For nearly three years at nGenera, I’ve been deeply involved in the description, promotion, or management of Enterprise 2.0, collaborative systems for very large organizations. And, the more time that passes, the more I’ve been convinced that there is an even more vexing collaboration paradox, which I’d categorize as a management or perhaps “relational” one.

For me, the classic reference article for this collaboration paradox is “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” written by Tammy Erickson and Lynda Gratton, published in the Harvard Business Review in November 2007. Here is a key passage early in the article that perfectly captures the paradox:

Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done. To put it another way, the qualities required for success are the same qualities that undermine success. (NOTE: bolding added for emphasis)

Members of complex teams are less likely—absent other influences—to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources—in other words, to collaborate. They are less likely to say that they “sink or swim” together, want one another to succeed, or view their goals as compatible.

The authors go on to describe specific methods of improving the potential for successful collaboration, which Tammy’ research since then has expanded to a list of what she refers to as ten (10) “enablers of collaborative capacity.” Among these enablers are things such as “important and challenging tasks,” “existence of trust-based relationships,” and “executives who role model collaboration.”

Want to know why your collaborative effort is struggling, even if the intent of the effort is well-defined and the expected outcomes well understood? Then, ask yourself if these enablers are being amply employed in your organization. Chances are that an authentic improvement (and I stress, authentic) in those enablers will improve the collaborative effort.

For more on this subject from Tammy herself, you can catch her keynote address for the Enterprise 2.0 conference last November, on demand from the nGenera website.

With that, I’ll make this post short-and-sweet and, on a personal note, wish a fond farewell to those of you who may followed my writing on the Wikinomics blog over the past year, as this is my final post on it.

You can still follow my thoughts on the industry at my personal blog (http://www.guengerich.com) as well as my daily musings on Twitter (@sguengerich). Thanks to everyone who has read or commented on the blog and a great thanks to my many nGenera friends and colleagues!

nGenera is a major, national sponsor of CoSN. If you have followed the work of Don and frequent collaborator Anthony Williams, you recognize this as consistent with their coverage of education as a key topic of their writing and nGenera’s research. And while I agree with Don and Anthony, that the tools and (in many cases) the conditions are in place for dramatic improvement to take place in the public education system for many a country, my personal opinion for the U.S. is gloomier, in that I think we are in for a decade of frustration.

Maybe I’m a little tired from a week of 18-20 hour days and running my Starbucks card through too many Venti bold cups of coffee. But, the state of public education in our country seems to be awash in contradictions, opposites, and (as the cliché goes) “left hands not knowing what the right hands are doing.”

For instance, on the one hand, it seems that most people understand the transformative potential for IT in learning. We are witness to it literally before our eyes on a daily basis, as my colleague Denis Hancock made the case so well in his post Wednesday, on the subject of the impact of iPhone apps on his daughter’s learning. Yet, on the other hand, few school districts include the CTO at the cabinet level (in other words, as a member of the senior executive team directly reporting to the superintendent) in the district’s leadership.

Part of the issue, which CoSN is working to change, is that the CTOs themselves are not well prepared to be effective at that senior leadership position. Many lack the business vision and strategic leadership skills to operate as effective change agents and equal partners in the running of the district with the other leaders. Thus, an important objective for CoSN’s members and staff is to promote the adoption of an Essential Skills Framework for CTOs, advocating that there is the profession itself can do a better job to equip its members, preparing them to be more effective leaders.

To take a different issue, on the one hand, there was a nearly universal cry for the need for standard approaches to web 2.0 content production, assessment, and platform deployment. Yet, on the other hand, in a panel that closed the morning portion of an international symposium day at the CoSN conference, it was ironic (to me anyhow) that the five speakers – from ePals, Taking IT Global, IEARN-USA, NASA’s GLOBE program, and European Schoolnet – presented their web 2.0 platforms for about 10 minutes each, in succession, but yet by my hearing completely missed the opportunity to address how they were working together.

In every case, each one seemed to be busily building communities of millions of users, thousands of pieces of content, with hundreds of schools and or regions involved. However, except in the case of the European Schoolnet, which is a partnership of multiple European education ministries, there was practically no mention of how any of the presenters were striving towards cross-promotion, standardization, or (god forbid) merger of operations and mission from two into one, or three into two, etc.

On the one hand, you have the President and Secretary of Education setting ambitious and merit-worthy goals of achieving an increase to a college graduation rate of 60% by the year 2020, from our present level of approximately 40%. This means, from the federal perspective, a real focus needs to be on what we can do to impact the success of kids at the 4^th grade level and above, starting now. Yet, on the other hand, data from regional groups like the E3 Alliance in Texas and others shows that frequently the point of greatest leverage is young children and getting them “school ready” by the time they get to kindergarten.

Lastly, the final day of the CoSN conference was billed as an advocacy day, where we spent the morning hearing about the legislative funding priorities for Education, from CoSN and three other education-related partners: ISTE, SETDA, and SIIA. On the one hand, the associations had the data and talking points clearly showing how critical education is to the success of the nation and how important some of the funding streams are to national goals.

Yet, on the other hand, the panel of congressional staffers who spoke to the audience of 100 or so software and CTO/CIO leaders convened to advocate to their various state delegations of senators and congressmen and women were extremely bearish on the chances of the education priorities getting much attention in 2010, due to other pressing U.S. national priorities such as healthcare reform, job creation, and of course, inflexible military and social entitlement program commitments.

It’s like the comment that a senior federal technology official from an agency (not the Department of Education) made to me, on my last day in the city this week, about the especially challenging position for a change agent in the government. He used the example of the military and recounted that it was about 100 years ago that the U.S. Navy determined they would no longer build ships out of wood…that all future vessels must be built using metal.

