Planet Enterprise 2.0

I am pleased to report that I will be speaking at KMWorld 2008 in San Jose, California later this year. the working title is "The Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Workplace: Cultural Markers, Competencies, & Core Change Challenges".

I’d like any of you who may be interested to help me, and perhaps help advance the general state of awareness and understanding of the type and scope of impacts the developments of the last several years have brought to the knowledge workplace.

A couple of months ago on this blog there was an interesting discussion unfold around an exploration of KM’s past and Enterprise 2.0’s present and (possible) future titled Retrospective on KM and the Impact of Web 2.0. 

In one camp some commenters gathered around the possibility that the post neatly "outlined the nexus of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and KM 2.0."  In the other camp the position was taken that:

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1. KM is not adaptive, Web 2.0 is.
2. KM supports collaboration. Collaboration is not social networking; 2.0 supports the latter.
3. KM wants to manage things; 2.0 wants to free things in loosely connected ways

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It seems clear that web services and personal "knowledge management" tools are migrating from the consumer Web into the workplace.  That phenomenon, combined with RSS feeds, wikis, search capabilities that are pushing towards the confluence of intent, imagination and serendipity and the growing scope of interactivity all of us are learning from the constant presence of the Web, may be forcing the issue of fundamentally rethinking the established and still-accepted ways of structuring, organizing and managing knowledge work.  Then again, maybe not ?

I know my position … I have argued for quite a while that the fundamental principles of work design need to change from those underpinning the industrial age to principles that stem from network structures and dynamics and yet still respect relevant core assumptions about domains and bodies of knowledge.  But there are very many other perspectives, concepts and examples that can either rebut or amplify that position.

I’d really like to take a stab at advancing the general debate about the issues cited above, as I believe there is a real opportunity to 1) stimulate the widespread and rapid shedding of obsolete elements of Industrial Age work design, 2) create much wider understanding about the congruence between some of the fundamental concepts of traditional KM and some of the fundamental dynamics of enterprise social computing, and 3) help popularize and make simple and easy to understand why there are real opportunities now for enterprises to (insert cliché here) tap into the potential and collective wisdom of employees and customers whilst also offering (and benefiting from) enriched jobs and more flexible and responsive cultures.

So … what I’d like to do now to  is gather your input in the form of questions, assertions, opinions and links to references such as articles and essays that speak to the differences, similarities, complements and conflicts between the concepts of KM and the use of social computing in the workplace that has been labeled Enterprise 2.0.  With that input there’s a chance I may be able to synthesize the content (mine and yours) to present at KMWorld 2008 that helps to clarify what’s new and useful and what’s not.

That’s what the comments section below is for.  Let’s see if we can create a knowledgeable, practical and useful conversation.

I’d also like to bring your attention to a new book by British author Niall Cook (with foreword by Don Tapscott of Wikinomics fame) titled "Enterprise 2.0 - How Social Software Will Change The Future of Work". 

Evidently I or we are not the only ones who think there are large opportunities for both intelligent, common-sensical and incremental improvements to knowledge work and for radical innovation and fundamental change.

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On this day of celebration of the United States revolution, I was celebrating the potential of another great revolution. Via social media and social networking, the stars and the moon aligned and the Age of Aquarius came into view.

While the theme of FASTforward ’08 was the User Revolution, the various keynote presentations actually presented compelling evidence for an even larger revolution: fundamentally redefining business models. I regularly leverage Don Tapscott’s allusion to an economic tsunami, and the corresponding revolutionary responses. But today I leveraged it in yet another critical way.

If there need be a voice to lead the charge in this revolution, the most credible voice is that of Jeffrey Hollender, President of Seventh Generation.

It occurred to me today that Jeffrey has quietly been engaged in the larger social ‘conversation’ for a long time — albeit in more traditional form of a newsletter, with a personal message from Jeffrey in each issue. But this realization only came about as a result of the serendipitous social-crossing (a random Twitter reference found) of a talk Jeffrey gave last month, at Sustainable Brands ’08.

My true enneagram one self was emotionally jumping up and down while listening to the following thoughts:

Just to give you a little context on where Seventh Generation is, after around 2000 the business was growing at about 25-30% a year. Last year the business grew 45%. This year-to-date, we’ve grown 65%.

I’m going to talk about something hard to see…something going on inside the company…the most challenging part of the equation…to build a culture…

Then he goes on to share artifacts of same.

If we come out with a marketing claim, are people in the company comfortable challenging that claim?

