With John Hagel on the speakers list for FASTforward ‘08, it seemed reasonable come up to speed on some of his more recent thoughts (if nothing else, to prepare ‘zinger’ questions for him). Somehow I stumbled first on comments about Web 2.0 and SOA, where I was struck by the dimensions of time and space in conversations: the reference to the date of his post had to be uncovered in small print at the bottom of several page views (I’ll let you discover what I mean), and more recent voices have offered perspectives I consider more reasonable, but these aren’t connected to his post (not a criticism, just an observation).

The fact that in his piece he calls out another FASTforward ‘08 speaker is even better. I found Hagel’s insistence that Andy McAfee overfocused on knowledge capture and not enough on knowledge creation interesting, because from the quotes Hagel included, McAfee was talking about access. He also suggested that McAfee and Nick Carr saw things from different perspectives, when, they appear to totally agree with one another. Indeed the Carr reference Hagel offers includes the following quote: “McAfee first explains why past knowledge management ’solutions’ rarely solved anything. He then explains what makes Web 2.0 technologies different. ‘The good news,’ he writes, is that the new technologies “focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on the practices and output of knowledge workers.’” And McAfee responds to Carr in another reference offered by Hagel, “Hear, hear.  The spread of Enterprise 2.0 technologies is definitely not a sure bet, and one of my deepest professional nightmares is being a hype merchant for each new IT gizmo that comes along.”

I did find Hagel’s specific advice about bridging the chasm between SOA and Web 2.0 interesting (but admittedly a bit one-sided):

“What is required to break this SOA logjam?  Two things.  First, Web 2.0 technologists need to work on connecting directly with line executives of large enterprises without trying to go through the IT departments. Second, they should avoid the temptation to present grand visions of new architectures and concentrate instead on starting points where these technologies can deliver near-term business impact. (This should not be too hard since by nature Web 2.0 technologists are bootstrappers and hackers.)”

Certainly there is a lot of this going on, but it doesn’t do anything to bring the two camps to a deeper understanding of perspectives (is there a theme here with Hagel?) and will miss opportunities to truly leverage the strengths of both.

But since Hagel has neither tags or search on his site, I can’t readily determine if he’s updated his position over the past year (but that would be an access issue :)  .

[Hmmm, did you also notice that not once does Hagel reference the term "Enterprise 2.0" except when quoting McAfee? Perhaps there are subtile perspective issues at play?] 

I hope Mr. Hagel isn’t feeling too abashed. Somehow, McAfee is always my champion in differences of opinion, particularly when jousting with Tom Davenport (I’m disappointed that these two won’t be on the same stage with one another at the ‘08 conference, but maybe we can stir up an exchange or two here on the blog).