Without that specific and irreversible requirement – which had an impact, no doubt, of enormous consequences to supply chains, inventories, jobs, and countless other transition costs – one can just imagine that 50, 60, 70 years later, we might still have been building and launching new ships made of wood. The problem, he said, is that in some domains – and I would venture that education is one of them – it’s very hard to recognize the wooden ships.

What do we do in the meantime, given that the status quo isn’t an acceptable option?  That’s where I think the government is at least trying to apply the principles of social entrepreneurship and innovation, with the reauthorization of “No Child Left Behind,” now more benignly named the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (or ESEA), and the “Race to the Top” program.  It’s also where I think we must see more public/private partnerships emerge.  Experimentation must be encouraged and real consequences have got to be at stake for communities, ultimately producing quantifiable, economic value like we describe in the Nexus Economics theme in nGenera’s 2010 research agenda.

So, if you’ve got a “wooden ship” that you want to sink and, more specifically, an education innovation that you want to promote, then tell us about it.  Or better yet, tell us AND tell the Department of Education, through its new Innovation website.  Let’s prevent a decade of frustration in public education.

I’ve written a couple of posts about the GreenXchange and a related sustainability workshop, in the run-up to Davos. What I haven’t talked about is an interesting behind-the-scenes aspect of the GreenXchange technology platform.

The technology platform itself is currently a working beta version, proving the GreenXchange concept, developed by Salesforce.com (with help from a Force.com partner), 2Degrees, and nGenera. You can view the “public facing” part of the GreenXchange at http://greenxchange.force.com.

What you won’t see on the website is a sophisticated “listener” capability that the GreenXchange platform provides to its founding members, through nGenera’s collaboration server.

Listening isn’t a new concept. Among its simplest forms is a stored search that gets “pushed” to you via e-mail or other messaging. Think Google Alerts, as an example. But, for modern brand managers, communications professionals, and marketing executives, listeners have become increasingly important applications, because of the ability for reputation to be shaped by parties external to your company, from your customers to your competitors.

In fact, listeners have become part of what is recognized as a “missing layer” of social media and collaborative application infrastructure. This layer of collaborative infrastructure fills the gaps left uncovered between the traditional IT systems management products, from vendors like IBM and HP, and the point solutions vendors of collaboration platforms, as shown in the figure.

In the case of the GreenXchange launch at Davos, we employed listeners primarily for the purpose of an external monitoring activity, to track, rate, and analyze the sentiment of the articles, posts, and other communications that were being generated by the announcement.

Specifically, we wanted to analyze the spike in activity found on the web pre-Davos and post-Davos. So, a listener was created to listen for the combination of “GreenXchange” AND any of the following words or phrases: World Economic Forum, WEF, Davos, or Annual Meeting.

The listener was first run on 1/22/2010; however, we exclude results from the first run because it pulls results from very early time periods and typically finds a very large number of web clips. We ignore the first run and measure velocity on the second run forward, so that it will provide meaningful metrics.

The next screen shot demonstrates the distribution of keywords based on the listener criteria. It is showing that GreenXchange and Davos have the highest key word matches.

This figure also shows that we had a total of 900 unique web clips that had been found since we ran the listener on Jan 25^th that matched our criteria. It also shows that we had a total of 995 occurrences, meaning that there was some duplication of web clips across various channels.

The next screenshot, in the figure below, shows us the velocity between runs. What is interesting is that 34 unique web clips were found on or before Jan 26^th prior to the launch and over 935 new web clips were found since the launch on Jan 27^th, as of Feb 2nd.

This screenshot also shows the top scoring or most popular content (articles), including articles posted on websites like businessweek.com and eqentia.com

The next screenshot, in the figure below, shows an example of the web clips that were retrieved from various channels, such as Yahoo, GoogleNews, and Bing. The score indicates our confidence that this article matches the search criteria and that this content is relevant.

The sentiment shows our confidence that this web clip is either positive or negative in sentiment. All but one in the example, appear to be positive with varying degrees of confidence. This sentiment can be corrected, with the sentiment engine adapting and becoming more accurate over time.

The web channel, publish date, domain, and keyword match are also listed. And we assign a status so that you can easily filter on new content that was discovered on the most recent listener run.

The next figure simply demonstrates how convenient it is to click through the listeners results, directly to the source content. In this example, one of the articles that came up as popular content was from businessgreen.com entitled “Just share it – top brands usher in era of green co-opetition.”

The next figure further shows this click through feature, invoked by clicking on the magnifying glass to the right of the article link and view the content within the listener.

After previewing the web clips, you can decide to add them as content to your collaboration platform and request that others inside your organization, or who have been granted secure access to it from outside your organization, can comment or collaborate on the content. This action is taken by clicking the “Add” link next to the magnifying glass.

Lastly, the figure below shows an activity history. For the GreenXchange listener illustrated, the first run occurred on Jan 22^nd, with 141 web clips returned to build the baseline. But as mentioned earlier, we ignored that result set, for velocity tracking and trending going forward.

For the first several days after the GreenXchange launch, we found over 100 new, unique web clips during the daily runs, on average, with some tapering off in recent runs.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, social media listening is just one component of the “missing layer” of collaborative infrastructure. Other capabilities built into nGenera’s collaboration server include:

• Policy management – Use listening technology to detect non-compliant email (port 25) and web interaction (port 80), either on the Internet or internally, and set policy rules to allow, quarantine or block this traffic
• Social metadata aggregation – continuously build rich profiles from multiple sources (Active Directory, SharePoint, HRIS, social networks, esp. Facebook, user-provided), continuously track relationship strength between profiles, and continuously aggregate log-level activities from a variety of integrated services
• Federated search – Provide ranked search results across all elements of the collaborative environment (internal and external)
• Basic collaborative metrics – Aggregated statistics of tightly and loosely coupled services

These capabilities and others – like powerful analytics engines and more sophisticated reporting – are clearly meeting a demand that large enterprises are more aware than ever that they need. In addition to nGenera’s collaboration server, vendors like Radian6, Socialware, and a number of others are helping to build this sector of software that is bound to be very lively for some time.

