Archive for September, 2007
by Rob Paterson
September 30, 2007 at 6:34 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Charles Handy, Donut, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, John Robb, Public Media, Social Media, Wisdom of Crowds
How often have you see an organizations tell itself and the world that it is “The Best” and has the best people? Of course - this can never be true because in a complex world we can never know everything. And knowing does not mean that you read a good book or took a course. Knowing means that you are immersed. For instance of the thousands of excellent people in public radio and TV, or the hundreds of thousands in marketing - who is immersed in social media? In the public media area I would venture less than 30.
No matter how smart we are - we all need help? So how do you get the help? Shift to the “Donut” - taking this route will open up access to the talent you need at a price you can afford.
One of the cleverest people I know is John Robb. Here is a nugget from him that clarifies this point:
Here’s three simple insights for organizational success in a chaotic, complex, and hyper-competitive environment (and a way to use the wisdom of crowds to unearth talent that you need to thrive):
- The best people (to solve any given problem) don’t work for your organization. A corollary to this: if you don’t have the best people working for you, you will fail.
- Use transparency and the marketplace to find the best people located outside your organization (simple test: whose ideas capture the greatest mindshare within your organization?). NY City’s contest is a great example of using transparency as a means of finding great talent.
- Buy all of the time they have available.
NOTE (on when being good isn’t enough): Another trend is that an increasing number of problems are information/knowledge intensive. This means that an old rule from the software world applies: a couple of great programmers are more valuable than a room full of good ones. Apply this rule to any complex information-intense problem you face and you will get much faster, cheaper, and better results.
None of us have the best people for any of the myriad issues that confront our organizations. But the best people do exist. Why not use the “Donut” to bring them in to help you?
by Rob Paterson
September 29, 2007 at 9:46 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Charles Handy, Donut, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
In the Ptolemaic Org design world - every move and every person is choreographed
Here is a clip from Chorus line showing the process - note that really experienced dancers are struggling. Imagine if on the night the music changed?
Here is a clip from UFIT - see how the group transition from one move to another. The class lasts for an hour and nothing is choreographed and most of the class are just regular folks.
I think that this shows me the essential difference between an energetic organization and a machine organization.
With social media you too can dance
by Rob Paterson
September 29, 2007 at 7:27 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Charles Handy, Donut, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Relationships
As I have been attending my client UFIT’s classes recently I have had a “Donut” moment. All at once the theory leapt into reality.
The picture above gives you a rough idea of the set up. As a newbie, I hang out trying not to be seen on the periphery. Gord is in the centre. Seen from this angle it would appear that we all follow him. But in practice this is not possible.
In practice, you have to follow the folks in the inner ring. These folks tend to be not only very experienced but are amplifying what Gord does. Note the guy in the red shirt - he is in the centre but is not connected. he is in effect working against the energy.
We have just noticed that while the instructor has to be energetically powerful, she or he is not very effective unless they have attracted this inner circle to themselves. We see this with new instructors - who have all the moves etc but not disciples. When Julie came as a guest to Charlottetown from her home base in Summerside, she brought her inner circle that has even named itself - Team Sweaty!.
Julie is a great instructor but having her Crew with her lifted the entire experience. It appears that the inner circle interact with each other and with the point in the centre. They create a “Sun” that attracts the outer rings with their “light”, energy and gravity.
So what does this mean?
I think that it means that we can now see how to operate the new organizational model. The new model is not a mechanical model that has friction and demands effort. It does not have to control every move and component. It is “Energetic”. If the centre and the inner circle are dense enough and in tune enough - the resulting energy will fill the system. My bet is that such an insight is behind the new reality of the 1% Rule for Networks such as for Wikipedia.
If we are correct - all of the current organizational theory can be thrown out the window. The current theory is like the old Ptolemaic (put the Earth in the centre) system. It was OK for a less complex world. But once people traveled around the globe - it became too complex. (They had to use very complex math to make it work giving the planets little orbits called epicycles) Our current organizational theory is based on a fallacy as was the Ptolemaic system - human organizations are not mechanical or kinetic - they are energetic. We all “Know” that really. Think of the days when the boss in at the office or away - think about the difference in “feel”. To make a mechanical system work, you have to have a non complex environment. A mass market ideal can be seen as being essentially “simple”.
But in a complex reality - as our interconnected world is today - a simple mechanical model can only work by making the processes over complex. Imagine trying to choreograph a UFIT class? The only way a UFIT class can work is an an organism that is connected energetically.
People moan on all the time about how hard change is. That is because in a machine model change is hard - it demands that parts are broken or that too much effort is put in choreography. But in a UFIT class, or in an organization that is set up energetically, change is fun, is easy and is natural.
So what then is the new work of the leaders in the energetic model?
- The person in the centre has to listen to the music and feel the energy of the system - they have to not only have the moves but be in tune with the group
- The person in the centre has to have their own Team Sweaty or inner circle. This group also have to be able to know the moves and to listen well.
