Author Archive
by Tom Mandel
June 19, 2007 at 1:11 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I’m starting to think that we need a new way of thinking about the ‘return’ on new technologies like those comprised by Enterprise 2.0. The traditional metric of “Return on Investment” is really not useful when discussing disruptive steps forward.
The most important ‘returns’ from these new technologies can’t be known in advance, and certainly they can’t be quantified in terms that come from the very contexts they are about to transform! How would a CxO have framed the ROI of telephones in a world where they weren’t in existence? Not possible.
Hence, I propose the idea of Return on Change — ROC — as a new framework for discussing the benefits of adopting the new. ROC can only be communicated in the form of stories — or maybe it would be better to call them scenarios — that envision the possible serendipities, singularities, black swans, or whatever term you prefer when you talk about the unexpected and transformative.
The term “black swan” I take from Nassim Taleb’s book of that title, which I think is essential reading for anyone who wants to investigate this complex world we live in and think we understand. The term refers to the singular, unexpected events that statistics cannot explain, and Taleb argues convincingly that there are more of these than you might imagine.
The idea is relevant to our subject — the influence of new social technologies on business. At its heart, ROI is a form of extrapolation — but you cannot extrapolate the new and change, however fervently you think you can.
Hence… Return on Change. Lets start using this term and thinking about what its radicalness means for the future of those who commit to The New.
by Tom Mandel
June 19, 2007 at 12:27 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Blogging Andy McAfee’s keynote from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Joseph Thornley notes that McAfee pushes back on the question of the ROI of Enterprise 2.0:
McAfee cautions against attempting to justify the adoption of the tools solely in terms of ROI. Early estimates are likely to be contentious. He instead suggests that the focus should be on telling the story of what they do.
(my emphasis) I think this is a key point, and it connects with one of the key capabilities of Enterprise 2.0 software as well — the ability it gives individuals in the organization to “tell the story” of what they are doing. I don’t just mean via blogging or wiki entries, but rather the fact that all the key technologies of Enterprise 2.0 (as of Web 2.0) enable people to express more fully what they are doing, just by doing it! Their tagging, their social networks, their social bookmarking — all these ways of being present and connecting express individuals and their work in a way that makes them more available and productive in the organization.
As I’ve stressed in past posts, this is not really about collaboration. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if that word passed from the vocabulary, or at least from wide use. In daily life, we are all interacting in ways that are useful, productive, generative all the time, not just when we are in explicit collaborative groups or working together on projects. These facts of sociality are much more significant than mere collaboration, I mean to say, and the more we enable them in software and other technologies (viz. mobility, media and more), the quicker and more surely we’ll continue to step forward in the process of changing business — and changing everything business can change.
by Tom Mandel
June 19, 2007 at 9:50 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I’m in SF for SuperNova later this week, but I wish I could also be in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference going on now. Fortunately, the Corante crowd is covering it blogeliciously, with Suw Charman giving us some notes on Andrew McAfee’s talk this a.m.
David Weinberger has opened a whole new field, however (and who’s to be surprised?) by blogging himself — possibly while he was giving his a.m. keynote? Anyway, here it is. Oh wait a minute, that’s still Suw reporting on David. Whatever. It’s really interesting. David’s subject is “Shaking Enterprise Foundations,” and good for him for talking sense!
(One problem with posts like this, btw, is that every third word and every name really should get a link — i just can’t do it this morning, gang. Sorry!)
Suw on David’s wrap-up:
these are big changes, it’s not hype, it’s right at the heart of knowledge, authority, trust, and how it’s smudging the supply chain, the org chart. We are reshaping business, whether we like it or not. Business is changing from being ‘theirs’, to the remaking of knowledge and authority that is ours.
That’s good stuff, folks.
by Tom Mandel
June 18, 2007 at 9:30 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Andrew McAfee raised the problem a month or so ago of whether people using Enterprise 2.0 tools look like they’re not busy enough. The meme has circulated enough that now it’s surfaced as a deck on slideshare.