But, when you consider the near-term cost and potential long-term damage to one’s brand – like what we’ve been seeing with the auto recall struggles of Toyota – it’s easy to understand why “learning to listen” in new ways using these tools has become an imperative for doing business.

It’s all part of the Open Government Directive mandated by the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo dated December 8, 2009. The Directive is a direct result of the work begun by the White House, under the auspices of an Open Government Initiative, in the early days of the Obama Administration. (We’re pleased, by the way, that Beth Noveck, a collaborator with Don and the Wikinomics team in recent years, has had such an important role leading the Initiative from inside the White House…congratulations Beth!)

I encourage you to read the Directive. It’s the antithesis of the kinds of 1,000-page government documents that get joked about on the late night TV programs. Instead, it is eleven pages long and has clear, unequivocal language such as “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

So, what can you expect in two to three weeks? Well, the first deadline in the directive actually already passed last week. To wit: “Within 45 days, each agency shall identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.” We discussed Data.gov and some of the terrific work going on in open source development of apps to tap into those rich data sets in my multi-part review of the inaugural O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit last year.

But, what you can expect by early February is that each agency will have created an “Open Government Webpage” to serve as its gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive. This is the place where each agency will provide information about its plans and solicit and receive input about its future. For the solicitation of citizen input, expect an already well-tested web 2.0 tool, like Ideascale, to power the process.

We’ll provide more updates in the coming weeks.  And, keep an eye on our partner website, The Collaboration Project, at the National Academy, for insightful policy updates on open government progress as well.  But, in the meantime, get in there and make your voice heard!

For example, it was over a decade ago that Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously said “There is no privacy…get over it.” Fast forward to a headline article last year in the New York Times during the throes of the financial crisis when banks were grasping for any new way to retain or gain customers – “Banks Mine Data and Woo Troubled Borrowers” – which speaks to the vast array of personalized information available for sale.

That Times article came back to mind this week, as I was sitting in a talk this week at our Fall All Member’s meeting by one of nGenera’s researchers on the subject of “Pervasive Personal Identity.” The talk was highlighting the findings in a major new research report nGenera produced on the same subject, for members of its syndicated research program (executive summary now available to the public).

But, among the points that caught my attention was the enormous breadth and depth of information we are entrusting with various digital services. For example, in November, Google announced general availability of its dashboard for users. Assuming you have an account with one or more Google services (such as G-mail, Youtube, etc.), just sign-in to your Google account and go to the URL: www.google.com/dashboard. You’ll get a fascinating lens into a portion of what Google “knows” about you, all in one place.

Or take the online matching service, eHarmony, for example, where it is estimated that they take in 15,000 new voluntary registrants to their 250-plus question in-depth survey each day. With an estimated nearly 20 million users, this makes them quite likely the best source of deep professional, emotional, and attitudinal data available on the planet at the moment.

Combine these with other sources of data about our selves – some of which we contribute and some of which is assembled without our knowing by vendors and services behind the scenes – and it is easy to see that we are approaching a point where we might be uniquely identified by the accumulation of our digital data. Think of it as your digital DNA, just like the unique marker that your real DNA represents in the physical world.

So, I got to thinkin’ (as we say in Texas) about the following question: “What if there was a better way for people to aggregate and monetize the data about themselves?” In other words, rather than accept that others control the buying and selling of our data, what if the individual was able to get in on the action? The more I thought about it, the more little additional pieces of the puzzle began to reveal themselves, like these:

(1) Ever since Seth Godin published the bible on permission marketing, we largely accept that the best we can do is barter our private data for little online trinkets, more or less valuable at any moment in time. Sometimes it’s free use of a software product; other times, it’s a discount on a t-shirt; or occasionally, it’s just the ability to download that white paper that I really crave. Instead, why not get cold hard cash for my private data?

(2) Ever since David Pullman rocked the investment world (literally) with Bowie bonds, there’s clearly a proven market for an individual’s capacity to produce value over their lifetime (way beyond what the insurance industry’s actuarial tables would indicate). Why let rock stars have all of the fun?

(3) And ever since Facebook started morphing towards the social operating system and Google also revealed that Personalized Search was their friendly way to let you know that – yes indeed – everything that you had ever searched for (including through their shadowy meta-services, like Doubleclick) was filed away somewhere to be mined by you or them (or maybe, who knows…?), there is a vast new, highly personalized set of data that each of us creates and incrementally refines – for free! – every time we use these services.

Any marketer worth their salt knows that the name-of-the-game in mastering profitability of initial customer acquisition and retention is understanding lifetime value. And the more they know about you – your profile, your activities, and your relationships – the more they can personalize offers and the products or services that go with them.

What if there was a new kind of social network service, where you could receive a fee for your participation in the network? Sure, you’d have to agree to be audited, as well as truthfully and accurately complete a comprehensive profile (including things like your detailed health records, down to your genetic makeup, like that available from 23andme.

You would also likely need to make a commitment to use the paid network as your primary (exclusive) social platform. But, why not? If, in effect, all of that same “private” information about you is available already for a fee, wouldn’t it be fair for you to get a cut?

It’s the ultimate form of personal information arbitrage – and you’d be the direct beneficiary. So, in the future, rather than all of these clever new gps-powered apps for the iPhone being the ones to charge advertisers for the ability to have their restaurants or coffee shops presented to you because of the free twitter stream that you generate while you are on the move, why can’t you be the one to receive the royalty fee for letting the advertiser know that you are going to be in the area and, by the way, happen to be awfully fond of lattes in the afternoon?

