by Bill Ives
May 9, 2008 at 5:25 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The Collaboration Technologies Conference had already grabbed the name, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, last year so the Portals, Collaboration and Content conference moved on to select Enterprise3. Actually one of the major sections of the conference is Enterprise 2.0 and to be fair they mean enterprise cubed or as in the Boston Celtics, the Enterprise Big Three - Portals, Collaboration, and Web. If you live in Boston you might ask which one is KG? I would vote for the last one. A few years ago I used run a portals practice but now it seems funny to still hear about portals. However, they are very much in existence, depending on your definition.
The wikipedia defines an Enterprise portal, as “a framework to provide a single point of access to a variety of information and tools.” But then defines Portal (fiction) as, “a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations.” As I witnessed some old style portal implementations run into the millions a few years ago without yet working I was not sure which definition was correct. What I have now seen that with some enterprise 2.0 composite applications, the single point becomes an intelligence integrator and not simply a doorway.
The conference site said,
“Portal technology has changed dramatically during the ten years I have been chairing this event. During this time period, portals have evolved from simply replacing intranets to embracing all aspects of enterprise computing for delivering and sharing business content both inside and outside organizations. To reflect the important role portals now play in the enterprise, the IIR Portals, Collaboration and Content conference has been renamed to Enterprise3.”
This is a good move and I am sure it will be a good conference looking at the program. It is coming up soon, May 19 -22 in San Diego. Apologies to the conference but it is late on a rainy Friday and I could resist these comments. Have a great weekend.
by Jim McGee
May 9, 2008 at 10:55 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08
The phrase “technology for us” has been kicking around in my head for the past several months. At the FASTForward ‘08 conference, I took a first pass at articulating my thinking in a video interview with Jerry Michalski. Consider this my next attempt. I expect there will be more.
Technology for Them
Information systems in organizations generally have been “technology for them.” Accounting systems, inventory control systems, ERP systems, reservations systems are all designed and imposed on their users.
Done properly, these systems yield efficiencies, predictable quality, and significant economic benefits. The design and implementation processes for these systems are industrial engineering at its best. Expert designers observe, redesign, and streamline processes to define and constrain what the target user population is allowed to do.
In these systems, users are simply one component in a mechanistic environment designed to constrain behaviors. User roles are limited to situations where technology is too expensive and a human user is more economical. Individual creativity and initiative are neither desirable or appropriate.
Technology for Me
The personal computer revolution brought “technology for me.” We saw innovation and scores of programs designed to improve the productivity and effectiveness of individual knowledge workers. Few of us would go back to a world without spreadsheets, word processors, or the other tools made possible and accessible via personal level information technology.
The first waves of innovation in the PC world focused largely on individual productivity. Attention to work process, if any, was a function of the idiosyncrasies of each user. Broadly speaking, innovation took one of two forms. Programmers and developers generalized from their own needs to develop unique tools solving their own problems. With luck, those solutions found enough kindred spirits to sustain a market. Early examples here would include the original Visicalc, ThinkTank, More, and dBase. More recent examples would include MindManager, SketchUp, Powerpoint, and the Brain.
The alternate development path was more corporate, with planned attempts to meet the application needs of perceived large markets of individual information and knowledge workers. Examples here would include the original Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Word, and Visio.
This development path emphasized industrial and mechanistic conceptions of work. Moreover, the logic of mass markets produced products targeted to the perceived lowest common denominator of user needs. At its worst, this path leads right back to technology for them and Microsoft Bob as a distorted model of users and use cases.
Us as Knowledge Worker
There are two dimensions of “technology for us” worth exploring. The first is “us” as knowledge workers; individuals charged with “thinking for a living” in Tom Davenport’s coinage and expected to exercise substantial initiative and autonomy in the design and execution of their work. The second dimension of “us” is the degree to which key work products and deliverables emerge from the collective and coordinated action of multiple knowledge workers. We’ll return to this second form of us in a bit.
