This blog, and the collection of esteemed writers herein, came together as a result of annual events that FAST Search & Technology sponsored, focused on Enterprise 2.0- related issues. In 2008, the last year before being purchased by Microsoft, Chief Technology Officer Bjørn Olstad offered a wonderful vision that FAST was working toward. Recast below, I’ve pulled a number of key quotes for review.

The theme of FASTforward ‘08 was “The User Revolution”. Based on what Bjørn spoke of then, one has to wonder what has happened to the potential of that revolution.

…previously people thought that intent was what they typed in a query box…And now people are seeing that intent can be captured in many ways. It can be what you type, it can be what you do, it can be how you collaborate with other people, it can be you as a person, it can be the team you work in… How do you capture intent? How do you act on intent?

Power is switching from a publishing perspective to a consumer perspective. That is a big challenge…

Bjørn explained that over time FAST had been focused more on the back end than the front end — the interaction space. And that they committed to a shift to the front end through their release of an Interaction Management module, part of their overall planned architecture.

If you can work on developing the user experience, that adds so much more value than developing deep in the core. So over time we have shifted most of the focus to create that richness about how search is powering actual algorithmic experiences far beyond what people believe was search — in portals, in deep applications, in rich applications — being powered by algorithms.

In the past, applications have kept various types of content, structured data and media as separate elements. FAST wanted to break down the barriers between these.

We have a new search core which is taking this to the next level…unstructured data, text, rich media all blended together but natively represented, and query languages of all types to access this that are also native.

…you get a new level of completeness, a data fusion model where you work on all types of data and it works on all types of queries, coming from applications (legacy) and users.

He goes on to talk about the significance of tags, but not only explicit tags, but things that can be inferred from behaviors.

That connection between work — that ability to tap into usage and convert that into metadata, implicit metadata, that subsequently can power more precise user experiences — has also been a key method.

He spoke of the difference of doing so at the individual levels and also making inferences at a team level (more social implications), moving lastly to the crowd level (wisdom of crowds implications).

In reflecting on the evolution of search, Bjørn notes while many companies have leveraged search as a mechanism for revenue generation, search can be leveraged as a business platform:

So it’s not just a technology — how can I put a search bar in the upper right-hand corner — this has become a platform as to how I can run my media company. Because the core assets have been changing. It used to be the content: I own the newspaper. Now…the power is with the user. How can they reach out to the user? Search is a key technology to do that.

It’s not just like the web search — you type a query, you get a list of links, you click on it and then you go and read it. What if it was quantitative? What if the value is not just in any document but is across documents and it’s only when you bring these pieces together that you actually see a pattern? …to get to a new level of analysis…bypassing the current BI level approach…using a much simpler access paradigm…

Talking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 that had already started to be seen across the market, Bjørn noted that even for the adoption of SharePoint, collaboration is one of the top 4 focuses. From a search perspective you can close the loop on things that go beyond the content itself and can look at the use of the content to infer value.

At that time, looking to the future of FAST Bjørn said:

The next generation technology for FAST has 3 pillars, 3 cornerstones…content [how can we aggregate it]…the user [search moves from being an API for content to something that can be managed directly]…a search core [changing the physics of search]

We need to rethink information access: is it databases, is it search, is it a business platform? This is really now changing and the technology stack is going to change forever, based on these components.

I really miss these events. The energy was tremendous.

If FAST was already moving toward this reality in early 2008, complete with customers demonstrating same, how is it that Tim Berners-Lee was trying to sell a similar vision at TED in early 2009, touted as the Next Web and Linked Data?

And what happened to all this forward momentum? Have we buried critical technologies again?

What is democracy? Is it just a vote every 4 years? Is that all the citizen has?

Who ensures that even that limited moment of choice and opinion is secure and trustworthy. How are the votes counted? Who ensures that the people have even voted? You don’t have to be living in Iran to wonder about that!

How does a candidate get chosen? In the west it depends on a party and immense sums of money. In other places, the regime makes the call. It is all but impossible to become powerful without having made a deal with the in group whether this is in Iran and the Mullahs or anywhere.

What might democracy become in the age of Social Media?

