Recently both BusinessWeek and Fast Company published their respective 50 most innovative companies list.  I have “mashedup” both lists in the chart below and edited the lists a bit. (Where there is overlap I indicate the difference in ranking order between lists.)  There was much to garner from these lists, beyond the corporate rankings individually.

What struck me first about these two lists was the degree of difference. Only 15 companies made each list; meaning each list had 35 different named companies. How could that be? Well its perspective, and I call this out because it is analogous to what we teach as the importance of corporate culture to an innovation practice. How does your company view innovation? What is considered innovative? What “gets the bosses attention?” These issues  dramatically effect the way innovation is executed and valued.  In the case of Fast there seems to be greater emphasis (though not exclusively) on disruptive innovation. There is a bit more focus on entrepreneurial start-ups, smaller companies doing new and different things in a market. This list uniquely includes companies such as First Solar, Spotify, Alidi Sud, Glam Media and Quantcast.

BusinessWeek appears to be (again not exclusively) more focused on established larger corporations that are doing incremental innovation to strengthen market dominance.  This list uniquely includes companies such as Toyota, Nintendo, Sony, Nokia, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase and Ford.

What struck me second were the 15 companies that made both lists  (i.e., Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Walmart, Amazon, GE, BMW, Disney, Cisco, Intel, Facebook and Nike). Of these, all but 2 are US-based firms. Even amongst the companies that did not make both lists, there is a respectable percentage of US-based firms. Despite much press of late to the contrary, the US, at least short-term,  based on these two lists, is not lagging in innovation.

The third thing that struck me was the degree to which many of these companies appear year after year. There were several other articles in each of these magazines that I encourage you to read, as well as others, including this one that discusses a study conducted by Bringham Young University on why innovation happens.  These articles point out that while most companies readily state that innovation is critical to success, few, in reality, do anything proactive about it. Few companies have a specific focus on innovation: a team, do training,  and practices etc.  IAI’s survey on innovation in 180+ companies supports this observation. Our study found that While 68% stated their organization believed that innovation should be managed as a corporate asset and process, only 49% have put in place any formal process to manage innovation. Similarly, only 49% have any form of executive management presiding over innovation.  More shockingly, perhaps is the fact that 46% of the organizations do not specifically reward innovation.

Too many business leaders believe that creative problem solving and innovation skills are inherent, either you have it or you don’t, but research seems to suggest otherwise. Jeff Dyer the conductor of the research at Bringham Young University stated “”I always thought creativity was genetic — that some people have it, some people don’t, and there’s not much you can do to get better at it,” But after conducting the study, Dyer thinks differently.  We at Information Architected agree.  In fact we dedicate a major part of our practice to dispelling that idea, and dare you to prove us wrong. We can show you how to change your corporate culture (and how to determine if it needs to be)  and how to instill a proactive innovation practice, complete with tools that hone each individual’s innovation skills and establish innovation as a corporate competency. We will take on any organization’s challenge and guarantee results. Come on – I dare ya. Learn more .

And here is a link to that chart I referred to:  InnovationTop50

Collaboration – it’s all the rage, and to some it is “new.”

Yet for any project, whether it is assembling a sales proposal in response to a Request For Proposals (RFP), to the collaboration and coordination necessary to build an aircraft carrier, or any size or style of collaboration in between, there are several questions to consider when it comes to modern day collaboration, what many are calling Enterprise 2.0, or for those with a longer history in business collaboration, Knowledge Management 2.0.

Do you believe that your organization has pulled together a suitably versatile and agile collaboration toolkit?

Are your collaboration tools built for distributed teams, or for localized teams?

Are the tools involved well-integrated into the flow of collaborative work (search, research, document, refine, revise, publish, re-use, etc.), or do you as a user of the toolkit have to remember what tool or application to use at various stages within the context of collaboration?

While management may say that “we need more collaboration,” are you measured based on collaborative contributions, or in the end are you actually penalized for team contributions if it gets in the way of your individual work and personal performance measures?

