“Contrary to the view that companies lose something when a worker leaves, the study found that they stood to gain. Specifically, firms that lost an employee to another firm were 8% more likely to cite that firm than other equivalent firms, Rosenkopf says. The reverse flow of knowledge was particularly pronounced when the employee moved to another region. Then the old firm was 22% more likely to cite the new firm. The outbound mobility effect held even when the researchers controlled for other factors that could influence patent citations, such as hiring, alliances and technological similarities between firms.”

1. How valuable and what are the benefits of Web 2.0/social media tools to military families with love ones who are deployed? Is this a critical necessity, or merely a useful addition to your options?

2. What impact would there be to families, with loves ones who are deployed, if Web 2.0/social media tools were NOT available to military members serving over seas?

3. When communicating with your love ones who are deployed, which social medium do you use most frequently?

The result has been an incredible 230+ comments, many of which are carefully crafted responses telling personal stories.

I thought I’d point out a few of those responses here:

“When my husband first deployed to Iraq in 2002 we used chat with webcam alot. This allowed our son then aged 2 1/2 the chance to see Daddy and communicate with him. For the longest time he was convinced his Daddy lived in the computer. It also allowed my husband to watch our newborn baby grow up and regularily hear his cries. The interaction that the social networking sites allow the soldiers and the families are of utmost importance–it makes the seperation a little bit easier by allowing the soldier a glimpse into the daily happenings at home.”

“Without the social networking tools, the immediate communication will be lost unless they can get a call thru and there isn’t always time to stand in a line and wait to use the phone. The nice thing is they can go to any base or outpost that has internet and get a quick message thru to say “hey I’m ok” when on a long mission or they aren’t back when expected due to problems. I also know of other families that would use the video feature on different messaging software to see their children. I would say there isn’t even a word for the peace of mind it gives parents, spouses, etc to be able to have almost immediate contact with their soldier and Marine.”

“Generationally, we have seen communications methods change in a deployed environment from letter writing, telephone calls e-mail to social media networks, each with accessibility, timeliness and cost pros/cons. The current generation has grown up with the hi-tech / real-time communications options and the previous generations are adopting them. If the tools were not available, I think it would adversely affect morale and possibly lead to decreased enlistment/re-enlistment. Perhaps some partnership can be accomplished between DoD and the media providers to better secure these sites or communities within those sites for military member use.”

“As an ex military member and a spouse whose husband is currently deployed, I say Security and Safety are first and foremost. We personally only use email correspondence and are looking into web cams but are concerned about security of his location. I agree these social networks can be great morale boosters however, if these are in anyway unsecure and can place our troops and/or their mission in harms way then stop them now, no questions asked!!!! Years ago families survived without them and although I know they are wonderful for morale, unless the governement can be 100% certain that no breech of security exists by using these then I say better safe than sorry and we can learn to live without them.”

I’d encourage users to visit the forum and scroll through some of the responses. They paint an amazing picture of how consumer Web 2.0 technologies have allowed those deployed to keep in touch. Through the forum, the DoD was also able to get a feel for what tools are important for families (Facebook and Skype seem to be the most popular) and what some of the risks might be (e.g. a webcam revealing someone’s location). As stated in a followup post, the next steps will be learning how to mitigate those risks and implementing training programs and policies to allow families to safely use social media tools.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC. The two-day conference was a fantastic opportunity to hear some of the leaders in open government thinking, including:

• Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO – “The Innovation Imperative“
• Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO – “Town Hall Meeting – The IT Dashboard“
• Dave Weinberger, Harvard Law and Cluetrain Manifesto – “Transparency as a Virtue“
• Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media – “Government as a Platform“

(If you’re interested, those talks are available via Adobe Connect here. Click on the linked headshot of the speaker you’d like to watch.)

I sat in on some great panel sessions as well:

• Openness, Information Sharing, and the Use of New Media in DoD
• Case Studies in Citizenship Engagement
• Transforming Citizen Engagement with Congress
• Embracing a Collaborative Culture

It was also great to connect with some of the participants and speakers through the conference’s live Tweet grid. If you’re interested in more links and insight, just search the hashtag #OGI on Twitter.

Throughout the conference I picked up on a few core themes that seemed to run through all the sessions. While the official themes were Government to Government, Government to Business and Government to Citizens, the following seemed to be the three focal points for moving forward with open government initiatives.

