Thanks to Martin Dugage of France’s Boostzone Institute, who provided the following commentary on the video clip.

My emphasis below … I am reminded of Euan Semple’s classic post about implementing social computing (The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?), and I don’t doubt that one of, if not the, the hardest part is senior managers and executives getting used to the idea of less or different control.

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Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chambers is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed.

My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it.

Chambers believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it.

-[ Snip ... ]

Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches.

The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes.

“If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”

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This is another “it had to happen but the apocalypse must be near” moment. I learned about the Shorty Awards that honors the best producers of short (140 characters or less, on Twitter) content in 2008. There are many categories  (e.g., sports, news, food, personal photography weird).  Mari Smith, who writes the Why Facebook blog, was pushing her candidacy and urging her readers to vote for her. It is too late for the initial tally as the initial round of voting ended midnight December 31. Had I known I would have voted for our own Paula Thornton.

However, as TechCrunch writes the “five Tweeters with the most nominations in each category will take part in a final round between January 5th and 14th. An awards ceremony will be held in New York in late January, where the winners of the “most important categories” (the site doesn’t say what qualifies as important) will be able to deliver acceptance speeches in person or via video in 140 characters or less.”

How do they say this with a straight face? What is next? Perhaps the Oscars should adopt this principle to avoid overly long acceptance speeches, as our attention spans get shorter. At least they need to have a speech that can be summarized on Twitter

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Deloitte Declares We Are in a “Media Democracy”
Bill Ives

Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat shared with us a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I find the first part more interesting.

There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter. I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other. Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.

There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication technology expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

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Deloitte’s organisational consulting has for some time now been involved in employee engagement and organisational change, and so its practitioners in those areas will understand more of the emerging sociology of the networked workplace environment than the other major consulting firms.  And of course, not to miss a beat, all the other major firms will all be out there now telling customers they have found a new ball to kick around, i,e, social computing.  They will come up with logical responses wherever there seems to be a growing market.  But beware of these firms’ response, in my opinion.  If you want to know why, email me.

Is the general awareness of the effects of using computers, the Web and the easy sharing and consumption of information flows beginning to reach a critical mass ?  Bill’s blog post would seem to suggest so.

And I’ll argue, as I have done for some time now, that the spread and penetration of social media use into organisations large and small will lead to some major changes in the practice of leadership and management (Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?, FASTForward, January 10, 2008) and slowly but surely the impact will be (or should be) the increased democratisation of many organisations.

My favourite astrologer does not agree … but we all know horoscope forecasts are somewhat suspect, right ?  But short-term, I can see the logic … in uncertain and ambiguous times, many people like the feeling of increased certainty offered by direction and control.  Just ask Lou Gertner what was the hardest part of the IBM turnaround in the early 90’s .. he’ll tell you "upward delegation"

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"In 2009, hierarchies will grow, democracy will ebb–"might is right" and pragmatic choices win."

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But indeed some form of democratisation reaching through a wide range of human activities, including work in an enterprise, seems inevitable.  The only alternative, I suggest, is the eventual use of information technology to control almost everything knowledge workers do, reducing computing activities to completing forms and updating various reports.  That does not seem too likely, but I suppose its true that you can’t predict the future.

Do you want your workplace to become more democratic than it is today ?  How will your workplace engage you a year from now … two years from now … five years from now ?

I was interviewed a bit more than a year ago by WorldBlu (Annual World’s Most Democratic Workplaces) founder Traci Fenton about the impact of social computing on organisational democracy.  If we believe that "knowledge is power" and that the days of a few people at the top of organisations taking all the decisions and telling everyone else how to do things are numbered (John Cambers of Cisco clearly believes that’s the case, and is not sacrificing organisational effectiveness with that belief), then it’s clear that eventually shifts in traditional organisational power will be more frequent, more observable, and carry more implications for major changes in the ways people are led and managed.  Gary Hamel clearly believes this is the case, as he outlines in his most recent book The Future of Management.

I’ve used this quote from business strategist and futurist Stan Davis before, but in this context I am not ashamed to repeat it because there are some very long term shifts underway for all of us, as the Deloitte study is beginning to recognize.  The media we use to work and interact with others is fundamentally different than it was at the end of the do com boom, and it ain’t going away.

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While there wasn’t something called social media or social computing back then, here’s Stan Davis on organizing in the future, from the 1987 book Future Perfect:

"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.

What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.

Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."

