Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

I went to an interesting evening event at the British Computer Society yesterday - a Gurteen Knowledge Café. The format of the evening was a series of discussions with small groups of attendees based round the topic "How do you imagine the Knowledge Technologies of the Future", with the groups mixing up at intervals. Overall, the discussions were fairly philosophical, with some of them moving too far into the future to have any practical impact. However, there were some interesting points for this blog, mostly around the information and knowledge made available to users of websites and other digital media. The fundamental question is - what are the underlying needs of your audience that you are trying to fulfil? There would seem to be two parts to the answer to this:

• It is about providing the information and knowledge they want  (or need, which is subtly different)
• It is also about enabling members of your audience to engage in the conversations they value, and even facilitating those conversations

I'm using the term "audience" here to mean the members of your organisation, or supporters of your charity and even going wider to include people who might be visiting your website for the first time … which poses the further question - have you assessed the needs of wider stakeholders? There were also some interesting comments on the way that Facebook is driving user behaviour:

• Listing the number of friends someone has driven people to want to acquire more
• The question mark Facebook had for people without a photo drove people to add a photo
• There is a trend for particularly younger Facebook users to be much more open and less concerned with privacy

We are hosting a seminar with the RSA - "Engaging the Community - the challenges and opportunities for the third sector" on 11th June 2009 where these issues will be discussed in more detail.