Could President Obama have gathered the financial and voter support in his campaign without it? I think that it would have been unlikely. Are most politicians responding to what happened in that election?

I don’t think so. For I think that they miss the point.

The tools of social media are just that. Tools!

The point is that to engage the people you have to have a cause that strikes to their heart. Obama had that.

What the tools do is to make a real cause too powerful for the status quo to push under the rug.

In Iran, people are risking and losing their lives  for change. In the before Social Media times such as at Tianemen Square, the regime can and did utterly squash dissent. I don’t think that this is possible today if the cause is well enough supported. Yes, the regime can set up a massacre that may stop the demonstrations. But the legitimacy of the regime will be ended. Their only chance then will be to become a North Korea or an Burma – a true pariah. The story will not end there.

The tools and the supporting global community are enabling the story to be told. The world is a witness.

There is also another aspect that I see. Our response to the traditional media is usually helplessness and then numbness. We see terrible events but we can do nothing but feel bad. Traditional media is so one way and so passive.

But people outside of Iran not only know what is going on but many are actively engaged in helping or in providing emotional support. This was even true for the Obama campaign. Millions of non Americans became personally engaged in the election in a way not possible by simply reading the paper or watching TV.

The Obama campaign – but regretfully not the Obama administration – and the Iranian push-back – will surely be seen in retrospect as a Tipping Point in the evolution of democracy. What will happen, I cannot know yet.

But the regimes everywhere will have to take note. There is a line of self interest and oppression that cannot be crossed. For if it is, the “Sleeper will awake”.

The voice of the people is no longer restricted to the ballot box. No longer subject to the control of the ballot box. No longer subject to the needs of party affiliation or millions of campaign dollars.

I don’t know how this will play out but it sure sounds more democratic to me.

So I have been really bad about writing on the FastForward blog. While I’m as short on good excuses as posts, I have been doing some interesting things in this space that I think may be particularly valuable to this community. Some of the work has revolved around the openmethodology.org (MIKE2.0) and open-sustainability.org (FISDEV) initiatives that I mentioned in past articles.

I have also been working on omCollab, which is a platform that can be used for enterprise collaboration. The capabilities available in omCollab are driven for the business requirements to support BearingPoint’s IM Solution Suite initiative. omCollab is free and open source, so anyone can use it. We’re starting to get a nice development community going with key participants from the US, Europe and China. Feel free to use it and let us know what you think.

Part of the reason we made omCollab open source is to advance to goal of building an integrated content repository, where enterprises mashup to open content on the web and use it drive their strategy, design practices and community viewpoint of the best assets on the public web. The goal is to develop a collaborative, community-based standard. For the Enterprise Architects in the crowd, the closest approach from a content perspective is probably TOGAF although as far as I know no one has built an open and collaborative methodology or architecture framework in this fashion before. I believe the idea that had even greater relevance around sustainable development – which is why I started open-sustainability.org.

Although we’ve certainly had some good success around using the content from MIKE2.0, its has been tougher to  build a collaborative community around the approach.  Do you think it can work?  Anything we should do differently?

The phrase “technology for us” has been kicking around in my head for the past several months. At the FASTForward ‘08 conference, I took a first pass at articulating my thinking in a video interview with Jerry Michalski. Consider this my next attempt. I expect there will be more.

Technology for Them

Information systems in organizations generally have been “technology for them.” Accounting systems, inventory control systems, ERP systems, reservations systems are all designed and imposed on their users.

Done properly, these systems yield efficiencies, predictable quality, and significant economic benefits. The design and implementation processes for these systems are industrial engineering at its best. Expert designers observe, redesign, and streamline processes to define and constrain what the target user population is allowed to do.

In these systems, users are simply one component in a mechanistic environment designed to constrain behaviors. User roles are limited to situations where technology is too expensive and a human user is more economical. Individual creativity and initiative are neither desirable or appropriate.

Technology for Me

The personal computer revolution brought “technology for me.” We saw innovation and scores of programs designed to improve the productivity and effectiveness of individual knowledge workers. Few of us would go back to a world without spreadsheets, word processors, or the other tools made possible and accessible via personal level information technology.

