Ik kwam een interessante discussie tegen op linkedin binnen de groep Internal Audit Professionals: If you could change one thing in internal auditing, what would it be—and why?

Er werden hier verschillende zaken genoemd zoals:

• het verplicht maken voor auditees om snel te reageren op audit verzoeken
• dat organisatieleden meer respect moeten hebben voor het werk dat auditors doen

Voor mij waren deze zaken erg naar buiten gekeerd. Daarom was ik blij dat er ook een reactie tussen stond dat internal audit hun doelen moeten afstemmen op de organisatie doelen en van daaruit hun meerwaarde moeten tonen. De internal audit zou conform HNW niet te veel op control moeten zitten, maar juist moeten kijken waar hun toegevoegde waarde voor de business zit.

Ik kreeg afgelopen week een artikel doorgemaild van een collega over het nieuwe werken (HNW) afkomstig van ManagementSite. Hierin werd de stelling neergezet of HNW nu de toekomst heeft of dat het blijft hangen als hype. Wat ik vooral interessant vond is het aanhalen van het implementeren van HNW. De auteurs stelden dat implementeren juist iets is wat haaks staat op HNW. Implementatie is iets van het ‘oude organiseren’. Daar kan ik me best wel in vinden. Tegelijkertijd stellen ze echter ook dat er wel een transformatieproces moet starten. Een transformatie proces van Command, Communication en Control naar Vakmanschap, Verbinding en Vertrouwen. Wat dit nu precies inhoudt blijft voor mij nog vaag, maar ik kan me voorstellen dat een veranderproces net zo iets is als implementatie, of in ieder geval eenzelfde karakter heeft. Het gaat nog steeds om gedrag veranderen, waarbij je altijd wilt kijken of het gewenst gedrag ook daadwerkelijk gestalte krijgt. Dit is toch een vorm van controle?

Nee ik kom toch telkens op een zelfde conclusie uit. Command, Communication en Control is en blijft onderdeel van organiseren. De waarden vakmanschap, verbinding en vertrouwen komen er echter bij in de vorm, dat command niet meer enkel vanuit de vaste top komt. Nee, command kan van elke professional komen. Iedere professional krijgt een deel verantwoordelijkheid om command, communication en control uit te voeren. Wat nu een probleem van deze professionals wordt als iedereen een command rol kan uitvoeren is hoe zorg ik dat alle professionals eenzelfde richting op koersen?

Dit moest ik even als hersenspinsel kwijt.

Windows xp just screwed up my syncplicity setup of working with two computers. Windows XP had allowed me on friday to extract a zip file with a large directory tree that windows XP clearly can’t support. I couldn’t even delete the directory anymore. Luckily I thought of changing the directory names to just one character to reduce the total length of the tree. Then I was able to delete the tree from windows XP.

I thought that would have fixed the problem. And yes it did. Syncplicity didn’t shut down anymore. However it didn’t sync anymore. So today I spend about 2 1/2 hours trying to get it running again. Arghh how frustrating that is. I could have used that time a lot better. But in the end I finally got it working again. How I did it, I have no clue. Computers can’t live with them, can’t live without them ….

With Larry Page as CEO, google is changing its course. The twiq podcast mentioned a new management structure in the google plex to enhance the innovation capability. New directors were installed on:

Chrome

Mobile

Search

Ads

Social

What is their connection? What I also find interesting is that business products like google apps are not mentioned. I’m pretty curious what google’s new strategy will become. Guess will find out the coming months.

I was wondering if there was a plugin which helped me to publish good articles that I found on the web. After some research I found the plugin ‘Lifestream’. It enables you to pull specific content from various social media sites. So I’m giving it a try. I’ve created an account with stumbleupon service and connected it with the lifestream plugin. Works so far! If I have the chance I will try to enhance the feature into the blog. Probably will take a while because of my busy schedule at the moment, but it’s on the to-do list. See how it works on the rightside of the blog beneath the categories.

Just read a discussion poll on linkedin of the group Quality Management Professionals. It was a poll about definitions of quality. The options were not quite clear, but it focused on the degree the customer’s requirements were fulfilled.

