by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2008 at 7:29 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory
John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.
As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”
Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.
“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.
Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:
“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”
So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.
John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”
These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.
To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.
by Jevon MacDonald
February 23, 2008 at 11:15 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is my favorite sign from FASTForward. I think it says a lot about the company and the idea that creating new things and being a step ahead is more important than protecting old ideas.
I found it on a blog but now I can’t remember which blog it was. (I didn’t have a camera to take a picture myself at the conference). If you took this, let me know and I will link through to you.
by Hylton Jolliffe
February 22, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Interviews
Below is the full list of video interviews conducted over three days at FASTforward 08. We encourage you to find the time to listen in – those interviewed had many insightful things to say, as did Jerry Michalski, our excellent host for the series, about Enterprise 2.0, the user revolution, search, and much, much more.
- Liv Brahin: UBS
- Gerry Campbell: president, search and content technologies, Reuters
- Michael Cleary: Reuters
- Bob Coxe – chief information officer for Criterion Systems
- Tom Davenport – consultant, author
- Jorn Ellefsen – CEO of Comperio
- Sue Feldman – research vice president, content technologies group, IDC
- Charles Fiesel – Roundarch
- Brooks Gibbins: vice president and general manager, financial services at FAST
- John Hagel – consultant, author
- Clare Hart – EVP, Dow Jones & Company
- Jon Husband: author, blogger, consultant
- Bill Ives: consultant, blogger
- Sandy Kemsley: consultant and blogger
- Kiyosh Kurihara: President of Japanese analyst firm TechVisor JP, Ltd.
- John Markus Lervik: CEO, FAST
- Jevon MacDonald: blogger perspective
- Jim McGee: consultant, author, blogger
- Joe McKendrick – analyst, blogger
- Bjørn Olstad: CTO of FAST
- Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
- Mark Pfeiffer: SAILLABS
- JP Rangaswami: CIO of British Telecom
- Safa Rashtchy: speaker at FASTForward’08
- Jan Paul Raven: Knowledge Concepts
- Benjamin Rudolph: Search Discovery
- Jared Spataro: group product manager, Microsoft
- Tim Stay: Perfect Search
- David Sutija – SVP of enterprise products, FAST
- Kyoko Suzuki: Computer World Japan
- Don Tapscott – strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
- Paula Thornton: experience design strategist
- Nate Treloar: SVP, Interaction Technology, FAST
- David Weinberger – speaker, consultant, author
- Zia Zaman: executive vice president, global marketing, FAST
Keynotes:
- John Hagel: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization
- David Weinberger: The Information Mess – And Why You Should Love It
by Paula Thornton
February 22, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, FASTForward '08, Microblogging, Twitter
As I commented to my colleagues as we were wrapping up on Wednesday, we truly experienced Conference 2.0. What we accomplished and how we participated in FASTforward ’08 embodied key elements of 2.0. Moreso, what we experienced/achieved via the conference could/should be a repeatable model for other conferences (not just FASTforward ones).
Some of the elements:
- The blog itself. With Sandy being quite prolific, she had posts up faster than most of us could take notes, let alone synthesize and edit them into pieces (and as Rob mentioned in his interview, there are others of us who need time to digest it all).
- The myff08.com. While we struggled with some of the interaction elements, one high-value deliverable was having the pdfs of the keynote presentations available the same day. Someone’s checking on more ‘public’ availability of these.
- Video interviews that were available the same day. While they are a bit large I immediately noticed a huge difference in both the audio and video quality over last year. Not to mention Jerry’s impeccable skill as an MC (not to diminish David’s efforts last year). Jerry effortlessly made us all look/sound better. [Not to forget, although I did, the tireless effort of behind-the-scenes work for videography/lighting/sound, scheduling and editing.]
- Microblogging (Twitter) and photojournaling. The latter could have used a little collaborative instigation by requesting photos from the at-large crowd and suggesting a tag to post on Flickr (and I obviously need a larger memory chip in my camera). We’re also looking to get an account (or syndication) to flow related tweets through the FASTforward blog space.
- [On a negative note, the tracking devices were nearly useless – I would not recommend the effort to do that again…the bloggers had some pretty strong offline commentary about them.]
Having wireless available makes a huge difference, as does not having it when trying to facilitate near-instantaneous sharing. I had to laugh at myself as I was trying to tweet on my phone, drop it to take a photo, start typing some notes in Word when I couldn’t type fast enough on my phone and/or grabbed a pen and threw a note on paper (my thanks to facilities planning for putting power strips on the front tables of every room). If I’d continued as I had in the first session and also had my audio stick running I would have been trying to operate on 5 channels simultaneously. I can tell you – it doesn’t work. But they were all just my experiment – not something I’d been specifically asked to do. They were my way of being engaged and contributing.
The critical point here is, while we had shared a couple of ‘blogger’ calls among ourselves before the event, they were mostly about the logistics of the event. Not much more. We did not have specific assignments or even any charters – it just evolved.
Even slightly more ‘formal’ actions evolved. For a panel luncheon on Wednesday, the panelist list was firmed up that morning. The ‘intended’ blogger participants ended up with schedule conflicts and new resources were put in place.
As I had stepped up to ‘facilitate’ (a format I simply recommended and was adopted), I felt some onus to check on the room early (not asked, not planed, just seemed reasonable). The room was found to not be staged for a panel at all. Kudos to FAST, the travel group they engaged for event logistics and to the hotel staff for quickly pulling together a SWAT team to reconfigure the room in 20 minutes. For some, all of these elements stacked together, let alone any one of them, could have turned into a nervous mess or frantic disaster. Everyone simply stepped up and gave it their ‘get it done’ best and no one else noticed. [Although in the frantic mess, I did leave my cell phone in the podium afterward, and yet 3 hours later it was safely found at the Registration Desk – exactly where an event logistics person suggested I might look first.]
I had earlier shared my observations (to someone who suggested they hadn’t noticed) as to FAST’s careful staging of the ‘welcome’ experience with the:
- Wash of orange color through the grand hallway
- Greeting attendees with refreshments, served graciously and enthusiastically before reaching the registration desk
- Lively visual impressions of the drinks in the neon orange tumblers with the FAST logo on the side
- Careful positioning of the vendor booths within the normal traffic flow (although for all of that careful staging, I still didn’t find time to get to more than 1 booth the whole time).
And where did I miss the whole contest for a car? Having that on the floor with the winner’s name on the roof, was a very STRONG association to the benefits of registering early. What were those rules, terms & conditions?
I’m sure there are other conferences we could take some leads from, but this one did just nicely, thank you.
Any other 2.0 experiences/observations to report?
Postscript: See related microblogging reference.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 6:20 pm · Filed under
Change, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
J.P. shares advice for leaders on how to create the cultural change required to become Enterprise 2.0 organizations.
Bio: J.P. Rangaswami is CIO of British Telecom’s (BT) Global Services group, which works in 170 countries and is the fastest growing division with BT Group, supporting large businesses and organizations across the globe. Regarded as something of a maverick and an innovator, J.P. is is an outspoken advocate of open source and using emerging and disruptive technologies to improve information sharing, education and collaboration. He was also CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort. J.P. was named to silicon.coms “Agenda Setters for 2007″ and has been awarded UK-based Waters Magazine’s “CIO of the Year” award.
