Archive for Web 2.0
by Rob Paterson
September 1, 2009 at 9:26 am · Filed under
PBS, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, Web 2.0
The largest costs for newspapers is of course the paper itself – the paper, the printing and the distribution PLUS all the entrenched union issues. Many are advocating that the only way the “Papers” will make it will be to drop the paper or at least most of the paper as say the Christian Science Monitor has done.
So here is my heresy for the day – maybe this is what Pub radio and TV needs to consider – dropping the reliance on the Air or Cable!
Before you think I am mad, here are three bits of news that you can knit together into a pattern to support this view.
- KCRW – is now going global and is offering a a 24/7 web based radio show – a Curated site! It starts Labor Day! They have the brand and they have the beginnings. of a global audience
“Santa Monica-based public radio station KCRW today announced the launch of Electic24, a new Web-based music station that promises to “encompass the whole scope of the public radio station’s musical footprint over the last 30 years.” The station will run 24 hours a day and feature picks from the station’s music library, selection of live in-studio performances, and interviews.
The station, curated by KCRW music director Chris Douridas, is set to premier on Labor Day at 9 AM PST. After launch, users can access the stream by visiting KCRW’s site.”
- KCET is covering the big fire in CA – its transmitter is at risk so it is going full tilt to offers news to its LOCAL audience via the web. (The Current) Back in the day KPBS lost its transmitter during the San Diego fire and had to use one donated by another station. The point here is that everybody in California can access the site via the web
- There are signs that the cable companies have it in for Public TV and are pulling Pub TV channels off the offering – far be it for me to wonder why (maybe pub TV tells the truth?) but there is no doubt that this is a trend and with the shift to digital – Pub TV is vulnerable.
(NYT)“Cable television systems across the country, wielding their new power to pick and choose the programs they carry, are dropping public television stations or switching them to less desirable positions on the cable dial.
Public television officials, who have been protesting this trend, assert that some three million viewers have been lost as a result of the cable-system actions, which have involved more than 200 stations. They also contend that the loss of audience has damaged the fund-raising efforts of the stations. The protests have in some instances spurred cable companies to reverse their decisions.”
Part of the key to the future for pub media is not to get web revenue to match their old Air revenue – that. is the same faint hope that newspapers had. It is surely to transform their costs. Air – like print – is the killer cost.
“Oh we could never do that” – but that is what the news papers are saying. As we can see above there are signs!
There are a number of other events that can help.
- Nearly all the best programs on the PBS system will be available on the web as of next week. NPR has its API and its Mobile platform
Why not take a few stations as an experiment and put as much of the schedule on the web locally as possible and see what happens. The components are there both in terms of content and distribution.
Plus the audience is there – video online is well past the Tipping Point.
Try it – please
by Jon Husband
August 13, 2009 at 1:02 am · Filed under
Adoption, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise Social Computing, Innovation, Organizational Design, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
About three months ago Beth Kanter wrote about the Crowdsourcing of Vision at the Smithsonian Museum. In a comment I suggested that crowdsourcing for visioning purposes was reminiscent of the use of OD (organizational development) principles and methods often found in large-scale organizational or system change initiatives.
Beth asked me to elaborate. This blog post is my response.
Let’s look at why and where crowdsourcing can be useful when organizations (private, public or not-for-profit) are facing important new or emerging issues.
Crowdsourcing – Collective Wisdom and Collective Intelligence
When considering crowdsourcing in the above context as a method for obtaining pertinent information and perspective from relatively large numbers of people, it is useful to differentiate between it and collective intelligence, a related concept.
Collective intelligence refers to the outcomes generated by pooling knowledge from diverse groups, using it to research and debate and then refining the resulting understanding into useful and actionable information.
Crowdsourcing collective wisdom refers to the aggregation of anonymously produced data from groups of independent, diverse and decentralized people (crowds). The information gathered is typically summarized into a collective judgment or perspective – the “wisdom” expressed by the crowd.
