Social Media Versus Knowledge Management: Generational War?

October 24, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, KM, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wikis, Wisdom of Crowds

How do you ‘can’ a Jedi master? How do you store the collective learnings of the organization? Why did we win that sale? What have we built somewhere else before? What did that design look like? We can take a relational database, slice it, dice it, and cut it, rotate those cubes, and do data mining. But in the end, the difference is what really animates an organization is a human being.”

These are questions put forth in an interview I had several years ago with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. As Allan so aptly put it, knowledge management has always been a confounding issue for organizations seeking to better digitize, if you will, their collective knowledge. All too often, huge pieces of that collective learning have walked out the door to other organizations or to retirement.

Now, of course, we see social networking as a way to organically capture an assemble that collective knowledge, both within and outside the enterprise walls. But how is the more informal, almost free-for-all social networking approach meshing with more formal efforts to capture and leverage knowledge?

Xerox researcher Venkatesh G. Rao, said that the emerging tension between social media and knowledge management is a “generational war,” with younger participants opting for Web 2.0-ish approaches, versus the command-and-control nature of knowledge management systems.

However, in a post responding to Venkatesh’s observation, Tony Baer called the idea of generational war, at least here, as “hogwash.” As Tony observes, Web 2.0 isn’t wasted on the young: “Twittering, Facebook et al tend to hit more of a younger demographic, but use of Web 2.0 tools is definitely not restricted to people under 30.”

In fact, social media is being embraced with a lot of gusto by end users of all generations. “There have been many of us around for years who have always contributed “folk” knowledge, but until recently lacked the tools to share it.”

There are distinct differences between conventional knowledge management approaches as we’ve known them and social media, however. Tony points to parallels with the software development world. “Conventional knowledge management is more of a waterfall process [one department hands off work to another], whereas social media tends to be more agile [working collaboratively, real-time].”  In other words, conventional knowledge management systems have been top-down mega-projects, versus the more grassroots, democratic nature of social media.

As Tony puts it. the rise of social networking introduces a new dimension to the art and science of knowledge management:

“The question is whether you do so in a carefully organized top down fashion or instead encourage a culture of more informal or organic knowledge sharing. There’s no single silver bullet that works, but what’s always disturbed us have been those top-down enterprise knowledge management projects that to us appeared as little more than make work for highly paid enterprise consultants…. Along came Web 2.0 and social media which provided new technologies for the grassroots to simply not wait for some project manager to start a harvesting session which is then converted into retrievable assets from some application requiring significant custom coding. Instead, the notion of Wikis, blogs, microblogs, chats, forums and so on is to use the right tool for the purpose as the purpose arises. Some call it fun. We’ve thought of the new social media as the next generation Knowledge Management.”

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A workbook on doing disruptive innovation effectively

October 23, 2008 at 8:46 pm · Filed under Book Review

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, Anthony, Scott D. et.al.

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is the newest installment in a series of books articulating and explicating Prof. Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. This hands on guide packages some of the insights developed as an outgrowth of the consulting work of Innosight, LLC, the consulting firm founded by Christensen to pursue the practical insights from his research at the Harvard Business School. If innovation is part of your current or prospective job description, this needs to be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course).

Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation appeared first with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. During the worst excesses of the dotcom boom, every start up business plan including an obligatory head nod to Christensen and an assertion that their business model was truly disruptive. Who doesn’t want to be innovative; ideally disruptively so. Christensen and his colleagues have continued to develop his theories in The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, and now The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

Christensen distinguishes two forms of innovation — sustaining and disruptive — not in terms of their technological features but in terms of their relationship to markets. The distinction in summarized in the following diagram reproduced from The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

In essence, Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation flows from recognizing that the pace of technology improvement is generally more rapid than the capacity of users in the market to take advantage of those improvements. This differential is what open possibilities for differing approaches to innovation.

In this market oriented theory of innovation, there are three paths available to organizations interested in articulating potentially disruptive strategies. The first is to identify and target "nonconsumers;" potential consumers for whom existing technologies fail to meet their particular needs. The second is to identify existing customers where existing technologies are more technology than they needs. The final is to investigate potential consumers in terms of what Christensen’s theory describes as "jobs to be done" as a path to defining new products and services to perform these jobs. I must confess that I still find this path the least well articulated aspect of this theory.

