Archive for Wisdom of Crowds
by Jon Husband
April 11, 2008 at 2:07 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software
Cross-posted to the FASTForward blog.
Much of what follows may not be new for anyone who may read this blog. Nevertheless, I think it’s always useful to look back every once in a while, if only to see how far and fast (or not) we’ve come since this Web thing started to penetrate more deeply and spread more widely into the workplace.
The changes to what we call knowledge work are now coming thick and fast.
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Knowledge management (KM) sometimes seems like the business buzzword that won’t go away. But that may be changing. As Web 2.0 penetrates and spreads through workplaces, will it render KM as it was once known obsolete … or not ?
We have all been wrestling with the massive changes brought onto the scene by Web 2.0 technology and capabilities … changes that portend transforming the relationship between information technology, the nature of knowledge work, how organizations are structured and how humans operate when surrounded and penetrated by ongoing flows of information. It’s doubly important to note and understand that we are in reality still only in the early days of these fundamental changes to both the processes of work and the capabilities of the electronic infrastructure of hardware and software, aluminum, silicon and logic that supports these transformations in behaviour in the digital workplace.
A first wave of what we currently call knowledge management (KM) appeared in the mid-to-late 1990’s as organizations began coming to grips with the potent combined forces of information technology and its twin sister, information-based knowledge work. Much of the attention and effort centred on integrated information systems and specialized information technology that combined enabled the categorization, archiving and easy access to documents and other codified knowledge. Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.
Much water has passed under many bridges over the past five years or so. Blogs and wikis began to appear on the scene in 2001 and 2002 and some speculated then that these tools - or more accurately their derivatives - would create a major impact on the knowledge workplace. They were followed by the evolution and expansion of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 … features, functions and web services enabled by plug-ins, widgets and other easy-to-use digital mechanisms. It was not until the middle of 2006 that IT executives and managers began to realize that lightweight, easy-to-use-and-integrate capabilities for finding information, pulling it apart and putting it together again in different ways, and exchanging that information to build useful knowledge would probably transform key areas of knowledge work and its attendant dynamics.
Today there is rapidly growing awareness that the Web will play a major, if not dominant, role in the use of information technology by organizations small and large, whether through upgrading to the latest versions of major ERP systems that incorporate social software and collaboration capabilities and a range of useful widgets and plug-ins, or through wider adoption of SaaS or a make-over of an enterprise’s work systems to incorporate collaborative platforms and capabilities. Increasingly, changes to functionality, systems integration and IT architecture will need to be built around both individual and group cognitive and interactive styles and needs as well as the enterprise’s business process requirements
Many interviews with some of the acknowledged experts in the domain of knowledge management and in technology companies have led to forecasts of some version of the points outlined below (and of course many variations on the theme that each point suggests):
1. KM assumed that knowledge work in information-based organizations basically remains more or less the same … more static or stable as opposed to dynamic (and always under construction) with ongoing reference to core dependencies on knowledge objects. In other words traditional KM was over-reliant on structure where structure when working with flows of information is difficult to impose and fix into place
2. “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question. It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used. This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work
3. Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing. It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction
4. By and large, incentives should not be used to stimulate information contributions. Generally, this leads to gaming by those that are better at managing than at creating/innovating
5. Had today’s Web 2.0 tools and capabilities had been available a decade ago, what we have called knowledge management would have been embraced and used more successfully
6. Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets. The knowledge accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of business / organizational processes on knowledge objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge from ongoing flows of dynamic information.
7. We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects. The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).
8. An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.
9. Computers alone cannot competently tag content. Authors must tag the content they create and / or use. Putting names and labels to content is essential and often may be words that do not appear in the content (this is the essence of metadata).
10. Centralized IT control is on its way out. Much more of the decision-making about what platforms / applications / software to be used will be made in by line management or by project teams. Security concerns are real due to Web 2.0 but not apocalyptic and should focus on protecting corporate data, not in regimenting the means of collaboration.
