The FASTForward Blog

The FASTForward Blog "a hosted discussion on Enterprise 2.0". Good stuff!

I found this through a button on Euan Semple's wonderful"the Obvious" blog.

Multitasking has reached warp speed

multitasking has reached warp speed
Originally uploaded by lynetter.

This got my attention because it's what I see my kids doing. But also it's increasingly what I see folks at work doing - although with varying degrees of success and failure.

As an observation of fact it seems to be true - however I'm not sure what impact it has on how effectively we work or even how efficiently!

The older generations try to multi task but don't quite get it
The younger generations at work would like to multitask more but we don't give then the business tools to do so!!

The flip test

Andrew McAfee (an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School) used the concept of a "technology flip test" to challenge thinking about the adoption of (in this case) blogs, wikis, RSS etc. in an enterprise. (See here).

Basically the test goes like this "Imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively platforms -- blogs, wikis, etc. --  and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies --  email, instant messaging, text messaging --  became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation.  What would happen?  How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?

It's an interesting challenge!   In the case above Andrew uses it to argue that businesses are paying too much attention to the downside and risks and should adopt "Enterprise 2.0" solutions such as blogs and wikis faster than at present!

Vinnie Mirchandani picked up on the flip test idea in this posting.

He asked:

a) All technology vendors - What if consumer/retail brands dominated enterprise technology markets?
b) Outsourcers - What if Intel was a service provider?
c) Software vendors - what if companies only bought business process functionality as an outsourced service?
d) Hardware vendors - what if companies had little or zero IT capital budgets and little physical space for gear?
e) US Telecom vendors - what if US broadband/mobile markets were like the auto market and customers were used to Japanese and Korean standards?

I'll come back to some of these as they really do shed a new light on some ideas whose time has come and have far reaching implications for how we will soon use technology in business.