Kathy Harris

Hello from L.A. This week I’m attending and presenting at two conferences: Web Innovation and Portals, Collaboration and Content. I’m presenting research in three areas: application strategy, the future of management and business innovation. At their heart, all three topics are about innovation and causing or adapting to change. In 2008, most organizations consider innovation to be an imperative and are in the midst of discovering where and how to innovate.

The Web 2.0 topic attracts the most interest. I’ve led six workshops and two briefings on Web 2.0 and customer relationship management during the past 6-8 weeks. One of the best stories from these workshops was about a CEO who holds monthly discussions on key business and technology trends; employees from across the company, including the highly-feared and misunderstood digital natives, are invited to join these sessions. Another government organization has a cross-agency team researching Web 2.0 and identifying projects that will benefit multiple agencies and their collaboration efforts. Despite this high interest and activity, few organizations have implemented significant Web 2.0 projects (most are still planning or at best, experimenting) and their use of social applications are more evolutionary than revolutionary (that is, Web 2.0 capabilities are seen as add-ons to current web environments, rather than new opportunities). Organizations need well defined business cases to dive in more deeply.

My second presentation – Managing in the 21st century – analyzes the impact of digital natives, mobility, communities and other disruptive workplace and workforce trends on the people who manage our organizations and their management practices. The bottom line is that managers who continue to rely on command and control practices and hierarchical organization styles may not be succeed the disruptions from these trends overcome the disruptions associated with these trends. For those who do succeed, new management styles and performance measures will be needed.

My final presentation identifies best practices in managing business innovation and identified key organizations who’ve mastered these practices. Organizations that are new to innovation or struggling with thorny problems can harvest many master practices. The secret sauce is that successful innovators must know their own obstacles and customize their innovation processes to overcome these.

Please comment or contribute to these ideas and research topics.