Join us for a discussion (continue discussion in comments below or twitter via #iaie20) on the current and future state of collaboration – and what it takes to ensure that your culture, skills, and technical tools are up to the task of real-time, flexible online collaboration. Not all collaboration efforts or outcomes are the same – make sure you are setting yourself up to succeed.

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Is your Information Architected for Collaboration? for Innovation? to leverage the strengths of the workers and teams within the organization?

Contact us now at 
617-933-9655 to discuss our Collaboration-focused assessments, consulting or workshops, and to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together. You can quickly jump-start or re-start your collaboration efforts, and we can show you how.

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Target your collaboration pains now, details on our consulting practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 Workshops, Coaching and Consulting
• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Invention Machine (headquartered in Boston) announced yesterday the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 6.0 with integrated collaboration and expert identification technologies to further accelerate product innovation. (see press release from Invention Machine)

Beyond Individual Innovators

Historically, Invention Machine’s Goldfire has been oriented towards providing an individually focused innovation “workbench” for the lone researcher or inventor. The offering combined (and continues to offer) advanced techniques and technologies such as semantic search capabilities, process modeling (typically in support of the assembled artifact of a product), knowledge mining, and knowledge re-use to decrease the amount of time it takes for individual engineers (much of the environment is modeled in support of physical rather than intellectual property inventions) or inventors/innovators to analyze a particular problem or set of problems, and uncover the ripest areas to go forth and solve the problem.

The offering has been and appears to remain one of the most advanced convergence of these technologies and techniques that we have seen in the innovation management space, and in many ways, is truly a solution with no direct, out of the box, commercial competition.

This is both a blessing and a curse, as markets are not typically made up of a company of one, but an ecosytem of competing products.

Innovation Market Maturity

As the company and it’s offerings have matured, and frankly, as the general awareness of innovation management has matured as well, there has been more of a push, alongside the rise of Enterprise 2.0 (meaning in most cases, collaboration) to support team-based or collaborative efforts at digitally supporting and scaling innovation capabilities.

With Goldfire 6.0, Invention Machine has added the collaboration-oriented ability to:

• Automatically identify and connect innovation workers with domain experts within their network
• Empower the community with precise “innovation intelligence” (similar to the “relationship intelligence” brought about by social network analysis and social computing I’d begun writing about in 2004 – see “Death of a Salesman? Birth of Relationship Intelligence” – now read over 4,000 times on Scribd) by leveraging undocumented expertise from problem-sharing dialogues, capturing and processing those discussions as reusable corporate assets.

From the managerial (top-down) aspect of Innovation Management, v6.0 provides:

• The ability to measure company-wide innovation initiatives and trends in real time.

With this third component, they have now begun to straddle three distinct layers – tools providing benefits to individuals (the original offering), to teams, and through to managers/executives.

Trend Watch

This offer is indicative of a two-part growing trend, collectively defined as “convergence”:

1. The convergence of tools to deliver value to individuals up through the executive suite (traditional enterprise software tends to focus on only one extreme or the other)
2. The convergence of process, information, content, knowledge and search techologies into a unified and pre-packaged business application (as opposed to a technology focused on a specific issue/problem)

Keep an eye open for areas where these trends are surfacing as business needs within your own organization, as this convergence is happening more and more, particularly as the realities of competition in the current economic environment continue to be challenging.

Combine those trends with the rising trend of innovation management maturity, and we’re (finally?) witnessing a triple convergence for business innovation.

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Invention Machine, or any innovation management related solution, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If not using Invention Machine’s Goldfire, but solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How We Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Invention Machine’s Goldfire 6.0, are an argument and opportunity for the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise, which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We call this an Innovation Architecture.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Iron Mountain announced yesterday that it had acquired Mimosa Systems, Inc., an enterprise-class content archiving solutions provider, for approximately $112 million in cash. (see press release via Iron Mountain or coverage on TechCrunch)

Colliding the Cloud and Premise

Iron Mountain is a curious company with a very large installed base from it’s traditional business of storing physical items for “safe, offsite, long-term storage.” Given the nature of most people in businesses as information hoarders, their traditional business has been remarkably robust, even giving the flailing economy.