There are both political and practical problems with applying technology effectively to the unique needs of knowledge workers. Previous organizational uses of technology have not had to deal with situations where the target audience was free to ignore you. Knowledge workers occupy positions of power and influence within the enterprise. They have the power and inclination to ignore, dismiss, and actively undermine ill-conceived and poorly executed efforts to modify their work practices. For that matter, they have to power to dismiss well-conceived and well-executed efforts on their behalf.
If you’re smart enough to avoid the trap of trying to dictate an approach to this user community and actively engage them in the design and implementation process, you run into the next constraint. Knowledge workers can’t articulate quality, effectiveness, or efficiency with anything resembling the precision that applies to manual or information work. The nature of knowledge work and its deliverables makes typical measurement approaches suspect (see Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work and The Invisibility of Knowledge Work, for example). We have only recently begun to understand individual knowledge work practices in ways that let us apply technology with some likelihood of success. In many ways we are still working out the details of the vision of knowledge work support first articulated by Vannevar Bush in the mid-1940s in As We May Think.
Us as Groups of Knowledge Workers
Organizations exist to solve problems beyond the capacity of individuals to tackle. This is as true of knowledge work as it is for all other types of work. For all the power of technology to make individual knowledge workers more productive and effective, the greater opportunity lies in developing skill at using technology to support collective activity.
What we haven’t yet done well is knit together our knowledge of how to improve group oriented work practices and technological possibilities. Further, the more promising efforts have seen limited penetration into organizations. When dealing with collective knowledge work we compound the problem of knowledge worker autonomy with the problem that the knowledge work processes we wish to improve are vague, imprecise, and squishy in ways quite uncharacteristic of the work processes we are comfortable working with in industrial settings.
If we take the analysis and improvement tools we are comfortable with in industrial process settings and simply port them to knowledge work environments, one of two things happens. Either, we become hopelessly frustrated trying to force a dynamic and fluid process into the confines of our swimlanes. Or, we mistake the small fraction of the process we can force fit into our tools for the entire phenomenon; guaranteeing that our target users will ignore us and route around our efforts.
While there are people who have thought about the problems of applying technology to complex knowledge work processes and practices, their work has not achieved the widespread adoption it needs to be a meaningful factor in most organizations. Some good entry points into this work include:
The inventory of technology solutions promising to streamline, improve, or transform group activities continues to grow, although it often seems more like baroque and rococo variations on a handful of themes than like new insights or frameworks. Will the next implementation of threaded discussion make any major contribution to educating a group on when and how to make effective use of that technique? Or to understanding what situations make it a poor choice of tool?
What seems to be missing is a synthesis of Group Behavior 101 and a groupware pattern language. I’m not aware of anything that would fit that bill, although Stewart Mader’s recent Wikipatterns might represent a potential starting point. Can anyone point to some examples I’m unaware of? Is this something that we should be working to develop?
by Joe McKendrick
May 6, 2008 at 10:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
My colleague Bill Ives just posted a thought-provoking discussion on why Web 2.0 is not the same animal as Enterprise 2.0.
There are definitely clear distinctions between the consumerist Web 2.0 services in play out there, versus the tools and services businesses are adopting. When technologies or services are taken behind the firewall, their purpose and requirements change, which is to solve business problems.
It’s worth noting, however, that in recent years, starting with the PC, we have seen a lot of consumer technologies percolating into the enterprise. As a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton observes, the lines keep blurring — “the boundaries between corporate and consumer technologies are beginning to disappear.”
As Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton, put it: “We have observed a convergence of technologies between these two segments [consumer and corporate] because the user needs have been converging. For instance, workers are demanding that corporate technology — say a search tool within a company — be as user friendly as Google’s popular search site.”
In fact, the article notes, in a few years, as predicted by Gartner, at least 10% of all information technology
spending will reside with employees (for laptops, iPhones and the like), and they will customize at least 90% of the technology they use at work.
Beyond gadgetry and online videos, the article goes on to make a very important observation as well: “the line between personal lives and work has blurred.” Employees often perform personal tasks — like watching the latest popular video on YouTube or shopping at Amazon.com — at work and they frequently complete corporate tasks at home on their own time.
