by Joe McKendrick
March 5, 2008 at 4:01 pm · Filed under
Change, Collaboration, Dead Paradigms, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, IT Department, Messy World, User Revolution
In the old days, radicals talked about workers owning the means of production.
What about owning the means of production in today’s information age?
Bob Lewis has a 21st Century take on this: why not leave it up up to the end users to supply their own computers on the job?
Here’s the lay of the land, as Bob puts it:
“When using their home computers, end-users experience a vast array of possibilities, but at the office they operate in a very constrained space; and increasingly, ‘work/life balance’ is giving way to “‘live your life wherever you are.’”
As we’ve seen from the many insights coming out of FastForward ‘08, users need to be unleashed to get their jobs done with the tools they see fit. So why not let employees do their thing with their own PCs? As Bob Lewis put it:
“No corporate-owned PCs at all. Let employees buy their own — whatever they think they need to do their jobs. It’s Nicholas Carr’s vision in reverse: Only central IT remains. Employees take over ownership of the periphery, including responsibility for their own PC support.”
We already see plenty of instances of employees using their own mobile devices for work-related connectivity. And, countless users log in from their homes to check into the intranet or for updated communications.
Of course, the legal departments would pull their hair out at the notion of everyone bringing in their own machines to work, especially in light of fears of data being taken out the door. But if there were a way to effectively lock down data either online or offline, wouldn’t this idea make a lot of sense?
So, Bob put another idea out there — virtualize. “Give end-users two virtual machines.” One virtual machine — the corporate virtual machine — could be “buttoned-down, corporate, protected, fully supported, and strongly connected.” The personal virtual machine could be the “sandbox,” on which users can do anything their hearts desire.
by Jon Husband
February 8, 2008 at 10:16 pm · Filed under
Adoption, Blogging, Culture, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Trust, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Via Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter, I learned that George Colony, Forrester’s CEO, has recently started a blog (… as Rob Paterson has been pointing out, Twitter is a great place to pick what’s of interest to you out of a flow of murmurs, pointers and other snippets from a bunch of smart people)
I think Forrester has been pretty steady and early in their understanding that blogging is here to stay and will have large impacts upon marketing, PR and the evolution of knowledge work inside the enterprise. Forrester’s Charlene Li was early to the party and produced some good research about the blogging and social software phenomena in a business context …
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… and more recently Forrester had the good sense to hire Jeremiah (Owyang), a smart and well-informed fellow.
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It will be interesting to watch and read Colony’s blogging, and over time see if he, like many other people, comes to believe that it is useful to think, question and listen in public and "out loud".
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Tags: Forrester, CEO blogging, Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang
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by Jon Husband
January 26, 2008 at 11:02 pm · Filed under
Business Model, Change, Charles Handy, Cloud Computing, Conferences, Dead Paradigms, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, open source
Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.
In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market. The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study 
David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.
It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.
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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence
Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.
[ Snip … ]
On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”
This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.
The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.
The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”
All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.
Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.
One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.
Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.
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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute. I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.
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Tags: Collective intelligence, new business logic, new business models, ROII, Return On Investment in Interaction, cloud computing, co-creating value, decentralization, wirearchy, hierarchy
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by Jon Husband
January 22, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under
Change, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds
Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" (both terms coined by Marc Prensky, a virtual learning / game-based learning guru), and recently colleague Rob Paterson offered up a post (The Social Web - A New "World") noting his "aha" moment about the issue.
"It" is interactive, it’s fast, the flows of information are overwhelming, it feeds social computing, it’s not going away, and it will be coming to a workplace near you. It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that the pressures due to a growing demographic shift are getting more and more tangible every month. When the Gartner Group starts predicting that the coming generations of knowledge workers will understand how to work in wirearchies, and predict that their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities .. well, one might say that awareness is growing.
Remember sending groups of people off for training on the latest complicated software ? Will that change ?
JP Rangaswami, who writes often about the use of social software in the enterprise based on his experiences at DkW and BT recently emphasized the coming impacts at the LeWeb 3 conference in Paris, noting in his presentation that:
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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.
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This also reminds me of the central issues raised in a seminal article article in the Economist 18 months ago titled The New Organization, namely that most organizations have watched the rise of the networked worker (and equipped them all with Crackberries) without making fundamental changes to organizational structures and work design,
I suspect that’s one of the core targets of Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, in which he lays out this key challenge for executives and managers everywhere.
Here’s one Gartner Group analyst’s take on the coming challenges associated with Enterprise 2.0 and the war for talent in a digital era.
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‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 into Your Business
Clint Boulton
September 20, 2007
Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools.
LAS VEGAS—Digital natives—people who grew up using interactive Internet tools—will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.
As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.
"They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done," Bradley said.
Digital natives will thus usher in what Gartner calls the Enterprise 2.0, where users will use rich Internet applications, social software and a Web platform to execute tasks.
Social software includes social networking (Facebook-like profiles), social collaboration (JotSpot-like wikis and blogs) and social publishing (social tagging, think Digg) tools to interact socially and boost organizational effectiveness.
While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be "free form," or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.
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Tags: Marc Prensky, Rob Paterson, JP Rangaswami, digital natives, Enterprise 2.0, hierarchy, wirearchy, the new organization, networks, Gartner Group
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