Crowdsourcing as a technique for gathering useful information stems from the concepts outlined in The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. With a nod to the definitions above, the practice of crowdsourcing can be useful for tapping into the attitudes, opinions and beliefs of the “crowd” represented by an organization’s employees, customers and other stakeholders.
Many nuances and constraints have been applied to Surowiecki’s original ideas, and examples advanced wherein the ideas work more or less effectively. Whether you agree or disagree with the concept, there’s a fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to its utility. A crowd made up of diverse people with as many perspectives as there are people can, when faced with a question, problem or idea, generate a coalescing of sense and thence a consensus.
Indeed, a number of processes for working with small or large groups stem from the same basic premise – organizational development, whole systems and socio-technical systems theory rest on significant input from a wide range of different actors. A crowd’s aggregated collective response to a question or challenge creates a perspective or a position. In Surowiecki’s terms this represents its collective wisdom.
Can Today’s Organizations Access The Collective Wisdom of Crowds?
The workforce and other stakeholders of any given organization is a form of crowd. An organization’s crowd is likely to be more homogenous than a general crowd, to be sure. In the context of crowdsourcing, this relative homogeneity becomes important. It provides boundaries or constraints that complexity theory tells us are useful for bringing focus to the reasons for and expected results from the crowdsourcing.
For quite a few years now there have been sustained clarion calls for the development of learning organizations, more responsive and flexible cultures and for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of effective leadership and management. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars have been spent on visioning, strategic planning, culture change initiatives, coaching and more effective internal communications.
There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and processes aimed at “harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential“.
However, the structure of most organizations is still clearly hierarchical and relies on learned command-and-control leadership and management techniques. Most leaders, executives and senior managers have been steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions. Their mental models began with these fundamental assumptions during their education and their first jobs. They have reached senior decision-making and leadership levels with the help of models that preceded today’s digital hyper-linked and networked environment with its wide, deep and rapid access to large numbers of people and vast amounts of information.
It is the rare “authentic” or natural leader that possesses or grows in him-or-herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity and inclusive decision-making to creating and leading a responsive, adaptable and effective organization. Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in “Level Five Leadership“, a featured article in the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Leadership issue. If you want to harness collective intelligence of the organizational crowd, you must have humility and good listening skills.
From Today to Tomorrow
Enter social software .. blogs, Twitter, wikis and various widgets (like IM interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing things and gather feedback from colleagues and customers). Using social software for purposeful activities tends to create gigantic, wide, always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.
So .. in this new electronic networked environment, how can today’s leaders go about developing vision, values, and a range of other elements of strategy and tactics.
We know from pre-Web experience that there is indeed something tangible, observable and useful in the knowledge and intelligence contained in and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue. Four or five decades of organizational development and organization change theory, practice and results have shown us that.
Many of us have been paying attention to the evolution of the Web’s impact on our lives and work for some time now. We tend to believe that the adroit, open and sincere use of social software to tap into and listen to a given organization’s crowd can materially help leaders and managers evolve into people who do not rely on charisma, positional power, coercion or dishonest political manipulation. Acknowledging and seeking ways to use the crowdsourced wisdom typically requires humility, listening and servant leadership to face and embrace the responsibilty to lead and manage effectively.
An important caveat … in spite of much work by many organizations towards inclusive engagement, it only takes a little bit of perceived ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents for control-oriented hierarchy to reassert itself very quickly.
Notwithstanding the apprehension of many of today’s more traditional or conservative leaders and managers, the possibilities of crowdsourcing useful vision and wisdom from employees, constituents and markets has been made much easier with the capabilities of today’s interconnected and interlinked Web. And, just as importantly, increasingly people want AND expect that their voices will be heard.
The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s intelligence and / or wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen ! This is where social software and methods like crowdsourcing can shine. They can and I believe will, eventually, replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture change initiative or surveys and diagnostics.
