Alamo, CA (PRWEB) January 22, 2010 –Brainpark.com, a leading developer of enterprise social networking software and project collaboration tools, has been awarded one of the technology industry’s most sought-after awards for start-ups; The Red Herring Global 100. Red Herring’s Global 100 list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs.

On January 12-14, 2010, over 500 technology industry professionals gathered in Laguna Niguel, California to honor the Top 100 privately-held technology companies in the world. Judging criteria included financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem. Contestants were further judged on their ability to handle the challenges of internationalization in addition to maintaining a global presence.

“After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed down our list from 1,200 potential companies to 200 finalists. Trying to get it down to 100 companies was a task upon itself. The top 100 companies who were chosen should be extremely proud, the competition was difficult,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring.

“We are very honored to stand with many great companies and leaders from all over the world to receive this award.” stated Mark Dowds, CEO of Brainpark.com. “Technology is more powerful than most people realize; it is time to show them what is really possible and to make their work life better. We are turning the tide to bring a smarter future,” he exclaimed. “Thank you to Alex and team at Red Herring for their hard work and diligence to make this all possible.”

About Brainpark.com
Brainpark.com is an award winning suite of enterprise social networking software tools designed to enhance workplace collaboration, increase employee productivity, and provide a unification framework for content, data and relationships that live in various systems. An enterprise work system that helps employees organize themselves by capturing their knowledge and relating that information to other work tasks in real-time, Brainpark software helps to connect disparate people working on similar tasks, creating organizational awareness, transparency, and self-governance.

About Red Herring
Red Herring, Inc., founded in 1993, is a media company whose mission is to cover innovation, technology, financing and entrepreneurial activity. Its staff of award-winning journalists tell readers what’s first, what matters and most importantly, why. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Google, Yahoo, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work. Red Herring is dedicated to thorough research, relevant metrics, deep financial analysis, in-depth reporting, crisp writing and thoughtful debate.

Village living is interesting as everyone emerges with a few interesting roles and contributions that make it all work. No-one is every sat down and told what their role in the community is, it just sort of happens over time. There were the gossipers who helped ensure everyone was up to speed. There were the farmers who made sure all the underage workforce got something productive to do on the weekend and earn pocket money. I could list many more but I am sure you get the gist.

Systems are fascinating entities. Quite often we think we know how they work and then we change something only to have it all break down around us. Nothing is as straight forward as we assume and the consultants/leaders who propose the simplicity of business 101 or simple fixes to save money normally are not around anymore when the repercussions surface later. There is always something we did not see or could not forsee when acting.

Meri Gruber found a very interesting article by David Sloan Wilson on her recent post about Enterprise 2.0 and chickens:

William Muir, an animal breeder at Purdue University, wanted to increase egg production by selective breeding, and he tried to do it in two ways. Both involved housing hens in cages (groups), which is standard practice in the poultry industry. The first method involved selecting the most productive hen within each cage to breed the next generation of hens. The second method involved selecting the most productive cages and using all the hens from those cages to breed the next generation of hens. You might think that the difference between the two methods is slight and that the first method should work better.  After all, it is individuals who lay eggs, so selecting the best individuals directly should be more efficient than selecting the best groups, which might include some individual duds.

The results told a completely different story. When Bill presented his results at a scientific conference, he showed a slide of hens selected by the first method after six generations. The audience gasped.  Inside the cage were only three hens, not nine, because the other six hens had been murdered.  The three survivors had plucked each other during their incessant attacks and were now nearly featherless… What happened?  The most productive individuals had achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of their cage mates.

The first method caused egg productivity to perversely decline, even though the most productive hens were chosen each and every generation. The second method caused egg productivity to increase 160 percent in six generations, an astonishing response as artificial selection experiments go.

Excerpt from Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson

Like the village, this “community” of chickens have a system that is not visible to many on the outside. Their productivity hinges on the things unseen or not considered. I suppose it is just like ours as human beings at work. Our productivity hinges on how happy we feel, how alert we are, how much we are respected, how much trust we have for leaders and co-workers, and how connected we are within the system.

To address the list above one of the best strategies to implement to enhance productivity would be health and fitness plans, reduction of caffeine, siesta’s, and open communication. Instead the smarter guys who crunch numbers and are only influenced by the measurable (instead of common sense) typically respond to enhancing productivity by rewards and recognition plans and requiring more reporting.

I am not suggesting that we go all fluffy at work but rather that we actually get more strategic, thoughtful, and sensitive to the complexity of the system. Instead of taking the low road of assessing individual productivity we need to stand back and ask what is missing within the system to bring the collaboration, sharing, and camaraderie that makes things sing and make small changes at the macro level that can nudge things in the right direction across the company.

