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6 November 2007
Insight 2007: What will 'Businesslike' mean when business isn't like business anymore?
Posted by Rob Styles at November 6, 2007 04:30 PM
Paul and Richard might be missing-in-action for a day or so as the whole company is sitting over at our conference, Talis Insight and Paul and Richard are chairing tracks. It's about half way through the first day and so far it's been thoroughly great - but I would say that, I work here.
This morning kicked off with an opening welcome and teaser from Dave Errington, our CEO, followed by a presentation from Euan Semple from which I take the title of this post. Euan is one of those people who not only totally gets what happening in this changing landscape of social knowledge, but who also delights in sharing that insight.
Euan talked through a range of social changes that he helped happen within the BBC and that he is talking about all over. Blogs, Forums and Wikis form the first phase of the change, but Connect (an internal Facebook style service), a BBC senior managers blog, Plase a wi-fi based geo-location announcing service and Last.fm also feature.
It would be so easy to rattle on and on about the technologies at play here, but that's not the key thing. The key part of Euan's thesis is that these tools provide fundamental changes to the ways people meet, learn about each other and both establish and maintain those relationships. That is, says Euan, the reason he ended up walking past the Whitehouse putting the world to rights with Thomas Vander Wal (who coined the term 'folksonomy').
There is something genuinely empowering about your own blog, or a wiki where you can correct any page within just a few clicks. This empowerment requires trust and Euan relates stories of managers who don't trust their staff to do these things - perhaps those managers need to look at their recruitment policy, says Euan.
That trust brings up an even more interesting observation though. two clicks to edit a page; no 30 page report, no knowledge management system, no review committee - surely that can't be Proper Work? However, contrary to first impressions, these are the most auditable tools there are. He shows a video of the changes to the Wikipedia entry for the 7 July London bombings - The footage shows how the page evolves and adapts as new information is brought together. At one point the page is replaced by an extremist comment, but almost immediately reverts back to a previous, objective, report. Shortly after Euan was asked to compare the reporting on Wikipedia with the reporting on BBC News Online; he found the BBC wanting...
Overall the thrust of Euan's talk is that you should allow everyone in your organisation access to these new capabilities, both inside and outside the organisation's walls. Oh, and once you have, get out of their way.
Technorati Tags: conference, euan semple, Insight07, internet social impact, library, talis
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Comments
Just in case you want to gather stuff on the conference together, I'm tagging my posts with Insight07. I'm happy to use an alternate tag if you want.
Posted by: Owen Stephens at November 7, 2007 12:48 AM
