by Jevon MacDonald
January 29, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
(Cheesy analogy alert!)
In 1968 in Mexico City, Dick Fosbury did something great. He did the high jump backwards, and confused a lot of people. They called it the “Fosbury Flop”
It took almost 10 years for the rest of the elite group of jumpers to start using the flop, by then it was too late for many of them.
It turns out that jumping backwards over a pole, at 2.24 meters isn’t that dangerous. Sure, to get to 2.24 meters, you have to be a pretty great athlete, but you and I can probably clear a pole 30% higher than we typically could. If we could just go over backwards.
It sounds simple enough, especially if there is going to be a nice piece of foam on the other side of the pole. When Dick Fosbury first did the flop, the mat was not the thick one we see today, it was simply a mat with enough thickness to replace sand as the landing surface, but it was enough to enable Fosbury to land on his neck.
I bet he was pretty nervous the first time he tried it.
In 1968 and for years to come, many would-be Fosburys were just too afraid, many were worried they would hurt themselves, but eventually they came around, by then younger generation of Fosbury jumpers began destroying the records set by their mentors.
Take the Jump?
If you saw someone achieve great success, I bet you think you would learn from it, but the truth is that many, many people will not be able to learn. Social Media and Social Principals in the enterprise are already transforming some of the world’s greatest enterprises, yet so many executives, managers and employees are just sitting by.
Try it once, just close your eyes and have faith. You may hit the bar your first few tries, but you won’t break you neck.
by Joe McKendrick
January 29, 2007 at 5:51 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA
Bob Serr responded to my recent post on the disruptive (or lack thereof) impact of SOA and Web 2.0 on the enterprise, and elaborates on what he sees as the differences between SOA and the emerging Enterprise 2.0 paradigm.
Bob is employing SOA in his own work, but points out that, ultimately, Enterprise 2.0 holds forth a much grander vision for enterprise transformation than SOA can deliver. “SOA is a technology; it is a way to build and deliver applications,” he explains. “Enterprise 2.0, however, is so much more than that because it represents a completely new way for people to communicate and interact.”
As a result, he cautions, “tightly coupling the success (and hype) of SOA to Enterprise 2.0 actually belittles the promise of Enterprise 2.0.”
Bob also provides additional evidence of the low-level impact of SOA, thus far:
“One piece of data that represents the foundation of my beliefs that SOA is possibly being over-hyped are the statistics of SOA based APIs and “Mashups” from the Programmable Web. From
Dion Hinchcliffe’s post,
The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006, as of December 13, 2006 there were 348 APIs registered and 1350 mashups. While these numbers are more impressive than say 0, they are nothing compared with the number of Websites that were created in the previous revolution, which was the World Wide Web.”
I agree with Bob that SOA will be a gradual, plodding, fairly undramatic process for most companies. Over the long run, SOA, in combination with other methodologies and technologies, will smooth the way for greater flexibility. A good way to view SOA is as an internal Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.
by Hylton Jolliffe
January 29, 2007 at 5:24 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Mike Gotta picks up James’ challenge to come up with 5 tips for gaining adoption for next-generation enterprise applications. His first:
“Define what Enterprise 2.0 means for you: I often feel like we’re back in the nineties debating what Knowledge Management is or is not. To overstate the issue – it really doesn’t matter what I think E2.0 is or what some other pundit, expert or analyst thinks it is — or is not. What matters most is for an organization to take ownership of the term and define for itself what Enterprise 2.0 means based on its own structural dynamics, culture, institutions, market pressures, human capital needs and so on. There is no universal truth here (perhaps some common scaffolding but no complete right or wrong). By taking ownership of the term, it allows people within an organization to put Enterprise 2.0 into a context that they can understand and relate to it in terms of change management, transformation complexity, risks and opportunities and so forth.”
Read the rest…
by Dana Gardner
January 29, 2007 at 1:15 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Innovator Interviews, Podcasts
Read a full transcript of the podcast.
Internet search has been around for years, while seeking out new business partners is as old as business itself. Can finding the right relationships through the burgeoning “Business Web” effectively exploit and leverage the increasingly powerful technologies such as semantic search?
Are businesses on the doorstep of vast new opportunities for the discovery of assets, resources, tacit knowledge and global business partner ecologies? To help answer these questions, I recently moderated a sponsored podcast on the new semantic search opportunity and explored how business relationships and the Business Web can be brought to bear on information overload and ecommerce value discovery.
