Archive for June, 2008
by Bill Ives
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.
by Joe McKendrick
June 19, 2008 at 9:58 am · Filed under
Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Semantic, Web 2.0
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.
by Jon Husband
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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by Bill Ives
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 includes consulting and software, nGenera.
Jevon asked each person: “why would people want to buy from them.” Here are responses.
Sabre –we specialize in travel and are already in the majority of Fortune 500 companies. (they also owns Travelocity). They have developed a social computing solution to allow for user input to go with travel. (I think this is great that they are including social computing components. Here is an excellent example of this type of user content added to a web site for foot travel (Appalachain Mountain Club Goes Web 2.0)
Jive – we have 2500 clients, 15% of Fortune 500 use our products. We are platform independent – java – and less expensive, best of breed. I think there are markets for each of the three approaches on this panel. (I certainly agree with the multiple markers)
Microsoft – We embrace small companies as partners to open up possibilities. We announced many partnerships at this conference to allow for quicker access to new capabilities. For our part, we focus on things people want for 5 – 10 years. We want to support long term solutions. (I like Microsoft’s strategy to open up Sharepoint to multiple partners to bring in additional functionality)
nGenera – we see the change to enterprise 2.0 as a 20 – 30 year transition. The cultural change is the big deal, not the technology. The new generation and globalization will drive this change. The command and control hierarchy will be broken down. We are working on leading companies through the transformation. Then bring solutions to play once these change issues are worked through. We bundle consulting with software. (I agree with the major nature of the transformation but not sure it will be 20 – 30 years)
Jevon then asked: “are you acting as thought leaders or responding to market?”
Jive – we have a strong client base – we meet with them constantly to understand problems and challenges – we include clients in our development process – we produce many iterations to incorporate these changes from clients
nGenera – we run forums and offer online communities to get client feedback
Microsoft – many of our partners do this – we focus on basic infrastructure and long term needs so work with partners to bring in fresh client input
Jevon – then asked: “why shouldn’t a company just hire a web developer than come to you/”
Microsoft – companies that see the evolution as a long term process need to make decisions on how to invest for the long term – they need something that will remain over time – which is more than a few web developers can provide
Jive – this transformation will be quick but there is more to it than just throwing in a blog or wiki – you need to have people who understand the enterprise – it is complex – a few web developers will not address this – it is more than just social networking – people need to be able to work together once they find each other – they need capabilities to work with all the complexity of the enterprise
Microsoft – we want to make sure MS platform that has key elements that work with all components – e.g. not just tags in wikis but also in enterprise applications – we want the integration of all data – like tags (I think Microsoft and Jive both made good points here)
Jevon – people buy Sharepoint because it is already there – is this the biggest reason
Microsoft – no – people buy for many reasons – one reason is that they want a product that will be around – also software that addresses all generations
The next question was whether they offer – on an on-premise vs hosted solution
Sabre – hosted
Jive – we allow for both – sometimes the issues is internal collaboration vs also external collaboration – customers tend to think hosted when arrive – three drivers, HR, business, IT – different questions so might change to an on-premise solution
Microsoft – goes either way – many partners provide hosted if want it quick – Microsoft in this space more now and wants there be a choice
(I later talked with Vassil Mladjev of Blogtronix who said may of his clients test the application int he cloud and then go inside the firewall for implementation.)
Audience Question – Jive and MOSS customer where people are using other wikis – how to support these people?
Jive 1. We are removing wiki markup in next release to make it easier for users
Microsoft – we built rich text editor so customers can change to other text editor – we design stuff to be extensible – we support a lot of upgrading and migrating to support our work with partners – we provide an ecosystem to make things happen at your pace – next version of Sharepoint will be less radical so migration next time will be easier.
Audience Question: Is there an issue when providing a general tool versus a focused one like the travel tool?
Jive – we are more focused than Sharepoint – we try to make it easy for people to find each other, connect, and work together – we provide a very specific focus so it is easier to use – you need to make easy it so everyone can use it so you get the large network effect
Microsoft – when Jive starts to be used more widely they will face the problems we face now – we try to provide inter-operatability to allow for multiple uses
Jive – we have clients with 40,000 users so we face such issues now
IBMer asked – what is source for next big innovation in your product?
Jive – become seemless in an effective way – since so many options in play now – tools need to get stuff to the right people – the tools need to bring things together in a clear way
Microsoft – like IBM we have a research division that looks out long term, we also have an intermediate research group that looks at office issues – one application to gather input on med-term issues is our Town Square – it is like a Facebook news feed –– we can see what people are doing – we are testing this with a large client – then maybe we will make it open source depending what happens (interesting idea – see Jon Husband’s TownSquare … Social Networking and Social Computing R&D for more)
nGenera – we run user forums for new ideas – we are looking at how enterprise computing is going to change
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