Technology?

The term “technology” is as misused as the word “diet”. Anything you eat makes up your diet. You can’t go on a diet, you’re already on one. You can, however, go on a “restricted diet” or a “reduction diet”. The key modifiers are often dropped.

Andrew McAfee purports that Enterprise 2.0 is “not not about the technology.” Using the Christensen definition noted above, this is true. But is Andy missing a modifier? His writings seem to focus on “digital technology”, which can indeed enable Enterprise 2.0. And yet, many of these technologies have been available for over a decade. How significant then are these technologies and where’s the issue?

Digital technologies labeled Enterprise 2.0, will not provide 2.0 results if implemented with 1.0 thinking.

2.0 Thinking: Embrace Dichotomy

How is 2.0 thinking different? It relies on a shift away from many commonly held beliefs. It is not an abandonment of such beliefs, but requires that they be suspended to move to a more flexible, adaptive middle. It requires the ability to embrace dichotomy, to simultaneously consider opposing concepts to find new possibilities (see “The Opposable Mind” by Roger Martin, Rotman School of Business and “The Innovation Paradox” by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes).

Digital technologies are, well, fundamentally digital. They operate off of algorithms and binary code. As such, they provide approximations of reality. But knowledge work is not inherently defined by processes. Forcing knowledge work into processes defined by algorithms and binary code introduces ‘rounding errors’. The more algorithms and binary code you string together into a single solution, the more error you introduce.

The promise of object-oriented theory was to create reusable pieces of code. This was a fallacy. The true potential was not in the code itself, but in reusable functions – algorithms of process (the real essence of SOA).

Consider the following continuum:

Based on observations from Roger Martin, the adaptive middle requires a move away from (not an abandonment of) binary code. The entire continuum is relevant — optimal flexibility synthesizes all of these. Where the dynamic middle falls, depends on the context of the problem or opportunity at hand. Consider the left side Art and the right side Science. Synthesized, they lead to the optimal: context-relevant design.

One discipline that relies on the synthesis of art and science is architecture. While digital architecture might be considered both art and science, Enterprise 2.0 requires a form of Enterprise Architecture akin to, but not equal to the Zachman Framework (frameworks, the conceptual equivalent to technology platforms). No one individual can or should defend the various perspectives needed to shape such an architecture.

Structure Minimized, Not Eliminated

Fundamental to Enterprise 2.0 is simplicity. The most simplistic form in nature is that which emerges, governed by the laws of complexity – the middle between chaos and order (basic premises of complexity science, including feedback loops are assumed and not detailed here).

Emergence is strangled by order and dissipates in chaos. It requires “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”. In his book by the same name, David Weinberger lays out a “unified theory of the web”. Enterprise 2.0 embraces a unified theory of work, celebrating the most adaptive resource a company has: its people.

Enterprise 2.0 unleashes the potential of corporate resources by shifting control. While management does not go away, it is not an activity in the hands of a few.

Gary Hamel suggests, “Management is out of date. Like the combustion engine, it’s a technology that has largely stopped evolving…” Management is not a group of people with a title, it’s “the capacity to marshal resources, lay out plans, program work, and spur effort” and “is central to the accomplishment of human purpose.”

Fluid Structure: Think Lava Lamp

There’s no ‘big bang’ theory. Emergence does not evolve from nothing – it requires structure. Endless possibilities of form emerge from the elements and constraints of a lava lamp. Break the container and the possibilities of the elements end.

Where does structure come from? It depends – this, the ultimate design answer. The right answer comes from the context of the business.

There are no checklists for creating an Enterprise 2.0-enabled environment. The business is already operating. The challenge is akin to repurposing a Boeing 777 into a 787 Dreamliner mid-flight, except there is no ‘finished’ design, but there is a starting architecture (heuristics). Most progress is tested/validated in-flight.

The term “repurposing” should not be taken lightly. Tremendous potential exists for leveraging what’s already in place: “Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees” Arthur Schopenhauer. One form of this is the mashup, but there are many other ways to leverage existing resources by using pieces of existing designs and solutions or modifying them with new functional or UI patterns.

