I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.

And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it.  The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever.  Yada, yada.  Promises, promises.  Here are a few revolutions:

• In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
• In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
• In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
• In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
• In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
• And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.

Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”

And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting?  What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution.  The social networking revolution.  An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way.  Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real.  The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.

I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.

Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships.  But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings.  Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.

(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town.  One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)

Of course everybody gets 2.0 now don’t they. After all even the Oscars were designed for Social Media. Large organizations are piling in.

But is this true? Certainly everyone is on board with the tools now. God I recall Jevon and I talking to CIBC 6 years ago and they thought we were martians. Now everyone is on Facebook!

But how many people “get” what is underpinning these tools? Not many and I have little hope for many too.

Why?

Because underneath all the hype, most of us see the world the same way as before. We see what we see with our eyes. Just like most people saw the world 500 years ago. Then, if you used your eyes, the world seemed flat. This perception allowed to you to do a lot of useful things. You also saw that the sun came up every morning and circled the Earth. This did not ruin your day and was also a useful observation. That is of course unless you wanted to sail a long distance. Or calculate a trajectory or build a complex building or in fact do almost anything that we take for granted in the modern world. Imagine Watt explaining the steam engine to the Vatican? Imagine trying to build a suspension bridge? Imagine anyone doing chemistry – see where I am going.

But we are not so stupid today are we? We don’t rely only on our eyes to tell us about reality?

Well here is your test. Can you see that all these things are in fact a fractal scaling of the same thing?

Can you see that what appears on the surface to your eyes as being unique, different and discrete are in reality the same and that all co-evolve and affect each other? Do you see them therefore as all obeying the same rules, the rules of networks? Can you see how with this perspective everything becomes actually quite simple to understand? All we need to know is how nature governs networks.

Or do you see them all as Objects that are are different – that interact only directly as objects do? That are therefore so complex that we can only know tiny bits of them. So medicine and science are all about the bits and the direct interactions. That we inhabit a Newtonian world where the geometry of nature’s interactions do not apply?

For is this not the prevailing paradigm?

This is why people seek to have masses of followers – this is a Newtonian idea about mass and gravity. It has nothing to do with co-evolution and true influence.

This is why it’s still ALL ABOUT ME! So long as I am OK it’s OK!

This is why medicine makes no sense and each week a new contradictory idea is floated. This is why science is lost in minutiae. This is why our organizations are so toxic. We have designed them to be Newtonian but we are fractal co-evolving networks. This why our mass education system is such a mess. This is why even how we fight our wars means that we have to lose them. This is why we think that there is a conflict between the planet and our economy.

We have been captured by a simple and wrong idea of us all being objects that bounce off each other like tennis balls whereas we are really magnetized iron filings.

No amount of Facebook Strategies will help you if you don’t get this.

The world is not flat and you and I are not an object.

If you want  to know more about this new paradigm of reality – I have the great honor to introduce you to the work of Alexei Kurakin – a genius – a Galileo of our time.

What exactly is the difference between “Social Business” and “Enterprise 2.0,” if there is one?

The question came up at in a Quora discussion, and asked again by Ross Dawson in one of his latest posts.

It’s semantics, but important semantics. Many articles and papers are using the terms interchangeably.  You may recall it was Andrew MacAfee who first surfaced the term “Enterprise 2.0″ back in 2007 as a way to describe the application of Web 2.0 approaches and thinking to enterprise settings, but separate it from the consumerist fanfare.

For his part, Ross sees Social Business as an emerging way to describe the transformation that organizations are undertaking as part of their Enterprise 2.0 activities. Enterprise 2.0 as a term may have a more technical cast to it.

In the Quora discussion, our colleague Jevon McDonald also saw Enterprise 2.0 in terms of the tools and Social Business as the outcome:

“Enterprise 2.0 represents a set of technologies and methodologies for IT implementation inside the enterprise. A Social Business uses Enterprise 2.0 software to implement internal social process but also accounts for things such as: external social presence, supporting process, HR issues, policy development and governance.”

Stowe Boyd echoed similar sentiments:

“A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances. Enterprise 2.0 is generally used to represent the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies — like cloud computing, social media, wikis, and the like — and is, as such, principally a technology adoption issue, and not a reconceptualization of business operations.”

