Risk management is an important topic for many organizations, especially those in financial services. Most of these organizations acquire risk one customer, one transaction at a time – this customer is not going to be able to pay (risk), this transaction is fraudulent (risk), this deal will not make money in the prevailing economic circumstances (risk). Many of these same organizations, however, have a portfolio focus in their risk management program – they use BI and reporting tools to summarize and assess their overall risk profile. They consider their total risk and invest their analytic dollars at this level. This is a mistake.

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HOPE is perhaps the single most lucrative thing to sell.

There are so many people in need of direction, while so few actually want to do the work required to achieve the end goal. Thus many scammers sell the end result up front while glossing over the hard work required to get there.

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In my last blog post I hinted I will be putting together another entry where I would reflect on something that has been in my mind for a good number of months, if not years altogether. Something that, to me, comes pretty close home as the main problem, issue, bottleneck, challenge (whatever other term you would want to use) on the full adoption of Social Computing within the enterprise by knowledge workers.

Funny enough, it hasn’t got to do anything with a good number of the various different challenges that plenty of people have been talking about all around for a long while now. Yes, this is a blog post where I would not talk about cultural barriers, nor the various technology challenges (Social software tools being too complex to use, as the main one, for instance, as well as the plethora of them available coming as a close second one), nor the difficulties in letting command-and-control let go by organisations as well as some of the management layers, nor the reluctance to change and so on and so forth.

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Most of the guides, how to articles, and general industry advice we have read on social media marketing contain some “myths” :

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Do you ever pause and think about the avatar you use online as the visual representation of you: your persona or alter ego? What it says to others about you and the organization you work for or represent?

Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behaviour and computing platform requirements, according to a report from industry analysts Gartner.

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I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four:

1. Business productivity and cost reduction
2. IT and business alignment
3. Business agility and speed to market
4. Business process re-engineering

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I had a healthy debate this past Friday with a number of  EA colleagues on Twitter about EA and if it is only for large companies.  Keep in mind that I have never worked in a large IT shop.  Most of my career I have worked in IT shops ranging from 50-300 people.  Currently I am in a startup and there are 5 IT people.  So obviously, I have a different perspective than the typical EA advocate.

It all started when I sent out this tweet:

Just finished a great discussion about EA & small business with Forrester’s Jeff Scott.  EA is not just for the big guys!

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Jakob Nielsen is a guru on intranets. He recently posted an extensive piece on Social Networking on Intranets that addressed adoption issues for enterprise 2.0 so I felt the need to cross post from FastForward. Thanks to J.B.Holston at Newsgator for pointing it out to me. It is a summary of the key findings from a study of 14 companies in a much larger 168 page report. It begins with the subtitle, Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0, which sort of captures his approach. Jakob portrays enterprise 2.0 as something that younger workers are pushing on enterprises. If you go to slow you will lose good younger workers and if you go too fast you will run risks to overall corporate culture.

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First off, just to be clear, I’ve never been a sales person.  I’ve never even played a sales person on TV.  All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at my marketing software startup).

Building Startup Sales Teams

1.  Don’t hire sales people too early.  In the early days, the founders should be able to sell (and should be selling).

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I am cross posting this from FastFoward to get more feedback and perhaps additional examples. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise. I think companies are focusing their guidelines too much on public use.

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