1. Despite the hurdles, collaboration is possible

You may be familiar with the memorandum President Obama issued in January to all heads of departments and agencies in the Federal Government. Aneesh Chopra highlighted this in his opening address, crediting the memo with enforcing the ‘three pillars of open government’: transparency, participatory and collaborative. Since that memorandum, new government collaboration projects have surfaced and already-existing projects have enjoyed being in the spotlight of case studies and media writeups.

One great example is the Transportation Security Authority’s (TSA) ‘Idea Factory’, which is also featured in the White House Open Government Innovations Gallery. The Idea Factory, boasting the slogan “Innovate. Collaborate. Succeed”, is a two year old project connecting some 50,000 geographically dispersed employees across countries. Tina Cariola, the Idea Factory’s Program Manager, said the TSA needed a way to tap the knowledge of all of their employees across the organization. She had clear guidelines: the site had to be up and running within only a few weeks and was to be designed as more than just an online suggestion box.

The result was a dynamic community allowing employees to interact and collaborate with each other around ideas. What’s really interesting is the fact that the Idea Factory was originally rolled out as an innovation program, yet the community has turned into a powerful tool for employee engagement and communication. TSA management is actually using the Idea Factory as a way to monitor the workforce ‘pulse’, providing insight and awareness of key trends among employees.

Currently, the Idea Factory is seeing around 300 ideas submitted per month, and after community and management review, 1-2 of those are being implemented.

Tina’s tips:
-Establish cross-functional teams when originally establishing your collaboration strategy and reviewing user generated ideas (lawyers, IT, management, HR)
-Publicly recognize key contributors and leaders within the community. This could mean award ceremonies as well as involving that individual as ideas are selected to advance to the next stage of development.

Cases like these demonstrated for the audience that despite the oft-cited security and IP risks, collaboration within, and even across, government departments is possible. In many instances, government employees’ experience in dealing with sensitive information was seen as a real asset when making the shift to a culture of collaboration.

2. Open innovation on a continual basis

Perhaps my favourite part of the conference was hearing about departments opening up and making considerable efforts in the areas of citizen and business engagement. By governments building an effective platform for participation, sharing information and inviting participants to build off of that, communities can be established where innovation can come from anywhere at anytime, RFP issued or not. Aneesh Chopra presented the platform idea via a “Menu of Open Government Tools”, empowering others to develop their own initiatives in a cost-effective manner:

A shining example here is the Department of Defense website DefenseSolutions.gov:

“A portal through which innovative companies, entrepreneurs, and research organizations can offer potential solutions to the Department of Defense. This portal, and the team behind it, are designed to encourage companies that have never considered doing business with DoD to participate.”

Aneesh Chopra also outlined the open dialog initiative wherein the White House invited citizens to draft policy recommendations for a Presidential Directive. Using well known collaborative tools such as IdeaScale and MixedInk, the three stage process produced thousands of votes and comments and can still be seen at each individual phase here:

1. Brainstorming
2. Discussion
3. Drafting Recommendations

For me, this marked the transition from a mindset of closed, project-based, incremental innovation to a government prepared to take good ideas from anywhere. As Aneesh pointed out, “Great ideas get funding, regardless of the rules“.

3. The need to provide compelling experiences

Last, but not least, I felt a real sense of urgency for government agencies to rethink their interactions with participants; the need to provide compelling experiences. This includes with other agencies, government employees, businesses and citizens.

Tammy’s talked about the power of great experiences before. As the idea of government as a platform takes off, I think this becomes even more crucial. Talent, customers, processes and selected information reside outside of the traditional boundaries of the organization. How people interact with the platform out ‘there’ is what’s important. Why should they engage? What’s the reward of doing so?

Part of this comes in presenting information in a consistent, clear, interactive and useful way. The IT Dashboard, as presented by Vivek Kundra, was a great case study here. The searchable and customizable dashboard is so compelling it has attracted more than 30 million visitors since it was launched…on June 30! It’s been effective, too. One presenter spoke of a case where nearly 45 projects were halted at once when someone interacting with the data raised some red flags about cost management.