What many people do not realize is the growing and significant impact of digital content that is “under management” by Iron Mountain. The split-personality of their physical and digital businesses not-withstanding (they reportedly have issues with the sales teams on either side of the virtual fences of the business not proactively selling across departmental or business unit lines), the digital business is booming as well, due in large part to concerns around rapid (and as low-cost as possible) response to eDiscovery issues.

Cloud 1st, Premise 2nd – Reverse of the Norm?

Back in 2007 (see Carl’s coverage of the acquistion of Stratify by Iron Mountain), Iron Mountain made one of it’s first explicit moves to directly address eDiscovery concerns with it’s acquisition of Stratify, a cloud-based offering used to outsource discovery activities with dedicated processes, semantic intelligence, etc..

Intrestingly, even though Iron Mountain’s longest line of business has been in the physical world, the Stratify acquisition jumped the straight past the traditional “legacy world” of on-premise solutions (to an extent) and straight to the cutting edge.

With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain rounds out the portfolio for eDiscovery (integration and post-acquisition pains not withstanding) by specifically pulling in a solution that focuses on content where it lives in the largest typical buckets – those being email (as much as my fellow 2.0 pundits like to tout that email is dead, I can assure you it is not, and won’t be any time soon), SharePoint (that slow-moving content platform that is raising all boats), and for those still unmanaged files on desktops, file servers, etc., they can tap into the unmanaged areas as well.

The Theory Is…

If you’ll pardon the pun, Iron Mountain’s strategy appears to be (and which I largely agree with) if you can’t move the (content) mountain into active management, bring the mountain into passive management, so that in case of emergency, you stand a chance of actively managing your way out of costly, and expensive legal proceedings.

While you cannot anticipate every emergency, contingency, nor accurately forecast risk, by setting up both a proactive information architecture for your normal 80% of daily content concerns, being able to embrace solutions like what Iron Mountain is aiming for with this acquisition (we’ll see how long it takes to connect the vision to a seamles customer experience), allows you to break down both your normal legacy content walls, and burst up and out to cloud-based offerings to get the best bang for the buck. While I did not use this exact example in a recent webinar on Collaboration (see slides), I believe the graphic is still useful nonetheless.

The next time you’re looking at an overhaul, installation, or minor tweak to your own information architecture, enterprise content management or eDiscovery capabilities, take a look at this graphic and see if you have spent enough time, money and effort to cover your bases adequately.

Destroy and Converge

This general movement of destroying silos or at least virtualizing and providing access across multiple silos of information is a continuing theme (well past it’s time to come to broader light), that we also covered in a past IAM Alert on Present.ly and SharePoint, and which is being covered in a Cloud/SharePoint webinar today, by my colleague Carl Frappaolo (stay tuned for link to the archive).

Expect more on the cloud and virtualization front as enterprises finally take to heart what software startups (and the US Government) has known for many years now. High costs and barriers to the flow of information = bad business, and not just bad legal outcomes.

Are You Embracing Hybrid Strategies?

Weigh in with your success or failure stories, and let’s keep pushing the boundaries. We have a long way to go, but there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in these areas.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Yesterday I tweeted (@carlfrappaolo) about a Boston Globe article on ECM search company, Endeca. I was going to let it go at that; congratulations Endeca for getting the attention of the Sunday Globe and for having the popular press cover the fact that search is more than just findability and Google, that search can be used as a form of business intelligence (BI).

