April 09, 2007
Aren't We a Little Old for Raves?
I’ll be participating in the Enterprise 2.0 Rave, which is being held May 21-22 in New York City. The event will "bring together leading thinkers in the areas of collaboration, knowledge management, e-learning, and social media with practitioners from a variety of industries – your peers – for an intense 24 -hour brainstorming session on the challenges and opportunities related to Enterprise 2.0 deployments."
I’m speaking after dinner on the 21st, then leading the discussion session on deployments and business processes on the 22nd. Other sessions that day will be devoted to adoption issues, and to getting started and measuring success. The organizers are thinking about some interesting variations to the standard conference agenda of keynotes, panels, discussion groups, etc.
The event will not be huge, and will be limited to practitioners, so it should be an excellent opportunity to swap ideas, understand the current state of E2.0, and meet people who are interested in the new tools and approaches. If it sounds interesting, please show up and come ready to listen and talk.
February 01, 2007
Wikipedia (B)
A few people have commented that the Wikipedia case Karim Lakhani and I wrote (available here under GFDL) doesn't resolve the issues it raises, and has an abrupt ending.
This is as intended. HBS cases read often like journalistic narratives, but their goal is to stop well short of telling the whole story. Instead, they aim to tee up a set of issues to be discussed in class. If the case itself resolved all those issues, there would be little to talk about. So we try to write them so that they lend themselves to good in-class discussions.
To facilitate these discussions we faculty assign a set of assignment questions along with the case. We ask students to read the case with these questions in mind, and to come to class prepared to talk about them, presenting their analyses, conclusions, points of view, justifications, recommendations, etc.
Here are the assignment questions I'm planning to ask my MBA students when I teach the Wikipedia case later this semester:
- If you were the administrator who volunteered to close out the Articles for Deletion process about the "Enterprise 2.0" article, what would your decision be? What tools, if any, do you have to make sure your recommendation is followed?
- Peruse a few Wikipedia articles on subjects where you have some interest or expertise. What do you think of them? Are they thorough? Accurate? Useful? Across all of them, how even is the quality?
- How do Wikipedia's processes for creating and modifying articles ever lead to high-quality results? How much do the encyclopedia's policies and guidelines help? What ensures that a contributor will follow them?
- What are the most important differences between Nupedia and Wikipedia? Why did Nupedia generate so few articles, and why does Wikipedia generate so many?
- Are you a Wikipedia deletionist, inclusionist, or something else? Why is this your philosophy?
- Do you agree that at the time of the case Wikipedia is a bureaucracy? Why or why not?
I'll let you know how the class goes...
January 15, 2007
A Technology Flip Test: Introducing Channels in a World of Platforms
The writer and and cultural observer Stanley Crouch, when asking his audience to consider a given issue, sometimes proposes a 'flip test' in which important elements of the status quo are reversed. It's an effective way to unmask hidden assumptions and double standards. And it can work quite well for questions around technology.
One useful flip test consists of mentally switching the order of appearance of a new technology and an existing one. At a conference years back I was sitting on a panel that was asked to talk about future of the book. As the discussion was heating up about the inevitability of the electric media, someone on the panel (I wish it had been me) proposed a flip test. He said "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?" It's fair to say that comment changed the direction of the panel.
So as talk about the risks and possible downsides of Enterprise 2.0 technologies continues, a flip test might bring some clarity to the discussion. This flip test consists of imagining that communication platforms (like E2.0 tools) are already in place, and then channels show up within corporations.
Most current collaboration technologies, including email, instant messaging, and cell phone texting are what I call channels. They essentially keep communications private. People beyond the sender and receiver(s) can't view the contents of information sent over channels, and usually don't even know that communication has taken place. Information sent via channels isn't widely visible, consultable, or searchable. And no record exists of who sent what to whom, so channels leave no trace of collaboration patterns.
The new generation of collaboration technologies that are underpinning Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, in contrast, are all platforms. They're repositories of digital content where contributions are globally visible (everyone with access to the platform can see them) and persistent (they stick around, and so can be consulted and searched for). Access to platforms can be restricted (to, for example, only members of an R&D lab or a team working on a particular deal) so that proprietary content isn't universally visible within a company, but the goal of a platform technology is to make content widely and perennially available to its members. A lot of content on this blog and other writing on W2.0 and E2.0 has articulated the desirable properties of digital platforms.
So here's the flip test: imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively E2.0 platforms -- blogs, wikis, etc. -- and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies -- email, instant messaging, text messaging -- became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation. What would happen? How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?
I imagine two main outcomes. First, users would adopt the new channel technologies for private communications, but not for much more than that. They'd quickly see that it's less efficient to use channels, and less helpful to their colleagues. In other words, whether they were thinking selfishly or selflessly they'd keep using platforms. And the endowment effect would be working in favor of the platform technologies they're already using.
Second, many constituencies would hate the new technologies, and strenuously advocate that they be kept out. In a company accustomed to platforms, introducing channels would be perceived as asking for trouble. They'd be seen as tools that would let sensitive information leave the company and jump over Chinese walls, let sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior flourish below the radar, and let people waste as much time as they wanted to chatting with each other about irrelevant stuff. What's even worse, compliance officers and other managers would feel largely powerless to stop this bad behavior, because channel traffic is so hard to monitor. They couldn't read all employee emails, and sampling would be unlikely to catch all the problems quickly enough to head them off.
For managers accustomed to platforms where all contributions are immediately and universally visible and traceable, channel technologies would seem scary. I could imagine that a common response, upon hearing about them, would be something like "No way. The risks of email and IM are too great. If people need to talk privately, let them pick up the phone. We'll set up a few email accounts so that we can exchange information with the outside world, but we're sticking with our platforms for internal communication."
What does this flip test reveal? To me, it indicates that many companies are paying far too much attention to the possible risks and downsides of E2.0 platforms, given that they've already deployed technologies that have much greater potential for abuse. I'm not advocating that channel technologies should be shut off and entirely replaced by platforms; I'm just trying to highlight the relative risks of the two technology categories. The flip test is a good way to do this.
What do you think? Am I missing something, or downplaying some important downsides about E2.0? Or is the flip test telling us what I think it is?
