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.
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.
September 09, 2006
Enterprise 2.0 Inclusionists and Deletionists
Wikipedia is facing a showdown, and it looks like it could be an important one, between contributors who think it should be a repository for all sorts of information ("Why shouldn't my middle school have an entry?" ) and those who believe it should it should keep out content that's not notable ("Why should your middle school have an entry?" ). The former call themselves
inclusionists, the latter
deletionists.
As the Enterprise 2.0 meme gains currency, a similar tension is appearing. Some are using it as a catch-all phrase that encompasses several converging trends within the enterprise software industry. Others are advocating a narrow definition that focuses only on the use of a new generation of digital collaboration tools within organizations.
I find that I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist and an Enterprise 2.0 deletionist, for the simple reason that an encyclopedia gets more useful the bigger, broader, and more all-encompassing it is, while a definition gets less useful. I think that if "Enterprise 2.0" becomes "All the changes in the enterprise software market that I (whoever I am) think are noteworthy" or "All the changes in the enterprise software market that you (whoever you are) need to be aware of" than the term itself loses most of its explanatory power and risks descending to the level of marketing hype.
So while I'm happy to see MR Rangaswami at Sandhill.com get excited about Enterprise 2.0, I was less happy to read his definition:
"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.
Whether created by software vendors, internal IT departments, line-of-business units or service providers, the software of Enterprise 2.0 will be flexible, simple and lightweight. It will be created using an infinite combination of the latest - and possibly, some old-fashioned - ingredients, including the following:
- Technologies - Open source, SOA/Web services (AJAX, RSS, blogs, wikis, tagging, social networking, and so on) Web 2.0, legacy and proprietary - or some combination
- Development Models - Relying on in-house, outsourced or offshore resources - or any combination; pursuing a global development strategy; and/or pursuing co-creation with users, partners or both
- Delivery Methods -Downloading individually; paying for a license; and/or, using on-demand/SaaS or via a service provider." (Vinnie Mirchandani concentrates on delivery methods in his recent piece on Enterprise 2.0)
By this definition, a company's new travel and expense reporting system would qualify as an Enterprise 2.0 application if it were developed in Chennai, rented to customers, and accessed via an AJAX-capable browser. This T&E system could be mandatory use, assign users to roles (submitter, approver, auditor, etc.), check to make sure all fields were present, and pre-define ironclad approval and reimbursement workflows, and still be considered an Enterprise 2.0 application.
This is pretty close to the opposite of the definition of Enterprise 2.0 I proposed a while back:
"Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).
Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.
Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.
Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
- Optional
- Free of up-front workflow
- Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
- Accepting of many types of data"
(This is a definition of a noun. When I use 'Enterprise 2.0' as an adjective, I mean "supporting of emergent collaboration." )
This definition is explicitly NOT about development models or delivery methods, and it's only about a small set of technologies that are visible to end users. Tags, for example, are visible to end users; Service-oriented architectures are not.
Ray Lane and Rod Boothby have been working with an appropriately narrow definition of Enterprise 2.0, and are doing a great job of articulating its impact. Dion Hinchcliffe has taken one of Rod's graphics and extended it a bit. The points it communicates are all about changes to collaboration, not to development or delivery models.
Enterprise 2.0, as these folk and I define it, is a trend that we think should be on the radar screens of non-technologist business leaders. Talking about development models and delivery methods is a good way to ensure that it doesn't get there, or doesn't stay there long. Business leaders' eyes will glaze over, or they'll quickly mentally file the topic as 'something for my tech team to worry about.'
Of course, there are many other possible audiences for insight and analysis about technology trends: CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, entrepreneurs, investors, etc. Lots of these groups are interested in development models and delivery methods, even if line managers generally aren't. But we already have terms to describe recent developments in these areas, many of which can be found in Rangaswami's definition above. So why stretch 'Enterprise 2.0' to encompass all of them?
Maybe we do need a new phrase or term to describe the confluence of recent developments in technologies themselves, their development, and their delivery. But let's not just Shanghai a pre-existing term that was doing useful work and force it into a whole new set of duties.
And one piece of free advice: Don't use '2.0' as part of any new term; people seem to be getting tired of it very quickly.
