Archive for April, 2010
by Rob Paterson
April 6, 2010 at 8:03 am · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, Chaord, Organizational Design, Relationships, Social Networking, Trust, Trusted Space
What is value? Usually it is something that is scarce. What is scarce today? Certainly not content which is why all the attempts to make content pay are doomed. Content has never been more plentiful. In fact we are approaching the point where content is all but infinite.
The Value point then becomes finding content that means some thing to each of us. So Search is a Holy Grail here. And it is very valuable. But can we rely only on algorithms? I do not think so.
This week two people that I respect and trust a lot Craig Newmark and Jeremiah Owyang have put their own stakes in the ground saying that ironically it will be a screen of named people in our social orbit that will be the final layer of screening for meaning. That our impersonal transactional world will return to a personal world where reputation is key. There is enough convergence to call it now I think.
What you are about to see is how the world will be organized in the future. It’s official now!
This is the new Org Chart.
The Inner Circle is your Trusted Space – moving out from this is a gradient of Trust and Intimacy – These rings have numeric boundaries. The Inner Circle is limited to 8. The next ring for you is 34. The outer ring is of course 144. If you look up to the diagram above the “Donut”, you will see the Fibonacci Curve. There you will see that these numbers are the boundaries of the curve – this is how nature organizes all complex systems. The Dunbar number is 144. (Not 150 by the way) We know that 8 is the ideal team size. We know that 34 is the ideal large team.
To the left I have added the “Permaflower” – this is the organizing model for Permaculture. I think that this may be the model that we use to organize the Natural Organization.
Here is how Craig opens his piece:
People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.
This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.
Everyone gets a chance to participate in large or small ways, giving a voice to what we once called “the silent majority.”
Here is how Jeremiah describes it:
Here is how a Permagarden is layed out:
Here we see the idea of a gradient in the hierarchy more clearly. Inside the network are of course sub networks. In Permagardening, these are called Guilds. They are reinforcing groups of diverse species. Toby Hemenway is the source of these lovely garden images.
Talking about guilds here is how Chris Allen has shown us how Guilds form in WOW.
In this slide you can also see the leverage that the Fibonacci Sequence can give you. Imagine your 8 inside the Trusted Space. Imagine that you have 4 good friends in the next circle who have 4 friends who have 4 friends and then 4 more – that is 4,096 people. A group of 34 with 4 friends gets you 1.3 million. 144 gets you 429 million.
A small group can have huge social leverage. Enough I think to so anything.
by Bill Ives
April 6, 2010 at 3:40 am · Filed under
ERP, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
I recently received a survey that looked at ERP Implementation strategies. The results made sense to me. It said the three most widely discussed are:
Big bang – Implementation happens in a single instance. All users move to the new system on a given date.
Phased rollout – Changeover occurs in phases over an extended period of time. Users move onto new system in a series of steps.
Parallel adoption – Both the legacy and new ERP system run at the same time. Users learn the new system while working on the old.
It turns out that 40% used a phased roll out, 38% used the big bang approach, 11% used a combo of biog bang and phased, and only 9% used parallel adoption.
Now I have yet to hear of a broad Enterprise 2.0 adoption effort that did not use some form of parallel adoption. The enterprise 2.0 approach is likely lead by example, internal viral marketing, and demonstrate value through use rather than the top down edict than is implicit, if not explicit in the ERP efforts.
ERP provides infrastructure that often requires work processes to confound to the software structure. Enterprise 2.0 is often attempting to provide tools that will conform to your work practices. With ERP adoption is not the issue, except in the 9% of cases where parallel adoption is used, With ERP the issue is implementation, as people are generally required to use the system. The study stated than 83% of the ERP implementations studied were considered successful.
Despite is low use, parallel adoption is thought to be the least risky ERP implementation process. “It includes running both the old and new ERP system at the same time. This way users can learn the new system while performing regular work activities on the old system. After requirements for the new system are met, then the legacy system is decommissioned.” It is also the most expensive method because of the heavier requirements and this accounts for its lower use.
I think the first lesson is not to mimic ERP as it is very different as described above. However, looking for opportunities to reduce and gradually eliminate parallel adoption is good strategy as you can potentially reduce costs and have the enterprise 2.0 become the “way of doing business.”
I was involved in one example were a blog was substituted for email and attachments as the way to support collaboration by a task force. The members had no choice and it was not presented as a big deal, just a switch in tools. Soon the increased value of using a transparent tool became apparent to the users and there was not a major adoption problem. It was basically a “big bang” approach on a micro-level. I guess you might refer to this as phased approach in looking at the enterprise context. So another lesson for me is looking for ways to introduce enterprise 2.0 as the way of doing business or a task without a look of fanfare. Sometimes the fanfare can get in the way, especially when old ways of doing business remain an option.
