by Paula Thornton
June 29, 2009 at 3:07 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing
I’m interrupting a couple of pieces in progress, because this topic is too significant to wait on. It raised its head as I was listening to a great panel discussion from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, facilitated by Peter Kim, featuring the Social ’stuff’ experiences of Allstate, Jet Blue and Humana. One caveat, as with all 2.0 conversations, it’s important to separate the B2C and C2C-focused examples from other focuses (B2E, E2E etc.). There’s a heavy B2C/C2C slant to the discussion.
Ben Foster from Allstate made two great comments:
Enterprises and practitioners are often guilty of using Social Media as a cure chasing a disease.
We’re moving past the experimentation stage…
There were many more great insights shared as these companies find their own ’success’ around these technologies. There was something between what was shared that scared me — a repeat of the evolution of IT: fostering isolationism — reinventing silos. One panelist even mentioned the word “silos” but I believe his meaning was in transcending organizational (or other) silos via open conversation. While conversations may be more ‘open’, they’re only as ‘open’ as the application or format by which they’re bound.
This is an old issue — one I posed to Bill Gates circa 1990 (when he was the ‘guest speaker’ for nearly every event in Seattle, and common folk had direct access to him). I asked him, “When are you going to separate the files you create from the applications that create them?” His response, “I don’t understand your question.” He didn’t wait for me to explain either. The main issue: the things applications create are ‘locked into’ the format of the application that creates them.
Blogs and wikis provide specific formats to content. There are behavioral format clues that differentiate a blog from a wiki, but under the covers it’s all content. Content elements have value beyond the formats and applications that hold them hostage — they’re enterprise assets that can be repurposed in other formats. The specific format of content (.pdf .doc .html) is really only relevant for consumption — to associate the ‘viewing’ of the content with an application that can display it. The semantics of the content itself doesn’t really care about the format (don’t hold me to that when I’m telling you how to create semantically-relevant formats), just ask your favorite search engine — it’s all words to them.
The significance and potential power of a format-agnostic architecture is evidenced in the recent demos of Google Wave. What we don’t have are the corresponding ‘drivers ed car crash movies’ to illustrate the disastrous end to conversations that are locked and isolated in disparate tools and formats.
Sadly, the significance of a well-architected application platform was something that was understood by the designers of Ventura Publisher, which applied format to the content via SGML — text, graphics, etc. were all managed in their raw form, and ‘assembled’ into the desired presentation format — in 1986. These were some of the same people from Xerox PARC who created the original graphical UI elements that Microsoft and Apple later fought over in court.
Consider a simple ‘hostage’ example (one that I’ve been aghast as many UX designers have missed the significance of), a UI with the labels “Blog” and “Wiki” as two separate options for navigation. If I’m looking for something (pick anything), which one should I look at to find what I’m looking for? You may suggest that I use the search feature (conveniently bypassing the original design issue altogether). This would have to assume that search constantly indexes all the conversations in real time — the results are typically grim, adoption fails.
Clearly, Microsoft contributed to ‘isolationism’ again with SharePoint — everything all neatly packaged in individual projects, with no ability to ‘watch’ for redundancies or facilitate cross-fertilization of conversations (ignoring for a moment that ‘conversations’ weren’t really supported anyway). And as David Armano pointed out in a Harvard Business Press post today, it all requires a healthy dose of seeding, feeding and weeding along the way (the continuous wetware element that IT rarely accounts for).
Sure, 2.0 technologies can increase transparency across organizations, but that’s all lost as you move across ‘closed’ solutions or formats, with no architectural layer to synthesize it all. One silo is simply replaced by another.
To capitalize on the potential of Enterprise 2.0, there has to be a total architecture that considers the full lifecycle and use of content, as it is leveraged for action (the part KM missed).
by Rob Paterson
June 29, 2009 at 9:41 am · Filed under
Adoption, Story
How can you get more people to use social media? The barrier is cultural not technical.
Tell good stories about people using it.
Harold Jarche pointed me to this excellent article by Peter Bregman writing for the HBR - Snip:
To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:
- Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
- Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.
How do you tell a good story? Here is the master Scott Simon with a lesson – telling a story about story telling
by Rob Paterson
June 27, 2009 at 12:48 pm · Filed under
Adoption, Air Travel, Twitter
In Canada, our Southwest is Westjet. Here is how Westjet plan to use Twitter. I think that this is a first in Canada and others will be forced to follow. The beginnings of a a Tribe!
Twitter account will give guests access to great deals
CALGARY, June 26 /CNW/ - WestJet today announced the
introduction of a new service that leverages the power of
Twitter to provide its guests with instant access to great deals.
Those Twitter users who sign up to follow "WestJet" on twitter.com
will be provided with seat sales, special offers and
other uniquely-WestJet opportunities. This Sunday, June 28, 2009,
the first of WestJet's Twitter deals will be made available to
those individuals following "WestJet".
"We are a young, vibrant and healthy company," said
Richard Bartrem, WestJet Vice-President, Culture and Communications.