But then this morning, serendipitously I heard a story on NPR about the dramatically changing world of television watching and the impact that is having on the services provided by Nielsen.  For decades Nielsen has had a monopoly on this market; reporting on the “popularity” of television programs based on eyeballs on TV sets at a particular time.  This data is extremely valuable because it provides potential advertisers with insight on how much a spot on a given program is worth, and to which audience. But television watching just isn’t what it used to be (echo newspapers and magazines).  Television content consumers have  alternative ways to access content (e.g.TiVo and Hulu) via alternative viewing devices that include smart phones and laptops, to name just a few.  (I know my kids are forever watching TV without the TV on.)

The viewing audience, including the way they view is changing. Nielsen customers (i.e. advertisers) are demanding that Nielsen keep pace and monitor these viewing habits. The television ad market is not dying – it is morphing and as a result is potentially more valuable.  Through ECM-based technologies,  it is possible to compile BI on multiple consumer habits, at unprecedented levels of granularity. In the case of television viewing, for example, not only what viewers are watching, but also when, where, what was skipped, re-played and shared.  As Nielsen’s president Steve Hasker put it. “”We’ll be able to tell what type of video they watch, what type of sites they go to, how they interact on those sites, what they buy on those sites, what types of news articles they’re reading.”

That is BI at a far lower and wider level of granularity than Nielson provides today.  Now think this new proposition through. Advertisers, using more ECM-based technology (e.g. e-publishing and DAM) advertisers can deliver more personalized and granular messages, in a timely manner – ads in context. Yes, once again, CONEXT is king, and BI is the keys to the kingdom.

ECM is at the foundation of great new opportunities and challenges for organizations. I recently completed an article for Ron Miller (not published yet) in which I focus on the circle between ECM, KM and Innovation Management. This triumvirate will soon become a requisite to remaining competitive in virtually any  market. The article discusses this concept in some detail, more than here. Here, I draw attention to the tie between Innovation Management and ECM (in that order). In a phrase: get innovative with ECM.  As highlighted in this blog post, the integration of new content types and new means of content distribution and consumption, coupled with new approaches to BI creates amazing opportunities; truly personalized real-time publishing, contextual publishing and a constant loop of feed back (including web 2.0 emergence) that allows the content provider to continuously fine-tune the presentation and make-up of content.  The future for advertising and marketing is ripe with positive change, and ECM is at the foundation of this.

OK, I admit it. I do not spend all my weekends sitting around thinking deep ECM and KM thoughts. I enjoy hanging out with the kids and indulging in some mindless TV watching.  Its amazing though how the KM/ECM geek in me will sometimes connect the two – mindless TV and ECM/KM that is.

Last night I was wrapping up the weekend watching The Simpsons with my 2 daughters. Sure, occasionally there is a poignant message or two – usually lost on the kids. But in last nights episode there was a strong and important message directed right to every KM, ECM and E2.0 manager. Intentional or not – it was there and you did not have to think to deeply to catch it.

The Simpsons find themselves in Machu Pichu (don’t ask why – its not worth it). The narrator is explaining the significance of the site and states something along the lines of “This great civilization built a great wall around its people to protect it from the outside and keep their culture pure. But great walls also lock out knowledge, (Seriously that is the word he used.) and as a result the Incas were not adept at understanding the rest of the world or dealing with change. When the conquistadors appeared they were confused, ran and were destroyed.”

OK – you all got it right? “But great walls also lock out knowledge.” (Yes, the historical accuracy is off here – but the tie to ECM, KM and E2.0 – nonetheless poignant and worth reiterating.) “But great walls also lock out knowledge.” I spared my kids the thought that popped into my mind, “EXACTLY and that is the mission of every KM, ECM and Enterprise 2.0 manager”, to manage the BALANCE between security and collaboration. It is a topic I have spoken, written and blogged about many times. IAI published a primer on this very subject. I am currently in the process of working with Susan Scrupski, and members of The 2.0 Adoption Council on this very issue.

A group of the Council members who had to deal with strict privacy laws in Europe could have taken the “Machu Pichu” approach and erred on the side of security. But in the interest of collaboration to support agility and innovation, they worked a bit harder and used techniques and technologies to strike a clever balance between security and collaboration.  Sure – some of us may look at such approaches and say “D’oh”, or even “Duh”, but far too many have yet to really embrace this balancing act as the primary focus of long term success in the world of Knowledge Management, ECM and E2.0.