11. Human Resources (HR) will in all likelihood need to undergo a massive transformation. The nature and design of knowledge work keeps changing and as that change accelerates, it’s likely that companies will need to move towards the self-organizing of work … including people, tools and methods.
Exploration of the issues in the field of Enterprise 2.0 has also more recently led to the understanding that social computing depends to some degree on the architecture, engineering and specialized knowledge handling technology that has come before. Numerous vendors with KM-labelled products (mostly leveraging intranets) appeared in the market in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. During that same period, hundreds of major enterprises developed and implemented KM programmes and / or functionality, to some degree or other.
Social computing in the enterprise is intended to improve the collaboration, use of information and knowledge and the decision-making effectiveness of individuals, teams or the whole enterprise. Today, more and more of the established KM-oriented products have added social-computing functionality. Existing capabilities and implementations are being adapted, re-designed and/or added to by Web 2.0 applications, platforms and capabilities that make it easier and faster for knowledge workers to exchange information, collaborate and build and use.
While through the spread of social computing KM may be coming out of an initial identity crisis, the advent and rapid spread of what is termed Enterprise 2.0 has helped create for KM a new Identity Crisis 2.0. Today it seems clear that the new crop of collaboration tools, platforms and methods for enhanced collaboration are rapidly synthesizing and integrating fragmented or separate components of what was understood to be a KM-oriented system a few short years ago.
And whatever the current guise (which is likely to be different in virtually every organization) increasingly practicality and ease-of-use will rule the day.
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by Jon Husband
March 9, 2008 at 11:51 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Business Model, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Messy World, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software
I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions … almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old … in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.
Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread. We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.
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The world’s 50 most powerful blogs
From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.
Here are the 50 best reasons to log on.
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The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment. Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other … always have done, and always will do so. And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.
I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.
Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives. That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.
It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0". I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting. I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.
In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group. His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.
Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics. In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said "OK, you win" and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.
It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between "inside" and ‘outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.
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by Jon Husband
February 1, 2008 at 2:52 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Cloud Computing, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Sustainable Development, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, mashups, open source
Hot on the heels of the recent post about "The Rise In Collective Intelligence - Decentralizing Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture" comes the release of a second report or white paper with a remarkably similar title … "User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value".
There must be something in the water or the air, one would think.
This announcement comes from the P2P Foundation, spearheaded by Michel Bauwens.
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User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value
This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.
It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.
The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).
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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era. The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.
At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago. I promise I’ll stop soon 
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"
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Tags: Collective Intelligenece, Co-creation of value, new paradigms, peer-to-peer, business models, wirearchy
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by Jon Husband
January 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Change, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IBM, IT Department, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software
This just off the presses at ZDNet …
It won’t be a surprise to most of the FASTForward blog readers, as I think there’s probably a unanimous consensus amongst analysts and pundits who write on this blog that social computing in an enterprise setting and the related architectures of hardware and software is an important and massive shift that will affect knowledge work and organizational structures.
And it’s now clear that Forrester, Gartner, Jupiter, McKinsey, Deloitte Touche, Watson Wyatt, Ernst & Young, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun … all the major ‘brand name’ providers of advice and technology to enterprises … are taking the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 very seriously.
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Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions from Forrester
Forrester published a report, “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” ($775, about $100 per page), which concludes that blogs, wikis, and social networking will further gain importance in 2008 as enterprises look to Web 2.0 tools to solve long-standing worker problems.
Not a big revelation.
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UPDATE:
Huh ? 42% "Not on our agenda" and 32% "Not a priority" translates into Forrester’s "Web 2.0 will be a 2008 priority" ?
Did that non sequitur get your attention ? It did mine.
The next section of the short ZDNet piece states:
Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their agenda to make it a priority by year’s end. Here’s why:
First, the IT shops that began experimenting with enterprise Web 2.0 tools for their own use in 2007 — for tasks like help desk ticket resolution, standards and documentation tracking and IT project management — will begin rolling out these tools more broadly to lines of business as they pass IT muster.
Second, CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees’ use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead.
