Earlier we posted some stuff about twitter. Today twitter has really hit mainstream in The Netherlands. So I guess it is time to look into how companies are using twitter to deliver value!

News
In terms of the groundwell strategies this a little bit of one way talking. Two examples are DWDD a popular TV news show and NRC a newspaper. DWDD only posts the people how are on the show in tweets so their followers know how is on the show that day. NRC tweets about new posts in their website containing a link to the site. For news the main goals is getting more visitors to the site and alerting people for new content.

Customer services
UPC is a Dutch example with close to 1500 followers, maybee inspired by Jetblue. The twitter stream is a way for customers to get in touch with customer support about problems with their cable TV. UPC is not as big as Jetblue, Jetblue has 1,5 million followers! Rijkswaterstaat is the dutch traffic agency that uses twitter to talk with the general public and explain projects and roadblocks. The twitter customer service is about another channel in the services mix.

Politics
D66 is using twitter for news events and discussion about policies.More political parties have discovered twitter, like PvdA and VVD. More or less politics use twitter as a mix between news and customer services.

Jobofferings
Randstad is posting joboffers on twitter through multiple accounts, you can find a buch of them using search. They segment in country and types of jobs. Some accounts are more popular than others. Other agencies offering this service are YER en Adformatie.

Discounts
Some companies give discounts to followers of specific people. Blogger Nalden is very popular in The Netherlands and companies give discounts to his followers!

Are there more business processes supported by twitter? There must be, so let us know!

Today I presented a paper I wrote together with Marinka Copier and Thijs Gaanderse at the International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon. My participation in this workshop brought me a lot of new insights. Not just from the reactions to my presentation, but also from listening to the other speakers and participating in the discussions that went on here these past two days.

One early comment that resonated with me was the distinction that was made between “hard” and “soft” elements of an organization: on the one hand hard artifacts that can be designed (information systems, offices, business processes, etc.) and on the other hand the parts of organizational systems that cannot be designed, such as individual behavior and social interaction. This of course lies at the heart of my own research and of my interest in game design.

I was encouraged by the reactions to my conception of a rule-set as the minimal structure that an organization is looking for. Case studies like the one described in our paper were recognized as a valuable research setting that add an important empirical element to related conceptual and theoretical work (such as that by Joao Vieira da Cunha, also present at the workshop). One insightful comment was that the term “minimal structure” does not relate so much to the number of rules, but to their elegance and their affordance for emergent behavior.

The keynote today was given by Antonio da Camara, CEO of a company called YDreams. Besides some of the very interesting projects his company is doing, he talked about how he designed his organization. What I thought was his most interesting remark was: “If I were to start another company now, it would be less emergent but more based on my experiences in the past.” This points to the need for supplying design knowledge to managers and entrepreneurs. It also addresses one of the questions that was raised during this workshop: who will use the results of our work? My answer to that question is – based on the discussions here – that the results of our work on organizational design are not directly applicable by managers or entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, it was pointed out that there have been big failures when working from the assumption that everyone can use these methods themselves. Applying organizational design knowledge requires specific training, so a manager will need an (internal or external) designer to come in and help him with this task. Much in the same way that managers will not design buildings or information systems themselves.

A presentation that got me thinking was the one by Robert Winter. He has been doing very interesting work on what he calls method engineering. I did not know this label before today, but it is actually part of what I’m doing in my research: I am constructing (or: engineering) a method for organization design. His point was that there is often too great a distance between the method and the actual problem that it is being applied to. He used the example of Davenport‘s BPR method. This is a very general method, being applied to a great variety of problems. Sometimes it can be better to make a method adaptable to specific design goals or context contingencies. This is definitely something to think about in my research as well: perhaps the steps we go through in our method should not be the same for all design problems.

I look back on a very worthwhile couple of days. Interesting discussions with fellow researchers, much food for thought, and a feeling of validation for the direction that my research is taking.