Throughout this book, the authors start by recapping the essentials of Christensen’s theoretical arguments and proceed to develop the next level of operational detail it takes to transform strategic insights into execution details. If you’re an organization seeking to develop its own disruptive strategy, the authors here have worked out many of the next level questions and identified the supporting analyses and design steps you would need to answer and complete. The authors are clearly competent and talented consultants who are willing to share how they manage and do their work. Their hope, of course, is that many of you will conclude that you need their help to do the work. What is nice here, is that they are confident enough in their abilities that they are quite thorough in what they share. This volume is not a teaser; it’s complete and coherent. You could pretty much take the book as a recipe and use it to develop your project plans. On the other hand, the plans by themselves won’t guarantee that you can assemble a team with the necessary qualifications to execute the plan successfully.

The other thing that this book does quite nicely is identify the kinds of organizational support structures and processes that you would want to put in place to institutionalize systematic disruptive innovation.

Christensen and his colleagues are continuing to build a rich, systematic, theory of disruptive innovation. With roots in academic research, they are freely sharing their insights and their methods. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is a solid workbook that will let you develop your own skill at doing disruptive innovation. Of course, the plan by itself won’t eliminate the need to gain the experience for yourself. But it’s a lot better strategy than to have to work everything out from scratch on your own.

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Jeff Han’s Truly Amazing Multi-Touch Sensing Computer Interface

October 23, 2008 at 5:21 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I recently saw a great YouTube video, Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Sensing, thanks to my friend Thierry Hubert at Wikigazette. Jeff showed a computer display that senses multiple touch points. So you can use all your fingers and others can join in. So you can take two sides of a photo to expand it in two directions at the same time, as Jeff showed. You can also have more than one person working.

He said that there is no reason that people should conform to computer interfaces, but rather the computer should conform to people, like the use of all your fingers. This should be a big plus for data visualization as Jeff suggested. He also went to NASA World Wind and showed how the interface seems to be transparent as you just work with the maps with both hands to move around and go in and out.

I was amazed when I saw the Apple Lisa visual interface in the very early 80s while doing some work for Apple. This seems to have the potential to have a far greater impact to change the way we interact with computers.

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Social Media must be able to do things and get measured - KETC and the Mortgage Crisis

October 21, 2008 at 3:47 pm · Filed under KETC, Measurement

Back in May, we started to think about how a TV Station could help its city cope with the then emerging mortgage crisis. Thanks to CPB, we at KETC got our chance to test our ideas that we could.

The test is over and the results are in. A major part of the project was measurement. We knew that emotion and anecdote - powerful as it is - would not be enough.

How do we measure media? In most cases on air we can get a sense of who is watching. On the web we know exactly who is watching. As we started the experiment to see if a Public TV station could help a community help itself we had to know more - we had to know if what we did - on air, on the web, in person and by measuring itself (Remember in Quantum the act of measurement affects the measured) had an impact.

Would what we did activate action?

Would what we did change perceptions?

Would what we did have a result in improving the health of our community?

Might acting as a social catalyst be the higher goal and role for public media?

Well dear readers, the research is in - yes to all of the above.

A huge thank you to Professor Dhavan Shah and his wonderful team at the University of Wisconsin

One of the points that we measured was the number of calls that the United Way got from people seeking help timed against our on air pieces. Here you can see a massive bump directly related to what we did.

There is more - we found that the act of measuring/surveying had also a huge impact

What do these numbers mean? Are they good, OK or mediocre?

I have shared with you just the highlights - we have a lot more information that tells us that not only were we able to shift beliefs, motivate reaching out and action but also increase support for the station.

It is going to be fascinating to see what happens as this work spreads more broadly in the public TV and Radio world.

It’s one thing to bring good content and information to the public. It is another to be able to help activate the public to take back power and control into their lives.

I feel that we are on the edge of a breakthrough - the networked world is finding its place and its organization

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The shift to the web is becoming decisive for news

October 20, 2008 at 6:46 am · Filed under Social Media

This weekend the big news was General Powell’s endorsement of Senator Obama - how did most of us watch this - on the web.

Katie Couric’s interview with Governor Palin was the Rubicon moment that showed most of us that the Governor was not up to the job. How did most of us watch it - on the web.

Paradoxically it has been SNL and Jon Stewart that have made a major impact on the election. They have deepened the insights of the conventional news sources. Most of us have watched Tina Fey and Jon - on the web.

The system has noticed.

Until maybe 2 months ago, all conventional news outlets have seen the web as a useful add on. Now, it is clear that the web is THE place to put up the key content. The air merely markets the web - the web is the primary source, where people virally spread your content and so where the conversation begins.

