Thoughts on Lean, communication, and social media
Social business is more than just conversation. If implemented properly, it can be a route to more effective operation and, by extension, higher profits. Most companies are nowadays managed through processes, and in this post I will explore the ways social business can be designed with a focus on process improvement.
Continue reading “The process approach to social business design”
When exploring what benefits becoming a social business can provide for the enterprise, it is important to make a serious comparison to a viable alternative. Attacking straw men is useless and can only hurt the adoption of social as an important part of the enterprise.
Continue reading “Social business enthusiasts need to leave straw men behind”
Meetings are an unending source of debate. Some feel they are essential, others consider them a huge waste of time. Most tend to agree that, at the very least, many meetings could be run in a more effective manner. This is where social collaboration platforms come into play.
Continue reading “Boost the productivity of internal meetings with social collaboration”
In the 1950s, Japanese companies began their path to glory based on a new form of thinking largely built on the ideas of W. Edwards Deming. The age of quality had begun.
In this post, I will argue that there are significant parallels between the ideals of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Enterprise 2.0, and that technology is finally ripe for an even more thorough application of many of Deming’s ideas.
Many companies need to comply with ISO 9001 requirements for quality management systems. This can be cumbersome at times, but technology has evolved to a state where it can also be quite easy: with a wiki!
Corporations need feedback to evolve. Feedback from customers is vital, but so is feedback from employees: employees see what is happening under the hood regarding products, processes, and tools. Social collaboration tools provide unparalleled opportunities to create feedback systems where thoughts are shared and discussed and changes are implemented, sometimes at lightning speed. This is a story of one such system.
Many types of rewards and incentives are popular when companies attempt to attract people to follow them or interact with them on social media. But what about incentives when collaborative tools are used internally? It is not at all obvious whether similar reward schemes are useful in an enterprise 2.0 environment.
I recently finished reading Sarah Maddox’s splendid book on technical communication in a wiki environment, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate. It answered most of my concerns on doing tech comm on a wiki, except for one: localization.
The seminar “Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa: käytännön kokemuksia kilpailukyvyn parantamisesta” (Social media in manufacturing: practical experiences on how to improve competitiveness) was held in Helsinki on 15 February 2012.
Except for the keynote presentation given by Lee Bryant from Dachis Group, all the presentations were in Finnish. I was one of the speakers at the event (video in Finnish is available here), and I published a generalized version of my presentation in this blog post just before the event.
In this post, I will take a look at what the other speakers had to say. Continue reading “Seminar: Social media in manufacturing in Helsinki on 15 February 2012”
There is more to social media than marketing. Indeed, companies are increasingly recognizing the value of social media as an internal tool.
In this post, I will examine one of the most important social media tools for companies, an internal wiki. Continue reading “Internal corporate wiki is an information sharing powerhouse”