It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that carry the collective wisdom of an organization’s ‘crowd’.
These days (and certainly tomorrow) it’s less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about listening to conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinating the collective wisdom of any given organizational crowd.
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by Paula Thornton
July 31, 2009 at 4:25 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Innovation, Intent, Interaction, Social Media, Web 2.0
Two differentiating attributes of 2.0 are adaptation and emergence. Adaptive systems rely on feedback loops for continuous assessment. Emergence is the result of self-organizing adaptation. The more fluid a solution architecture, the more readily it can adapt. But fluid architectures are not yet the norm and there will always be situations where more structure is needed. In both cases, we will still rely on individuals to call out a need for adaptation, effectively — change.
Collaborative Web 2.0 environments like getsatisfaction.com, while self-organizing — allowing people to solve problems among themselves — do not adapt. There is no real problem solving going on. People are either sharing information for things that aren’t really problems (lack of knowledge) or they’re devising workarounds. Until the workarounds are acknowledged, there will be no changes to really ‘fix’ the problem.
Consider the volume of money spent on marketing, sales and even customer service — all focused on gaining customers and business transactions. What ratio is that compared to money spent to ‘allow’ individuals to interact with a business, clearing the rubbish that gets in the way of people who ’show up’ to do business? I’d like to call this the intent ratio: how intent businesses are at addressing the intent of their consumers. Companies might focus on measuring ‘retention’, but are inattentive to the business ‘machine’ and its health, starting with the points of interaction — the touchpoints — assessing them from the perspective of the individuals.
In Web1.0, one prevalent means of assessing interactions is via Web Analytics and Web Metrics. I hold the highest respect for two leaders in this space, namely Eric T. Peterson and Avinash Kaushik.
This work, however, is only part of a larger domain of interaction assessment: Design Research. This generic term applies equally to all interactions and related design (online and offline). For some audiences, I also use the label “Consumer Insight” (in E2.0, the predominant ‘consumer’ is the employee).
This model was devised to differentiate key research sources and related activities:
- Transactional Analytics
For online interactions, this typically = clickstream. The clickstream captures the interaction or transaction. While relevant, this data is nearly useless in isolation. It lacks the necessary context to draw meaningful conclusions. Knowing how many people visited a site is not nearly as relevant as why they visited (intent) and how successful they felt they were. Having a heartbeat tells you little about your health.
- Behavioral Analytics
This is the marriage of action and intent. If you don’t know why people are interacting with the business, little can be inferred about their actions. Some transactional (clickstream) tools infer intent — stacking one inference on another — the potential for erroneous conclusions exponentiates. Knowing the intent is also useless without the transaction — there is no way to truly assess the say/do gap (which is often significant).
- Feedback Loops
While most of what we’re talking about here can be considered feedback, this is called out to address two specific goals: gathering data from all the touchpoints and intentionally designing better loops in the touchpoints. This is a huge area of focus: key touchpoints are typically buried in divergent/competing organizations (website, customer service, call center, sales, marketing — for employees, the touchpoints of interaction are less well-defined). Coordinating a total experience and the feedback associated with all touchpoints is a major undertaking. Often the touchpoints don’t gather relevant feedback, they focus too much on ‘resolving’ an issue and not ’solving’ it. The ’solving’ of repeated issues doesn’t happen where there is no awareness. Awareness comes from the synthesis and sharing of the findings.
- Usability Studies
I’m not an advocate of usability studies because they are isolated from many relevant factors, are often laden with prescribed intents, and people tend not to be as ‘honest’ as is needed. If they’ve already been done, leverage the relevant findings. Most real ‘usability’ issues can be identified via the other methods. Usability studies may still be valid for production models that rely on major releases (as opposed to the continuous change of 2.0) or for situations where no other form of research is possible.
- Ethnographic Discovery
One of the best ways to gather relevant context — observing and/or talking to people as they engage in an activity — it can provide rich insight. There is often relevant contextual findings gathered during projects, but it is rarely synthesized/packaged and made available for others (it often gets buried, repurposed as requirements — focusing on the ‘what’ not the ‘why’).