Don frequently says that we ought to go way beyond issuing social security numbers or inking the footprints of every newborn; additionally, he says, let’s issue everyone a website at birth. Of course, the notion of any government taking a step like that immediately brings to mind the second coming of Orwell’s “1984″ and Big Brother.

But, how about a hybrid? I envision something that is an international, public/private partnership, akin to the Internet naming authority ICANN. It would require a great deal of international cooperation, superior transparency in its operations, and the greatest security, privacy, and legal minds involved in its governance, to provide the level of credibility required to be effective. Call it www.lifetimevalue.me. (But, make sure to send me a royalty: I already registered the domain.)

Today and tomorrow (Nov 12-13), Nike is hosting a “collaboratory” specifically on the subject of “double closed loop” production, which is an extension of the closed loop paradigm to consider and care for developing populations and regions.

If you want to follow what’s going via twitter, LIVE:

Then just click through to this link: http://twitter.com/CLCollabLIVE
Then hit “follow”
And you will start seeing the twitter stream as we go,

Or

You can just search for the tag #gxlive
And you will see all tweets that contain that tag.

Wish you were here!

I specifically talked about the nascent, but very exciting work underway with the GreenXchange, being championed by Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy, along with other founding members (of which nGenera is one, in the interest of full disclosure).

Well, the post spurred interest from several sources, one of which was my good friend Scott Campbell at SAP. Scott introduced me to the “Hopenhagen” movement, which is being led by partners Coca-Cola, Siemens, and SAP. The goal of Hopenhagen is to prompt an effective dialog among citizens of all the world’s nations to raise awareness for the importance of decisions at COP 15 that support a healthy climate and a healthy global economy.

COP 15 is the United Nations event occurring in mid-December in Copenhagen, Denmark where world leaders are expected to, in my layman’s terms, pick up where Kyoto left off and produce an agreement to which ALL of the world’s nations can agree to protect the earth’s climate. You can learn more about the mission of Hopenhagen at the movement’s website.

In Scott’s words, “Individual empowerment and commitment are critical to the success of this effort and Hopenhagen serves as a natural extension to give everyone an opportunity to raise their voice for change.” Apart from the Hopenhagen website, you can learn more about the specific point of view of SAP customers and other members of their eco-system in the Sustainability area on BPX, SAP’s corporate blog, which Scott claims reaches 1.8 million member communities.

POSTSCRIPT: Not to digress too much from the topic of corporate efforts to stem climate change, but there is an incredibly important sub-text to these two efforts (i.e., Hopenhagen and GreenXchange) that is relevant to every other private or public sector initiative where using collaborative software and other tools of the web 2.0/social media age are critical to success.

Historically, the standard practices employed to ensure that such an effort doesn’t wither include practices like securing strong executive sponsorship, executing strategically targeted word-of-mouth promotions, and assigning a focused online community manager or two.

However, time and again, anecdotal evidence has begun to show that such collaborative efforts have a “high mortality rate.” Why is this so, even when one has budgeted appropriately and run their collaborative community “by the book?”

The answer lies in a previously poorly understood phenomenon we call “Collaborative Intents,” that Tammy Erickson and other senior members of nGenera’s faculty and research team have studied. I’ll talk more about Collaborative Intents in my next Wikinomics post in November. In the meantime, if you want to get a jump start on the topic, you can download the Boardroom Imperative authored by Tammy and others now.

Each presenter gets the same amount of limited time (5-7 minutes) to cover key points that include: innovation, overall market opportunity, stage of development, intellectual property (IP) position, resource requirements, environmental impact, management team, and potential ROI. After their formal remarks, judges followed by audience members, have another 5 minutes or so to ask follow-up questions.

It’s always interesting to hear over 20 presentations by company principals in such a concentrated period of time. Besides being reminded how important it is to prepare and rehearse a presentation, by listening to a range of styles from very good to universally awful, you also pick up attitudes and perceptions about themes that entrepreneurs and investors consider important and how those change over time.

One of the themes I listened closely for was the approach to IP. Historically, intellectual property – especially patents – has been one of those areas considered to be critical by investors for several reasons, particularly for businesses based on “hard science” like biotech and clean energy.

First, an IP “position” is critical because investors want to know that the company has done its “homework” and has determined at some reasonable level, in advance, that it is not building its business on the legally protected work of others. Or, if it is, investors want to know that the company has a command of the IP that it must acquire or license in order to get its product(s) to market.

Second, traditionally, IP represents a competitive barrier to entry to other companies that may be trying to bring to market similar products. The thinking is that by having one or more patents on key discoveries or innovations, the competition may be slowed down or possibly completely thwarted from proceeding.

Leading to the third reason investors have traditionally viewed IP as critical, which is that IP potentially represents a “hard asset” in which the investor tangibly has an ownership interest. Worst case, should “all else fail” (which the percentages say is likely, otherwise they wouldn’t call it “venture” capital), there is the hope that the investor can monetize any patents that are secured through their investment.

Best case, the IP is so compelling and differentiating that it enables the company to bring to market a product that enjoys higher-margin profits, due to customer demand. Or, taking it a step further, competitors may want to acquire the right to use the protected IP via licensing, joint venturing, or other arrangements.

All of this is background to say that the attitudes and perceptions about IP are changing, both on the entrepreneur and investor side. While it was still an important criterion for evaluation, more than one presenter at the CEVS said, to paraphrase, “I’m really less focused on patents or other IP protection and more focused on time to market and execution, because I don’t believe that the time and money spent on the IP strategy gains you much advantage, versus the cost.”

The main reasons given for this position, were two-fold: (1) in this globally-connected market of ideas, it’s too “cheap” – both time- and money-wise – to find ways around patents (versus the costs of securing them) enabling you and/or your competitor to continue forward with your primary plans and (2) in the spirit of the global dangers of climate change, the necessity for clean technologies demands that products innovative products and services be brought to market as fast as possible.