Tell me what you think!
by Tom Mandel
June 18, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Interesting article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal — “Social Studies” offers an overview of how companies are incorporating the use, especially, of blogs, wikis and rss, and goes on to hint at coming adoption of social networking and content tagging.
For readers of this blog, there’s not much news here, but coverage like this is certain to fuel experiments in adoption, so — as Martha Stewart might say — it’s a good thing.
by Tom Mandel
May 29, 2007 at 11:42 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In my last post, I reported on JP Rangaswami’s open email system. By opening his email to his staff, he has essentially created a ‘cost-free’ collaboration forum with no learning curve.
I can easily imagine the value of an email server add-on that would allow anyone to turn any email to which she had access into a message thread. Perhaps something like this exists.
Email has always been collaborative in some sense — that’s what “cc:” is for after all. Open email extends this utility. But there is more one could - and should - do with email.
Because email is chock full of tacit knowledge, it’s an ideal content base for tagging and social networking.
Collaborative groups are pre-defined - as in the case of JP’s staff - and leave little headroom for any ‘emergent’ result. People in the group share collective intelligence and add to it too, within the limits of the group.
But, if email could be tagged, we would share collective intelligence in an even more useful way and would allow people to integrate and extend knowledge by mashing up an even larger variety of sources — including, in this case, what must be the largest unstructured knowledge repository in existence: email.
by Tom Mandel
May 29, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This morning I read about JP Rangaswami’s open email system in a post by Stowe Boyd. JP has
opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.
Stowe points out “how revolutionary open email could be in a historically closed and secretive corporate context.”
Jimmy Guterman, writing on O’Reilly Radar takes the point a step further — or rather, his fellow Radarite Brady Forrest does; Jimmy quotes him as noting that
Although this is analogous to making email like forums and wikis, the key difference is that you are using email as the entry point. It’s not a separate wiki/forum site.
Good point. “And,” Jimmy adds, “since it’s a tool that everyone uses already, it’s more likely that the non-alphageeks you work with might be more likely to use it.” That’s an even better point.
Jimmy asks whether readers think this would work in their companies — and I’ll ask the same thing.
by Tom Mandel
May 21, 2007 at 8:20 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In a series of blog posts, Shai Agassi has taken up the subject of enterprise software, the third generation. Shai approaches his subject from a very different angle from what we are talking about here as “Enterprise 2.0,” but obviously there is much to think about in juxtaposing the perspectives. This is essential reading.
In his first post, Shai “looked at the following four layers in the stack: Store, Compute, Messaging, Presentation” and saw the following characteristics for the new generation:
Storage moves to some combination of Network Storage (think S3) in combination with in-memory stores
Compute will be disrupted on the server by cloud computing (which is an evolution to higher level of distributed than C/S) together with local grids as represented by appliances.
Networks will move from packets to events – in a sense sending business objects around, with the network aware of the content and able to route them using local enterprise bus that understand the relationships between roles and resources using rules.
Finally on the client side we will see smarter browsing – able to scale up the experience and fit the experience to the user and the content. At the same time, mobile clients with higher fidelity of experience but lower level of resources (screen and keyboard) will overtake the role of the desktop as the dominant platforms for user interaction.
More interesting, he says, is the question “what meaningful new experiences do you get from these innovations when they come together.”
Comments and his follow-up post make this a very lively and important conversation. Check it out.
by Tom Mandel
May 21, 2007 at 8:11 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Last week I wrote about a Wall Street Journal article chronicling the conflicts that globalization has led to at SAP (full text of the WSJ article here). We can expect more problems of this ilk as companies employ Enterprise 2.0 tools to ease global collaboration and social networking.