Perhaps, as Clay Shirky is saying (cited here by Jim McGee), the organization as we know it is disappearing. Yes, there are still formal government regulations that define the legal status of an “employee” and how many hours are worked per week and so forth. But thanks to information technology and networking, organizations can function more effectively as confederations of entrepreneurs/service providers than as rigid, hierarchical 9-to-5 entities.
There are issues, of course. Security, for one, can be a real show-stopper. Many companies are not comfortable — and may even have legal issues with — with the idea of data and processes being taken to offsite providers. These are issues that have to be worked out.
However, the boundaries between consumer-business technology and work-life have blurred to the point where there’s no going back. Just as continuing education is a personal initiative that is in every company’s best interest to foster, the knowledge and value being gained through “consumerist” social networking and computing will only come back to enrich productivity and spur motivation within the enterprise.
by Bill Ives
May 5, 2008 at 7:12 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Last week I had an interesting conversation with Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct sales at Awareness. We discussed their recently announced Facebook integration through their Awareness Facebook Application Framework. I have written about Awareness a number of times here and elsewhere (see Awareness – Enterprise 2.0 Social Media Platform). I have also been writing a bit about Facebook on this blog (e.g., Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron). I discussed how Facebook is not a business-oriented platform for solving business problems inside the enterprise, with rare exceptions, as it is a consumer web application with different objectives. However, I also said, picking up from Puneet Gupta, that Facebook can play a role in the enterprise when it is used appropriately as a social networking vehicle.
I have also written about how a number of firms have provided a means to integrate social software (aka enterprise 2.0) with traditional enterprise applications. Now Awareness, an enterprise social software platform, has taken things the other way by allowing for the integration of their business oriented social software platform with the consumer web platform, Facebook. They are doing this to combine the robust business oriented capabilities of their program with the networking capabilities of Facebook to allow firms to build better communities, primarily for business to consumer communities. I think this is a smart move and a good use of Facebook for business out in the consumer web.
Many of us know what Facebook brings to the table for groups and communities. It certainly has become the dominant player in this space so we are on it because our friends are. I am a member for that reason, as well as its enhanced social networking capabilities. Awareness comes to the table with a single architecture for all forms of user-generated content (e.g., text, video, photos, etc.) that operates in a uniform fashion across all forms of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, forums, mashups, etc.). User-generated content is also captured and stored with profile information about the user who generated it. This allows you to gather content through any channel (e.g., blog. wiki) and share it thorough any other channel, while retaining the context of the author who generated it.
These are clearly not capabilities within Facebook but they are capabilities that are very useful for a business oriented B2C community. Awareness builds a branded Facebook application for each customer. The resulting Facebook application is unique to each customer’s community. The benefit of having an Awarness-powered Facebook application is that it “extends” their community into Facebook and they can use Facebook’s viral marketing tools. I asked Eric to elaborate on this. He made several points:
1. You are in complete control. You establish the rules for the community dynamics – moderation, security, permissioning, etc. – and you can change them as your needs evolve. You can control who can do what, who can see what, what content is appropriate or not, etc.
2, It’s your content, and you can use it anyway you want. You can mine the content for valuable trends and insights; you can analyze participation metrics; you can access it via APIs and reuse it elsewhere as they do on their own Awareness site.
3. You can extend your community to other places where your users “live.” If you build a group in Facebook or some other social site, it will be there and only there. However, if you have an Awareness-powered community, you can also extend your community to Facebook (via the Awareness Facebook Application Framework) and eventually other social sites so your community can “live” in more than one place.
4. You can modify the community to meet your users’ needs. You can change the look and feel, incorporate new features (tagging, mapping, calendars, etc) to adjust to your users’ needs.
5. You can integrate it with your enterprise environment. Integrate with SSO/identity management systems, enterprise search, third party applications, etc.
6. You can monetize your community. It’s yours to do as you please. If you want to run ads on it or some other form of monetization, you can.
7. The community is in your brand image and style and strengthens your web presence. It’s your URL, your look/feel, and can be a seamless part of your web presence. Their Awareness site is an example of this (you can’t tell where the community ends and the website begins).