Two ideas came immediately to mind:

1. is quality only measured by focusing on the customers’ need or should more stakeholders be taken into account?
2. should the requirements be the focus or the customers’ goals? This was also mentioned in a comment on the poll.

Apparently it’s not that easily to define quality. Even wikipedia states that “Quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.” So before defining a term as quality, you should ask the other person first what he thinks of quality and then come up with a definition that works for the both of you.

Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled “The Real Life Social Network.” Gina Trapani at Smarterware.org wrote a post on it and it includes the presentation which was given by Paul. The presentation gives an interesting view on what I also experienced when using the various social sites like facebook and twitter. These sites give me a hard time differentiating between my various social groups. Therefore it holds me back to use it freely to share all kinds of information. This I think is a major problem, because the reason I turn to the social media is to share ideas with others. Now some of it can be public, however other ideas I just want to share with a specific social tie. Do I need to use different social sites then, like linkedin for business ties and facebook for other social groups and twitter for the public?  It’s certainly possible, but it doesn’t make it easy for me. I’m doing it now with different ID’s on the various social sites, and I really think it gives me a lot more hassle than I want to handle. So how Paul presents the idea of looking more closely at how social relationships work is a nice refreshing idea and gives me hope that Social Computing on the web will change in the near future in which it finally will help me to enhance my social ties.

For my work I’m exploring the same concept in which I claim that enterprise communications like wiki’s and blogs are not truly the real key to social computing. The benefits start when concepts like personal profiles and group profiles become a centralized component in the social platform which can then be connected with something like workspaces and or various communication services. As an employee I don’t have just one activity. I have various different activities which also creates various relationships. These relationships I want to enhance with social technology so I’m able to perform better. This is only possible when I can create various groups in the most easy way possible.

Well these are just ideas and I still need to explore the various collaboration types I blogged about earlier. But I think this is a key component. Next time I hope to be able to say a little bit more on the subject.

The community platform of AIIM.org is online:

• Enterprise 2.0 community
• Enterprise Record Management community

It looks good so far! They’ve created a lot of content already. Maybe in one day, as they pronounced it would be live on the 19th

I do wonder though why they didn’t create the possibility that I can use my  UserID and password for the AIIM.org site, or that I can use my Linkedin or Facebook account. Now I have to create another account. Now I’m used to that by now, but I had hoped a different approach for an expert community like AIIM.

Well it doesn’t matter for now. They’ve created some nice reading material for the coming month.

I’m looking at work and collaboration patterns to find out how social media can be introduced and managed into an organization. I hoped to find some easy answers on the internet, but it’s harder than I thought. So far I found some highly academic papers like the following:

• Patterns of Virtual Collaboration
• Groupware Patterns Map
• Towards an ontology of collaboration patterns

A little more accessible articles:

• Collaboration: Patterns and Tips for Success with Wikis

And a interesting site on Wikipatterns:

• wikipatterns.com

While I can’t really form a good overview yet, or find out if it relates to my quest to find workpatterns, I did appreciate the following metamodel (extracted from Towards an ontology of collaboration patterns ). It might come in handy for my research:

Collaboration stack

It gives a perspective on what I’m looking for. I’m interested in the top 3 levels. This should provide the starting point to address the different collaboration needs in an organization.

If someone has ideas on these top three levels of collaboration patterns, I would love to hear it. I will follow up this post with new information as soon as I find it.

So the site is live!

It’s amazing how easy it is nowadays to create a website or blog. My previous provider was a bit out of date. Now that I have a new hosting provider I’ve got this site up and running in a few minutes, thanks to this installatron application.

There were a couple of options and because at work we talked about drupal, I did a quick comparison between WordPress and Drupal. But wordpress seems fine for my needs at the moment. A good quick insight is found on the following sites:

• 10 fundamental differences between WordPress and Drupal
• What is difference between Drupal and WordPress?

At least it helped me.

Now I’m going go look around a bit more at the admin panel.

Henri