Last night @nalden was at “De Wereld Draait Door” a dutch daily news talk show. Nalden is a great guy living in the true sense of the new generations hitting your workfloors about now. In this show he talks about his blog and his way of live sharing his thoughts to those who are interested. And he can make a nice living doing just this. When he is confronted with the jobtitle ‘trendwatcher’, he denies this and says he is just a young man paying attention! This is a great way to illustrate the connected mode of Generation Y. I included the video is his discussion in Dutch so you can get an idea about what is going on with this generation that is wondering around inside your company trying to figure out why corporate life got alienated from what is going on outside their walls.

Nalden is making his living in his own unique way but these are a lot of people just like him that are looking for jobs inside your companies. They are making use of technologies that are not provided by most IT departments and in a way that is unknown to most managers.

Shouldn’t your company be trying to make these talented people feel at home and challenge them to make a difference for their company?

I was trying to make an overview of communities and sites concerning the New World of Work in The Netherlands, “Het Nieuwe Werken”. I came up with the following alphabetical list, which is not complete off course. I excluded all vendors and only added non branded communities.

• Ambtenaar 2.0, a community with more than 2500 members looking into the new government worker, with regular open coffee events and lots of activity online. Ambtenaar 2.0 is a more open variety of Overheid 2.0, a more closed community on Government 2.0
• Het Nieuwe Werken Blog, a pure blog written by some the thoughtleaders in the Netherlands on this subject, active since february 2009
• Het Nieuwe Werken op Lindedin, a group with more than 4700 members and 154 recent discussions
• Innovatief Organiseren, a platform started by managementsite.nl, active since september 2006
• Nework community op Linkedin, a closed community with 200 members (of which 88 registered at linkedin) and quarterly meetings
• Over Het Nieuwe Werken, a community and conference initiated by Kluwer
• Telewerkforum, a foundation active since 1995 and supported by 88 companies
• Vernieuwing in Werk, a more recent community with more than 250 members, active online and in meetups
• Werken 2.0, a blog with more than 563 articles on the subject and also an overview of the communities on linkedin and ning

To show how much content is being added on this theme I performed a Google search on “Het Nieuwe Werken” delivers about 72.400 results. A more loosely executed search on this theme gets you more than 4 million results. The theme is hot in The Netherlands and based on some discussions with people outside of the Netherlands I think were somewhat ahead of the troops. But I doubt if this is true…

Fo you know of other initiatives in The Netherlands or Global initiative? Do you have an opinion on the state of The New World of Work in a global perspective? Let us know!

Yesterday Josh Bernoff presented the table of contents of the sequel to Groundswell. In his new book the groundswell inside the company gets more attention than in the first book. Four chapters will be dedicated to “Your People”. I am looking forward to the contents of these chapters! These chapters will discuss empowerment, collaboration and leadership.

In his blogpost he mentions one of the principles they came up with: “If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems”. This principle will have big impact on IT and Risk for making it possible for employees to actually design their own IT to fit their needs. IT have to hop on to the trend or be left back and actualy lose the role they were designed to do! The risk people have to figure out a way to empower employees to make smart decisions and minimize risk at the same time. The current financial crisis illustrates that these two do not necessarily go together well…

Last weekend I finished reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. They describe strategies for winning in a world transformed by social technologies. To start of an organization needs to think about POST (People, objectives, strategy and technology). As I look back in doing implementations of new ways of digital working inside companies, I see the same pattern in all of my projects. At the start we try to analyze the current state of an entire company. Our analysis does not stop with people but considers processes and IT and the physical workplace. The social technographics profile tries to standardize and benchmark the population you aim for. This is essential because you need make sure your solutions are going to be used by your chosen population. When you are profiling an organization you will encounter differences within parts of your organization. These differences will occur between divisions and team, between countries between generations and between male and female.