It also deals with things like my compensation [“Our Compensation Principles and Beliefs”]

Everybody gets a free massage every week…that’s an easy thing to do. [this is where my screaming kicked up a decibel or two] It’s easy to let dogs run around the office.

We provide 100% paid health insurance for our employees.

We ABSOLUTELY believe that employees should have an ownership stake in the company. You can’t build an equitable, responsible company if your people…don’t own part of that company.

I think that equity and justice don’t particularly exist inside most companies.

Yes, a fundamental element of Seventh Generation is social responsibility. But Jeffrey takes social responsibility to the next level, by investing in the social health and well-being of his employees. Socialprise is about fundamentally redesigning an organization around the strength of the human element. It’s about finally overthrowing over-yang’d classic business models with a healthier balance of yin. It is through the healthy balance that a company will be better prepared to survive the buffets of the economic onslaught.

Why? Because just as a tree that spreads and digs its roots deep, an enterprise is made more stable through the strength afforded it by all of its relationships. Socialprise is an enterprise that understands and capitalizes on the most important economic factor responsible for its existence: Relationship Equity.

Seventh Generation has always been fundamentally grounded in the definition of a Socialprise. They’ve not allowed newer forms of the social exchange to pass them by. Just last week, Seventh Generation started a Twitter account, to highlight key messages including posts from Jeffrey’s blog, Inspired Protagonist. I’m thrilled because I rely upon Twitter as a messaging filter more than RSS (as do others).

And now Jeffrey has joined forces with others to redefine The Future of Management, as instigated by Gary Hamel.

Mr. Hollender, count me in as a revolutionary recruit.

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Can machines understand the feelings expressed in text? Social media (including blogs, discussion groups, private emails, etc) and mainstream press (web pages, newswires, announcements, etc) are full of quirky, subtle cues about people’s attitudes and opinions. Harvesting this information has proven to be valuable for tracking companies’ reputations, playing financial markets, analyzing customer loyalty, tracking brand effectiveness – and lots of other applications. But doing this by hand is so expensive and inconsistent that only a few market research shops do it.

Machine “understanding” of sentiment – which promises to unlock the information in social media in particular - is a technology that has been part of search as well as a field called text analytics for years. We may have reached a “tipping point” for this technology – at least that’s my impression from my recent visit to the 4th annual Text Analytics Summit last week.

Text Analytics is one of the “adjacent” areas that overlaps search, and the boundaries are getting fuzzier by the year. It remains a small specialty market but it has grown well beyond its roots with government and pharma customers, and this year’s summit had a nice buzz to it (in contrast to last year, which was noticeably flat). Given the blurry adjacencies to Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence, and the rash of acquisitions over the last year, one can’t help wonder how long it will be until text analytics is no longer its own market. At the vendor and analyst panels, many of the panelists thought text analytics would become subsumed into applications (like Voice-of-the-Customer or market-influence-analysis), acquired into search and BI, or both.

One of the interesting things to me was that sentiment analysis was everywhere. The vendors exhibiting all highlighted sentiment analysis, the Microsoft Research talk demo’d sentiment analysis, half of the talks mentioned sentiment analysis. Nick Patience of the 451 group listed 20 vendors supplying sentiment analysis, and he missed a few I know of. Andrew Bernstein of Cymphony (a longstanding provider of “market influence analytics”) went so far as to say that an analysis of social media was practically useless without it.

But as far as I can tell the technology hasn’t changed dramatically over the last couple of years. FAST customers have been using sentiment analysis for about 4 years now, and many of the offline text-blob analysis applications (which FAST doesn’t do but which a number of vendors do quite well) have been around for equally as long. So what’s changed? Why the extra buzz this year?
Some people seemed to think this was the ebb and flow of the market; other folks felt the tipping point had been reached, or that acquisitions of ClearForest, Teragram, Inxight, etc had raised the level of interest and broadened the sales channel.

I think there’s another factor, too – business analysts are getting used to fuzziness, and the packaging of this technology has become simple enough to reach the point that you don’t need to be a linguist to use it. This technology will never be perfect, but it is good enough to add real value, and I think it gets even more traction when you stop focusing on how it works and start just using it. I heard none of the usual disclaimers about how machines can’t understand sarcasm, which was refreshing – this group at least knows that there are always limitations in the machine understanding of human language, and seems to have moved on.