January 06, 2007
FastForward to February in San Diego
I'll be speaking at the FastForward conference, which takes place in San Diego from February 7-9. It's sponsored by the enterprise search company FAST, and bills itself as "The Business and Technology Conference for Innovate, Search-powered Enterprise 2.0 Applications." It was not hard to convince me to leave New England for Southern California in February, but I'm looking forward to it for reasons beyond the weather. For one thing, the speakers include Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, John Batelle, Ray Lane, and many others. I listen carefully to what these folk have to say, and I'm eager to hear what they've been working on lately, what conclusions they've reached, and how they think the phenomenon of Enterprise 2.0 will unfold.
I also hope to have the chance to talk with a lot of the conference attendees, to learn what their experiences have been as they've introduced the new generation of collaboration tools and social software. I understand that the conference organizers are putting together a couple roundtables; please let them know if you'd like to participate.
Finally, I know some of the topics I'm going to cover in my talk, but what would you like to hear about? What are the burning issues around Enterprise 2.0 in your company? The biggest open questions? Leave a comment and let us know, or send me an email.
December 31, 2006
The First Year of Enterprise 2.0, and the Second
Since Sloan Management Review published "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration" in the spring of 2006, a lot has happened. Many people have discussed the tools, technologies, approaches, and philosophies of Enterprise 2.0 in conferences, articles, interviews, and blogs. Even more importantly, many companies have moved past discussion to deployment, and are building Intranets that resemble today's Internet: multi-voiced, egalitarian, social, dynamic, self-organizing, and benefiting from network effects.
My Enterprise 2.0-related highlights from 2006 include:
Conferences:
It looks like the conference circuit will heat up in 2007. The Fastforward conference, for example, takes place February 7-9 in San Diego and describes its focus as "Enterprise 2.0 and how today's companies and individuals are harnessing technology to collaborate, innovate, manage knowledge and much more." And the CTC conference, held yearly in Boston in June, has changed its name to Enterprise 2.0!
Conversations and Case Studies with, among others,
Articles in:
And, of course, blogs and bloggers too numerous to mention. I'd list a few, but I know I'd just wind up leaving out a colleague who's been important to me. So I'll avoid that inadvertent snub and wait until HBS faculty blogs include a blogroll.
Across all of these, I've noticed many areas of agreement and convergence. These include the ideas that Enterprise 2.0 is:
- Composed of platforms where content is persistent and globally visible, not channels (like email) where transmissions can't be easily traced or consulted.
- Lightweight: not hard to deploy or learn
- Initially freeform and unstructured
- Eventually emergent and self-organizing
- Composed of SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, and signals)
- A decent vehicle for capturing or pointing to knowledge. E2.0, in other words, might fulfill some of the promise of KM systems.
- Largely dependent on human issues, not technical ones.
However, not all the news related to E2.0 was good news in 2006. For me, the most disheartening event was Wikipedia's "Enterprise 2.0" article being nominated for deletion from the online encyclopedia, and having to go through the articles for deletion process. Like many of us, I am a huge fan and user of Wikipedia, and have held it up as a prime example of how technology lets large numbers of people come together, collaborate, and generate highly valuable outputs. So it was a blow when a concept I'd helped originate was deemed by some to be unworthy of inclusion.
Along with Ross Mayfield and a couple others I participated in the articles for deletion process. I was gratified when the official result of this process was that the article on Enterprise 2.0 be kept, then mystified when an administrator acted after this decision to strip much of the article's content and rename it "Enterprise Social Software." As of the time of this writing that title remains, and the article is considered a stub. Of course, I or anyone else could change the title or beef up the article. But I find that I just don't have the bandwidth to slug it out with anyone who decides to disagree, and I'm apparently not alone. The current version of the article has fewer edits and editors than did the original one. It seems that those of us who are interested in the concept have moved on to other forums. It also seems like Wikipedia's deletionists have lost twice on this one; they lost the argument over deleting the article, and they also lost the interest of some people who were interested in contributing to the community.
My other 2006 disappointment was seeing attempts to expand the definition of "Enterprise 2.0" well beyond the one I proposed in May:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
As I've written in a couple blog posts, some people are trying to broaden this definition to something like "all the interesting things that are happening in the enterprise software market." I think this is a bad idea; it will lead to confusion, and to a loss of interest by senior executives within companies. Who wants that?
Looking Ahead
I like the predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007 made by Dion Hinchcliffe and Rod Boothby, and won't try to go head-to-head with them. Instead, I want to present a few scenarios for how E2.0 is going to progress in the coming year. It's very hard for me to believe that the trends we've been observing are going to sputter to a halt in 2007; there's simply too much momentum, and too compelling a justification. But it's also hard to believe that all companies are going to try to deploy E2.0 tools and techniques, or that all of those that do are going to succeed in filling up the 'empty quarter' of non-adopters within their organizations. I can envision three broad scenarios:
- Niches. Enterprise 2.0 remains confined to geek-heavy groups (e.g. IT departments), companies, and/or industries (software). Techies and newbies use the new tools routinely as part of their jobs, but few others do. And users of Enterprise 2.0 software will have to continue to use email with their older and more square colleagues.
- Spotty mainstream penetration. The management of some mainstream companies makes the necessary investments -- of money, time, and their own energy -- and succeeds in deploying an E2.0 infrastructure and getting it widely used. Most of their competitors remain unaware, unwilling, or unable.
- Deep penetration. Blogs, wikis, tags, cloud views, RSS aggregators, etc. become the principle collaboration tools used by most companies.
I think the third scenario is the least likely. Enterprise 2.0 is too big a phase shift, and the 9X problem of email too real, to permit deep penetration by the end of 2007. This implies that E2.0 deployment will continue to be highly uneven. And this in turn implies, I believe, that these tools will be competitive differentiators, rather than levelers. We'll have to watch closely to see if this is in fact the case.
Happy New Year!
December 26, 2006
Wising Up about Dumbing Down
This blog is devoted to the impact of the Web and other information technologies on companies, not on culture. But partly because it’s the holidays and partly in response to Time’s declaration that the Web 2.0-enabled ‘You’ is the Person of the Year, I wanted to relax the boundary just a bit and discuss one of the persistent criticisms of Web 2.0 (and one I’ve also heard made about Enterprise 2.0). This is the idea that the profusion of online content is leading to a ‘dumbing down’ of our culture and/or society.
