Capping IT Off

Wow, check your blood suger level, man!
I hope you feel relieved now that this is out of your system. ;-)

Mark, I guess this is pretty much what you are doing as well... ;-)

And what happens when The DIGITAL NATIVES like yourself are GOING CORPORATE?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1937

Johan

Johan, thanks for the excellent article! I agree with the article that a big drive in the enterprise is caused by the younger "tech-savvy" employees that enter Capgemini, but the adoption of the so called Web 2.0 or social networking tools is at the moment very much in the picture at Capgemini (also with the not-so-younger people ;) ). We use for instance the Office communicator and Skype and inside the global Java community we are experimenting with Facebook as a community tool.

From my point of view the main driver for this is collaboration. Both internally (e.g. with our Rightshore offices in India, Argentina, Morocco, ...) but also externally with our customers who are also globally operating businesses. It saves costs, saves time and actually can make the ties stronger.

Lee; great to see that Capgemini are on track with trying out and using these tools internally. Me and my collegues have taken a similar approach and are intensivelly trying out as many of these tools as we can internally.

The interesting feature in this transistion is that adoption is driven by the actual users; the employees demand these tools from their employer, rather than the traditional push model. A user revolution.

Hopefully this can also put an end to the horrible corporate GUI; have for example yet not seen a single user friendly resource planning system. User experience within corporate tools will go through a revolution.

However as a summary, there is a lot to be done; how many companies would for example be confident to Go Public with their corporate intranet? Employees tools will go through a transistion and deserve alot of spotlight for a long time...

Regards Johan

PS: Heard OffShore, NearShore, HomeShore, etc. but RightShore was a first :-)

Johan, I completely agree with you wrt the horrible corporate GUI. Have yet to see a stunning SAP interface :-D

Regarding your remark about the corporate intranet, we have had some discussions internally at Capgemini when we set up our internal wiki. There were a couple of people in favor of this and we would create with that some kind of "open source knowledge", a step further than open source software. Somehow the discussion died out and the wiki was launched internally. However we do feel the need that we need some collaboration platform to work with our partners, customers and the community, so we are looking at ways how we can open up our intranet, or at least a part of it. One big question you need to ask yourself is: what kind of added value does it have to visitors? It's not enough that we just open our wiki to the public. Most likely most people won't give a d*mn, since we are not a products based company but a services based company.

The question I would like to ask you is what would attract you to visit frequently the Capgemini public wiki (or other collaboration tool)? One other issue you need to think about is that once we open the wiki, we need to put extra work in it to maintain the data. There is a difference in when you keep it internally or when you share it with the world. We need to monitor the quality, quantity and protect possible sensitive customer information. Is this effort worth the trouble?

Lee; expecting (hoping) that SAP user interfaces will be a key selling point very soon

Most consulting companies are today inviting clients to take part of project related administration and documenatation through extranets (recently boosted by MS SharePoint solution). But this is just a fundamental start. Your reference to knowledge sharing is more exciting. My advice to Cap would be to create very specicialized wikis; for example one about "RightShoring"; an area where (im sure) Cap possess unique knowledge and experience. To gather this unique competence would definitly attract people like myself who are interested in the latest development of this area; and more importantly I would be invited to participate and share my thoughts and experience (which certainly would be of interest for your consultants). Be the focal point of certain expert areas where both your consultants and people like me are able to collaborate to share information, knowledge and ideas within a certain area! Would love to put in a couple of hours every week if I was able to get a similar input from other exciting persons...just like me and you Lee who both are passionate of the latest digital trends and new ways to collaborate...

This Gartner report from 2007 captures some of what we have been discussing: Enterprise Web 2.0 Goes Mainstream