Terri Griffith is a Professor in Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business and author of the The Plugged-In Manager. She studies how we mix together the technology of work (everything from telepresence to the size and type of tools a crew would use to build a fence), the way we organize to do this work (virtual teams, collaborative leadership, hiring and pay plans), and the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the people we work with. For more, please see TerriGriffith.com or follow Terri on Twitter: @TerriGriffith.
Companies and employees are finding unique ways to work in a world supported by mobile Internet access. We’re seeing growth in coworking, and telecommuting in general, and Needle is a great example just how far you can push these ideas. Read more »
The teams at Rally Software and Getty Images demonstrate that co-creation is not only possible, but likely necessary, to be a success in business today. As they show, co-creation helps reduce barriers between what a business needs and what it can get from its suppliers. Read more »
Yammer has a sophisticated understanding of how customers come to value their tools. They understand that although executive leadership and groundswell support are important, it’s the heart of the company that has the greatest impact on how Yammer ends up being used. Read more »
Work boundaries have blurred and so has our understanding of who knows what in a given company. WikiOrgCharts uses the power of crowdsourcing to bring that information into focus. Having a clear picture of roles within an organization makes it easier for partnering companies to collaborate. Read more »
Something as simple as Smartsheet’s cloud-enabled spreadsheets can greatly improve communication in the workplace, allowing everyone to see how different steps in a project relate to manpower, timing, and other resources. The Oshkosh, Wisconsin School District provides a useful example of Smartsheet’s capabilities. Read more »
IBM recently announced new social networking and collaboration mobile apps — specifically designed to support enterprise needs around consumer mobile devices. IBM aims to bring social networking, real-time collaboration, and online meeting capabilities from behind the company firewall and into the hands of tablet users. Read more »
Today, Wrike launched a free version of their project management software into the Google Apps Marketplace. Wrike’s CEO Andrew Filev says the free version will continue to improve as Google expands their API to allow greater flexibility for building off the Google ecosystem of applications. Read more »
Our product life cycles are getting shorter — putting more pressure on how quickly we can form teams and work effectively across teams. At the same time, team members are often working apart or on-the-go. Managers need support, and performance management platforms, such as Rypple, aim to help. Read more »
Data is playing a bigger role in how we do our work. According to a recent study by Factiva, there are at least six different personas that workers take on in their data work, illustrating the different ways we relate to this data. Read more »
The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills. We are starting to understand the value of being data-savvy and how different kinds of data can be used to influence behavior and improve organizational policies and practices. Read more »
What would work be like if our colleagues just knew what we were working on? Peers could better coordinate, and managers could more easily allocate resources. DoubleDutch HYVE takes us one step closer, automatically letting colleagues know what we’re doing, for whom, and where. Read more »
Data is playing a bigger role in our work, requiring that organizations and individuals learn to work with Big Data to stay competitive. The role of data scientist is emerging in organizations wanting to take advantage of this data flow. Read more »
David Robins’ company Binfire created project management software based on the philosophy that better collaboration and communication leads to increased productivity. But as his global team worked on the software, he learned how best to manage that collaboration and when to involve others in planning. Read more »
This month, online collaboration platform Teambox added private elements, offering users various levels of privacy. More than just a response to Google+ Circles, the feature supports modern organizational practices, allowing employees to share limited information with vendors and clients. Read more »
More than email and even shared documents, shared calendars can feel a bit intrusive. These 10 tips will help you make sure your coworkers respect your time when they schedule you for meetings, and they may even make those meetings more efficient. Read more »
Wrike’s new release adds increased flexibility and speed to the project management software, which is designed to allow companies to crowdsource project management by taking advantage of the “work graph.” Read more »
As businesses rely more and more on analytics and data to make strategic decisions, they continue to struggle with some thorny issues, such as incorporating data into company culture and allowing employees to access the data they need, according to a recent study. Read more »
Last week, Inmagic introduced IdeaNet, an innovation management platform. I spoke with Phillip Green, Inmagic’s CTO, about how the company approaches B2B collaboration and how its clients integrate innovation into customer interactions. I came away from the conversation with a new appreciation for keeping things simple. Read more »
An interesting example of the practice of open innovation is the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, as SAP and its partners have found a way to integrate hardware and software innovation in a way that is open, but also protective of intellectual property. Read more »
The latest IBM CEO study reports, “More than 62% of development projects fail to meet the intended schedule and 30% of project costs are due to rework and poor execution of requirements.” IBM Jazz is working to address these problems through greater support of developer collaboration. Read more »
RedCritter Tracker is a thoughtfully gamified project management tool for software development teams that’s set to launch later this month. Founder and CEO Mike Beatty walked me through the app’s key capabilities, including project management support, visibility into employee skill sets, customizable rewards, and badges. Read more »
Submissions to the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Innovation closed July 18. For two months, management practitioners, consultants and professors have been posting their work hacks and stories of experimenting with radical management practices to share with the community, gather feedback, and gain recognition. Read more »
Spigit is a leading enterprise social innovation platform. Paul Pluschkell, CEO and co-founder of the company, talked to me about the product and Spigit’s perspective on innovation management, which supports the “edge to the core” philosophy that is top of mind in many high-impact organizational settings Read more »
It’s great to have access to technologies that allow us to collaborate on documents in real time. However, real-time collaboration, in fact all collaborative writing, will be more successful if you follow these five steps to integrate your writing process with your tool’s technical capabilities. Read more »
Imagine you have a new group of interns and you want them scouting a new location for your next store in San Francisco. You’d like to do some team building to warm them up to the task. You can build an app for that! Read more »
Brainstorm began as an internal innovation management platform at Intuit, but it’s now available as an external offering following extensive customer testing. Tad Milbourn, product manager for Brainstorm, walked me through the application’s role in the company’s own innovation approach. Read more »
It is important to understand that our work takes place in a system. To be an effective web worker, it is vital that you think about the whole system that you work in, not just the critical dimension of the moment. Read more »
I teach technology and innovation to working professional MBA students who are changing courses and teams every ten weeks. Collaboration tools are critical to our effectiveness. Over the last two years, my courses have served as testing grounds for two locally-grown, student-designed tools: Acceledge and Piazza. Read more »
Just like other voice-focused communications, video content is hard to find, not accessible to all and hard to repackage. But transcription can add value to to both content providers and content users in at least three ways, and creating these transcripts is becoming easier. Read more »
Our “workspace” is no longer just an office, it’s come to mean the entirety of how we get our work done. We need a seamless workspace to focus on our work; our tools and practices should allow us to flow from activity to activity. Read more »
Transparency is something we want from our collaborators, know has value, but often lag about providing ourselves. While studies show transparency nearly always results in better outcomes, people often withhold information because they feel it would take too much time or are uncomfortable sharing it. Read more »
Once you have the good ideas, what do you do with them? Innovation management tools can support the transition from good idea to great change or product. I spoke with Vincent Carbone, Brightidea co-founder and COO, about the company and his perspective on innovation management. Read more »
While there’s no single way to kick off a group in a collaborative process, the available research says you should start small with a specific, achievable goal, rather than trying to implement a full technology platform at the same time as you’re organizing the project. Read more »
The Internet provides companies with a great way to gather new ideas. But it’s also important to think about how you ask for ideas, and what you do with them once you have them. Idea generation is generally the first step in an organization’s innovation process. Read more »