Whatever the reason, it was fun to see some real success stories – real companies getting real benefits out of analyzing their unstructured text. Of course, it’s always fun to party with other people who care about the surface forms of sentiment, and like finding new ways to combine statistics and linguistics. But the feeling at this summit was different than I expected – more real, more pragmatic, more mainstream. And there was a certain sentiment in the air…

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We have been discussing web 2.0 versus enterprise 2.0 a bit there, (e.g., Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron) so I wanted to share this addition to the conversation. I met Kevin Mullens from MIT at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. He writes the blog, A Technical Manager’s Perspective and posted some thoughts from the conference, Web 2.0 is Not Enterprise 2.0. I have been slow to catch up on all I learned at this very useful event and connect with all the people I met. Kevin provides a nice articulation of the differences. “Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions.”

He goes on to say, “So what does it mean to deliver Web Services like solutions with more collaboration? I think it is different for every application. Some applications like blogs and wiki’s already have collaboration built in, however most do not, so we need to analyze were collaboration and social computing could be beneficial to the solution that we are trying to solve.”

I would add to the built-in collaboration is controlled transparency for those who need to know. The transparency starts the collaboration. Andrew McAfee’s said in an excellent session at the Fast Forward Summit, the old enterprise tolls hung on the verb “impose” and the new ones hang on the verb “emerge.” I added that with this new emergence through transparency, there is increased accountability. How that is handled may determine the success of enterprise 2.0. In the consumer web you are only accountable to yourself. In enterprise 2.0 you are accountable to the group success of your team, your company. Let’s hope that supportive managers, like supportive coaches, will help their individuals work as teams. If they try to use the transparency as a tool to simply be watchdogs and impose their rules, it will defeat the potential of enterprise 2.0. These new tools will certainly enable enhanced participation and engagement but managers will have to use them wisely. There needs to be the right balance of “impose” and “emerge.”

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We have 3 months from a standing start to make a difference in St Louis. We have our clients needing to know what we are doing in real time. When we are done, we need to be able to scale what we have done and share all our lessons with the larger public TV and Radio system.

To do all of this we have to work across the silos - the TV production people have to work with Outreach - who has to work with Marketing - who has to work with the Web guys - our CEO has to see it all but not get in the way - the client has to see it all but not make reporting our goal - other stations have to see what we are doing without us spending all our time talking to them. We all have to learn from our mistakes and we all have lessons to share.

How do we ourselves learn how to work in a more collaborative way? How do all of us learn the essence of Social Media?

How do we all do all of this when we have noooooooo time!!!!!

So how are we doing all of this and not going mad? We have discovered that Ning can be a brilliant social project management tool that allows us to do all of these things.

Here are some screen shots that I hope will illustrate how Ning can be so helpful as a Project Management tool in the Social Media Age:

Here is the top of the main page of our Team Site. The main Groups of activity have their forums displayed here. While we all have to see everything - each group of course has its specifics. Jack and the Project Managers and our clients and partners can all see everything and do.

You will see on the left a YouTube clip - all our TV Content is mounted on the site again so that all can see it and also so that Mike and I can repost it to the blog. You will see on the right the RSS feed from the Blog so that all can see what Mike and I are doing there in real time as well.

Here is the internal blog feature of the site. Here anyone can post updates and news. It is our bulletin board. Content issues, trip reports, other material that we have found, issues to be raised - all can and do go here. You can add pictures and all kinds of files and material to theses posts. Anyone can reply.

Everything on Ning is searchable so we don’t have to worry about a taxonomy that we could never keep up with. Later when we have to go back and discover why we did something, we only have to use a key word to find out.

We use the Forum section for group reports. Here the PM, Ross, calls in public for our weekly task and outcomes. It’s all public - you are late or ineffective - it’s brutally clear. So Ross will be less and less the herder of cats and we all have to take more responsibility to do our job. There is no hiding here!

There is also no hiding that Jack is always watching! A critical issue in moving fast but also safe is the paradox that in the end the CEO is responsible but if we make him the bottleneck for all decisions, then we fail.

The nature of the Site means that Jack can and does see everything. So CEO becomes the facilitator rather than the barrier for speed and safety.

Total transparency - we have not only all of us who have jobs on the project on the Team Site but we also have members from CPB, from PBS, from Stations, from our Measurement Team, from Social Media Advisers. We are doing all the work in full view of our peers and our client. They see not only the good work but our struggles too.

I think that this is surely the way of the future - especially because this work has to be replicated to be successful.

I wonder - are we alone in using Ning in this way?

