Japanese Business Culture & Social Computing

June 27, 2008 at 11:09 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

A couple of weeks ago I was in Sapporo at the Infinity Ventures Summit (the site’s in Japanese) to talk about the role of informal networks in business and show off Trampoline’s SONAR Suite. This is the largest technology innovation conference in Japan, bringing together the leading start-ups, corporations, analysts and investors. The focus was mainly on mobile and consumer internet so Trampoline really stood out as an enterprise infrastructure provider. We were also one of just four non-Asian firms invited to present.

I’ve travelled in Japan in the past but this was my first visit in a business context. The amazing etiquette involved in exchanging business cards was the first thing that struck me. In an unstructured setting like a drinks reception in the West cards are typically swapped at the end of a conversation if there’s a likely relevance for future contact. In Japan cards are exchanged at the start of a conversation with no filter for relevance. This means you get through a lot of cards and your pockets rapidly end up bulging with other people’s.

Cards must be offered horizontally with the text in the correct orientation for the recipient, held at the corners in both hands. When you receive a card you must hold it similarly in both hands and give it your full attention for a second or two before looking up or continuing conversation. You must hold the card in front of you throughout the conversation. It’s insulting to put it in your pocket, scribble a note on it or (worst of all) hand someone a crumpled or disfigured card. If you’re sitting around a table with people the correct thing to do is lay everyone’s cards out in front of you in a neat row matching their positions around the table.

What interested me most, however, was the cultural alignment of Japanese enterprises with social computing solutions. Previously I’d assumed that Japanese business culture would be intrinsically hostile to technologies that make informal groupings and networks visible, or which lead to information being shared in new ways, since there is sensitive etiquette surrounding these processes. However my experiences in Sapporo completely changed my view of this.

The connection I’d failed to make previously is that Japanese corporations have historically placed a much higher value on the informal networks amongst their employees than their Western counterparts. Within the “shushin koyo” model of life-long relationships between employer and employee, many aspects of the individual’s social life were organised and supported by the corporation. This was seen to build organisational strength and forge links outside the formal structure (both of which are also notable drivers for social networking tools in the enterprise). During the long recession in the 1990s a lot of these extra-curricular activities were cut, but a management culture persisted in which informal networks were highly valued. On the face of it enterprise social computing tools are perfectly placed to fill this gap.

In many cases products developed for a Western market will need to be modified significantly before they are suitable for Japanese customers. This won’t simply be a case of changing language in the user interface. Behaviours around privacy management and authorisation will almost certainly need to be modified to fit different cultural nuances. But contrary to my initial assumption, Japanese corporations may prove to be early and well-informed adopters of social computing technologies.

I’m indebted to Shuji Honjo for drawing my attention to the possible like between social computing and corporate involvement in extra-curricular activities.

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Can Enterprise 2.0 fix Social Security?

June 25, 2008 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, User Revolution

Of course Enterprise 2.0 by itself won’t fix the U.S. Social Security system, which is projected to run out of money by the year 2020, but follow my logic here.

The New York Times just ran a piece on the advantages of keeping people working past what is considered “traditional” retirement age. As the article relates, there’s a lot of value to society in keeping people on the job, in both generating more tax revenues and less strain on the Social Security and Medicare system:

“The emphatic conclusion of recent research into retirement policy and labor markets is that working another two or three years would have a surprisingly powerful impact on the retirement living standards of millions of boomers and on the economy. The economic gains, according to a report published this month by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research group, would include increased household savings, higher tax collections and a reduction of the fiscal strain on Social Security and Medicare; together, that would add an estimated $13 trillion to the economy by 2025, or about a year’s total output of goods and services today.”

But, surprise, surprise, the corporate world still hasn’t gotten the message, and still clings to outdated and counter-productive prejudices about hiring employees over 50. It’s the same old story we’ve been hearing for years. In the 1980s, when I was director of the Administrative Management Society and editor of its journal, Management World, we issued countless reports and articles on the advantages of hiring and retaining “older” workers. We also spoke quite a bit about the convergence of work and life, and why work should be an ongoing source of meaning, learning, and inspiration, versus something you try to escape from as you enter your sixth decade.