The first waves of innovation in the PC world focused largely on individual productivity. Attention to work process, if any, was a function of the idiosyncrasies of each user. Broadly speaking, innovation took one of two forms. Programmers and developers generalized from their own needs to develop unique tools solving their own problems. With luck, those solutions found enough kindred spirits to sustain a market. Early examples here would include the original Visicalc, ThinkTank, More, and dBase. More recent examples would include MindManager, SketchUp, Powerpoint, and the Brain.

The alternate development path was more corporate, with planned attempts to meet the application needs of perceived large markets of individual information and knowledge workers. Examples here would include the original Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Word, and Visio.

This development path emphasized industrial and mechanistic conceptions of work. Moreover, the logic of mass markets produced products targeted to the perceived lowest common denominator of user needs. At its worst, this path leads right back to technology for them and Microsoft Bob as a distorted model of users and use cases.

Us as Knowledge Worker

There are two dimensions of “technology for us” worth exploring. The first is “us” as knowledge workers; individuals charged with “thinking for a living” in Tom Davenport’s coinage and expected to exercise substantial initiative and autonomy in the design and execution of their work. The second dimension of “us” is the degree to which key work products and deliverables emerge from the collective and coordinated action of multiple knowledge workers. We’ll return to this second form of us in a bit.

There are both political and practical problems with applying technology effectively to the unique needs of knowledge workers. Previous organizational uses of technology have not had to deal with situations where the target audience was free to ignore you. Knowledge workers occupy positions of power and influence within the enterprise. They have the power and inclination to ignore, dismiss, and actively undermine ill-conceived and poorly executed efforts to modify their work practices. For that matter, they have to power to dismiss well-conceived and well-executed efforts on their behalf. 

If you’re smart enough to avoid the trap of trying to dictate an approach to this user community and actively engage them in the design and implementation process, you run into the next constraint. Knowledge workers can’t articulate quality, effectiveness, or efficiency with anything resembling the precision that applies to manual or information work. The nature of knowledge work and its deliverables makes typical measurement approaches suspect (see Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work and The Invisibility of Knowledge Work, for example). We have only recently begun to understand individual knowledge work practices in ways that let us apply technology with some likelihood of success. In many ways we are still working out the details of the vision of knowledge work support first articulated by Vannevar Bush in the mid-1940s in As We May Think.

Us as Groups of Knowledge Workers

Organizations exist to solve problems beyond the capacity of individuals to tackle. This is as true of knowledge work as it is for all other types of work. For all the power of technology to make individual knowledge workers more productive and effective, the greater opportunity lies in developing skill at using technology to support collective activity.

What we haven’t yet done well is knit together our knowledge of how to improve group oriented work practices and technological possibilities. Further, the more promising efforts have seen limited penetration into organizations. When dealing with collective knowledge work we compound the problem of knowledge worker autonomy with the problem that the knowledge work processes we wish to improve are vague, imprecise, and squishy in ways quite uncharacteristic of the work processes we are comfortable working with in industrial settings.

If we take the analysis and improvement tools we are comfortable with in industrial process settings and simply port them to knowledge work environments, one of two things happens. Either, we become hopelessly frustrated trying to force a dynamic and fluid process into the confines of our swimlanes. Or, we mistake the small fraction of the process we can force fit into our tools for the entire phenomenon; guaranteeing that our target users will ignore us and route around our efforts.

While there are people who have thought about the problems of applying technology to complex knowledge work processes and practices, their work has not achieved the widespread adoption it needs to be a meaningful factor in most organizations. Some good entry points into this work include:

• Doug Engelbart. Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware
• Alan Kay. The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet
• Dave Snowden. Cognitive Edge (Snowden’s blog may be the simplest place to start here; the papers tend to be a bit academic)
• Jeff Conklin. Wicked Problems and Social Complexity (pdf). Cognexus Institute

The inventory of technology solutions promising to streamline, improve, or transform group activities continues to grow, although it often seems more like baroque and rococo variations on a handful of themes than like new insights or frameworks. Will the next implementation of threaded discussion make any major contribution to educating a group on when and how to make effective use of that technique? Or to understanding what situations make it a poor choice of tool?

