Inside the Cubicle

Google creating the lightweight Enterprise

Last month all the talk at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (which I sadly missed) was on the moves by IBM (Lotus), Intel (SuiteTwo) and Microsoft (Sharepoint 2007) to showcase their integrated suite of social media applications.

For Fortune 1000 businesses, these companies have a clear edge because they offer proven, secure solutions that can implemented behind the firewall (making the IT people happy)

But for small to mid-size businesses the answer for applications may be the same we have seen for advertising: GOOGLE.

Let's take a look at some of Google's recent acquisitions
Postini - security
Grand Central - VOIP
JotSpot - Wikis
Feedburner - RSS Management

Throw in Gmail, GChat, Google Docs (formerly Writely) , and you have a powerful version of Google Apps. Google Apps has quickly become a legitimate externally hosted solution for companies.

With an external hosted solution based around collaborative tools organizations can:
- Accommodate geographically dispersed employees
- Save money on IT hosting and maintenance
- Facilitate knowledge management and social networking in your organization

This last point is a big one. An externally hosted system forces information into a space where the organization can access it in a number of ways. Stephen Baker at Blogspotting notes the Orwellian uses this could have. I suppose I am naive, but I think the benefits of more effective compliance, ease of social networking and improved workflow will be more prevalent than snooping bosses.

Anyway, I am curious to see if any big company switches over to Google in the next year - then look for the dominoes to fall.

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Technorati Tags: Google, Enterprise2.0, Applications, Postini

Collaborative innovation at IBM

Great article in today's Chicago Tribune about the results of IBM's InnovationJam.

What is a Jam? In essence, it is a gigantic online brainstorming session. It is a way to gather ideas from thousands of individuals (in these cases, employees) through free-flowing conversations that work toward collective goals. It is modeled after the idea of musicians participating in "jam sessions."

In 2003, IBM successfully used a Jam to reexamine the company's values.

This year's InnovationJam was the company's most ambitious ever, involving 53,000 people in 77 countries and resulted in 37,000 ideas. The jam was conducted at the urging of Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano who said: "There's no hierarchy to this kind of creative collaboration. Whether you're a senior executive, a scientist, a business consultant or even a 13-year-old child of an IBMer, everyone gets to be heard."

According to the article:
" IBM managers then used automation to winnow the 37,000 offerings down to 300 defined ideas. Finally, more than 50 employees came to IBM's Watson Research Center to work in teams for most of a week to further combine and trim ideas to around 30."

IBM has pledged $100 million to support the ideas coming out of the jam. I imagine this is a fraction of their existing  R&D budget.

This is a slightly different tactic than Kraft has taken with its approach to innovation. Kraft is using what is referred to as "open innovation," and accepting ideas from external sources through its Web site.

What does all this mean?

Call it the wisdom of crowds approach to innovation, or crowdsourcing - whatever it is, it is just good business. The rate of innovation needed to stay competitive in the global economy is directly proportional to the rate of replication that currently exists. The idea here is that any edge will be fleeting, so innovation must be constant. The more people you can involve in a system of constructive innovation, the better your odds to produce successes more often.

What this demonstrates is that engaging employees is about far more than boosting moral and reciting the company values, it is about empowering employees to contribute to the advancement of the business.

Is there a risk here? Absolutely. With the IBM jam, 67 clients were allowed to look in on the jam, and competitors could have been looking in on certain aspects to steal or copy. For Kraft, individuals are free to take ideas elsewhere or develop them themselves.

The model here is incredibly similar to the model that I believe most public relations firms should be taking. Use whatever resources you have to aggregate information - technology, employees, etc. - and make your money by doing smarter things with that information than other people do. You will win in three ways:
- Traditional companies will not be open to new information and therefore will have a limited view of problem solving and difficulty finding innovative solutions.
- A more open process helps develop a community around the innovation process that will reduce the risks and boost the possibility of success (while minimizing resource investment.)
- Overall, an increase in information flow makes you more knowledgeable, involved and relevant in the marketplace, giving you a brand advantage.