- The larger and the more connected Team Sweaty is - the more powerful the energy is to attract the system
- So the organization is simplified as the Copernican Revolution simplified the universe. All the leader has to do is to hold the key ideas and attract and nurture the inner circle - the resulting energy will drive the system. No more attempting to choreograph and drill every part. Most of the effort, friction and labor goes away. With it most of the cost and the anguish.
The old model is like this steam engine. It’s big, noisy, hot and very very inefficient. It has to run on tracks on a schedule. There is little flexibility. The smallest mistake in scheduling can lead to a big crash. Without constant reinvestment of outside resources it cannot grow.
The new system is like this. It follows the 14 billion year old design that nature uses. It is so much more powerful than any machine. It is is a life creating system. It has a timetable measured in millenia.
So my friends the choice is clear and it is yours.
Do you want to run a railway or a solar system?
by Joe McKendrick
September 26, 2007 at 10:17 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Stanley Bing, who’s column regularly graces the back page of Fortune, brings old-world thinking to the brave new world of techno-business. In fact, he seems like a guy stuck in 1960, looking forward to his three-martini lunch. He probably spends the afternoon in his office practicing golf putts into a floor cup, just like the executives in those old movies, or Darren’s boss Larry at McMahon & Tate.
Yet, Bing’s the boss at a modern-day corporation. In this latest column, Bing gets some social networking religion. “These days a person without a social network is an island,” he decides.
However, being the face-to-face, drink-in-hand schmoozer he is, Bing decides he wasn’t cut out for such global electronic interactions. He didn’t like the idea of personal details “rocketing around a community the size of Sweden, available to a vast pool of people trolling the electronic landscape.”
How many other bosses out there would have be happier in a 1960 corporation than dealing with today’s digital realities? Plenty, I’m sure.
by Bill Ives
September 25, 2007 at 1:22 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0, like Web 2.0, is in part, about user-generated content, and increasing participation in key conversations. It is also about making all of this participation more accessible to bring more voices to enterprise decision making. Here is a company that is taking a different, and so far somewhat unique, approach to these goals.
Working in what might be called Extranet 2.0, Communispace builds, manages, and facilitates private, online customer communities allowing for ongoing customer conversations. It is a three way dialog with the company, the customers, and the Communispace facilitators.
An online customer community typically involves 300-500 invited prospects and customers who regularly spend time brainstorming ideas, sharing emotions and experiences, discussing trends, and helping a company figure out marketing and business issues. Unlike public customer forums, the private online communities are facilitated by Communispace with the goal of providing greater focus to the conversations and driving deeper insight.
I recently spoke with Debi Kleiman, Director of Product Marketing at Communispace who said, “we are one part private social network of brand advisors, one part insight engine – literally hardwiring the voice of the customer into their business. We find that those companies who get the most out of their communities, and make it a valuable asset to the enterprise, are those that use their communities strategically. In other words, they leverage it cross-functionally in their organization, involving many departments and disciplines, allowing first-hand access to the unfiltered voice of the customer to those who can really use it. And they use the community as a “hub” for their initiatives – whether with their agency partners or other working partners – it becomes the central point of thinking when framing and developing key marketing initiatives.”
The concept began in the spirit of co-creation as one of their customers suggested that they set up one of their online communities with their customers. The first community was successful and now there are over 275 communities with a 96% renewal rate, a nice validation of the co-creation concept.
One example is the HP IPG PhotoSpace community which provides access to an advisory board of target consumers who shared their opinions, wants, reactions, and ideas within this private group, allowing for greater candor. The HP group participants can also observe customer member interactions for insight into unmet needs. Using the online community makes it possible to generate user information and continuously test the HP customer experience. It also built customer interest and loyalty because of the sense of participation in sharing ideas but also in influencing product decisions. I also found this user involvement was always key to any enterprise initiative. It is nice to see it facilitated through these communities. As a result of the sense of co-creation, satisfaction ranked high in the HP community. The community won an HP internal competition for Best in Category for Innovative Customer Marketing Research.
In another example, the CDW community recently received an award from the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA). Calvin Vass, Senior Manager, Market Research at CDW said, “Through our online communities, CDW receives continuous customer feedback from IT decision makers that allows us to include the voice of the customer in our day-to-day business decisions. We are able to act quickly on what customers are telling us and this allows us to develop stronger relationships.”
This is a nice business application of the James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds concept. These online communities offer another proof point for his well-known thesis that the aggregation of information in groups results in decisions that are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The collective conversation of a large group of customers certainly adds content well beyond what the marketing people, the product development people, the sales people, and the customer service people could do on their own. It is nice to see that the process of collecting these online customer conversations also helps bring together these individual groups within the enterprise. I think this approach demonstrates some of the diversity possible under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella. It is a way of doing business more that a particular technology.
by Joe McKendrick
September 24, 2007 at 9:22 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Oliver Widder, creator of the Geek & Poke series, has an uncanny knack for keeping things in perspective.
by Joe McKendrick
September 21, 2007 at 5:13 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
Word is out that Gartner, Inc., the firm that never met a buzzword it didn’t like, has signaled its disapproval at the “Web 3.0″ moniker that is sometimes applied to the Semantic Web.