Eric offered an example of an Awareness powered Facebook community run by The Port Charlotte Voice, a New York Times Regional newspaper. It is their first customer to implement the Awareness Facebook Application Framework and the Facebook group is in its early stages. The newspaper can now present a variety of headlines, user-generated content and more from its online Awareness-powered social media community directly into Facebook. You can see the Port Charlotte Voice Facebook application with the link in this sentence.
The consumer web has brought a lot to the enterprise. Companies have taken many concepts from the consumer web to create business tools such as Awareness. It is nice to see some of the robustness of these new business tools going back into the consumer web to make it more robust for business.
by Jon Husband
May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, barriers, enterprise software
Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects. At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most.
In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.
30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s. He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.
It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case. There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.
The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption. It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).
Via Wikipedia:
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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks
Management theory
Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.
[ Snip … ]
He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.
Managers and workers
Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:
"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)
Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.
"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend
[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States
- Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
- H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
- Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
- Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
- Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
- Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
- Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
- Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
- Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
- James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.
I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web. And today I am thinking about "the future of work".
It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.
David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization. He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) . We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems. And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.
But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism. As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment. A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).
There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now. A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles). It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".
Generally, I agree but with reservations. Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).
Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate. Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.
.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.
[ Snip … ]
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.
Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”
And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.
Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
[ Snip … }
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?
Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.
And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.
But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.
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by Jim McGee
May 2, 2008 at 10:08 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Clay Shirky’s got a new talk and he’s taking it on the road. It’s stimulating a good bit of thoughtful discussion around the web. Here’s a video version of his talk:
There’s a somewhat better quality video at blip.tv. (although I can’t seem to successfully embed that here)
Shirky has also posted a transcript of the talk on his site, if you’d prefer to read instead of watch. The talk is a riff on one of the themes of his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. I’ll post a complete review of that shortly; it’s well worth you’re making time to read it.
One of the stories Shirky hangs his argument on is an interchange with a TV producer about the creation and growth of Wikipedia. Here’s how he tells it:
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation. [Gin, Television, and Social Surplus]
The notion of “cognitive surplus” is a clever and useful way to frame the issue. Now, Shirky is primarily interested in the societal level impacts of new technologies. Big numbers help his argument tremendously, but they are a little bit like the arguments for why you might want to target your new consumer product at China (”if we only get one person in a hundred to drink our new sport drink, we’ll sell millions!”). Or the dotcom era arguments for capturing eyeballs. I don’t think that Shirky falls into this trap himself. Here, and in his book, he explicitly talks about how the design and architecture of systems such as Wikipedia leverage cognitive surplus in granular ways to exploit these large numbers.
My primary interests are inside organizations. How can we translate and adapt these insights into those environments? Organizational theorists, not being as clever or market oriented as Shirky, did not think up a notion as attractive as “cognitive surplus.” Instead, they talk about the notion of “organizational slack.” In hindsight, a very poor choice of words. For the last two decades, or more, organizations have been rooting out “slack” wherever they could find it. When the goal is efficiency, this is an appropriate strategy. However, it leaves no capacity for innovation and adaptation. Those few organizations that explicitly provide this capacity, such as Google’s 20% rule, are deemed notable and newsworthy.
The first order of business for business is to immediately appropriate Shirky’s term. Organizations that care about innovation and adaptive capacity should begin talking about “cognitive surplus.” Look for ways to measure it, if only crudely, and increase it.
The second task is to better understand and appreciate how various new technologies and tools let organizations derive benefit from smaller grains of cognitive surplus. Google’s 20% rule is a product of a time largely before blogs and wikis. Can an organization combine the tools with a one hour or 10 minute rule? Can we get value out of an hour a week or 10 minutes contributing to an internal wiki? Clearly, we will need to design some thoughtful support and encouragement processes around the tools in order to take advantage of a different scale of participation.
The third task is to monitor how well the large number phenomena outside the enterprise operate inside. We may discover critical mass issues; efforts below a certain scale are doomed to fail, while slightly larger efforts will need an extensive “life-support” system to survive. Other efforts may need support scaffolding but can become self-sustaining. Today, we have far more questions than answers. Shirky has provided us with some good new notions to start finding answers. I’d also recommend some of the following discussions that I’ve come across so far:
by Bill Ives
May 2, 2008 at 8:33 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is the second time this week I have felt the need to discuss the legitimacy of this blog. I wrote in Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron that I noticed that the subtitle of this blog is a “hosted discussion on enterprise 2.0” so I attempted to comment on our content. Now I also see the word blog in very large letters above this post. This is the first time I have cross posted back froim my own blog but I am interested in your response to this question.