Most companies I’ve been exposed to, either:
- Address none of these to any real degree
- Focus on Transactional Analytics only (e.g. clickstream)
- Focus on some aspect of several, but in isolation from each other
- Rely on ‘market research’ methods (ineffective here)
- Fail to collectively capture, synthesize and leverage the findings
The goal is to bring together relevant facts to inform discovery (the possibilities) that then lead to design — especially adaptive design to support individuals interacting with or on behalf of a business. Such facts are often difficult to find and difficult to effectively interpret and leverage — the barriers to ‘use’ are too high. Lowering these barriers is game-changing.
Various technologies (esp. web analytics) often include dashboards. Such dashboards include relevant data but they often include data focused on Search Engine Optimization and performance, which is of lesser relevance here.
For this model there’s potential for a collection (a dashboard might be one form) with related details and views that continuously offer and highlight new findings across various touchpoints. A more 2.0 approach would bring the facts into the context they’re related to, featuring (draw attention to via teasers) certain findings in tidbits, leading to more detail. Set up as an open ’social’ collection, individuals can share their discoveries and be the storytellers of what they’ve witnessed by both introducing new discovery findings or commenting on the data gathered from the touchpoints: a conversation flowing on the stream of work.
By bringing together the ‘witness’ of both automated touchpoints and human reports, the health of the business machine is given a ‘voice’ — the implicit becomes more explicit, providing a context and a means to:
- Suggest new actions or changes
(inherently different than the ‘idea’ model for innovation)
- Validate proposed changes
If an E2.0 initiative does not include provisions for such context, wherein does adaptation occur? If not adaptive, is it 2.0?
by Rob Paterson
April 17, 2009 at 9:02 am · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Barriers, Change, Clayton Christenson, Dead Paradigms, Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Innovation, Innovator's Dilemma, Marketing, Ning, QuickTax, Social Media, Trusted Space, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, YouTube, Zombies
The Dominos “YouTube Adventure” last week – when a couple made a disgusting video of what they did in making a Dominos Sub – is I think a “Rubicon” moment. Not just for Dominos, who had already put their toe into the river of Social Media but for every enterprise. (Excellent revue here by Frederic Lardinois from Read Write Web on what happened + Stats + Dominos response + an analysis)
All your customers, voters, members, suppliers – the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle – as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!
The Rubicon is that – whether you like it or not – the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.
So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation – your brand – the trust you have – is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.
You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.
As with Dominos – using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.
Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then – I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture – they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response – they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.
They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.
They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?
But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan – “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?
The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.
Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” – a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” – an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.
This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.
To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.
This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.
The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?
Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this – in fact who hate it – to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.
The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:
ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.
“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”
The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.
Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.
The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:
- Listen before you Speak – The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this – you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.
- Participate not Pontificate – To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world – many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans? You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.
- Importance – Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found – This is all about whether you are going to live or die – As the Coke folks say but more gently than I – Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast – the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?
Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.
Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.
Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.
by Jon Husband
March 30, 2009 at 6:48 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Work-net-ing, Trusted Space, Web 2.0
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In November of 2008, Stowe Boyd and I were invited to speak at the soft launch of blueKiwi 2009, an innovative collaboration platform which is one of the leading European providers of Enterprise 2.0 social computing business software. Stowe began the evening’s presentation with an overview of the high-level impacts of the web on human activities, I brought that down somewhat closer to the ground by providing a perspective on the impacts of interconnection and networks on organizational and management dynamics, and Carlos Diaz, the President and CEO of blueKiwi, gave the audience an excellent overview of blueKiwi’s value proposition and the design and new features offered by the 2009 version.
blueKiwi has now revamped its web site to signal the launch of the bK 2009 version and value proposition, and is “coming out” with bK 2009 at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
Last week I caught up with Carlos and co-founder Christophe Routhieau, CTO and software architect, in order to go into deeper detail as to why blueKiwi promises both innovation and pragmatic value as a social business collaboration platform.
