CTC - "Running Your Business on Web 2.0: Simple, Lightweight Apps"

This session, "Running Your Business on Web 2.0: Simple, Lightweight Apps," was run by Rod Boothby, author of the great Innovation Creators blog. Rod goes through about a dozen slides a minute, and a lot of visuals, so I suspect my notes will miss a lot.

His is a consultant - he works with knowledge workers.

He started a blog, found it was a good communication tool and asked why he couldn't use it in his work.

The key question to ask: Are you on the grid? (Can Google find you?)

The case for Web 2.0 in the enterprise is the case for hyper-linked information

(It is significant that more people are willing to read something via html than download a pdf.)

Everything in business comes down to greed and fear.

Greed

• Constant Innovation In order to acheive a constant stream of profits is to constantly innovate. You constantly innovate by leveraging the people around you.
• Improve efficiency
• Happier/ more engaged employees are more productive

Knowledge workers create ad-hoc things. They invent stuff and solve problems.

Fear

• Sarbanes-Oxley
• Global Communication

We rarely need to make life-and-death real-time decisions. It is more important to build relationships and communication

We rarely need to collaborate in real time. We can build off each other in a continuum.

Knowledge workers = Innovation Creators

We don't need knowledge management, we need better communication tools

Business case for blogs
- Empower employees - as a manager you need to be able to take people with small or big ideas and give them the ability to make that a success.

Example: In his organization, everyone is getting a People Pages and Project Pages (blogs by another name).
This will create:

• A searchable database of everyone (130,000 globally) and what they are working on
• Make a personal benefit by having by-lined articles that show readership and ranking
• Will have client blogs
• Focus pages that will talk on a particular topic

The point is to create blogs with a obvious business purposes. A way people can construct and link information that makes sense.

Simple tools:
37 Signals
Google
Joyent
Wordpress
MovableType
SocialText
Traction
Zoho

These things are agile

The key is:

• Individuals and interactions over process and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

It is important of encouraging a cottage-industry of internal  user-developed-application (UDA). This allows others to do work and increases

Who gets it?: Blogtronix, Automattic, Socialtext, iUpload (others I didn't get down)

Problem is IT's first job is to not get fired and second job is to protect the information.

IT is slow to adpot SOA because it is not linear, it is messy.

Suggestion of Enterprise Web 2.0 Gateway

What Should Go Behind the Firewall:
Authentication, Access Control, Encryption, Audit Trail

Already sort of happening with Sxip

We are going to have to consider the laws of identity.

Conclusion:

• To profit you must innovate

• To innovate you need to empower innovator creators

• Innovation creators need the tools (blogs, wikis)

In the end the business case comes in terms of innovation. These things are all just tools that will facilitate innovation, people still have to use these tools. In the end it comes down to defining what you need in terms of tools in the business. This will different in each business. Give people the tools to make their own application.

He makes it clear that all of these conversation are INTERNAL. External conversations need a lot more control. Think about going slowly.

The distribution of blogging policy actual resulted in increase in usage. You need a senior person to communicate this stuff (preferrably in person). Then get that senior person to recognize participation.

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, CTCBoston, CTC, collaborative+technologies+conference, Boothby, Innovation, Innovation+Creators, blogs

Comments

[Joel L.]

Hi there,

the links to "Simple tools" are broken (no http://)

[Jeffrey Treem]

Joel,

Thanks for letting me know. It should be fixed now. Cheers.