Bioteams: what can we learn from nature's social networks?
Nature’s teams, such as bees, geese, ants and dolphins, are based on a small number of fundamentally different principles than human teams. Interestingly these “bioteams” seem to bear a much closer resemblance to today’s virtual/ mobile social networks than the traditional organisation teams we all know and love. Ken will explore whether an awareness of these principles can help us get much more value out of both social software and social networks.
Ken Thompson was formerly the European IT Manager with Reuters in London, and then became Managing Director with VISION Consulting in Belfast successfully delivering highly successful IT, Business Process and Change Management Services to major clients in the financial services, government and small business sectors. Before this he was Director of a leading UK Software Engineering Research Institute where his particular research interests included the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), which he introduced to the UK, CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) where he was commissioned by the UK Government to write a book "CASE and the issues for IS Management". For the last 10 years Ken has been an expert practitioner in the area of virtual enterprise networks, virtual professional communities and virtual teams. One of his most active consulting areas is helping groups of small to medium sized businesses come together to form 'Virtual Enterprise Networks' (VENs) to enable them to achieve things collectively they would lack the scale for individually. Ken is founder of the Bioteams blog, a unique online web site dedicated to the explanation of bioteam concepts - learning lessons from nature's best teams and applying them in our organizations, mobile workgroups, virtual communities and business/social networks. Ken has recently published two books 'Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Best Designs.' and 'The Networked Enterprise: Competing for the Future Through Virtual Enterprise Networks' (both from MK Press). Ken is also the founder of Swarmteams® a mobile community engagement system based on biological principles. He has a first class honours degree in physics and applied mathematics, holds a private pilots license for fixed wing and micro light aircraft and loves soccer and snowboarding.
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