Shai Agassi, who left SAP recently, was quoted in the article and has now commented on it in his blog.
by Tom Mandel
May 17, 2007 at 10:32 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The recent flap at and about Digg, which first pulled then allowed community-generated posts w/ a key for breaking DVD encryption, is an example of one way Web 2.0 (and therefore Enterprise 2.0) user generation of content can lead to conflict. Jevon MacDonald has written about the flap on this blog.
Is it a surprise that conflicts arise in a community? I don’t think so. But, many of us tend towards a kind of techno-utopianism, believing that a ‘content democracy’ has within it — almost by definition — the tools to resolve conflict. You can look at the Digg issue resolution as confirming the point or as disproving it (the community will not share liability should Digg be sued).
Behind this techno-utopianism is a primitive form of libertarian political views. By primitive, I don’t necessarily mean unintelligent, not at all, but primitive all the same — a few simple ideas, not really open to examination or disproof, upon which many judgments depend.
Perhaps the problems at Digg will help us examine such ideas? The examination would be useful for those of us involved in advice or consulting in respect of changing organizations via Enterprise 2.0 tools. Changing the work done in them or changing their culture.
I’ve written about Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent post on this subject. Like Dion, I’m an optimist on the subject. I too believe that new tools can catalyze new initiatives and new cultural values.
But, we ought to understand as well the complexity of these changes, and the inherent limitations they may face in any particular context or for any particular enterprise or other entity. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates the extraordinary complex of problems that can arise around such change. The article investigates SAP’s changing culture as it globalizes and distributes decision-making and product development to compete in a ‘2.0′ world.
This is essential reading. I read the paper edition of the article on an airplane last friday, the day it came out, but it looks like most of the text is captured here.
About ten days ago, Dave Winer wrote a post comparing Twitter to a coral reef. “Calling a technology a coral reef is the highest compliment I can pay.” I’ll torque Dave’s metaphor slightly by applying it to social computing as a whole. Coral reefs are marvelous entities, developing and feeding ecologies and becoming beautiful. But, they are quite sensitive to externalities — should the surrounding temperature rise even slightly, the reef’s survival can be threatened.
In just this way, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and many other social computing initiatives engage in a critical, sensitive way with their externalities — the cultures and core interests of the people they impact. Those of us who paid some attention to SAP’s recent Sapphire conference in Atlanta know that SAP is committed to this new set of technologies. But the Digg story and the SAP story should get us thinking about the pace, methods, limits and effects of change. It’s our role to be optimists, but we need to be realists as well. We need to constantly rethink our ‘primitives.’
by Tom Mandel
May 17, 2007 at 9:31 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
We’ve been talking a lot lately about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, about whether it’s a big thing or a small thing, about whether it changes the world or changes work, about the forces that promote it or stand in its way. It’s a good thing.
But, I bet most of us know lots of people who really don’t understand what Enterprise 2.0 is or why it’s relevant to them at all. We spend time explaining the basics to those folks. That’s a good thing too.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply point them to a resource that would help them ‘get it’ quickly? I don’t mean something like Wikipedia or a del.icio.us page full of links they can use to research Enterprise 2.0, or even a list of links to work by Andrew McAfee, the inventor of the term if not the phenomenon. People need to understand why something is relevant to them before investing the time to read encyclopedia articles or look into a subject in depth.
With that in mind, meet Charlie. This simple and engaging presentation gets people excited about Enterprise 2.0 — every time!
by Tom Mandel
May 8, 2007 at 3:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Dion Hinchcliffe’s post with the above title is too useful for you to rely on my summary. All the same, here is the key point, as I see it. Hinchcliffe notes that
“business “culture… often holds back what’s possible in terms of information technology — certainly for good reasons at times — but just as often because it lacks a change agent that can successfully bridge the barriers that’s preventing the corporate culture from evolving to adapt to ideas and approaches that are genuinely beneficial.”
But, he argues, this is not a likely fate for Enterprise 2.0 technologies:
“because they appear to so easily cross organizational boundaries, can be adopted so easily, require virtually no training, are highly social, and so on, Enterprise 2.0 apps appear to have their very own “change agent” by their fundamental nature.”
