Jiri’s Notepad

Some fun thought experiments combining few EconPapers:

Aral, Brynjolfsson & Van Alstyne found out that “asynchronous information seeking such as email and database use promotes multitasking while synchronous information seeking over the phone shows a negative correlation.” Add to that the conclusions of the paper by Nick Bloom from LSE that shows that “technologies that reduce information costs enable agents to acquire more knowledge and ‘empower’ lower level agents. Conversely, technologies reducing communication costs substitute agent’s knowledge for directions from their managers, and lead to centralization”.

Now substitute ‘communication technology’ with ‘twitter’ and ‘facebook’ and watch the results…

Rather than the empowerment of workers, you may get the exact opposite… Maybe it is the time for social networking advocates to make social computing improve the quality of information, or they risk ending up with the results that are exact opposite of what was intended.

In the last post I asked a (rhetorical) question about case studies for social computing software. I had a quick look around to answer my own question, and in fact I found quite a few of them. Most case studies are from knowledge-heavy industries/functions, but you can get a decent view on which functions you can get business benefit in:

• Idea management (collecting ideas on process innovation, product innovation)
• Idea crowdsourcing (Dell)
• Customer forums
• Knowledge sharing / management: Rio Tinto,
• Collaborative planning, forecasting & replenishment: Aerochain
• Customer outreach
• Customer communities - Nike, Avon
• Understanding customers (social networking analytics)
• Viral marketing: Quicksilver

An important point is that these tools need to be used in to enrich/enhance/change existing business processes rather than as a standalone technical solution. As Sameer Patel puts it, “… data, and intelligence normally buried in closed process centric activity and systems were pushed into people centric social realms for improvement, only then to be put back into process systems in their newer highly optimized forms.” A brilliant example of how this could work is German Fidor Bank.

Sources: Beyond enthusiasm, CIMA Report on e2.0, Sameer Patel: Why Process Barfs on Social, Rio Tinto videos on Communities of Practice and Denis Howlett’s Glimpse to the Future.

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?