wissel.net

I was presenting on "Workforce 2.0" at the Brunei ICT Career Day. The event was organized by new newly formed InfoCom Federation of Brunei (IFB), the IT vendors industry association. I know the 2.0 memme is a bit overstretched, so I decided to present my case with a little tongue in cheek. In a nutshell: well trained talent is more mobile than ever, so attracting and retaining them requires enterprises (the 2.0 versions of course) to adopt to the work and collaboration style favored by them. They will blog and twitter about work and their customer interaction anyway, so providing them with the platform within makes that more valuable for their companies (Knowledge Management anyone). I got good questions from participants from AITI as well as the Prime Ministers Office: How do you "police" a Social Software environment against abuses: time wasted or even use against corporate interest. The example given was: If an IBM engineer uses the communities tool to gather a group of experts with the intention to jointly leave IBM and setup an independent, innovative and competing company. My reply to that: it happened before (SAP anyone?) even without these tools. Today IBM probably would have a close look and later buy the new company.
In the evening we had dinner with Bruneian customers and a good set of discussion items: How do you design a long term national development plan when the world is developing at "Internet speed"? Somehow inevitably the discussion later touched the topic of the recent Malaysian election, where the common understanding is, that bloggers played a big role in the mood swing that led to the heavy election losses of the current government. One of my Malaysian colleagues attributed the influence of the bloggers mainly to the failure of the Malaysian government to reach out to young voters and their failure to engage in dialogue to address the growing frustration about progress and inclusion (or the lack of) in Malaysian politics. As my mom always told me: you better listen!