It seems to me that this is a very interesting rejoinder to the charge of ‘techno-determinism’ made against folks who see Enterprise 2.0 as an inevitable next step.
Perhaps any truly viral technology is so because it is a change agent as well as a productivity tool. Certainly this is true of mobile phones, and one can see that the entire music industry must change because of the iPod and rss.
by Tom Mandel
May 8, 2007 at 1:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The blogospherical (not to say circular) conversation continues about Tom Davenport’s post questioning the impact of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee’s response, and the ensuing opining by moi and others here and elsewhere.
Jon Husband agrees with both Tom and Andrew. He also concurs with others who have weighed in that Enterprise 2.0 will have long-term effects in organizational change; don’t look for any near-term changes. I like Jon, but really the nice thing about predicting long-term effects is that the prediction comes with zero expectations, and the bad thing is that it has no value at all. I’m sure Jon would agree.
To me, there is something very wrong about this so-called debate, which is being conducted in an exchange of abstractions and palliatives. Here are the three leading - or should I say misleading - abstractions:
- Enterprise 2.0 technologies pose an explicit challenge to the hierarchies of organizations
- Believing that widespread adoption of E2.0 is inevitable is “techno-determinism and -utopianism” (Andrew McAfee’s phrase)
- A big change like Enterprise 2.0 can only happen if it is sponsored by “management” as a “strategic” move executed from the top down.
Each of these abstractions is wildly incorrect and ahistorical. I’ll address each of them in a subsequent post.
Right now, I want to move from the abstract to the concrete and offer an example of how an Enterprise 2.0 technology would make a typical piece of enterprise work easier and in doing so would relieve an organizational hierarchy of a task it’s not good at.
Lets say I am in senior management at Enormabus, Inc., and I have a meeting with an important prospect in Paris to discuss a potential order for our new ThogWheel product. Lets say that I live in Pleasanton CA and for whatever reason I can’t bring an engineer with me to the Paris meeting. Thogwheel is complicated, though, and I’d really like to have a sales engineer with me who fully understands it, one from the Paris region or at least close enough to fly in for the meeting. How do I find that person?
Assuming that I navigate the explicit hierarchy of our organization, I’ll climb the local communications ladder until I find someone at a level high enough that she has a peer in Paris. Through my contact, I’ll get to that person in Paris, who will then navigate the French office hierarchy downward from report to report until the right person is found and put in touch with me.
Notice that this methodology is quite brittle; one person on vacation or otherwise unreachable breaks the tree, and I have to start over on a new path up/down the hierarchy. Note also that for many in the chain it is low-priority “busy work” to move my request along. Success is questionable unless the hierarchy of power is explicitly deployed to make this happen.
Now, what if instead we had Enterprise 2.0 social bookmarking/tagging software integrated with our Enterprise search at Enormabus. Software like that provided by Connectbeam (disclosure: I have a stake in Connectbeam), Cogenz, Lotus Connections, and others. By navigating tags and user profiles, On my own, I would quickly find a sales engineer in or near Paris who is familiar with Thogwheel. The effort might take from 5-15 minutes. The net savings in effort is high, the redundancy and resilience of the system is high, no or little coordination is required, and there is no need to deploy relations of power to make it happen.
Ceteris paribus, this kind of capability is available across the Enterprise 2.0 technology stack. It’s simple, inexpensive, and in most cases you can just start using it without anyone’s help. Do you really think something is going to stop this from happening? You don’t have to be a techno-determinist or a techno-utopian to know which way the wind blows.
This is the same kind of transformation as occurred 25 years ago when to get a financial model I had to navigate a bunch of formalisms, get my request to the MIS department (you remember them, don’t you?) and into their queue, and wait six months. Then I found the IBM PC and Lotus 123. End of story. End of MIS department!
by Tom Mandel
May 3, 2007 at 8:05 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
My post on Tom Davenport’s skeptical response to “Enterprise 2.0″ has drawn an interesting response from Bill Ives on this blog. There is not enough difference among any of us to allow for a real debate, but I want to clarify a point from my post.
