Inside the Cubicle

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 - "Identity 2.0"

The first session I attended on Thursday was given by Dr. Phillip Windley from BYU and titled "Identity 2.0."

Why does identity matter? In today's world where service transaction are increasing, and hard goods transactions are decreasing, identity matters.

What is an identity? credentials, attributes or traits that are associated with a particular identifier

Driver's licenses are identity documents - They have:

• attributes
• authentication mechanisms
• associated with providing authorization
  

He give an example of people purchasing beer. The clerk applies an algorithm (what date is appropriate) and acts as a policy decision point.

Why do we care about identity? Security

There is an idea in corporations that we need to make our systems easy to use internally, but we then need to secure our borders.

Wide Area Identity:

• Federated identity
• Internet Indentity

People want federated identity out of fear of credentials being used out of context. The primary reason for this is transfer trust. (Example: We can use our passport as identity for a check at a store because we transfer the trust in the government, however we could never use a store gift card for identity to cross the border because we don't transfer the trust in the store)

Roles:

1. Identity issuer (Organization that issues credentials)
2. Relying party (Organization that is relying on other organization's authentication)
3. User

Gives an example of an employee accessing a 401K provider through the employee portal (These make more sense with the accompanying diagrams):
Scenario 1
- The ID issuer and relying party has a prior arangement
- The user is only involved peripherally, and only by policy 

Scenario 2
- ID issuer and relying party need no prior agreement
- User involved structurally

Involving the user structurally in the fedreration reduces the risk and liability

Identity types are either addresses or tokens - addresses are also tokens, but have the added feature of being addresses as well (ex: an e-mail would be an address, a user name would be a token)

Different names for Internte Identity Technologies

OpenID
CardSpace
SXIP
Higgins
Liberty

There is a project just announced called OSIS (Open-Source Indentity Selector) that will bring all of these together

Reputation is not the same as identity because others create reputation. You can do things to help shape it, buut you can't shape it.

Principles of Reputation
-Trust based on reputation
- Exists in the context of community
- Reputation based on identity
- Reputation is a currency
- Reputation is multi-level

The reputation of a particular identity is a function of: facts, a set of transactions, and a set of ratings and endorsements.

Transparency in transactions is a debate. Some argue that transparency is essential, others would disagree. Example: Google doesn't show the algorithm it uses for search reputation.

Identity in the Enterprise

- Most identity systems simply grew up over the years.

- We need to develop identity management architectures. This principle is pased on an idea of city planning.

Windley feels security policies should be seperate from identity policies.

Access control scales geometrically, but accountability scales linearly and can be done inexpensively.

Identity policies make up a key part of strategy in terms of how you are going to deal with people. It also makes clear how others can deal with you.

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, ctcboston, collaborative+technologies+conference, collaboration, Windley, Identity, Reputation

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

CTC - "Social Software"

This session on social software was run by Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText. As a fan of Ross' blog, I was looking forward to this presentation and he did not disappoint.

If the notes are a little disjointed, I apologize as it was more of a conversation than a presentation (which is a good thing). Not all of these notes are from Ross, some are from participants, but they are all lumped together.

Social software – software that creates group interaction

Web 2.0 is made of people. There is a critical mass of people on the internet

now to make things happen

There is a significant trend of people who feel comfortable sharing identities and be more transparent.

Enterprise

2.0 – Free-form social software applied to business. This requires that the structure is not determined ahead of time.

The overarching sentiment here is that you need to share control in order to reap value.

One of the obstacles for enterprise wikis is attribution. Attribution is incredibly important, people want their voice to be heard.

We need to create things recognizing that they will be imperfect and allowing them to be improved upon by others. Need to be willing to give up some control.

When launching social software, don’t try to build in structure too early. Let the community dictate the direction.

Mayfield will build a prototype for about 90 days. This not only builds content, but also builds a community of people willing to defend technology.

One of the roles of hosting a community is directing attention.

 Taking advantage of the bits and pieces of information (Digg) is collective intelligence. What is going on in Wikipedia is collaborative intelligence.

Clay Shirky said “Process is embedded response to prior stupidity”

Employees don’t spend most of time with business processes, they spend time with exceptions to processes.

