Archive for FASTForward '08
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 Paula Thornton
February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under
Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution, barriers
Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08. It details the actions of Ford of Canada:
FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.
The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”
The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.
“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.
I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).
I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?
It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.
by Paula Thornton
February 25, 2008 at 1:28 am · Filed under
3.0, FASTForward '08, intent, interaction, metadata, semantic
Not to diminish my colleague Joe’s efforts to report on John Hagel’s comments, the true potential is not in the Attention Economy but in the Attraction Economy (not to be limited to emotional connection, see also video [7:21] — emotion is one dimension in a personal economic model of decisions, and is relevant but not a priority in enterprise interactions).
Attention is the goal; attraction is the most effective means to achieve the goal: moving from reactive to interactive. The new ROI is Return on Interaction.
Hagel misses the real potential when he recommends moving from “push” to “pull” to optimize resources. Basic laws of physics suggest that the level of energy (effort) expended is the same for either push or pull – there is no net gain. The only way to capitalize beyond push or pull models is to leverage existing energy (effort for free) – by tapping the ‘draw’, the natural forces of attraction between: the customer and the company, the employer and the company, any combination of resources seeking each other.
Several different speakers illustrated how this attraction can be facilitated: zero-term search, liberal use of personal metadata and related metadata to build inference.
Ok, so if we’re going to talk inference then we’re really pushing toward 3.0. But the true innovative stories were leaning in that direction.
Gerry Campbell of Reuters, spoke of the significance of context — the need to create an ecosystem (infrastructure) that provides capabilities beyond core business operations. To move themselves and their customers toward such a reality, Reuters purchased a technology upon which they built Calais to enrich content with semantic metadata. Over time, user-generated context also needs to be fed back into the system. Such efforts move toward a big “tent” revival, where Michael Cleary of Reuters suggests that con-tent is brought together seamlessly with in-tent.
by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2008 at 7:29 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory
John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.
As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”
Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.
“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.
Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:
“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”
So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.
John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”
These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.
To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.
by Hylton Jolliffe
February 22, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Interviews
Yesterday (Day Three), we posted the last round of video interviews from FASTforward 08. We encourage you to find the time to listen in - those interviewed had many insightful things to say, as did Jerry Michalski, our excellent host for the series, about Enterprise 2.0, the user revolution, search, and much, much more.
Day Three
Day Two
- Gerry Campbell: president, search and content technologies, Reuters
- Zia Zaman: executive vice president, global marketing, FAST
- Safa Rashtchy: speaker at FASTForward’08
- Jan Paul Raven: Knowledge Concepts
- Jared Spataro: group product manager, Microsoft
- Benjamin Rudolph: Search Discovery
- Jim McGee: consultant, author, blogger
- Mark Pfeiffer: SAILLABS
- Bill Ives: consultant, blogger
- Jon Husband: author, blogger, consultant
- Paula Thornton: experience design strategist
- Bjørn Olstad: CTO of FAST
- Sandy Kemsley: consultant and blogger
- Tim Stay: Perfect Search
- Liv Brahin: UBS
- Michael Cleary: Reuters
Day One
- John Hagel - consultant, author
- Joe McKendrick - analyst, blogger
- Bob Coxe - chief information officer for Criterion Systems
- Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
- Clare Hart - EVP, Dow Jones & Company
- David Sutija - SVP of enterprise products, FAST
- David Weinberger - speaker, consultant, author
- Tom Davenport - consultant, author
- Jorn Ellefsen - CEO of Comperio
- Charles Fiesel - Roundarch
- Don Tapscott - strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
- Sue Feldman - research vice president, content technologies group, IDC
Keynotes:
- John Hagel: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization
- David Weinberger: The Information Mess – And Why You Should Love It
by Paula Thornton
February 22, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, FASTForward '08, Microblogging, Twitter
As I commented to my colleagues as we were wrapping up on Wednesday, we truly experienced Conference 2.0. What we accomplished and how we participated in FASTforward ’08 embodied key elements of 2.0. Moreso, what we experienced/achieved via the conference could/should be a repeatable model for other conferences (not just FASTforward ones).