While digital technologies contribute to the structure, they are only seeds. At the lowest level construct, Blog technology is not different than a Wiki: both provide functions to create and display content in a specific format. The main distinctions in Blogs and Wikis are the functions and formats they provide. But the same is true for all other common desktop applications. A Blog or a Wiki is no more inherently social than email.

Indeed, Blogs and Wikis are common to desktop applications in one very negative way: they can create more silos of information faster. This is the antithesis of the flexibility required by Enterprise 2.0. There must be a guiding architecture for Enterprise 2.0 success, one that separates the UI from the functions, the format from the content and data. A digital technology that earns an E2.0-relevant label, will be built around or support such an architecture, one that understands and leverages the fundamentals of fluid structure.

Architectures rely on operating assumptions: an HVAC system must be kept in good repair to maintain comfortable temperatures for building occupants. Enterprise 2.0 requires some form of facilities maintenance. The evolving details of the care and feeding of the environment can be embodied in a Governance Model, not to be confused with highly regulated models often used for restraint. The E2.0 version is more heuristic than algorithmic, but includes a blend of recommendations and process. It may define formal and informal roles. It simply reflects agreements.

No Beginning, No End

There is no prescribed starting point for Enterprise 2.0, but there is one capability that emergence fundamentally depends on: the ability for people to find each other by things that define relevance – work, topics, skills, affiliations, trust. As well, people must have ready access to relevant ‘raw materials’ for their work. Shorten the distance to finding relevant resources.

To be truly emergent, Enterprise 2.0 must be seamlessly integrated with knowledge work. It cannot be an appendage; it should not require adoption.

Enterprise 2.0 is inherently social. It is not about managing knowledge but is about rendering knowledge. It is enabled by, but is not achieved by installing a digital technology. It unleashes the potential of humans not with workflow, but by flowing work and thought on persistent conversations.

Jeff at NPR with Andy Carvin, me and David Weinberger taken by Doc Searls

Jeff Jarvis writes today about the value of his blog – He says that it has got him all his work over the last few years. The same is true for me. NPR, all my work in New Media, Blackwater, Education – all my paying gigs have come through this medium.

Our money comes largely as a side effect: Here is Seth on that -

At a seminar at the local library, someone asked, “how do I make a lot of money blogging?”

My guess is that at least week’s seminar, the one on growing orchids, no one raised his hand and said, “how do I make a lot of money growing orchids?”

Sure, people make money growing orchids. Some people probably get rich growing orchids. Not many though. And my guess is that the people who do make money gardening probably didn’t set out to do so.

Blogging is much the same way. The best bloggers make money, but mostly as a side effect, not as a direct result of setting out to use a blog to make a profit. It’s just too long a ramp up time, too frustrating and too uncertain to be the best path to make a living.

If it makes you happy (and your readers happy) it’s a great place to start. Step by step you get better at it, and then you discover the ancillary benefits. But the benefits kick in best when you don’t set out to achieve them.

What about you?

Immediately following Hart, David Weinberger gave us his vision of where the chaotic, miscellaneous, Web in all its ganglionic glory appears to be tending. Weinberger offered a radical recasting of the now hallowed nostrum, “Information wants to be free.” It’s quite otherwise — if I may paraphrase his thought: It’s we who are trying to be free from information.

Hart and Weinberger were coming to the crux of FASTforward08 from seemingly antipodal perspectives, and it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both:

In this corner, Hart, the corporate maven, looking at advanced search and context as a new platform for news and data providers like Dow Jones to actualize in ways that add tremendous and new kinds of informational value to large numbers of end users – so much so that they’ll happily pay ample subscriber fees for the privilege.

In that corner, Weinberger, looking at the “here comes everybody” energy, complexity, and messiness of the web as it is today, with its social spontaneity, its twittering micro-nets, its folksonomies that defy rational taxonomies because they’re spun from the arbitrariness of all those other minds. Each of whose lives, passions, traumas and idiosyncrasies is planting its own imprint on what matters to them. The result: a burgeoning infinity of highly idiosyncratic tags, links and ephemera, each of which makes sense within the universe of one that constitutes any single end user, but which present varying degrees of opacity to any data-mining operative whose success depends upon predicting how various sets of users organize their most vitally important data.