I could spend a whole other blog post arguing the pro and con merits of this changing position by entrepreneurs about IP, but instead I want to focus on a development where businesspeople are embracing this position and doing something potentially transformative about it through an effort called the GreenXchange.

The GreenXchange is a project of Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy. Their vision is to create an “open innovation platform” that promotes the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve the problems of sustainability. The goal is to create a “commons” among as large a group of commercial, public sector, and non-profit stakeholders as possible, leveraging ideas and techniques such as using patent pools, research non-assertions, and technologies that support networked and community-based knowledge transfer and sharing.

These principles sound familiar to most of us, of course, because at this point they are recognized as the essential foundations of the open software/open source movement, where Creative Commons is recognized as a leader in providing intellectual property licensing, facilitating sharing and knowledge transfer. The GreenXchange is technically a project of Science Commons, which was launched with the goal of bringing the openness and sharing that have made Creative Commons licenses a success in the arts and cultural fields to the world of science.

The GreenXchange was first publicly discussed at the 2009 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Work is underway now, among the founding partners and technology partners that have been recruited, to begin putting in place the systems for operating the GreenXchange. The goal – from discussions with GreenXchange principals – is to use the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen as a key forum for building momentum and participation for the GreenXchange, with further announcements about GreenXchange platform availability by the Davos WEF in January 2010.

Think for a moment, about how the landscape of software is different today from what it was 20 years ago. By having the LAMP stack, as it is often called (i.e., Linux-Apache-MySQL, PHP), and all of the many other open source software products available via innovations like Creative Commons’ licenses, there is a much richer, more competitive marketplace, frequently featuring better alternatives to traditionally proprietary, closed offerings from commercial vendors.

Thinking about where we are today with software open innovation gives you a glimpse of what could be the transformative nature of the GreenXchange on the cleantech industry and other sustainability ventures in 5, 10, 20 years from now.

To highlight these differences further, my personal observation was that there was a dramatic over-emphasis on visual, programmatic, and evangelical descriptions of the Government 2.0 examples presented during the event. However, there was an under-emphasis on subjects such as process change, adaptable methodology, and cultural dynamics.

The one notable exception was Eric Ries of Kleiner Perkins Caufield whose “lean start-up” discussion was an insightful, but moreso from the perspective of the “developer of a product” and not “the implementer of a large-scale enterprise solution” – see Eric’s blog for more: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

This is not to say that presenters dismissed the subjects. But their comments amounted to lip service clichés, such as “you have to manage the change” and “it’s important to get your management’s support.” But there were practically no specifics given for how to perform those critical activities.

In fact, the only presenters that spoke confidently about such issues were the government reps themselves: CIOs and directors, for example, from large healthcare, communications and defense agencies. However, it sounded as though most were relying heavily on their knowledge and skills with existing, time-tested Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) frameworks, leadership approaches, and change management methods.

This is a problem. On the one hand, the Whitehouse and current administration is opening up the floodgates of structured and unstructured data, supported by everything from policy directives, such as the Open Government Initiative, to technology innovation, such as last week’s initial roll-out of the federal Apps.gov website, promoting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and cloud computing.

On the other hand, there is an enormous federal bureaucracy with its supporting technological, procedural, and people infrastructure supporting systems and that are mission critical and strategic – they can’t go down and they can’t fail. Many people’s lives and livelihoods depend on them.

It’s like having two gears that are spinning at very different speeds, but extremely rapidly, with the force of the government 2.0 movement forcing the gears together. My opinion is that the solution to enabling the gears to mesh and spin together is from innovations in process management and service implementation of enterprise 2.0 (or what I’ll refer to, for simplicity’s sake, as “collaborative”) systems.

It may not sound so thrilling, but I believe it is absolutely the key to success. At nGenera, we have spent a great deal of time and money studying organizational collaboration, large and small. And, from this research, we have learned what elements are crucial for the success of large-scale collaborative initiatives, like those that lie ahead of the federal government as it implements more government 2.0 initiatives.

Some of these elements are well-documented, for example, “Eight Ways to Collaborate,” published in the Harvard Business Review by Tammy Erickson and Lynda Gratton in 2007, from their landmark study on enterprise collaboration.

Since then, at the heart of newer research, is a construct referred to as “collaborative intents.” In other words, collaboration and collaborative systems are not an “end” in themselves…they are a means to an end. The question is what are the difference kinds of “ends” – or better said “outcomes” – that leaders seek to achieve through collaborative systems. This is an absolutely fundamental, crucial decision point that must be met early in the design and development process.

Far too often, unfortunately, the collaborative intent or intents are not decisively settled. This lack of clarity can be a major source of misalignment and can cause significant hardship resulting in cost and timeline over-runs for a major government 2.0 project. We’ve developed a boardroom imperative describing collaborative intents that you can download.

Others have begun to recognize that existing management processes and approaches to implementing new services are insufficient, as well. At the conference that Nick and I attended, there was a large presence from major service providers, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, to smaller niche players, such as Aquilent. In every case, there was no doubt that there was a great deal of momentum and a lot of learning going on about how the old ways of doing things needed to be re-thought.

I’ll be talking more about collaborative intents and associated methodologies in future posts. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from others about their experiences with implementing new social networking-based or collaborative systems for their public sector purposes, whether local/municipal, state/provincial, or federal.

As I’ve come to learn with age, you are certainly as young as you feel, act, and – I would add – as you think. Invariably, with age comes experience and with experience comes the tendency to recognize patterns – or what one interprets as patterns.

This can be a good thing when it comes to mitigating risks and maximizing returns. However, it can be a bad thing when it stifles innovation. At the half century mark, I’ve seen the upside and downside of this dynamic tension between innovation risk and return.

