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It seems that the Enterprise 2.0 and eLearning community has recently discovered the idea of Value Networks. This concept has been around in the work of Verna Alee, Clayton Christensen, and many others for at least ten years. Christian Briggs, co-founder of SociaLens wrote a chapter about it in 2009, entitled "Web 2.0 Business Models as Decentralized Value Creation Systems" in the following book: http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/book/978-0-387-85894-4

Indiana University has saved nearly $20 million by joining with other universities to reduce administrative costs for essential financial software systems. The Kuali Financial System is open source software that was created to fit the needs of colleges and universities. By definition, open source software is free to use, distribute and modify, meaning IU avoids the costs of licensing expensive commercial systems that often cost tens of millions of dollars to buy and install. IU fully implemented and transitioned to the Kuali System in February.

What's the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles. In keeping with the generally boisterous nature of Monki Gras, the conversation with Hoffman and Cantrill was a bit more bare-knuckle than your average conference presentation. Perhaps it's a result of their joint suffering under the "Somali warlord style of management" (as Hoffman put it) of Sun Microsystems.

The adoption of social software by organizations started with the tools, and has moved to focus on the purpose for the tools. The last piece of the puzzle with be the people: their skills with the technologies and the ways that those skills affect their relationships with each other.

This is worth reading and thinking about on both a governmental and at an organizational level. As elements in a system become more interdependent, and as the speed and scale of financial, informational, contractual, physical transactions between the elements of a system increase, the system can become more prone to big shocks from relatively small disruptions.  If Churchill said in the age of radio that "..A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" what would he have said about organizations in the age of mobile devices, Twitter and YouTube?

"Survey results revealed engineers' chief concern to be fear of exposing critical company intellectual property (IP), with 58.5 percent of respondents citing security as their primary hesitation. Loss of productivity was a worry for 40.1 percent of respondents, while 29.3 percent said company policy precluded them from frequenting social networking sites on the job."

Gartner's predictions include a very interesting statement, that "by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments." What this means is that social media is starting to be integrated tightly with hard-core business intelligence functions in support of decision making. 

I had written this a while ago, but i think it is worth revisiting. Many of the core reasons for the replacement of "Rule of Thumb" practice with "Scientific Management" in the early 1900's have now changed, ushering in an era where we need both. In case you're wondering, scientific management is still the basis for much of today's management practice and organizational structures. 

Mindtouch Executive Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman, writing for Cloudave, identifies Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phillip W. Schiller as the top social Chief Marketing Officer of the Fortune 100.

According to a new report from Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely. The report says that many clients are approaching the firm for insight on creating best practices for remote, mobile workplaces assuming these changes are part of the remote future when in reality the change is already well underway. Previously, we looked at some of Forrester's research indicating that as much as 18% of the workforce used their personal smartphones for work, whether they were allowed to or not. That research showed only 29% of workers polled did work outside the office.

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways? An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

Social media, or at least its widespread use, may be relatively new, but certain human behaviors are not. For example, David Aaker, blogging at the Harvard Business Review, points to a study by Ernest Dichter from 1966 on word-of-mouth persuasion. The report had three key findings, all of which are relevant to social business today.