By making all this data available for mashups and other innovative services, everyday people are allowed a view into government with far more relevance on their personal lives than, say, just tables of data. And when people are compelled to take action, change happens (e.g. 45 projects get halted because of poor contractor performance). A few weeks ago I posted an interview I did with Zappos about engaging potential talent. The same principles apply here when engaging the public. Compelling comes in the form of personal, emotional, and/or relationship-based interactions.

David Weinberger labels this human touch as ‘the spiritual lure of the Web’, in the The Cluetrain Manifesto:

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.

Citizens and business are beginning to engage with government in interesting ways because of new expectations of a two way exchange of information and learning. New social tools are combining with changing mindsets on openness and collaboration and are starting to demonstrate the real power of that ‘return of voice’ in the form of effective citizen and business engagement.

While browsing the CoSN website (which, by the way, is loaded with resources for educators looking to bring technology into their schools), I came across a really great video called “Learning to Change, Changing to Learn“.

The video itself is simple, interviewing a handful of young people about the impact of technology on their lives. What’s amazing is some of the insight in their answers.

Here are some of my favourite quotes:

“If I didn’t have computers, I would say a lot of my hobbies that make up most of my time, I wouldn’t have. Because, well, I learned Japanese, and I learned a lot of that through the Internet.”

“That’s the cool thing about technology. You can change things whenever you want.”

“When you have access to everything, you learn how to know yourself better because you are forced to decide what to use and what not to use.”

“What we’re doing in gaming – coordination and communication – is very similar to what we’re doing at school. In the game, we have to talk to each other, we have to coordinate what we’re going to do in order to make sure that we do it well.”

And my personal favourite:

“I would say that being able to experiment with technology, is really what makes it technology. If people didn’t sit there and experiment with test tubes back in the days of Newton, nothing would have happened. It’s paving the way for us to move forward as a species and a civilization.”

The video can be seen here.

“What type of incentive would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?”

Source: http://linkedin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/graph21.jpg?w=502&h=321

The concept of using crowdsourcing to translate content is not new. Facebook, Mozilla and TED have used similar strategies. Ming wrote about Facebook’s translation initiative here.

When first looking at LinkedIn’s effort to utilize crowdsourcing, it appears as though they’ve made the right moves. They engaged their audience, asked for opinions with a survey and acknowledged the importance of incentives when looking to users to make contributions.

There is an interesting factor at play here, though. LinkedIn is known as a professional network. And given that LinkedIn serves this professional purpose, it’s worthy to note that direct financial compensation was left out of the possible responses for the survey question shown above.
As a result, LinkedIn has received a flurry of feedback over the last two weeks, much of it coming from translators themselves voicing their opinions about professionals being compensated fairly. A Twitter hashtag was established (#linkedinfail) and a LinkedIn discussion group was formed (Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses), now with 300+ members.
Here’s a look at some of the comments that have been posted in the past two weeks:

If LinkedIn goes ahead with an open call for translations, they’ll likely attract both professional and amateur translators. The issue then is that a professional and an amateur participate for different reasons. The professional looks for financial compensation, while the amateur seeks out, for example, recognition within the community (ie. “You’re the #1 translator of [ language name] based on submitting [x number of translations]“).
That becomes interesting because one of those deals – the amateur – is a much better one for LinkedIn (provided they put in place a system to ensure some standard of quality in translation).
So, if you’re a translator – which side are you on? Is this an opportunity to contribute to a community and gain valuable experience? Or, as some have questioned, is this the exploitation of professionals?
You might also be interested in “Is Spec Work Evil?”

Don’s post yesterday, “Will universities stay relevant?”, sparked some interesting discussion around the idea that our education system is in crisis. Given Mike’s innovative perspective on teaching, I sent him the article and asked for his feedback. To be clear, Don addressed the university system and Mike’s perspective comes from teaching high school, but I still thought it would be interesting to hear what his experience has been like in the classroom.

With his permission, I’ve posted some of his email response here, which he also published on his blog “Teaching, Technology & More“:

“You must understand that students like yourself are not the norm in terms of being in touch with the digital world and having the passion to use the tools available to them in the pursuit of knowledge.  Most of these students head off to university (and our new inflated grading system is making it easier) with little self-initiative and passion for learning.  I have been using technology in the classroom for 3 years now but I still fall back to the lecture style often because most of my students are not mature enough to embrace student-directed project based learning.