Some of the elements:
- The blog itself. With Sandy being quite prolific, she had posts up faster than most of us could take notes, let alone synthesize and edit them into pieces (and as Rob mentioned in his interview, there are others of us who need time to digest it all).
- The myff08.com. While we struggled with some of the interaction elements, one high-value deliverable was having the pdfs of the keynote presentations available the same day. Someone’s checking on more ‘public’ availability of these.
- Video interviews that were available the same day. While they are a bit large I immediately noticed a huge difference in both the audio and video quality over last year. Not to mention Jerry’s impeccable skill as an MC (not to diminish David’s efforts last year). Jerry effortlessly made us all look/sound better. [Not to forget, although I did, the tireless effort of behind-the-scenes work for videography/lighting/sound, scheduling and editing.]
- Microblogging (Twitter) and photojournaling. The latter could have used a little collaborative instigation by requesting photos from the at-large crowd and suggesting a tag to post on Flickr (and I obviously need a larger memory chip in my camera). We’re also looking to get an account (or syndication) to flow related tweets through the FASTforward blog space.
- [On a negative note, the tracking devices were nearly useless – I would not recommend the effort to do that again…the bloggers had some pretty strong offline commentary about them.]
Having wireless available makes a huge difference, as does not having it when trying to facilitate near-instantaneous sharing. I had to laugh at myself as I was trying to tweet on my phone, drop it to take a photo, start typing some notes in Word when I couldn’t type fast enough on my phone and/or grabbed a pen and threw a note on paper (my thanks to facilities planning for putting power strips on the front tables of every room). If I’d continued as I had in the first session and also had my audio stick running I would have been trying to operate on 5 channels simultaneously. I can tell you – it doesn’t work. But they were all just my experiment – not something I’d been specifically asked to do. They were my way of being engaged and contributing.
The critical point here is, while we had shared a couple of ‘blogger’ calls among ourselves before the event, they were mostly about the logistics of the event. Not much more. We did not have specific assignments or even any charters – it just evolved.
Even slightly more ‘formal’ actions evolved. For a panel luncheon on Wednesday, the panelist list was firmed up that morning. The ‘intended’ blogger participants ended up with schedule conflicts and new resources were put in place.
As I had stepped up to ‘facilitate’ (a format I simply recommended and was adopted), I felt some onus to check on the room early (not asked, not planed, just seemed reasonable). The room was found to not be staged for a panel at all. Kudos to FAST, the travel group they engaged for event logistics and to the hotel staff for quickly pulling together a SWAT team to reconfigure the room in 20 minutes. For some, all of these elements stacked together, let alone any one of them, could have turned into a nervous mess or frantic disaster. Everyone simply stepped up and gave it their ‘get it done’ best and no one else noticed. [Although in the frantic mess, I did leave my cell phone in the podium afterward, and yet 3 hours later it was safely found at the Registration Desk – exactly where an event logistics person suggested I might look first.]
I had earlier shared my observations (to someone who suggested they hadn’t noticed) as to FAST’s careful staging of the ‘welcome’ experience with the:
- Wash of orange color through the grand hallway
- Greeting attendees with refreshments, served graciously and enthusiastically before reaching the registration desk
- Lively visual impressions of the drinks in the neon orange tumblers with the FAST logo on the side
- Careful positioning of the vendor booths within the normal traffic flow (although for all of that careful staging, I still didn’t find time to get to more than 1 booth the whole time).
And where did I miss the whole contest for a car? Having that on the floor with the winner’s name on the roof, was a very STRONG association to the benefits of registering early. What were those rules, terms & conditions?
I’m sure there are other conferences we could take some leads from, but this one did just nicely, thank you.
Any other 2.0 experiences/observations to report?
Postscript: See related microblogging reference.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 6:20 pm · Filed under
Change, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
J.P. shares advice for leaders on how to create the cultural change required to become Enterprise 2.0 organizations.