According to Network World, Gartner analysts at the consultancy’s latest innovation summit said that new technologies such as virtual worlds and the Semantic Web do not deserve their own new label, since “they’re not providing the same kind of fundamental change as blogs, wikis and social networking tools.” As analyst Gene Phifer put it: “It’s not going to be another era like Web 2.0. However, there will be some very interesting innovative things coming out. If you’re in love with numbering schemes, maybe it’s Web 2.1.”
Fair enough. Web 2.1 it is. But does that mean we have to go to Enterprise 2.1?
Gartner analysts also took some Enterprise 2.0 thinking to task, saying the stock enterprise approaches to technology management won’t work here. Analyst Tom Austin is quoted as saying that “the biggest problem with Enterprise 2.0 is thinking about it as ‘what product do I buy and how many people are using it.’ This isn’t an issue of provisioning telephone service.”
Gartner projects a 42% compound annual growth rate in the Web 2.0 market through 2011. Best of all, much of the stuff is cheap, they said. Phifer pointed out that “mashup technology might cost a few hundred thousand dollars, while blogging and wiki tools could cost a few thousand. But that’s not as expensive as acquiring and managing a traditional software infrastructure. You’re not looking at humongous investments.”
by Bill Ives
September 21, 2007 at 2:43 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
First, I want to offer thanks to The Shed 2.0 and the Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist blogs for referencing my post on Enterprise Wiki Increases Collaboration and Connections at Janssen-Cilag. They are both worth checking out if you have been to them. I also want to pick on something that the Shed 2.0 writer added. After an initial positive start, he was stalled in growing the readership for his internal blog until a “someone in semi-senior management” got involved. Then readership jumped another 100, including people who knew about it but had not yet picked up on it. He concludes, “So I guess E2 will still suffer some of E1’s problems. Most people will probably still want to be led rather than lead. The learnings from this though…get someone senior on board with you ASAP. Approach things from various different angles, bottom up, top down, side to side and round and round.”
The need for senior support goes way back beyond E1 and is not a bad thing in my view. For example, I have never seen a knowledge management effort succeed that did not have a supporter at the senior level. It was best if this supporter was on the business side rather than IT. Whenever we started an effort we looked for our senior management champion. Now in those days this was also important because more funding was involved. However, the benefit went way beyond securing funding. It was a critical factor in securing participation. Leaders help and if they are participating in discussion forums (a type of old style “blogs”) the quality and level of participation will increase. Moving to the enterprise 2.0 world, I will imagine that the quality and level of participation will also increase if people know that senior management is involved and looking at what is going on, and participating
by Paula Thornton
September 20, 2007 at 7:36 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, barriers
In deference to Geoffrey Moore, this isn’t about early adopters, but it is about the ability to adopt. More importantly, it’s about a chasm — a really big one. One much more significant than the reference we’ve been making to ‘barriers’.
Let me first offer thanks to Bill for his reference to the Forrester blog post Web 2.0 Changes The Information Workplace. It spurred a flurry of ideas that grew well beyond posting a comment there.
I’m currently at Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit. And while I am happy to report that Gartner does know a bit more about 2.0 than I might have thought before, I did find that they and Forrester are missing critical issues. I already knew there were gaps — I’ve been very proactive trying to start conversations around the things they’re not talking about. The difference now is that I applied the skills of my craft — experience design — to conversations with attendees. I uncovered new facts that blow the lid off of my former concerns.
The Forrester analyst correctly suggested that 2.0 simplifies the ability to enable Information Workplace strategies (which are equally relevant to the success of Enterprise 2.0). This is conceptually correct but fundamentally flawed. It assumes that three necessary conditions can be met: vision, funding and staffing.
The first is strategic in nature. Most IT groups lack strategic-thinking or strategic-implementing resources. Why? Their funding models. They have operated so long in a ‘response’ mode (project-based funding), they have been ’stupified’ out of believing that they can/should think strategically. Typically, anyone with strategic mindsets have long ago left those environments to capitalize on new ideas in the marketplace.
As conference attendees describe their various challenges, I ask if they are doing basic things that could move them forward. They respond in a way that suggests they do not readily see how such actions would be important or would help their current situation. They cannot make the conceptual leap from the mess they’re in to a way forward.
Most of the recommendations Gartner and Forrester are making are perceived as being too ‘fluffy’ (the specific phrase is often “too conceptual”). IT resources are having problems moving beyond the locked down, concrete world that they are ideally suited to address, to the reality they face.
Strategic thinking, design thinking are inherently ’squishy’. 2.0 is not gaining momentum because it’s the ‘latest’ fad, it’s gaining momentum because of the need to address the complexity of reality. IT is uniquely positioned to help businesses address complexity, by providing the infrastructures to ‘let go’ of structure elsewhere.
Gartner is saying that 2.0 is justifiable because it provides a reality check from the things that 1.0 didn’t address (and thank goodness, they suggest that there is no relative justification for anything 3.0 — in the keynote this morning, “It’s the Web Stupid”).
