Group items tagged

Collaboration is an essential element of doing business. and most companies spend their working day communicating with customers, suppliers, partners and colleagues. For many businesses this is still an efficient process. Stats show that each business loses an estimated £10k per year sitting in traffic en route to meetings. This doesn't take into account the time and cost of communicating across their companies or distributed workforces. In other words the things businesses are doing to ensure they run smoothly are actually costing them money. Internet based collaboration tools can replace face-to-face meetings, allowing you to work with a team in another office, another company, or even another time zone. And they are just as useful to help you stay on top of projects that involve people in the same office, because they bring together the information and resources you need to run your business on a daily basis.

Businesses are learning that social networking, used properly, can be an effective business tool. Having your employees involved in the community can enhance the company's reputation and bring in more business - so long as it's done right. Thus many large firms, especially in the technology industry, are actually encouraging their employees to blog, tweet, and participate in forums and social sites on company time.\n\nEven so, you still need to exert some control over how these sites are used. You can't just give employees free rein and hope they'll all exercise common sense. And you can't, in all fairness, blame them for violating rules that don't officially exist. You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they're presenting themselves as representatives of the company.

Businesses are learning that social networking, used properly, can be an effective business tool. Having your employees involved in the community can enhance the company's reputation and bring in more business - so long as it's done right. Thus many large firms, especially in the technology industry, are actually encouraging their employees to blog, tweet, and participate in forums and social sites on company time. Even so, you still need to exert some control over how these sites are used. You can't just give employees free rein and hope they'll all exercise common sense. And you can't, in all fairness, blame them for violating rules that don't officially exist. You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they're presenting themselves as representatives of the company.

The latest surveys continue to show the social computing provides real business benefits, but is it really as rosy as all that? Dion Hinchcliffe takes a closer look at what benefits are consistently reported with Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business while looking at where the actual value lies.

"Gamification, as research firm Forrester defines it, is "the insertion of game dynamics and mechanics into non-game activities to drive a desired behavior." To be successful, businesses need to engage their communities in ways that match business goals, whether that's by increasing communication with employees and customers, reducing support costs, or promoting a greater sense of community and recognition."

" Innovation Culture - MIT Sloane talk by the charismatic CEO, Terri Kelly. The top things I took from this inspiring talk are: - Staff turnover only 5% (the new hire process is lengthy and rigorous to ensure cultural fit) - CEO is elected by staff (CEO is one of the few job titles in the organisation - Costs are regarded as 'investments' - Every individual has a sponsor or coach - Leaders get there through others wanting to follow, not their power - Innovation culture is the MAIN driver of business results - Business units are no larger than 250 people (the founder talked about divide to multiply) - 'Give them the right tools, minimal bureaucracy, responsibility for P&L, expect people to lattice (network), organise around small teams'. Lastly, the culture at Gore has evloved of 50 years - it takes huge effort (equal to strategy and business development) and a lot of time to change culture I screen grabbed some of the culture survey questions that staff fill out about their leaders (not the other way round) http://members.ki-network.org/innovation/Innovation%20SIG%20Picture%20Library/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=1"

If you need to do a job more than once then automate it - or so the wisdom goes. And now the growing availability of intelligent, automated software - or bots - is making automation a reality for businesses of all sizes.

To fully benefit from new business technology, CIOs need to adapt their traditional IT functions to the opportunities and challenges of emerging technology "ecosystems." Here's how it's done.

"By capturing the big data on user activity and using this data to create a more engaging experience, businesses can better engage and motivate employees. As many at Dreamforce 2013 learned, combining big data with gamification is a powerful tool for motivating better performance, driving business results, and generating a competitive advantage."

"The biggest problem that businesses -- and governments -- must solve is one that rarely comes up in a behavioral psych lab: how to get people's attention in a world filled with more distractions by the day."

" BBC Radio 4 'In Business' with Peter day 11th Jan 2007. A great introduction to 'open source'. The history and future of the phenomenon of open source computing. This is highly relevant to our July 4th KIN Workshop on 'open innovation' where we will explore whether the open-source model can apply to other business innovation."

"Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. is a leading consultant on gamification as a business model to increase customer engagement. She also holds a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology. In 2010, Kim reworked Bartle's Player Types Model. She replaced the "Killer" type with "Express" -- a much more business- and school-friendly descriptor! Completing the axis, "Compete" took the place of "Achiever," "Explore" replaced "Explorer," and "Collaborate" replaced "Cooperate.""

Worth downloading and reading this paper. One abstract: "The ultimate goal is to enable data scientists,business analysts and other users "to extract the most information they can out of data as quickly as possible....For the business, we need answers now. The market is fixing the pace, so we have to give the best answer we can at the right time."

"This programme was broadcast on 17th January. A threat to traditional business or a fantastic opportunity? 30 Minutes."

CIOs have a major role to play in preparing businesses for the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on business strategy and human employment, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner predicts that by 2022, smart machines and robots may replace highly trained professionals in tasks within medicine, law and IT.

Syngenta is a global agriculture business that helps farmers make better use of their available resources, primarily through agrochemical and seed production. In order to continue to advance crop productivity, it invested more than $1.4bn in research and development (R&D) across 150 international sites in 2014.

If you want to move know-how around, this is a great model.If you thought business innovation was lacklustre, this is the extreme end - but it clearly works.

"A little more than a year ago, Gartner said gamification was being "driven by novelty and hype" and that by 2014, 80 percent of current gamified applications will "fail to meet business objectives primarily because of poor design.""

Systems of insight are the business discipline and technology to harness insights and turn data into action.

Many companies have invested significantly in gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still struggle to extract insights, put them to work for the business and create truly data-driven organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores how organisations can spark a chain of events through top-down leadership and bottom-up employee engagement that creates a culture with data at the centre of decision-making.

Many companies have invested significantly in gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still struggle to extract insights, put them to work for the business and create truly data-driven organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores how organisations can spark a chain of events through top-down leadership and bottom-up employee engagement that creates a culture with data at the centre of decision-making.