Joshua Porter recently wrote an interesting post, “Why people don’t trust “bloggers” in response to Jeremiah Owyang who claims that people don’t trust bloggers. As Joshua wrote that Jeremiah based his observations on three studies by respected marketing research companies: Forrester, Edelman, and Pollara. These studies found that bloggers do not elicit much trust when compared to other sources of information. Then he makes an excellent observation, “I can’t help but think that these studies weighted the questions…oh just a little bit. I mean, who would trust someone based solely on the fact that they happen to write a blog? Does merely creating a blogger account and whipping out a few blog posts make one a trusted authority on…anything? Of course not.”
I totally agree with Joshua. If the question had been, as he says, “Do you trust bloggers who you read regularly/subscribe to?” most people would answer that they do.” Why would they read them? As Joshua said, I am sure that Jeremiah hopes people trust him. There are many bloggers out there. Just because you know how to start a blog, which is not rocket science, does not mean that you know anything else. As two of the commenters on Jeremiah’s blog posts said:
“Contrary to what you may imply, you are trusted by many of your readers. You’ve earned this trust by being transparent, by being consistent, by slowly building a reputation, and by the multiple channels in which someone can learn about you.”
“I think that you are confusing two categories. Of course people don’t trust a generic category called ‘bloggers’ But they do trust people they ‘know’, and in these days of social networking ‘knowing’ someone may mean you have never met them in real life. But if a relationship of trust & authenticity has been developed between you & them, then they could trust a blogger
Blogs are conversations and they do put more responsibility on the reader to judge the material than say, the New York Times, with its army of fact checkers. But even the NYT gets it wrong some times and everyone has some type of bias. Blogs are also a medium. The NYT also has many of them. Do you trust a magazine article more than television? In each case, the answer would be it depends on the person. This is not say that communication channels do not have their own properties. Naturally, seeing someone on TV gives you more information than a magazine article. Blogs are usually the voice of a single person or a group of individuals and not an editorial board. However, a blogger has to build the trust of his or her audience by being consistent and transparent as the first commenter wrote above.
The Edelman study compared bloggers to academics, industry analysts, CEOs, regular employees of a company, etc. to “bloggers.” Guess what, many of these people in the other categories write blogs. So does the New York Times. The study compared one channel to people who write in multiple channels, including blogs. The Forrester study compared reviews by a known expert to a reviews by a blogger. What if the known expert expressed his views through a blog? It often happens. Blogs offer an expanded platform for business communication. Whether you believe what the blogger writes is more a factor of the blogger, himself or herself, than the communication channel.
Many bloggers I read are also friends that I have meet in person. Friends had the highest trust ratings in the Forrester study so where do blogger friends fall in the ratings? I also read other bloggers, like Joshua that I have not met. However, I already respect his thought process. That does not mean that I will trust or agree with everything he writes. But I do think he got this one correct. I have also never met Jeremiah but I know his blog, it has been on my blog roll for some time, and I respect his expertise. I also agree with much of what he writes. I just think he got it wrong this time. But that can happen with close friends. It does not mean I will stop trusting Jeremiah. I also respect the three research firms and have said good things about Forrester on this blog. I just disagree with how they did those studies. In the end it is up to the bloggers to earn your trust and you to grant it, regardless of the communication channel they are using.
As a post script, I ran across this blog post from Andrew McAfee, Evidence of the Value of a Blog, where he said he was “pretty sure that this blog is the main reason I made the list.” The list being the Ziff Davis Enterprise list of the ’100 Most Influential People in IT” where they put him as #38. Andrew is another blogger who earned trust through many sources, but he credits the blog as a major one. I looked at the list and noticed a few other bloggers on it.