That being said, the first two years of university (as I recall them) are designed to “weed out” those who really do not belong, so to speak.  Although most of my professors in the 80’s and early 90’s used the lecture style, their classrooms became more open to critical thought and discussion after second year.  From what I am told, this is still the case.

Right now, I have reached a point in my classroom where I cannot proceed any further with student-driven methods due to lack of technology and support.  We do not have the bandwidth nor the requisite hardware in place to allow students to develop their critical thinking skills using web based applications.

I sympathize with the universities somewhat.  Many of these professors grew up without technology and are now being pushed to adopt it.  The process will take time and embracing a digital pedagogy does not ensure critical thinking skills will be developed.  The passion for learning must come from the students and that passion is something that transcends generations.

What I mean to say is students, like yourself, who have a passion for learning always embrace the latest technology the world has to offer to enhance their critical thinking skills and understanding of concepts.  The fact that you are using Twitter, etc. to accomplish this is no different than a student in the early 1980’s using one of the first computers to be more productive or a student in the 1950’s using a slide rule to do the same.

We need to work on fueling the passion for learning if we want to produce a generation of critical thinkers.  I try to use technology to inspire students to become passionate about knowledge.  The technology on its own is merely a conduit to critical thinking.  The passion for learning must come from within.”

I first learned of Zappos when I watched a speech CEO Tony Hsieh delivered at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) about their “customer-centric approach to killing the competition”. Since then, Zappos has received the praise of media, customers and employees alike, even after laying off 8% of their staff. (At the time of the speech Tony had *only* 10,000 followers on Twitter. He is now at 600,000+). One of my favourite parts of the presentation is Tony’s statement that the brand is simply an extension of the company culture, and providing a compelling customer experience completely depends on hiring employees who fit that culture.

One of the keys to that culture is Zappos Core Value #6, Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication. By Zappos opening up and sharing what goes on in a regular day at the company, customers and potential employees are invited to experience the corporate culture without ever making an appearance on the payroll. If a prospective employee likes what they see, they might make a great Zapponian, especially if they share similar values with CVF (’Core Values Frog‘). Giving prospective employees a sneak peak into the culture of the company might explain why only 3% of new hires take Zappos up on their famous $2000 incentive to quit after training.

I was interested in how Zappos identified and hired people in the first place. I got in touch with Zappos Recruiting Manager, Christa Foley (currently twitter rank #4 at twitter.zappos.com ) to learn how Zappos uses social media to identify and hire quality people, and further encourages new hires to use those tools once part of the Zappos team (430+ employees are listed on the Zappos twitter page). I’ve included some highlights of our conversation after the jump.

How is Zappos using social networks for recruiting purposes?

We’re using Twitter very heavily and to some extent, Facebook and LinkedIn. We’re not using Facebook and LinkedIn as much as I’d like us to be so we’re working on some strategies to use these networks more effectively in the future. For Twitter specifically, we’re in a really lucky position because we have such a big group of employees on Twitter, over 400, and then, of course, Tony has an ungodly amount of followers on Twitter, something like over 500,000 at this point. So you definitely could say we’re pretty active in the Twitter world.

It wouldn’t fit within our culture to be salesy/pushy so we’re not using Twitter to promote Zappos just for the sake of promoting Zappos. We’re using it for what I think it was intended, which is a social network that we all enjoy. I’ve got a team of four people in recruiting and we’re not blasting on Twitter every job opening or constantly directing people to our jobs page. To me, that feels like spamming, which I think goes against what Twitter was meant to be used for. I know spam happens online in general and you definitely can see that on Twitter too.

For us, we use much more of a passive approach to recruit on Twitter. Whether, through the following that various employees have or certainly through Tony’s followers, there seems to be a buzz about Zappos which helps us identify possible candidates.

How are you finding potential hires on Twitter?

We use the search function on Twitter and search Zappos mentions on a daily basis. Anybody who mentions ‘wow I’d love to work at Zappos’ or ‘just read this article about Zappos and it seems like it’s a cool place to work’ or ‘I wish you guys were in New York’ , basically any loose references to maybe wanting to work at Zappos, we reach out to those folks.

