by Carl Frappaolo
March 29, 2007 at 1:52 pm
· Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, guest commentary
guest commentary
Let me start this entry by stating that I am one of the biggest advocates of Enterprise 2.0. I have written numerous opinion pieces on the powers of the Internet and the capabilities of tools such as SNA, KM, search etc. Nonetheless, I have to say that as I sat through many of the presentations at Fast Forward and read many of the entries in this blog I cannot help but feel that many are drinking the Kool Aid.
What am I speaking about? Well, many of the presentations and blog entries speak of Web 2.0 as unprecedented capability that will revolutionize business forever. I cannot help but recall how “web 1.0″ was touted as doing this (does anyone remember vortals?), along with numerous other revolutions - e-mail, EDI, groupware, KM, to name but a few - and I do mean just a few.
The powers of online collaboration, new approaches to search and content intelligence are powerful. But their powers are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Furthermore, they do not change most of the basic tenets of human psychology and business management (in this regard I side with Tom Davenport - see Experts Agree to Disagree). It is naive to think that Web 2.0 will take off all on its own, as so many other blog entries and Fast Forward presenters would have us believe. Indeed, this very blog site has a leader, orchestrated contributors, and a policy statement . Their role is not heavy handed, but it is there nonetheless. Any community needs an individual responsible for activity, ethics and relevancy. To allow truly free collaboration is negligent (I am speaking here of corporate blogs, not those blogs that are nothing more than the inane ramblings of “anyone”. Corporations need only look at e-mail and the degree to which it has complicated legal discovery to begin to understand the impact that blogs can have. I have worked with many regulated industries (e.g. pharmaceutical, defense), that share an implied culture of “watch what you write - not what you say.” The spoken word (not recorded) cannot come back to haunt you. But the written word, whether on paper or a blog, can. Business blogs need to be monitored. Rules need to be imposed. When I suggested this at an working luncheon at Fast Forward, someone challenged me stating “you do not trust your own employees.” How naive. Breaches in security, propriety and confidentiality come intentionally and accidentally. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, are corporate blogs records? Of course they are. Therefore they warrant the same scrutiny and management that any other potential corporate record does.
Perhaps this is why McAfee states “enterprises have to be convinced that the technologies are iron-clad secure and scalable.”
Secondly, and equally as important, corporations that want to maximize the return on Web 2.0 technologies need to control their introduction and availability, lest the “ugly portal in need of a taxonomy beast” raises its ugly head again. Consider this blog site. An individual new to the community may never fully appreciate the depth of knowledge that has been captured here. Navigation is limited to groupings by month and author. Contextual search is a feature that is difficult to “discover”. The power of the search tool is limited. It does not provide half of the functionality that was touted at Fast Forward. Web 2.0 technologies need to be orchestrated as part of an overall Information architecture, on an ongoing basis. As the needs and focus of the community change, so too should the blog site.
Analysts and technology providers that promise the powers of Web 2.0 without simtultaneously exposing the “dark side” – the need to align to corporate culture, to monitor and manage, to design and tactically deploy, do the market a great disservice.
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Very well said. Technology is a double-edged sword. Failing to realize this will put us where we were in the beginning of the new millenium, when the dot-com bubble burst. Let’s not get carried away again. Don’t give in to the dark side.
This won’t be the first time I’ve not sided with Davenport. I absolutely agree with issues related to cultures, etc., but that’s why I hold such hope for 2.0 thinking. It provides the means by which we can bypass a lot of that dross. It shifts the power base to the people doing the work. The difficulties will be for management to figure out how to change the way they ‘think’ about work. And, as has been said countless times before (other times, other channels) companies can either choose to ‘host’ these activities or they’ll happen on their own (they already do in far less effective renditions).
When was the last time you used bicycle technology to get to work? For all the reasons that it is a highly mis-matched technology in most cases (exceptions: gridlocked passages, 3rd world countries), business as usual is bicycle technology…you’ll be slow to the destination and risk getting run over.
Make no mistake, the darkness is all on the side of status quo. It’s caused by excessive use of ‘head in sand’ technique. Yearning for the good old days is not realistic, just as ‘control’ is no longer bounded by the walls of the organization.