First of all, let’s acknowledge that there really is a sea change going on. Web 2.0 is a revolution, not an evolution, in content availability. Cheap gear has made it easy to generate multimedia material, and the Internet enables instantaneous and free worldwide distribution. Web 2.0 is the opening up of that distribution platform to just about everyone. This is a legitimate discontinuity, and it doesn’t feel like Time’s Person of the Year was undeserved
The question is, is this development to be welcomed or decried? The decriers most common worry is one of dumbing down—that Web 2.0 is yielding a sea of bad online content that threatens to drown the good.
There are, of course, many types of bad online content. Most of us would agree on what the worst is: it’s child pornography, hate speech, ideology-based incitements to violence, and other material that repels most people and makes suspect not only the producer, but also the consumer. If you saw a co-worker browsing a Web page full of this stuff you’d call the police or, at the very least, never have lunch with the person again.
The dumbing down argument is not really about this worst content, so let’s leave it aside and concentrate on Web materials that instead of being appalling are, well, dumb. It’s important to acknowledge up front that there are many types of dumb content.
First of all, there’s the stuff that that appears to be the product of a truly feeble mind. As the introduction to Time’s Person of the Year story put it: "Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred." Like most of us, I’ve many times stared slack-jawed at my screen, amazed that someone took the time to click the ‘comment’ button, type away, and pass the CAPTHCA, yet couldn’t find the time to acquaint themselves with any linguistic, grammatical, or cultural guidelines for self-expression.
Another category of dumb content is that which suffers from really poor production values. Grainy YouTube videos, blogs that ignore principles of spelling, punctuation, and layout, cell phone pictures taken at the point in the party when the keg’s nearly empty—they’re all out there, in large amounts.
A third type is online material that shows people doing things that you find pretty dumb. One of my colleagues is always calling me into his office and showing me YouTube videos of driveway mechanics who do things like build turboshaft engines at home. He finds this stuff fascinating. I find it profoundly uninteresting. Even though my friend and the guys in the videos are clearly very smart, it all seems pretty dumb to me and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch it.
I’m even more mystified by the popularity of lip sync videos. This seems to me to be the last stage of a descent into what Malcolm McLaren presciently called ‘karaoke culture;’ endless recycling and re-consumption of cultural products, like bland pop songs, that weren’t that good to begin with.
So by my own definitions there’s a whole ocean of dumb content out there, and more being added every day. And I’m pretty confident that the same is true for any single person’s definition of dumb; I doubt that anyone’s tastes are so broad that they’d enjoy most of what’s being contributed to the new Web 2.0 platforms.
The important question is, so what? What are the negative consequences of this rising sea of dumb content? There are a few possibilities here.
One is that the dumb stuff could crowd out the good stuff, taking up all the available capacity. But since it’s free to contribute to virtually all of the Web 2.0 platforms I can’t see how this could be happening. Storage and processing are now so cheap that it’s feasible for YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Blogger, Gmail, Friendster, etc. to let us participate for free. It’s easy to lose sight of just how remarkable this is. If you have access to a connected computer, you don’t need to have any disposable income to contribute to Web 2.0; financial constraints have simply vanished. So your content becomes part of the Web, whether it’s dumb or smart and whether you’re rich or poor.
Another pessimistic possibility is that with all this content available it becomes impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff—that the huge volumes of dumb stuff impair our ability to find what we want. But think how many mechanisms we have navigate to the Web, including the Web 2.0 portion, efficiently. There’s Google, of course, and the more I use it the more convinced I am that search is now the dominant navigation paradigm. Google’s main search engine returns results from Web 2.0 platforms like blogs, Wikipedia, and YouTube, and the specialized blog search beta is customized for the blogosphere, as are technorati and bloglines.
Most Web 2.0 platforms also include both tags and extensions, which are pointers to other content of interest. Extensions can be automatic (as with Flickr clusters) or human-based. Usernames are a simple example of human-based extensions; if I see that mikestopforth and I have bookmarked a lot of the same Web pages using del.icio.us, I’m interested to see what other sites he’s come across. Del.icio.us lets me peruse his collection (it also lets him keep some or all of it private.).
Finally, there’s the lunch table. A lot of conversations there start with "Did you see / hear / watch / read about (something on the Web)?" My human network, in other words, helps me navigate the digital one.
So the proximate threats from dumb content—that it crowds out the good stuff, or makes it harder to find—don’t seem that severe. But what about the vague, scary notion that the large amounts of dumb content are corroding our intelligence, judgment, or critical facilities? That they’re attacking our cultural immune systems and lowering our resistance? That they’re impairing our ability not to find good content, but to recognize it?
There are a few responses to this argument. The first one that occurred to me was to compare the Web and Web 2.0 to TV in this regard. And it’s clear to me that the Web has a long, long way to go before it matches either TV’s penetration into American life, or its banality. FCC Chairman Newton Minow got it just about right in his famous 1961 speech:
"When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you — and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland."
The entertainer Ernie Kovacs summarized this state of affairs beautifully with his quote: "Television - a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done."
A second response to the current-media-are-making-us-dumb argument is to point out that it’s as probably as old as any form of media. I won’t even try to summarize quotes from across cultures and across centuries about how bad things are getting; suffice it to say that there are a lot of them. People of much education and refined taste have always been sneering at the vulgarians at the gate, and predicting that they were about to overrun the citadels of culture. And yet somehow there always appear new generations of people with much education and refined taste, and new citadels that need defending.
But defending against homemade turboshaft engine videos? Some people actually like those, find them highly entertaining, and learn from them. And I imagine that many friendships, professional relationships, and even communities have been formed on the back of Web 2.0 content that I find dumb.
In addition, who exactly needs to be defended against lip sync videos? Sure, they’re dumb. But is there any evidence that they rot your brain or make you incapable of doing or enjoying anything else? What harm are they doing? If it weren’t for them, would we finally be working through The Canterbury Tales? I seriously doubt it.
I want to be clear that I’m not making any version of the post-modernist argument that distinctions among ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of art and culture are false distinctions. I deeply believe that some cultural products are more complex than others, and so require more concentration and preparation to appreciate. Shakespeare, in other words, is more complex than Borat.