If you haven’t, I again invite you to read the primer on Content Security, and the 2.0 Adoption Council report when it is available next month.

A week ago, my long time colleague, whose opinion I respect, Whitney Tidmarsh, (@whitneytidmarsh) EMC Documentum CMO and AIIM Board member tweeted the following: “ Great discussion with #AIIM board about the relevance of the term #ECM today. Does #ECM mean anything to you? What would you call it?” I immediately tweeted back “Duh – ECM”. I was pleased to see a others chime in on my side of the debate – including @Bduhon and @piewords.

While Twitter gave us a forum in which to quickly and succinctly express our views on this issue, the issue is one I am passionate enough about to want  (OK need ) to expound further. (Whitney are you listening?)

When I first saw the tweet I immediately thought of one of my favorite Shakespearean quotes “A Rose By any other name would smell as sweet.”

I know there is something to be said for the value of labeling a market the “right way”, but why would AIIM, “The ECM association” spend so much time on this acronym. I know from meetings of the past this is often a topic. As @Piwords tweeted “ECM is a known term. I can’t imagine starting education process over. Fix the definition.”  How true. Why waste time pondering the acronym? What does the acronym stand for – not in the literal sense, but the functional sense – that is the issue.  I have always liked the acronym because it is so rich in meaning and potential growth. As I stated in my inaugural blog post, I take ECM literally and broadly:

Enterprise – business focused across the organization, directly tied to business processes and value propositions;
Content – in today’s digital age virtually everything, from paper in filing cabinets to know-how in people’s heads, text to video, from html-based web pages to PDF’d contracts;
Management – the manipulation of content to promote and/or accelerate education, decision making and collaboration and full lifecycle control from authoring and scanning to myriad electronic displays – A full lifecycle cradle-to-grave proactive management of the content.
In this definition, ECM includes: tactical technologies such as records management, imaging, search and retrieval, digital rights management, enterprise rights management, web content management; related technologies such as workflow and BPM; and broader applications and disciplines such as Information Architecture, Knowledge Management, Innovation Management and Enterprise 2.0.

With such an appreciation for all that the acronym stands for you can appreciate the almost limitless possibilities for ECM. Although the market enjoys a solid past (steeped in ground-breaking imaging systems and pre-web search tools), it enjoys a vibrant present (characterized by Web and Enterprise 2.0) and has a rich future ahead (with emerging new digital content types, increasingly portable and flexible interfaces/devices and burgeoning new approaches to dynamically manipulating content in context on the horizon.) This is what keeps my passion for ECM alive.

So it being the end of yet another year, I thought I would expound just a bit more on the future of ECM, not just into 2010, but beyond. These are some of the issues that I think keep ECM relevant, vibrant and ripe with opportunity.

ECM May Divorce from Component Technologies, But Joint Custody Must be Granted

Coincidentally, earlier this week Lawrence Hart (aka @piwords) and I engaged in some further Twitter banter regarding ECM vs. WCM. Lawrence was attending an AIIM webinar on the future of ECM, and commented that he believes WCM and ECM will soon part. As he put it – a quick divorce was best. We ended up agreeing that this was OK – as long as there was joint custody of the children (i.e. content.) The point is ECM is not a technology or product per se, but an underlying foundation/system. Organizations will likely not deploy this system via a single tool – maybe even single vendor. Strategies will lead to, in most cases, deploying best of breed functionality for specialized instances. This is fine, in fact in some instances much encouraged – as long as the strategy does not lose sight of the overall system/foundation. Management and access must appear to the business user as a single system. Please – no more silos.

