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.

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.

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.

Tell me what you think!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shai Agassi, who left SAP recently, was quoted in the article and has now commented on it in his 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.’