But did companies listen?  Nooooo….

Let’s look at what Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 could mean to the relationship between enterprises and individuals.  That is, the workplace is quickly evolving from a structured show-your-face 9-to-5 cellblock to more of an open, participate community, linked by common interests and interlocking skills. These communities are global in nature, stretching well beyond corporate cubicle environments to home offices, remote locations, and anywhere anyone is using a mobile, connected device.

The corporation is evolving into a confederation on entrepreneurs. Work and insights are delivered through Web-based communities and ad-hoc teams pulled together for specific purposes.

Now, keep following my thinking here. What difference does it make that the individual at the other end of an electronic interchange is 18 or 80? You don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. For that matter, these electronic workplace communities are oblivious to race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality (assuming you can interact in the same language). There’s opportunity for everyone with the right skills, unencumbered by biases and archaic thinking.

And companies shouldn’t fret too much about the ability of more senior workers to learn and use computer technology. As the New York Times article reports, one 64-year-old administrative assistant at S.C. Johnson kept updating her skills in budgeting, financial planning and project management programs to the point where she is a highly valued project manager. She recently designed an emergency planning Website for the company. She wants to retire in a couple of years, but her boss wants her to stick around until she’s 70.

One of the beauties of Enterprise and Web 2.0 is that these technologies break down the barriers that closed many skilled and talented individuals out of the system.

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Enterprise 2.0 … More Hierarchy or Less Hierarchy ?

June 23, 2008 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Change, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Trust, User Revolution

By now so very much has been written and said about

1. the impacts both positive and negative of hyperlink-driven mass collaboration,
2. the vast potential for increased effectiveness related to sharing information and scaffolding knowledge, and
3. the apparent flattening of organizations that will follow. 

I have been a proponent, though I would like to point out that I have never suggested hierarchy will disappear or that it is not a necessary component for decision-making and direction in many if not most contexts.

I have been blogging for at least five years.  I consider reading comments and sometimes adding a comment of my own to be an integral part of blogging .. in fact, as often as not I learn more and get more out of the comments section than from the blog post itself.  I have also consulted to organizations for about 20 years on work design, work effectiveness, competencies and performance, knowledge management, management and leadership development, and organizational learning and change.

Euan Semple is well known for helping to create, grow and sustain the effective use of social software tools in a complex knowledge-intensive environment (the UK’s BBC).  Part of his role in doing so was to offer workshops for managers and leaders about working effectively and "managing" knowledge in that environment.  No doubt part of the effective use of such tools and processes involved people "thinking outside the box" out loud, in the semi-public exchanges between colleagues in the organizational context.

Here’s an excerpt from an anecdote he published last year titled "Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There".

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"I could never trust my staff to use these sorts of tools", he said, "they would end up wasting all of their time".

[Snip ...]

The first thing I did was to ask if he thought his recruitment policy was working for him. If he couldn’t trust his staff to make minute by minute decisions about how they spent their working days how on earth was he going to trust them to make bigger decisions on his behalf? He brushed this aside and restated that whatever his staff’s judgment the sort of activity I had been describing was still a waste of time.

To this I replied first that, contrary to his assumption, people took moments to glance at a forum or a blog and if by responding they answered a worthwhile question their answer could benefit thousands of others and save a lot of time and effort.

Secondly I responded that people have always had all sorts of ways of wasting time available to them from staring out of the window to having a coffee and if they are truly wasting time then surely it was his job as a manager to deal with them and their under-performance?

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In knowledge work environments people are always reading and talking, exchanging information and opinions, pointing to things of pertinence and related interest.  In a sense, people are already doing substantial parts of what is involved in the use of blogs and wikis … it’s just that the new tools are making it more visible and let workers capture the content for immediate or future use.  I do not think that there is much constant full-on dedication to executing a chronologically-arranged set of daily tasks (though much reengineering and embedding of work processes in the "electronic concrete" of many ERP systems in search of constant efficiency would mitigate my assertion).