A couple of recent articles reminded me of how this drama plays out every day in the tech industry, often outside of the typical consumer’s eyesight. For example, with respect to iPhone adoption in large corporations, ZDNet recently published the results of one of their CIO Jury surveys announcing “The iPhone has no place in business.”

The essence of the article is that it costs too much to support the iPhone, relative to other smartphones, like the latest Blackberry. No doubt, many of the chief information officers are relying on their years of experience summed up in the adage: avoid buying version 1.0 of any new product.

However, what avoiding the iPhone also means is missing the upside of applying an innovative free market of mobile applications. In some cases, these apps have the potential to be game-changing in the promotion of a company’s brand or potentially opening up an additional channel of revenue.

In another article, entitled “Doctors try to stifle online patient reviews,” CNET blogger Chris Matyszczyk describes an effort by a physicians advocacy enterprise to promote the signing of a “Mutual Privacy Agreement” between doctors and their patients which prevents the latter from reviewing the former online.

As one commentator to the article noted: “Good luck stifling the internet. These doctors are showing their age or ignorance. It’s only a matter of time before younger more open minded doctors embrace services like HealthcareReviews.com and start referring patients there, or even offer a computer in the lobby while they wait!”

He concludes: “Once they start encouraging reviews they will get the positive endorsement they probably deserve, otherwise the results will be skewed by a few cranky patients. These sites work both ways, they can be a positive marketing and advertising tool for the doctor as well as a negative one.”

By taking these conservative stands, the CIOs and physicians in these examples are sending a message that “information is bad for you” even though they might argue that’s not the case and that they have very sound reasons for their approach. Nonetheless, it’s a good reminder to keep a youthful attitude of experimentation towards new technologies, so you are ready to catch the next wave when it comes.

First, I got some extra inspiration by attending the National Instruments annual users’ conference last week in Austin. Here are a couple of photos of Isadora, a robot that works very similarly to the CopyCat that I wrote about, this time built by a student team. The left-hand photo shows the small version of the bot, whose manual movements are captured via the NI software shown on the screen and then communicated to the larger robot in the right-hand photo, which automatically duplicates the movements.

Second, also in last week’s post, I mentioned my colleague Alan Majer and his “GoodRobot” project. If you like to help him with a little market research regarding robots, please take a look at his wiki page and add your thoughts. Just thinking through your responses to the questions helps to get you thinking about the possibilities.

Third, I have a grass roots appeal: if you have any interest in this subject, plan to attend South-by-Southwest (SXSW) next March, or just want to help us out, please go to the panel picker beginning Monday, August 17 and cast a vote for “Controlling Robots Through the Web.”

It’s already begun, really, if you include the factory-based robots at modern manufacturers or offerings such as iRobot’s Roomba and other products for the home. But, with advances in wireless communications, broadband connectivity, continuing miniaturization and commoditization of components like cameras, power supplies, batteries, motors, etc., the next wave of robots at work and home is getting within reach – and they will be available on a mass scale.

For example, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2009) earlier this year, a team from Anybots debuted their new device, tentatively called QA. You can watch a video of QA running through a few of its paces in its home lab. Cool things about QA include: wireless, internet-based control; human height and good mobility; and 2-way telepresence.

Not cool: $30,000 USD suggested price, at the moment, which is mainly due to each model being hand-crafted until they can forge a manufacturing partnership that gets scale. (That’s the goal anyhow.)

For another example of a robot still in development and prototyping, take a look at one of the side projects of fellow Wikinomics colleague, Alan Majer. I find the fine-grained degree of precision in the movement of this prototype very impressive. Again, remotely controlled and wireless through the Internet.

But as frequently happens, it may well be that someone like Will Wright – the brains behind The Sims and Spore – will be among the first to crack the code of mass collaborative robots. For example, take a look at this intriguing video demo of CopyCat, a lab prototype that is nominally a project of Wight’s StupidFunClub.

Now, think about if I have a CopyCat and you have a CopyCat and a dozen of our best Facebook friends have CopyCats? Well, it takes the idea of a FB “poke” to a whole new level of meaning! I’m looking forward to seeing how this and other robotic technologies percolate to the broader global audience.

Recent and upcoming barcamp invitations that I’ve received have featured themes ranging from product development, to entrepreneurship, to better government. The public sector, in fact, seems to have gone barcamp-crazy. Colleagues Anthony Williams and Alex Marshall have chronicled barcamps in these pages already this year.

As an organization that evangelizes mass collaboration, it shouldn’t be a surprise that nGenera has been a sponsor of E2Open, the official unconference for one of the industry’s higher profile annual conferences, Enterprise 2.0. We’ve co-sponsored it for the past 2 years with our friends at SocialText and there have been some terrific discussions and presentations produced as a result.

But, here’s the history of barcamps that many who associate them with tech-oriented origins don’t know: the origins of the modern barcamp are nearly 25 years old! Begun under the semi-clunky name “open space meetings,” the modern version was dreamt up by a diverse bunch of souls, heavily dominated by org dev and other liberal arts majors that agreed to break the rules and try something new.

The open space meeting (now coined “Open space technology“) was born. I knew when I got my first barcamp invitation back in 2006 that this concept felt eerily familiar. The reason for the familiarity was that I had participated in my first barcamp-by-another-name a decade earlier. I remember it well, as it was such an unfamiliar way to conduct a learning session.

The open space format was the principal meeting method for the capstone retreat of a year-long Austin leadership program for which I had been selected, called Leadership Austin. I remember vividly sitting around in a giant circle of more than 50 people in a very large, conference room, uncluttered by tables, powerpoint projectors, or other gadgets.