I’m a big fan of Tom Davenport. As a commentator on and analyst of organizations and their cultures, I can’t even carry Tom’s gym bag! When I called a point of his “rhetorical,” I wasn’t criticizing him — rhetoric is one of the key tools of all writing. It’s not a bad thing!
My goal was to distinguish between enterprise work and the organization of enterprises. Big changes to the ways people work in enterprises do not necessarily change the structure of those organizations, not in the short run and not necessarily in ways we can predict.
Even if lots of people in an enterprise blog, and its teams use wikis, and everyone benefits from tagging and social bookmarking, and social networks arise to ease collaboration — even with all these things, we cannot conclude that these enterprises will become more “democratic” or “better places to work.” The changes are good on their own, but technology is demonstrably not a route to utopia.
In that sense, I could be thought of as agreeing with Tom Davenport. Change is constant, and it is emergent. New tools do affect the future, but we we won’t be able to measure that effect directly, and the end of hierarchical organization is nowhere in sight.
But, I hope the key takeaway from my post is that we will see the success of Enterprise 2.0 in its wide adoption — not in some change it spurs in global capitalism or corporate hierarchies. In fact, I hesitated before writing this post, because I didn’t want to displace Jevon MacDonald’s post on accelerating Enterprise 2.0 adoption from the top of this blog. Check it out.
by Tom Mandel
May 1, 2007 at 4:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Tom Davenport recently wrote an think piece to explain why social software won’t transform the enterprise. Andrew McAfee, who coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0″ to describe this kind of software, replied. In comments on their two posts, a lively debate ensued.
Tom describes Enterprise 2.0 as “the widespread adoption of social media and participative technologies in order to transform culture and decision-making in large organizations.” He then disputes the claim that it will “empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work,” although he does express himself as favoring this development.
I don’t understand the debate, because Tom’s first point is a rhetorical straw man, and his second seems both inaccurate and ahistorical:
1. Social technologies don’t exist in order to transform organizations. That’s a straw man. They exist in order to give people powerful new tools to get their work done!
2. Pretty much any technology that gives people in business more power to communicate, model, express, collaborate, or undertake any other core business activity will “empower employees, decentralize decisions, (and) free up knowledge.” It would be hard to imagine any other result! Yet, obviously, it’s not the technology but the widespread use of the technology that leads to change.
Surely, the prime example is the personal computer itself — and there were plenty of people around to express the same kind of skepticism Tom expresses about social software. The PC changed the way enterprise work was done. So will the new Enterprise 2.0 tools of social media and other social software.
Now, will enterprises be transformed because enterprise work has been transformed?
Well, were they transformed by the PC, by email, by the Web itself? They certainly were changed, and new technologies will continue to change them.
The tools of Enterprise 2.0 are simple and powerful, the results will be emergent; we can’t know them in advance, but we can be sure they will be there!
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by Tom Mandel
April 30, 2007 at 2:40 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In some ways, the simplicity of this helps us understand why we want to open up knowledge, increase human connections, and create more ways for people to exchange more — in the enterprise, on the block, around the world.
In this generation, in a world where so much has become possible, will we not all be measured by what we have contributed to change?
by Tom Mandel
April 30, 2007 at 2:29 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
My friend Luis Suarez, an IBM knowledge management 2.0 guru, has written a nice post about the ways Twitter would be useful to enterprise workers, especially those who are very mobile — obviously, that’s a growing number.
It’s a great post, and I hope you’ll click over for a read — so I won’t summarize it here. What I will say is that it indicates a trend I’m watching: an amazing percentage of new services on the Web, that debut for… well, lets say just for whoever might be interested in something new (usually - tho not always - techies and geeks), really do refactor well for enterprise use. Sometimes, as in the case of Twitter, it’s obvious — especially once someone like Luis does the work of pointing the applications out to you! Other times, it is a matter of experimenting with the functionality of an online service and trying to think through how it would translate to your business context.