What seems to be missing is a synthesis of Group Behavior 101 and a groupware pattern language. I’m not aware of anything that would fit that bill, although Stewart Mader’s recent Wikipatterns might represent a potential starting point. Can anyone point to some examples I’m unaware of? Is this something that we should be working to develop?

A particular juxtaposition struck me on the middle day of FASTforward08 – I wonder if anyone else found it worth pondering as well. On Tuesday we had the fine keynote by Clare Hart of Dow Jones, who focused on the increasingly contextualized modes in which business information, news, and other commodified data will be gathered into “dashboards” that anticipate the specific needs of professional end users.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The other day I was driving with my 16-year-old at a certain speed down the highway. We needed to get her to her new job at the pizza parlor on time, and were making the usual desultory conversation along the way. She had opened her Macbook and started editing photos taken earlier that day. She was also surfing six or seven radio stations looking for songs she liked, and texting three or four friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think it was as a result of Andrew’s presentation at the recent FASTForward 08 conference, but may have been related to the recent Enterprise 2.0 / KM discussion reported on this blog involving Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, moderated by colleague Jim McGee.

David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work.  This is news because it was, I believe, beginning to seem as if Davenport was becoming a somewhat curmudgeonly holdout against a growing consensus that wikis, blogs and social computing are having a clear impact on the nature of knowledge work and the "management" off socially-constructed just-in-time knowledge.

As a general assertion, I think it’s fair to say that social computing is bringing new capabilities and capacity to the (interactive) construction of just-in-time knowledge in an environment characterized by ongoing flows of information

Tom Davenport quoted in the Gurteen Knowledge newsletter:

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" Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better "knowledge capture and sharing",  and more effective "collective intelligence", there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."

and later

"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."

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Actually, it’s not fair to say that Tom Davenport "has agreed to understand" …. it’s more fair to say that the context in which terminology and jargon are being used has become clearer to him and more commonly shared amongst participants in (an important) conversation.

It seems clear to me that "Enterprise 2.0" is here to stay … the clearest signal to date is the raft of changes made over the past two or three years to the mainstream offerings of the biggest workplace productivity vendors to enable many forms of collaboration, combined with acquisitions, strategic alliances with innovative smaller E2.0 players and the beginning moves by the major consulting firms (such as publishing white papers, surveys and research reports) to pay attention to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 field.

I believe that social computing in the workplace will lead to the re-design of the fundamental principles of knowledge work.  Dave Snowden is a well-known KM guru who has said as much in a podcast created several months ago wherein I asked him about the likely impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge work and knowledge management. 

Here’s a link to that podcast, wherein in my opinion Dave holds forth on the coming changes to the design and dynamics of knowledge work in a particularly clear and coherent manner.

Dave Snowden is also fond of saying that "one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater" … and in the context of this post I think it’s useful to note that one of the happy outcomes of our growing understanding of the Enterprise 2.0 field is that the advent of using wikis and blogs and widgets and social computing inside the firewall does not mean that all the thinking, theorizing and implementation of initiatives related to KM 1.0 needs to be tossed away.  Rather it seems that much of what has gone before can be built upon and enhanced, and notably in the areas of cultural adaptation and changes to management practices.

Indeed, I (and my co-author Jim Bair) have tried to reflect these emerging perspectives in a just-published industry book titled "Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of Web 2.0" – (ARK Group UK), recently given an initial once-over on this blog by colleague Bill Ives, wherein I cite Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Dave Snowden, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ikujiro Nonaka and a number of other well-known KM theorists and practitioners.  I like to believe that the book’s content has struck an initial balance between the complex taxonomies of many organizations’ accumulated "knowledge", the large investments made over the past decade to enterprise information architecture, many workers’ need for some structure and direction and the clear power of more organic social computing carried out by interconnected individuals with a wide range of styles when it comes to cognition, learning and ways to turn pertinent information into useful knowledge.

I also think it’s clear that we are all going to be learning a lot more about the design, dynamics and management of knowledge work over the next several years.  It will never be left to be completely organic – free-flowing, self-assembling and emergent.  Humans are tinkerers, especially in a technocratic era and even more so those of such an era who are bent on having organizations perform more and better.  They will always be looking for ways to make knowledge and knowledge work more effective and more profitable. 

FASTForward 08 made that clear.

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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.

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.