August 22, 2006
A Chance at Redemption
Ross Mayfield has done the heavy lifting of reviving the speed-deleted (ow!) Wikipedia entry on 'Enterprise 2.0.' This provides us an opportunity to get it right and re-post it, or perhaps ask that it be submitted to a vote.
As we work on this, we'd do well to keep in mind the reasons that it was deleted. They include the fact that Enterprise 2.0 is a neologism, and Wikipedia's guidelines say that entries about neologisms must be more than just definitions, and must not consist of original research. The guidelines are pretty adamant on the latter point; given the volume of print and online material on Enterprise 2.0, we clearly don't need to do any original research.
The other objection mentioned during the deletion process has to do with the noteworthiness or notability of the term. I find this confusing, because I've never understood Wikipedia to have such a criteria for inclusion. The closest I can find is this excerpt from the list of what Wikipedia is not, and I think we avoid all of these easily.
So what should an encyclopedia entry on Enterprise 2.0 consist of? Here's my proposed outline, which I promise to work on sometime soon.
Definition(s)
List of proposed E2.0 technologies
E2.0 and the concept of emergence
Claims made for the difference between E2.0 techs and previous techs used for collaboration w/in companies
Evidence of E2.0 in practice
Controversies
Is E2.0 about architecture (SOA, SaaS, etc.) or communities / users
External references
This is, of course, just a suggestion. But let's get this done and accepted by Wikipedia one way or another so that we and others can then use it.
August 07, 2006
Among the Wikimaniacs
Our panel yesterday at Wikimania was great fun. I was amazed at how many people were willing to drag themselves out of bed on Sunday and get to a 9:30 am panel on the use of wikis within organizations, a topic that is not (yet) near to everyone's heart.
My new HBS colleague Karim Lakhani did an admirable job riding herd on the panelists and encouraging lots of dialogue with the audience. He and I want to thank our panelists Josh Bancroft , Ned Gulley, Michael Idinopulos, and Ross Mayfield
I'm sure they'll be blogging about their impressions, and after the current round of conferences I'll post more here about the common themes I saw. For now I just want to share a couple quick post-panel impressions and some news.
Perhaps the best part about an event like yesterday's is when you see something new -- when you have an I-never-thought-of-it-that-way-before moment. For me, that came when I listened to people talk about the many different ways there are to contribute to an organization's wiki, from authoring to editing to gardening to correcting spelling mistakes. The discussion made me realize that for all the emphasis I'd placed on the freeform nature of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, I'd missed one important way in which these tools get out of the way of their users: they don't have any notion of what constitutes a good contribution, or a complete one, or an approved one, or a minimum one.
I can see at least two important positive implications of this non-judgmental attitude toward contributions. First, people with many different talents and proclivities can meaningfully pitch in. In other words, wikis aren't just for subject matter experts and those who can write lapidary prose. They're also for information architects, fact-finders, nitpickers, linkers, taggers, etc. Prior to Enterprise 2.0, these folk had virtually no opportunity to influence their companies' digital platforms unless they worked in the Intranet group.
Second, people don't have to dive headlong into making contributions. They can instead dip a toe in the water by doing something as minor as correcting a spelling or punctuation mistake (of which there are usually no shortage). Once they see how easy it is to participate they often make deeper contributions. More than one person yesterday admitted that they purposely misspell words sometimes in order to draw wiki participation.
The problem with accepting all kinds of contributions, of course, is that some of them might not be helpful. Wikipedians spend a lot of time dealing with vandals, trolls, and people caught up in edit wars. They also spend a lot of time thinking through guidelines and policies for dealing with them. So will advocates of organizational wikis have to do the same?
Ross Mayfield said that in four years of building wikis for corporations Socialtext has seen precisely 0 trolls and 0 instances of vandalism. I was astonished by this and polled the entire room. No one reported even a single instance of counterproductive behavior on the wiki.
As I've written before, one of the advantages the Intranet has over the Internet is that people within companies share a culture and norms, and are usually quite reluctant to overturn them. In addition, vandals and trolls can usually be easily identified behind the firewall. So perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised that employees aren't using corporate wikis to act out.
Ross has generously set up a public wiki to talk about enterprise wikis. It's at https://www.socialtext.net/ewikimania . What shall we use it for?
