Archive for Enterprise 2.0
by Bill Ives
July 27, 2010 at 3:38 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Here is an interesting idea that has been well articulated in a new book, The Learning Layer by Steven Flinn. I recently had a chance to speak with Steve about this marriage of aspects of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence (aka adaptive systems) that can have useful applications within the enterprise.
Steve is the CEO of ManyWorlds, a firm that conducts R&D in the area of next generation systems and business processes and provides practical applications of this work to organizations. He was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell where he held a variety of positions including Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Alliances. Steve has a background in economics, mathematics and computer science.
Steve noted that use of personalized responses based on user behavior has been pervasive on the consumer Web through such things as Amazon’s recommendations. However, this technology has been applied much less within the enterprise. He feels that this is ironic since behavioral information available within the enterprise can generally be much richer than out on the Web. You have a more clearly defined set of users and many more interactions to data mine, along with more related teams who collaborate and generate more behavioral data. I would certainly agree with the difference in the quality of information on user behavior and also add that many Web 2.0 applications such as wikis work better within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This seems to be another case.
The Learning Layer approach takes this personalization several steps further. Not only are personalized recommendations provided to individual users based on their behavior and the behavior of others, but the system feeds these recommendations back to itself to continuously adapt on an automated basis. Steve said that the technology is currently available to do this, it just needs to be properly applied.
For example, a system managing content might make recommendations for related content based on a user’s profile and actions. Using the Learning Layer approach, it would also keep track of all user behavior and feed this back into the system on a regular basis. The relationship between two sets of content may become stronger or weaker depending how it is currently being used. The same logic can be applied to the connections between people to see the ebb and flow of connections.
The approach can be applied to work flow and here it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Just as old school knowledge management created more direct business value when aligned to business processes, I see the same thing happening here. Let’s take the example of a property casualty insurance underwriter. After the system takes in enough actions to be able to differentiate the skill level of users, it is ready to go.
Now if an underwriter with no experience in underwriting laundry mats, for example, starts to work on one the system recognizes this. It also knows the steps that an inexperienced underwriter should take when working with laundry mats and provides these process steps. It can also recommend a person who is slightly more advanced than the user who can offer guidance. If the user has middle level experience, then the process steps can be tailored to that level. In the meanwhile the system is observing the ongoing user behavior on an aggregated basis and making adjustments in the proper process steps for everyone at all levels.
The technology is around to create this type of system. I can see the value and wish I had this capability when I designed knowledge management systems for underwriters in the early 90s. Call centers that deal with complex topics would be another great target area. You need to have enough complexity to warrant this type of intervention and then enough users to generate useful data for the system to apply.
We also discussed the concept of learning value that Steve raises in the book. He took the concept of value of information from decision analysis and applied it to learning. In decision analysis people calculate the value of having certain information to help with decisions. The same concept can be applied to learning. When undertaking an activity there is the direct value and the value of the learning derived from the undertaking. This often translates into the amount of uncertainty that can be eliminated by the new knowledge and its effect on actions. Steve noted that learning only has real value if it changes behavior (i.e., decisions). If people will still do the same thing regardless then nothing is gained. That sounds simple but it is often overlooked.
I like this approach. I think it does extend the possibilities of enterprise 2.0. If we can create data rich environments through the transparent interactions within enterprise 2.0 then we have expanded the learning opportunities. Then if we can use this expanded learning to better guide individual behavior we have taken it a notch further. Now if we can turn this learning back on the system to auto-generate changes within the system itself, we have taken things another step further. I think the data gained from the transparency of enterprise 2.0 is a large piece of the value. Here is an approach to make better use of this transparency.
by Paula Thornton
July 20, 2010 at 10:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
With considerable attention paid to Enterprise 2.0 adoption, it’s time to turn the light on something lurking in the shadows: engagement — or, more appropriately, disengagement. This isn’t a matter of rejecting the technology — this is a matter of people not being able to get along.
Consider typical relationships and interactions. A relationship or interaction is abandoned when:
- The useful reason for the relationship or interaction has been fulfilled
- There were ‘irreconcilable differences’
At work, people are most effective when they can leverage all the resources available to them. Well-designed Enterprise 2.0 capabilities provide critical value by connecting resources to one another. But then what happens?