John Tropea, on the other hand, sees Social Business as the journey to reach Enterprise 2.0. E 2.0, he says, is more the idealized end state — Enterprise 2.0 is a concept and strategy to do business a different way…  a more transparent workplace, two-way communication, networked/activity centric overlayed on the present process-centric and blended with hierarchy.” As he puts it:

“With social business design we may reach a state of enterprise 2.0 eventually.”

So which comes first — Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business?

Consider the plight of the Web designer.  I saw a comic a couple of years back (author unknown) that really laid out quite well the hair-pulling process of designing, building, and maintaining a site.  It goes something like this:

1. “Everything is cool the beginning.  The client communicates their needs. You set expectations. Enthusiasm and excitement all ’round.”
2. “The client shows you their current Website. You both laugh at how terrible it is.”
3. “You redesign the Website. It looks nice and works well. This is the high point of the design.”
4. “Just a few ‘minor’ changes.”
5. “Minor changes start to add up.”
6. “The client gets others involved:  ‘Looks great, but I want feedback from my friends, co-workers, uncle, pet hamster, etc.’”
7. “All hope is lost.  You begin to fantasize about other careers… “
8. “You are no longer a Web designer. You are a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing and instant messaging.”
9. “An abomination is born. The client has completely forgotten that they hired you, the Web designer, to build them a great product.”

The process of Website design and management has turned up many, many abominations for businesses across the land. However, social networking may be sorting that all out.  In fact, the flight from Website abominations may now be fueling the social networking movement for many businesses.

IDC’s Frank Gens, for one, recently issued his predictions for the year ahead, and foresees social networking software growing at a 38% percent clip over the next five years. In addition, more than one-quarter of vendors could be gobbled up in 2011:

“We believe that — as a sure sign of social business mainstreaming — 2011 will be a year of consolidation and convergence for social business software vendors, as well as a year of adoption expanding into small and medium-sized businesses.”

The small to medium size business sector is an interesting and growing sweet spot for social enterprise. In fact, SMB adoption is likely to grow to 40 percent of these companies employing online services to better market their products and services, he predicts. The benefit to small businesses:  it’s cheaper and easier to use free online social media services than to go through the time and expense of setting up a customized Website.

In his 2011 report, Gens observes that Website development has topped out for many small and medium-size businesses. Instead, he says, “small and midsize firms will increasingly flock to Facebook and other social networks to establish a free online presence that improves their ability to acquire, engage, and retain customers without the hassle and cost of setting up a traditional Website. We predict that the percentage of SMBs using social networks for promotional purposes will exceed 40% by year-end 2011.”

I’ve finally gotten around to the following TED video that’s been queued up in my "to read/watch" stack. In it, Sugata Mitra describes his "Hole in the Wall" experiments that placed internet connected PCs into New Delhi slums and watched what happened. It’s worth 20 minutes of your time.

(Video Link)

Mitra’s conclusion is that you can get a lot of learning for very little investment, particularly in the trappings of formal education that we tend to take for granted. People are wired to learn and appear to do so best in small groups of like-minded learners. They need access to resources and encouragement. They don’t particularly need someone more expert to guide them; their natural curiosity works as well or better. Mitra’s view is that education is best treated as a self-organizing system.

Digging into how learning works versus how we naively think it works is important in the world we find ourselves in. Individually and organizationally, we are faced with ongoing challenges to learn. Neither we nor our organizations can afford the necessary learning time if it has to be in the form of conventional settings. Following the threads worked for the kids in Mitra’s experiments. We need to follow a similar path. We also need to experiment with integrating those learning paths into the demands of day-to-day work.

I’ve argued many times previously that technology does not create Enterprise 2.0, but enables it. I stumbled on a brilliant contextual example of this from George Lucas as he was explaining to Bill Moyers, in The Mythology of Star Wars, why the digital technology was critical to his capabilities as a director to bring his stories to the screen. He speaks of his struggle to bring an immaculate realism to a totally unreal fantasy world:

“It wasn’t until we created digital cinema that I was able to suddenly have my imagination go wild…it allows me to create sets that I could not have otherwise. Before digital technology…you couldn’t build a set big enough, you couldn’t create that reality.”