So … it’s logical to assume that one of the key propositions of value to enterprises with respect to the use of blogs and wikis is the learning and the construction of pertinent knowledge that derives from the interaction and exchange of participants. 

This visible interaction and exchange is also the area that I believe raises skepticism and resistance on the part of many managers and executives.  I suspect that in many enterprises unless the tools’ use and the conversations they engender are always aligned with the mission and objectives of an enterprise or the projects / initiatives where the tools are applied,  the conversations will be seen as wasting time, or creating or supporting unwanted questioning and dissent.

I think it’s also quite possible that without effective moderation and facilitation a fair bit of the interaction and exchange of information enabled by social software inside the firewall will be cautious and measured, which can have a damping effect on the full range of the potential available when people converse on purpose about shared focus and activities.

It has often been suggested that organizational culture is or can be a significant obstacle to the effective and productive use of social software in enterprises.  I’d add managerial style and leadership philosophy (see Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management).  There is quite a bit of evidence available from the growth of wikis and blogging that publishing relevant content, commenting and the interaction that can follow facilitates increased and / or more rapid learning and idea generation.  As we become more experienced, we are learning that social computing initiatives are greatly affected by the context, purpose, boundaries and moderation styles in use for a given community.

So … I suspect that there will be wave after wave after wave of examples where enterprises begin to use blogs and wikis, don’t pay enough atention to context, purpose, boundaries and moderation,  and find that the organization’s culture and the style(s) of various managers are at odds with the dynamics of blogs and wikis.  When things seem looser or less aligned, I suspect that there will often be reversion to command-and-control, whether by tightening the ways the blogs and wikis are used or by canceling the experiment.

I also think that there are many employees in many organizations that mostly want clear direction and a clear set of tasks and objectives to be given to them by management, in exchange for a wage, decent working conditions and some possibility of some employment security.  They want hierarchy, to reduce ambiguity and possible confusion and uncertainty (Lou Gerstner of IBM once said that his toughest challenge in making substantial change work was the desire of many to "delegate upwards"). 

It takes an inspiring vision and purpose and a healthy respectful culture for most people to get excited about engaging in improvement, responsiveness and innovation.  Implementing social software towards the creation of an Enterprise 2.0 will I believe be a significant leadership and management challenge, and will often sharpen the issues for personal, management and organizational development. 

Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives will often be a major organizational change, mainly in terms of the communications and management challenges, and sharpens the game with respect to listening, empowering, coaching and responding clearly and truthfully.

Hierarchy 2.0 ?

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Tags: organizational change, hierarchy, wirearchy

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Old Media meets Social Media - KETC and the Mortgage Crisis - On the edge of launch

June 23, 2008 at 6:56 am · Filed under Barriers, KETC, Ning, Public Media, Public TV, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Subprime, TV, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution, Video

We are beavering away getting ready for a launch at the beginning of July.

One of the tools that we are using to enable us all to work with each other across many departments, different places and different organizations is Ning. Ning is not a traditional project management tool but we are finding it very helpful.

Soon we will have not only the project team using it but also folks from several stations, CPB and PBS and a few friends who know a lot more than old Rob about reaching the hard to reach.

I think that this is a new way of running a project - where the client and the next to go can look under the hood while we are still making the car.

In essence the work looks like this:

The Big Idea: - Our research tells us that many can save their homes but are prevented because they do not know where to go for help that they can trust. Many who can be helped are shamed and don’t want to put their hand up or are frozen. They have no one who has empathy who can help them find help.

Many cannot keep their homes. But they too are frozen with fear. This fear may well turn to resentment. Many are not directly affected but will be when many houses in their neighborhood are - at the moment they are stuck as individuals - how can they protect their own street? They need help.