The conclusion is you should use some sort of profiling at the beginning of your project, this will result in multiple different profiles. Some companies transform profiles into persona’s to better understand needs and considerations for a target group. You need to analyze work processes to grasp the work that is being done inside. Plotting these processes inside a matrix to see differences between collaborative nature and complexity of work. This complete analysis will give a good base for designing a new way of working!

What are your thoughts on this? How do you think POST can be enriched to cover more ground?

I was invited to give a presentation about my research today at the CoreNet Global Summit in Las Vegas. CoreNet Global is the world’s leading professional association for corporate real estate and workplace executives. They have been active in organizing a dialogue between researchers and practitioners. This session was part of that effort.

I started out with a very brief overview of the history of computer games, leading up to MMOGs and World of Warcraft. I then went over some principles of game design and how it can be used to inform organizational design. I explained the importance of the rule set as the means to induce certain behavior. This led up to an explanation of the methodology that I’ve developed together with Marinka Copier, that has the organizational rule set as an end product.

The link to the workplace is something that I’ve been exploring recently. I put forward the idea that the workplace could be used as a means to express this organizational rule set and communicate it to employees. And with this idea, I put the audience to work. Of course we didn’t have time to go through the entire design process, so we did a highly condensed version. I gave each group a desired behavior as a starting point (such as: collaboration). I then asked them to choose one or more rules that would induce this behavior and to describe how the workplace could communicate these rules.

I was pleasantly surprised by the energy that this exercise generated. Here are some of the ideas that came out of it:

• If the desired behavior is collaboration, the rules could be: you answer the phone when it rings, you are available 50% of your time to connect, 50% of those connections have to be face-to-face.
• A second group came up with these rules for collaboration: all ideas are welcome and valued; experiences, abilities and ideas are always visible; all members must participate.
• To express these rules for collaboration in the workplace, a group developed workplace interventions such as: colocating individuals or units to mirror certain behavior and strategically locating visible, high energy business units.
• For customer focus, one group wrote down the rule that “we actively solicit our customers’ opinions about how effectively our products and services have performed”; a way to express that rule in the workplace could be a wall of customer comments
• Several groups worked with the rule that employees who live more than 20 miles from the office would be there a maximum of two days a week (to induce sustainable behavior); as an expression of this rule in the workplace they came up with maximum technological support for the virtual workplace and maximum support for “non-task objectives” when in the office: celebrations, feeling good about the company, building trust, managing conflicts.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the session today for their enthusiasm and input and I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation with some of you.

The paper I wrote together with Marinka Copier (Utrecht School of the Arts) and my colleague Thijs Gaanderse about our first case study with applied game design was accepted for the International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering in Lisbon this December.

And next week I will be at the CoreNet Global Summit to discuss what implications my research on game design could have for new ways of working and the design of the workplace. Incorporating the workplace is a recent perspective I’ve been taking that looks quite promising. More about my CoreNet presentation and the subsequent discussions next week, when I will report from Las Vegas.

In today’s world of work the need for effective and efficient collaboration to create value is big. To create value we collaborate with coworkers, peers and customers form around the world to solve problems or create new and better products. Collaboration is for the most part communication between the collaborators. Communication is one of the hardest things to do out there. There are three mayor challeges in communicating to collaborate.

The first one is about communication in general. If we want to collaborate we have to communicate to express our thoughts on the subject, get feedback, discuss new ideas, summarize and make conclusions. This is a very hard thing to do effective and efficient. We need to know our own communication skills and preferences and know about these skills and preferences for the people we collaborate with. I think the MBTI assessment is a great way to figure out personal preferences and their impact on communication.

Second challenge is about language. The current playing field is a global one and thus we communicate in different languages. The langauage that is used in communication between people with different languages is mostly english. Let’s call english the global interaction language. If you are a native english speaker you have some advantages here, but for the most of us this is a challenge to translate ideas of others and your own ideas from the interaction language to the native language. For me this blogpost is witten in english (as my cobloggers and myself want to engage the largest possible crowd) but my thoughts are in dutch. Somewhere between my mind and fingers my ideas get translated. Just the use of the interaction language is not enough because the crowd out there does not have the same level of english. For everybody including native english speakers another challenge is to use terminology that the reader can comprehend.