Effectively Lucas is pronouncing that technology enables the ability to embrace the myth. Suspend for a moment your alignment of meaning for myth as fantasy or unreal. While it is indeed those things, so is the realm of possibilities. You cannot have a conversation about innovation and not embrace the realm of the myth: an archetype for new realities…and existing ones.

Just prior to the interview, Bill Moyers mentions the influence of Joseph Campbell on Lucas’s understanding of the power of the myth. Campbell provides deep insight into the relevance of myth to the realm of possibilities:

“Myths…come from realizations of some kind that have to then find expression in symbolic form.”

From his own interview with Bill Moyers, Campbell says:

“All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again.”

On a related note Lucas says:

“The human race has always believed it’s known everything…that’s where mythology came from — constructing some kind of context for the unknown.”

But there are myths to represent the unknown and myths to serve as archetypes of the known. Every enterprise operates from its myths. The question is whether or not the operating myths are consistent across the organization and/or truly represent the ‘truth’ that all participants believe they are working toward. George Lucas spoke about his ability to create his own realities but that once he created a rule, he had to live with it — he couldn’t randomly abandon a fundamental rule (e.g. there is sound in space — which in reality, there is not) or his story would be unbelievable and would lose credibility. Loss of credibility undermines trust and fuels discontent and anarchy.

In an earlier reference, Joseph Campbell was speaking of the relevance of myth as a means by which to pursue a noble cause (in his case — earth). Through their research, the authors of Tribal Leadership seemingly discovered the power of a noble cause supported by a set of values (rules that cannot be compromised), which differentiate business cultures and behaviors. But 15 years earlier, Charles Handy had made a similar discovery through his own experiment, as referenced in The Age of Paradox:

“Logical, sensible, mature individuals were competing to the point of lunacy because I had kept them apart. By not allowing them to communicate, I had also prevented them from establishing an alliance, an agreed-on objective, and a means of proceeding. Only when I picked people who had had a chance to talk together were they able to achieve a common goal which benefited them both… A common cause, the willingness to deny oneself in the interest of that common cause, and trust that the other party will do the same –these are the essential of sensible organizational behavior. Much of the time this sensible behavior does not happen because people do not talk, do not trust, and have no common cause…

We instinctively work for our own immediate advantage unless there is an obvious common cause with people whom we can trust to that an initial sacrifice turns out in the end to be to our mutual advantage.”

George Lucas reflects on Star Wars:

“One of the main themes in the film is having organisms realize that they must live together, and that they must live together for mutual advantage. Not just humans, but all living things and everything in the galaxy is part of a greater whole.”

And yet how often inside of an organization are people making sacrifices based on myths which suggest “mutual advantage” but for which there is no intention or means of including them in the benefits? How many operating myths are created for the purpose of providing advantage to a few (a means by which a manager supposedly ‘incents’ his people in order that he might attain a bonus)?

How does a company and its people discover what the operating myths are and whether or not there are conflicts of credibility which might undermine the larger common good? Through open conversations aligned to observable work — fundamental attributes of any meaningful Enterprise 2.0 initiative.

….
Postscript: Perhaps an alternate title for this post could have been “E2.0: Archetypes and Axioms”

I don’t own an iphone or an ipad. I nearly caused a familial meltdown years ago, rejecting my husband’s carefully selected birthday gift: a video ipod. Spending over 3 decades in the corporate world — particularly in IT where anything Apple has been (until more recently) an exception — I’ve just never had a desire to own anything Apple (I will admit to being turned into a ‘movie jukebox’ junkie by the AppleTV unit at my daughter’s house). This seems contradictory to my other purchasing decisions, which are mainly driven by good design criteria (especially cars). But I can and do respect the mind of Steve Jobs.

Reading through the transcript of an interview with former Apple CEO John Scully, I found many critical E2.0-relevant messages from Steve.

While understanding an individual is relevant to design, asking them what they want or think of something new might not be (circle back to the issues with requirements):

“How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.”

Steve effectively suggests that the gap between where things are and where they need to be next is often too large for people to traverse in their minds. One of the challenges with E2.0 is that it presents a gap that too many cannot bridge. Until they are immersed in a context-relevant scenario, the value will never be evident. That doesn’t mean immersing them in just any scenario — it has to be ‘their’ scenario.

Scully noted that he and Steve found common ground not through technology but through industrial design — in the beauty and function of a thing.

“Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry.”

