For one of our latest projects, we found ourselves in Hong Kong creating a best-practice case study film for a key customer in the home furnishing world. It was an exciting collaboration and we're happy to note that our film has been added to the customer's organizational toolbox!

Training police officers to identify signs of possible human trafficking and exploitation is key to the Swedish Police Force's wider effort to combat these crimes in all forms. Our collaborative work with Rikspolisstyrelsen (RPS) in this training has begun to yield promising results as seen here in the article from Sweden's Dagens Nyheter:

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/tvangsarbete-gar-om-sexhandel

It's good to see this work making a difference!

SamSari has signed an agreement with Lernia AB to further develop and implement their values so that they complement the organization’s existing vision. These values will form the basis of Lernia’s ways of working and its relationship with employees, customers and other key stakeholders.

Background: The first phase of this initiative began in September 2011 when Lernia held a special two-day Strategy Forum featuring the participation and input of over 200 key leaders within the organization. With SamSari acting in a support and advisory role, participants explored the importance of Lernia’s existing values and their impact on the overall strategic direction of the organization. The emerging consensus focused on a growing need to develop an evolved set of values more in line with the company’s current business realities. Such values would support an aligned organization, ‘One Lernia’, creating greater unity, cooperation and overall business value.

 What’s happening now: The projects second phase has involved ongoing concept development work throughout October 2011 which has set the stage for the current third phase. In this phase SamSari will work closely with Lernia in a concerted effort to further develop and clarify the organization’s values and to develop an implementation and communication plan aimed at ensuring Lernia’s people truly live the new values. The program, One Learnia- It begins with you and me, will be developed using key input from three key groups:

·         The leadership team consisting of top managers and business unit leaders

·         All Employees

·   A top talent reference group, an eight member panel of key leaders responsible for developing an implementation and communication plan using the Business Action Learning  Methodology.

Working together, these three groups will all contribute to the success of One Lernia as it is implemented over the course of 2012-2013.

The sky’s the limit? Think again.

At times it’s been labeled a fleeting trend, a fashionable buzzword- at others the future of digital information infrastructure. But what is the cloud anyway?

The term originates in a 1996 paper from MIT where researchers used the term “cloud” to describe how the decentralized Internet could be coordinated into a unified system. Wikipedia describes the cloud as the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).” It’s an exciting, dramatic sounding concept, one that has such a ring to it that Dell and other major computing firms have even made repeated unsuccessful attempts to trademark the term. But in many ways the idea is nothing new:  companies like Google and Amazon are already providing cloud services to millions of users around the globe. 

In fact such services are rapidly becoming big business. The think-tank IDC predicts cloud computing will be a 44 billion dollar market by 2013 with some analysts putting the figure at 160 billion by 2015. In late 2009 the city of Los Angeles reported that it plans to save millions by switching from Novell’s GroupWise desktop software to cloud-based Google Apps. Ever forward-looking, Apple has joined the rising cloud tide with the construction of a massive new data center dedicated to future cloud computing offerings.  And IBM is reportedly working on a computing system called Project Kittyhawk that would be capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.

The irony of this last fact, according to many cloud critics, is that the rise of the personal computer was itself a rebellion against the tyranny of centralized computing operations – and of the IBM mainframe world in particular. As Oracle founder Bill Ellison puts it: “Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, but the present and the entire past of computing.” This presents its own problems. In addition to growing concerns about regulatory problems, legislative issues and security vulnerabilities, there is a fear about relinquishing control of technical capabilities to a source somewhere “out there” in the cloud. This is a scary prospect, especially for businesses where data sensitivity is essential.  In the era of WikiLeaks and political wrangling around privacy issues such as  Google’s recent problems in China,  the need for better control and security is rapidly becoming a major factor in how businesses think about and administer their IT networks.

Here at SamSari, we temper these concerns with the growing enthusiasm among some of our closest customers over the cloud’s enormous potential for positive impact. Whether their aim is opening new and stronger communication channels within their organization, or pushing a vision of a more connected, interdependent world, our customers are increasingly turning to cloud services to add value to their business. As a Change Agency working with communication, we think it’s important to be there every step of the way as our customers adopt new technology and new ways of working. Whether the future is in the cloud or bolted tight to terra firma, it’s bound to be exciting. We’ll see you there!

The trees are a riot of color, the days growing shorter, but we're keeping warm with a host of new projects from Volvo Trucks, SEB and Ericsson. 

Today we'll meet the latest addition to our team of change agents, Emma Darelid. She shares a little bit about life in Tanzania, her passion for dance and her newfound mission helping our customers achieve meaningful change.

What kind of experience do you bring to the SamSari team?

 I’ve studied international  business and economics at the Stockholm School of Economics, just graduated about a month ago. Apart from that, some of the things I’ve done is to spend one year in southern France after high school, studying French. I’ve also studied Sociology at Stockholm university and Spanish in Barcelona for a couple of months.

 After two years at Handels, I had a gap year where I studied at a folkhögskola. As a part of this, I went to Tanzania for six months working as a volunteer at a deaf school and travelling around a bit. Early this year (2011) I got the chance to go back to eastern Africa doing a Minor Field Study as my thesis. I spent January and February in Nairobi doing research about the potential of a Swedish mobile health service on the Kenyan market. But of course, both of those trips also included eating loads of fruit and getting new perspectives on life.

I also did an exchange semester in Milan in the spring of 2010 and got the chance to meet a lot of great people, enjoy Italian food and study economics courses focusing on development and innovation.

 What do you love to do?

 One of my main interests is dance. For the past couple of years I’ve been taking classes in a lot of different styles, mostly within hiphop/street dance, even though I’ve been doing jazz dance and ballet since I was a kid.  Currently, I mainly focus on house dance and hiphop.My interest in dancing is linked to my interest in music. I’ve been playing and singing since I was a kid, and even though I’m not actively doing it right now, having music around me is a necessity and finding a great house mix is something that always makes my day. I also enjoy exercising – running, going to the gym etc, and put quite a lot of time into that. It is a way of finding inspiration and enjoying music at the same time. When I have the chance, I also like to ski, travel quite a bit and meet new people from different backgrounds.

How has joining the SamSari team been so far?

I feel excited about joining SamSari! My impression is that it is a place where people take care of each other and achieve great things together, and I’m happy to be able to become a part of that. It feels inspiring to use and develop creativity, organizational skills and the ability to understand more about people, within the work setting.  I feel that achieving change is an engaging issue, and why not do it while having fun!?

Welcome to the team Emma!