The Definition of Content will be Challenged and Enriched

For years I have been extolling the ever-broadening capability of digitizing content. With the same level of activity and disruption that scanning/imaging had NEARLY 3 decades ago – look for serious business application of video and audio content, imminently. Further out on the horizon, keep an eye out for the inclusion of touch and smell in the definition of ECM. I know I have been talking about this for quite awhile, and it likely will not take off in 2010 – but it is clearly on the horizon. You may recall in one of the last reports I wrote for AIIM, I reported that 1% of companies surveyed indicated that digital smell (i.e. olfactory content) and digital touch technology, are used within their organization.. Although AIIM editors struck this finding from final publication, as it was seen as too radical, I believe it is very much a real issue. Start thinking creatively. How might not only audio and video content bring new value to your business applications, but also touch and smell. Some more forward thinking organizations clearly already have. Just last month, TIME Magazine (Note: not a techy magazine), ran an article on the business value of smell. With such attention, it is only a matter of time (pun not intended) before we are all provided smell-based messaging, encouraging us to make purchases, make decisions and enhance customer satisfaction.

Hardware Creates an Untehered World

Ah – speaking of such applications, we cannot forget the hardware that will enable this as well. In 2009, devices such as SmartPhones, Sony Reader and Kindle became most familiar to the ECM crowd. (“Yeah, there’s an app for that.”) But we are just scratching the surface. E-paper and digital display technologies/products will continue to morph in creative new was (e.g. rolled up portable newspapers to intelligent dynamic nametags at conferences).

Context is King

In this vein of thought, look to advances in e-publishing technology. I foresee great advances in the ability to “publish” content in context, via combinations of RFD, e-publishing, text analytics and BI. Yes, E-publishing vendors such as MarkLogic and PTC will  have a much more prominent place at the ECM table.

2.0 Heralds in Greater Need for Security

And now for a more tempered voice. The Web and E2.0 movements will grow in stature and notoriety,  and collaboration will be the buzz word de jour. But with this, the lawyers, compliance officers and records managers in the ECM industry will again raise their prudent and knowledgeable heads and push the security-side technology providers just a little bit further.

So there you have it. ECM a dull old topic – I don’t think so.

The video archive of our keynote from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco is now available. It is embedded and viewable below – running just under 22 minutes.

Thanks again to Steve Wylie for inviting us to keynote a second time, to Susan Scrupski for her work and our partnership with The 2.0 Adoption Council, and to Wayne Kurtzman for the fantastic voice-over work in the intro video clip.

This represents highlights of some of the most shocking and interesting findings from the work we have been doing with The 2.0 Adoption Council, focusing, in this case, on IT Resistance, Management Resistance and User Resistance, budgets spent, and where those budgets are being allocated for Enterprise 2.0 projects at large-scale and in large enterprises (of all types represented in the council).

Interested in the companion whitepaper and further Enterprise 2.0 resources?

• Sign up for the entire bundle of related Enterprise 2.0 Resources we have created both directly based on the resarch presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, as well as additional resources created in the last year.

Are you experiencing similar resistance in your own organization?

How have you overcome the resistance? Top-down? Bottom-up? Internal communications? Carrot? Stick? Weigh in – we all need to uncover the best and worst practices if this market is going to take hold and grow even further.

An article in today’s Boston Globe, reports that a new regulation will compel bloggers to disclose any affiliations or gifts they have received.

As Web 2.0 matures, it will be more regulated. This is an issue I have blogged and spoken about many times before.  But what makes this article even more interesting to me is the reaction of bloggers. In this case the regulation actually seeks to make blogs more transparent – exposing any and all connections between the author and another possibly conflicting interest. The article states “Beginning today, bloggers, Twitterers, and others who write online reviews or endorse products … must disclose it when they receive free merchandise or payment for writing about an item.” Ah – disclosure – full transparency.  This is a good thing – right?

Web 2.0 zealots have long pontificated that the 2.0 movement is grounded in transparency and openness. And yet, in this instance they are “unhappy” with a ruling that makes their sites even more transparent. Oh the irony.