Is this working? All the paradoxes and demands that I defined at the beginning of this post have been met by taking this route

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As my regular readers know, (More Context in the link) I am working with KETC, Channel 9 in St Louis on a project funded by CPB, to see how a Public TV station could use its position as a Trusted Space, rather than simply as a broadcaster, to make a difference in the “economic forest fire” that is the mortgage/housing /credit crisis that is sweeping through America.

It is the hope of CPB that Public Media can do more to serve its country than offer great content alone. It is our collective hope that by learning how to do what we are doing now well, that Public TV and Radio can serve the public by acting as a convener of Trust for the community - so that we can draw on the great and latent power that resides in all local communities to take action themselves to solve the great problems that confront us.

Our hope is that our one station in one city can offer enough experience that in the fall many more can join in the work and that soon we may have a national effort underway.

Here is an update as to how we are starting this work.

First of all - we had to settle on what could be our objective? What could we do that was both possible and legitimate to help? What was the “problem that could be solved and what did we really bring to the table?

What we hear is going on that can be remedied is this. Many people can be helped to stay in their homes. BUT to be helped, they have to act very quickly. Days make a difference. The barriers to these people getting the help that will save their home are these:

* They don’t know where the safe help is. They are surrounded by sharks waiting to feed off them
* They are often frozen by shame and fear.

We can connect them to help that they can trust. We can use our power as story tellers to help break through the shame barrier - we can show that they are not alone and that there is hope. We have decided that we can and that we have to be the “Connector” - connect people that can be helped to the help that can be trusted. We have to connect the help to the help, so that it can be more powerful.

So for those who can be helped, maybe 30% of the total, the issue is Trust. They have to know who they can trust in a situation where they have had all their trust in financial advice destroyed.

So one of our aims is to “reveal” the Nodes of Trust in St Louis. To reveal the hidden network of help. To reveal this network not only to those who need it but to those that who are part of this network of help and trust. We are going to use who we are - the most trusted organization in the City - to use our power of media to reveal a hidden part of our city - the network of Nodes of Trust that exist in St Louis. Over the last 2 weeks we have been convening meetings in our studios of the leaders of these organizations. Many of these people had never met before.

We are going to do our best to connect these people enough to each other that the latent power of this network of Trust becomes manifest and real.

View Larger Map

Just as KPBS used Google Maps to show the extent and the nature of both the fire and the help - so we plan to do the same. With by the way the active help of KPBS and Google Maps. This is our first shot.

Our hope is that the community will help us produce the definitive map of “help” and “Trust” in St Louis. Our hunch is that each community has a map of trust - the Bosnians, the African Americans, the Hispanics etc. Our hunch is that these Nodes of Trust are even more local and less obvious than the ones we start with - they surely include churches, beauty salons, cafes etc. These Nodes of Trust are real. They exist. They are just for now outside of our vision. If we can reveal them and connect them - then what? What can St Louis really do when the full power of this resource is realized?

Surely every city has this latent network of Trust and local power that can be activated and enhanced by a crisis and by a convener who has no ax to grind?

So much of this work is different from Broadcasting - we are drawing on the years of experience in the station of outreach and on our position in the city as being part of the community to work face to face with those who can help to enhance their efforts. Our key local partner in this is the United Way who run a funnel into the network of help via their 21 number.

But even with help available, what about the issues of fear and shame that block people from seeking help?

Here we use our power as story tellers. Fear and shame can be overcome, if we can see that we are not alone and that forces beyond us have been and are in play. Here video and TV have an unparalleled power to tell story and to connect. Here is a link to our YouTube Channel where we will have many many many stories. We will be broadcasting interstitials (one minute items), 6 minute items and long format shows. All that we broadcast will be put up on our blog, on YouTube and Facebook

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_TGHt0ymEo

Is the problem just about people losing their homes? No!

We are starting to see that the real problem is the ripple effect of people losing their homes on the entire fabric of America. As vacant houses destroy the value of the rest of the street, as ruined streets destroy a community, as ruined communities destroy a city, as ruined cities destroy the state - we see that this is like the flood in New Orleans. Cities and then states become socially and then economically gutted.

The tragedy is greater than the loss of a home and the dream for a family. This is a cancer that threatens the nation. As such, being self righteous and blaming others and thinking that the pain can be limited to to the guilty, is to be short sighted.

We have to be the story teller about “The Ripple Effect”. Many think that they are OK. Many think that we should do nothing to help the stupid and the ill informed.

