage the Good Practice Guide resources themselves cannot be edited. The access control settings allow us to start out with a locked down version of the guide and over time create new areas where contribution is encouraged. The beauty of this system is that formally reviewed content and member generated content can be separated and clearly identified within the same website.

The wiki is a simple tool that opens up many new possibilities, the example I have outlined above is just one possibility. We are experimenting with a range of smaller scale ‘behind the firewall’ projects within CPA Australia, I’ll write more about the challenges and benefits of some of these over the coming months.

Have you implemented a wiki project? Tell us your stories about how it went.

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