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By TaiTran, April 17, 2009 11:04 am

1. Introduction

This article discusses implications behind the adoption of a “2.0″ approach to corporate management. This article is built on and extends the introductory discussion of an FPT HR representative on their application of 2.0 to internal communications. It seeks an equivalent position of the 2.0 characteristics within an organization. Basing on this finding, recommendations are given to FPT.

Hi TaiTran,
Ko hiểu youtube có lỗi hay do mạng lởm nên tôi ko trả lời bạn trực tiếp được tại video trên youtube. Quản trị 2.0.
Quản trị 2.0 là khái niệm được FPT nhắc tới bắt đầu từ 2008, đơn giản là ứng dụng 2.0 vào công việc quản trị. Các bạn chắc biết rõ hơn tôi về web 1.0 và 2.0 và biết sự khác biệt giữa 1.0 – tiếp nhận thông tin 1 chiều và 2.0 tăng tính tương tác.
Quản trị 2.0 tương tự:
- Đưa ứng dụng web 2.0 vào việc quản trị. Ví dụ mở các kênh tiếp nhận thông tin từ nhân viên qua blog công ty để lãnh đạo lắng nghe ý kiến nhân viên tốt hơn. Các lãnh đạo tự mở blog cá nhân để chia sẻ về suy nghĩ bản thân, truyền tải thông điệp lãnh đạo (ko nhất thiết trong công việc) để gần hơn với nhân viên và tiếp thu thông tin.
Hiện FPT đang có kênh 2.0 đặc trưng là: Chợ Dưa FSoft – chodua.com và FLI Blog: fli.fpt20.com, là kênh internet có thể truy cập. Còn các forum, mạng nội bộ khác chỉ dành cho nhân viên FPT. Đặc điểm ẩn danh cho phép nhiều người được nói thẳng nói thật ý kiến và cả các bức xúc của mình trong công việc hay comment thoải mái về các chính sách công ty mà ko sợ lộ mặt.
Những cái này có thể nhiều công ty đã áp dụng như “học thuật” hóa thì được gọi là quản trị 2.0.
Những thông tin khác bạn có thể đọc tại fli.fpt20.com hoặc chodua.com. Mời bạn vào trao đổi! Tks!

vanbich, FPT HR representative

Ông Trương Gia Bình nói về Visky 2.0

2. The position of the 2.0 characteristics

2a. Web 2.0 is about Communication. Is Enterprise 2.0 about Communication?

Basing on the comment from vanbich, the idea of FPT 2.0 is to provide channels and facilities for their employees to communicate with one another and with leaders.

At first, it seems sensible given light that a Web 2.0 product provides platforms for its users to communicate and share information with one another. And users do this with purposes.

Some examples of Web 2.0 products:

How are “2.0 communication” and FPT’s explanation linked together?

It’s useful to map the idea:

Figure 1 – trying mapping web 2.0 product and enterprise 2.0: incorrect

While we see that the total scale of a Web 2.0 product is allow Communication, the total scale of an Enterprise is much larger than that. We want to revise the ‘conventional’ enterprise:

Figure 2 – simplified model of a conventional enterprise

That is the full scale of an Enterprise. Communication plays an important role, but does not take up entirely its operations.

So how do we map it more precisely?

2b. Here is what I visual it: mapping between two 2.0 entities

Firstly, as we know that communication is the main activity of a Web 2.0 product, it is important to find out what is the main activity of an Enterprise. As from figure 2, the main activity of an enterprise is Production and/or Providing Services.

Secondly, it is important to characterize the style of communication in Web 2.0 products so that we can do the same on the style of production of an enterprise.

What best describes “multi-directional” and “decentralized”? It is autonomous. People in the 2.0 sphere communicate autonomously and are responsible for their behaviors.

Combining these two findings, here is what I propose the mapping between a Web 2.0 product and an Enterprise:

Figure 3 – mapping web 2.0 product and enterprise 2.0

At full scale, the applied 2.0 characteristics does not only involve open and partially anonymous communication, but reach the level of autonomy in production.