The differences between Hart and Weinberger come through in the differences between Hart’s dashboard and Weinberger’s “new front page.” For Hart, the idea is to know what the user needs and wants, and to build a unique set of data that changes with the contextual moment. Her example of the finance worker whose top news stories and analyses will be shaped by his or her clients’ portfolios made perfect sense, because the professional setting from day to day offers a predicable set of tasks, hotspots, and priorities.

Weinberger’s “front page,” on the other hand, is described as a rich and amorphous mess of referrals, nets, connections, keyed to the individual but marshaled by no one, controlled by no one. No two front pages of this kind will ever be alike, raising serious questions about to what extent there could ever be some commodification sufficiently compelling as to command a subscription fee.

Of course a key difference is that Hart’s dashboard is driven by professionally identified objectives and informational needs, where Weinberger’s “new front page” has as many shapes as it has users. Where Hart begins with the assumption that much of what her user needs and wants can be intuited and provided, Weinberger’s user is pretty much the vortex of a dynamic series of singularities – indeed, his user’s “front page” is more like the sign of what is unknowable until it exists, and mutates as soon as it is known. Never the same, as once was said of a river.

In a way, isn’t this one paradox at the heart of FASTforward08? Its ambitious spectrum brought the promise and excitement of advanced search techniques that will surely provide large new affordances within the Enterprise and new opportunities for monetization in the space between the Enterprise and its end users. At the same time, it touched on some thorny questions arising from the fact that human beings are usually not transparent, often do not understand themselves, and resist efforts by others to horn in where they themselves may fear to tread.

Which gives us reason to ponder one of the many suggestive things FAST ceo John Markus Lervik had to say in his opening address:

Today’s online environment is shaped by the person in it.

If true – and there’s reason to think it is becoming more true each day – then the professional knowledge worker is about to enter an environment steeped in a precocious awareness of her needs and wishes.

But those who, like irritants in oysters, generate something in the web that goes deeper than the consumption of information, could be less than delighted when approached by someone offering to do it all for them.

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.

The description from the program: “Reality has sold us a bill of goods: Because we’ve had to keep our physical stuff neat and orderly, we’ve assumed that the ideal information system also is neat and orderly. But that type of organization actually excludes more information than it makes available. As information – and, importantly, metadata – get digitized, we have to unlearn millennia of lessons reality has taught us. The changes affect not only the basic principles of organization, but also who gets believed and why. In this session, David Weinberger explores what happens to experts, authorities, and the business and institutions that depend on them as we move to social knowledge, rich in connections but often uncontrolled and uncontrollable.”

Of course one of the key complicating factors is that implementation of much of Enterprise 2.0 involves some degree or other of empowerment, which has been a bugbear of organizational life and organizational development for a long time.

As I listened to and watched the presentations, my mind kept circling back to three interesting books I’ve gone though in the past couple of years …. 1) McLuhan For Managers – New Tools for New Thinking, by de Kerckhove and Federman, 2) The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel, and 3) The Future of Work, by Tom Malone.  And I thought of other books I have chewed through in the past as well, as the remainder of this post will show.

Combining the theme of the conference (The User Revolution) the two recent and important white papers recently cited on this blog about user co-creation of value leading to new business logic and new business models, John Hagel’s observations on the impact of the user revolution on organizations, and the presentations from the thought leaders cited above, and the countless articles about the changes observed and coming to top-down direction, control and management, one could be forgiven for suspecting that something big is about to come our way.

There’s always attempts to minimise complexity and the need to deeply understand (we were talking about the above issues at lunch today, and one of our lunchtime companions said "you’ve got to keep it simple, otherwise CEO’s and managers won’t engage").  Right !  

And I mean that .. I think he’s right.  Which is why I expect that many companies will have some interesting failures if they try to do too much too fast.  McAfee did note that there aren’t many horror stories out there, but I think it’s clear that as these tools and services spread, increasingly work will need to be re-designed and the changes to organizational structures and dynamics will accumulate until it’s clear that the networked organization operates very differently, and has different needs for hygiene and development than do today’s existing pyramidic organizations.