July 04, 2006
Raising the Least Common Denominator
Brian Gillooly, the editor-in-chief of Optimize magazine, sent me an email after the CTC conference:
"One thing that I wanted to raise, which I did at the MIT CIO Symposium the day before… was the concept of the common denominator with E 2.0 (and Web 2.0). One of the gentlemen in your session made the comment about E 2.0 allowing "decisions from on high ... or down low, for that matter" and I called out a little too loudly, "Bingo!" I had asked the panel at MIT if there was a concern that E 2.0 risks "dumbing down" the organization, because while it does allow for good ideas to trickle up from anywhere in the organization that otherwise may not have, I think it also enables more "common denominator" suggestions, input, or decisions to temper the overall organization. I used, for example, what passes for entertainment or content on Web 2.0 places like MySpace, YouTube, or the like. It’s downright scary. By extension, can’t that sort of "common denominator-ism" pervade the enterprise over time? You made the point that a Wiki editor could find him or herself in a very powerful position in an organization, and I agree with that, but I would think the masses could have great sway here."
This is a good question; it’s a topic of current debate on Web, and it’s clearly relevant for the enterprise. The last thing any company wants to do is set up an environment that contributes to dumbing down.
So which is it? Is the IQ of an online group that of its dumbest member, the sum of all IQs, or something in between? Do online communities aggregate knowledge or dissipate it?
Some examples are pretty clear: markets work, in part because of the power of the price mechanism, the incentives to perform well, and the availability of clear, simple, and continuous feedback. But what about the Web 2.0 content generation and aggregation platforms like the ones Brian mentions? Some of them are clearly popular and big, but is their content any ‘good?’
Most of Everything is Bad...
It’s a safe bet that almost everyone you ask will say that most of it is pretty bad. But most people, I bet, would also say that they found some great stuff on YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc. Some of this ‘great stuff’ is at the level of mindless diversion or guilty pleasure, but not all of it. I came across some fine pictures of the last solar eclipse on Flickr.
True, I find that most of what’s on these platforms is bad, uninteresting, trashy, and/or poorly done. But I feel the same way when I go through a bookstore, walk along a magazine rack, scan movie listings, or peruse almost any sample from any publishing industry. In other words, it’s simply not news that there’s a lot of junk out there. Given freedom of expression, relatively low barriers to entry, and non-uniformity of tastes, how could we expect anything else?
... But So What?
The junk becomes a problem if it obscures the good stuff, or if it makes us such lousy consumers of content that we become morons or dupes. Let’s take the first problem first. Several earlier posts have concentrated on the mechanisms by which the cream of the online content rises to the top; they include links, tags, powerful search, RSS, and automated tools like Flickr clusters. These are extremely powerful and precise tools. They help each of us define the signals we’re interested in, then separate them from the noise.
The One(?) Problem
But the fact that current search technology relies heavily on backlinks can give rise to a problem, best illustrated with an example. I want my medical advice to come from the ‘medical establishment’ and to be based on research like double-blind clinical trials. And like lots of people, I start any new quest for information at the Google search box. But when I typed ‘herbal remedies’ into the box just now, the first non-paid search result Google returned was an online store, the second from a gardener’s guide, the third a guide of uncertain provenance, etc. It seemed that only one of the first ten search results was going to be useful to me, given my preferences about sources. This is because most people who discuss herbal remedies on the Web and link to other sites evidently don’t share my preferences.
My point here is not that most Web content about herbal remedies is wrong or bad. That’s a judgment I’m not qualified to make. My point is simply that there’s not a good way right now to limit my search results to sites that do have the right qualifications, however I define them. Current search results are the result of a huge ongoing Web-wide popularity contest. It’s a method that works surprisingly well, but it doesn’t give me what I want when I search for information about herbal remedies.
A combination of search and tagging, a la Google Co-op might be able to do better. Google Co-op, which is still in beta, "is a platform which enables you to use your expertise to help other users find information" according to the company (if that’s not a Web 2.0-style explanation, I don’t know what is). I’d be very grateful if the AMA someday used it or a similar tool to tag the herbal remedy sites they consider to be solid or authoritative. I’d confine my searches to include only those sites. People who wanted their search results to exclude information from the medical establishment would do just about the opposite. And we’d all get what we want from the Web. The signal would rise above the noise, even though we defined the signal very differently.