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Technorati Tags: IBM, Kraft, Innovation

It isn't about what you know, it is about what who you know knows

Last week I attended a talk given by University of Chicago Graduate Business School Professor Ronald Burt (shout out to the Human Capital Institute, who put on the session). Burt is considered an expert on social capital and one of the leading researchers on the role of social networks within business settings. In 2000 he left academia to serve in an executive role at Raytheon.

Here are some excerpts from the talk (my apologies to professor Burt if I got anything wrong):

- As we flattened down bureaucracies, people became more the authors of their own jobs. This was necessary to compete globally, because you can’t afford the fat.

- Now you have to negotiate more for resources, get buy-in for novel approaches.

- Now it is not enough to be smart or have success, now more of your success is dependant upon your ability to relate to other people.

- Social capital refers to the assets you have in terms of how you are positioned in a market (a social network of competitors, collaborators and colleagues)

- There is a thriving science to the study of an asset known as social capital:

• It has a metric
• It has a substantial affect on performance
• It can be taught

- How is Social Capital responsible for innovation and good ideas? (creativity is an import-export game)

- Can Social Capital Be Taught? (yes, indicated by improved performance, promotion, and retention of desirable employees)

Human Capital: competitive advantage due to individual abilities or skills
Social Capital: competitive advantage due to surrounding organization

- If the group is not greater than sum of the parts, than you might as well break up the group and contract the work out.

- Our lives are filled with small worlds of organizations and markets, the idea that we have clusters that are joined through loose ties.

- There are information implications to this structure. People in similar groups tend to view things similar, and so information inside tends to become more homogeneous.

- Information becomes embedded in a location and becomes difficult to move.

- There are several Web sites that will model networks of related information: Touchgraph.com, Musicplasma.com, Digg.com, Dartmouthatlas.org

- In a small world, there are two leadership roles that individuals can have: Robert or James (Note: Burt had a nice graph to show this). Robert and James have the same social circumference – what is different is how their contacts are connected. James’ approach is to find a way to get contacts aligned and drive out variation – basis of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. Robert is at the intersection of social worlds is more likely to be exposed to good ideas. He understands that a singularly strategy is a choice, and is in a position to see better option or new ideas (entrepreneur). James only knows right and wrong, one way for success and failure.

- Invention has its origins in the way you organize, not in your capabilities.

- People who work at the intersection of social networks make more money, get promoted faster, etc.

Burt refers to these gaps between social networds as "structural holes" and notes that individuals who are able to work in these holes and bring information from one group to another are a value add.

The lesson?: It isn't about what you know, it is about what those around you know  and your willingness and ability to take that information and apply it to new situations and problems.

For organizations, it is about valuing diversity of ideas and fluidity of relationships. The consistent innovation neccessary for success in today's global economy isn't likely to be born from disciplined R&D processes, it needs to come from everywhere and anywhere, anyone and anytime. Organizations who do not accept, cultivate and activate this type of thinking will be left behind.

In case you hadn't noticed, I am really interested in social networks lately...

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Technorati Tags: innovation, Burt, social+networks

When they leave, what goes with them?

Bosses on your back to show them the ROI of new media technologies within the enterprise?

Ask them to think about all the money they have spent paying, training, educating and generally investing in employees. Then think about what they get when that investment leaves? The answer is likley very little. In fact, the largest cost of turnover is not the costs associated with severance or recruiting, but the indirect costs of lost organizational knowledge.

I was listening to a Webinar a couple weeks ago on which Robert Scoble mentioned that when he left Microsoft, he left more than 1.5 Gigabytes of information in his email alone. What happens to this information now? It is archived for a couple weeks and likely lost forever. Even if someone were to try to sort through this, there would be no context for the information.

What if this information were on internal blogs and wikis? What if employees were encouraged to post there tricks for unjamming the copier or gave tips for closing a sale with the client?

Most of this information is useless or irrelevant on its own, but within its proper context and for particular individuals it would be invaluable. It is not about knowledge management, but rather about creating a community of information that allows employees to solve their own problems and find new solutions.

If organizations do not provide new media tools within the enterprise, employees will go elsewhere (del.iciio.us, flickr, MySpace, Blogger) to do what they want to do.

