Archive for January, 2013

Why Isn’t The Future Workforce Leading The Future of Work?

11 COMMENTS
January 29th, 2013

I’m writing this from the IBM Connect conference in Orlando where one of the big topics of discussion is collaboration and the future of work, both topics I am very passionate about.  What I’m about to say might sound harsh but it’s true and it’s something that IBM and
every other vendor and conference producer needs to hear.  One of the things that I found most ironic at the IBM event is that a bunch of “old” people were talking about the future of work and the future workforce.  It’s ironic because nobody from this future workforce was present at the conference.  Now again, I know that might sound a bit harsh but that doesn’t make it any less true.  How can we be talking about the future of work and the future workforce and how can we be building products for this so called future workforce when they are not present at the events?  It makes no sense.  I hate to say it but the future workforce is in their teens and twenties not in their fifties.

It’s not just IBM, I see this time and time again.  We keep talking about the future and the “future” is not involved in the conversations, in the designs and development of the products, or in any of the discussions around how the future of work is going to change.  Instead we have people who are going to be retiring soon who are leading all of these discussions.  This doesn’t mean that the ideas are bad or that the are wrong, it just means that when this workforce retires we are going to be back to square one!

The simple idea is this, if we want to talk about the future of work and the future worker, then guess what, these people need to be present at the discussions.  Every company I look at it whether it be IBM, SAP, Salesforce, or anyone else; has an “old” person as the face of the future of work and collaboration (or social business or whatever else you want to cal it), and it’s typically a person that has been at the company for many years (sometimes decades!)  Why?  What kind of a future is that?  Where is the twenty something year old who is actually the future workforce?  Sometimes these conferences honestly feel like an older generation of people getting together as a support group letting each other know that everything is going to be “ok.”

It’s just a bit of a mixed message don’t you think?

TAGS: future of work, future workforce, ibm connect, old people, young people

How to Select Enterprise Collaboration Vendors

0 COMMENTS
January 24th, 2013

Towards the end of last year I wrote a post on the eight variables to evaluate enterprise collaboration vendors which you should read before continuing with this post.  Today I want the vendor evaluation discussion a bit further with something that I actually wrote for CMSWire a few weeks ago on scoring and comparing vendors.  Before we get into that let’s recap what these eight variables are, seen in the image below:

vendorvariables1-hires

Comparing vendors can be broken down into four steps which coincide with the image below:

Step 1 – Sort Variables by Order of Importance
Not every organization is going to order these eight variables in the same way. For example, at your company “price” might be the most important thing to consider whereas at another company it might be “technology and security,” so order these accordingly. This is all done in column one.

Step 2 – Assign a “Weight” to Each Variable
You can do this however you want. To keep things simple I just assigned numbers 1 through 8 but some companies do this as fractions as well. This gives you the ability to address slight differences between each variable. This is all done in column two.

Step 3 – Rate the Vendor on Each Variable
To keep things simple we can use a simple 0 through 3 scale where 0 denotes a vendor that is severely lacking in an area and a 3 denotes a vendor who meets all of your needs in an area. Essentially what you are doing here is figuring how important each vendor variable is in relation to the others. This is shown in column three.

Step 4 – Create your Weighted Score
All you need to do now is multiply columns two and three together to get a number in column four. Once you do that, just go down the column and add all of the numbers together. Doing so in my example results in 75. This is seen in column four.

Here’s a visual to help guide through the process:

enterprise collaboration technology evalutation

You can do this for as many vendors as you want and it gives you a fairly good objective comparison of multiple vendors so that you can choose the one that best meets your needs.  Feel free to adapt and change this model to whatever makes sense for you.

TAGS: enterprise collaboration vendors, evaluating enterprise social software vendors, evaluating technology vendors, how to pick collaboration tools, select enterprise collaboration vendor, select technology vendors

The Multi-Screen Employee Experience

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January 21st, 2013

Multi-screen experiences are crucial but they aren’t just for the consumer that has his tablet open while watching TV.  The multi-screen experience is just as important for employees within organizations and is a necessity for the future of work.  Let’s take at a realistic scenario: Tina wakes up in the morning to check her email on [...]

TAGS: multi screen employee experience, multi-screen experience, muti screen experience, the employee experience

New Whitepaper: Business Value of Collaboraton

0 COMMENTS
January 17th, 2013

Chess Media Group is hard at work with some big and exciting things for 2013!  One of the things we are going to be focusing on is providing more educational and strategic content around collaboration, the future of work, and the future workplace.  Based on a lot of conversations we have been having this type [...]

TAGS: business value of collaboration, collaboration resource, whitepaper

Some of My Favorite Quotes on Collaboration

11 COMMENTS
January 15th, 2013

It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. —Charles Darwin (I gave a presentation recently where I talked about how the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty, in that kind of an environment those who collaborate and work [...]

TAGS: quotes on collaboration

The Future Worker and The Future Workplace

3 COMMENTS
January 10th, 2013

As I mentioned in a previous article on The Manager of Today, many of our educational institutions and businesses have been modeled after the military where everyone needs to think the same way, dress the same, get access to the same information, and do what they are told, just like everyone else. This model is [...]

TAGS: company, employee, evolving work, future worker, future workplace, manager, work


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