IT understands technology. The predominant ‘thinking’ model inside of IT (those resources who readily survive) cannot see past their daily challenges. They need specifics — they’re more successful ‘doing’ than ‘thinking’, particularly in a business strategic way. This is not about adding more business analysts, they’re part of the problem too.
But telling IT that they need different resources only adds to their frustration and disillusionment. The possibilities offered to them as to a ‘way forward’ has to be reasonable. It has to consider their current reality: constrained time and resources.
Unless (as has happened in some cases) someone with deep IT experience also has the aptitude to move into a strategic role on the business side to change the investment model in IT, the existing IT resources need ways to sell new ideas to the business. The thinking models most effective for sales and marketing are the least effective for surviving in most IT environments. That means, they likely are challenged thinking this way – to even begin to imagine the possibilities.
This presents an opportunity to suggest things they can do to have more meaningful conversations with the business and begin to bridge the chasm that separates them. They need advice to help them do the following:
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Create and leverage conceptual artifacts that can ‘ground’ a shared understanding, to provide a context for continuous conversations. Often IT speaks in ways equally ‘fluffy’ from the business perspective. Such artifacts would include, at a minimum, Enterprise Framework components like Subject Areas (data architecture) and Function Areas (the means by which to ground a SOA, and by association a Web Services initiative – critical to the success of 2.0).
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Replace technological terms in business conversations with ‘results’, framed by reference to the Framework artifacts.
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Engage the business to decide, collectively, what their priorities are, relative to the Framework. Today IT is by default managing these priorities, robbing the business of the opportunity to see and resolve the conflicts in a more open, informed way.
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Create a 2.0 culture that exposes the work being done as a total picture (again, leveraging the Framework to communicate). This minimizes the ability for individual groups to ‘pander’ focuses on their initiatives, based solely on their ability to throw money at IT resources. Even where companies have attempted to initiate IT Governance Models to mitigate rogue IT spending, they often prove to be ineffective and inefficient as a ‘gate’ to spending. By nature of sheer numbers alone, such Governance bodies typically only review ‘large’ initiatives. In the new world, ‘small’ is the new black. The collective of the ‘smalls’ today are often larger than the biggest ‘large’ initiative.
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Learn to differentiate between technical architectures and capital “A”, Architecture. Many technical architects do not understand the fundamental principles of architecture. If they did, they would not be able to do their job effectively without all of the other architects who can/should influence the decisions they make: data architects, metadata architects (they are fundamentally different – such resources often come out of graduate programs in Library and Information Science), user experience architects, process architects, function architects (SOA, WOA), etc.
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Question the effectiveness of the Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC). It is woefully inadequate to successfully leverage Architecture in a strategic, business-value-adding way. Learn about the well-established Commercial Construction industry. Blueprints go out to bid to ‘trades’. Applications Development is a trade. The SDLC ‘starts’ after a whole series of larger activities have already gone on to identify the effort – including the creation of blueprints and specifications. Requirements are the things that a ‘trade’ recommends back to the General Contractor (in the form of a bid) to suggest what it is they will do to fulfill the blueprints and specifications. The current effort to solicit “requirements” (in nearly every development methodology in practice today) is fundamentally flawed.
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Embrace the reality that the SDLC is meaningless in a 2.0 world. 2.0 development is informed in a wholly different way. It should be informed by Design Research, which in the simplest case is done as illustrated by Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group (see related video tours in
The 5 Ps of Design & Development). In a larger perspective it is informed by continuous research about the business and its relationship with people and vice versa.
I challenge both Gartner and Forrester to apply some of these recommendations to their own companies and ask this question: Is the research we’re doing and the advice we’re giving grounded in a shared understanding of our customers and the context in which they’d have to apply this advice? Before answering that question, remember that most analyst interactions occur in response to a specific problem, taken out of context from a larger whole. Embrace the whole and see what emerges.
by Bill Ives
September 20, 2007 at 9:43 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I like a report that encourages KM people to embrace Enterprise Web 2.0 (their term), “Information and knowledge management managers must move Web 2.0 policies and usage guidelines to the top of their priorities. It’s critical to address Web 2.0 now, before usage explodes within your organization.” This is one of the conclusions of Forrester’s Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up For Business.
The report includes some research on the question, “using your best estimate, how much business value has been derived from your deployment of each of the following technologies?” They include IM, RSS, podcasting, wikis, social networking, and blogs. The report discusses the positive answers which are significant but I also found it interesting that for every technology except social networking (13%) the “no value” answers were 7% or less. In each of these cases there were more than twice as many “substantial value” answers (the highest rating) as “no value” answers.
Their research also found substantial usage of these enterprise 2.0 technologies in firms that have invested in the technologies. Even with firms that have no plans to use the technologies, the tools are already being used but to a much lesser extent. The report warns CIOs against allowing unsanctioned usage and offers some good suggestions for mitigating any risks. The writers also offer some excellent best practices to make Enterprise 2.0 adoption successful, beginning with an audit of current use. It is nice to see the analysts firms continue to pick up on Enterprise 2.0 and endorse it.