What about us Fast Forward bloggers? Many of us have our own blogs. Everyone talks through other channels. This blog is sponsored by FAST, as clearly stated at the top of the blog. However, we have complete editorial freedom. The only time the FAST people even talked with us was over the merger with Microsoft, as they did with many others. No one will read this post before I hit the publish button. I guess I should stop and hit that button now so you can read it.
by Rob Paterson
April 30, 2008 at 10:34 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Community, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Long Tail, Social Media, Social Networking
As the web moves from a village - 60,000 blogger in 2002 - to a megacity - where will the structure be found? Where is the value? Fast is working on that problem through behavioral search. I would like to add to that the core human organizational design.
How will be get through all the noise that is building on the web? How will we find the value along the Long Tail as content grows to the infinite?
Many of us agree that in a world of infinite content, that the value will no longer be in the mass market but in the niches in the Long Tail.
Our intuition tells us that it is in the niches where the scarcity and hence value lies - attention, attraction and hence energy. If this is true, then how do we find the right niche and unleash this power? What is the best filter?
I think that our best filter is our small circle of trust. It has both the power and the reach. I believe that this “circle of trust” is defined by our biology and not by software. Real “friends” are not an infinite resource but exist only in small numbers that fit the “Magic” or “Dunbar Numbers” that in turn fit the Fibonacci sequence.
So here is the data - based on the early part of the Fibonacci sequence and where I have assumed that the Circle of influence may be to the Power of 4.
So a circle of 8 - the ideal Trusted Space - can attract, affect and influence 4,096 people. If I have 144 in my circle we can reach just over 400 million others. BUT my bet is that just as the reach goes up, the gravitational pull goes down.
2 - 16
3 - 82
5 - 625
8 - 4,096
13 - 28,561
34 - 1,336,336
55 - 9,150, 625
89 - 62, 742,241
144 - 429, 981, 696
Notice anything? As we look at the sequence we see a Pareto or power curve - it’s the Long Tail.
So what do I also “see”?
I think that there are two power curves here. One is reach and the other is power or gravity.
The greatest gravitational pull is at 2 - the most effective reach is 144. There is likely a “sweet spot” along the curve where reach and pull are best found in concert. My bet is that it is in using the circles of 8 - 13 - 34. You can reach more than a million people with 34 and you can really attract 4,096 powerfully at 4.
If my intuition is correct, then the full power of social software might be revealed as we explore these numbers and their meaning. Does this not put a new face on marketing? Does it tell us how we will find and attach to content in a universe of infinite content? Does this say something about how to organize anything?
I am a historian by training - can you help by testing this and also by drawing it?
by Bill Ives
April 29, 2008 at 3:51 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I noticed that the subtitle of this blog is a “hosted discussion on enterprise 2.0” so I could not resist the challenge that Fred Wilson (aka A VC in NYC) recently tossed in his post, Is “Social Enterprise Software” An Oxymoron? While Fred did not use the term enterprise 2.0 in his post, he referenced two other blog posts challenging enterprise 2.0 at the end with the implication they supported his concerns. The technology part of enterprise 2.0 is often referred to as social software or some variation on this theme so we stand accused. Let me take this on in two parts.
First, enterprise 2.0 is certainly not web 2.0. It is easy to offer up a few consumer web 2.0 applications in an argument that social software does not belong in the enterprise. Fred offers the wikipedia definition of social software that only lists consumer web examples. Someone needs to update the definition. Forrester was careful to exclude this class of software in its Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. They did not include consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter when they predicted the enterprise web 2.0 market would grow to $4.6 billion globally by 2013. At the same time they said that that enterprise web 2.0 will get absorbed into the fabric of the enterprise (see Social Networking is Climbing the Revenue Projection Ladder on this blog). More on this last issue in the second half of this post when I cover the oxymoron part.
Consumer web tools are often designed to increase traffic and generate ad revenue, not exactly enterprise goals. I generally do not feel that they should form the basis of enterprise social computing with some possible rare exceptions. But should we go to the other extreme and have consumer web tools banned from the enterprise? That was the subject of a recent debate between two Garner analysts, Nikos Drakos and Ray Valdes. I think this is going too far. There is a role for social activities at work whether they be actual or virtual. Puneet Gupta put this in a clear perspective in his post, The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script, that was a follow up to his post on the Drakos Valdes debate.
