Where Are We Going? What will be Enterprise 20.0?

May 30, 2007 at 7:35 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is about, among other things, transparency, and providing accessible archives of key business interactions. As the McKinsey report, The next revolution in interactions, offered, it is within these interactions that much of the enterprise value is located. With Enterprise 2.0 we want to unlock this value for broader use. But how far can we go with this transparent archiving?

A recent New Yorker article, Remember This?, (May 28.2007) provides a look into where we might be going. Gordon Bell, formerly of DEC and now with Microsoft is exploring the archive genre in depth. Bell is a super smart guy who was the first person from Kirksville, Missouri to go to MIT. He also played a key role in the early days of DEC, the formation of the Internet, and a few other things before ending up doing exploratory research at Microsoft.

Once Gordon learned of the possibilities of scanning documents, he decided to go paperless with his life records. This did not stop with documents but went on to phone calls, IMs., and anything that happen on his computer. And now his archiving includes his in person conversations, and, with the help of a camera around his neck, anything he sees.

His second insight was that storage would be available by 2007 for just about whatever a person wanted to save (and it has). His third epiphany was that by adding contemporary material to his archive he was building a “personal-transaction processing system.” What he meant he was recoding everything he did. It is more a transaction storage system.

But how do you go back and find all the stuff? A colleague at Microsoft, Eric Horvitz is working on a Lifebrowser that uses time as a means of locating information. It learns your preferences through your requests and becomes smarter.

So now we may have no boundaries on our enterprise archive capabilities. The use of blogs and wikis to record the interactions of project teams or field repair teams, for example, for further use has been seen as an improvement over the silos of email and attachments. These may seem primitive first steps into the world that Gordon Bell envisions.

The New Yorker article concludes with some speculations on the consequences of this boundless archiving. We are selective and revisionist in our memory. What will happen if it is possible to fact check everything? What will be the characteristic of the new Enterprise 20.0 when the limits to archiving are gone?

The article concludes with a quote from Bell, “Your aspirations go up with every new tool. You’ve got all this content there and you want to use it, but there’s always this problem of wanting more.”

And more and more…

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Can Enterprises Come to Grips With ‘Web 2.0 Creep’?

May 29, 2007 at 12:03 pm · Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0

My colleague Paula Thornton recently observed that Cisco Systems appears to be not only talking the talk on Web 2.0, but also walking the walk.

Now, NetworkWorld’s Phil Hochmuth provides further analysis of remarks by Cisco CEO John Chambers and other IT executives at the recent Interop confab to conclude that a new phenomenon is shaping enterprises as of late: “Web 2.0 creep.”

Chambers put it this way — getting Web 2.0 [and by extension, Enterprise 2.0] into the enterprise involves an end-run around IT. He observed in his keynote that Web 2.0 software such as blogs, chat, Web video and other tools, have “been a way that people kind of communicated in spite of the IT department” inside large organizations. “Now the IT department has to lead.”

It’s not that IT is unaware of these new tools and methodologies. The networking folks in attendance at Interop certainly are well aware of Web 2.0/E2.0 and the collaborative powers the technologies have to offer. The biggest challenge is attaching hard-dollar business value to the solutions.

As Tom Marcin, director of global telecommunications at DuPont, put it at one panel discussion:

“We’re now being asked to build social networks and self-forming networks to solve business problems. We’re expected to transform businesses. But guess what, we’re expected to reduce costs. Collaboration tools are of value to us. But we can’t sell a project on migrating 60,000 employees, based upon the soft benefits associated with it. I need to show demonstrable savings directly linked to the solution we put in. One month of data on a pilot would not cut it.”

Maybe I’ve been on the planet to long, but these arguments sound awfully familiar. In the 1980s, employees (including IT employees themselves) brought PCs into their departments to get around the process delays associated with Big centralized, heavily regulated IT. In the 1990s, it was the Internet, followed by mobile devices. Lately, its been Web services.

Every generation has its rebellious spirit. Web 2.0/E2.0 is only the latest evolution of rapidly deployable tools and methodologies that can get at business problems faster than the more deliberate and committee-intensive approaches demanded by IT and corporate management.

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email as collaboration; email as social networking

May 29, 2007 at 11:42 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In my last post, I reported on JP Rangaswami’s open email system. By opening his email to his staff, he has essentially created a ‘cost-free’ collaboration forum with no learning curve.

I can easily imagine the value of an email server add-on that would allow anyone to turn any email to which she had access into a message thread. Perhaps something like this exists.

Email has always been collaborative in some sense — that’s what “cc:” is for after all. Open email extends this utility. But there is more one could – and should – do with email.

Because email is chock full of tacit knowledge, it’s an ideal content base for tagging and social networking.

Collaborative groups are pre-defined – as in the case of JP’s staff – and leave little headroom for any ‘emergent’ result. People in the group share collective intelligence and add to it too, within the limits of the group.

But, if email could be tagged, we would share collective intelligence in an even more useful way and would allow people to integrate and extend knowledge by mashing up an even larger variety of sources — including, in this case, what must be the largest unstructured knowledge repository in existence: email.

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Open email — is it for you?

May 29, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

This morning I read about JP Rangaswami’s open email system in a post by Stowe Boyd. JP has

opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.

Stowe points out “how revolutionary open email could be in a historically closed and secretive corporate context.”

Jimmy Guterman, writing on O’Reilly Radar takes the point a step further — or rather, his fellow Radarite Brady Forrest does; Jimmy quotes him as noting that

Although this is analogous to making email like forums and wikis, the key difference is that you are using email as the entry point. It’s not a separate wiki/forum site.

Good point. “And,” Jimmy adds, “since it’s a tool that everyone uses already, it’s more likely that the non-alphageeks you work with might be more likely to use it.” That’s an even better point.

Jimmy asks whether readers think this would work in their companies — and I’ll ask the same thing.

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Has the long-expected wave of cyber crime/warfare finally appeared?

May 29, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Guest Commentary, Innovator Interviews, Podcasts, Social Computing, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

Reports in The Economist, New York Times, and PC World point to a stunning lurch in the sophistication and reach of recent nefarious online attacks. And the initial sniff test pulls up a whiff of state or large-scale organization sponsorship and support of these events.

They may well be a bellwether of what to expect. These are likely not loosely aligned hackers, but outright strategic aggression designed to influence politics and the behaviors of nations and large corporations.

As many of these articles allude to, the attacks problem will not get any better until the basic architecture and governance of the Internet technologies themselves are addressed. Band-Aids on 1,000 cuts only propels the ongoing Spy vs. Spy gamesmanship — only the stakes are fast escalating.

And so with that I dust off a sponsored conversation I had last year with Akamai Technologies co-founder and chief scientist, Professor Tom Leighton. In it he pretty much predicts — nearly a year ago — what we’re now seeing. His prescriptions are not easy, but they increasingly seem necessary. Read the transcript, or listen to the podcast.

Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B discussions on the Internet and society.

 

 Akamai's Leighton on cyber security [28:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (9778)

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