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Here’s Stan catching up to the Web 2.0 world ("catching up" isn’t quite the right term … outlining what he think with respect to the most recent development so n the Web is probably better

Decision-making over the past quarter-century has continually moved from the center to periphery, down hierarchies to where decisions are carried out. Current technologies, especially of the Web 2.0 world, have moved that decision-making even further, overwhelmingly beyond firms’ boundaries and into the physical and mental space of the customer.

The differences between the two worlds are striking.

Whereas information is still hoarded and protected in companies, it is freely shared and reused in the connected Web 2.0 world. Hierarchy and command still rule the day in most organizations, while individuals are self-organizing, loose and flat.

Other shifts are from command & control to adapt & evolve, from provider-generated to consumer-generated content, from vertical to horizontal organization, and from an ‘audience-’ to a ‘community-’ approach to customers.

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It would be interesting to learn what you think.

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Dean Takahash at Venture Beat shared with us a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I find the first part more interesting. 

There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter.  I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other.  Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.

There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication technology expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.

The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science and essential for many forms of instruction. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).

However, the invention of text did not replace poetry, it just reduced the content it covered to what was more appropriate for the media. I think the same thing will happen with Twitter and blogs.

Each medium had its strengths and limitations. It was not until the development of papyrus that real literary and academic works could easily be recorded and transported. This technology was used by the Greeks and Romans from the 5th century BC until the 8th or 9th century AD. Papyrus was superseded by parchment beginning in the 4th century AD. Both of these new media were easier to store and transport than the clay tablets but they were also more susceptible to the fire of invading armies. The ease of copying and movement to other locations preserved more work on paper but perhaps many more original stone tablets still exist. Digital media has many advances over paper until your hard drive crashes with no backup.

 Returning to the present, the Deloitte study, Ed Moran, director of product innovation at Deloitte Services said, “A lot of media will coexist…We won’t see a massive extinction.” Looking across all generations, television remains the most influential ad medium for 88 percent of respondents. Magazines (49 percent) and online (48 percent) tied for second. Radio remained influential for 27 percent of the respondents. Only 5 percent — mostly millennials — considered cell phone ads to be the most influential. Roughly 70 percent of all consumers are watching user-generated videos. YouTube is no longer just a fad.  Google must be pleased with their purchase.

In my informal survey of two very plugged in Generation Xers (early 30s), they had only vaguely heard of Twitter, but were very heavy users of Facebook, text messaging, iTunes, laptops, and email.  I had to explain Twitter to them in the context of these other tools.  The rest of the survey is interesting. My main objection is the discovery that I am no longer considered a Boomer. This survey graduated me to the “matures” category.  Well, bl*ep them, I was born post WW2 and still have a lot of immaturity left.  

 For my first post in 2009 I will share Peter Kim’s Social Media Predictions 2009. Now Peter did this two weeks ago and I am sure it has been commented on. I learned about it through Susan Scrupski who posted in on Knowledge Plaza. I will not repeat the details.

However, I am struck by the mix of bears and bulls on the social media market and presence for 2009.  There are more bears than bulls. That might not be surprising in a down market. However. I am hearing from a lot of enterprise 2.0 vendors that sales are up. However, this is a small, and likely biased sample.

There seems to be only one real bull - “Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball.” - Ann Handley - who was consistent with what I am hearing although she used a different metaphor.

In addition, there were a number of people who were somewhat positive but said that more accountability and ROI are needed. I would certainly agree with them. I also side with Ann against the bears. 

Last year at the time I went out on a limb and said I would lose weight. I was right but I did not like that fact that this applied not only to my body but my retirement funds. I hope I am right again for 2009 on social media. I think they will become common place over time. It is a matter of when not whether in my mind. 

As the User Revolution rages on, its impact is being felt not only by newly empowered users but by businesses struggling to respond. We see Enterprise Search as a key technology in harnessing the power of the User Revolution through rich, new user experiences that drive online business and enterprise productivity.

FASTforward’09 will explore how leading-edge companies use search and related technologies to engage people in interactive experiences and connect them to information. The event provides a much-needed forum to discuss best practices for developing and implementing search solutions that allow people to create content, consume information, and collaborate with each other in innovative new ways. We’ll kick off the conference with a discussion of the latest Web 2.0 trends and then spend two days talking about what it all means for you and your business. A strong line-up of guest speakers, Microsoft executives, and customer presentations will make this a event you won’t want to miss.

Commenting on her experience at the conference last year, Krista Thomas—VP of Marketing and Communications at Thomson Reuters—had this to say: “FASTforward is the best ‘user-conference’ I have ever experienced. Given the quality of the speakers and content and the thought-leadership of your executives and clients, the event amounts to a meeting of the best minds in search and content technologies.”