It turns out that we’ve been conditioned into behaviors that ill prepare us for the new opportunities that follow:
- In school we are taught to listen quietly and raise our hand to speak — because one person speaking at a time brought order.
- In business we originally used Memorandums (Memos) to say anything. But there was an implied formality of a memo, wherein if you spoke you were speaking formally on behalf of the company. After all, the memo often bore the company logo.
- Memos were replaced by email which was more interactive, but clearly lacked the real potential of an open conversation, and still carried the vestige of formality that was inherited from it’s memorandum roots.
- Early forms of open conversations took place in digital bulletin boards, evolved from physical boards where people would post messages for each other: An exchange of messages; hardly a conversation.
- Then there were digital discussion groups, which have evolved in various formats. But there’s a huge difference between having a discussion via an email listserve and one on LinkedIn where you can see an individual’s profile and other evidences of who they are.
- Conversations often take place in meetings, but political dynamics often inhibit the exchange. Pixar executives (in extra features on The Incredibles DVD) talk about times when they’ve had to challenge people who have held back their real thoughts in a meeting, as such honesty is critical to their culture and the success of their projects.
- I was reminded via a LinkedIn conversation that we are often chided into certain bad behaviors where others believe we should only contribute to that for which we are formally recognized to have expertise, as defined by our role.
If speaking one’s mind can still be an issue in Pixar’s culture, imagine the challenge elsewhere. Many think that disagreeing with something or someone is, well, disagreeable. Participants often pounce on individuals who express non-consenting views. In online discussions, people repeatedly bail out of conversations over misunderstandings that they didn’t stick around to clarify or otherwise attempt to reach common ground. Others haven’t learned the gentleman’s art of agreeing to disagree.
The University of Wisconsin thought the issue to be significant enough that they created an employee reference to improve the effectiveness of conversations, titled “Having Conversations at Work that Work!”
In order for any organization to be truly successful over time, its people must build and maintain strong, professional relationships with one another and that promote productive conversations about the work that is to be accomplished. Unfortunately, such relationships do not come easily or naturally. They require commitment, know-how, patience, and practice. Even then, successful outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Failure to develop them, though, usually guarantees frustration, conflict, and alienation between those who need to work together.
Let’s apply the “So what?” factor for a moment. So what if people bail out of conversations? So what if people can’t agree to disagree? How is this any different than the many decades we’ve been operating this way?
It turns out that we’ve been operating within the boundaries of a ‘fudge factor’. Businesses got away with errors because there was leeway to do so. Just as the efficiencies of markets squeeze the margins out of profits, the rate of change in businesses today is squeezing out the margins for error. The margins are also being squeezed by the exponential increase in the number of potential errors that can take place, and do. Businesses are discovering that there are errors that have been accommodated by these margins, which have never mattered…until now.
Can you imagine the conversations now going on at BP, which had they taken place openly over the past year could have potentially averted the successive errors that resulted in a global disaster? In the hearings, there was evidence that people had been told of the risks. Had these been open conversations would others have pushed back on the decisions? With more voices involved, would there have been more of a chorus of support to express the seriousness of the risks? Were these issues not similar to those that put Toyota in the Congressional hot seat as well?
What is it about these cultures that allowed for these gross errors to occur and not be challenged by others? Are there biases toward action over talk? In his book Informal Coalitions, Chris Rodgers challenges a common bias of action over talk:
For leaders, talk is action. Amonst other things:
- Talk sets the context within which action takes place. failure to understand the critical link between context and action is, perhaps, one of the main causes of poor “follow through” and failed initiatives.
- Talk is central to sensemaking and the creation of meaning.
…
- Talk is essential to the effective implementation of action by aligning effort, solving unforeseen problems and charting progress.
…
Even where Enterprise 2.0 infrastructures provide the means for open conversations, will individuals have the courage and commitment to stay engaged in the exchange? Or will they revert to prior conditioning and disengage at the first sign of conflict?