The current problem - Most of the help is hard to find, finds you or is on the web. Most of it is “help” from “Vultures” or the people who “helped” get people into this mess.

What is Public TV’s great Value? - We are the most trusted organization in town.

So what then is the work? - We can’t give people money. We can’t know all the answers. But we can find the help that people can trust and we can fortify the existing networks of trust to give people the best shot of finding help that they can trust.

So I think that our work is to find the 30 - 60 “Nodes of Trust” in St Louis - those people and those organizations that have the trust of each segment and form a trusted bond with them. If we can do this, then we can do “The Work” which is I think to help people find the help.

If we can do this, we will also have found a new relationship with our city. A relationship much more meaningful than bringing quality content. A relationship where we can reveal and strengthen the fabric of community and so equip it to cope with the harsh realities of our time.

Here then is a sequence of what we may see happen - all this work is done by the brilliant Valdis Krebs.

This is where we are now - this may be how your city is - there are institutions but they are not connected and these are only the big ones. In reality there are maybe hundreds of churches, beauty salons, youth centres whatever that are Nodes Of Trust.

Here is what I think we have to do this summer - reveal and connect the key nodes. At first it will be us going out to the and then revealing them to each other and to the public.

We plan to use Google Maps to do this. We will have a layer for each community. The Bosnians will have their map. The African Americans will have their map and so on. Each push pin will have as much data as possible and we will ask the public for more Nodes.

We will connect this network to the best and most trusted help that we can find. We are now digging into what is on offer and who can help in every area. We will use our ability to tell stories in print - see a new post of the Beacon - on Video - on the web and in person.

If we are fortunate - some of these Nodes will start to connect independently of us to each other.

I think this might be all that we can do this summer.

But here is my hope. That as this network becomes more self aware and as we help it find each other - then some kind of life will emerge. Like a nuclear reaction and that we will have been present at the birth of a star:

What could St Louis be capable of - if it now looked like this?

What would be the place of a public TV station - if we could have ben the midwife attending such a birth?

What could America be like if the 300 stations in the country could have this effect in the 300 major cities of the nation?

There is a lot to play for at a time when there is a lot at stake.

Over the next 7 days I will offer up more detail as it becomes available

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Fast Forward Summit Notes: Jeff Fried on Business Transformation Powered by Search

June 22, 2008 at 11:01 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Jeff Fried, the VP Product Management, at Fast led an interesting session Business Transformation Powered by Search at the recent Fast Forward Summit in Boston. He set the context by saying that the magnitude of new information has help drive the growth of Fast search. There are now 1,300,000,000 users on the web and 100,000,000 active domains. Jeff said that search can drive productivity by unlocking silos and partitioned this concept into three themes:

First, there is information discovery. You do not want to get blind sided by business competitors. The majority of Cisco.com users find their information through search. It helps customers make purchase decisions and reduces customer support costs. Cisco recently launched a big project to improve search and their top goal was to make information access more customer centric, the next theme Jeff raised.

Best Buy – a Fast client – gives credit to customer centric search for helping transform their online business. They gained market share by experiencing no down time in search on their site even in peak times. Career Builder was neck & neck with Monster.com a few years ago. Now Career Builder, a Fast customer, is well ahead by providing a better search experience for users. The Bowen Craggs survey on effectiveness of web site named Siemens, a Fast client, as number one.

Finally, operational intelligence is another goal that can be supported by effective search. Jeff said it is important to try to make search not a black box, but open and extensible. He showed this great picture of a giant needle sticking out of a hay stack and said search should be called “find.” He discussed the Merrill Lynch research library. In this enterprise case, the paradigm of a single search box does not apply. Researchers need rich filtering to be effective. This also true in pharma where Fast powers 6 of the top 10 pharma companies. These are information companies. For example, Orion needed to consolidate the many avenues to search. A typical job task used 8 different sources so Orion needed one search experience that drew on many sources. At the same, it had to go to very precise results to increase productivity of pharma researchers. Fast provided this single source.