As previously stated, I have many times before blogged about the need for responsible use of Web and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, including the strategic leveraging of security, control and yes full-disclosure.  As Web 2.0 matures, perhaps many of its zealots will have to mature as well and realize that in many cases their  writings are not random ramblings but real business content, which needs to be responsibly managed and  accurately positioned for what it really is.

The article is really worth a read. The commentary and arguments from bloggers are telling and at times almost amusing.

Today I had the great fortune to attend the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) program at Babson College.  I almost didn’t go – having just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I was feeling a bit “full” of talk on collaboration and technology. But luckily three things coerced me into attending.

1. The event was being produced by Kavin Moody of CIMS, who I had worked with a few weeks back on a similar symposium at Olin Innovation Lab (Olin College of Engineering), and was impressed with the group and his work.

2.  The speaker, Karen Sobel Loeski was highly recommended by my colleague Joe Wehr, whose opinion I respect and value greatly.

3. The topic was just a bit left of center – Leading the Virtual Workforce.

So I decided to go. WOW – OMG am I glad I did.

Karen Sobel Loeski was not only a dynamic, engaging and entertaining speaker, but her message was fascinating.  As those of you who follow my work know, when I address collaboration and knowledge management audits I utilize an 8-dimension model. Using a variety of techniques I measure the effectiveness of (and obstacles caused by) these 9 facets.

In performing these assessments leadership style is assessed – as part of team structure, communication and structure. But, Karen’s work focuses deeply  on leadership.

While I  pontificate on the value of leadership and best practices in leading collaborative teams – and the need for a different approaches when teams are virtual – Karen actually has come up with something called the virtual distance, an approach by which one can measure the reach or gap that exists amongst a virtual team.

I will not go into her talk and work in detail here. I recommend that you buy her 2 books – really.

I will summarize my favorite points.

1. The need to address the issue of virtual distance is critical in this era of Enterprise 2.0.  One of the biggest value propositions of E2.0 is the ability to support and facilitate effective team-based collaboration regardless of time and distance between team members. This is empowering, but as we migrate to a virtual workforce, we need to realize that the approach and role of team management needs to be adapted. All too often we hear that E2.0 is about collaboration without leadership, anarchy, and the destruction of business management. Karen (and I) averts that this simply is not so. Teams – virtually any team (no pun intended) – begs for leadership – of some sort. The leader of a virtual team faces different challenges and requires different sensitivities and skills but is as critical as a “traditional” team leader.

2. Although typically associated with geographically dispersed teams, virtual distance can occur between 2 people sitting in the same car (you had to be there to appreciate this comment). Virtual distance is a cognitive and psychological distance as well as a physical distance. Karen provides a 10-dimension model to assess the virtual distance of a team.

The Virtual Distance Index^TM

3.  Glocalization of our workforces has changed many issues for business – not just leadership style. We need to reexamine how we evaluate the value of our workers and the work they perform. ROI models steeped in “cost/time of widgets produced” models simply do not work any longer.  Karen offered many great examples; one:  Adobe Reader makes no money directly for Adobe, so it has no value right? – We all know the answer is “wrong” – it is “new value”.  Although “its not about the technology” – technology is changing the economic models of the past.

Interestingly enough, I was speaking with Michael Idinopulos of SocialText the other day. SocialText  provides a host of services (including assessments) along with their E2.0 technology, because (as a virtual company themselves) they appreciate that the value derived from technologies that enable virtual collaboration and teaming is only maximized if the culture AND LEADERSHIP associated with the technology usage are specifically adapted to leverage the technologies and the environments they create. Michael addresses the issue of “leaderless collaboration” very well in his post Transparency, not Anarchy.

I think part of the reason we are having such a difficult time getting through this transition is partially based in our lexicon. Perhaps we need to think of another term for technology-enabled teams and collaboration  that transcend time and distance.  We call them virtual – but there is NOTHING virtual about them.  They are very real, and they are very powerful.  I’ll wrap this somewhat lengthy post up by stealing a quote from Karen’s presentation – she quoted Albert Einstein “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”