But we are learning that such an attitude is like blaming people who have typhoid. There is a “dis-ease” spreading. The impact of this crisis on the few will affect the many. We cannot stand by and think that we will be OK. This is like America in WWII. For what happens in the “other neighborhood is going to affect us and the whole world. So as Ed Murrow, the spiritual father of Public Service as a broadcaster, told the larger story of the war from the Blitz in London, so we at KETC have to tell the story of the larger Ripple Effect of the housing crisis on our city and state.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQAzH5wYAFk

Again - here we use our TV channel and all the power of social media. Here we also convene meetings with people who don’t normally meet and we are asking them to work together to understand the full risk and power of the Ripple Effect.

Here we give our voice on TV and on the Beacon to others such as Senator MacAskill to speak to the challenge that confronts us all.

“People are making assumptions that just certain kinds of people are in this position,” McCaskill said. “I think that people’s stereotypes kick in. I don’t think they realize that these distressed homes and families are all over the St. Louis area. From Chesterfield to South County to Warren County and St. Charles, there are homes facing foreclosure.”

McCaskill said the impact of the foreclosure crisis — which analysts predict could reach 3 million nationally — goes well beyond individual homeowners and is undermining the strength of the U.S. economy.

“There is this ripple effect that foreclosures have on the economy that we are focused on. This isn’t about a bailout for any individual. This is about what’s best for our economy so we don’t fall off the table into a full-blown depression,” she said.

“It’s hard for people because they’re used to operating within their lane. Can I pay my bills? And if I can pay my bills, why are we helping anybody who can’t pay their bills? This is not about staying in your lane. This is about our overall economic strength right now as a nation and the things we can do that help the credit markets stabilize, that help the dollar strengthen, that cut out some of the speculation in oil. All of those things need to happen, and this housing bill is just one part of that.”

“What you don’t see in this room are the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are just like you,” she said to the homeowners in the assemblage. “We estimate up to 20,000 homes in Missouri will face foreclosure before the end of next year. So, imagine if we had 20,000 people in this room what it would look like. You are not in this alone. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of others out there that have the same kind of challenges.”

This is a very long post. I don’t know how to compress our story while it is still being written.

I will post shortly about how we are “Managing” this process - by using social media and total project transparency - but I have a request first.

We need help. In particular we need help from bloggers in St Louis. I know you are out there. You are surely also part of the Nodes of Trust in St Louis. You too are the unseen network of trust in the city. Please some of you contact me so that you too can become visible and that you too can help your city and your state in this time of great need.

So this then is the context for our work.

We are going full tilt to the end of August to learn how to connect people to help. To learn how to help the help become connected so that they can offer more and better help. To learn how to tell the bigger story of the Ripple effect so that those with the power to help at this level can also locate their power and apply it. To be the beta test site for public media so that we can extend this work nationally.

At the end of his speech to congress after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt said this:

With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.

Maybe we can modify this call to hope and to the determination of the people and say:

With confidence in our communities—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.

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Media sites have traditionally worked to keep their content collections proprietary while preventing user churn to other sites. Now, as search engines gain more power, and users become more fickle, it might be time to make it easier for consumers to discover content on other sites – effectively tearing down site “garden walls.” We’ll get to the bottom of this choice in a three part series.

Search Portals - The Other Side of the Wall

During the web’s adolescence, the relationship between content producers and content consumers was direct, and web content promotion efforts were limited to internal site factors – UI, navigation and basic site search. If a site’s content was in demand, it developed a loyal user base and became the trusted authority for that type of content.

Today, search portals like Google, Yahoo! and MSN disrupt the relationship between sites and audiences, offering unfettered access to highly specific content from across the web. As a result, customers can freely churn to competitive sites. Such liquid content discovery and consumption erodes your site’s competitive advantage and position as the trusted content authority.

The Media Site Response – Tear Down Your Walls?

How should content owners react to the more competitive marketplace resulting from search portals’ influence on the value chain? The most obvious answer is to improve content quality - but this is often too expensive. Instead, some sites are expanding content offerings by including content from other sites. Others are offering discovery of other external web content through search. But these tactics present a tradeoff: they build engagement and pageviews while making it easier for users to be lured by external sites.

This is the core of the choice between maintaining a ‘walled garden’ content site and tearing down the walls. A walled garden site ignores the broader needs of users while aggressively promoting proprietary content. The hope is that users will focus on what’s in front of them, remain engaged, and drive revenue accordingly. Yet without incorporating external content, users will inevitably explore elsewhere. And a site without walls encourages consumers to use the site as a portal. On sites like these users can discover and access proprietary and broader web content alike, and generating the associated page views. Boston.com has recently adopted this tactic, with some early success. So what’s to be done – build walls and keep users focused on your content alone, or tear them down in the hopes that engagement and pageviews will improve?