All those failing E2.0 projects, just how many UX resources were on those initiatives? There are some great E2.0 technologies out there. Most of them have major design issues. If the count of developers to design staff is not approaching 1to1, you may want to rethink your efforts. When you rely on technologists to design results, you miss adding the rich perspectives of other design disciplines — like jewelry, or commercial building, or landscaping.

Other quotes, taken out of context, reinforce this:

“you’re starting at the wrong end of the value chain. You are not starting with the components. You are starting with the user experience.

……The user experience is taken all the way from the experience of using the product, to the advertising of how it is presented, to the design of the product.”

I’d suggest that one of the biggest challenges for all IT output, not just E2.0, is that they’ve always started at the wrong end of the value chain. The problem is that they’ve been able to get away with it, until now. There was so much leeway that the error was tolerated. The gap has closed and the breadth of responsibility has widened — technology is only part of the solution.

“What Steve’s brilliance is, is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put into the context of his design methodology — everything is design.

… as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

[...in comparison at Microsoft] everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Does IT even have designers and/or are there designers that direct the work outside of IT? Are you seeing the issues here?

“What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.”

Deciding what not to do is critical to E2.0. The methodology of pursuing requirements focuses mainly on determining what to do — that’s what makes the approach the antithesis of E2.0. The decision has to be a design one — but an informed decision. The first E2.0 function I ever designed was a rework of an existing function (the best place to look for candidate opportunities is with the stuff already happening). In this case it was a people directory built on LotusNotes. It worked, but the interaction to get to the results was cumbersome.

So I worked backwards. The individual profile page at the end of the application was great. I simply eliminated all the other parts before it (not literally, just virtually) and designed a new UI that capitalized on the most common scenarios: searching for first name or last name. The existing ponderous application was left in place for all the other special case scenarios, like searching for everyone in a department, etc. Yes, all of these could have been redesigned over time, but the initial goal is always to go for the high volume or high return activities. Using code from the Yahoo! patterns, a prototype was up in 4 hours and it was production in 2 weeks. While most of that time was spent grappling with issues getting the data exchange to work, there was also the scheduling for moving something into production — IT itself is a barrier to E2.0, from an operational perspective.

Steve Jobs has a no bozo policy; so does E2.0:

“The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them ‘bozos.’ That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.”

One of the grand potentials of E2.0 is as a superhighway for bypassing bozos.

Another key Jobs attribute:

“When he knows something is going to be important he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.”

This reflects the influence of John Lasseter at Pixar, which I’ve reported on before. That said, there’s a grand connection between Jobs and Lasseter which predates 1996 (see Charlie Rose interview).

One of the issues with E2.0 implementations is that it’s more about discovery than anything else. E2.0 projects fail because they’re not focused on discovery. Speaking of Jobs’ fascination with Edwin Land, who brought the instant camera to Poloroid:

“Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them.”

“So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.”

Are your E2.0 efforts being understood through the lens of designing?

The Altimeter Group just wrapped up its “Rise of Social Commerce” event, and there’s no question that there is a groundswell of interest in adopting and adapting social networking to drive new business.

Altimeter partner Lora Cecere provided a four-stage continuum to assess where companies are at in their social business growth.  The four key phases are as follows (by the way, she noted in her presentation, most companies are still in Stage 1):

• Stage 1 — “Let’s Be Social”: Companies “are using social technologies for the sake of being the social. The focus is on the brand, and building a community and its value.” Questions to be asked include: “What are the best tactics to use?” and “How do I influence
  the most influential?”
• Stage 2 –  “Enlightened Engagement”: Companies “recognize that customers seek to be informed during the shopping experience, and integrate an information layer onto the two-way dialog.  This is done through external voices, from customers, prospects, subject matter experts, in the form of reviews or opinions, for example.” Questions to be asked include: “How do I make this easier for the shopper to engage?”, “How do I effectively connect the shopper to enterprise processes?”
  and “How do I use social technologies to improve dialogue with the value chain?”
• Stage 3 — “Store of the Community”: Customers “help drive product selection, assortment, and merchandising. Few companies are ready for this phase, as it requires a complete rewiring of the organization.”  Questions to be asked include: “How do I use shopper insights?”, “Which shopper input best reflects market opportunity?” and “How do I engage trading
  partners to deliver against the store of the community?”
• Stage 4 — “Frictionless Commerce”: The buying experience “is completely redesigned to create a fully customer-centric experience. Companies will need to start with a blank slate to truly envision what this will look like.”  Questions to be asked include: “How do I redesign the buying experience?”, “How do I enrich enlightened engagement processes without slowing buying cycles?”

