Real-Time Economy Community - New ideas

Leveraging social media

Olga Kuznetsova — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:53:30 GMT

At the moment many corporations have a negative-cautious view of social media. They frequently block access to facebook, twitter fearing that employees start using such applications uncontrollably or get some malware.

Paradoxically, these same companies encourage people contribute to local internal "social"ized tools like internal wikis, forums, etc. The latter don't work as effectively as expected - partially because people simply don't want to "befriend" with their colleagues, even less with their bosses/subordinates; partially, because there are just too few users and critical mass is never achieved.

The truth is individual companies cannot change the course of development of social media anymore. So why not to change your approach to it? And why not to start with leveraging existing public social media instead re-inventing them internally?

One way is to actually start rewarding people whose usage of social media directly benefits the company. After all, you can hear a lot of interesting ideas or read good articles recommended by your social media friends. To ensure enough attention to work, people can be managed through weekly/monthly targets. However, there is a need for additional rewards if a person creates a good idea for business by synthesizing information available on the Internet and sharing with colleagues.

Another way is to try to learn as much as possible about perspective employees through their social media activity. This should go along with encouraging employees recruit specialists to their departments through their own social networks. Even more so, with the growth of freelancing and outsourcing, increasing number of people will be recruited based on brief virtual interview and portfolio plus social media standing. To do this effectively, companies need to create measurement forms to be able to evaluate persons based on their social media activity.

This inevitably means that companies need to become more open themselves. Information spreads among thousands of users simultaneously these days and keeping trade secrets is increasingly complicated. However, nurturing a community feeling among employees, customers and other stakeholders will help preserve competitive position better.

RTE programme aiming for real-time financial management processes

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:04:37 GMT

Real-Time Economy programme is developing new technical solutions and operating models for use in corporate financial management. The aim of the development work is to enhance the efficiency and automation of financial management processes as well as the competitiveness of Finnish companies.

The project, Fully Integrated Accounting (FIA), focuses in particular on developing electronic financial management processes, taking into account the demands created by archiving, auditing and taxation. One of the project’s objectives is to model a new set of account codes, with the starting point being the vision of integrated financial management for the future.

The work being carried out in the FIA project will offer new solutions to meet future challenges. The automation of financial management will make production processes more effective, promote the production of new services with added value and free up experts from routine work for expert tasks. In addition, a common account code will make it possible to develop more efficient links with the authorities.

The joint project involves Tieto, Aditro, the Association of Finnish Accounting Firms, and several SMEs. Helsinki School of Economics is responsible for the research part of the project. The FIA project will end in June 2010. FIA is partly funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES).

For further information, please contact:
Jyrki Poteri, Director, +358 40 570 7870, jyrki.poteri@tieto.com
Mikael Fagerholm, Director, Aditro Financials Oy, +358 40 562 1848, mikael.fagerholm@aditro.com

Striving for a real RTE

Juhani Anttila — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:17:54 GMT

I have been interested in finding links between Real-Time Economy and Social Technologies.

I understand RTE as organizations and communities carrying out effectively and efficiently the present duties and regenerating continuously for future challenges. It is essential to understand that organizations are living systems and learning through relationships with its environments. In this context key issues are conversations and language. Almost classical text for this topic is “The Little Grey Book” of Sun Microsystems. It is worth of reading it again. However, I have not seen much discussion or references to this text. Now, social technologies give real opportunities to reinforce “leadership and language” for regenerating organizations for RTE.

Web application to aid decision-making?

Johanna Kotipelto — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:06:52 GMT

The real-time web application could be used as a tool in decision-making. While considering different options or business transactions, an entrepreneur could "try out" different outcomes in the financial statement in advance, before actually committing any one of them. This could be useful at least for a starting entrepreneur and for long term investments. And, of course, mobile user interface would free the user of time and space.

I pictured the use of Palkka.fi while imagining the trying out different calculations.

If you're not familiar with Palkka.fi: you'll get an idea in Finnish or Swedish at www.palkka.fi: Choose Siirry palveluun and then Vierailija and accept the terms of use. Choose whether you want to use the service as a business or a household and then pick up one of the case examples (and press the "kopioi" button) and see how employing actually works out!

And of course, accounting itself would be performed straight from the phase of ordering. Should there be cause for corrections, the eInvoice would then more or less automatically add or substract those entries.

New niche in B2B business intelligence with social media?

arno kourula — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:25:52 GMT

Company provides service, for example financial and economic analysis or any type of business intelligence, to B2B customers. A social media application could provide customers a chance to evaluate and share information about the topics analyzed. The company could also find new niches in market segmentation. Traditional form of provind business intelligence would be to send out written reports without interaction between service provider and user.

Example: financial and economic analysis sold to professional investors by investment banks and independent research companies.