It’s also where the producer can track with precision who watches. As the recession deepens, what advertising there will be will demand this precision. Only the web can deliver this.

Expect a major re-alignment.

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Cisco I-Prize Announces its Winner and a Successful Global Collaboration

October 19, 2008 at 9:25 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I wrote about the Cisco I-Prize a few months ago – see Mining the Web and the World for Innovation a while back. This week they announced their winner and I spoke to David Hsieh, Senior Director of Marketing for Cisco’s Emerging Technology Group about the wining team and the contest in general. First, to summarize the contest, Cisco launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winners get to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. More specifically, the winning team has the opportunity to join Cisco , drive the development of their business idea and are eligible to receive a $250,000 cash prize. Cisco may then invest approximately $10 million over three years to staff, develop, and go to market with a new business based on the idea.

The winning team contained two Germans and a Russian. It is led by Anna Gossen, a computer science student at the Karlsruhe University in Germany. The other members include Niels Gossen, a computer science student at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Sergey Bessonnitsyn, a systems engineer from Russia. They are looking at the ways to using the network as the platform for visibility, manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems. David said their approach will look at more energy consumption at a more granular level to better forecast energy needs at a more granular and effective level. If the power company guesses too low there are “brown outs.” If they guess too high, which is the usual case, power is wasted.

In the initial phase, the contest attracted more than 2,500 entrepreneurs from 104 countries who presented 1200 ideas. The ideas were posted on the public site and others could promote or demote the idea. New teams were also formed as people saw potential partners with similar ideas. Cisco also encouraged this. The winning team acted together from the start like 25% of the other teams who went on to the next phase.
To participate in phase two, 32 ideas were selected. In some cases existing teams carried them forward and in other cases new were teams were formed. A third of these teams were multi-national like the winners. These teams were given Cisco’s collaboration portfolio of Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications and the new Cisco WebEx® Connect application platform, to brainstorm their initial ideas, collaborate on the business plan, and virtually present their ideas to Cisco. See my recent App Gap post, Cisco WebEx Combine Strengths to Launch New Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform)

In the third, and final phase, twelve teams carried forward. They were given a lot of support and each had a Cisco team mentor who worked with them to further develop their business plan. At this phase, there was much more interaction with team via telepresence. There was a new emphasis on the people, as well as the idea, as the winners were to be offered jobs at Cisco.

Cisco is pleased with this experiment and investment. It validates the open collaboration model. They were one of the first large companies to try this. It is very counter to the current VC model in Silicon Valley. These funding and support resources are not available in most of the world and Cisco was able to engage people in 104 companies through the web. They did not do major promotion for this effort and did no marketing in many of the 104 countries were the participants live. They found that many people wanted their ideas to work as much as they wanted to make a lot of money on the idea. Many of the other eleven finalists are looking for ways to continue their idea.

I asked David about their lessons learned. The first one was to validate the desire to collaborate on the global scale. Cisco hoped this would happen but there was no certainty. Next time they may go bigger and bolder. I liked this idea when I first heard about it. I am very glad it succeeded. Perhaps the G7 should have a similar contest on alternative energy solutions and efforts to curtail global warming.

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Dueling philosophies: social media vs. knowledge management

October 17, 2008 at 2:44 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, KM, Social Media

Venkat Rao of Xerox recently introduced an important argument about the underlying differences between social media and knowledge management approaches inside the Enterprise. Here’s the way I described them at delicious. Both are worth a look, a read, and some thought.

Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War - An interesting and thought provoking post on some major philosophical differences between the world of knowledge management and social media. While I think the effort to link these differences to generational differences (Boomers vs. Millenials) is a bit of a stretch, the contrasts in philosophy and approach themselves are quite telling.

• Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: The Reactions - This is a follow up to an earlier discussion of the differences between knowledge management and social media in the enterprise. It collects various responses and reactions and goes on to react to the reactions. Definitely well worth reading.

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Tact, efficiency define a balanced approach

October 15, 2008 at 8:19 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In my first post here in the FastForwardBlog, I offered some tips on getting started down the path of Enterprise 2.0 in your organization. With the current economic situation still casting a shadow, I believe the advice is more important than ever.

Bringing social computing in to your organization in the near term will require measured amounts of tact and enthusiasm. You will need to set a pace that others can maintain, but you must be sure to maintain that pace even through the current climate.