I like Ted Rubin’s wrap-up of the discourse being heard through the conference, and he surfaces the ROR metric (Return on Relationship), which pairs nicely with the network-effect  Return on Investment in Interaction that my colleague Jon Husband has discussed here at FastForward. Rubin talked about the relationship aspect of social business:

“The view/perspective I keep hearing is all about leveraging consumer’s social graph to sell more product. But when I hear the case studies, and see where true progress is being made, I hear more about interaction, engagement, and sharing… i.e. relationships. When I think about social commerce what seems to be the greatest opportunity is growing/nurturing the connection, participation and loyalty of a consumer, which in turn will build ROR… Return on Relationship. This is the first step required to make all this social integration sustainable and long lasting. Relationships are what will lead to the ability to sell more, not using customers to sell more product, but by facilitating/enabling feedback, sharing, reviews, and therefore build dynamic advocates who openly sell product they love and are passionate about.”

This morning @MrAlanCooper was on a roll with an anti-requirements theme of tweets. I replied that almost a decade ago I had given a conference presentation “Requirements Don’t Work”, which included many references from his books. Recognizing that I randomly perpetuate this conversation all over the place, I’ve gathered parts of it here, starting with one from today:

Requirements are a response to a design — they’re not the procuring cause of a design.

Let’s look at this realistically. If the current methods, which include requirements, worked then why is there a 68% failure rate in IT projects? Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman) postulated:

The solution lies in recognizing that requirements definition is critical.

Been there. Thought that too. But it’s been debunked (sadly, pre-internet, reference to the study is gone). I replied to Michael’s post:

Back in 1990 or so I found a one-page ‘editorial’ that reshaped my career focus. It effectively reported a study to ‘debunk’ the “we didn’t get the requirements right” theory.

So they audited the process. Were all the requirements captured as intended? Check. Were all the requirements met by the solution? Check. Result: Fail!

And this is where my life changed…they brought anthropologists into the environment in which the system was being used — an emergency room. They added more requirements based on their observations…the system was a success.

Now let’s talk about having the wrong skills…

Attempts to share this same story with a group of Business Analysts, was met with opposition. There I commented:

In reality, requirements (especially the way in which they’re gathered and managed in most cases) serve only one purpose — facilitating testing. They are typically useless for ensuring the success of a solution….

Another valuable analogy to consider is the model employed by commercial building. In that model, assume that Requirements and ensuing Development are not part of the activities of the General Contractor, but are one of the responding trades. That means that a larger architectural/design effort has gone on prior to the ‘response’. In that prior effort, blueprints are already drawn up and specifications (not requirements) have been delivered. The ‘requirements’ are the responses by the individual trades as to how they plan to fulfill the specifications.

The fact that we have a huge phase missing in the discipline of the SDLC and that it starts with some ‘poof’ ["...and then a miracle happens"] of requirements has been a fallacy for decades.

The author of this blog post was unnerved by the dissonance that ensued in the path to common understanding (a deplorable practice often seen in requirements gathering sessions) and closed the comments. Shutting down the conversation is a symptom of the problem: behaviors indicative of and reinforced in cultures of command and control — the antithesis of a 2.0 era. Design inherently insists on embracing creative dissonance.

Clearly there are those who understand the difference — Alan Cooper’s comments today were retweeted by many. Some have traveled similar paths of discovery, such as @suredoc’s (Keith Anderson) “Prototyping Insights From a Guy Who Writes Requirements“, where he also takes direct aim at the classic Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

The SDLC mindset is based on the fact requirements drive everything. By “requirements” I mean a document of some sort that can either be well-written or, as I’ve seen of late, an Excel spreadsheet wishlist.

I remember a custom 9 volume SDLC manual set. I was fascinated by the ‘whole’ of it all. Imagine, 9 volumes of detail as to how the floor of hundreds of developers were to do their jobs (manuals for which I was the most frequent user…to insert page corrections — the cost of which I shudder to consider). In ALL of those hundreds of pages there was a reference to “start with the requirements” and not a stitch of information on what they were or how you got them — in the SDLC, requirements just somehow magically appear.