Wikipedia and Thomas Jefferson to the Rescue
After Google didn’t give me what I was looking for within one page of results, I went to Wikipedia and typed in ‘herbal remedies.’ I found the entry somewhat scattershot and a bit of a Frankenstein— obviously stitched together from the contributions of many individuals. But I also found it very informative, and a good starting point. It linked, for example, to an editorial from NEJM on the risks of alternative medicine, which was exactly the kind of information I was looking for. It also linked to the Website of the National Herbalists Association of Australia, which is probably exactly the kind of information someone else is looking for.
Reading the article reminded me why I’m such an admirer of Wikipedia. Its community had managed to generate a helpful and informative entry on a controversial topic. The community’s insistence on a neutral point of view for articles was a key ingredient for this good outcome. Wikipedia demonstrates that people can come together and, instead of shouting at each other about how herbal remedies are either the only way forward for humanity or a huge ongoing scam, generate something that educates and helps other people.
This is the opposite of dumbing down. And one of the main themes of this blog is that this kind of productive collaboration should be easier within Intranets than across the Internet. Enterprise 2.0, in other words, should be at least as powerful as Web 2.0. The informal and formal leaders of a company have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to shape both the processes of collaboration and their outcomes. If the digital collaboration platform turns into a shouting match or a random collection of junk they really have no one to blame but themselves.
There is ample evidence that online communities can rise above Gillooly’s ‘common denominator-ism,’ especially with the great new technologies we have to generate, refine, interlink, tag, store, filter, and search content. If we can’t use them to rise above the lowest common denominator, shame on us.
The second question posed above about bad content— whether it can erode our critical faculties to the point that we become morons or dupes— is a huge, broad, and deep one. Many people believe that this process is in fact taking place. In addition to everything else he did, Thomas Jefferson left these folk brilliant instructions in an 1820 letter he wrote to William Jarvis:
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."
Cynicism, elitism, and defeatism are all easy poses, and trying to internalize and follow this advice is hard work. But down which path do real rewards lie?
June 10, 2006
Is Enterprise Anonymity an Oxymoron?
As I've discussed here a few times, individual enterprises have a couple big advantages over the Internet as a whole as they work to encourage the use of new platforms for communication and collaboration. Business leaders can shape their companies' cultures and incentives to drive blogging, tagging, wiki contributions, podcasting, etc. On the Web, in contrast, cultures have to be built from scratch (as this memoir from Larry Sanger makes clear, culture-building at Wikipedia has been intense, ongoing, and contentious) and incentives come mostly from within contributors themselves -- their desires to be altruistic or more productive.
The obvious big advantage of the Web over the enterprise is its massive scale. With hundreds of millions of people online, it's not too surprising that about 2000 of them have apparently devoted much of their lives to Wikipedia, becoming what that community defines as 'very active users.' Some other Web-wide platforms are also big enough to benefit from the power law of participation and so gain the benefits of emergence.
Another big advantage of the Web so far, and one that's a bit less obvious, is the fact that its participants can choose their levels of anonymity. As a New Yorker cartoon pointed out in 1993, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." People can choose exactly how much they want to reveal about themselves as they participate in Web platforms. It's perfectly possible for me to maintain my anonymity and set up a blog, comment on others' blogs, rise up through the ranks of Wikipedians, set up a MySpace page, look for a mate or a date on Craigslist, post a bunch of photos to Flickr, etc. As I did all of this, any required communication could happen via email, IM, IRC, etc. using aliases that hid my true identity.
Of course, this is a huge double-edged sword. Anonymity and the difficulty of ascertaining true identity are great boons to trolls, terrorists, spewers of hate speech, spammers, predators, hackers, and all the other folk who reverse network effects and reduce the Web's value for the rest of us.
The drawbacks of the Web's anonymity are real, but so are its advantages. Anonymity lets people express themselves without fear of reprisal, and without being subject to the possibly harsh judgments of their peers. It can let them bring important truths to light and whistle-blow without fear of losing their jobs, demolishing their careers, or losing their standing in a community that means something to them (recall that Mark Felt was a high-ranking FBI official while he was acting as Deep Throat.).
