by Paula Thornton
February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution
Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08. It details the actions of Ford of Canada:
FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.
The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”
The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.
“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.
I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).
I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?
It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.
by Bill Ives
February 25, 2008 at 2:57 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I received a useful report from Awareness on adoption trends for web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. In an email survey they found that 54% of organizations with over 500 employees are using web 2.0 tools and 74% of those with under 500 employees. The majority of these use a both internal and external facing web tools. Blogs are the most used web 2.0 technology (87%) followed by communities, wikis, RSS feeds, and social networking. The vast majority (96%) report that the use of web 2.0 tools haven been successful. The biggest obstacle to deploying web 2.0 tools in the limited availability of internal resources to support their deployment. Security is also a concern. The results were obtained by Equation research in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The recent date might explain why these results are a bit higher than some others such as reported in Some Initial Web 2.0 Enterprise Research. However, the desire for web 2.0 in the enterprise has been building for some time. A University of Massachusetts survey done in late 2006 found that a majority of business respondents (66%) felt that social media were important to the firm’s business strategy. Another 2006 study by Watson Wyatt found that nearly 50% of the employee population prefers – and expects – collaborative and interactive methods of communication fund on the consumer web.
I was especially interested in how these tools were helping organizations both inside and outside the enterprise. Here is a summary:
Positive impacts for internal facing social media
Improving communication and collaboration – 91%
Finding experts inside the company – 81%
Improving knowledge management – 78%
Positive impacts for external facing social media
Increasing customer engagement – 68%
Increasing brand awareness & loyalty – 64%
Providing market research – 58%
Generating revenue – 39%
The Awareness research found that going forward 28% of organizations with over 500 employees have budgets greater than $50,000 for web 2.0 tools or social media. The top tools planned are blogs and wikis (56%) but many are also planning to deploy online communities.
Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct sales at Awareness told me, “It’s clear from the report that two trends exist. First, enterprises are very interested in taking advantage of social media for business purposes. Second, many of them are stalled by two factors: concerns about security, moderation, and control; and the fact that they have limited resources and understanding to drive a successful Web 2.0 project. As you know at Awareness, we are putting a lot of energy into addressing both of the concerns. We’ve built a platform that specifically addresses the issues of security, moderation, and control, and because we do the work and host the communities for people we can help them overcome the obstacles of not having enough resources.”
Thanks to Awareness for sharing this work. Future studies should include a new category of web 2.0 tool, workspace or collaborative platforms, such as what Awareness offers. You can download the report from their web site.
by Paula Thornton
February 25, 2008 at 1:28 am · Filed under
3.0, FASTForward '08, Intent, Interaction, Metadata, Semantic
Not to diminish my colleague Joe’s efforts to report on John Hagel’s comments, the true potential is not in the Attention Economy but in the Attraction Economy (not to be limited to emotional connection, see also video [7:21] — emotion is one dimension in a personal economic model of decisions, and is relevant but not a priority in enterprise interactions).
Attention is the goal; attraction is the most effective means to achieve the goal: moving from reactive to interactive. The new ROI is Return on Interaction.
Hagel misses the real potential when he recommends moving from “push” to “pull” to optimize resources. Basic laws of physics suggest that the level of energy (effort) expended is the same for either push or pull – there is no net gain. The only way to capitalize beyond push or pull models is to leverage existing energy (effort for free) – by tapping the ‘draw’, the natural forces of attraction between: the customer and the company, the employer and the company, any combination of resources seeking each other.
Several different speakers illustrated how this attraction can be facilitated: zero-term search, liberal use of personal metadata and related metadata to build inference.
Ok, so if we’re going to talk inference then we’re really pushing toward 3.0. But the true innovative stories were leaning in that direction.
Gerry Campbell of Reuters, spoke of the significance of context — the need to create an ecosystem (infrastructure) that provides capabilities beyond core business operations. To move themselves and their customers toward such a reality, Reuters purchased a technology upon which they built Calais to enrich content with semantic metadata. Over time, user-generated context also needs to be fed back into the system. Such efforts move toward a big “tent” revival, where Michael Cleary of Reuters suggests that con-tent is brought together seamlessly with in-tent.
by Jon Husband
February 24, 2008 at 9:03 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, Podcasts, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I don’t think it was as a result of Andrew’s presentation at the recent FASTForward 08 conference, but may have been related to the recent Enterprise 2.0 / KM discussion reported on this blog involving Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, moderated by colleague Jim McGee.
David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work. This is news because it was, I believe, beginning to seem as if Davenport was becoming a somewhat curmudgeonly holdout against a growing consensus that wikis, blogs and social computing are having a clear impact on the nature of knowledge work and the "management" off socially-constructed just-in-time knowledge.
As a general assertion, I think it’s fair to say that social computing is bringing new capabilities and capacity to the (interactive) construction of just-in-time knowledge in an environment characterized by ongoing flows of information
Tom Davenport quoted in the Gurteen Knowledge newsletter:
.
" Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better "knowledge capture and sharing", and more effective "collective intelligence", there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."
and later
"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."
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Actually, it’s not fair to say that Tom Davenport "has agreed to understand" …. it’s more fair to say that the context in which terminology and jargon are being used has become clearer to him and more commonly shared amongst participants in (an important) conversation.
It seems clear to me that "Enterprise 2.0" is here to stay … the clearest signal to date is the raft of changes made over the past two or three years to the mainstream offerings of the biggest workplace productivity vendors to enable many forms of collaboration, combined with acquisitions, strategic alliances with innovative smaller E2.0 players and the beginning moves by the major consulting firms (such as publishing white papers, surveys and research reports) to pay attention to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 field.
I believe that social computing in the workplace will lead to the re-design of the fundamental principles of knowledge work. Dave Snowden is a well-known KM guru who has said as much in a podcast created several months ago wherein I asked him about the likely impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge work and knowledge management.
Here’s a link to that podcast, wherein in my opinion Dave holds forth on the coming changes to the design and dynamics of knowledge work in a particularly clear and coherent manner.
Dave Snowden is also fond of saying that "one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater" … and in the context of this post I think it’s useful to note that one of the happy outcomes of our growing understanding of the Enterprise 2.0 field is that the advent of using wikis and blogs and widgets and social computing inside the firewall does not mean that all the thinking, theorizing and implementation of initiatives related to KM 1.0 needs to be tossed away. Rather it seems that much of what has gone before can be built upon and enhanced, and notably in the areas of cultural adaptation and changes to management practices.
Indeed, I (and my co-author Jim Bair) have tried to reflect these emerging perspectives in a just-published industry book titled "Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of Web 2.0" – (ARK Group UK), recently given an initial once-over on this blog by colleague Bill Ives, wherein I cite Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Dave Snowden, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ikujiro Nonaka and a number of other well-known KM theorists and practitioners. I like to believe that the book’s content has struck an initial balance between the complex taxonomies of many organizations’ accumulated "knowledge", the large investments made over the past decade to enterprise information architecture, many workers’ need for some structure and direction and the clear power of more organic social computing carried out by interconnected individuals with a wide range of styles when it comes to cognition, learning and ways to turn pertinent information into useful knowledge.
I also think it’s clear that we are all going to be learning a lot more about the design, dynamics and management of knowledge work over the next several years. It will never be left to be completely organic – free-flowing, self-assembling and emergent. Humans are tinkerers, especially in a technocratic era and even more so those of such an era who are bent on having organizations perform more and better. They will always be looking for ways to make knowledge and knowledge work more effective and more profitable.
FASTForward 08 made that clear.
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