Trying to figure out what all of that means ahead of time to create an ‘optimal solution’ is meaningless. Like knowledge, it defines itself and its relevance within the business context, guided by a design strategy. This is the primary reason that the ‘internet as platform’ is so relevant. This is the same reason that any E2.0 solution should not be an ‘application’, but a flexible platform to accommodate a variety of structures that can be tailored to ‘fit’ situations as conditions change. It means that we need to move from an application-focused paradigm to an architecture-focused one, where we leverage ‘bits’ of structure that are ‘applied’ for a given set of circumstances in the form of: templates, filters and functions.

This goes before the box (which i am not sure where it came from…

Couple of things:

1. I found my new favorite paragraph to explain why E20 and all related tools and terms matter.

Incredible insight into the changes to come.

As I said to you before via Twitter, time to stop talking and start doing – unfortunately. The difference between this version and the past is that two key things happened now. First, people became aware of their power, position, and the awesomeness (for lack of a better word) of the internet. They get it, and they use it. Last time we went through this the movie “The Net” had given people the totally wrong idea about it and the fear was still there. No longer, now we know what it is, what it can do, and how to use it. Second, we have (to quote your post) the working platforms — which we did not have last time. This is what is going to make it easy: KB, KM, User Management, CM all in one place and managed very well. That platform if what is going to drive the changes.

And those platforms (for all companies involved in a short term) are communities.

Think about how a community comes together, communicates, collaborates, and even defends itself. That is what you want to bring out from people so they can contribute to the community thriving. and flourishing, And, btw, if we get it all this working together and happy with each other, we will go back to the basic tenets of making the changes you highlight above – but faster, easier, and better.

As well this new research might add at least one question mark on our assumptions, “Cozy Social Networks are Stifling Innovation” http://twurl.nl/gy2n6x

Adoption is a whole ‘nuther subject I’ve addressed previously http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/07/09/adoption-cant-be-driven/

Resistance is the same thing in physics as ‘noise’. It’s there to tell us something. We have to both listen and seek to understand what it’s telling us.

People are not resistant to change…they’re resistant to being changed without cause. There are plenty of things they’re dying to have changed.

There is all this innovation going on and yet conditions are not changing in the workplace. What is happening? I believe that companies who wish to increase the quantity and quality of meaningful collaboration amongst its knowledge workers are going to have to be willing to change the way that they do business. Innovation isn’t just another line item in the budget. It is a profound and systemic alteration of the corporate culture. One without the other is just a waste of time and money.

I once was was very accepting of the ‘community’ model. You’ve updated that a bit with the ‘collaborative places’ concept — far more flexible.

I’ve discovered that there are often situations where the ‘collaborative places’ are separate from the individuals — which is one scenario of relevance. But they often fail to address the collective space of the individual — which is different than, but inclusive of, a profile.

I’ll diverge from your belief in 3D and VR. While there are some cases where they are justifiable, in general ‘real’ is far cheaper (video and the like). The cost-benefit of VR doesn’t weigh out.

We did come up with a case tonight where we yearned for a VR situation — leveraging the writings of dead people to create personalities that can adapt to a conversation based on the patterns of their existing logic. But then we figured if we were going to go down that path we’d just as soon engage in the exchange of Q&A with them on a Holodeck : )

There is one sentence I really like : “In reality, for the average worker, the only thing about an enterprise that is real to them is their workspace that sits before them”. I would add, their workspace, their office and probably the water cooler and the copymachine …

One of the challenges for E2.0 professionals is to think of their collaborative platforms and social media tools as “places” and not applications. We have already moved, I think, from individual – focused applications. We are designing the tools that allow for collective thinking and action (I also like “Clay Shirky very brilliantly points out that the true potential is in moving “from Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action”).

To my mind, collective thinking and action really happen when people meet physically, are able to engage with one another and AFTERWARDS, keep working together, meeting when necessary. And then, the challenge for the new E2.0 environment is to appear as places where people that have little opportunity to meet physically are able to really engage and share their thoughts and issues.

It all boils down to replacing the “desktop” with a variety of access into an ecosystem of collaborative places, where real and virtual melt seeminglessly. It’s why I think 3D and virtual reality are needed to reach all promises of E2.0

As well, ‘most’ of it is design specific — being able to bring all of the elements together. We actually faced very similar issues when attempting to deliver Data Warehousing. With a major vendor conference held at MCI (with then DW-practice colleagues from BT [British Telecom] and MCI Systemhouse [a consulting arm]) we told vendors that what we really needed for them to do was to STOP building applications/solutions and start building components so we could assemble them all, as needed, and put our own UI on the front — in 1996!

Having lived with this same architectural vision for over 15 years, it’s so hard to be patient. But I continue to learn a lot more as I wait.

I agree with you that we need a lot more doing in innovation than focus on simply the outcomes. If you want real innovation to happen around the way people communicate & collaborate with each other, you need to give them a set of tools to enable it to happen and build a reinforcing system–then get out of the way. You might need to give them some guidelines up front, but if the tools are the right tools, the community involved should be able to figure out the best way to apply them within their own contexts fairly quickly. Look at the Twitter evolution as a real-world example.

Having done some focused research on enabling collaboration & communication in decentralised work teams a while ago, I think there’s still a lot to do in this space. Rather than the vendors trying to push more products, I think what we really need are some good examples where communities have employed these tools to produce a measurable reduction in the transaction costs of performing their daily activities, and where this has been done by using the tools in non-standard or innovative ways. I haven’t seen any of these yet, but would love to have pointers to them if they exist.

In a way, you’re really talking about the convergence of things SOA, E2.0 & Cloud, presented in an accessible way that allows people to focus on getting things done vs. how or what the tools are or the services they provide. Unfortunately, I think we’re a ways away from where the tools are natural extensions of the knowledge worker in the same way the hammer is the extension of the blacksmith’s arm. Many opportunities for innovating, however.