It can also let them be several people at once. Many people have interests wholly unrelated to their professional lives, and would prefer that the two not mingle. It's not that these outside interests are sleazy; it's just that they involve different communities, different vocabularies, different norms, etc. Web platforms can be a great way to participate in many separate communities without having them bleed into each other.
In short, online anonymity has its drawbacks, but it accelerates self-expression and the good that goes along with it. But anonymity is very hard to come by inside the enterprise, and digital anonymity is close to impossible. Let's say I wanted to send our new Dean Jay Light a note telling him some things I think he should know about the burdens and oppression suffered by HBS junior faculty (this is a purely hypothetical example; we actually have a great working environment). I'd want him to have confidence that the note actually did come from a junior faculty member here, but I wouldn't want him (or anyone else) be able to trace it back to me; I'd want to be the Deep Throat of HBS.
So what would I do? A paper letter or an email from a Gmail or Yahoo! account could have come from any Yahoo. An email from my HBS account, however, immediately identifies me. I don't have any good way to digitally communicate within this community as a member of the community, but with anonymity.
Now let's flip the problem around and imagine that Dean Light wants to get the most honest responses possible from the junior faculty (or the research assistants, current MBA students, staff, alums, etc.) on issues he considers important. What would he do? Have lots of one-on-ones? Set up a suggestion box? Set up a special-purpose email address? And what if he wanted us to be able to react to each other's answers? Would he set up focus groups facilitated by a third party?
Each of these methods would probably yield some useful results, but they all fall short of fostering maximum freedom of expression while at the same time ensuring that all contributions actually come from within the community.
These two goals are actually not mutually incompatible. In fact, they can both be easily realized with current tools. The key is to include a third party into the mix in addition to the enterprise and its workforce. The role of this third party -- let's call it a go-between -- is to provide assurances to the enterprise that communications are actually coming from designated contributors while also assuring contributors that they'll remain anonymous to the enterprise, and to each other.
The mechanics are pretty simple. If Jay Light wants to find out what the HBS junior faculty think about a set of issues, he directs the go-between to send each of us an email with instructions, a password, and a URL within the go-between's domain name. We go to the URL and enter our passwords. We're then assigned special-purpose usernames (something like 'juniorfac1xx'') and given access to all the platforms (discussion boards, wikis, blogs, chat sessions, etc.) and channels (Web-based email) that Jay has set up. If he wants us to see each other's replies, he uses platforms; if he doesn't, he uses channels. We then fire away. If he wants to follow up with any of us the go-between forwards his email to us and lets us reply using our special-purpose usernames.
To reassure me that HBS couldn't use its servers' log files to find out who was saying what, I'd want to make sure that all my contributions were made within the go-between's domain name. And Jay would want to be sure that if anyone started using the platforms to post threats or harassments, then HBS could learn their true identity and take action to protect the community. This implies that the enterprise, the workforce, and the go-between would have to agree in advance on a few rules of engagement. And that we'd all have to trust the go-between to respect them.
In this scheme, the fact that true identities could be revealed would probably be enough to keep most people from using the go-between to pursue vendettas or launch personal attacks. The role of go-between is tailor-made for software as a service.
I'm excited about Enterprise 2.0 because I think it allows legitimately new modes of collaboration -- it lets people work together in ways that were just not previously possible. The capability to have anonymous online contributions and dialogues within the enterprise is potentially a quite valuable addition to the Enterprise 2.0 toolkit. This capability would let companies have difficult conversations even when there's not a high level of what my colleague Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety -- "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking." IT certainly doesn't make this shared belief any less important, but it can be a substitute for it in narrow but important ways.
June 06, 2006
Enterprise 2.0: The State of the Meme
It's been exciting to watch awareness and discussion of Enterprise 2.0 spread across the blogosphere over the past few months. The term appears to have taken root and started to blossom. More importantly, the concepts underlying the term are being debated, refined, and propagated. It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry yet, and Google Trends says today that "Your terms - "enterprise 2.0" - do not have enough search volume to show graphs," but something tells me that this is just a matter of time.