On the subject of software to experiment with, I’ve been looking at Library Thing, a service that lets you catalog your books, tag them, and create social networks around the books in your library. It’s neat.
It seems obvious to me that Library Thing would be useful in an enterprise context. We all have favorite books, ones that have influenced us or that we have been able to apply in our business life. Nor need it be limited to books — periodicals, individual articles, Wikipedia entries, blogs and posts, each of these represents a social nexus, a way to find, interact with, and grow through people who can add to what we know and can do. In that sense, Library Thing, which was certainly not conceived for business use, seems a natural for business users to experiment with.
One thing we may be learning is that “collaboration” is not the only, maybe not even the main, software-supported social application. I.e., neither wikis nor blogs even begin to exhaust the field of enterprise social software. We may be about to figure out that they really aren’t even central to the field. Perhaps it’s the kind of connections that have potential for serendipity that are the greatest untapped resource within the social potential of the enterprise.
Software and serendipity — now there’s a subject for further investigation. Please feel free to use the comment thread to that end. I’ll be very interested to follow and participate in the discussion.
by Tom Mandel
April 26, 2007 at 11:52 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Lately, we’ve been hearing some concern that Enterprise 2.0 tools run counter to the core organizational principles of the enterprise. That’d make them dangerous. Enough so that complexity-in-business guru Dave Snowden recently noted a suggestion from a corporate Knowledge Management person that employees should be required to have a license to blog – ala a driver’s license.
That sounds serious, doesn’t it? After all, organizations are hierarchical, structured around relationships of management and reporting, whereas the new tools of Enterprise 2.0 reflect the individual and unorganized state of the public Web, especially “Web 2.0.” Isn’t there a contradiction here? Are “Enterprise 2.0” and the enterprise itself on a collision course?
This idea comes naturally to anyone who fears that a fiefdom or other power domain may be breached by new social software tools. But, it’s also behind the concern expressed by some of Andy McAfee’s students that using social software tools will make them seem laggards – like they don’t have enough to do. And Nicholas Carr’s skeptical claim (a year ago - he may have a different opinion now) that the more valuable an employee’s work and time are the less likely she may be to use these new tools amounts to the same argument as well.
If you are like me, you sense that these arguments are specious, but you have a hard time putting into words what’s wrong with them. After all, we have always gotten our work done with the tools we had; did this ever before prevent us from adopting new tools? Moreover, this same objection was used against bringing personal computers into the enterprise a quarter century ago. People were too busy to use them; only gadget freaks were interested.
As to the idea that social software can be a time waster, so can any productivity tool. Ever drum a pencil up and down on your desk?
As good a counter-example as the PC is, there is an even better one sitting on your desk. A purely social technology you use day in and day out – I mean your telephone, of course. Talk about a potential time-waster! Talk about the most important business productivity instrument of the twentieth century!
Here’s what I think is wrong with these arguments – they confuse corporate organization with the way we get corporate work done. Yes, reporting and managerial relationships are inherently hierarchical. But, this organization sits on top of a work environment that is always social and often collaborative.
Perhaps we are misled by the checkered history of the term collaboration; in the last two decades we have seen a lot of “collaboration software” that wasn’t very productive. And, too, perhaps we have the idea that “social” means something like “socializing”, so that we are forced to argue for social software by saying that, hey, lunch can be productive too!
It’s information itself that is social — embedded, that is, in the active social relations of the people who create and use it. Access to that “sociality” of information is what turns it into useful, human knowledge - in business as in daily life. Recently, a Sean Park post reminded me of The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that is essential reading for anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0.
by Tom Mandel
April 18, 2007 at 5:05 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Do you know why human beings like sex, why dogs hump each other, why male pigeons bob and weave, courting a crack in the sidewalk? I do.
