I had the opportunity to hear how Nokia has been doing their co-creation. Jussi Mäkinen (@luovanto) gave a speech at a seminar on social media in marketing. Jussi is the marketing manager in charge of co-creation and launching of N900.
I especially liked a few points he brought up in his presentation.
I've talked (pardon, written) a lot about passion. So do Like Minds. The way I see it, these new social media "market squares" can be seen as tribes; communities that take form around one (or few) topics. They can be values, philosophies or ways to act. Most often, however, there is a core doing, something tangible that unites the people coming together.
But whatever that core is, most oftenly the brightest common nominator is passion.
Jussi brought up passion, too. In their search of the new, they came across high professionality, passion and freedom to create. On the other side, there are rigid hierarhcical structures of the official organization who has to cope with all kinds of regulations, even laws, restricting their R&D funcion.
Agility, to my understanding, is the main explanation to why unofficial structures are capable to come up with results and create faster than "the old school". How then does agility live inside our organizations? There's evidence that it doesn't.
There's talk about Facebook generation and High-Performance Teams and Radical Management. We need new kinds of structures to nurture these workers - creators - in their new ways of doing things. The same applies in the public sector!
Gone are the good old days of industrial management, eh?
Developers in the 21st century are very privileged. With seats in the front row, we are equipped with apps and tech and knowledge our ancestors only dreamt of.
But what counts the most in our ability to create new, is our ability to apply and enrich what has already been done.
In ICT "that old" often seems to be an impediment. But the deep fulfillment in life comes from beating the difficulties, solving the problems and climbing over the mountains of obstacles.
Enough with the chitchat, what I wanted to share with you today, is a notion I'd call the fourth step in developing eServices.
Developing ICT-based services is like..
Me and my colleague developers and visionaries have often envied the "new" Eastern European countries. They had a fresh start, building everything from the scratch, being able to align everything at once, at least, so it seems. More mature ICT-countries suffer from the burden of the past. Our systems are partly old technique, and combining that old with something new and very different can be tough, costly - sometimes even impossible.
..building with blocks?
What I've learned, in my networks of different branches of the society, is to look at things like blocks or Legos, if you like, and then share the same blocks whenever possible. It seems to me that building something new can only start at the ground level - obviously! For the most efficient outcome, it also needs to be modular, done with blocks.
In public sector, my fear is that we're always trying to build something else.. something that "can't be built with these old blocks, so let's build a brand new something else" - only to find out that we can't get rid of that old one, either, because this new one needs bits and pieces of that old one. Or, that old one still carries a bit of the old process and the new one takes care of only part of the entity.
For higher productivity we would need solutions that truly make it possible to let go of something old. Otherwise our empire keeps eternally expanding.
Data as the smallest joint particle
When you can isolate data into the smallest mutual factor, you can look at any process as a flow of data. The real productivity can only be achieved with wisdom: sharing information, combining processes whenever possible and starting with the customer / citizen. A few great examples on this road to Real-Time Economy
eInvoicing takes all the information electronically, from system A to system B. It is the green way, the productive way and the most efficient way to work. And, thanks to development alongside SEPA, eInvoicing with its ISO20022 standard will also enable carrying that data of the financial transaction directly to accounting.
Fully Integrated Accounting can thus entail data from the eInvoicing, via an electronic accounting reference. Further on, data on actual payments and the different particles, split payments, of the total amount can also be verified by the bank.
Overlapping use of data needs..
Accounting, however, is only the halfway. Closing the books starts the marathon of a multitude of reporting. Businesses need to file in their tax returns, report to statistics, file their financial statement in the trade register, to name but a few. All those "sub-processes" demand skills and further calculations.
Now, with our previous thought of joint data as building blocks, Unified Reporting Code (F) has now split certain items of information into smaller fragments in a way that enables more automatic reporting in Finland.
..harmonization of concepts
Essential blocks are the steps toward more Real-Time Economy and higher productivity. What public sector needs to do and has now started to do, is unifying its core concepts. Definitions and meanings must be unified, in order to ICT to co-work, mingle and be integrated.
With meta data, relations and data models taken care of, a real ontology will one day enable semantic web and enormous savings in overlapping workload, vain searches and loss of information.
A few months ago I was struggling with "evil minds", the scene and plotting on a level that reminded me of the French court.
Is this where Man has "risen" in 2010, I remember thinking. Then I bumped into the latest Robin Hood with Russell Crowe.
Rise and rise again..until lambs become lions
I opened the trailer (sorry, can't seem to find the one anymore) and completely fell in love with the words. They promised change. I wrote them down so that I would remember.
Empower every man and you'll gain strength. Are you ready to be who you are?
There's a familiar echo in here. Is Robin Hood getting social in 2010?