The rules were, to say the least, unconventional compared to any meeting that I’d participated in, up to that point. Looking them over again, I still marvel at their simple power. The barcamp/unconference generation has developed its own iteration of meeting protocol as well. But, if you are considering a barcamp in your future – either as a participant, presenter, or both – I urge you to scan the original. I think you’ll appreciate their elegance and the insight that this group of liberal arts innovators had to produce such a powerful form of in-person collaboration.

His original definition for web 2.0 was: “Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet – a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects.”

He and collaborators since reduced the definition to the following compact version: Web 2.0 is “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” Wikipedia defines a network effect as the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people.” The notion being that, as number of people using the good or service increases, the value of it increases – referred to as a positive network effect (with “externality” sometimes being used in place of “effect”).

But, the bottom-line is that “web 2.0” has become a catch-all for a vast range of innovative technologies, processes, services, and ideas. It has spawned a plethora of related and sub-categories, including social media, cloud computing, collaborative applications, software-as-a-service, rich internet applications, enterprise 2.0, and on.

With all of the richness of diversity and five years of history under our collective global belt, nGenera has recently launched a research study to determine what has been learned about the factors contributing to success and failure of web 2.0 initiatives.

And just like the web 2.0 definition calls for, the more people that participate, the more valuable the study will be for everyone. So, please join us in this effort and take the survey. The study director, Tim Bevins, would like to know what you think and will make sure that all participants receive a copy of the management summary when the research is completed.

We hope you join us in sharing what you have learned about those factors that, in your experience, help assure web 2.0 success or, on the other hand, are guaranteed to bring the web 2.0 initiative down in flames!

The interesting thing is that measuring the bona fide desirable business outcomes of an enterprise 2.0-style collaborative initiative is a little like measuring the winner of a Sim game. There are many variables at work, many interrelated systems, and what may seem like success at one level can lead to failure at another, higher-order system level.

But progress is being made and many bright minds are working on the problem. Recently, my colleague George Danner posted a clever piece about this subject, breaking it down into a combination of layman’s terms and math, in a way only George (“I’m just a simple mathematician”) can do. Here’s what he posted:

“Our company, nGenera, is all about how Collaborative Enterprise Management – how firms can leverage the power of collaboration for strategic value. The evidence is clear that most companies have far to go to achieve a collaborative enterprise, so we have our work cut out for us.

For the average organization, it is a legitimate question to ask: what is the business value of collaboration? It sounds nice, makes a nice phrase in a mission statement, but what really is the economic value, in dollars and cents, to making a collaborative enterprise? …a completely valid question.

Since we are also scientists of business, we tend to come at this question from a scientific viewpoint. Want to know the value of collaboration? – then simply contrast the value of the collaborative firm versus that same firm in the absence of collaboration.

The question of “added value” in cooperative settings has been addressed exhaustively in the science of Game Theory. Here, economists use stylized examples to illustrate cooperation and competition in quantitative ways. One of the classic examples is called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Here is the setup:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 9‐year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only one year in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five‐year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should prisoners act?

To understand the decision confronting the two prisoners, we use a device called a payoff matrix, as shown in Figure 1.

Now let’s fill in the matrix with the payoff numbers. In the case where a prisoner receives a 9 year sentence, we consider the payoff to be a -9. The prisoners would obviously prefer a smaller negative number to a larger one.

Now let’s examine the decision for an individual prisoner. Either prisoner can be silent, in which case he can receive a 1 year or nine year sentence, depending upon the moves of the other. Either prisoner could betray, in which case he would receive a 0 or 5 year sentence, depending on the moves of the other.

Note that the “betray” strategy beats the “silence” strategy in any case – a 0 is better than a ‐1 and a ‐5 is better than a ‐9. For this reason, we achieve equilibrium in the game when each player follows his best strategy – to betray the other and receive a 5 year sentence each. But wait – that is worse than the overall best strategy, which is for both to remain silent!…hence, the “dilemma.”

You will recognize that the reason the prisoner’s behave the way that they do is the artificial walls (or in some cases actual walls) between the prisoners, not allowing them to observe the other or to compare strategies – in other words, barriers to collaboration. So what if the prisoners could collaborate?

In an ideal world, they would compare their strategies and pick the value maximizing choice – to remain silent. Therefore one could argue that the economic value of collaboration is the difference between the two cases ‐1 – (‐5) = +4; +4 X 2 prisoners = 8. Therefore the prisoners created 8 positive years of value between them by collaborating.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma vignette is a highly stylized illustration; yet, the very same dynamics emerge in business problems with budgeting, price negotiation, and shared service adoption. In practice, however, this may mean contrasting a conventional supply chain with one where information sharing with respect to buyer forecasts or internal material requirements or even customer orders operates.”

George goes on to write that “Business simulation is a vital tool in just such investigations, as one could easily construct that set of experiments using a simulation model replica of the supply chains in question.”

George and his colleagues on the simulation and analytics team at nGenera are working on ever more concrete models to use in measuring and then verifying the results of large-scale enterprise-wide collaborative efforts. What examples have you observed? What metrics have you seen that are broadly applicable and validating repeatable methods for successful collaboration? Please let us know!

First was a stunning article about Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app. Yep, you heard it right: the NIN iPhone app…I have it my phone now. It’s been a while since one of my colleagues, Ian Da Silva, wrote about Mr. Reznor, who is Nine Inch Nails.  But the gent has not gotten any less intense or tech-savvy. In the new article from last month that I refer to, Reznor sounds even more like an enterprise 2.0 guru than ever. Here are but a few choice quotes:

Regarding the inertia of the music industry: “Anyone who’s an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact — no idea,” he declares. “…They’re in such a state of denial it’s impossible for them to understand what’s happening,” Reznor says.