What I don’t believe is that the Globe Theater is going to be converted to the Sacha Baron Cohen Multiplex any time soon. I don’t, in other words, think that we’re about to lose our ability to differentiate complex products, or our desire to engage with them. Pre-Internet technologies have given people and societies plenty of opportunities to succumb to banality, and to create and consume only cultural junk food. We haven’t completely given in to this temptation, have we?
To believe in Web-enabled dumbing down you have to believe that something about the current sea of online content and the new content generation tools is eroding two very deep-rooted human capabilities: the desire and ability to create complex works, and the desire and ability to consume them. I don’t think Web 2.0 is anywhere near that powerful.
Let me end with a couple very sharp quotes. The writer Jonathon Franzen introduces his collection of essays How to be Alone with a mea culpa:
"I used to be a very angry and theory-minded person. I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don’t read much Henry James. I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn’t share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times. I used to think that our American political economy was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions, exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder the planet in the process."
Franzen describes how he needed to leave this "prison of angry thoughts" in order to wrestle with something truly important: "the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture."
It’s true that Web 2.0 tools are increasing the levels of both noise and distraction in our culture. But that’s not all they’re doing. They’re also helping lots of people preserve and further their individuality. And if they’re not already, they’ll eventually start yielding complex and important work.
One of my heroes is The New Yorker‘s longtime movie critic Pauline Kael, who had the gift of discernment. She cared nothing for any pre-established categories of film (action, art-house, independent, foreign, etc.), trusted her own judgment, and always wrote with insight, clarity, and punch. In her review of "The Road Warrior" (which she called ‘terrific junk food’ ) she talked about why she went to movies:
"to experience all the worlds that all the hacks and craftsmen and artists who worked in the movies could bring into being."
Web 2.0 is empowering all kinds of creators: hacks to be sure, but also craftsmen and artists. Shouldn’t we be truly excited to experience the best of the worlds they’ll put up on the World Wide Web?
Happy Holidays!
December 18, 2006
The Person of the Year at Work
You've probably heard by now that Time has declared "You" to be the Person of the Year, due entirely to Web 2.0. The introduction to the cover story makes some interesting points:
"Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom... But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map... But 2006 gave us some ideas. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious."
The article doesn't mention Enterprise 2.0 -- the application of Web 2.0 tools, approaches, and philosophies within organizations, but the quotes above are as relevant for the Intranet as for the Internet.
If you're a business leader and you're not just a little bit curious about Enterprise 2.0, why not? Do you not want your organization to become any more lateralized, searchable, multi-voiced or self-organizing? Do technologies that help put into practice managerial philosophies other than command-and-control make you uncomfortable?
Or are you completely happy with how people in your company intersect and interact? Do they have all the tools they need to do so?
Or do you think that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are currently too insecure, unstable, expensive, hard to install, and/or hard to use to be worth the bother?
Or do you think that there's really nothing new under the sun? Are you so tired of IT hype that you've simply stopped listening?
That, I think, would be a serious mistake.
December 03, 2006
Required Reading
Today's New York Times Magazine's cover story is "Open Source Spying." The teaser after the title asks "The nation's intelligence agencies are giving their cold-war-era computer systems a complete makeover. But will blogs and wikis really help spies uncover terrorist plots?"
It's a fantastic and fascinating article, and should be read by anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0 or national security. It describes how the agencies' IT current infrastructures are extensively fragmented, partly by design and partly because of uncoordinated investment, and how this fragmentation dramatically impedes analysts' abilities to do their most fundamental job: connecting the dots.
As author Clive Thompson points out, dot-connecting for a fluid and highly decentralized enemy like al Qaida means something very different than for a monolithic, siloed, and hierarchical foe like the Soviet Union. And the agencies' existing knowledge management and groupware systems (which is essentially what they are), which have consumed billions of dollars of investment, really aren't well-suited for the new task. And some efforts, like a $170 million FBI case management system, have simply been abandoned.
Thompson is astute and even-handed about the challenges faced by E2.0 efforts within the agencies, and the article is far from uniformly optimistic. Yet I found that it contained some very encouraging news. First and foremost, it appears that many of the most important people at the top of the recently-established Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) sincerely want E2.0 to take root. These people include the CIO, the head of analysis, and his CTO; I imagine these gentlemen have some clout, and know how to get things done within the establishment.
They're certainly willing to solicit and try new ideas. the DNI has experimented with blogs and wikis, including an 'Intellipedia', and sponsored the Galileo Awards, where analysts could submit essays describing new approaches. The title of the winning essay should gladden our hearts: "The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community."
It also seems the DNI is making some smart choices with its E2.0 initiatives. They're building a three-tier Intellipedia, for example, that will mirror the existing access levels of Top Secret, Secret, and Unclassified. I hope they're ensuring that searches in the more tightly restricted environments can also return results from the lower levels, and that some form of tagging exists.
The article touches on a number of subjects familiar to readers of this blog, including:
- The efficacy of link-based search. Thompson writes that "Searching Intelink [an inter-agency Intranet and document repository] thus resembles searching the Internet before blogs and Google came along -- a lot of disconnected information, hard to sort through."
- The frustrations of technically friendly newbies when they walk into old-school computing environments. The article opens by describing the reaction of one Web 2.0-savvy new analyst to the tools at his disposal within the Defense Intelligence Agency: "The reality was a colossal letdown."
- Resistance by middle managers. Wilson Dizard, a longtime government technology watcher, is quoted as saying that "You have all these little barons at N.S.A. and C.I.A. and whatever, and a lot of people think they're not going to do what the D.N.I says, if push comes to shove."
- The threat of security breaches. Although I think security risks within corporations are often overblown, they're deadly serious in intelligence work. The identities of confidential informants can be revealed, and moles like Robert Hanssen can sell the information they find on internal networks.
- The huge role of top management. Given bureaucracy, massive investment in legacy systems, and the inertia of large organizations, it's pretty clear nothing significant will happen unless people at the top drive change.
- The importance of many types of contribution. "The most valuable spy system is one that can quickly assemble disparate pieces that are already lying around — information gathered by doctors, aid workers, police officers or security guards at corporations."