3. Some considerations

1. It’s easier for startups than for an established company.
   Think about Google. It had been famous for its anti-corporate culture at the first days. As the company becomes mature, corporate issues start to emerge.
2. Does the structure of the company make it reasonable to build autonomous teams/divisions?
3. Does the culture of the company and the culture of the society make it reasonable to build autonomous teams/divisions?
4. How ready are the employees, in terms of capability and mentality, to be autonomous?
5. Autonomous, together with self-directed communication is not new. It traces back to 1970s and Motorola, Xerox, AT&T and so on. However, it might be new to Vietnam.

4. Some recommendations for FPT toward 2.0

1. Select mature teams to build autonomy
2. Delayer these teams
3. Allow (sometimes dramatic) changes in structure, culture and mentality
4. Allow (sometimes dramatic) changes in personnel management and resource allocation
5. Treat this as on-going experiment

Benefits:

1. Bring the “2.0 spirit” to the company as leaders desire
2. Increase innovation
3. Reduce cost, especially management overhead
4. Reduce absenteeism
5. Identify unofficial leaders of the teams in addition to the existing leadership training program

5. Summary

Changes in production characteristics, rather than sheerly in communication, reflect the full-scale shift within an Enterprise. Analyzing Web 2.0 characteristics leads us to autonomy. Whether and how FPT will implement it is interesting to observe. The implications of recommendations in this article go beyond social media, product management and technology companies to leadership generally.

6. Reflection

It has been challenging and exciting to write this. The excitement was how I can link seemingly scattered parts of my knowledge to form a cohesion piece of consultation – something I love doing. The great challenge lies in the idea of evaluating a big, established, known and loved company. Nevertheless, if I want to learn, first thing first, I must dare the keyboard discussion.

Comments (2)

By TaiTran, April 1, 2009 7:09 pm

1. The website henantrua.vn is the mean; VinaCyber’s event organizing is the core.

2. VinaGame’s online game is the core; their offline activities are supporting services.

3. The focus of the social network tamtay.vn is contents, what are their offline activities for?

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By TaiTran, March 24, 2009 11:45 am

My caution toward Google was unnecessary and over-acting.

Google has increased their involvement in Vietnam online market by investing in the infrastructure and services. I consider load time is a quality of service.

Yahoo! is extending their presence by marketing and education efforts.

Friendster is crawling in through localization and services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t shown a visible sign of interest in monetizing the Vietnam online market. It’s understandable as they’re putting efforts on the competition against Google and Mozilla.

Comments (1)

By TaiTran, January 31, 2009 2:08 pm

The recession is forcing some web services to start charging their customers. And surprise? Some power users are ready to pay. Today I received another email from MyOtherDrive on premium accounts.

I guess it’s time now to put it on the table how much I am willing to spend for web services and why.

My first list includes Facebook and a news aggregator.

My Facebook

My Facebook = less formal LinkedIn + FriendFeed with friends + Photobucket + Life events Reader + Address Book + Calendar + mini-CRM + mini-YouTube

I don’t know whether Facebook likes it or not (if you don’t like it just contact me, Facebook) but above is how I utilize my Facebook account.

1. My profile on Facebook can be used to include professional and academic information. It’s not entirely an online CV but rather an informal page with relevant info. What makes it more like my LinkedIn is that I have received a dozen of business opportunities via Facebook, thrice as much as from LinkedIn. Sidenote: I’ll give Caravat some time

2. Facebook is now my feed aggregator of non-personal updates. My blog entries here, my reading archive on Tumblr, bookmarked links on StumbleUpon, submitted news on Mixx flow to my Facebook newsfeed. What Facebook offers me that FriendFeed hasn’t is audience: I have much more connections on Facebook than on FriendFeed and some of them are my readers.

3. Another disclosure is that Facebook Photos was the first feature that kept me with the service. I don’t compare with Flickr because Flickr is more of a publishing service than a sharing service.

4. What Life events Reader? I receive updates on events and activities around my location on Facebook.

5. Even when Facebook profile doesn’t explicitly capitalize them, contacts can be stored in Facebook. At least, I have a connection with ones I know and when I can’t ping them via cellphones or instant messengers, I drop them a message on Facebook.