Speakers for FASTforward’09 include:

• Charlene Li - Independent Analyst on Emerging Technologies, co-author of Groundswell. “Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.” - Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines
• Clay Shirky - Author, Consultant, Professor. His new book, Here Comes Everybody, explores the effects of open networks, collaboration, and user-created and disseminated content on organizations and industries. “In story after story, Clay masterfully makes the connections as to why business, society and our lives continue to be transformed by a world of net-enabled social tools. His pattern-matching skills are second to none.” - Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect
• Don Tapscott - Internationally renowned authority on the strategic value and impact of information technol­ogy and chairman of nGenera Innovation Network. “Don Tapscott provides an exciting roadmap to surviving and thriving in the Connected Era.” - Michael S. Dell, Chairman And CEO, Dell

Discover for yourself why FASTforward has become the largest global business and technology conference dedicated to search-driven innovation! Visit the FASTforward’09 event site for more details and to register – and register by January 9th and save $400.

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Despite attempts at organizational change during the ‘90’s, the decade was notable for down sizing, top-down control, extravagant CEO pay, and other hallmarks of the Old Management. But a New Management is emerging that harnesses the knowledge lying unused among employees at the bottom of the firm and scattered outside its walls among customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

Drawing on hundreds of examples, a survey of 426 managers, technology forecasts, and economic trends, Bill concludes that the New Management is extending markets and democracy to create a self-organizing corporate community operating from the bottom-up and the outside in.

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For those of you who are more deeply interested in the principles of  KM (knowledge management), innovation and ways to "break down" silos of information, enhance idea flow and benefit from employees’ creativity and purpose, I can recommend one of Dr. Halal’s earlier books:  Internal Markets - Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization.

I presume there’s a decent fit with these concepts and the ongoing evolution of enterprise search (actually, I don’t presume .. having read the book about a decade ago, and having paid attention to the evolution of enterprise search, I know there’s a lot of value in this book).

Interestingly, in the blurb on his web site about this 1993 book, he highlights the paradox that North American and western European corporations worship free enterprise principles excepting when it comes to running any given organization.

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One of the great ironies of capitalism is that while founded on the liberating principles of free enterprise, most corporations themselves are centrally-controlled, hierarchical systems, not too different from the centrally-planned economies that failed in the communist bloc.

This book brings together case studies describing the creative transformation of progressive corporations into the only feasible alternative to hierarchy - self-managed internal enterprise units forming an internal market economy.

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This (centralised control) is in some cases changing, more and more rapidly.  But it remains an interesting issue … just look at the title of the most recent Fast Company cover article … provocative title, n’est ce pas ?

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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist

Power to the people — and profits to the company — is a bold tech promise we’ve heard before. If Chambers can pull it off, if he can prove that his model drives innovation at a market-beating pace, he will replace his pal Jack Welch as the most influential leadership guru of the modern era.

[ Snip ... ]

Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chambers’s office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers.

Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company’s rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. "We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know," he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes — all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program

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If I am not mistaken, the issue of centralised control remains one of the core issues in play (remember, the book above was published in 1993 !) when it comes to considering whether and how to engage with or commit to a path towards Enterprise 2.0 architecture, applications and dynamics.

I can only assume that Dr. Halal has watched the growth of the field called Enterprise 2.0 with enthusiasm, interest and perhaps some bemusement.

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Tags: hierarchy, wirearchy, internal markets for knowledge, innovation, new management

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The Economist Intelligence Unit reported that Web 2.0 has moved from buzzword to reality in many of the world’s largest corporations. They conducted a survey of 406 senior executives worldwide and found that 79% of respondents see the collaborative web as a way to boost revenues and cut costs. They said that, ╥perhaps the most interesting finding is that a full 85% of C-suite executives see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase revenue and/or margins, versus 75% of middle management. Nothing like having top down sponsorship delivered to a largely already convinced group of middle managers. This top down effect also extend to the view that Web 2.0 is transformative, affecting all parts of the business (35% versus 28%) and is making a significant impact on the company╒s business model (41% versus 22%). They asked good questions.

The top perceived potential for Web 2.0 was to transform the way that companies interact with their customers. Many of these study participants were part of large companies already using Web 2.0 tools and methods. The most cited use was the creation of online communities to help with product marketing or product development. Next was the use of blogs or wikis to initiate conversations and share knowledge inside or outside the company.