A related report, Passionate Employees: The Gateway to Enterprise Web 2.0 Sales, remarks, “Forrester user-clients regularly tell us that vocal employees have been hounding then to get blogs, social networking, and wikis into the enterprise.” It adds that employee requests were a driver in web 2.0 related investments nearly 40% of the time. These are the stories we need to help take Enterprise 2.0 mainstream.
There is more on how web 2.0 impacts the enterprise in the Forrester blog post, Web 2.0 Changes The Information Workplace, referenced in the report. Three of the changes include the evolution of role-based technologies into more individualized tools, as well as the increased social nature of the workplace and the increased speed. As they wrote, “Web 2.0 makes Information Workplaces easier to deploy, modify, and use than ever before.” These are all points made on this blog but it good to see them nicely articulated in another forum.
by Rob Paterson
September 20, 2007 at 6:43 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, NBC, NPR, PBS, Public Media
It’s official - the traditional broadcast mass media business model is dead. Today NBC opened its own direct to viewer store. It had no choice. (NYT)
NBC Universal said yesterday that it would soon permit consumers to download many of NBC’s most popular programs free to personal computers and other devices for one week immediately after their broadcasts.
The service, which is set to start in November after a test period in October, comes less than three weeks after NBC Universal said it was pulling its programs out of the highly successful iTunes service of Apple Inc. That partnership fell apart because of a dispute over Apple’s iTunes pricing policies and what NBC executives said were concerns about lack of piracy protection.
NBC’s move comes as companies throughout the television business search for new economic models in the face of enormous changes in the business. Networks continue to lose audience share, and viewers — especially many of the highly prized viewers under 30 years old — are increasingly demanding control of their program choices, insisting on being able to watch shows when, where and how they want.
At the same time viewers are finding more and more ways, like TiVo machines, to avoid watching the commercials that have long provided the bulk of television revenue.
Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group, said, “The shift from programmer to consumer controlling program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years.”
NBC makes many of its popular shows available online in streaming media, which means that fans can watch episodes on their computers. Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs like “Heroes,” “The Office” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on the night that they are broadcast and keep them for seven days. They would also be able to subscribe to shows, guaranteeing delivery each week.
But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.
The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.
The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.
In a second phase of the NBC rollout, customers would pay a fee for downloads of episodes that they would then own, and the files would be transferable to other devices. NBC hopes to offer this service by mid-2008, depending on how quickly the company can put in place the secure software necessary to allow payment by credit card.
The latter system is what is already available through iTunes.
Like Wile E Coyote, the affiliates have not hit the canyon floor yet - but gravity has an inevitable force. So the local stations in commercial and in public media are going to die or create a new model for themselves. It is no longer possible to make money by having a local monopoly on content. Nor can the affiliate depend on the national producer like NBC to protect them.
Both the National Producers and the Affiliates are going to face a crisis before all of this works it way through.
I work with and talk a lot to public radio and TV stations that have long been aware of this inevitability. They have plans well under way along the lines that I have described here. But many have had their head in the sand and may find that they are too late. The real challenge is first of all ‘Mindset”. It takes time to imagine an entirely new way of being.
Think of a habit that you have in your life - one of mine is indolence and sloth. I knew for ages that I was really over weight and weak. My Dad died at my age partly because of this. But in spite of my wife pleading for me to take care, I refused. It took over a year for me to take charge myself, and then only because a dear client, who is in the business of helping the unwilling, took me by the hand. Now, my new habit has taken hold and I feel so much better. I can now experience the improvement and I think I am on my way. It has taken small steps and lots of encouragement and lots of time.
Most stations have none of this. It takes special circumstances to change your whole way of life - even if death is a consequence. Many stations will not have the benefit of a loving and capable friend to help them change. Now they do not have the time either. It’s going to be ugly for many but the aware will pull away and do well.
It’s going to be very rough as well for the national producers. Will their revenue from selling direct, keep up with the losses that they will experience as stations push back on the price for programs that are no longer exclusive?
The fact is that there will still be traditional viewers and listeners but not enough to pay either the station or the producers way.
My bet is that NPR is especially vulnerable here. NPR fees are a very significant cost to stations that will be starving for revenue. NPR’s costs are high. They are also in need of a new building just when the crunch will hit. I think that there is a way though of NPR and PBS and the local stations all starving to death.
What if NPR and PBS had a central site that sold you their content for a very small fee. I click to buy a Nova Program or Morning Edition for a month. I pay a small fee on my credit card as on iTunes or 1 Click on Amazon. My IP forces a choice immediately - which station I will support. The national producer and the station get fed. I get what I want - my content “My Way”.
The affiliates and the producers in Public Media have to get together and do something like this soon. If they don’t the entire system of Public Media will die, leaving only a few local stations.
What will you say when your children ask you why America lost its last place where civic discourse could take place? What then will be lost? Whose fault will it be? It will be the fault of every station leader and NPR and PBS executive who thought that someone else would do their work. It will be the fault of every person in Public Media who refuses to see crisis that confronts them. It will be the fault of every leader who thinks that they can do this on their own.
I beg you all to act together. It just needs a few of you to take the lead and the rest will follow.
by Joe McKendrick
September 19, 2007 at 4:01 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0
The ‘Facebook Economy‘ — that’s what Business 2.0 brands the opportunities that have sprung up around Facebook, the mother of all social networking sites.