6. Calendar! Facebook doesn’t provide a full-pledged calendar but since I have been utilizing its birthday-reminder function, I want to use it as a calendar as well. This is achieved with built-in Events feature or some applications.

7. Mini-CRM. While I haven’t provided any services or sold any product on Facebook, I know a bit of how I will be able to do that.

8. Mini-YouTube. Facebook Videos handles my videos well enough for me, except for a few that I want to be publicly available.

Up to $5/month

Considering the impact, I would be ready to pay up to $5 per month for Facebook provided that I have some privileges:

What I want for premium Facebook account

1. Lift the photo size from 604px width to at least 800px width like that of Orkut
2. Lift the limit of 60 photos per album to unlimited
3. Increase the maximum number of networks from 6 to unlimited
4. Maximum number of friends to send messages to is increased from 20 to at least 100. I don’t sp.am, never.
5. My news are broadcast more often to my connections
6. Optionally increase the maximum number of groups from 200 to a bigger number
7. A feature to download contents from Facebook, including all my photos in original size, all videos, all contacts of my connections that they make available, all notes, all posted items

A business news and analysis aggregator

As discussed on LinkHay, I am ready to pay up to $200/year for a business news aggregator, provided that high quality analysis is included and news are valuable. 200 bucks is the price of Harvard Business Review subscription so I would expect something that level of quality.

Storage

What I haven’t included here is storage. I will update more on this need when I am sure what I want.

How about you? What kind of services would you pay for and how much?

Comments (2)

By TaiTran, August 7, 2008 12:13 pm

Eventually after aggressively penetrating Vietnam market with a lot of properties such as the colorful Zing portal, the controversial Zing chat and the very successful social-networking site Yobanbe, Zing MP3…, Zing is preparing to roll out Email service.

• 30Mb attachment, 3 times as much as that of Yahoo! Mail
• Server in Vietnam so bottle-neck effect is eliminated.

Through a short interview with Zing team’s Chief Developer, I learned that the following will be supported

• Unlimited storage
• POP3
• Screen capture
• e-cards
• Music embed. This is a smart move to integrate with products together.

When I logged in using Safari, the message “System is busy” pops out. I retried with Firefox and it went well. The message looks like a facade to the incompatibility of many browsers.

My prediction is that many users will utilize this service as a music-sharing channel.

Will you explore this email service?

Comments (0)

By TaiTran, July 21, 2008 12:13 pm

Eventually after aggressively penetrating Vietnam market with a lot of properties such as the colorful Zing portal, the controversial Zing chat and the very successful social-networking site Yobanbe, Zing MP3…, Zing is preparing to roll out Email service.

• 30Mb attachment, 3 times as much as that of Yahoo! Mail
• Server in Vietnam so neck-effect is eliminated.

Through a short interview with Zing team’s Chief Developer, I learned that the following will be supported

• Unlimited storage
• POP3
• Screen capture
• e-cards
• Music embed. This is a smart move to integrate with products together.

My prediction is that many users will utilize this service as a music-sharing channel.

Will you explore this email service?

Comments (0)

By TaiTran, April 19, 2008 6:51 pm

Previously MediaMax had provided 25Gb of free storage. One constraint was that only files under 10Mb can be downloaded.

However, even with files less than 10Mb, I always had errors with downloading.

Furthermore, the MediaMax uploader was heavy with .NET 2.0 platform and very slow in response to file management functions.

***

I have quit using MediaMax for a while. In 19/4/2008, they announced a new line of service: The Linkup. While scanning the site, I could see that it has not been complete.

Meanwhile, all free MediaMax accounts will be removed.

***

So I’m facing a major issue: I’m having some Gbs of data which can’t be downloaded, and they’re gonna be removed by 25/4/2008 unless I pay for using the service.

Monetization with advertising is quite okay for me, but upgrade enforcement doesn’t look very nice.

So find me on megaupload, box and mediafire next

Full Update from MediaMax

Comments (4)

By TaiTran, November 8, 2007 7:45 pm

We thought Web Service was good. It certainly is!

Web Service has brought the economy to the web. There is no need to repeat what Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and Google all have done.

Web 2.0 and a different approach

But another approach is rising fast. Web service providers now make their product a Web Platform.