From that post:

Some tips:

• Look inside: Chances are you have at least a few clued-in people. Take them to lunch and and give them some space to share their ideas. If they are really on to something, try to free up some of their workday so that they can experiment
• Listen carefully: There are two conversations going on right now, one about Technology, and one about a Business Ideology. If technology isn’t your thing, then start moving forward with new business ideas and the right technology will emerge, and if you are pegged as a technology person then start opening up the world of low cost options to your colleagues.
• Don’t rush: Major shifts in corporate structure and direction are painful and drawn out exercises. Instead of feeling the need to act, focus instead on assimilating relevant new ideas and contextualizing them around your own strategy.
• Act fast: Low cost and low friction opportunities are now available to everyone, learn to try small. If a transformation is going to take place successfully in your organization, it will be through thousands of small efforts, not one large push.
• Check your ego: Here is the painful part, and one of the secrets. The baseline requirement of Enterprise 2.0 is to learn to let go and to realize that you must learn to trust those around you before you yourself will earn their trust.
• Learn to imagine again: For the first time in almost 70 years business is truly changing, and the possibilities are endless. What does that mean for you?
• You are creating this too: This isn’t about converting to a new ideology, this isn’t even about accepting a new idea, we are early enough in the new world of the New Enterprise that each participant is a creator. There are no masters yet, no old guard or new revolutionaries, there is simply an idea out there that is really starting to take hold, and every disciple is must do double time as a prophet.
• Learn to be ready: Only when you fully realize the potential for your organization can you find the right help. The best and smartest people will not be coming to you, you will have to find them. There is a boom of sorts coming in Enterprise 2.0, so be wary of snake-oil salesmen and instead go out and learn from the gurus and masters who will continue to emerge in the next year and beyond.
• Keep reading: The amount of knowledge, understanding and ideas that are being shared is staggering. Never before in business have so many innovations and creations been available for free. So start reading every relevant blog, article and book you can find, and don’t stop: the ideas will not stop evolving.

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What He Said

October 14, 2008 at 2:08 pm · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0

Frankly I couldn’t have said it any better than Leo Babauta, in his piece Productivity 2.0: How the New Rules of Work Are Changing the Game. Indeed, he’s said a lot of relevant things I’ve wanted to say, but just haven’t gotten around to.

To put it all in context he compares two perspectives — Old School vs. Productivity 2.0 — across the following dimensions:

Crank It Out vs Deep Focus
Lots of Planning vs Just Start
Tons of Paperwork vs Automate
Multi-Tasking is Productive vs Multi-Project and Single-Task
Produce More vs Produce Less
Be Organized vs Tag, Archive and Search
Hierarchy vs Independence, Freedom and Collaboration
Work Longer Hours vs Work Fewer Hours

This all reinforces fundamental 2.0 thinking.
Way to go, Leo.

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Are Enterprise 2.0 Applications Prices Going to Fall? What About Market Size?

October 14, 2008 at 9:01 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I recently wrote on this blog on why the enterprise 2.0 market might continue to grow in a down market, see Awareness Report Shows Significant Rise in Enterprise Social Media - Will It Continue? My blog colleague Jevon MacDonald covered the concept in more depth in his post, In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. I really like the series of points Jevon made. He concludes with this statement, “In a time of uncertainty such as we have seen in the past several months, new and promising technologies may prove to be the safest harbour for those who must continue to deliver growth.”

Forrester is leader in promoting the enterprise 2.0 market. More recently, Oliver Young provided a new report with some cautions, Vendors: Prepare For Falling Prices For Enterprise Web 2.0 Collaboration And Productivity Apps. It was likely written before the recent market downturn. The summary states, “The enterprise Web 2.0 market is experiencing an explosion of activity among enterprises seeking collaboration and productivity improvements. While that explosion is placing Web 2.0 technology in the hands of millions of knowledge workers, cutthroat competition, commoditization, bundling, and subsumption are all offsetting the associated license revenue growth. How bad will it get? Forrester expects that most Web 2.0 tools will experience falling average deal sizes over the next five years, with some deal sizes dropping by more than half. Product managers must take steps today to manage increasingly competitive times ahead.”

Part of this prediction is the normal evolution of new software markets. Oliver points out that in many cases the tools have moved into a period of refinement rather than breakthrough innovation. This may be largely true but I still see some new genres or expansions on existing ones as I interview application suppliers for the AppGap blog.