Finally, for IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Forrester
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by Rob Paterson
January 27, 2008 at 7:32 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, Business Model, Community, Grooming, NPR, Public Insight Journalism, Public Media, Social Computing, Social Media, Twitter, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds, iTouch
This is a slice of time last night on my Twitter. I am watching TV but I have my iTouch in my lap. When the ads come on, I mute the set and go back to my Twitter feed. here I have a real friend - not a Fake Friend - Andy Carvin covering the South Carolina Primary. I also have a Twitter friend worrying about how to cope with teen boys - her son is out late.
As Andy twittered his coverage, others that I know, pitched in too.
This was not strangers talking to strangers but Friends Talking to Friends - much much much much warmer.
Add the back channel of a parent asking for help about how to cope with your teens being out late and this is an entirely new Media Experience.
I am inside a system - inside a system that is deeply human and that I feel a part of.
BPPDiner - the Twitter inner circle for Bryant Park Project is also adding this warmth to the show. Already we are seeing program ideas being discussed in real time with the listener. Over the weekend even contact is still there between the crew and each other and their inner group.
My intuition is shouting out that somehting that I don’t fully understand yet is happening that will turn out to be momentous.
by Jon Husband
January 26, 2008 at 11:02 pm · Filed under
Business Model, Change, Charles Handy, Cloud Computing, Conferences, Dead Paradigms, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, open source
Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.
In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market. The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study
David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.
It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.
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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence
Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.
[ Snip … ]
On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”
This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.
The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.
The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”
All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.
Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.
One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.
Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.
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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute. I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.
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Tags: Collective intelligence, new business logic, new business models, ROII, Return On Investment in Interaction, cloud computing, co-creating value, decentralization, wirearchy, hierarchy
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by Joe McKendrick
January 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Dan Carew responded to my last post on ‘Recession 2.0,‘ in which I predicted that in the event of an economic downturn, people would not be as powerless as they once were, because they will have social networking and other Web 2.0-based tools at their disposal to reach out and grab new opportunities.
Dan is a bit more pessimistic, and said my thinking was based on ‘irrationally exuberant’ boosterism and pollyannishness:
“A stock market crash is going to sink Web 2.0 ships, just as surely as it sinks others. And you gotta be kidding if you think the read/write Web could mitigate, no less reverse it.”
Dan feels that an economic downturn, if severe, may give us more time to blog, or use our iPhones from the soup kitchen, but that’s about it. But Web 2.0 won’t do us much good when the electricity gets cut off.
Perhaps if I’m being too pollyanish, then Dan is being too Eeyorish (remember Eeyore?), and the actual scenario would fall somewhere in the middle.
In a follow-up discussion Dan and I are having, I point out that if and when layoffs hit (and we all know we don’t need a recession for that), people have more options to drive their own fate, versus living on unemployment checks and hoping the company calls them back.
“People can remain well-connected to their professional networks, and leverage tools and potential opportunities that have not been readily available in times gone by. If you want to try to start a new business, the Web offers an abundance of ideas and opportunities — and visibility across the globe. Not a lot of start-up capital is required. The Web is an incredible global tool at our disposal, for very minimal cost.”
But Dan argues that if things got bad, they would get real bad, and nobody will want your Web-based services, period:
“Consumers won’t have extra cash to buy the clever non-essential item you’re selling on eBay or a Web store; companies will be retrenching and won’t be hiring consultants.” And don’t bother casting a net for global buyers, because there won’t be any.
Dan also argues that increased productivity, and the advent of the radio and telephone didn’t help folks back in the 1930s. (Hey, didn’t Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats at least calm down the runs on the banks?)
My argument is that employees and entrepreneurs don’t have to be victims this time around, in the event of a downturn. We have access to far more knowledge, tools, and networks now than we did in previous times, and this is going to help us not only to manage through tough times, but even identify niches where we can flourish. And if this works for enough people, it could help turn the tide of a downturn.