I usually follow them and if they don’t follow me back in a couple of days, then I’ll @reply to them so I can let them know how to find our openings and apply. But more often than not, if you follow someone, they’ll follow you back especially if they’ve just mentioned Zappos, and I have “Zappos Recruiting ” in my profile. In that scenario, I’ll direct message them about our jobs.zappos.com site. So a lot of my Twitter activities are via direct messages versus public replies.

What’s different about hiring in social networks versus traditional job boards?

I would say the quality of people, at least from an industry and skill-set standpoint, tends to be higher. When we post on a major job board, we may get 500 applicants but a large percentage of them won’t be qualified or they are outside of the salary ranges posted for the jobs, or they don’t want to move or those kinds of things. Whereas I think when you’re using something like Twitter or Facebook or Linked In, someone connecting with you via these avenues has probably done their research or knows about your company more than just ‘I want to be an AP clerk and there’s 20 positions open in my city on Monster so I’m going to apply to all of them. ’

How have social networks benefited employees once they are working in the company?

Twitter for us is also a really good way for employees to connect. We have a Zappos Twitter page, twitter.zappos.com , so employees can see just the Zappos employee feed . It’s a great way to connect with people you share common interests with where you may not have otherwise. We have a very friendly, open environment but with over 700 employees in our Vegas office, while you would always say ‘hi!’ in the hallway to everyone, before Twitter you may not realize that person also loves to hike, has children the same age as your children, loves the same restaurant you do, etc.. I think as a company from a culture standpoint, Twitter has helped us tremendously with being another avenue for people to connect. This is important to us because one of our core values is to Create a Positive Team and Family Spirit where you don’t view your co-workers as simply coworkers but where you connect with them on a personal level. .

Why has Zappos been so open about employees using social media, where other companies have been fairly resistant?

I think because we were fortunate enough to embrace it early on and see the many values it offers and how it helps enhance our culture. We believe that if you get the culture right, most other things fall into place. I think that maybe with other companies, their fears with social media are about what employees might say or how their activity might negatively impact their company’s brand. We have embraced social media and encourage our employees to do so too. And as far as our direction to employees about what they can or cannot say, we don’t really have a policy on this. If we did a good job with hiring for culture fit and training new hires about our culture, it’s a non-issue. So maybe you have reason to worry about what people are saying, or how they’re representing your company if everyone isn’t aligned to the company vision and culture.

By no means do we have it all figured out. Everything that we do is a work in progress. It’s almost more of an art in some regards than a science but I think our culture, openness and transparency aligns itself well with the basic premiss of social media.

Image Credit: Meg Pickard, @megpickard, meish.org

The graph is an informal analysis based on the observations of Meg Pickard, who heads up social media at The Guardian. Meg’s blog is highly recommended.

So what do you do when your talent starts walking out the door?

Well, if you’re Google, you create an an algorithm.

As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, Google has created an algorithm to predict which employees are likely to leave the company, often times before the employee knows him or herself.

As the WSJ explains:

“The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.”

From a managerial perspective, this insight could be quite useful depending on how those inputs are structured. It’s interesting to think about “employee engagement” as a key performance indicator, or an average “likely to leave” rating which could give a manager a close-to-real-time employee morale index.

In addition, could managers monitor the changes in employee morale as a result of implementing policy changes? For example, did a certain training program leave employees feeling more engaged over a certain time period?

If bundled with the latest social network analysis software , a manager might be able to visually see social clusters where morale was low, and potentially isolate the issue to the leader or some other characteristic specific to that group of employees.

Not everyone shares my optimistic view of the potential uses of such data. Some of the comments on the article:

ZAC HINKEL wrote: This reminds me of the movie ‘Minority Report.’ Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Mark Shallcross wrote: There’s a precious quote buried in there: “… and some found the company’s human-resources programs too impersonal.” Now, why would they think that?

James Curry wrote: This very action is indicative of why Google is shedding talent. Math cannot manage human beings.

CHRIS GROTHKOPP wrote: “You will now be given your mathematically appropriate level of positive feedback today to keep your departure quotient in the acceptable variance range.”

What do you think? Is this an effective use of data? Will it help Google solve the ‘talent exodus’?