Why the ‘Facebook’ rather than the ‘MySpace’ economy? Because, the article’s authors explain, Facebook has opened up its network for developers to build and sell new applications.
There’s a couple of developers, for example, that posted an application that turns Facebook photos into a slide show, and has generated more than $200,000 in ad sales. Everyone is piling on, in fact. The article notes that in just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. Bay Partners, a prominent venture capital firm in the Valley, reportedly has set aside more than $12 million to bootstrap 50 new Facebook applications
Essentially, Facebook has opened itself as a bazaar or online mall of sorts, in which it , starting in May, granted developers the right to hawk applications to its huge installed base of users. In exchange, Facebook becomes a richer environment.
While the enterprise aspect to this is still very limited (the Facebook economy seems to be mainly consumeristic fun-time apps), the model is something worth watching closely. The growth of this phenomenon will result in an area of opportunity at the enterprise level.
First, eventually, such applications on demand will be increasingly targeted at businesses, giving rise to a new breed of “Micro-ISVs.” And, as these applications — or services — become available on the open market, components, enterprises may come to rely more on functions provided through Software as a Service model, versus developing and maintaining everything themselves in house, or handing everything over, lock, stock, and barrel, to a SaaS provider.
Enterprises can then aggregate services on an on-demand basis to meet their own customer demands, or teams or departments within enterprises can quickly assemble needed functionality on an ad-hoc basis. Many, if not all, of such services may be provided from third parties. It is likely, then, that MicroISVs may be the providers of these service-oriented components, perhaps charging on a per-transaction basis. A MicroISV may be an entrepreneur working from a spare bedroom; or it may be a unit of a larger non-IT enterprise as well. Many of today’s enterprises have already evolved into confederations of entrepreneurs and ad-hoc teams on a process level.
Ultimately, we’ll be seeing loosely coupled businesses, run on loosely coupled services. Just as businesses are evolving into loosely coupled components, so to are the systems that support them. Many industry analysts predict that the concept of an “application” will be obsolete — rather, our businesses will depend on services that are combined, mixed, matched, mashed and reused as needed. Over the years, there has been a great deal of angst about the viability of the “hollow” corporation, which links processes and services to customers, but produces nothing itself. Thanks to new technologies, what was a linear supply chain is now close to being a synchronous network, affording better visibility and control over processes.
In fact, more and more solutions are being built collaboratively, paving the way for the creation of modular, standardized building blocks that can be assembled, on-demand, for specific requirements. Application vendors that play the role of “assemblers” — rather than “creators” — can leverage these components and quickly deliver services or components at reasonable prices will have the upper hand in the market going forward.
by Rob Paterson
September 19, 2007 at 7:38 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Relationships
Today, the Times took down the pay wall around from around its best content. The bet is that Rupert Murdoch will take down the wall around the Wall Street Journal. Jeff Jarvis comments best on the decision here. Doc Searls adds good sense here.
The business model based on making content scarce is over. No one leading a media organization will be able to say to their board - “I am following the Times” Any board member can ask the CEO of any media organization - “So what then is our business model?’
The points I would like to make are these:
- All business models must be based on something that is legitimately scarce. Today, no matter how expensive it is to make, content will become freely available quickly. So much music is free that you cannot legitimately charge much for a song. So much film is free that you cannot charge much for a move. So much information is free, that you cannot charge much for it (Britannica). This is a reality - so you have to get over it and find another area that is legitimately scarce where you can find value. So where is it?
- Content is approaching infinite - one of the areas of value is to be able to find what you want quickly. Google has done well by seeing this at the macro stage. Finding value = value. So offering navigation and advice on content will only increase in value, as the range of content expands.
- Niche will beat general in this area. Just as Life magazine gave way to specialty mags, so those who provide navigation for niche will do better. Book of the Month Club broke even. But the Military Book Clubs and Gardening Book clubs thrived - their fans bought everything and participated in finding and promoting new content
- People will pay small amounts in this new world for having the content “Their Way”. 3 billion purchases of songs on iTunes shows us that if - you offer the navigation - you offer the ability to then use the content as the customer wants: not streamed but usable to listen or watch any time - AND you make it easy to pay for and download - people will buy - AT A PRICE.
- BUT most of all - as we see in the niche book clubs - it is RELATIONSHIPS that are really scarce in this machine and alienating world that we now inhabit.
Here is Jeff’s eloquent summation of this point:
It’s the relationship that is valuable. It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution. That is the essential media moral of the internet story. It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it. That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.
Last week at KETC we had a pledge night where we offered the 50 films that we had made of our members who had sent in their stories on WWII. Taking the calls - ROTC students. Showcased: not announcers but KETC’s production staff. Helping out - Many Vets - some in uniform. St Louis started to come together that night in the Studio and out in the city. The night was all about real relationships. And oh yes - the money was good too. Here is a broader view of how KETC is learning to connect in a more natural way with its members.
At KETC, we are learning how to make a real connection and how to help the people of St Louis have their own stories told well and shred back to those that love and care for them.