Readers and fellow posters, it would be good to get your takes on whether Web 2.0 can make a difference if things got rough, or if you agree with Dan that we’re toast, no matter how many social network accounts we have.
by Jon Husband
January 22, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under
Change, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds
Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" (both terms coined by Marc Prensky, a virtual learning / game-based learning guru), and recently colleague Rob Paterson offered up a post (The Social Web - A New "World") noting his "aha" moment about the issue.
"It" is interactive, it’s fast, the flows of information are overwhelming, it feeds social computing, it’s not going away, and it will be coming to a workplace near you. It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that the pressures due to a growing demographic shift are getting more and more tangible every month. When the Gartner Group starts predicting that the coming generations of knowledge workers will understand how to work in wirearchies, and predict that their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities .. well, one might say that awareness is growing.
Remember sending groups of people off for training on the latest complicated software ? Will that change ?
JP Rangaswami, who writes often about the use of social software in the enterprise based on his experiences at DkW and BT recently emphasized the coming impacts at the LeWeb 3 conference in Paris, noting in his presentation that:
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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.
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This also reminds me of the central issues raised in a seminal article article in the Economist 18 months ago titled The New Organization, namely that most organizations have watched the rise of the networked worker (and equipped them all with Crackberries) without making fundamental changes to organizational structures and work design,
I suspect that’s one of the core targets of Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, in which he lays out this key challenge for executives and managers everywhere.
Here’s one Gartner Group analyst’s take on the coming challenges associated with Enterprise 2.0 and the war for talent in a digital era.
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‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 into Your Business
Clint Boulton
September 20, 2007
Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools.
LAS VEGAS—Digital natives—people who grew up using interactive Internet tools—will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.
As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.
"They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done," Bradley said.
Digital natives will thus usher in what Gartner calls the Enterprise 2.0, where users will use rich Internet applications, social software and a Web platform to execute tasks.
Social software includes social networking (Facebook-like profiles), social collaboration (JotSpot-like wikis and blogs) and social publishing (social tagging, think Digg) tools to interact socially and boost organizational effectiveness.
While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be "free form," or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.
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Tags: Marc Prensky, Rob Paterson, JP Rangaswami, digital natives, Enterprise 2.0, hierarchy, wirearchy, the new organization, networks, Gartner Group
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by Joe McKendrick
January 21, 2008 at 11:20 pm · Filed under
SOA, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Lately, there has been a frenzy going on — at hysterical levels — across the media about a “looming recession.” I don’t intend to join the gloom-and-doom crowd, because I believe the economy is very diverse and resilient.
However, it is an inescapable fact that business growth moves in cycles — up and down. In the event of a downturn, let’s ponder the role of our hyper-networked space in managing through tougher times. We may have not seen anything like it.
Let me start with this thought: It’s not 1975 anymore. In the recession that stormed through the 1974-75 period, there were massive layoffs. Workers were dismissed from plants and offices, and were lined up at unemployment offices. They were powerless, and cut off from information relevant to their industry, coworkers, and new opportunities. Nor for that matter is it 1981, when the ugly cycle repeated itself, or 1991 and 2001, when more powerless white-collar workers joined the unemployment lines.
In those times, it often didn’t matter how much value employees provided to their organizations, when it came time to slash, they were cast out to the street. Of course, many were hired back within a couple of years as things get better. But in the meantime, there were anxious months — and afterwards, the constant fear of future layoffs.
Workers are no longer those powerless pawns, locked into 9-to-5 routines, subject to the whims of their employers. Instead, they carry around portable skills, portable resources, and portable networks that can be quickly applied and adapted to new environments and situations. As we frequently discuss here at FastForward, the balance of power in organizations has shifted to the end-user. If the organization thinks it can no longer afford the services and expertise an employee provides, that employee may be able to rapidly shift that expertise and services to another organization.
Now, employees remain connected in real time not only to their co-workers from organizations past and present, but also networks of professionals in their areas of expertise. Opportunities and new ideas for generating opportunities can be quickly shared and acted upon. Blogs, wikis, search engines and the like have transformed our workspaces into one single gigantic virtual workplace. We no longer depend on our coworkers down the hall; we now leverage resources from across the globe.