For many sites, pageviews and user loyalty will go up when the walls come down. Yet, the choice of opening is not for everyone. As we’ll discuss in the next installment, the answer to the walled garden question depends on whether you believe own content, or customers.

Next week: What’s your biggest asset, content or customers?

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On the App Gap I recently wrote about Brightidea’s Webstorm Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process (see Brightidea – Brings Focused Enterprise 2.0 Capabilities to Innovation). In my conversation with Matt Greeley, CEO at Brightidea we covered one of the impressive uses of Webstorm outside the firewall, Cisco’s I-Prize. I think this is a great story with some lessons learned for others who want mine the wisdom of crowds, so I will explore it more here.

Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. More specifically, “the winning team may have the opportunity to be hired by Cisco to found a new business unit and share a $250,000 signing bonus. Cisco may invest approximately $10 million over three years to staff, develop, and go to market with a new business based on your idea.” While the Cisco site did use the words “may’ this is a very tangible commitment. Cisco is committing a lot of time and money to the process. This attractive prize has brought in ideas for over 100 countries. Brightidea’s Webstorm is used to manage these inputs, and facilitate to discussion and rating of them. Matt said that he felt one reason this has been so successful is that it is short-lived competition with a clear conclusion and reward. It is not simply collecting ideas like the traditional idea suggestion box.

Here is the rest of the story on the process from the Cisco site, “It’s simple. Register on the Cisco I-Prize Website. Post your idea and comment on other ideas posted by fellow entrepreneurs. Use the Human Network to refine your concept and form an idea team of all-stars that can take your idea to the next level. Cisco will select up to 100 semifinalist teams that will work with Cisco experts using state-of-the-art collaboration tools to build a business plan and presentation. Next, up to 10 finalist teams will present to a judging panel for the ultimate prize: the opportunity to start a new business unit with access to the resources that Cisco has to offer.”

So there is a bit of “American Idol” plus at lot of social networking. Ideas are posted on the public site and others can promote or demote the idea. At the same time the ideas go into the internal review process. The ten finalists work with Cisco’s support to refine and present their idea to the Cisco review panel. In addition to the implementing the winning idea, Cisco is reaping many other benefits. It gets access to all the other ideas. It also wants to position itself as the place to think about when you have an idea. It wants to be seen as an employer of choice. The final teams presented their ideas between April 14 and May 3 and the winner should be announced soon. It will be interesting to see where the winner goes and if some of the runner ups make it big also. I can see a TV reality show in the making; I hope it works and becomes a model for gathering innovation.

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A couple of weeks ago I was in Sapporo at the Infinity Ventures Summit (the site’s in Japanese) to talk about the role of informal networks in business and show off Trampoline’s SONAR Suite. This is the largest technology innovation conference in Japan, bringing together the leading start-ups, corporations, analysts and investors. The focus was mainly on mobile and consumer internet so Trampoline really stood out as an enterprise infrastructure provider. We were also one of just four non-Asian firms invited to present.

I’ve travelled in Japan in the past but this was my first visit in a business context. The amazing etiquette involved in exchanging business cards was the first thing that struck me. In an unstructured setting like a drinks reception in the West cards are typically swapped at the end of a conversation if there’s a likely relevance for future contact. In Japan cards are exchanged at the start of a conversation with no filter for relevance. This means you get through a lot of cards and your pockets rapidly end up bulging with other people’s.

Cards must be offered horizontally with the text in the correct orientation for the recipient, held at the corners in both hands. When you receive a card you must hold it similarly in both hands and give it your full attention for a second or two before looking up or continuing conversation. You must hold the card in front of you throughout the conversation. It’s insulting to put it in your pocket, scribble a note on it or (worst of all) hand someone a crumpled or disfigured card. If you’re sitting around a table with people the correct thing to do is lay everyone’s cards out in front of you in a neat row matching their positions around the table.

What interested me most, however, was the cultural alignment of Japanese enterprises with social computing solutions. Previously I’d assumed that Japanese business culture would be intrinsically hostile to technologies that make informal groupings and networks visible, or which lead to information being shared in new ways, since there is sensitive etiquette surrounding these processes. However my experiences in Sapporo completely changed my view of this.