"We need to employ all media possible to reach guests and
prospective guests to offer them relevant information and great
deals.
Today's announcement is a reflection of how social media has
become a staple for many of our guests and our WestJetters.
The viral and word-of-mouth nature of social media is perfect for
companies with great offers, great products and fun cultures
like WestJet.
"We are encouraging as many people as possible to sign
up and follow us on Twitter.com before Sunday, June 28, so that
they are in the know with the first of many wonderful deals."
In addition, each day from Sunday, June 28, to Thursday,
July 2, WestJet will be offering its followers on twitter.com
one trip for two people anywhereWestJet flies in Canada.
Visit WestJet's Twitter site at twitter.com/westjet
for more details.
by Jim McGee
June 27, 2009 at 12:22 pm · Filed under
Clayton Christenson, Enterprise 2.0
A dozen years ago, at the height of the dotcom boom, Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma. It started from a simple observation that transformative innovations that reshaped competitive landscapes and created new industries almost invariable came from new organizations. Conventional wisdom held that this was a reflection of poor management and decision making on the part of incumbents. Christensen started with a more interesting, and ultimately more productive, question. What if it was sound management practice on the part of incumbents that prevented them from investing in those innovations that went on to create new industries? This question and Christensen’s research led to his distinguishing disruptive vs. sustaining forms of innovation. I originally reviewed the book in the Spring 1998 issue of Context Magazine. It became the bible of consulting firms working in the dotcom space. Every proposed idea was labeled as disruptive. Who knows, some of those consultant’s might even have read the book.
Meanwhile, Christensen and his colleagues and collaborators continued to work out the ideas and implications of his emerging theoretical framework. The Innovator’s Dilemma was followed by
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth.
In this book, Christensen begins to lay out how you can take the notions of disruptive innovation and use them to design a reasonable course of action in the absence of the kind of analytical data strategy consultants desire. Disruptive innovations attack either the lower ends of existing markets where there are customers willing to settle for less performance at less cost, or new markets where a new packaging and design of available technologies creates an alternative to non-consumption. The example I found easiest to understand here was Sony’s invention of the portable transistor radio. Compared to vacuum tube radios the first transistor radios were crappy, but good enough for teenagers and others on the go whose alternative was no music at all.
Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change.
In this third effort to work out the implications of distinguishing between sustaining and disruptive innovation, Christensen and his collaborators shift their attention from individual competitors to industry level analysis. They take their theoretical structures and apply them across several industry settings and ask how those particular industries (education, aviation, health care, semiconductors, and telecommunications) are more or less vulnerable to disruptive innovation strategies. What Christensen and colleagues are doing here is to begin integrating their innovation theories and Porter’s theories of competitive strategy. This is not so much a case of seeing whether their new theoretical hammer can pound strategy nails as it is of whether they are making progress in creating a new and robust toolkit for strategy problems.
The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, Anthony, Scott D.
This volume is written by Scott Anthony and several other collaborators of Christensen who are putting his ideas to work at the consulting firm Innosight. They develop the next level of operational detail 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 the next level questions and identified the supporting analyses and design steps you would need to answer and complete. 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.
This core of books would equip you with a robust set of insights and practical techniques to begin thinking about when and where you might attempt to develop and deploy new products, services, and business models in disruptively innovative ways. The one area that is underdeveloped in this framework is that of design. There is an implicit bias in the material that tends to keep design in the "perform magic" category. I believe this is part and parcel of the general execution bias of business literature in general. Design is flaky, creative, stuff and real managers distinguish themselves on execution. But that is a topic for another post. These books belong on your shelf and the ideas belong in your toolkit.
by Hylton Jolliffe
June 24, 2009 at 4:45 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
With the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in full swing in Boston, we thought it as good a time as any to let you know about a tweak of focus here at the FASTforward Blog. As you know if you’ve been tuning in to this blog since its launch, its purview has been Enterprise 2.0 in its entirety – ranging from talk of tools and their selection, the first barrier of adoption, to discussion of the cultural issues and challenges around adoption, the second barrier.
While selecting the right tools for the job can certainly prove a barrier to adoption for some organizations, even after they select the right tools they are always faced with the more formidable barrier to adoption – one based on social, cultural and business process issues. How to let people organize themselves in those environments? How to integrate the use of the tools with various business processes and in some cases allow those business processes to transform themselves? How to let go of control and allow some form of self-organization? How to reconcile existing workplace policies with those new virtual environments?
There are many publications and blogs that focus on that first barrier, the tools, and we’re going to leave that to them. Going forward we’ll be single-mindedly focused on the second and the questions above are the critical ones we’ll be focused on. We’ll be telling stories, reporting successes and failures, offering commentary and counsel on what works and what doesn’t, and weighing in on which models or practices should be emulated or avoided. We hope that you’ll take the opportunity to share your learnings with us and and in turn our community of readers, many of whom are wrestling with similar challenges and struggles. Sound like a useful refinement of purpose? As always, we’re interested in your feedback and thoughts.