All of the policies are already in place regulating employee behavior, so there is no need for significant additional regulation.

In past three years, we have not had one instance of an employee doing something nefarious on a Wiki.

Organizations should focus on training and practices, and not so much on the technology.

A great idea for developing a blogging policy is to use a wiki to let the employee raise the issues

Social media structure should mirror architecture in that they should begin with an open friendly area and then break-off into more specific, private areas. However, you should try to hold off on private areas as much as possible.

One of the challenges in an enterprise is to bring in the people using open source solutions, one solution is to work with them and make them champions of the product.

The very act of using social media, is sharing information. You get information by proxy in that you count on others you trust and value providing you with that information.

 Two ways to instill practice in the wiki

- Have the hierarchy designate a facilitator to organize and structure stuff

- Have a robust training or practice where everyone feels empowered and capable of editing on their own

An IBM employee mentioned that as part of his performance evaluation, his manager looks at the number of people that he comes into contact with via his blog.

The incentive for someone in an enterprise to participate in internal tagging is first for the user itself, and next the ability to interact with other experts.

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, Collaborative+technologies+conference, ctcBoston, collaboration, Ross+Mayfield, SocialText

CTC - "The Social Life of Learning in the Networked Age"

For the second time today, I got to hear the esteemed John Seely Brown speak about collaboration. Here are his comments from the session "The Social Life of Learning in the Networked Age."

For a more in-depth report, check out Ross Mayfield's account of the presentation

The end goal is to create a culture of learning

The traditional view of learning is the Cartesian view (I think, therefore I am) - knowledge as substance. The result is pedagogy as transferring knowledge.

We need a social view – We participate, therefore we are. Understanding is socially constructed

Learning/knowledge

- knowing is rooted in action

- understanding is socially constructed

- learning is social and collaborative

Collaborative study groups are effective. The social construction of understanding, the social life of learning is real. This works virtually as well – IMing.

Example: A class showed a video tape of lectures. The rule was that the class had to watch as a group and every three minutes stop the tape and ask if there were any questions. These people did better than those who attended class in person. The individuals who were the best facilitators of this type of collaborative learning, had the best business careers.

The idea is whether this could work well virtually. 

Our world is focused on the Explicit – learning about. However, today you can learn about in seconds on Google.

Instead we should focus on the Tacit - learning to be.

Today’s generation who have grown up in a digital age want to lean

Learning to be – enculturating into the practices of a field often via legitimate peripheral participation

One of the problems with learning to be is the cost associated with creating a learning environment. 

However, in today’s environment of open-source communities, you have learning environments at your fingertips.

Nowadays you:

- write code to be read

- engagement through useful additions

- social capital matters

The open-source community creates a global apprenticeship platform.

This trend can also be seen in the rise of the pro-amateur class. These are niche communities of co-creation, learning and sharing, dedicated, disciplined, serious leisure, passion-based informal learning.

(These skills were listed as those necessary to be an effective guild leader in the “World of Warcraft” video game, for more, check out this article in WIRED)

• Creates a vision and a set of values that attracts

• Finds, evaluates, and then recruits players with diverse skill sets to fit with your norms

• Creates platforms for apprenticeship – newbies

• Orchestrates group strategy and governance

• Creates, sells and adheres to the governance principles for group and adjudicates disputes

Look at how all of these are metaphors for effective leadership characteristics

We have the tools to create a participatory culture of tinkering, learning and sharing

We are in the midst of a fundamental transition, moving from supply push to demand pull

We have an opportunity to bring the cognitive and social together in a type of networked learning.

CTC - Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps

Below are comments from Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge.

"We can't solve 21st-century problems with 19th-century organizations" - quote from member of CIA.

We have always been networkeed, even in a hierarchal structures. In is just that we used to view each other as static systems. Now we see that we are hubs that form webs.

The goal of transparency is for employees to see how you fit in all the way through to the top

People at the top of organizations have trouble looking down more than a couple levels

Communications by cascade can't reach everyone, but sideways communications can.

An organizational structure is thought of as a pyramid, but it is actually more of a diamond. This means that you need to find a way to reach the middle.

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Technorati Tags: CTC2006, Collaboration, collaborative+technologies+Conference, CTCboston, netage