It seems that so far executives are more convinced of external uses of Web 2.0 than internal enterprise 2.0 efforts. The study found that 68% of executives expect Web 2.0 methods and tools to be the single biggest factor changing the ways their company interacts with customers. While 49% said these tools will change how employees interact with each other and the company.  This is not surprising given the current usage patterns within the sample reported above and the broader awareness of Web 2.0 marketing efforts than enterprise 2.0 collaboration efforts.

Building on this nearly 60% of those surveyed said that their companies are asking customers to contribute their product development and/or enhancement, or that they plan to do so within the coming two years. In addition, about half of companies say they are, or are planning to, treat customers as co-developers of products that are in a constant state of improvement. The wisdom of crowds has caught on. 

It is appropriate that I learned about this work through social media, Jacob Morgan’s blog post, Companies Believe Social Media Can Increase Revenue!. It was one of the three most popular for the week on Social Media Today. 

Four IBMers, Joan M. DiMicco, David R. Millen, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan recently published, Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace.  It focused on their Beehive social networking website behind IBM’s firewall.  Beehive was launched in 2007 by IBM Research as an internal social network site for IBM employees designed to blur the boundaries of work and home, professional and personal, and business and fun. I briefly mentioned BeeHive as part of Looking Closely at Lotus Connections. At the time I wrote that the Beehive tools are exploring how to use Facebook features like fun walls, photo posting, and high 5 inside the enterprise. 

IBM Research is looking at four main areas: understanding adoption, usage patterns, motivations, and impact. This position paper gives a brief overview of the key findings from last two:  motivations and impact on the workplace. The found that within a company intranet╒s protected environment, employees choose to reach out on Beehive to new people rather than only connecting to those they know, which is different than behavior reported on Facebook. Now I have seen a lot of reaching out to new people who have connections to known people on Facebook but still, this is interesting. They also found that employees also share personal details that have not appeared with any significant frequency within IBM on other enterprise social software tools, such as intranet social bookmarking and blogging.

Looking further through in-depth interview they found three motivations: interacting with colleagues on a personal level, career advancement, and the ability to convince others to support ideas and projects. They wrote that, employees use Beehive to present themselves professionally and to network with those they believe can assist them in their career goals within IBM. Being part of large consulting organization in a past life, I can understand the internal marketplace dynamics that this system plays into.  Social media is often used for viral marketing in the external marketplaces so it is not surprising that people would make use of its capabilities in a large organization with an active marketplace for people, ideas, and projects.

The researchers also looked at impact. They found that the more intensely someone uses Beehive (as measured by more frequent visits and stronger associations with the online community) the higher their reported social capital, across all measures. In other words, they have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise. 

They said these results are only at the correlational level and they cannot make any casual inferences.  However, I do think they are looking at some interesting ways to measure the effects of social software, independent of the effects of this particular software. In addition, I think that an interesting next step would be to look at the relationship of these measures to the bottom line business results.  The IBM researchers at looking at sound level three behavioral changes. Now me needed to see if there are ways we can tie these behaviors to level four financial impacts. I feel confident that this can be done. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing out this work to me. 

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The current issue of Fast Company has a cover article on Cisco and their ongoing efforts to reorganize into something that is an excellent case study of what Enterprise 2.0 may look like in an established organization. It shouldn’t be any surprise that the quintessential networking company is on the leading edge of network thinking applied to organizational design. At the same time, Cisco is a large, successful, hierarchical, engineering-centric organization that isn’t likely to be terribly interested in organizational fads.

Here’s the argument in a nutshell:

Chambers has greater ambitions, even now, in the midst of turmoil. Or, perhaps, especially now. He has been taking Cisco through a massive, radical, often bumpy reorganization. The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. "In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us," he explains. "All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there." Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos — not to mention a new financial incentive system — encourage executives to work together like never before. Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.

The bumpy part — and the eye-opener — is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success. What used to be "me" is now "we." The goal is to get more products to market faster, and Chambers crows at the results. "The boards and councils have been able to innovate with tremendous speed. Fifteen minutes and one week to get a [business] plan that used to take six months!" As storm clouds form for the rest of the business community, he says, "We’re going to gain market share." ["How Cisco's CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist", Ellen McGirt]

What makes this case study useful and interesting is its emphasis on organization not technology. There’s an undercurrent in the article that everything is all a bit "socialist" somehow and isn’t that a surprise, which I found annoying at points. The more interesting point is that a bunch of engineers and big-organization executives are essentially concluding that hierarchy isn’t scaling well enough to meet their goals.

More than anything else, this story provides a well-documented case study that is an existence proof to other skeptical executives that the combination of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the right organizational principles and practices can succeed.