Joining me for the discussion are Russ Glass, vice president of product and marketing at ZoomInfo, and John Blossom, president of Shore Communications and a noted industry analyst.
Here are some excerpts:
Search engines have become a natural first point for not just Googling individuals to find general information or haphazard information, but to solve real, specific business and sales problems. In today’s environment, with so much information being published by individuals and institutions, search engines don’t necessarily provide the level of filtering that the average businessperson needs to be able to do solve problems effectively.
Businesses are getting much more intelligent about how they use the Web to present themselves as not just companies with shareware sites, but as publishers that provide in-depth information about their activities. At the same time, individuals in business are learning how to expose themselves through that instrument also.
Why bother? Well, our research shows that most people in business start on the open Web when they’re trying to solve a business problem and find business information, as opposed to going to internal subscription services. Certainly, subscription content is still a very important part of the equation, but many people — knowing that companies are out there publishing information on the Web — are going out to search engines to find the answers to their business questions.
Web 2.0 is probably best described as the read/write Web, where there is an increasing proportion of content that’s being pushed out by individuals as opposed to institutions. We have a broader mix of sources and a broader mix of information going out from a range of publishers. It has some default structure in it because of the standards that are being applied, but it’s still fairly loose information.
Business publications and corporations are all beginning to latch onto this idea and to use Web 2.0-style publishing to be able to reach people. We have individuals out there in business with Weblogs. We have CEO’s with Weblogs. We have PR departments with Weblogs. Everybody is pushing out and trying to engage the world in a conversation. Now, with all that information out there, the question is how we structure it. What we’re beginning to see in the Web environment is the use of more sophisticated content extraction technologies and analytics to be able to take those relationships and to present them more effectively to information systems.There is a great example that Don Tapscott uses in his new book, Wikinomics. He talks about a gold mining company up in Canada that recognized all of a sudden that they had all sorts of potential deposits of gold, but they had no idea exactly where they were, and they wanted to get at them most efficiently. Their CEO happened to go to a seminar that was talking about open-source software and Linus Torvald’s development of Linux.
He said to himself, “Well, let’s open-source our functions.” He put all of their normally secretive information about geology and mineralogy, mineral deposits that were on that property, and he put it out on the open Web and asked people to find the gold. He put out a little reward money. They got input from over 1,000 people, and doubled the yield of that property in just a matter of weeks. … The wisdom of crowds.
The Web is becoming a more effective tool over time to classify businesses than traditional industry classification schemes. The competitors I had three months ago are not necessarily the competitors I’m going to have three months from now — or even today — because business changes at the speed of light, as the Internet pumps information around the world and business strategies change on a dime.
In that sort of environment, it becomes more effective to be able to classify companies and individuals through semantics and relationships that are defined through Web content, than to rely exclusively on databases based on long standing industry classifications and formal relationships. Being able to get those webs of competitors and relationships right on the fly requires an environment like the Web, where that information changes every day.
Listen to the podcast, or read the full transcript for more on new opportunities for Business Web search and discovery. Sponsor: ZoomInfo.
Businesses gain powerful new tools with emergence of semantic search [33:17m]:
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by Euan Semple
January 29, 2007 at 12:20 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
There has been an interesting exchange between James Dellow and James Robertson about this blog and whether or not it has been useful. I have pondered through the day as to how, if at all, to respond and I have tried to pull together something coherent – as coherence seems to be something that is felt to be lacking.
However I have failed. So here, in the spirit of small pieces loosely joined are my thoughts.
- There was no brief for those of us asked to contribute to this blog other than to write about Enterprise 2.0. There was no request for consensus or even to be “useful”.
- I was wary about getting involved because there is a real risk of Enterprise 2.0 turning into a “thing” and a thing that can be done correctly or incorrectly with a whole load of people telling you what correct is. This IMHO is not good and is what led to KM disappearing up its own proverbial and being devalued.
- I have actually enjoyed reading and writing for this blog more than I thought and have appreciated the fact that those contributing have diverse and in some cases divergent views. This for me is one of the key pleasures of the web. I can build rich and subtle tapestries of information and ideas and assemble and re-assemble them into my own view depending on context and mood. IMHO it truly is small pieces loosely joined with the emphasis on the loosely!
- If I had a list of five things that I’d suggest people do there would only be one – don’t do what people tell you to do. Do what makes sense, do what works and do what you have the energy to sustain in the face of the considerable challenges that will be thrown before you. By all means have conversations with people who have been around and seen and done related things and who are happy to have interesting conversations with you but that is it. No formulas and no experts.