We started off by covering a bit of history about blueKiwi’s roots and how the platform came into being just as the Web began to have major impact on the knowledge-based workplace. Carlos and Christophe were already successful web entrepreneurs in France. Carlos and his brother Manuel co-founded the web agency groupeReflect and Christophe joined the agency in 2000, and the team managed it successfully through several business cycles, eventually selling it to Emakina, an interactive marketing agency. Carlos and Christophe said it was useful and important to the early success of blueKiwi that they are coming to the issues of collaboration and social computing from the web rather than from a starting point in the pre-web information technology world (the traditional software world).
The initial version of blueKiwi was conceived and built prior to the advent of the domain known as Enterprise 2.0 in response to client organizations that wanted to use Web 2.0 capabilities inside their organizations to communicate more spontaneously and efficiently. So they and their early clients understood that people were growing into using the Web, and wanted to use that knowledge and understanding to inform the core design principles, functionality and usability of the first version of blueKiwi, which was built and implemented at one of their key clients, Dassault Systems.
Given that all the serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms claim to focus on the sociality now seen as central to effective responsiveness and organizational agility and effectiveness, I asked them what differentiates bK2009 from some of the other leading Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms. For me, this is where things start to get really interesting and what I find exciting about what blueKiwi has to offer. Starting from the vantage point of the Web 2.0-savvy user, they have designed and built blueKiwi to be user-centric whilst responding to the business issues that require the building, distributing and and deploying of business-focused knowledge … the essence of social business computing, in my opinion.
bK2009 is centered on the building, nourishing and sustaining of business-focused relationships – building useful knowledge and getting things done. Carlos and Christophe pointed out that they had learned something important during the 2nd wave of blueKiwi’s adoption by clients … most collaboration systems start from the point of view of technical capabilities and do not make it easy, or overlook, the building and growing of relationships. In the past, users of collaborative platforms had to go about building their business relationships, both internally and externally, outside of the collaboration system / platform. bK2009 is first and foremost a means of building valuable and value-added relationships in the course of doing one’s work … it can enable, contain and manage all the activity in a business ecosystem.
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Digging a bit deeper, I asked them what they thought was unique about blueKiwi. Carlos and Christophe believe that not only is their product design different from competitors, but they are very enthused about breaking new ground with the “economic model” offered by blueKiwi. The feel that with bK 2009 they are breaking new ground in two ways.
First … all collaboration platforms offer spaces where people can connect, gather, share and exchange information. Thus far, the mainstream approach has been to offer spaces where people can connect and gather, and then share content … information about issues, problems, and areas of interest, and as people exchange and collaborate, useful knowledge is built. bK2009 turns this upside down, or around (you choose). It is designed on the principle that the collaborative space is there for content and its distribution, and the individual user then chooses which groups she or he wishes to engage with. Thus, any individual user can be a member of the groups they have chosen to interact with. And of course it has a Twitter clone as one of its features.
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What eventuates is a network of interaction around pertinent content, and thus over time an ecosystem around issues in which engagement is de facto defined by the users’ interest and willingness to engage. This then leads to the ability to watch and quantify the volume of interactions and obtain a better, and visible , understanding of the value that is being created (responsiveness, innovation, deepening understanding and so on).
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There are three key effects stemming from this approach:
1. there is an inherent, and ongoing, flexibility in creating and participating in (”on the fly”, said Carlos) any given group (reminiscent of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group-forming ) – the individual is always in a sense at the centre of an information ecosystem in which she or he is by definition an integral part,
2. thus, an organization’s productive social networks are developed out of the interactions between individuals (I call this the “natural sociology of knowledge work”), which in effect reproduces the dynamics of blogging or using LinkedIn or Facebook, and
3. bK 2009’s profiles reveal an individual’s contributions in a dynamic and interactive way … an user creates his or her profile, but others can add to it (a la reputation systems) and finally, the bK 2009 platform offers up various analytics on the types and foci of any user’s inter-activities.