Imagine the possibility of all businesses being at risk who lack the kind of open, supportive Pixarian leadership, who will encourage their people to stretch lethargic muscles of engagement. We will continue to witness the sad after-effects of those who do not.
by Bill Ives
July 15, 2010 at 4:12 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
Forrester will publish the book, Empowered, in September, co-authored by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, its sequel to Groundswell. Groundswell was about social technologies empowering consumers, the new book demonstrates how empowered customers place demands on companies, and how it takes empowered employees (refered to as HEROes – highly empowered and resourceful operatives) to meet their demands. In this book, the authors tell the stories of some of these HEROes, like Mark Betka at the US State Department, the Twelpforce team at Best Buy, and the Rob Sharpe, who transformed sales training at Black & Decker with his own internal YouTube.
I got a preview of the approach as Forrester shared a review copy of the report, The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff. Here is apartial quote form the summary. “The HERO Index is a new tool we have developed to measure just how empowered and resourceful your own employees are. Our data reveals that some industries (like technology products and services) and job descriptions (like marketing and nonretail sales) harbor more HEROes than others. Your new job is to find the HEROes in your organization and to encourage and support their innovative applications.”
I like this approach. There has been too much effort to simplify jobs and automate processes. What first appealed to me about the early stages of knowledge management was the attempt to empower employees with the right information to excel at their jobs. The same opportunity was what re-energized me when enterprise 2.0 came along. To research this report, Forrester surveyed 4,364 US information workers — people who use computers or mobile devices in their jobs — in November 2009.
The reports points out that the same Web 2.0 technologies that empower customers are available to empowered employees in (I would add) enterprise 2.0. They then offer many cases of what I would call enterprise 2.0. For example, Sales trainer Rob Sharpe at Stanley Black & Decker created his own internal YouTube-type sites to share insights. Employees working with clients can use can use cloud technologies to share project schedules or background materials.
These efforts are often light-weight from an IT perspective and are originated by people form the business units rather than IT. In fact, they found that reveal that 39% of HEROes use productivity tools not provided by their IT departments. These employees often do things at their own expense. For example, they found that 23% of HEROes use a smartphone for work and more than half of them — 12% — paid for it themselves. In addition, 13% pay for all or some of their monthly data plan. They do this just toe enable them to do their job better. No wonder they should be considered heroes.
I am looking forward to this book. In the meanwhile the report if very useful to help you find HEROs in your organization, help then succeed and/or become a HERO yourself.
by Bill Ives
July 14, 2010 at 12:49 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Search
According to Brian Hill at Forrester, recent mergers and acquisitions in the eDiscovery market can be good for organizations wanting to mitigate legal risk with a mix of disjointed applications as long as they do their home work (see eDiscovery Market Consolidation Continues Its Steady March). I was pleased to receive a review copy. As usual, organizations must focus on separating marketing hype from actual functionality, especially in the area of end-to-end process capabilities. While integrated advances can provide concrete benefits and help rationalize application infrastructure, it’s important to look at these in the context of a broader eDiscovery strategy.
Such strategies should identify technology gaps and costly process integration points. Then enterprises need to request more eDiscovery application integration. Even then you cannot expect to end up with a single provider. The report notes that recent survey results indicate that 60% of records management stakeholders and 57% of message archiving users perceive “synchronizing eDiscovery, records management, and archiving efforts” to be a challenge.
In theory the transparency within enterprise 2.0 should support greater eDiscovery capabilities but there is still the tendency to create even more silos. Cross platform capabilities need tor receive a greater focus. The report offers some useful guidelines for enterprises as they navigate this space.
by Joe McKendrick
July 11, 2010 at 4:29 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin didn’t have social networking or Enterprise 2.0 technologies at their disposal. But they had a global, visionary way of thinking. Imagine how the power of their ideas would have been shared and spread if they did have such tools. That’s what’s happening these days.
With the multi-disciplinary talents they possessed, visionaries such as da Vinci, Franklin, and others shook the world. Now, the world demands new versatility. Today’s managers and professionals are in a prime position to capture that spirit and carry it forward, thanks to technology innovations, says Vinnie Mirchandani in his new book, The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations.