The connection I’d failed to make previously is that Japanese corporations have historically placed a much higher value on the informal networks amongst their employees than their Western counterparts. Within the “shushin koyo” model of life-long relationships between employer and employee, many aspects of the individual’s social life were organised and supported by the corporation. This was seen to build organisational strength and forge links outside the formal structure (both of which are also notable drivers for social networking tools in the enterprise). During the long recession in the 1990s a lot of these extra-curricular activities were cut, but a management culture persisted in which informal networks were highly valued. On the face of it enterprise social computing tools are perfectly placed to fill this gap.

In many cases products developed for a Western market will need to be modified significantly before they are suitable for Japanese customers. This won’t simply be a case of changing language in the user interface. Behaviours around privacy management and authorisation will almost certainly need to be modified to fit different cultural nuances. But contrary to my initial assumption, Japanese corporations may prove to be early and well-informed adopters of social computing technologies.

I’m indebted to Shuji Honjo for drawing my attention to the possible like between social computing and corporate involvement in extra-curricular activities.

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Of course Enterprise 2.0 by itself won’t fix the U.S. Social Security system, which is projected to run out of money by the year 2020, but follow my logic here.

The New York Times just ran a piece on the advantages of keeping people working past what is considered “traditional” retirement age. As the article relates, there’s a lot of value to society in keeping people on the job, in both generating more tax revenues and less strain on the Social Security and Medicare system:

“The emphatic conclusion of recent research into retirement policy and labor markets is that working another two or three years would have a surprisingly powerful impact on the retirement living standards of millions of boomers and on the economy. The economic gains, according to a report published this month by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research group, would include increased household savings, higher tax collections and a reduction of the fiscal strain on Social Security and Medicare; together, that would add an estimated $13 trillion to the economy by 2025, or about a year’s total output of goods and services today.”

But, surprise, surprise, the corporate world still hasn’t gotten the message, and still clings to outdated and counter-productive prejudices about hiring employees over 50. It’s the same old story we’ve been hearing for years. In the 1980s, when I was director of the Administrative Management Society and editor of its journal, Management World, we issued countless reports and articles on the advantages of hiring and retaining “older” workers. We also spoke quite a bit about the convergence of work and life, and why work should be an ongoing source of meaning, learning, and inspiration, versus something you try to escape from as you enter your sixth decade.

But did companies listen?  Nooooo….

Let’s look at what Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 could mean to the relationship between enterprises and individuals.  That is, the workplace is quickly evolving from a structured show-your-face 9-to-5 cellblock to more of an open, participate community, linked by common interests and interlocking skills. These communities are global in nature, stretching well beyond corporate cubicle environments to home offices, remote locations, and anywhere anyone is using a mobile, connected device.

The corporation is evolving into a confederation on entrepreneurs. Work and insights are delivered through Web-based communities and ad-hoc teams pulled together for specific purposes.

Now, keep following my thinking here. What difference does it make that the individual at the other end of an electronic interchange is 18 or 80? You don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. For that matter, these electronic workplace communities are oblivious to race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality (assuming you can interact in the same language). There’s opportunity for everyone with the right skills, unencumbered by biases and archaic thinking.

And companies shouldn’t fret too much about the ability of more senior workers to learn and use computer technology. As the New York Times article reports, one 64-year-old administrative assistant at S.C. Johnson kept updating her skills in budgeting, financial planning and project management programs to the point where she is a highly valued project manager. She recently designed an emergency planning Website for the company. She wants to retire in a couple of years, but her boss wants her to stick around until she’s 70.

One of the beauties of Enterprise and Web 2.0 is that these technologies break down the barriers that closed many skilled and talented individuals out of the system.

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By now so very much has been written and said about

1. the impacts both positive and negative of hyperlink-driven mass collaboration,
2. the vast potential for increased effectiveness related to sharing information and scaffolding knowledge, and
3. the apparent flattening of organizations that will follow. 

I have been a proponent, though I would like to point out that I have never suggested hierarchy will disappear or that it is not a necessary component for decision-making and direction in many if not most contexts.

I have been blogging for at least five years.  I consider reading comments and sometimes adding a comment of my own to be an integral part of blogging .. in fact, as often as not I learn more and get more out of the comments section than from the blog post itself.  I have also consulted to organizations for about 20 years on work design, work effectiveness, competencies and performance, knowledge management, management and leadership development, and organizational learning and change.