Reuters had a traditional financial trading desk that was overly complex with dense data presentations. Now Reuters changed to a search driven experience to clean up the desk and increased productivity for their traders.

Jeff said there is a trend that enterprise search and business intelligence are converging, Unstructured and structured data world were very separate. Business intelligence world operated in structured searches and data. Enterprise search is now moving more into structured data world. I think that business intelligence also needs to look at unstructured data more and more.

Jeff provided another example, a large Australian telecommunications provider. Its customer information is their core asset but they grew into 11 different customer information data bases – billing, service, etc. These were not in synch which created a big problem. Much of data is very structured and was hard to integrate. Now they combined the data sources through search. It reduced confusion and broke down their information silos. Search can enable unique user experiences and provide the match of unique intent with content.

Jeff said there is still room for improvement. A recent Wall Street Journal article said that 49% of respondents feel finding information within the enterprise is difficult. My experience says that this is a big improvement over the past. Fast is working to make those numbers of frustrated continue to go down further.

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New Open FAST-SharePoint Search Bits Post @ MSFT Codeplex

June 20, 2008 at 3:42 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, Social Media, Sponsored Post, open source

There was a lot of discussion in the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference posts by Bill Ives, Jevon MacDonald, and Jon Husband around issues in the deployment and management of the technology platforms for emergent 2.0 practices. As you know, we have always held that Search (the S in Andy McAfee’s SLATES model for E20) is the core “glue” in these platforms, pulling together concepts and people across the silos of project wikis, individual blogs, TownSquare-type enterprise Facebook projects, etc. Search becomes a core facility for knowing what you know as a firm and as an individual, and for keeping found things found and learned lessons learned.

As part of Microsoft, FAST is now working with the SharePoint team to help enable the growing base of 85 million Microsoft Office SharePoint Server licensees to integrate advanced search and discovery capabilities into their collaborative environments, including, of course, the SharePoint E20 applications.

It’s been around 45 days since Microsoft completed the acquisition of FAST, and now we are publishing tools to deliver interoperability between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server in an open process. Today we posted a set of open downloadable FAST search Web Parts on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site for the developer community. See more about the details at the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog or check out the SharePoint Team Blog.

These Web Parts are available as a free download and provide discrete pluggable services for such functions as including an advanced FAST ESP search box in any SharePoint project and for creating conversational results displays that allow SharePoint users to refine searches through navigating dynamic clusters of content. SharePoint administrators will be able to build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint Server 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Look for the features, functionality and range of FAST ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.

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FAST

Fast Forward Summit Notes – Andrew McAfee

June 19, 2008 at 8:29 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee spoke today at the Fast Forward Summit in Boston on the topic, A World of Change. Here are my notes with some side comments in (parens). I found out that he was the first blogger at Harvard Business School and that now there are two. He used no powerpoint. He wanted to provide some ideas and then engage in a conversation (this is great – we did this at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on our blogging panel).

Andrew provided a recap of 2008 for him so far in the two parts of his professional life – in the classroom and the outside world – these are very different for him

First, he discussed his course – the informal title is “what every general manager needs to know about IT” – he finds that his students do not want to be CIOs although many have IT background but they do not want to go back there. (I guess the CIO whatabees go to Sloan)

He tells them that one of the biggest mistakes that general managers make is to assume that IT is someone else’s responsibility. He says that they should not leave it up to IT. They need to understand the issues and get involved.

Andrew starts the course with a coverage of classic enterprise systems – he says they are a great way to impose the will of the top executives on the masses – He thought his students would like it since the stereo type of HBS student is someone who thinks they know it all. However, he finds that they actually want to get away from using a managerial heavy hand. The dominant verb in this section is “impose.”

