Finally - The answer to adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in the traditional Corporation

April 9, 2008 at 6:15 am · Filed under Change, Culture, Dr David Vaine, Euan Semple, Interviews, KM, Management Theory, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Story, The 'Phoric, Video, YouTube, interaction, podcasts

On April 1st, we had the honor of recording a podcast of the esteemed Dr David Vaine, Senior Partner of Apparently KM PLC, who has finally revealed how to make 2.0 work in the most traditional organization.

The link to the “Phoric” is here. I must warn you that some of the material may not be workplace safe.

The ‘Phoric” is a site where well known people in the 2.0 world choose 3 clips from YouTube and discuss why these are important to them. You may find some of the other guests moving and funny. Guest include Matt Moore, Euan Semple, Alex Kjerulf (Chief Happiness Officer)

All fun aside, and there is lots of fun here, the “Phoric shows the “heart” of the 2.0 relationship explicitly and it shows how simple tools can have a huge impact.

Enjoy

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Profound Shift: The Attention Economy Emerges

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.

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Blogger Perspective - Jon Husband

February 20, 2008 at 12:51 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory

Jerry and Jon discuss how the management theories of Ackoff, Drucker, Argyris may be coming true.

 

 Jon Husband: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (199)

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