The third challenge is about cultural differences that have impact on communications. The sender and receiver of communication both have mental models in which they interpret communication. This interpretation is after translation. So in this blogpost I am thinking in dutch and writing in english. But I am writing this from a dutch mindset and chances are the you, my valued reader , are interpreting my english writing with a indian mindset. Differences in your culture colour your reading and comprehension of my thoughts. To make this post succesfull I should have written this post with your cultural background in mind and you should have read this post with my cultural background in mind aswell! This is a very difficult task because I am not familiar with indian culture and I don’t want to focus on indian readers but to a global audience, so where to start? For the reader this is also a hard thing to do, because it implicates you need to know about dutch culture as well! Some of the best examples on this challenge I read the other day in Outliers a book by Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about communication in the cockpit of aeroplanes and the possible destructive power of culture on collaboration.

If we take these challenges into account it is a mirracle that communication is succeeding in the first place. The question is if this mirracle is a consequence of contious actions or uncontius behaviour?

Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch has been on my mind this week. In my opinion: a must read. Besides the IT impact, it also looks at Cloud Computing and the networked world from a social-economical point of view. For instance: the similarity and difference between the shift into the Industrial Age and the shift into the Information Age is explicitly made.

But, I’m not sure if I totally concur with the proposed negative effect on doing work and the erosion of the financial strength of the middle class.

Without a doubt, when shifting into the industrial age, the way of doing work and business changed completely. Forever. Part of this was the introduction of the efficient production process and the big corporations (as we still know today). Economy of scale.

Because of this (but not only), the middle class flourished and became wealthier. Workers got more, and bought more. And, this new and readily available thing called “electricity” meant never before seen products. Which were sold. More production was needed. Bigger salaries. Et cetera, the virtuous circle is clear. (I’m leaving the big depression out of this, which you might not agree uppon). This process gave a more healthy spread of the wealth.

The statement that is given is that when the Information Age enters its mature state,the effect on the middle class will be totally different. The middle class will financially lose ground and the rich/poor ratio will skew; like it did before the Industrial Age. Perhaps even more (one signal is the Long Tail paradigm seen “dark”, were everybody can join in for nothing, and only a happy few take all the apples. I.e.: YouTube.).

This got me wondering. Is this true for all? Make no mistake, I think there’s a clear-cut case for the media industry: newspapers, music, films, et cetera. It’s being overwhelmed with free and readily accessible information, sharing and amateur production(s). The real deep professional’s part gets lost in the shallow waters of information overload (although, “gets lost” doesn’t mean “dissapears”).

In fact, one can state that: everything that can be virtualized or digitized can succum to the zero cost of (sharing) information-paradigm.

A small, non exhaustive list of industries:

- Automotive

- Consumer Products

- Energy & Utilities

- Financial Services

- Healthcare

- Industrial Machinery

- Nonprofit & Public Sector

- Retail

- Technology

- Telecommunications

- Transportation Services

And Media

I’m a strong believer that the true digital (and networked) world in which we live (and which will further mature), combined with the steep increase in abundance of bandwidth, will have a massive impact in the way we do our work and how we organize our industries and business (although, a shift to IPv6 will be mandatory). A signal as “going in to the cloud” is one of them (let’s try to use this phenomenon to take on the energy problem the world faces?). Another one is the further and more swift rise of the knowledge worker and the service sector.

But, does this mean that all the industries and its workers as we now know them are threatened in their existence? (Here, I over-dramatize the statement to try to make a point). My statement: Does every industry, as summarized above, “suit” the thesis presented?

If not, what will be the effect for the middle class and the way of work? Will there come another (not anticipated?) positive spiral to next nirvana (again, dramatized)?

What’s your opinion?