It is not so much that employers lose control over employees behavior in these situations, but that they lose any proprietary benefits associated with the information an employee develops, encounters or aggregates.

Presumably, you hire individuals because they are talented and are able to provide some value to your organization. If you engage them through new media technologies, you will be able to access, leverage and retain the information they possess, and it will become a competitive advantage.

(to give credit where credit is due, David Carter of iUpload, who I had the pleasure of having lunch with today, mentioned to me that he discussed this idea with Scoble a while ago)

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Technorati Tags: Employee, turnover, blog, Scoble, iupload

CTC - "Enterprise 2.0"

This talk was given by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who popularized the term Enterprise 2.0 . The topic has generated tremendous reaction and discussion on his blog, as it did at the conference as well.

Emergent Platforms:

1. Structure is not imposed up front
- roles and identities are of little importance
- any form of data or information is acceptable
- Busisness process is not rigid, workflow is flexible
- Optionality - these technologies are not mandated

2. Structure emerges over time (just because we don't state with a structure, doesn't mean one doesn't develop over time).

He makes the point that almost everyone has an easier time finding information on the free Internet, than they do on their supposedly structured intranet.

Google works because the link structure of the Internet gives us a great structure for the Internet. The same type of principle works with tag clouds on flickr, del.icio.us and technorati. It gives structure to something that had no structure at the start.

The Current State of Enterprise 2.0:

• We are in the early days of this - Business executives at Harvard Business School get either a deer in a headlights looks or are utterly overwhelmed. Many executives feel that creating a blog takes to much work. Awareness of tools, ease of use and accessibility is very low.
• Encouraging examples: wikis, blogs, prediction markets, tagging
  • prediction markets - an internal stock exchange that allows people to buy or sell on the success of certain events (based on Iowa Electronic Markets
• Tech companies are early adopters - need to move slowly in other business areas where they are not tech savvy

Which is easier - Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0?
Web advantages
    - Long Tail - only need a small set of passionate users
    - Can dial up or down the level of anonymity

Enterprise Advantages
    - Incentives - can provide direct motivation for participation
    - Culture - the collegial atmosphere and caring is not sufficient and caring
    - Management? - not users or IT staff - what is going to make this work in a company is whether management really wants this to work or not

Vibrant Communities and Ghost Towns
When Enterprise 2.0 works
    - Interdependance - what makes a team is the level of interdependance, you need some level of shared fate
    - Goals/deadlines/output - need something tangible that you are working to
    - Nudge from leaders - not mandate
    - No powerful holdouts

When Enterprise 2.0 doesn't work
    - Independence
    - No goals, deadlines
    - "If we build it, they will come
    - Wrong user demographics - younger and tech friendly your workforce is, the  more success you will have

Question was raised as to whether it makes sense to go with blogs or wikis within an enterprise. There was the issue of the need for attribution.
Two issues:
- It is only logical that these tools (blogs and wikis) will begin to merge together
- There is still a documented trail on a wiki

The issue of relevancy - A blog is more like a lecture, from one trusted source, where a wiki is more like a discussion. Difference between opinion and subject matter expert.

Issue of incentives - Depends if you are incentivized for participation or goal acheivement. In a competitive environment, you may want personal recognition (i.e, every individual is rewarded for their talents)

What is needed from technologists?
- Better search
- Integration and consolidation - the danger of not doing this is having a bunch of individual walled gardens
- Simple, intuitive UI
- Features? - do we keep these completely free-form. That may be a little naive for the Enterprise
- Workflow - Are we ever going to need to build in a little bit of assigned procedures


Decision: Which is it?

Do leaders really believe "People are our most important asset...we believe in transparency...we want to encourage collaboration and cross-functional cooperation..."

or do they really think...

"Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret..." - Max Weber

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

CTC - "Making Sense of Web 2.0: Impact on the Enterprise"

The afternoon breakouts began with Dion Hinchcliffe, editor-in-chief of Web 2.0 Journal, talking about "Making Sense of Web 2.0: Impact on the Enterprise" (He zoomed through the presentation pretty quickly and had a lot of diagrams, so I will try to post the presentation later)

A reductionist view of Web 2.0 - A Read-Write Web + Lots of People Using It = Collective Intelligence

Network Effects - A good or service that has value based on other people having it (e-mail, wikis, etc.)