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Second … as blueKiwi has evolved through its second wave of client installations, what it learned was the practical logic of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks, whereby the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members of the network (debate continues, as you will note in the links and citations at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry). To date, the standard model of pricing for social computing / social business platforms involves fees based on the number of seats or users. The more users, the larger the fee, and the fewer the users, the less the fee. So, many organizations begin with pilots, or make decisions about enhancing collaborative capability that involve decisions about the difficulty and costs of customization of their installation of Sharepoint or IBM Lotus Connections.
Back to Metcalfe’s Law … blueKiwi believes that organizations should realize that collaboration in connected networks is the way work will be done all the time in the near future, and so organizations should seek to enroll and engage the entire organization in the use of the collaborative platform. Thus, the fees to use bK2009 are based on the levels of user activity each month. As activity increases the value to the organization increases, and accordingly blueKiwi’s revenues from that client increase. Conversely, if there is no activity, there is no revenue to blueKiwi.
This is essentially like pricing a utility, like paying for electricity or water … so, if eventually all or almost all knowledge work is going to happen on a collaborative platform, it makes sense that the platform and its capabilities be seen as one of the organization’s necessary utilities. As activity increases and the value to the organization increases, so should the price paid for the capabilities that help create the value. Technology is thus not a cost per se, rather the activity the technology enables reflects the price and value of the utility, and the users determine the ROI.
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Regarding its positioning in the Enterprise 2.0 market space, Carlos stated that bK 2009 is coming from the position of having “nothing to defend”. What does he mean ? He means that, for example, Sharepoint or IBM Lotus have fundamental technology assumptions and massive installations to defend, whereas blueKiwi is a new player, one that is coming from origins in / on the web as opposed to previous, pre-web IT design principles and architecture. They (blueKiwi) watched consumer behaviour on the web, Dassault Systems asked them to help build a system for more spontaneous, efficient and effective exchanges of information and knowledge, and the result after several years of intense design, development and deployment is a collaborative platform that in my opinion more closely mirrors the natural sociology of knowledge work than any other platform about which I know. The fundamental design principle stems not from the “technology” that supported existing work processes, whereby the design and architecture of the technology drives the way(s) users operate it (or try to do so), but from how people exchange and use information and knowledge.
bK 2009 is a “social technology” .. a couple of other capabilities reinforce this position. bK 2009 enables users to plug in and use a range of widgets so that they can take advantage of a wide range of pertinent socially-generated information and knowledge (this is closely aligned with some of my previous mutterings about mass customization / mass personalization of knowledge work). As both Carlos and Christophe stated, the ultimate goal is have organizations recognize that bK 2009 is effectively a layer over the organization’s existing IT architecture, and that it can and should operate as a strategic complementarity to existing databases, enterprise search engines, security functions and so on. It’s a social technology, and blueKiwi wants existing and future client organizations to see its design and capabilities as offering a “Social Hub” that complements an organization’s existing industrial-strength information technology architecture and investments.
Over and above the offering for large enterprises considering Enterprise 2.0 possibilities, blueKiwi is also now offering bK2009 Pro Edition for small and medium-sized organizations, for a flat (and affordable) fee. An interesting wrinkle … it allows such organizations to invite external members of its value web to join and interact. So, effectively it is providing these organizations with what they would today seek to accomplish by setting up a Facebook group (effectively side-stepping any potential hassles with Facebook privacy or Facebook owning all the member data). Neat !
I was impressed by this company and its people when I spent time with them, and I remain impressed. Can you tell ?
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UPDATE: If you want to know more about bK2009 or can’t see the detail on the screen shots well enough to understand as well as you’d like to, here are three short, well-produced video clips that help explain how bK2009 helps Foster Conversations, Build Efficient Networks and Bring People Together.
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