conscious1's posterous

<Pretending not to be smug about actually carrying on with my commitment to follow through with this blog...I smirk in a darkened room>

In my parallel life; I help out within a few committees at the British Computer Society (The Chartered Institute for IT). Yup! You guessed right...no one calls it that. 'The BCS' is what most call it. I must say at this juncture (just because it sounds cool when everyone else does) - All the views represented herewith are mine and mine alone. I enjoy helping out at the BCS because it is filled with some of the brightest minds in technology and the tooth-fairy has filled me with thoughts that I can become just as smart simply by association.

Tonight, I had the immense privilege of attending an extremely interesting debate styled event on Social-Media (SM) strategy and the business case at the BCS. The panellists who bore the challenge of tackling the issues were a collective of intellectual elite in the persons of Jemima Gibbons @jemimaG, LJ Rich @ljrich, Joanne Jacobs @joannejacobs and Dr. Sue Black @Dr_Black. I hobbled ever so excitedly along to the event with pre-conceived ideas of discussions about how exciting it was to be alive in the age when aggregation of ideas was at its simplest courtesy of SM. I was expecting a few suits to highlight how they were leveraging their business operations with the help of SM. I was also certain that I will be present at the unveiling of the new office of 'Social Media Strategist' and be introduced to her many exciting duties. It was such a good debate because it threw all my assumptions under one of the few buses that happened to be on time. Joanne Jacobs, a Social Media Consultant and a true gem of a speaker aptly made an eloquent case for Social Media strategy and the role of the SM Strategist. Far from plunging the non-protesting student who is seeking work experience in front of a Computer terminal to manage your twitter account and save costs. The SM Strategist should be that decision making professional in the firm rightly equipped with a cross disciplinary suite of skills ranging from an ability to train others all the way up through low level engagement to business strategy alignment. This person spec means that we may be looking for someone who is a bit more experienced and mature than an adolescent twitter enthusiast. In my opinion not a word of a lie passed her lips and I will be doing her excellent presentation a disservice by paraphrasing all her comments. Believe me when I say she will make heaven based on her evangelism of Social Media strategy. I am from that school of hard knocks that deride any kind of intellectual elitism that dribble into snobbery and is often borne out of 'knowledge hoarding' from simple kinfolk like I. My views on SM may be a bit biased because from my rose-tweeted view of the world I can see no wrong in embracing a medium/media where previously independent pockets of persons can perform seamless knowledge transfers with hardly any barriers to entry. However even more absurdly, I fail to understand how empowering a group of people who cut across developed and developing divides with accessibility to a constantly updated crowd sourced knowledge base can be a questionable thing. In the same vein, I question businesses who shift about with certain unease when talk of SM within their organisations crop up. They seem to be pre-occupied with concerns about staff productivity and the perceived informality SM presents. Come on son! The numbers speak for themselves. In an environment where creating competitive advantage is key to the sustainability and success of any business, surely even my non-MBA having self suspects that harnessing this vast potential or cesspit of information is a much preferable route than waving a big stick about. Even worse still is when I am around a technologist or CIO like I was at the debate; who described SM as 'the thing he wanted to keep out'. With a public that shows insatiable thirst for technology thanks to Apple, Twitter and Facebook, the technologists job should be to accelerate the take up of new technologies where possible. Philip Clarke of Tesco having made that enviable CIO to CEO progression means that dream has been realised and IT desperately needs to become that conduit which creates business savvy radical thinkers who are great communicators. Any CIO who dismisses the ever growing momentum of SM does so at his/her peril. Social networks enable flexible working and without that a firm risks alienating talent says Jemima Gibbons. 

It's not all bad news as there are a few firms that get SM. I hear IBM is one of such and I will be researching that. I am not totally bereft of critical thought as to believe that SM is a panacea for all the world's ills or that it provides that which will make a Fortune 500 of a Pizza shop(it actually just might). Yes, I also accept that there are also policy issues around educating the workforce about the security overheads using external SM tools can present. Of course the issues surrounding commenting about official issues in private social networks is also one that could do with more discourse. I will however not go as far as even start to make any kind of sense of obvious bullying in place of common sense as exhibited in the recent Baskers-gate and Paul Chambers cases.  I also know that there are under currents of group-think that can surface from SM. However, I will happily be a clone in that group-think posse that propels an ideological revolution in Iran, that has helped save Bletchley Park, amplifies calls for aid in Pakistan and Haiti or allow me a tiny part of Stephen Fry's mind. Do I think SM is a fad that will die a natural death...NO!! I think finally the people have found their opium and nothing excites them more than taking knowledge previously exclusive to Ivy league dorms and golf ranges and mixing that up with helpings of Justin Bieber memes as quaff-able doses of infotainment. Can this be transposed into a business context where internal and external musings can be morphed into nuggets of information that propel competitive advantage? The jury is still out on that. However, from wiki's to micro-blogs; a conducive non-regimented environment for knowledge transfer should be encouraged in business.

Peace + Light!

C!!