There are a lot of definitions of Web 2.0s and they are all true in some way.

Aspects of Web 2.0
Stratgic positioning
    - web as a platform
User Positioning
    - you control your own data
Core Compenticies
    - Services, not packaged software
    - Harnessing collective intelligence

Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of the platforms. Going beyond the page to the idea of applications

7 tenets of Web 2.0

1. Web as platform - open, reusable Web services, permalinks, syndication
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence - services that get better, the more people use them
3. Information as the Core Capability, Not Software - Google Maps, "Blogosphere"
4. End of Discrete Software Releases - continous improvement becomes the norm
5. Lightwieght programming models - users can be their own programers
6. Fundamentally federated software systems - examples: iTunes, blogosphere
7. Rich User Experiences - Results found in software are as good as can be found anywhere else

Core competencies of Web 2.0

• Online services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability

• Maintaining control over unique, hard to re-create information that gets better with more users

• Trusting your users as co-developers

• Harnessing collective intelligence

• Leveraging The Long Tail

• Lightwieght user interfaces, development models

The most pressing issue facing the enterprise over the next year is the conflict/overlap/reconciliation between SOA and Web 2.0

The simplicity of use and ability to exploit network effects has resulted in enormous online communities.

Now users have extended beyond early adopters and techies. It now has global adoption and blogosphere doubles every six months

Will this happen in the enterprise?
Two pre-requisites to acquiring  knowledge

• Motivation - People will discover that they can help themselves to solve problems and get information
• Context - Understanding concepts and reasons for them. As people become more familiar with benefits it will become more widespread

We should strive for less transactional interactions and more tacit interactions. Tacit interactions provide the largest productivity gains.

Technologies allow us to allocate activities more effieciently between tacit interaction and transactional employees.

Technology to boost the quality, speed and scalability of the decisions employees make.

Applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise
- Low barrier, available anywhere
- Allow users to structure business information (folksonomies over taxonomies)
- Continous bottom-up management by end-users
- Business processes exposed as Web services (or at least a feed)
- Easy inclusion of external Web services (outside-in)
- Based on portable, recognized standards
- Web 2.0 style collaboration (Wikis, Visible Path, etc.)

Adding enterprise "context" to blogs - Question is whether this stuff eliminates benefits of blogging
- Enterprise Integrated Secruity
- Approval Process for Posts and New Users
- Content Auditing (preferably automated)
- Open Services - Both usage and consumption
- High-Quality Enterprise Federated Search (huge problem)
- Flexible Hosting Options

Governance is a key issue in that when you open yourself up to other departments and users, you bring up

Examples:
IBM and QEDwiki
ProgrammableWeb.com
MashupFeed.com

Government agency creates an internal wiki. They wanted to get workers to contrinute high value information, but they couldn't get contributions from workers because it wasn't in their self-interest.

The result of long-term Web 2.0: Social Computing

• moving from top-down to bottom-up model

• moving from ownership to experience

• Power is moving from institutions to communities

Major Trends for Enterprise 2.0

• Enterprise Mashups
• Ad-hoc yet integrated
• Consistent Foundations

Reccommendations
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Reuse first, build structure
Provide minimum structure and let users build from there

CTC - "Real-Time Communications Dashboards: Making Real-Time Collaboration Real"

This talk was moderated by Johna Till Johnson, President, Nemertes Research and included

- David Bieselin, Director of Software Development, Cisco Systems
- Doree Duncan Seligmann, PhD, Director Collaborative Applications Research, Avaya Labs
- David Marshak, Senior Product Manager, IBM

Johna:
The number of people who are virtual workers has increased 800% over the past five years, A virtual worker is someone whose boss or manager is in a different locations.

Along with this is an increase in demand for tools that help manage and work with this distributed workforce.

Question: Where are you seeing this concept of dashboard? what business areas?

