wissel.net

Usability - Productivity - Business - The web - Singapore & Twins

Brunei ICT Career Day


I was presenting on "Workforce 2.0" at the Brunei ICT Career Day. The event was organized by new newly formed InfoCom Federation of Brunei ( IFB), the IT vendors industry association. I know the 2.0 memme is a bit overstretched, so I decided to present my case with a little tongue in cheek. In a nutshell: well trained talent is more mobile than ever, so attracting and retaining them requires enterprises (the 2.0 versions of course) to adopt to the work and collaboration style favored by them. They will blog and twitter about work and their customer interaction anyway, so providing them with the platform within makes that more valuable for their companies (Knowledge Management anyone). I got good questions from participants from AITI as well as the Prime Ministers Office: How do you "police" a Social Software environment against abuses: time wasted or even use against corporate interest. The example given was: If an IBM engineer uses the communities tool to gather a group of experts with the intention to jointly leave IBM and setup an independent, innovative and competing company. My reply to that: it happened before (SAP anyone?) even without these tools. Today IBM probably would have a close look and later buy the new company.
In the evening we had dinner with Bruneian customers and a good set of discussion items: How do you design a long term national development plan when the world is developing at "Internet speed"? Somehow inevitably the discussion later touched the topic of the recent Malaysian election, where the common understanding is, that bloggers played a big role in the mood swing that led to the heavy election losses of the current government. One of my Malaysian colleagues attributed the influence of the bloggers mainly to the failure of the Malaysian government to reach out to young voters and their failure to engage in dialogue to address the growing frustration about progress and inclusion (or the lack of) in Malaysian politics. As my mom always told me: you better listen!

Posted by on 03 May 2008 | Comments (2) | categories: IBM - Lotus IBM Notes Lotus Notes

Comments

  1. posted by Pg Izam on Monday 05 May 2008 AD:
    { Link }

    Emoticon biggrin.gif

    Since you mentioned Twitter ... I saw that earlier Twitter was experiencing "scalability issues" which some say may have something to do with its Ruby on Rails heritage.

    So I jokingly asked "What if someone staged a coup and took all the Ruby on Rails experts from IBM and formed a spin off?".

    Well ... on 2nd thought SAP might be more "marketable" skills than Ruby on Rails. Emoticon tongue.gif

    Would've thought your answer to "developing national plans @ internet speed" would be to PUT national plans on the internet (process for developing them, updating them, measuring performance against them ... and all the content too, yeah that's important as well).

    WikiStrategies.com, anyone? Emoticon cool.gif Emoticon cool.gif Emoticon cool.gif

    Good talk! Looking forward to participating in Workplace 2.0!
  2. posted by Kevin Pettitt on Tuesday 06 May 2008 AD:
    Regarding the potential for "brain drain" if your organization deploys social software, I agree that the availability of community tools is not what creates the problem. However, these tools can, by giving even low-level employees a big-picture view of the organization, expose any existing patterns of mismanagement. One guess who doesn't like that Emoticon smile.gif