Today’s organizations are looking for new ways of competing in today’s crazy global economy — digitally, virtually, and analytically. Vinnie’s book points out how technology innovations are expanding beyond the bounds of managing operating and storage systems. (Polymath is a Greek word for one who excels in many disciplines.) Technology — thanks to the network effect — is driving many of the important changes now reshaping business and society.
For example, Vinnie takes a look at GE’s approach to corporate IT — not as a cost center, but as a profit center — which makes the business even more innovative. The company “is innovating based on savvy understanding of global technology economics and the astute leveraging of licensing and intellectual property rights.” For example, GE maintains a “professional networking platform” called SupportCentral that “has more than 50,000 communities with over 10,000 experts across almost 20,000 business process flows.” With 25 million hits a day in 20 languages from GE employees around the globe, SupportCentral, as Vinnie describes it, is “the biggest business-focused social network you have never heard of.”
The IT culture GE supports helps it to maintain its lead as one of the most innovative companies in the world. As Vinnie describes it, “in a world focused on light innovation around social networks and mobile devices, GE is making industrial innovation fashionable again…. Its internal IT innovates on its own and coaches its business unit on intellectual property and technology contracting issues as the businesses increasingly embed technology into their products.”
Vinnie also discusses the growing role of analytics in helping guide corporate decisions, but cautions that it takes knowledgeable humans to make the most of the capabilities the technology unleashes. “A wide range of analytical tools and technologies is available to enterprises today. Particularly encouraging is the progress around unstructured analytics, predictive analytics, and data visualization. Of course, recent misses in economic forecasting have reemphasized the need for ‘human intelligence.’ For that reason, it is nice to see a new generation of analytical ‘artists’ like Paul Kredrosky [author of the 'Infectious Greed' blog] emerge and the move to a decision-, not data-centric, analytical framework.”
Taking a cue from the Renaissance nature of the today’s technology, Vinnie distills much of his thinking into a RENAISSANCE Framework, which encompasses the following:
- Residence: “Homes better technologically equipped than the office.” As Vinnie describes it: “Enterprises are gradually waking up to the fact there is no law precluding them from using products aimed at consumers themselves, sometimes at startling savings.”
- Exotics: “Innovation from left field.”
- Networks: “Bluetooth to broadband.” Vinnie describes the revolution reshaping communications on all levels — limitless telco opportunities; mobile apps, entire countries joining the computer network, function-rich devices, and citizen journalism.
- “Arsonists” and other disruptors. Vinnie observes that “most rebels tend to be start-ups, but often larger, established vendors will go after one another, especially when they are trailing in a market or introducing a new product.” Vinnie quotes Seth Ravin: industries need to go through conversions, to go against what some would call today’s “evil empires.”
- Interfaces: “For all our services.” Beyond the iPad, Vinnie discusses technology-driven transportation, and even technology you can wear.
- Sustainability: “Delivering to both the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ agendas.” Social responsibility is not just a PR strategy; it’s baked into the business model of many organizations.
- Singularity: “The human-machine convergence.”
- Analytics: “Spreadsheets, search, and semantics.” Vinnie cites examples such as Best Buy, which “has 15-plus terabytes of data on over 75 million customers… its sophisticated analytics has allowed it to identify that a sliver—just seven percent of its customers—drive 43 percent of the company’s overall sales volume.”
- Networks: “Communities, crowds, contracts, and collaboration.” Vinnie quotes Paul Greenberg, who talks about the “Social CRM” phenomenon: “The customer is increasingly controlling the conversation… Classic” CRM was operational… Social CRM is not operational—it’s collaborative more often than not. It is based on the company and customer’s interplay. It’s no longer how do you manage a customer but how you engage that customer.”
- Clouds: “Technology-as-a-service.”
- Ethics: Essential in “an age of cyberwar and cloning.” Vinnie quotes Batya Friedman: “Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is a way of looking at systems that brings in human values — so informed consent, human dignity, physical and psychological well – being among others; designers can use VSD alongside their favorite design practices, doing their best technical and usability work.”
Image: Diagram of a random network containing components that all have approximately the same number of connectivity. Image courtesy of Panos Oikonomou and Philippe Cluzel, University of Chicago.
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