]]> http://www.brainpark.com/business/community-productivity-in-the-enterprise/feed/ 0 http://www.brainpark.com/business/more/ http://www.brainpark.com/business/more/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:49:31 +0000 Mark Dowds http://www.brainpark.com/?p=870 One movie scene most of us will never forget is when Oliver Twist, desperate with hunger, rose from the table and advanced to the master with bowl and spoon in hand to audaciously ask, ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ The carnage that followed all hinged around the shock and repetition of the word ‘MORE!’

‘More’ is a word that rarely raises an eyebrow or causes disdain in our modern world. Some things are changing due to energy crises and obesity but mostly ‘more is better’ is the mindset of the masses. Rockerfella was once asked how much money one needs to be happy. His response was ‘just a little bit more.’

Yesterday’s conversation starter on HBR called ‘Is Social Media Worth Your Time?’ provoked this post. Morten Hansen appropriately states: Some people miss this point: They think of adoption success in a company as the number of wikis, blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages that people have created and used. In other words, they measure success as the activity level. But that’s the same as saying, “in our company, we have lots of meetings so we must be doing something right.”

When I inquire among leaders responsible for collaboration and communication within enterprise how they know if their existing solutions are delivering the goods I often get statistical responses of how many searches are being done on an average day or how much original content is being created by the people.  This only tells me if people are using a system but it doesn’t communicate if a problem is being solved effectively. In my estimation the more searching you have to do reflects how ineffective the system you have created. This is rarely considered in this addicted googling generation.

When I walk down the halls of other Enterprise 2.0 vendors I get a little scared. There is no doubt many are doing a great sales job and have borrowed extensively from consumer social media but what I want at work are better filters and less noise. I have a job to do and I don’t want to have to bother with being social with everyone. Computing technology today has the ability to do more than we realize, it just needs innovative minds solving problems more effectively. There is no reason why we should need to search for everything we need or have to worry about tagging and taxonomies/folksonomies. Computers are supposed to be smart and free us from filing and sorting, it is about time we saw more of this.

I want suggest that less is better as long as the information is more precise and more relevant to my needs. I enjoy that each day I no longer have to search hard drives and emails to find the information I need. Neither do I have to search to find the expertise I need as I work on projects as they are suggested to me as brainpark learns what I am working on. Life is simpler and I have more space to think and innovate. There is no going back.

If you are seeking a business focused collaboration system that is alternative to everything else you have seen we may be the people you want to be talking to. We solve complex problems and know that computers were created to serve us.

Jim Estill, formerly of Synnex Canada
Brydon Gilliss, Brainpark
Steve McCartney, formerly of Atria Networks LP

Today at 5pm PDT, Brainpark’s CEO, Mark Dowds will be sharing his thoughts on 10 Things You Need To Build a Great Company.

There are currently 88 students attending with only 11 spaces remaining available. If you plan on participating, this would be a good time to sign up and register.

More about Edufire:

TechCrunch

ZDNet

FastCompany

This conference is a gathering of operators and thinkers who get to discover more about the dialogue going on within the IBM Data Governance Council. The IBM Data Governance Council is a group of 50 global companies, including Abbott Labs, American Express, Bank of America, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd, Bank of Montreal, Bell Canada, BMO Financial Group, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Discover Financial, Kasikornbank, MasterCard, Nordea Bank, Wachovia, Washington Mutual and the World Bank, among others, that have pioneered best practices around risk assessment and data governance to help the business world take a more disciplined approach to how companies handle data.

There are rumors that Mark and Bobby will be wearing suits this week. If there is anyone that can capture them in this attire and share it with us we will be forever indebted.

Rebuilding history is rarely accurate as you have only so much information your retain. Plus it is a laborious exercise that takes some serious commitment. On top of that, each place you search presents you with other information you weren’t looking for. Before you know if you are re-reading other documents and websites that have nothing to do with the current task. If you allowed yourself (or had some time to spare) you could spend a day searching and reading only to get to 5PM and realize you are no further ahead on your work than when you sat down in the morning.

“The problem is, some of the information is in your browser bookmarks, some is in files on your hard drive, the rest is mixed up in email and project tools. Being the decent person you are…you spend an hour or two searching and trying to rebuild the information for your own and someone else’s benefit.”

We have an insatiable appetite for information. We can’t get enough of it. Search has become an addiction for many. The first thing we see folks wanting to do in a situation with lots of information is to start searching it (and often for no focused reason). We also get a blank stare from many people when we mention that we don’t use tagging and search to help you get your job done. We are discovering that one key aspect of our training sessions is to lead people beyond this way of functioning and to show them what computers can really do.

This recent post on Slate is fascinating. Here is a teaser: “We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.”

At Brainpark we are not working on a better way to search for information within a company. We are working to replace the whole notion of search. We believe there is a better way to work and a more productive system that can get your work done better and faster.