- The advantages of an Intranet over the Internet. Intellipedia has not been subject to vandalism, probably in part because all contributions can be traced to their source.
- The ability for new connections to form. "Intellipedia's Nigeria page will... attract contributions from other intelligence employees who have expertise [the head of analysis] isn't yet aware of -- an analyst who served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, or a staff member who has recently traveled there."
- The minimum efficient scale for emergence. The article questions whether the most restrictive Top Secret Intellipedia will have enough members to yield good content.
The article presents a wonderful case study for any organization considering or embarking on E2.0 efforts, and I have trouble thinking of a situation where it's more important to get it right.
If there are a lot of people in the agencies who want to catch bad guys more than they want to protect fiefdoms, and if there are no horrible early PR disasters or security breaches, and if people see that contributing can actually help their careers, then E2.0 should take off in the US intelligence community. I hope like crazy that the first of these conditions is already true. The other two are not foregone conclusions (remember the prediction markets within the Department of Defense that got branded as 'terror markets,' and had to be shut down?), but neither are they highly unlikely.
After reading the article, I have some confidence that the intelligence agencies will be able to transform themselves by adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools, methods, and mindsets. The top and the bottom want the transformation to take place. Let's all hope this is enough.
November 30, 2006
What we talk about when we talk about Enterprise 2.0
The good people writing at Sandhill.com seem bound and determined to define Enterprise 2.0 as broadly as possible. First there were posts by M.R. Rangaswami and Vinnie Mirchandani in September of this year. Rangaswami wrote that:
"Enterprise 2.0 is the synergy of a new set of technologies, development models and delivery methods that are used to develop business software and deliver it to users."
I argued against this use of the phrase after I came across it, partly because I feel proprietary of the phrase I helped coin. Naturally, I'd like to see my definition, which centers on the use of social software platforms within enterprises, become the dominant one. So it's hard to watch others stretch the original definition to accommodate other concepts.
However, I also responded as I did to M.R and Vinnie (whose opinion I've come to respect a lot) because I felt that we'd lose the attention of non-IT business leaders as soon as we defined E2.0 as anything except the process of using the new social tools within companies. There's a large role for business leaders in this process, and I've found that they're willing, even eager, to discuss what that role is.
They're a lot less eager to hear about software as a service, open source development methods, and offshoring. Their eyes glaze over when these topics come up, and I can almost hear them think "We have an IT department so I don't have to think about these things."
Earlier today a colleague wrote "Well it doesn't take long in IT for any new term that gets any play to get totally hijacked. Here's a new extreme for totally redefining Enterprise 2.0" and pointed me to this post at Sandhill.com by Philip Lay. He writes:
"[T]he three main pillars of Enterprise 2.0 [are] open source programming languages such as the interactive web application development tool Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript & XML), the increasing number of SaaS offerings, and the highly anticipated appearance of hundreds of SOA application modules in the form of re-usable web services."
This definition contains no trace of or allusion to human interaction with technology, which is the core of what I and others have been talking about under the rubric of 'Enterprise 2.0.' Lay's definition consists of three trends: a software development approach (open source), a software delivery approach (software as a service, or SaaS) and a systems integration approach (service-oriented architecture, or SOA).
Two of these three -- SaaS and open source -- have nothing to do with changing how a company operates; they're simply about different and hopefully lower IT cost structures. SOA is about modular reuse and recombination of code.
As a result, there's very little in Lay's definition for a non-IT business leader to get excited about, or to act on. And yet even without business leader involvement, Lay's Enterprise 2.0 will yield the following benefits:
"Enterprise 2.0... encapsulates long-held aspirational goals for business and government organizations that wish to become truly responsive to their customers and partners using the most leading-edge information technologies available today. Thus, concepts such as the "real-time" enterprise, as well as advanced "inter-enterprise collaboration", finally become more achievable, at least in theory."
Lay does admit that this will take time:
"Enterprise 2.0 - or, if you prefer, the concept of the real-time, inter-personal, proactive, truly customer-focused enterprise enabled by the best services-based software technologies available today - ... will take a decade or so for the changes in business models and operating approaches to take shape."
but the words "at least in theory" above are the only indication in his column that (his definition of) Enterprise 2.0 is anything but a foregone conclusion.
I may be missing something fundamental, but how are Lay's three developments, even in combination, supposed to lead to a "inter-personal, proactive, truly customer-focused enterprise" that is "truly responsive to... customers and partners"?
I completely fail to see how buying applications that are written in an open source community instead of within a corporation, and/or renting them as a service instead of running them on internal servers, leads to any higher levels of pro-activeness, customer intimacy, responsiveness, etc.
Some think that SOA is a different story. Proponents of SOA / Web Services / the Semantic Web say huge benefits will be realized as applications become more modularized, re-combinable, and hot-swappable, but as Lay acknowledges "the proposed [SOA] standards relative to vital components such as UDDI and other registries, plus repositories, WSDL, XML markup language, and other protocols expected to navigate between legacy and new applications, have yet to become widely accepted or broadly deployed."
I'd go a lot further than that. As I wrote in Sloan Management Review a while back, I think this vision is quite distant, if not unattainable. Systems integration is, for the foreseeable future, going to continue to be slow, painstaking work undertaken only by companies that know they're going to be doing a lot of business together for some time to come.
IT advocates too often make claims about technologies that are disproportionate to, or even divorced from, what the technologies actually do. Is it any wonder, then, that the IT-business dialog is so tenuous and marked by skepticism, and that IT so rarely has a real seat at the table during strategic discussions? How long should we expect businesspeople to believe technologists' assertions that a brave new world is at hand, and that it can be inhabited after one more set of trends comes to fruition?
This is clearly an interesting time for corporate information technology, and open source code, SaaS, SOA, and Enterprise 2.0 (as I defined it) are all important trends. But conflating them, warping them, and overpromising their impact seem like excellent ways to ensure that they're soon perceived as failures, rather than successes.
I don't quite know what to do about the fact that my phrase has been co-opted in this way, beyond pointing it out and arguing against it. I'll have to ask Clay Christensen what he does every time he hears someone say "we've got a disruptive technology" when they really mean "we've got a technology we want you to buy."