David - The most pronounced versions of these are in highly structured businesses such as healthcare and finance. It is also becoming more popular among remote workers

Doree - Gave example of hospital nurse wearing headsets that showed position in hospital and status

David - Disagrees with dashboard because it is all contextual. Two models:

1. How do I find information and people
2. How do I receive requests for information and my time

When you are looking at structure, you have to consider not just personality, but also roles and the prescriptions that go along with the role.

Johna -
Key concepts of a dashboard are:
Presence - where all people and what are they doing
Availability - what are people doing and what resources can I tap

David -
He gets no voicemail because people never call unless he is available, and they know he is the right person to answer that question. It shows the importance of accurately displaying presence and context.

IBM has Blue Pages and is adding bookmarking, tagginging and ability to connect with indidviduals who may be experts in certain areas.

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, ctcBoston, Collaborative+Technologies+Conference, CTC, Collaboration, IBM, Avaya, Cisco, dashboards

CTC - "Generational Shifts: Brain Drain and Youth Culture"

Next up was a panel discussion on generational shifts: Stowe Boyd, Managing Director, A working Model moderated with comments from John Beck, author, Got Game and Jim Ware, Executive Producer, Work Design Collaborative

Jim:

The American population is aging. And while we will likely face an increasingly strong employement market as these people retire, this generation is not going quietly. They will work longer and work part-time.

The traditional worker used to be focused on tenure and security and expected company to be paternalistic. The emergent workers expect change and don't respect organizational charts.

This cuts across generations. Spherion predicts that as of 2009, 90% of workers will be characterized  as emergent.

Organizations must prepare for MAJOR talent shortages in the next decade

How do they do this?

1. Recognize changing workforce values, expectations and individual needs
2. Learn to manage generational diversity
3. Become a "Next Generation Company" - a company that allows telecommuniting and embraces new technology, and a company that looks at innovative HR programs

John:

Asked what percentage of employees had grown up playing video games - 34% of employees over 35, 80% of employees under 35

The variable of whether someone grew up playing up video games was stongly correlated with certain relevant workplace beliefs

Why does gaming create a unique way of looking at the world?

• Games are a valid way to experience and learn about the world
• Games change how the respond to incentives & risk and how they absorb new concepts
• Games provide an important outlet for creativity and drive down new problem solving methods
• Games command their ATTENTION better than most other types of interface

Gamers are:

1. more competitive
2. more global in their thinking
3. less connected to their companies
4. more sociable and work in terms better
5. come across as self-important (feel they are experts, but want to be rewarded based on performance)
6. gamers believe more in luck (more willing to accept failure, more capable of figuring out the algorithm and how to beat system)

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, ctcboston, Collaborative+Technologies+Conference, colloboration, gaming, attention,

CTC - Linda Stone

To kick off Day 2, we heard from Linda Stone, who discussed "Attention in an Always on World."

We are operating in an increasingly noisy world.

Yet the sweet spot of opportunity is the meeting place of human desire and new technology.

We operate in a realm on "Continous Partial Attention." This is different from multi-tasking in that multi-tasking is motivated by a desire to be more productive. To pay contious partial  attention is motivated by a desire to be constantly connected, to be scanning for opportunities and things of interest. Contious partial attention means that we are constantly wanting to be interested and engaged.

It is as if we are expecting our own bandwidth to keep up with increasing computing bandwidth.

It doesn't matter whether you view this as a good or bad thing, it is important that you recognize it as a dominant paradigm. It can valuable in small doses, but probably bad a guiding practice.

We shifted from personal improvements to connections.

This always on, always connected world, escalates everything to the level of crisis and immediate need.

We need to make technologies that improve our lives, not just take up more attention.

We are on the cusp of a new era where we are seeking out people and things that we trust and that resonate with our values and views. We want to be able to make the best decision in a world when we are bombarded with so many choices.

We want to sort through noise (Google, TiVo). We want to trust companies we buy from and the authorities that we listen to.

We will increasingly be drawn to messages are allow us to belong, mean something and discern things.

We have gone from information workers, to knowledge workers and now we have the chance to be wisdom workers.

The new differentiator is not simply ease of use, but whether a new tool or technology improves a quality of life.

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, Collaborative+Technologies+Conference, CTCBoston, collaboration, Linda+Stone, attention