In a just published book Work Goes Mobile by Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, authors of Nokia’s mobility master plan, propose a very useful application profiling scheme to establish the degree to which a business could exploit mobile technologies in their broadest sense. This approach would also be very useful for establishing the support requirements for virtually networked teams.

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

Thanks to Cory Sorice for pointing me to an article, Heres an idea: Let everyone have ideas, in the New York Times, March 26 which reports on Rite-Solutions a technology company who have created a vigorous marketplace for ideas inside their company in what Tim O’Reilly calls an “architecture of participation”.

Andrew Faughy, General Manager and Director of VEN Operations Ltd, gives an excellent video lecture ‘VEN: The Story so Far’ at the ICE Conference (Milan 2006) on the Virtual Enterprise Network concept in practice in Yorkshire in the UK involving nearly 400 small businesses.

As a facilitator I do a lot of work with groups of small businesses who say they are interested in "collaborating as a network" (whatever that means). The conventional approach to working with such a group is to first build some trust, exchange company information and then start exploring collaboration possibilities. The problem is that this approach does not really work!