I was in Columbus last week where WOSU invited in many vets and their families who also had shared their stories. We watched a preview of The War and then a film of many of those in the audience who had told their story on a show that WOSU made that was like Antiques Road Show. Here Vets or family members told their story and showed us their memorabilia. You can see some of them here online. This is what it looked like at the fabulous COSI facility.
We are finding that doing our best to find out how to create a much closer set of relationships is leading us to the moment when we will solve the question - what is the operational answer to a business model based on the true scarcity today of real relationships
by Bill Ives
September 18, 2007 at 4:16 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Janssen-Cilag is an Australian pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. It was using a static HTML site for an intranet. Called InfoDownUnder, it was originally developed in 2001. Some content was out of date and there was no search capability. Trust in the system was low and demand for change was high.
Nathan Wallace, in the CIO at Janssen-Cilag was progessive in his vision and suggested the organization implement a wiki as their intranet. They needed a system where editing is immediate and very simple. It was more important to let people add content rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do. At any rate, the risk of letting anyone change anything was low, since the wiki provided a complete history of changes so mistakes can be quickly undone. The history would also allow the administration people to hold irresponsible individuals accountable for improper actions.
After a successful pilot, Nathan obtained approval to replace the existing intranet with a wiki. None of the old content was migrated as trust was not high on the old content. They only provided 5 minutes of training on the new system. They selected Confluence by Atlassian and did some customization to increase usability. They wisely did not make a big deal of the new intranet being a wiki. Nathan said that many employees do not know it is a wiki. They just think of it as an easy to use intranet. They called the new system, JCintra and implementation has been as success.
Nathan wrote, “our contributions per month has continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect. To drive adoption, we’ve primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet. Today, announcements ranging from major restructures to new babies for employees flow through the news page without clogging up email inboxes.”
He went on to add, “Business information that was previously scattered in email (e.g. Business Planning presentations) is now collected into a permanent, secure online space. We have a growing reference and history of information to build on and make available to newcomers. Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.” That is because knowledge management became a byproduct of using the wiki and not a separate activity.
It is great to see these Enterprise 2.0 success stories continue to accumulate.
by Bill Ives
September 14, 2007 at 7:22 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The call for papers for the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference is now open at the conference site. Submissions are due December 14, 2007. I was part of a panel last year and it was a great conference. I had a chance to meet a number of people in this space in person that I had only known on a virtual basis. It will be in Boston again. There is a long list of Enterprise 2.0 topics, most of which have been discussed on this blog, and they will take suggestion for others.
by Jevon MacDonald
September 14, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I am back, fresh off a trip to San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference.
I was at Office 2.0 last year, so I have been reflecting a little bit on the changes I saw, and didn’t see, from last year and now.
The Conversation
The conversation has come along a little bit in the last year. It is no longer impossible to get people to talk about the impact of social software in the Enterprise, how CxOs need to respond, or not respond, to it.
Memes this year were:
- Facebook parallels with Enterprise Software
- The coming surge of social software-savvy workers who are entering the workplace
The conversation did get a lot more practical this year. There was a lot more “this is what we are doing”, and even more “this is what we tried, and this is how we failed”. The back-hall conversations were even more pragmatic.
The infrastructure conversation has also moved along somewhat. Projects like OpenSAM are gaining traction, but are still not being implemented or backed in any significant way by vendors.
Vendors
It is safe to say that there has been almost no change in the last year as far as available tools and platforms are concerned.
Sure Zoho is a little less buggy, and Google Docs is looking a lot nicer these days. Wikis were practically off the map. Socialtext and Atlassian, who were the darlings at last years show, could hardly be found (although Ross Mayfield, uber connected founder of SocialText, did help organize the fantastic unconference in the day preceeding the conference), and the big-bang have-to-have-it new product just didn’t exist this year (which is probably a good thing).
Where does this leave us?
The Office 2.0 Conference is a benchmark in the Enterprise 2.0 community. Enterprise 2.0 really came in to it’s own at Office 2.0 last year, and I am afraid that things have moved painfully slowly in the last year.
Fresh Blood
It’s amazing to see that a lot of the biggest names in Enterprise 2.0 are already starting to move off the radar. People like Scott Gavin and his partner Simon Revell as well as Adam Carson from Morgan Stanley and Lee White from GsK are the new rising stars of Enterprise 2.0. They are the Jesuit Priests of Enterprise Social Software. (more on that later).
We need these new, eager and practical voices to keep driving the conversation.
Ignore the Vendors
Vendors have been pretending like they are going to provide The Solution to all of your Enterprise 2.0 needs.
I am afraid that this is one of the little tricks we are learning about Enterprise 2.0. No vendor is going to be able to do a proper one-size-fits-all solution, and vendors are confirming that by doing very little.
by George Dearing
September 12, 2007 at 4:55 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, IBM, Microsoft, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, enterprise software
2008 will no doubt be a telling year in the corporate social media and Web 2.0 space. And if this CIO Insight story is any indication, the race will again pit David v. Goliath. But what’s different this time around? Will the Web 2.0 shakeout be any different than all the other enterprise software battles?