What do you see that enterprise 2.0 can learn form ERP, if anything?
by Jevon MacDonald
April 5, 2010 at 5:33 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
The Enterprise 2.0 Conference hosts a startup launchpad every year that has proven to be a great way for high quality Enterprise 2.0 focused startups to get in front of a group of potential partners, analysts, press and customers. In return, the Enterprise 2.0 conference audience has a chance to see the most promising and innovative enterprise Social Business software coming to the market. This has always been my favorite part of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
At Dachis Group we are committed to supporting enterprise Social Business startups as much as possible, in that capacity I am proud to be helping out this year as one of the judges and presenters for the launchpad competition.
To enter the first round of judging, simply tweet about your startup using the #e2conf-lp tag!
The competition invites all companies and developers, large and small, to enter their application. Their is no fee for entry, nor do do you need to be an exhibitor at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (although if you are, that’s cool too). The bar for entry is set very low – simply Tweet to #e2conf-lp and tell us in 140 characters or less why you are ‘Launch Pad worthy.
You have until April 19th to complete your Twitter pitch – we’ll close submissions at the end of the day. Upon Tweeting your entry to #e2conf-lp, the Launch Pad Jury will make note of your entry. Our Jury will then vote to whittle down the Twitter submissions to 8.
by Bill Ives
April 1, 2010 at 2:10 pm · Filed under
Search, Web 2.0
Pew Research conducts a “future of the Internet” survey every few years. They include some provocative open-ended questions and give them to a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. Andy Oram was one of these and he published the questions and his longer that requested responses. The first one was, “Will Google make us stupid?” Now I generally agree with the idea that there are no stupid questions. This one comes close but it might serve the purpose of pointing out why the answer is no.
Some advances in information processing have been met with resistance and perhaps even caused people to raise the above question. The phonetic alphabet reduced our dependence on memory and allowed for the literal record of ideas. It did perhaps make our memory less potent as we had the crutch of a written record to make up for lapses. However, the numerous advantages certainly out weight any losses here.
Some inventions do not seem to carry many negative consequences such as the calculator, at least from my perspective. Others provide great benefits but at a cost. The automobile gets us places faster but has increased pollution, results in many deaths, and increased many countries dependence on foreign oil. However, we would not give it up.
I think that search engines like Google belong in the same category as the calculator. I do not see any major consequences here. As Andy writes in opposition to Nicolas Carr, “Google frees the time we used to spend pulling together the last 10% of facts we need to complete our research. I read Carr’s article when The Atlantic first published it, but I used a web search to pull it back up and review it before writing this response. Google is my friend.” It is my friend too and it provides more than the last 10% for me. However, like any information tool, the final responsibility for determining the value of the content lies with the person using it.
Despite the day, Pew actually asked this question, at least if you believe Andy and he wrote his piece a number of days ago.
by Joe McKendrick
April 1, 2010 at 10:16 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Crowdsourcing is gaining a lot of credence as one of the most compelling methods we have ever seen for acquiring knowledge. It also may be a huge money-saver.
I was just interviewed and quoted in a USA Today article by Jon Swartz, who documented the incredible efficiencies to be gained by tapping into social networks to solve problems or come up with new ideas. “Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”
Crowdsourcing seems to be strong — or at least most visible — in the advertising sector, he observes. For example, “since 2007, Frito-Lay has dangled prize money and the promise of Super Bowl airtime to wannabe ad execs to create a TV spot for its Doritos chips. It gets thousands of entries and has chosen spots as good as something a Madison Avenue agency might produce for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” In another example, PepsiCo “sponsored a contest that resulted in 30 viral videos for Pepsi’s Aquafina Splash. Pepsi paid $10,000 for three of the videos, which were viewed more than 400,000 times.”
In the article, I cited government agency adoption of crowdsourcing to address vexing environmental challenges. The example I had in mind was how the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, established by Congress after the Exxon Valdez spill, went out to a social network of engineers and scientists to find a way to clean up Prince William Sound. The solution that came back worked.
The idea of harnessing collective intelligence from the network was also recently explored by Aaron Saenz, who observes that collective intelligence (CI) has supplanted individual Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as the new measurement of value. As he put it: “A slight rise in individual intelligence can’t compare to the effect of hundreds of millions of people going online in the next decade. Internet connectivity is increasing quicker than biology could every hope to keep up with.”
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