As a longtime OD practitioner, and with many friends and acquaintances in this field in several countries on at least three continents, may I say that with respect to hyperlinks and electronicised information systems that people use to communicate and sometimes collaborate .. yes there will be complexity added to the process of effectiveness in organizations, and yes, hyperlinks can and sometimes do subvert hierarchy (a la Weinberger).

Many OD consultants know a fair bit about Semler’s leadership of Semco and the structures and dynamics it has engendered, the earlier Saturn environment, self-directed work teams, socio-technical work systems, Barry Oshry’s work on power in social systems, the relative looseness and fluidity of smaller organization, Participative Work Design (Emery & Trist), Weisbord’s Productive Workplaces: Organizing And Managing For Meaning, Dignity and Community, Zuboff’s seminal study of pulp & paper factory workers  chronicled in her book In The Age of The Smart Machine: the Future Of Work And Power, Elliott Jacque’s stratification methodologies according to time-span of decision-making, and so on.  Another practical look at the emerging possibilities for the democratization of the workplace / organization can be found in Thomas Malone’s recent book The Future Of Work.  Seriously, I could go on … the issues are not new, and there’s a rich history out there to tap into.

The issue(s) of empowerment and how to work effectively as information and values exert a democratising effect have been with us for a long time.  There is a lot to learn about the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives from the thought and work of OD practitioners over the past three or four decades.

But (imo … an important caveat, to be sure) not very much has changed over the past 30 years.  I believe I could make an argument that hierarchy has actually in many instances increased its grip over the past five years.  In saying that, I am consciously remembering David W’s various statements about how hyperlinks and digitally-connected environments can cut the slack out of interactions between people.  With a ruthless focus on efficiency and the use of information technology to pour electronic concrete over many large-scale business processes, we can observe today that when it comes to purposeful interaction between employees and other employees, and employees and customers, and employees and management, there’s not much slack or room to experiment in may organizational systems today … and perhaps little tolerance for the messiness of experimenting with social computing.

Andrew McAfee did say, at the end of his presentation, that implementation would be hard, and that increasingly IT and social computing would create differences in performance between companies.

I think he’s right .. and I also expect that the practice of organizational development will rise from relative obscurity.  But .. and it’s an important but … not too many current OD practitioners have a lot of experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools and services.

The good news is that I think there’s a reasonable chance that there’s a new breed of line managers coming along who get this stuff, and will plunge into it relatively enthusiastically.

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Bio: David Weinberger is a respected industry commentator, thought leader, and author widely recognized for his work on the emergence of the Internet as a revolutionary force in business and in society. David is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard. He published his most recent book, Everything is Miscellaneous, last year and is often seen and heard on such forums as National Public Radio in the U.S. and as a keynote speaker at Internet-related conferences.

David Weinberger will be speaking at the Fast Forward conference in Feb. I mention this in the context of his helpful thoughts about how the world is going to be “organized” when there is so much content available.

The world no longer has to be organized in a hierarchy.  It can be found instead.

It appears that Micorsoft sees the value in enabling people within enterprises to discover the “Wisdom of Crowds”. No longer does the Enterprise have to Organize its information in an ever more cumbersome and complex hierarchy. What Microsoft hope they can offer the user is easy access to anyhting inside the organization – just as Google is allowing us such access outside. With this approach to search, the full power of the enterprise knowledge can be accessed relatively easily. This might actually start to change things?

This leads me to another point about Media, TV and Radio.

TV and radio Content is today largely organized as a library or worse. Much of the content is simply a set of lists or even worse a set of Banker’s Boxes with stuff in it that you have to rummage through to find. Look around station or Producers sites – I wont embarrasss them by linking. You will see a catalog or worse a long, long list of stuff with no way of finding it or finding out whether the content is worth looking at.
My sister lost a 4 carat diamond a few years ago while cleaning out the horses in her barn. The diamond remains latently valuable but only if a person was to find it. That is what it is like for most stations and producers. If you have diamonds, they are in the shit somewhere and no one knows how big they are. PS her old farm is in new Jersey.

So many in TV and Radio have not got one of the key value issues in the new media. If I cannot find it easily and if I cannot evaluate whether I should use my precious time, no matter how good the content is – it has little or no value.

Organizing content to be found and to be evaluated will be a critical source of value in the new media when content will approach the infinite.

More later