Euan Semple is well known for helping to create, grow and sustain the effective use of social software tools in a complex knowledge-intensive environment (the UK’s BBC).  Part of his role in doing so was to offer workshops for managers and leaders about working effectively and "managing" knowledge in that environment.  No doubt part of the effective use of such tools and processes involved people "thinking outside the box" out loud, in the semi-public exchanges between colleagues in the organizational context.

Here’s an excerpt from an anecdote he published last year titled "Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There".

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"I could never trust my staff to use these sorts of tools", he said, "they would end up wasting all of their time".

[Snip ...]

The first thing I did was to ask if he thought his recruitment policy was working for him. If he couldn’t trust his staff to make minute by minute decisions about how they spent their working days how on earth was he going to trust them to make bigger decisions on his behalf? He brushed this aside and restated that whatever his staff’s judgment the sort of activity I had been describing was still a waste of time.

To this I replied first that, contrary to his assumption, people took moments to glance at a forum or a blog and if by responding they answered a worthwhile question their answer could benefit thousands of others and save a lot of time and effort.

Secondly I responded that people have always had all sorts of ways of wasting time available to them from staring out of the window to having a coffee and if they are truly wasting time then surely it was his job as a manager to deal with them and their under-performance?

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In knowledge work environments people are always reading and talking, exchanging information and opinions, pointing to things of pertinence and related interest.  In a sense, people are already doing substantial parts of what is involved in the use of blogs and wikis … it’s just that the new tools are making it more visible and let workers capture the content for immediate or future use.  I do not think that there is much constant full-on dedication to executing a chronologically-arranged set of daily tasks (though much reengineering and embedding of work processes in the "electronic concrete" of many ERP systems in search of constant efficiency would mitigate my assertion).

So … it’s logical to assume that one of the key propositions of value to enterprises with respect to the use of blogs and wikis is the learning and the construction of pertinent knowledge that derives from the interaction and exchange of participants. 

This visible interaction and exchange is also the area that I believe raises skepticism and resistance on the part of many managers and executives.  I suspect that in many enterprises unless the tools’ use and the conversations they engender are always aligned with the mission and objectives of an enterprise or the projects / initiatives where the tools are applied,  the conversations will be seen as wasting time, or creating or supporting unwanted questioning and dissent.

I think it’s also quite possible that without effective moderation and facilitation a fair bit of the interaction and exchange of information enabled by social software inside the firewall will be cautious and measured, which can have a damping effect on the full range of the potential available when people converse on purpose about shared focus and activities.

It has often been suggested that organizational culture is or can be a significant obstacle to the effective and productive use of social software in enterprises.  I’d add managerial style and leadership philosophy (see Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management).  There is quite a bit of evidence available from the growth of wikis and blogging that publishing relevant content, commenting and the interaction that can follow facilitates increased and / or more rapid learning and idea generation.  As we become more experienced, we are learning that social computing initiatives are greatly affected by the context, purpose, boundaries and moderation styles in use for a given community.

So … I suspect that there will be wave after wave after wave of examples where enterprises begin to use blogs and wikis, don’t pay enough atention to context, purpose, boundaries and moderation,  and find that the organization’s culture and the style(s) of various managers are at odds with the dynamics of blogs and wikis.  When things seem looser or less aligned, I suspect that there will often be reversion to command-and-control, whether by tightening the ways the blogs and wikis are used or by canceling the experiment.

I also think that there are many employees in many organizations that mostly want clear direction and a clear set of tasks and objectives to be given to them by management, in exchange for a wage, decent working conditions and some possibility of some employment security.  They want hierarchy, to reduce ambiguity and possible confusion and uncertainty (Lou Gerstner of IBM once said that his toughest challenge in making substantial change work was the desire of many to "delegate upwards"). 

It takes an inspiring vision and purpose and a healthy respectful culture for most people to get excited about engaging in improvement, responsiveness and innovation.  Implementing social software towards the creation of an Enterprise 2.0 will I believe be a significant leadership and management challenge, and will often sharpen the issues for personal, management and organizational development. 

Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives will often be a major organizational change, mainly in terms of the communications and management challenges, and sharpens the game with respect to listening, empowering, coaching and responding clearly and truthfully.

Hierarchy 2.0 ?

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Tags: organizational change, hierarchy, wirearchy

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We are beavering away getting ready for a launch at the beginning of July.

One of the tools that we are using to enable us all to work with each other across many departments, different places and different organizations is Ning. Ning is not a traditional project management tool but we are finding it very helpful.

Soon we will have not only the project team using it but also folks from several stations, CPB and PBS and a few friends who know a lot more than old Rob about reaching the hard to reach.

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