Bio: J.P. Rangaswami is CIO of British Telecom’s (BT) Global Services group, which works in 170 countries and is the fastest growing division with BT Group, supporting large businesses and organizations across the globe. Regarded as something of a maverick and an innovator, J.P. is is an outspoken advocate of open source and using emerging and disruptive technologies to improve information sharing, education and collaboration. He was also CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort. J.P. was named to silicon.coms “Agenda Setters for 2007″ and has been awarded UK-based Waters Magazine’s “CIO of the Year” award.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast, Search
Jerry asks John how it feels to see his small Norwegian company grow into a global company — and what the Microsoft deal means.
Bio: John Markus Lervik, Ph.D., is CEO and a co-founder of FAST. Dr. Lervik earlier served as the company’s CTO, and holds a Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
John Markus Lervik:
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by Sara Clark
February 21, 2008 at 4:55 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast
Nate reviews the criteria for the Innovation Awards.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:45 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08
Jevon on the user experience, Enterprise 2.0, flexible software, inflows, outflows, and “interflows” of information, content curation and more.
Jevon MacDonald:
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by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
Kiyoshi Kurihara on Japan as a culture of experimentation and the irony of Japan being behind on Enterprise 2.0 while they are ahead on new gadget ideas.
Kiyoshi Kurihara Jerry Michalski:
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by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:26 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, Fast, Financial services
Brooks talks with Jerry about the new strategic importance of search for financial services companies in creating a consistent customer experience across multiple touchpoints.
Brooks Gibbins has worldwide responsibility for the securities, retail banking, insurance and financial information sectors at FAST. He has over 12 years of experience in enterprise software and hosted solutions in the financial services market. Prior to joining FAST, he was a key executive with Multex.com, a financial information and global research portals company. He oversaw the build out of the European business, co-led global sales, and headed up the firm’s investment management solutions business. He began his career with Price Waterhouse in their SAP technology consulting practice.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under
Computerworld, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
Kyoko talks with Jerry about how the conference — her first FASTforward — has given her a rich range of new insights and stories to share with her readers in Japan.
Kyoko Suzuki is a member of the editorial staff at Computerworld Japan, part of IDG, Inc. Japan.
by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 3:22 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
Reuters’ Gerry Campbell, who was a main speaker today, talks about the two competing forces that are shaping the future of content –the continued explosion of content and the increased frustration of users to find content that’s right for them – and how his company is planning to add contextualized content solutions in the future.
Bio: Gerry Campbell brings a deep domain expertise to existing Reuters’ products and drives breakthrough innovation in the delivery of relevant information and insight to customers. Previously Mr. Campbell was Senior VP for AOL’s Search and Directional Media group, and managed the AOL Search, Local Search, Yellow Pages, Netscape Search, and eCommerce Search properties. He also led product strategy for AltaVista’s commerce group, has held marketing and management positions with Compaq and CompuServe, and co-founded Bounce Networks, a digital media start-up. He holds an MBA and BA in Mass Media from The Ohio State University.
Gerry Campbell :
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by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast, Search
Zia Zaman’s take-aways from FASTforward’08 and his views on how search will change the world.
by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 3:02 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
Safa and Jerry discuss the differences between appointment television and television when you want it and how this transitions into other areas.
Bio: Safa was most recently a Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst focused on Internet media and marketing, and the lead China analyst at Piper Jaffray and Company. He led the firm’s expansion efforts in the Internet industry and, most notably, in expansion to China. Mr. Rashtchy has published numerous research and industry reports, including 2007’s widely accliamed The User Revolution - The New Advertising Ecosystem and the Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium.
by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 3:00 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
A FAST Partner gives his take on the FASTFoward Conference.
by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 2:59 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Microsoft
Jared and Jerry discuss how Microsoft and FAST will work together and how search has become a strategic element for them.
Bio: Jared Spataro is responsible for enterprise search at Microsoft. His professional career has focused on software, and before joining Microsoft he worked for a leading enterprise content management vendor. Mr. Spataro earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.
by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 2:57 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Search
Benjamin, of Search Discovery, gives us his view on what the hot topics at FASTForward’08 are.
Benjamin Rudolph:
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by Jerry Michalski
February 20, 2008 at 2:55 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Web 2.0
Jim and Jerry have an interesting discussion around the distinction of making technology for “them” to “me” to “us.
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