November 27, 2006
Enterprise 2.0 Insecurities
After I posted on Avenue A | Razorfish's Enterprise 2.0 Intranet, a few commenters pointed out a potentially troublesome feature. When employees (or anyone else, for that matter) add the tag 'AARF' in del.icio.us, Flickr, or Digg, the so-tagged items show up within the company's Intranet. The intent of this feature, as I wrote, is to let employees easily and automatically make each other aware of potentially interesting content on the Internet.
Because these 'AARF' tags are universally visible, however, other companies can also see them and take advantage of them. It would be technically straightforward for a competitor to scan del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg for the 'AARF' tag, thereby seeing what Avenue A | Razorfish employees are highlighting for each other. As Microsoft's Alex Barnett posted:
"A potential issue to point out here. Since employees are using the AARF tag to share content with other employees and they are doing so on public sites such as del.icio.us,
I can also see what AARF employees are bookmarking and sharing with other AARF employees. Is that a good thing? We'll, it's good for me
. But is that good for AARF? Look,
here is a sample. From a cursory look at the AARF tagged bookmarks, I can tell:
- Someone is probably lobbying HR for Starbucks coffee machines at the office (I can't blame them...)
- Someone is studying Second Life's audience size, probably as an opportunity to either establish their own presence for the agency, or collating info so they can advise clients
- Someone is trying to figure out the ROI on blogging (rather you than me...)
- Someone is interested in mobile social software apps
Are they giving away company secrets? Lobbying for Starbucks coffee machines, er, probably not. Corporate Second Life plans for AARF? Maybe..."
Avenue A | Razorfish's Ray Velez responded on my blog:
"anyone can use the aarf tag and associate it with a bookmark. This potentially lets us get information from a larger audience. Which may turn out to be a bigger spam issue more than anything else. The only information that can be gleaned from this is what we think is interesting in terms of websites out there. Check out Alex Barnett’s post for a good explanation and yes I do like Starbucks coffee
. If it’s a site we want to keep behind a firewall we can make it private. The tagging algorithm and keywords we use internally to add metadata to wiki content and documents is completely behind the firewall."
This exchange highlights a deep issue around the use of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, which are by their nature more open, transparent, and visible than communication channels like email. Most of my work has stressed the benefits of using these platforms, but there are also potential drawbacks.
Perhaps the most obvious of these goes by the label 'security.' It's the fear that the wrong content will show up on the platform, and/or that it will be viewed by the wrong people. The wrong people include competitors, clearly, but also perhaps dishonest employees who would be willing to sell secrets if they have access to them. They might also include regulators, especially if employees post the wrong content. For a regulator, this would include information that leaped over a Chinese wall.
For a boss, there are many more flavors of wrong content -- trade secrets, hate speech, information that gets discovered by the other side's lawyers, information that becomes a public relations disaster, etc., With all these risks, Enterprise 2.0 can seem like more trouble than it's worth. In a November 21 story in the Times, for example, a lawyer who advises universities says that blogging by college presidents is 'an insane thing to do.'
At the risk of underplaying real security concerns, I want to make a case for a laid-back / laissez faire approach to security and Enterprise 2.0. The main reason this approach will work is a simple one: people already know how to behave appropriately, and they're not going to be driven suddenly wild by the appearance of the new platforms.
They've had access to phones, faxes, copiers, USB drives, email, and IM for a while now, and so have had plenty of opportunity to wreak havoc with security. Despite the existence of these tools, most companies haven't seen all their secrets made public or been sued out of existence. Shouldn't this tell us something about the extent to which people can be trusted to use communication tools appropriately?
Granted, Enterprise 2.0 platforms bring some new challenges. Foremost among them is probably the fact that contributions to these platforms are intended to be persistent over time and visible to all members. This implies that training and explicit policies about appropriate and inappropriate contributions might be useful. But I don't think it implies that Enterprise 2.0 represents a security risk so large that it should be shunned, or approached only with great caution.
I find it telling that the new communication and collaboration platforms have taken off most quickly in high tech industries despite the huge premium tech companies place on secrecy and protection of intellectual property. This is partly due to the fact that these companies are full of techies, but it's also because these firms operate in incredibly dynamic environments and so have particularly acute information sharing needs. It makes sense, then, that they'd be the first to adopt new tools that let people keep up to date with the latest developments, and with each other.
Let me end this post by suggesting a thought experiment. Imagine two competitors, one of which has the guiding principle "keep security risks and discoverability to a minimum," the other of which is guided by the rule "make it as easy as possible for people to collaborate and access each others' expertise." Both put in technology infrastructures appropriate for their guiding principles. Take all IT, legal, and leak-related costs into account. Which of these two comes out ahead over time? I know which one I'm betting on.
November 18, 2006
Now THAT's What I'm Talking About!
I put out a call for case studies a while back. I was looking for examples of deep Enterprise 2.0 penetration -- where freeform social software platforms had become so widely and deeply used that they were no-longer-exceptional parts of the company's technology infrastructure, and its culture.
Susan Scrupski and Jerry Bowles, two of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, came across one such example and directed it my way.
I met yesterday with David Deal, Ray Velez, and Amy Vickers from Avenue A | Razorfish, a 1000 person, $190 million interactive services firm headquartered in Seattle. AARF helps clients with digital marketing and advertising, with their customer-facing websites, and also with their Intranets and Extranets.
What I found most interesting about the company was its own Intranet. To hear David, Ray, and Amy tell it, the company's traditional static Intranet -- the place where an employee would go to look up benefits information or peruse the latest press releases -- still exists, but has been marginalized by a suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools. Ray fired up his laptop and showed me the company's de facto homepage:
Let's look at this page one section at a time. The leftmost area of the screen, which is consistent across all of AARF's E2.0 Intranet pages, is devoted to navigation. Underneath the search box are two sets of pointers to other pages. The contents of the top box are imposed, the bottom emergent. The top box has links to many of the usual suspects: individuals' pages, projects, and company information. Underneath this is a tag cloud. Employees can tag documents they upload and pages on the Intranet and Internet with helpful words and phrases. The most popular of these tags show up in the box in alphabetical order, with font size indicating relative popularity.