Andrew then switches the class coverage to enterprise 2.0 – these tools are exactly the opposite – these tools allow you to get out of the away and let ideas emerge. The dominant verb in this section is “emerge.” Andrew thought students would find this uncomfortable – he was wrong on both counts – they loved the second one – liked emergence - He likes this outcome as it ends the class on a high note. (I think he knew all along that this would happen or at least he hoped it would, thus the sequence)

The semester ended in April and he has been on the road to talk about enterprise 2.0 every since. Andrew said it has been fun – the trend is positive – there is broad geographic and multi-level support for enterprise 2.0 within many organizations and across industries. (I am seeing this also)

He recently led a panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It included senior people from CIA, Pzifer, Wachovia Bank – all conservative organizations – but they all have dedicated staff toward enterprise 2.0 – at the CIA people using enterprise 2.0 tools are finding new colleagues across silos (we really need for our security) – Prior to the enterprise 2.0 era we had bad tools for collaboration and discovery Euan Semple (former head of KM at BBC) said do you really want to find bad stuff or the right colleague? (Euan writes the excellent blog – The Obvious - I have always found that finding the right person was more valuable that finding the right document) (Here are my notes from Andrew’s panel, Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Reality Check with Andrew McAfee and a summary of my notes from the entire conference, My Enterprise 2.0 2008 Conference Notes)

Andrew was at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government yesterday for an gov 2.0 conference – He had felt government was likely to be behind the times – but actually government may be ahead of the private sector in the use of enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 tools are cheap and easy to launch – He learned about the DC mayor’s office and the virtual Alabama project.

Andrew closed his opening comments with three issues:

1. Should you be strategic and apply an integrated environment or do a thousand pilots - Andrew sides with the board approach to fully reap benefits of enterprise 2.0 – the interconnections - otherwise you get 1000 siloed walled gardens – Enterprise 2.0 still can be quick for broad implementation. (I agree very strongly. If it is really be enterprise 2.0 there needs to be enterprise consistency. Otherwise you get a lot of disconnected web 2.0 tools. There needs to be connectivity between the enterprise tools. Open APIs can make this happen if done right. There is a role for IT here to provide support so it is not a lot of little disconnected efforts. This is like the early days of intranets, except the tools are more powerful and the stakes are higher.)

2. What are obstacles to implementation? Andrew asked the audience to choose between – technical, managerial, or individual – The people in audience felt that the answer was managerial and that was Andrew’s prior view – The Enterprise 2.0 conference panel all said no – it is new for individuals – there is a lot of inertia as people are used to emails – managers are just as uncomfortable as users but they are not putting up management obstacles – managers need to led by example – they need to say I am not going to use emails on this project - (recognizing this, some vendors have enabled users to interact with their platforms through email) Andrew found that command and control managers are not the obstacle to enterprise 2.0. (While I generally agree we have to remember that this is a biased sample. People whose senior management objects to enterprise 2.0 and the concept of emergence are not as likely to be in the conference and certainly not on this type of panel.)

3. What are the right incentives – how to encourage the new behavior – many are in the trinket school – Andrew likes the shovel from the CIA – a symbol of the new way to find new information. Then there are the anti- trinkets people – they say just give a managerial pat on the back to encourage use. Others say give some cash – others are against this- people will just do it for the money (and stop when the money stops)

Andrew feels that the best answer is to just talk to people about what they are doing and set expectations – if managers pay attention that is the biggest help – and use it themselves

He also cited Bill Marriott’s blog as a great example of senior executive blogging. As he travels around his hotels, he provides blog comments. Bill does not write much but he uses a digital tape recorder – it is transcribed into his blog and his staff adds the sound file as a podcast to show it is really Bill’s words.

During the Q&A session I asked the question. – The tension between impose and emerge has been around for centuries. I imagined John Dewey would be cheering on enterprise 2.0 if he was still around. Andrew at first thought I was speaking about the library system guy – I actually meant Dewey the education reformer who pushed for discovery learning and letting learners learn through emergence. I said the two Deweys might be on opposite sides of the issue. Anyway, I asked if he thought that if he taught his class 40 years ago would he get the same response? In other words are the tools leading the change? or Are the tools enabling people to do something they naturally want to do but were unable to do with prior tools? Andrew agreed with the second option (and so do I – think this is a major reason for the power and potential of the tools. – These tools speak to and enable real needs that existed before the tools.)