To better inform myself, I sought out leaders in the requirements process and attended training. Aside from helping us look for ‘nouns’ (clearly a data-focused paradigm), the instructor attempted to give us tracking and auditing skills — again, circling back to the feloneous assumption that requirements are somehow ‘lost’ and that’s the cause of failure. There was nothing discussed about eliciting requirements or the issues to do so — including the also infamous lament from developers “but they keep changing their minds” — as if the changing landscape of business wasn’t a design reality that needed to be embraced.

Similar to my inspiration from the commercial building industry, in “The Obsolete Idea of Requirements” @smalltalk80 (Niklas Björnerstedt) was inspired by the advertising agency model:

In advertising, a customer typically does not write a contract for a single project. The contract is instead the foundation of an extended relation. The advertiser works with the customer, looking at what the customer does and what the customer wants to achieve in the future.  The advertiser then formulates ideas that are elaborated on together with the customer. Some of these ideas result in “projects”, others are more open ended. Over time the customer uses a number of (imperfect) measures to assess how well the advertiser is helping it achieve its goals. Most of the goals a customer cares about are not related to a particular project, they are formulated in terms of the business itself.

Three things to add to great observations. First, Niklas is seeing the influences of design practices in the customer relationship. Second, advertising has a significant difference: creating need where none exists. Third, where he notes “They would describe what they were doing today and what their goals were for the future.” — this will lead to incremental improvements and often radically incremental improvements, but rarely innovative results (often also part of the “requirements”). But innovation isn’t always or even mostly desirable. There are many ’starving workers in the business landscape’ who would trade their paychecks for ‘good enough’. Many truly innovative solutions can be found in the amazing work-arounds that employees have created on their own, just to get their work done in spite of the euphemistic machine they’re forced to operate in.

The realm of Enterprise 2.0 insists on a more open, interative, collaborative and continuous means of making stuff happen than the methods of classic requirements can afford. In design, requirements are the collection of constraints that must be honored, or thoughtfully traversed. Requirements do not specify the results. But as my first quote embraced the classic definition of requirements — the things used to test results against — if everyone still needs to call those “requirements”, let it so remain.

Footnote: In re-reading a prior piece I’d written on Pixar, I was reminded of earlier ranting I’d done on requirements.

An analysis issued earlier in the year looked at social network usage of employees at the largest corporations, resulting in what’s considered the first comprehensive look at social media activity among 100,000+ employees of these corporations.

The resulting NetProspex Social Report provides a “Social 50 Ranking” of the top 50 most social corporations in America, as well as “The Twitter 20″ of  companies with the most employees on Twitter. In addition, a network breakdown looks at what social networks are most used by employees at the largest corporations, and even gender differences are discussed.

The top 10 social enterprises include  1)  Microsoft;  2) eBay;  3)  Amazon.com;  4) Walt Disney; 5)  Google;  5) Electronic Arts; 7) Intuit; 8 ) Raytheon; 9)  Best Buy; and 10) Apple.

The most popular social networking service was LinkedIn, used by 43 percent of employees of companies, followed by Facebook at 11 percent.

Reed Smith, however, made an interesting observation about the types of companies not appearing on this list. Namely, healthcare-related organizations.  At a time when the entire country is in an upheaval over spiraling healthcare costs and concerns about quality of care, wouldn’t this be a good time for hospitals to be more socially networked?

This is not to say there is no social networking of any kind taking place in healthcare settings. Smith points to numbers compiled by Ed Bennett that at least 825 hospitals have active social network efforts underway, including 634 Twitter accounts, 631 Facebook pages, and 391 YouTube channels.  Of course, this is only about 14 percent of the 5,815 functioning hospitals in the United States, as tracked by the American Hospital Association.

Low numbers, but at least a start. How could hospitals benefit from social media?  A big, big area where social would make a difference right away is in nursing and allied health recruiting.  Many healthcare establishments are struggling to find qualified, certified professionals to round out their patient care teams. Nursing shortages are legend, but there are far too few respiratory techs, radiology techs, cytotechnologists, and physical therapists. Being able to build and participate in online networks where HR and staffing specialists could engage with skilled professionals could go a long way in alleviating these critical shortages.