Puneet said, “I do not think the debate was asking the right question. Facebook is a consumer oriented networking tool that is increasingly being adopted by business people as a social networking tool for business purposes. In this way it is like a “virtual social event or other recreational activity” that can be effectively used for business networking. I would not ban my sales force from attending social events in the real world with customers during business hours if this activity has the potential to lead to sales or helps with customer relations. But if my salesperson goes to social events in the real world every day or surfs Facebook all day and does not make any sales, I might “ban” that person. In the end you need to use good judgment.”
He added that he does not ban Facebook in his company (Connectbeam) and concluded with “I think the more important question is what social networking tools are right for your business. In this case I would pick a tool that is designed for business use, and not one designed for recreational use and built to generate high traffic.” This is a good transition to part two.
Enterprise 2.0 is not an oxymoron. Not that I especially like the term but it seems to be sticking as did web 2.0 that no one liked at first, either. What is more important than the term is the existence of an emerging class of business software that does not simply take consumer web tools behind the firewall. These tools are developed for businesses to solve business problems. Businesses are run and operated by people, for the most part for now, and these tools look at the social context of information. There are many communities within an enterprise: project teams, divisions, etc. Then there are the communities that enterprises want to have with their suppliers and customers. In 2006 McKinsey issues the report, The Next Revolution in Interactions, in which they said, “In today’s developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services.” They say that traditionally the focus of business and IT investments has been on production rather than interactions. They added that in today’s post-knowledge economy it is interactions that count for the most.
Many of these enterprise 2.0 tools support, monitor, and make accessible these important business interactions, the social side of the enterprise. Many of them have been written about on this blog and on the AppGap blog, as well as many other places. My colleagues and I have interviewed many of them. Forrester likely interviewed even more for their market prediction and they seem to take this market seriously. But instead of only looking at numbers, here is just one of many examples, Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0 and QuickBase.
XM Radio brought in an enterprise 2.0 tool, QuickBase, to help bring more rigor, order, collaboration, and transparency to the processes. XM first used it for project management around the launch of XM Radio’s newest product called the XpressRC. QuickBase facilitated global communication amongst the many partners involved in the successful launch of the XpressRC throughout the end-to-end supply chain. QuickBase provided a robust program management database that made the key issues transparent so they could be addressed and resolved in a timely manner. The transparency promoted accountability and a clear and concise escalation process. The right data was in place for all to see and progress could be posted in QuickBase via a very effective metrics dashboard. It was the first time they produced a product on time and on budget.
A variety of uses emerged. QuickBase was utilized by XM to manage outsourced partner management throughout the Supply Chain. It was used for collaboration with manufacturing partners. Operational and logistics issues could be listed in QuickBase and resolved within the tool. Emails on issue resolution were eliminated as all progress was entered real time by the respective parties. QuickBase was applied to assist XM with end to end visibility of product throughout the supply chain and is used as the primary inventory reporting tool. The graphics for all product artwork and packaging resides in a repository within QuickBase and can be quickly accessed and used by XM and all of their supply chain partners. XM radio also uses QuickBase to many cost reduction and efficiency improvement projects to provide a common platform and toolset so the all projects are managed consistently and transparently.
There are many other enterprise 2.0 tools that have produced similar stories. Here is a partial list of Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories from 2007. I am hearing many more in 2008 but have not consolidated a list yet. Fred mentioned the security issue and this is real and one that the business oriented enterprise 2.0 venders have recognized and are tackling (e.g., Central Desktop Acts on Enterprise 2.0 Security). In fairness to Fred, he said he would keep an open mind and watch with interest what Jeff Dachis builds in this space. I will also, but I think we do not have to wait for Jeff to look at the social side of business transactions and benefit in ways that XM Radio did.
Have said all this, the last thing I would recommend is to go out pushing the enterprise 2.0 banner as a sales approach. As Jevon MacDonald rightly said, “Enterprise 2.0 budgets do not exist, except where some early adopters create them.” You sell solutions to business problems but, since people still run and operate business, there are a lot of business problems where making the social side of transactions more transparent and better supported will provide real business benefits.