Andrew said that we got the tool kit for “impose” during the 90s (in the form of enterprise applications) now we have the tool kit for “emerge” – this is why it is not just hype from the vendors but addressing a real need.

Someone asked if enterprise apps and the new enterprise 2.0 apps will get together – many big enterprise apps are adding enterprise 2.0 – but will they succeed? – Andrew said he had concerns because it against their DNA, which is to impose. (a number of the enterprise 2.0 tools are proving ways to integrate with traditional enterprise applications and a number of the enterprise applications are providing open APIs to facilitate this integration. I think this is a better plan than having the enterprise applications building their own enterprise 2.0 apps)

I was thinking another question but there was not time. All of the discussion about enabling emergence is wonderful and I totally support it, as it is part of my DNA. However, there is another aspect as these tools enable something that rides the boundary of “impose” and “emerge,” that is accountability. The transparency allows senior executives to actually see much better what is going on in their organization and more proactively manage. In one example, XM Radio said that their first on-time and on-budget product launch occurred when they switched to enterprise 2.0. This increased transparency gives senior management an increased opportunity to impose or support. I wonder what Andrew’s perspective would be on this issue. I am also interested in yours.

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Goodbye, Corporate Data Silo; Hello Linked Data

June 19, 2008 at 9:58 am · Filed under Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, semantic

Alas, the corporate data silo that we’ve all learned to love and cherish is slipping away. However, the enterprise, cross-enterprise, and cloud-based metadata and semantic data world taking its place means more than just lots of more data available to everyone. It means profound changes to the way we look at work, relationships, and the enterprise itself.

Paul Miller provides a summary of Kingsley Idehen’s comments at the recent Linked Data Planet conference in New York. Kingsley explored some themes we have been bouncing around at this blogsite as well — that is, how enterprises view the relationship between Web 2.0 and employee productivity.

The emerging semantic Web — in which intelligence is applied to data in the cloud — is blurring all the lines that demarcated employees versus customers, work time versus personal time, and even enterprises versus individuals.  At the core is the idea of “Linked Data,”a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee that describes HTTP-based Data Access by Reference on the Web.

Kingsley is also highly linked himself. Access to slides from his presentation can be found here at his blogsite or here at AuthorStream, among many other places.

As Paul relates in his summary, Kingsley said that the revolution in “user generated content” in the consumer space has spread to enterprise environments. While this is a good thing, it also creates “increasingly complex challenges in engaging with and empowering its employees on the one hand, and recognizing and responding to the blurring lines between work time and personal time, employee and customer on the other.”

Linked Data, Kingsley argued, offers a powerful means to “mesh disparate and heterogenous data” over the web in ways that cross some of these boundaries.

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Supernova 2008 - Interview with Umair Haque

June 18, 2008 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Business Model, Change, Emergent, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0

          (originally posted to Supernova Conversation Hub blog)

I sat down earlier today with Umair Haque, who had been scheduled to present his Manifesto for a Next Industrial Revolution today at Supernova 2008.

Unfortunately his mother is quite ill and so he was not able to travel from London to be here.

He graciously shared with the Supernova attendees a write-up of the Manifesto, and also made himself available for this interview. Thanks, Umair … and I’ll do my best to do justice to his thinking and message.

Over the past seven or eight years the users of the Internet and the architects and developers of web services have created a new infrastructure and architecture for people to interact and create value in a wide range of human activities. Many have spoken for at least a decade about the transformative power of the Internet, and we have seen at least two waves of innovation develop … the initial dot.com boom and bust and the subsequent arrival of the broadly defined Web 2.0 phenomenon of social computing.