They build up a very good core based on solid philosophy. Then they provide API for developers to build applications on.

Browser

With their defeat by Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, Mozilla temporarily withdrew and launch their next hit: Firefox.

As in September 2007, market share of Firefox reaches 35.4%, according to W3C.

One important reason why Firefox has become this popular is due to its extensions gallery. A huge collection of well-done small web services are offered for free by developers worldwide.

Many of Firefox extensions are done to support other web services such as Google Search, Blogging, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, digg, Amazon, eBay.

Gradually, the browser becomes one of the largest centralized points of the web.

Social Networking

Talking about Social Networking today, we have to praise Facebook immediately.

Facebook is also doing very well to provide their API so that applications can be developed on a very good and mature skeleton.

Most successful Facebook applications support networking purpose such as free gifts, messages, testimonials, collaborative games.

The goal of a social networking site is to become the home of as many activities of users as possible.

Content Management Systems

WordPress, Joomla, phpBB have been building communities around them.

Themes allow personalization.

Plugins allow customization.

Most of all, the platform allow monetization.

Conclusion: Web Platforms

Looking at these obvious examples, we see that Firefox, Facebook, WordPress et al offer a very solid and useful core and highly flexible and open API on which applications, extensions, addons, plugins, themes can grow and develop.

They have become Web Platforms to Web Services.

These Web Services in turn make the Platforms new and ever-changing.

Future: Information Depot

In near future, or maybe now already, we’ll see these central points become Information Depot in Semantic Web.

When a web seller wants to approach specific market segment, it should know what and how the potential customers are like. How? From Information Nodes such as e-Commerce sites and Social Networking sites. It would go to Amazon to get information on the customers’ buying preferences, and go to Facebook to get information on the customers’ networks and personal interests.

Can you imagine what happens next? These Information Depots will be able to manipulate the information in whichever way they prefer, not limited to making the information available, for prices.

Conclusion

We’re moving from separated glamorous isles to metropolitans on the web.

You will be able to do many things on a single website. Enjoy the sweetness it brings, while not lowing your guard on diabetes.

Comments (1)

By TaiTran, October 16, 2007 12:17 am

Recap of new features

Though you might have experienced them already. I’ll make a quick recap when the new Yahoo! Mail turns official and becomes default.

New hot keys

Although Yahoo! Mail classic already provided hot keys and prompts, new Yahoo! Mail makes them shorter thus more memorable.

Tabs

Tabs come into place. Now we have different tabs for each of our task, whether it is reading different messages or composing different letters.

Integrated RSS reader

It allows you to forward a post as an email.

Unlimited Storage

I still remembered the time when we used to have only 4Mb per account. It was only 4 years ago. Time flies any now we have more and more and more storage due to cheaper hardware.

In 2007, storage is no longer a big concern of users. At the time of this post, Hotmail already offers 5Gb, Gmail will be offering 4Gb. Nevertheless, unlimited is always nice.

Integrated Yahoo! Messenger chat

Though basic, it comes in handy.

SMS Messaging

It currently works for U.S., India, Philippines and Canadian mobile numbers.

More effective spam-filters

It’s hard to estimate how effective it is, but it works well on my account.

Built-in Context Menu

Context Menu refers to a menu that appears when you right-click on a Graphical User Interface element.

Hint: in some browsers, the browser’s Context Menu is displayed together with Yahoo! Mail Context Menu and is of higher priority. To use Yahoo! Mail Context Menu, hit “Esc” once.

What I wish Yahoo! had offered

• Forwarding
  It’s only available with Yahoo! Plus. Gmail offers forwarding for their free account. The strategy is Yahoo! and Google is different so I have to learn to live with it.
• POP3
  Also available with Yahoo! Plus

How I use different email services

I tried around 40 free email services in 2003. I now narrow down to one Yahoo! Mail, one Gmail, one Hotmail and some email accounts on my professional website taitran.com

1. Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! services such 360 are for staying in touch with my personal networks
2. Gmail is for more professional connections such as organizations, societies
3. The Hotmail account is more exploring Microsoft Live, MSN and Hotmail
4. My professional email at taitran dot com is for occasions when branding is really important

Which email services do you use? Do you use different email services for different purpose?