The middle column consists of two boxes. The top one is devoted to Internet content, the bottom one to AARF Intranet content. What Internet content shows up? AARF has built interfaces to the bookmarking site del.icio.us, the photo sharing site Flickr, and Digg, a site where members vote on the importance of news stories. All three use tags, or something close.
AARF employees have learned to add the tag 'AARF' when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues. Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet. So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to let its employees share Internet content with each other. It's also free; these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no permissions. I find this simply brilliant.
The bottom box in the middle of the page shows most recent documents uploaded to and pages created on the company's Intranet. Since the E2.0 Intranet is essentially a wiki, anyone can create a new page. AARF uses the free, open source MediaWiki wiki software. This software is not WYSIWYG, so users need to be comfortable with the MediaWiki markup language.
The rightmost section of the page shows the most recent blog posts. At AARF, these include emails to group mailing lists, which are automatically posted to a bloglike page.
Obviously, this is a highly dynamic page where most content doesn't stick around long. Only the leftmost part of the page remains at all constant over time; the rest of it churns constantly. In other words, it's definitely not the place to go to find any specific piece of Intranet content. So how popular and useful can it be?
Highly popular, and highly useful. I find that the sites I visit most often these days are ones that give me 'the latest.' They help me stay on top of (or at least feel like I'm staying on top of) the world, the blogosphere, and my personal network of people and content. This page does the same thing at the company level for AARF employees. It gives them 'the latest' about their work environment. And it does so in a bottom-up and egalitarian fashion. This page doesn't contain the latest information that the company's senior managers, or its IT staffers, think employees should know about; it contains the latest information that employees think employees should know about.
But what about navigating all the rest of AARF's Intranet content? Shouldn't the home page help with that? If that search box in the upper left works well enough, it does. I believe the Googlers when they say "search is the navigation paradigm." I bet that most people at AARF can quickly get where they want on the Intranet if they start at this page and type a few words into the box.
Other pages on the company's E2.0 Intranet display the same smart mixture of standardized and freeform content, and other intelligent uses of new tools for wading through lots of content. Here's Ray's personal page:
The content at the top is imported from the company's directory. All the stuff underneath he added himself.
Here's a wiki page. The graphic in the upper right shows other pages that link to it:
And here's the page employees use to upload documents. They can add tags by clicking or typing:
AARF prides itself on its knowledge of how people actually consume and navigate through online content. As I look at their own E2.0 Intranet, I think this pride might not be misplaced. This Intranet passed a test I often use to assess technology penetration. I asked David, Ray, and Amy what would happen if the E2.0 tools were shut down at AARF. They looked at each other for a second, then all started laughing. Test passed.
David had the only grey hair in the group, so I asked him if it was difficult for the more senior people at AARF to understand the E2.0 Intranet and contribute effectively to it. His answer was intriguing. He said that he had a nephew at college, and the only way he would consent to communicate with David was via Facebook -- no email, no IM. Because of this, AARF's Intranet was not unfamiliar territory. His anecdote provided more evidence that newbies think very differently about IT and collaboration, as I wrote earlier. It also showed me that we oldsters can learn the new modes of collaboration if the incentives are in place.
AARF, of course, is an atypical company in many ways. It's full of people who slap together mashups in their spare time (like the one that lets AARF employees enter the addresses of lunch places near their Manhattan office so that they display on a Google Maps). So its 'empty quarter' of non-adopters is going to be comparatively quite small.
Still, though, their E2.0 Intranet is a really nice piece of work. I'm relieved that we finally have a clear case study of deep penetration of Enterprise 2.0 technologies across a sizable company. And I'm optimistic that this example is a harbinger of things to come.
October 16, 2006
Boundary Spanning at Office 2.0
I spoke at the Office 2.0 conference last week, which was superbly organized by Ismael Ghalimi and his colleagues. It was great to meet so many of the enterprise irregulars, who I’d been interacting with only digitally up to that point.
The highlight of the event for me was the chance to hear from and meet Esther Dyson, who has been a leading technology observer, analyst, and theorist for some time now.
The conference opened with her being interviewed by CNET‘s Dan Farber. This was bad news and good. Bad because I was up next, and she is an incredibly tough act to follow. Good because one of her strongest themes around the future of IT-supported work (at least as I heard her) is also one that I find critically important, and that I stressed in my speech.
Esther sees a need for what she called "lightweight project management" or "lightweight workflow." This is software that (to paraphrase and extend what she said— Esther, I’m sorry if I’m misrepresenting any of your ideas) would let one user quickly set up a business process— a linked sequence of tasks performed by people with different roles— deploy that process across all the people and groups involved in executing it, then monitor progress toward its completion.
To take a trivial example, let’s say three co-authors and I, each at a different school, are getting a paper ready to submit to a journal. We’ve got to
- finalize the analyses,
- revise the results and conclusions sections based on these analyses
- check all the references and finalize the bibliography
- give it a final once-over
- do all the formatting and housekeeping required for the journal we’re submitting it to
We’ve agreed which one of us is responsible for steps 1,2,3, and 5, and that we’re all responsible for step 4. We’ve also all agreed that we want to get the paper submitted within two weeks. At this point, what I’d really like is a Web-based tool that lets me flowchart this process, say who’s responsible for each step and what the deadline is, and set up some kind of document check-in and check-out repository. The tool would then take responsibility for telling each of us when work was ready for us, and also for bugging us as deadlines approached (and passed). It would also have a dashboard that any of us could use to learn at a glance how far along the process was, who was on the critical path, and whether anyone was behind schedule.
I realize, of course, that this is not an easy system to develop. Robust yet lightweight document version control, for example, is hard to accomplish. It’s also not a system whose exact features and functionality are clear at this point— should my co-authors, for instance, have the ability to change the process I define and deploy? Finally, it‘s pretty clear that lightweight workflow software is going to have to walk a particularly delicate balance between providing structure and being easy and appealing to use. If it doesn’t propose and enforce enough workflow it won’t be a sufficient improvement over emailing documents and updates around. If it feels rigid, unfriendly, or hard to use, in contrast, people will abandon it and go back emailing documents and updates around. For this tool, in other words, the 9X problem of email looms particularly large.