What happens in 2008?
Here’s some thoughts:
- The incumbent enterprise software vendors have the edge in total dollars spent in 2008 as they give away what Web 2.0 functionality they have.
- Pure-play social media and Web 2.0 vendors get out of the gate faster because their platforms are easier to stitch together — the gap shortens in late 2008 as acquisitions are made.
- Bigger vendors will provide the underlying architecture and deep integration to existing apps.
- Enterprises will learn that mixing and matching Web 2.0 technologies with existing apps provides real value - advantage upstarts.
- Pure-play social media vendors will quickly evolve their alliance strategies — the lines of coexistence or competition will be blurred.
- Enterprise software vendors will go wide while smaller vendors go deep. In other words, the small guys will do one or two things really well and the big boys will do a lot of stuff kind of well.
- Vertical expertise will take precedence very soon. Advantage: enterprise software vendors.
- Bigger vendors will sneak web 2.0 inside the enterprise. You’ll get the content repository from IBM — and it’ll include publishing and subscription capabilities, AKA blog and RSS.
- Pure-plays will rely more heavily on 3rd-party services..similar to the early enterprise portal days and all those clunky content gadgets.
But don’t count out the current crop of social media upstarts so fast, though. They can still can put their best enterprise foot forward when they have to. Below is Awareness Networks’ (formerly iUpload) passage marketing to the deer-in-the-headlight IT decision-maker.
..if a corporation deploys separate tools for each form of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, etc.) they will create disparate islands of information that later will have to be somehow integrated. A common approach to all forms of social media allows an organization to employ the most appropriate form of social media for each business need with the assurance of knowing that the content is re-purposable to any other form. In this mode, a user can generate content in one participation style (e.g., a blog) that later appears in another participation style (e.g., a wiki or a discussion group) . This maximizes the value of the user-generated content and avoids any silos of information.
What else do you see in the coming months?
by Bill Ives
September 12, 2007 at 1:59 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Last week I spoke with René Bonvanie, the SVP of worldwide marketing, partner programs and online services at Serena Software. René recently joined Serena from Salesforce.com to help with the launch of their enterprise mashup solution. Serena has been providing application lifecycle management software for some time. They are now entering the Enterprise 2.0 and SaaS space with a just announced mashup suite to meet a growing need. I have felt for a while that mashups might be the Enterprise 2.0 tool with the greatest impact in the long run so I applaud their direction.
As René pointed out, there is an increasing backlog of IT projects in most enterprises. The vast majority of IT budgets are chewed up by infrastructure to get the current applications going. René spoke about the neglected long tail of simple applications left in the queue to the increasing frustration of the business side. When IT groups have any breathing room they go for the big complex projects, as they should. But business users have many requests for simple applications to increase the efficiency and effectives of business processes. These requests are increasing as those on the business side see the cool Web 2.0 advances in their personal lives. They want the same innovations at their work and they are already starting to bring these tools to work (for example, see WSJ on An Office Winner: Consumer Tech).
Mashups offer a potential answer if they are made business-user friendly to use. That is what Serena has done. They have created the Serena Mashup Composer to enable the design, development and testing of mashups to support business process. They have developed a GUI interface that is similar to Office 2007 to target the business user who has the skills of an MS Office power user. It allows for the development of applications to support work process without programming. It is designed to free the IT department of the backlog of simple applications they cannot support and empower the business users to roll their own. I watched René demo the creation of a sample application and it seemed like the task that even I could do, the acid test for ease of use and the absence of IT skill requirements.
How does it work? René first provided a consumer example. Facebook, my favorite networking application, has open APIs. So third party developers can create applications without involving the IT people at Facebook. One example is the best friends application used by 12 million people, enhancing the appeal of Facebook without requiring any investment on their part. There have been close to 4,000 mashups developed for Facebook with no expense on their part.
The same thing can happen in the enterprise as application providers such as SAP and PeopleSoft have now provided open APIs. So a process approval mashup can take data from applications inside the firewall such as SAP (on the process) and PeopleSoft (on the approvers). You can even add data from hosted applications such as Salesfoce.com in a secure manner.
Serena is also changing their business model to reflect the new world. They have been proving software for purchase and implementation for years. Now they are offering on-demand services. But they have gone further. You can use the Serena Mashup Composer for free. You can design, develop and test your mashups without paying anything. Then they offer the Serena Mashup Server to provide the on-demand service to run these applications and here is where they make their money. You only pay when you have what you want and are ready to use it.
Serena then takes this new business model another step further. They are planning to provide the Serena Mashup Exchange in February 2008 so firms can share mashups and benefit from each other’s development. The initial version will be open on the Web for anyone to use. They also plan to offer private versions for mashup exchanges behind the firewall for organizations that prefer to operate this way. It is nice to see traditional enterprise providers understanding the new Web, how it can help the enterprise, the new business models it suggests. It will be interesting to see where this goes will provide some examples of Serena mashups in my next post.
by Rob Paterson
September 12, 2007 at 6:32 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Story, Web 2.0,