His next major point is that bundling creates a more homogenous set of competitors. Here I completely agree. Many of the best of breed providers are moving away from their initial starting point (e.g., blog, wiki, social networking, etc.) to providing more a consolidated suite or platform. The newest entries such as smaller players like Qtask and big guys like CiscoWebEx are talking about integrated platforms. Others like Attivio are combining capabilities (business intelligence and enterprise search in their case). Even Microsoft, which announced a number of integration capabilities with best of breed vendors, is moving to adding a lot of those capabilities into Sharepoint – see upcoming Sharepoint investment areas.

Oliver then talks about subsumption (a word surprisingly not liked in the Microsoft spell checker) which is an extension of bundling. He writes, “Microsoft and SAP, are rolling Web 2.0 features into existing software packages; in many cases, they are providing the technology at no extra cost. Microsoft, for example, bundles lightweight blogging and wiki tools into SharePoint.” My recent experiences with Sharepoint implementers supports this idea.

Getting down to details, Oliver predicts the price for blogs and wikis will fall the most. They were part of the original selection of web 2.0 tools so this makes sense, especially as other tools have picked up some of their breakthrough functions like project management. He says that social networking will follow blogs and wikis and become commoditized with Sharepoint being a major reason. On the brighter side, Oliver predicts that mashups will continue to grow in maturity and use. Once again I agree with Oliver as mashups become more of the underlying plumbing in enterprise 2.0 tools like Deki for CRM. Mashup providers like Serena should do well as they refine their offering and firms like Nexaweb that use mashups for deep enterprise application integrations should also do well.

There is much more and I recommend the report. I wonder how these trends that support some falling process might intersect with the potential for increased demand that Jevon mentions and I referenced in the opening paragraph of this post.

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An Early (and Smart) Step Towards “Mainstreaming” Enterpise 2.0

October 11, 2008 at 1:50 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Community, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Robert Scoble, Social Computing, SocialText, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0

At the end of September (seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?) Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext announced the go-to-market of SocialText 3.0 (Connected Collaboration With Context), involving the integration of Facebook and Twitter functionalities into the wiki-based Socialtext collaborative platform.

In my opinion this reinforces a major trend that I believe will redefine how knowledge work is designed (I wrote about this massive trend and its importance in the Ark Group publication "Making Knowledge Work - The Arrival of Web 2.0"). 

What I mean by trend is that over the past two years all the major workplace software vendors - Microsoft, IBM Lotus, Open Text, Google, Oracle, EMC Documentum, SAP, Adobe and so on - have all launched (or acquired companies that provide the elements of) "renovated" platforms that have collaboration and social computing at their cores.  As just one example of the ongoing evolution in this arena, see Bill Ives’ recent post about Microsoft’s investment plans for Sharepoint, in which he notes "The next release of Sharepoint, Microsoft will be investing for the paradigm shift to more web 2.0 capabilities".

When a critical mass of large organizations have upgraded or migrated to platforms with collaboration and social computing at their cores, I expect that the changes to the ways people work with information and each other to create and use pertinent knowledge will accelerate.

In the case of Socialtext 3.0, I think it’s very smart to make explicit the "transfer" of massively-adopted consumer technologies to make it easy for people to connect, collaborate and co-create as they are already doing outside the firewall.  Leadership and management will change (or have to) to see this as an opportunity to focus people on what is important and what needs to be done - including increased tolerance for new ideas and potential innovation - and not as a crisis of control.

Rather than recreate all the links, I’ve let Robert Scoble do the work for me from this excerpt from his blog post of September 30th.

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SocialText Brings Enterprise Facebook and Twitter to Wikis

Socialtext is making big news all over the Web this morning. Here’s a rundown, later in the post I’ll talk about why. I also have an exclusive video of Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext demonstrating the new features to me.

Ross Mayfield, for my cell phone camera last night, explains the changes in this 18-minute video.

Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext, writes on his blog “Hello Socialtext 3.0!”

BusinessWeek: Socialtext 3.0: Will Wikis Finally Find Their Place in Business?

Webware: Socialtext co-founder: Enterprise Twitter isn’t enough.

eWeek: Socialtext Signals Marks Wiki Provider’s Move into Enterprise Microblogging.

Dawn Foster notes the move of Enterprises to social.

Zoli Erdos says “Socialtext Becomes Really Social.”

ZDNet: “Socialtext enters Twitter for Enterprise sweepstakes.”

TechCrunch writes “SocialText 3.0 blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise.”

So, why are these changes important? Because they bring the social features that many people have gotten to know on Twitter and Facebook into the Enterprise along with advanced wiki functionality.

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I would add "They represent an early look at the ways most people will work (and the kinds of tools they will use) within another five to ten years"

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