Many employees simply may not even need a full-time employer anymore. In 1975, the idea of going the entrepreneurial route was not a realistic option for most workers. It took plenty of seed money and visibility to get a new operation going and profitable.
Now, it’s possible to start an innovative new business with virtually little or no investment, employing Web-based resources. It’s now possible to run an entire business on Web 2.0-based services — from infrastructure to databases to business intelligence and analytics. Many are free, the rest only charge on an incremental per-use basis.
There’s the example of GigaVox Media, a podcasting support company, that invested a grand total of $80 for its first two months in the kind of same robust IT infrastructure that would be available to GM. All the computing power you need is available right from the Web — no investment required. Web 2.0 and Software as a Service may give rise to thousands of new businesses.
Unlike previous economic downturns, many of today’s workers and professionals will not resign themselves to the powerlessness of the unemployment line. Any economic downturn has the potential to be reversed or mitigated by empowered employees or entrepreneurs who will be able to collaborate, share information and knowledge, and quickly respond to and act on new opportunities, thanks to our networked economy.
by Rob Paterson
January 16, 2008 at 8:17 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, CPB, Emergent, NPR, NPR Music, PBS, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, TV, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Wouldn’t it be something if Public TV and Radio got together to cover the election? Would it be great if the local stations got together with the big producers to cover the election?
Well it’s more than a dream now - CPB is funding just such a Mashup - The beginning I think of the key new force in public media - a Real Network of Many to Many.
Many of us had had a problem wit the term “Network” in Radio and TV. What it really means is one powerful producer using a system to distribute its product. Of course a real network is a diverse multi node system that where many nodes add value to the whole.
This is what is being “born” in Public radio and TV. Our hope a year ago was that the Election would be a powerful enough incentive to help the current large players to grit their teeth and really share and work with each other. This is working.
Here is Andy Carvin with the story.
Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.
“By pooling content produced locally and nationally — for radio, television, and online — we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public,” said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. “We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting.”
“This grant underscores CPB’s support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are,” added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. “This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms.”
The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality - many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn’t have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.
The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR’s annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn’t take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn’t get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work……….
Now with NPR Music - we are seeing a real network emerging. With a real network, there will come the network effects for all concerned.
by Jon Husband
January 10, 2008 at 8:37 pm · Filed under
Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software
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Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management. This call to exploration, exploration and action is concomitant with the emergence of the much-debated arena of what has been called Enterprise 2.0.
Here’s a key excerpt:
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This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.
Most of us grew up in a “post-industrial” society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.
Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by “managers”. To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.
While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: “The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization.” This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.
It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
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It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding their ways into the workplace. Why wouldn’t they ? After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment. People have always been creating and building up “... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.”
The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment. Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.
What is today called Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities. These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as Hamel asserts, it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart. See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail
I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making. I am not arguing that we need to replace hierarchy holus-blous … rather, I am suggesting that the capabilities of information systems combined with social computing capabilities and two decades of experience with team development and organizational development processes can permit centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.
As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … it is my belief that the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL and quality circles through socio-technical systems approach(es) through self-directed and self-managing teams and “workouts” on into inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to “management” (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search, Open Space, and dialogue circles. The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as the application of information to products and services in ever-increasing amounts and more and more rapid and both integrated and fragmented flows.
Now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The principles cited in the paragraph above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiatives and requires collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed. That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as deciding what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,
Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades. The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.
I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so. To reiterate, as it has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while coping with what actually “is”. Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, has often suggested that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as the proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.
I think OD has suffered from being seen as “soft” and a “nice-to-have-time-to-do”, especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century. While it is a maxim in the OD field that “the soft stuff is the hard stuff”, it can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hardnosed management hard-asses, the “I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack” crowd.
Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0. However it is not seen today as the dominant “management” model.
The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.
Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need. Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:
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“Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both.”
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Tags: hierarchy, Enterprise 2.0, wirearchy, organizational development, management innovation
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