Yesterday I had a nice *talk* with Scott Gould. We pondered what was keeping people from sharing and collaboration. Scott is about to blog about that.
We've lived an era of enormous wealth and greed. Wealth rips off man's humanity, claim the humanists, it's every man for himself. Even in this era of social media, they say, the majority of people is just screaming their name. It's all about me, myself and I.
My recent experiences give hope for humanity.
My friend started a fight for her Down sister, as her weaponry she has a blog (F), Twitter and Facebook. It's only her first week, but she's already raised a significant amount of support from her own network. Social media can make a difference.
Her question is, why don't the civil servants care. I have been worrying something quite alike: the civil servants seem to lack courage to be themselves, or think by themselves. In trying to make the Gov 2.0, the good old obedient attitude "Don't do anything unless you're told to" turns out to be the loser's garment.
Fortunately, people want to dive in when they become passionate about something.
Last night I watched Griff Rhys Jones in Sydney. There he heard an astonishing witness to the Sydneysidean concept of mateness. The ladies he met told him that they are ready to give up on materia in order to be able to spend time with their friends.
Then a young woman told what the level of that friendship really is. After her husband had got a cancer, their friends collected a half a million dollars so that he could travel to the States to get treated there. He got cured.
That is Man 2.0. Caring. Putting others before oneself. Prioritizing the real thing. Life.
On my last post I used mobile, camera and publishing as "new media user experience". With Web 2.0 the ways we do things are in a constant change.
As the matter of fact, the only constant in our lives seems to be change.
Tonight I took part in HBR chat, under the topic From Corporate Ladder to Lattice. The main idea is that, not only our life, hobbies, targets of interest and how we carry them change - but also and even more so, our work is under a radical change.
The workplace isn't what it used to be--and neither is the workforce. Today's companies have fewer hierarchical layers. The nature of work is also more virtual, collaborative, and transparent than at any previous time. -HBR
In my mind those two have a strong connection. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, in order to proceed in your career, you need the constant change.
Bus driver 2.0
If you're a bus driver, instead of gasoline, your new vehicle might use natural gas or even electronic batteries. And as you drive along, traffic lights favor you: thanks to the new technology allowing the integration of the satellite - GPS - traffic light system(F). Sustainable development in mind: the less you need to wait with your motor running, the less you cause exhaustive fumes and pollute the nature.
If you started your career some 20 years ago, there's been a huge change, at least in your mind!
Knowledge worker 2.0
Even bigger is the distance between the old office worker in comparison with today's knowledge worker. Back in 1997 when I started with the Tax Administration, the departments received their instructions on paper. Bulletins were pinned on a board for every one. - Today everything comes in email, 2-10 times a day, and the highlights for customers are also published on our website.
My boss explained to me at my first week: "Our PC's are all new: last year (or so) we had just one PC in a team of 8-12 workers." -Today I have a laptop and a Nokia E90, and emails reach me through both those devices.
Outsourcing the reason?
But these are not the only changes around. In the name of productivity organizations are cutting back fixed costs. Good bye secretaries, good bye bookkeepers and ladies who used to calculate our salaries or arrange our business trips and so on. All the assisting work is being outsourced. The question is, do we really gain or lose on this track?
Today I need to operate on three separate applications in order to report my working hours, prepare for the development discussions and approve the invoices. (There is no OpenID, no common logic or user experience. People, even bosses make the coffee, since there are no more secretaries..)
On the other hand, I love to update the campaign site myself, instead of giving the text to someone to copy-paste and then do it all over again because I'm not happy with the layout. - Not all agree with my point of view. How do you feel about it?
Social media is Collaboration!
For us knowledge workers this is a golden era. Social media tools enable us to group with like minded people. In "tribes" we can learn more efficiently on the subjects we're all interested in and also share our expertise with other Like Minds.
In essence, it is this bigger picture that tonight's HBRchat was about:
Q1: What are the major trends at play that are changing the traditional career model?
Q2: How can companies transition from this traditional model to flexible, more strategic one?
Q3: How can we as individuals shape our own “career lattices?”
Conversationalists brought up open dialogue, collaboration and transparency. As things become more transparent, strategy and sharing values are an essential part of the new leadership. Finally, stepping stones to the new career are constant learning, pushing the edges and a somewhat entrepreneurial mindset that flourishes with trust.
The motto for the new worker could be, as @bennydu put it:
Always be humble, open-minded, never stop learning! Coach Wooden said: "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts"
If you're interested what else was said, you'll find the hashtagged Tweets in Topsy
I had the opportunity to hear how Nokia has been doing their co-creation. Jussi Mäkinen (@luovanto) gave a speech at a seminar on social media in marketing. Jussi is the marketing manager in charge of co-creation and launching of N900. 
