Jiri’s Notepad

I need to re-learn to write shorter and more frequent posts, so here comes a shorter piece, while I am working on the continuation of my post on Lean.

I spent two years working for a extremely cost-sensitive customer, followed by a year in business development, so I am now rather sensitised to the whole cost/value discussion. Considering I am interested in the practical applications of social computing, I find the ongoing discussion about business value of e2.0 rather interesting and almost personal subject. Today I came across  Aral, Brynjolfsson & Van Alstyne’s paper called Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity that is interesting by a virtue of being one of the few fact-based contributions to the discussion.

One of the key conclusion of the paper is that “the structure and size of workers’ communication networks are highly correlated with performance.” This seems to be a proof of the ultimate impact of one’s social network on company performance (in hard numbers sense, rather than in woolly e2.0 will make you more in tune with the universe, which must lead to better business value sense).

The only thing that makes me wary is the fact that the research was done using data from a recruitment agency. I  be still careful about generalising this conclusion beyond the knowledge-heavy services industries / functions. We now seem to know how w2.0 fits into a broader enterprise technology landscape and there seems to be case studies from knowledge heavy industries. The question is, do we have any from process-focused and less knowledge-heavy functions?