The reason I’m excited about this type of tool despite the above caveats is that it fits in a potentially large blank space in a picture of corporate IT. At the Office 2.0 conference I showed the picture below. It divides end-user-visible information technologies into three categories: those that facilitate discrete tasks, those that define then deploy structured interactions in the form of business processes, and those that allow unstructured and unplanned interactions. I label these Function, Enterprise, and Network IT, respectively.
Each of these categories is currently well-populated, but the boundary regions between them are not. Or at least, not yet. My loose working definition of ‘Office 2.0’ is the lowering of the barrier between the task and the unstructured interaction. This trend is epitomized by Google’s announcement, on the day of the conference, of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which are exactly what one would expect: web-based and group-based tools for creating documents and spreadsheets. Google D&S gives many types of knowledge worker the choice between working individually, or as part of a team. If they work within a team, they no longer have to use two pieces of technology (Word and email, or Excel and email) to get their job done. Instead, they use one tool that spans a previously existing boundary.
Esther’s proposed tool for lightweight workflow would span another boundary— the one between structured and unstructured interactions. This would be a welcome technology for at least two reasons. First, it would match and support the semi-structured ways that lots of knowledge work (like the paper completion effort described above) gets done.
Second, it could also help appropriate business processes form and solidify over time. As I wrote earlier, the best configuration for a given business process isn’t always clear in advance, yet the enterprise systems we have don’t typically lend themselves to quick-and-easy process tweaking. They’re great for embedding a process once it’s developed, but not so great at experimenting and iterating to come up with a good process. So lightweight workflow software could be both an end in itself and a means to accomplishing other ends.
We’ll always have a need for technologies that rest squarely within the borders of the task, the structured interaction, and the unstructured interaction. CAD systems, ERP, and email are not going anywhere. And we’ll continue to see new beneficial technologies appear within each of these categories. I agree with Esther that a wiki is simply a container, but that’s exactly what we need for some purposes. When I launched my course wiki at the start of last semester I didn’t want it to have any traces of structure, workflow, or hierarchy. I wanted those to appear over time based on what my students did with the tool.
I imagine that some of the most interesting near-term corporate technology developments, however, will come at the intersections between today’s technology categories. Clever technologists and entrepreneurs are going to take advantage of the current ‘building blocks’ of IT— abundant bandwidth, lively browsers, fast development environments, more link-able applications, etc.— to build tools that cover and support more of the modes of corporate knowledge work, and that cross current lines rather than staying within them.
I have to confess that I’m not up to speed on all the applications and sites that currently provide something like lightweight workflow. I understand, for example, that Itensil does something close to this, but I missed the chance to get a demo from them at the conference. I take some comfort from the fact that if I’ve overlooked the ‘silver bullet’ tool then Esther has, too, since she talked about lightweight workflow as a desideratum rather than a done deal. If you know of good boundary-spanning technologies, please leave a comment and tell us about them.
October 07, 2006
Irregular Opinions
I got to moderate a panel on Enterprise 2.0 at Longworth Venture Partners annual conference this past week. A pleasant surprise for me was that all four panelists— Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalini, Zoli Erdos, and Rod Boothby—were members of the ‘Enterprise Irregulars.’ This is a group of bloggers assembled by Nolan to ponder the future of enterprise software. As we were getting our microphones put on I asked Jeff if I could join, and he told me I was in.
Also pleasant, but perhaps less of a surprise, was the level of optimism expressed by all panelists about the future spread of Enterprise 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, mashups, and a host of yet-to-be-developed-and-named tools to let knowledge workers work the elements of their enterprise systems— data and business processes—in unstructured ways.
I brought up the 9X problem of email: the idea that any new collaboration technology will have to be nine times better than email in order to displace it. The irregulars didn’t seem that bothered by it. All of them told the audience stories from their personal experience about how eager users are for something better, and how quickly they make the switch to Enterprise 2.0 tools.
I also asked how important line managers were in helping this switch take place. Jeff and Ismael didn’t see much of a role for them. Jeff talked about how quickly and easily wikis spread within SAP when he worked there, and Ismael told how he organized next week’s Office 2.0 conference using office 2.0 technologies and virtually no paper, and how the tools and processes he used were flexible enough to accommodate the vendor qualification and invoicing processes of all of the conference’s sponsors. Zoli, on the other hand, talked about the steps he took when he ran a startup to encourage his team to use new collaboration technologies. His remarks reminded me a lot of what I heard from DrKW’s Darren Lennard when I talked with him about getting busy investment bankers to stop using email and start using Enterprise 2.0 tools.
Rod told somewhat different stories. He’s been working for a while to get large mainstream organizations to change their modes of collaboration and knowledge management. He wasn’t as optimistic as some others that "if we build it, they will come." He’d seen plenty of management teams that were indifferent to or confused by the new technologies, and how hard it was get momentum when this was the case. To be sure, he’s also seen success stories. He told the audience, for example, about how effective wikis could be for letting groups develop Sarbanes-Oxley compliance policies. But overall, his experiences seemed different than those of the other panelists.
We didn’t have enough time to pursue the issue, but I wanted to ask the Irregulars about the possibility that the tools we’re so interested in are destined to be niche technologies. The niche will be inherently novelty-friendly and tech-friendly workplaces like the ones inside startups and technology vendors. This is a big niche, and if Enterprise 2.0 technologies succeed only in such workplaces it doesn’t mean at all that they’re failures. It does mean, though, that they’re not going to have an impact on most companies or most knowledge workers.
Another possibility is that Enterprise 2.0 takes off quickly in tech-friendly environments, then slowly penetrates other ones, perhaps as worker and managers migrate into them or perhaps as entry-level employes demand the kinds of tools they’re accustomed to using on the Web.
In summary, this panel discussion helped bring into sharper focus the important question around Enterprise 2.0 technologies. It’s not "Will these tools succeed anywhere?" It’s "What determines where these technologies will succeed, and how quickly?" What are the most important drivers— industry, employee demographics, managerial willpower? What else? What do you think?
September 23, 2006
The New Choreography
At Wednesday's New New Internet conference Google's Rajen Sheth gave a great talk. As part of it, he drew a distinction between application deployment within the enterprise and on the Web.
I think he was being kind to the enterprise model when he described it as managers and technologists trying to figure out what users within the company want, then trying to deliver it to the
