Oscar Berg News & Articles

Expectations run high for the role of intranets in employees daily work routine, but if they aren't meeting these six requirements, they're falling short. 

Most people don't think corporate bulletin board when they think of their intranets. This article makes the case that intranets are just as removed from day to day work.

We have been struggling with the downside of email for quite a while -- it's high time to act. 

Banning internal email -- is it a stupid idea, or a necessary thing to do?

Oscar Berg is excited about the potential of the digital workplace and what it can achieve. That excitement comes through in his writings and in his active voice in the community. Learn more about Oscar in this interview.

With the threat of another recession looming, businesses will have to refocus where they concentrate their efforts and budgets in 2013.

We humans aren’t the fastest animals on the surface of this earth. Nor are we the strongest, or the ones with the most powerful senses. Far from it.

There has been much buzz lately about the results from a study by McKinsey Global Institute, which estimated that knowledge worker productivity could potentially be increased with 20-25 percent with use of social technologies. Whether or not these figures are realistic or not, they point to the great potential for improving knowledge work and how social technologies can play a key role in unlocking that potential.

Today's workforce has a growing number of tools at their disposal to communicate, collaborate and get work done. But there is a concurrent increase in workflow complexity, which, left unmanaged, results in time lost and inefficiencies. It's time to bridge the gap between the two.

For years, tech-savvy early adopters have adopted and used social tools such as blogs, wikis and micro-blogging at work. During recent years, more and more organizations have decided to deploy software platforms that bring such tools to the fingertips of all or a large portion of the employees.

The "you get what you pay for" mentality still survives in the enterprise and is an important point to remember when trying to demonstrate the true value of collaborative tools to decision makers.

"Rather than following a process, I follow a cloud of activities.”

That’s how a colleague of mine, a software developer, described the nature of his work. To me this also captures the nature of how knowledge work is evolving: it is becoming more fluid and unpredictable, with little structure and repeatability. Add to this that knowledge work is becoming increasingly interdependent; completing a task often requires many interactions with information entities from different sources as well as with people from different locations, organizations and time zones.

Ask ten people what Social Business means to them, and you will come back with ten different answers. But if you look closer, you will soon find the common denominator: it’s about putting people back in business.

It is impossible to ignore the macro perspective when trying to predict what will happen within the social business and Enterprise 2.0 arena in 2012. With a new financial crisis just around the corner, this time to be caused by several Western nations caving in under unmanageable debts, the threat of such a crisis is already driving the world economy towards a recession. Even though many businesses are still making good profits, they know they have to prepare themselves for less favorable market conditions. I believe social principles and technologies have a key role to play in these preparations.

Andrew Carnegie believed that the only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people, and that the productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it. If this was true a hundred years ago, it must be even truer today as organizations face an increasing pace of change and are becoming more knowledge-intense, relying on a core of highly collaborative and specialized knowledge workers who are geographically dispersed.