Control is in the hands of whomever choses to wield it - obviously there is much room in between the extremes of heavy-handed control and complete freedom, and we need to pluck the best from both sides and leave what we can aside.
I work with Carl, and we debate this all the time - I tend to be on the information wants to be free side, but let’s face it, intellectual property can neither be freely shared nor completely protected, and risk management is serious business. Would you like your healthcare practitioners blogging about their day, and whatever ailments you have, in a public or even semi-public setting? Blogs and Wikis aren’t for everything, and the point is to choose the appropriate tools, with guidance, and reasonable oversights, to keep this from becoming a BIG pile of smoking guns.
“Trust, but verify” sums it up nicely, rather than a 1984/Big Brother approach.
Unfortuately, the issue is matter of control, and not having it when you want it. Don’t get me started on medical. Why should those who want their medical background protected, prevent me from sharing it between doctors? I’m guessing you’ve never sat in a doctor’s reception with two small children (decidedly in high gear that day) having to fill out your name and address for the 4th time (first time in for family member number 4) and your family health history.
The first law of design…it depends.
Paula - for what you’re describing, that is simply bad process and system design, and has nothing to do with blogs, wikis, or what we’re in general discussing from the Enterprise 2.0 perspective, even find/search per se, which is of course where FAST sits in all of this.
And yes, I have two children myself, and have had that exact problem. My solution? I found a smaller doctor’s office, that didn’t have the crowds and giant, complex, legacy systems - and in fact we no longer have to fill out any paperwork whatsoever when we go their office, aside from getting a receipt back for the co-pay. My own doctor is part of a larger system, but even they have largely modernized, and have minimal paperwork. Vote with your dollars, and take your health business elsewhere, assuming you can, while the rest of this sorts itself out.
Larger systems have bigger problems, and workflow and imaging technology, on the old and low-end, have provided solutions to these problems for 10-20 years at least, and specifically came from a healthcare background, although typically on the insurance side. e-Forms have been around for an easy 10 years, and Carl’s point (correct me here Carl, if I’m twisting your message), and mine, is that without an appropriate ability to impose controls, you have no control, and that is not a good idea in a corporate/organizational setting.
What you’re describing on being able to share your health information directly, and personally, is more about who owns the records, and should you have portability and personal control in how that information is shared. That whole realm of problems is really hairy - and could be addressed with standards and solutions available now, but it’s a matter of getting enough of an ecosystem (government, insurance, hospitals, other providers) to be plugged into the supporting infrastructure to make it happen. Portability of healthcare isn’t just about the coverage, but the history, and making it all work for all participants.
As a side illustration - There was a terrible (or great, depending on how you look at it) Patrick Swayze movie called “Road House” (www.imdb.com/title/tt0098206/) that came out in 1989, with Patrick Swayze as a loner bouncer that went from town to town helping to clean up problem clientele. He traveled with his own copies of all of his medical records, x-rays, patient history, etc. in a big ol’ folder so his history could travel with him as he broke ribs, got stabbed, shot, etc. and make sure his “never the same twice” doctors knew his history.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived in a dozen states, and had many doctors, and so my medical history is scattered to the winds, and it might’ve been a good idea for me to keep copies of all of my records (if I could get them) to take with me. Too late. Jump to an electronic collection of this content/history, searchable/findable and crosslinkable to relevant drug, treatment, and predictive models, with appropriate controls, stored in a SaaS cloud that anyone from emergency responders to doctors, etc. can access with ease (or embedded/tagged in your body?), and voila, we’re in the 21st century.
You can bet though, that once your health information is fully centralized, the controls around that information had better be awfully good, or we are going to be in for an even worse run of Identity Theft than we’re already seeing.
It’s all possible now, and happening in fits and starts around the world, but as William Gibson said, “The Future is Already Here, it’s Just Unevenly Distributed.”
This is all fascinating stuff, and we need to have these discussions to think things through, or we’ll end up with new variations of smaller, lighter-weight, yet still bad/ill-conceived solutions. Upward, not backward, is my mission.
Design is what 2.0 is all about: simplifying.
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