I have said enough for one post and will close with one of the emerging trends, the integration of social software and traditional enterprise software. More on that later. Thanks Fred for getting me charged up a grey, rainy day.
by Rob Paterson
April 29, 2008 at 8:13 am · Filed under
ABC News, CBS, Information Management, Interview, Messy World, Michael Skoler, News, Politics, Public Insight Journalism, Public Media, Public TV, Social Networking, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution
It’s ironic isn’t it, that at a time when the problems that confront us, such as the end of cheap oil, a war that we cannot get out of, an education system that fails 40% of Americans, a healthcare system that serves only a few, that our news is so awful.
CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.
News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.
How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?
I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.
Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience - how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.
This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.
The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.
What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?
by Rob Paterson
April 28, 2008 at 1:05 pm · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter
Thanks to John Proffitt
by Rob Paterson
April 24, 2008 at 2:39 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Chris Corrigan, The 'Phoric, YouTube
Isn’t an underlying principle of 2.0 that it uses nature’s rules and hence should make everything a lot easier?
But because we have all spent a life time working against nature - using effort and control to hold back chaos - many of us don’t know what working with nature might look or feel like.
I who blather on about nature all the time am as guilty as any of us - I know this failure of mine to be true when I saw the 2 videos in this week’s ‘Phoric that were offered up by the incomparable Chris Corrigan.
Here is a taste - a video that shows that we need only use small tools to do big things - reminds me of the power of Twitter. Just as an aside, over 3 million people have seen this video. The power of 2.0! The other videos show why control is overrated as are goals!!!! Wow think of that Goals overrated? Give up control - NEVER!
by Jon Husband
April 23, 2008 at 6:25 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interview, SOA, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Over the past two weeks in between a lot of work and some more hard work, I managed to pop in to several sessions at the OpenWeb Vancouver conference, a two-day conference focused on "showcasing open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelizing the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large".
At OpenWeb I was introduced to one of the presenters, Duane Nickull, Senior Global Technology Evangelist for Adobe. According to Duane, he is Adobe’s only Vancouver employee (nice work if you can get it, jetting all over the world whilst coming home every once in a while to this lovely little corner of the globe). Duane has also just co-authored a book with Tim O’Reilly … I’m pretty sure it’s about SOA but I can’t quite remember. I’ll clear that up soon and report back in the interview (see below).
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The main focus of my professional career has been working for both the United Nations CEFACT committee and OASIS for the purposes of writing and building new architectures for global integration of multiple systems. I also work for Adobe Systems which I love. Great company!
Since 1996, I have been fortunate enough to work on multiple enterprise architectures including many service oriented architectures (SOA) within various standards bodies including W3C, UN/CEFACT, OASIS and others. I have also contributed to many SOA papers and articles on service oriented architecture. My focus has shifted towards many web service standards in recent years.
I have worked on many other interesting technologies including the first contextual XML Search Engine, an Alternative fuel hydrogen project and the new UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture and related technologies. The next level of this work will probably be linked to Ontology work. I participate in the Ontolog Forum which is a great group.
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Duane’s OpenWeb Vancouver session was titled "Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis".
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"Many enterprises seek knowledge of the design patterns used by successful Web 2.0 companies. This session starts with Tim O’Reilly’s list of Web 2.0 examples and distills the abstract architectural patterns from behind the examples. By using the patterns notation, the core knowledge of the design principles is preserved in a template which can be reused in multiple domains including government."
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I asked Duane if I could interview him … about Adobe, it’s plans for Enterprise 2.0, what flows of information mean to him and his colleagues at Adobe and insights on noticing, and using patterns to design and build better, easier-to-use, more flexible and more powerful applications.
We’re still looking for a mutually convenient date (he travels a lot and is speaking at the Web 2.0 conference at the moment, so this really means when will Duane next be back in Vancouver ?), but it looks like I will interview him sometime in the first week of May. I hope you’ll check in for what I will strive mightily to make an interesting and educational interview.
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) and you shouldn’t expect to see SharePoint running on UNIX. We’re making a business decision for enterprise search and feel great about what it means for our FAST search customers.