Umair suggests, provocatively, that while we are increasingly living and working in these new interconnected conditions, we are still by and large using industrial era assumptions and logic to drive the purpose and, yes, the dynamics of creating economic and social value. We have (collectively) inherited a dominant economic model based on exploiting resources, capital and talent in order to create, grow and make more efficient, a model that increasingly appears ill-suited to the challenges of a world whose population is growing, whose complexity is accelerating and whose ambiguities and pernicious challenges are clearly more threatening than at any time in the past. Haque argues that we need to undergo a fundamental DNA-like change in our dominant concepts about economic purpose and value. We need to organize differently, in order to seek value from new forms of efficiency, more constant innovation, easier and more comprehensive adaptation and more consistent effectiveness.

One of the key issues contained in this major challenge is that of raising the awareness for entrepreneurs, investors, executives, managers and policy-makers everywhere the need for and availability of “flexible centralization / decentralization”. This is the ability to centralize the parts of a business or organizational operations necessary for greatest effectiveness while simultaneously decentralizing other parts of the operations into distributed networks to gain the greatest benefit possible from those dynamics.

Umair said he wrote this manifesto because of his conviction that the necessary “DNA” (see the reasons for the scare quotes below) is coming out of, or being generated by the dynamics of the Web 2.0 environment wherein information is being shared and relevant utility, knowledge and business logic is being constructed during the course of (generally) non-hierarchical social interaction.

However, he believes there is a trap, which he is now calling the Facebook Trap. It’s not clear what Facebook is organizing or what specific purpose of form of economic value it is supporting or creating, other than personal profiles and page views against which to match contextual advertising. This extends into the point noted above, that by and large with current developments on the Web we are still using 1.0-ish economic and business logic. While it’s true that there are more and more conversations searching for conceptual pathways and answers at edge-dwelling gatherings like Supernova, it’s also true that the significant applications and services on the Web to date are still primarily concerned with monetization and economic performance based on existing business logic.

In his opinion, Silicon Valley (as an example) is either ignoring or refusing to confront some simple economic logic … use of the Web to build services and solutions won’t stop, it has become a structural component of our societies and economies, and it’s not about charities or about games. As he noted during the interview, the marginal scarcity of water or food may not be a huge problem for the Valley, but it’s in solving such economic problems that there exists the potential for creating huge, and progressive, economic and social value … for building a better, and interconnected, world.

In his words “the Valley should be the crucible of asymmetric competition“, out of which will emerge new companies using new mental and physical models to solve problems the old companies aren’t equipped to solve,. And when they emerge, they will do so much more quickly than did yesteryear’s examples of creative destruction.

I challenged Umair on a pet peeve of mine … academics, management and organizational theorists and business consultants everywhere often talk about organizational and economic DNA. I suspect that organizations and models don’t actually have DNA … it’s a fundamental component of a coherent organic entity. Rather those who work with and in the concepts and knowledge of given domains or in the structures of a given industry are so immersed in the models and dynamics that they “feel” the fundamental assumptions are natural. Thus, these fundamental assumptions are like DNA in that the core principles drive the thinking, perceptions, analyses and actions.

Haque agreed, and we both agreed to agree that the use of the term DNA is in effect (for our purposes here) a metaphor, a useful mental construct for helping to guide evolutionary processes and growth. And thus back to Umair’s central point … time is short, powerful new conditions are at hand, and the problems we need to solve are important, urgent and present significant new opportunities. But we need to look at them using new attitudes and new logic, or in Umair’s words, new DNA.

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Tags: Umair Haque, Havas Media Lab, Next Industrial Revolution, Supernova 2008

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Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Three Approaches to Social Computing Platforms

June 14, 2008 at 9:26 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I went to an interesting session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on Wednesday led by our very own Jevon MacDonald. It had a large software firm – Microsoft (Lawrence Liu) a small firm – Jive (Sam Lawrence), a custom effort, – Sabre for travel (John Samuel), and a company that inc