While there are always exceptions, wikis, blogs, social networks and other collaborative applications are almost non-existent within or between construction firms. This surprises me, especially given that construction appears to be a highly collaborative industry by nature. Just think of the large number of firms involved in any given building project, with constantly changing information that needs to be disseminated quickly and efficiently in order to avoid costly errors related to materials, labour, transport and safety. Judging by this, a construction site should be a breeding ground for collaborative applications and information sharing.

Nonetheless, the adoption of these tools seems slow for the industry and as it turns out, I’m not alone in thinking this way. Construction lawyer Barry LePatner, author of ‘Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets’, goes so far as to label construction as “the industry that time forgot”, citing case after case where project delays and budget overruns could have been avoided or mitigated with a more collaborative design & build process. LePatner explains the slow-to-adopt nature of the business in the introduction to his book.

“Much like the flattening of the world described by Thomas L. Friedman, the impending use of the latest technology, global implementation of new materials and building systems, and long overdue research and capital investment will radically alter the construction landscape in the next ten to twenty years. The construction industry today is the last major industry in our world to remain “mom and pop”. It is an industry that shuns risk at all levels and hordes information on its day-to-day operations.”

When I stand back and examine construction as an industry, a few things come to mind which begin to paint the picture of why construction has been so slow to adopt:

• Because most firms involved contribute via either the production of physical goods or supply of skilled labour, they carry a substantial amount of overhead, conduct business in a relatively small geographic region, heavily rely on providing labour in the field & on-site, and as a result, experience relatively low profit margins.
• Construction is not scalable the way other manufactured, knowledge or information-based products are. With the exception of pre-fabricated, modular homes, it is rarely the case where a single design is constructed in a controlled environment over and over again.
• This results in risk-averse production and R&D. “Why invest in the required innovation on this project if we may never face a similar situation again?”

Despite all this, there have been some signs of a light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps explained by the emergence of low-cost, web-based collaboration tools, or the fact that we find ourselves in this economy, I’ve noticed a recent flurry of adoption of new technologies and business practices in construction-related organizations:

EllisDon Corporation

Geoff Smith, President and CEO of EllisDon, one of Canada’s largest general contractors, recently started blogging from the company’s website. In his recent post titled ‘OK, I finally get it: We gotta get naked”, Smith says:

“I have struggled for a long time with the notion of wide, free, open collaboration….But I have realized that if you want to take everything in, you need to give everything away. If you want to benefit from the global construction community, one revelation at a time, you have to be willing to help others as much as you can, openly, freely. We are now taking every step we can to open up our website, to open up our experts and databanks, to make everything we have accessible to everyone, to invite everyone to come talk to us by offering to tell them everything we know. It’s so obvious to me now, I can’t believe I was so stupid for so long.”

Open Architecture Network

Another great example is the work Open Architecture Network is doing. A result of winning the 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair started Open Architecture Network as “a clearinghouse for designs…where communities can connect with designers and donors, and where builders can manage a project from start to finish, with timelines, commenting tools and forums. Clean design and a powerful backend make the network accessible to anyone worldwide, while Creative Commons licensing allows projects to be sampled, remixed and customized.” An excellent video is Cameron Sinclair’s original TED talk explaining ‘open-source architecture’.

Bechtel

A recent article in BusinessWeek featured an interview with Geir Ramleth, CIO of Bechtel, outlining how he helped the largest engineering company in the United States rebuild their entire corporate network in hopes of making data more accessible. Influenced by companies like Amazon, YouTube, Google and Salesforce.com, Bechtel built three of their own data centers in an attempt to develop an internal network in the ‘cloud’. By arming employees, contractors and partners with smart devices, these workers were then able to access the data they needed through on-demand, SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. At any given time, up to one third of people with access to Bechtel’s internal network are not employees of the firm. By altering the way Bechtel engages with talent (in a fashion closely aligned with the eight norms of the Net Generation), the company is finding that less training is required for new workers and is providing a drastically improved user experience for those they do business with. Impressive for a 110 year-old construction company!

While these may appear as only incremental innovations to those in the software, technology, web or other quick-to-adopt industries, they are breakthroughs for the construction industry, and it will be interesting to see how things progress in the coming months and years. What other industries face similar challenges in ‘getting naked’? Do my reasons for slow adoption apply there as well? I can think of one well-known example where an innovative CEO, inspired by the open-source model behind Linux, used the principles of Wikinomics to turn around his failing mining company. What are others?