All the species that weren’t possessed of an over-the-top, redundantly expressed sexuality died out, that’s why.
Jerry Bowles’ response to Brian Oberkirch’s blog post about the ownership of “content” (God, I hate that word), is an example of a principle I am creating with my fingertips right now — the principle that ideas want to appear in many places. One could take it further and say that the better an idea is the more places it wants to appear, perhaps even the more responsibility we bear to make it appear in more places.
I’ve just been looking at my friend Jerry Michalski’s Google Reader shared items, his reblog as people seem to be calling this kind of thing. Google Reader lets you aggregate a bunch of feeds, format the content as if it were a single blog, and then “share it” — i.e. publish it at a publicly-accessible URL. Jerry’s shared item site doesn’t contain any ads, but you know and I know that Google is going to use these reblogs as places to post ads; if not today, wait until tomorrow.
Seems to me one could recreate any aggregation site, or a custom one, on one’s own — and then republish it (or refeed it to your own URL with your own advertisements). Ummm, the pillow fight’s in full force; I don’t think we’re going to get the feathers back in their pillows, do you?
Note that a reader can’t comment on blog posts in a Google Reader reblog, and that clicking on a post takes you to the site it came from. Moreover, given that the dust has settled between Jerry Bowles and Brian Oberkirch, please understand that I’m not writing to direct you to that tooting teapot (as I called it in a comment on Brian’s original post). I’m writing because of the principle I just created.
Redundancy is critical to the flow of ideas and the creation of knowledge. I think that it is a nice pair of glasses through which to view some core Enterprise 2.0 phenomena, in particular the value of tagging, which is a redundancy engine.
In fact, I’m so excited about my new principle, which I may call Let a 100 flowers bloom, that I am going to use this post to create a contest. I’m going to give a free t-shirt to the person who contributes the best Enterprise 2.0 example of “idea redundancy” and its value. Use comments to this post to suggest your ideas; the deadline is this friday COB.
(By the way — I have too many t-shirts any way; I’ll just pull some conference shirt from my drawer and send it to the winner. Don’t worry, I’ll wash and fold it first!)
by Tom Mandel
April 17, 2007 at 4:10 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This, from itbusiness.ca, Canadian business magazine, reads a bit as a puff piece, but is still interesting:
Donald Rippert, Accenture’s chief technology officer,”sees the future of computing in the enterprise” in “the kinds of things teenagers are doing online.” Rippert “has already begun making that vision a reality at Accenture, …borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet.”
“Rippert looked at YouTube and wondered why a teenager can find a an amateur video on the site quickly and easily, but finding a video of a corporate presentation in a business’s archives is next to impossible if you don’t know the exact title of the file. He picked up on the idea of allowing every user to tag content.” “This month, Accenture went live with a new global employee network that looks much like Facebook.”
It would be interesting to take a look at Accenture’s new offering, and I’ll see whether that’s possible. Rippert goes on to say that more is coming, including wikis.
I wonder, when you read the article, whether you’ll agree about two things that stick out for me.
1. wikis are coming late in the cycle. It’s not wikis or any software for user-generated content that is driving this new architecture. And, Rippert stresses, employees won’t be pressured into using wikis or similar software.
2. instead what seems to drive the process for Rippert and Accenture is tagging and social search. The new ways to search, unlike wikis, Rippert adds, “will replace the old way of doing things and employees will have little choice about using them.”
Lets keep an eye on this; are we seeing a new order of Enterprise 2.0 implementation develop, in which tagging, social search, and Facebook-like profiles lead the way? These technologies seem to lean more in the direction of social networking and rather away from collaboration.
Not that these are unrelated, but there is a difference, and it’s worth watching whether powering emergent phenomena like networking takes precedence over powering the more traditional end of “the architecture of participation.”
I think entrepreneurs, investors and enterprise technology strategists should all be very interested to learn more about Accenture’s new goodies. What do you think?
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