“As an artist, you are now the marketer…I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free,” Reznor says. “But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”

Regarding the decision to use off-the-shelf resources — Blogger, Twitter, FeedBurner, Flickr, YouTube — rather than trying to duplicate what other people had already created: “They’re going to do a better job than we are and they’re going to have a lot more resources to put into it.”

Lastly, regarding the one part of NIN.com that Reznor had custom-built at the piece at the center of it all: the database of fan info that has been harvested from the registration process giving Reznor 2 million e-mail addresses: “If The Slip [NIN’s most recent album] had ‘X’ number of downloads, we know who those people are and we’ll reach out to them with the next thing we have,” he says. A concert coming up in Atlanta? It’s a simple matter to send out e-mails to everyone within a hundred-mile radius of the city. “That seems to be the most valuable thing you can get — a way to reach people,” Reznor says.

Second was a fascinating article about the crazy cool guys at MacHeist. If you are a Mac user (I’m not on the desktop; iPhone only), then you’ve probably heard of this gig. Running for its third year, as the Wired article explains “MacHeist consists of a series of online missions, and the completion of each stage unlocks access to a free Mac application. The difficulty of the puzzles encourages community collaboration in MacHeist’s forums. And the entire scheme is designed to promote the sale of a Mac software bundle.”

But, here’s what I love about this deal: it’s an absolutely novel way to sell software. Check out the economics: “Putting on MacHeist is neither cheap nor easy, but the payoff is big. Overall, MacHeist 3 sold more than $3 million worth of bundles, earning about $750,000 for charity, $1.25 million for independent software developers, and $1 million for MacHeist. After $400,000 in marketing and production expenses, that leaves a fat payday for MacHeist’s founders.”

Isn’t that a trip? I love the creativity, inventing a sales model that stands out in the crowd and engages people intensely in a way that just about nothing else could do in a down economy. The whole thing completely changes your notion of the traditional model of software sales. 

Forget the drudgery of shop-bot price comparison or scanning the aisles of OfficeMax for that bundle of Mac utilities. Play, smile, learn, and buy. In this spirit, I say it’s time for the Enterprise Heist – an approach as completely unconventional for selling enterprise applications to large organizations.

Both the MacHeist and the NIN articles are examples of what some creativity and elbow grease can do. I encourage you to read the full versions of both articles. Tell me about the best entertainment-inspired business stories that you’ve run across. I’m sure there are some great ones.

Well April 1 – which has been widely publicized as an activation date for Conficker – has come and gone in many parts of the world, and the 24-hour news channels are already moving on, given that Judgement Day 2009 appears a lot less dramatic than it was in T2. (BTW, who thinks this type of hysteria is something we are going to have to deal with every decade, like a cyber-version of locust hordes?  Remember Y2K?)

Nonetheless, back to the smart people, the thinking is that a heightened state of vigilance will be required for quite some time (forever?) because the reality of it is, this is ultimately about making money.  And the best way to make money is to take it quietly and hope no one ever notices, so you enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Which fruits, by the way, appear to be pretty attractive, no matter if you are in a third or first world country.  Check out this paragraph from a BBC News article on the subject:

A recent report by security firm Finjan claimed that cybercrime is as lucrative a business as drug trafficking.  Its Cybercrime Intelligence Report found that a single hacker could make as much as $10,800 (£7,300) a day, which the company extrapolated to $3.9m (£2.6m) a year.  Finjan’s chief technology officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak said: “Cybercrime today is a very, very big business and those behind Conficker have spent a lot of money organizing, writing code and securing these machines so they will be looking for a return soon.  “This type of cybercrime activity is here to stay and will grow because there is so much money involved and it’s hard to get caught.

Couple that with Asia exceeding the rest of the world in growth of Internet access (with China blowing past the U.S. in total users last year, and growing) and you can understand this related news about the growth in malicious activity, posted on ZDNet:

Released Tuesday, March 31, the MessageLabs Intelligence Report revealed that 2, 797 new Web sites hosting malicious content including spyware, were blocked by the security vendor in March, a 200 percent jump over the previous month. The rise, which was the highest since October 2008, was largely due to a spike in the number of images containing injected scripts. Such images were also found in e-mail messages during the month, said MessageLabs, now a Symantec company.

So, Skynet lives on, but rather than the drama of save-the-world heroics that conveniently fits in a 2-hour movie format, the “real” Skynets of the future are much more likely to be designed like the biotech going into steroids:  undetectable and highly lucrative.

On a quick related note:  If you want a convenient way to tap into nGenera’s smart people to learn more and share your own thoughts & experiences on security, then make sure to visit the nGenera public community.  Just visit community.ngenera.com to get started.

Well, today, NY Times reporter John Markoff gave a progress report on the latest in a global battle between the creator (or more like creators) of an ultra-sophisticated computer work, called Conficker, and a group of computer security experts, developers, and law enforcement agencies, rallied together by the ICANN.The Conficker worm is software code that is intended to infect and then control millions of computers (which when infected, are known as zombies) so that they can be operated like one giant computer, referred to as a botnet. The zombie computer networks can be used in many ways, from generating attacks on other computer networks, to distributing malicious software and pernicious messages like spam, to seizing control of Internet domain names.

The article starts off as an interesting update on the worm and how it has been increasingly strengthened since it was first released late last year. But, where is goes from interesting to downright fascinating is when it turns to the subject of motivation by the Conficker creators.

Quoting: “The growing suspicion is that Conficker will ultimately be a computing-for-hire scheme. Researchers expect it will imitate the hottest fad in the computer industry, called cloud computing, in which companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Sun sell computing as a service over the Internet.”

Although there have been clues about the Conficker author’s (or authors’) location – not the least of which is that among the very first things the worm does is check for a Ukrainian keyboard – the evidence is inconclusive. But, the odds are on a very advanced and productive team centered in Eastern Europe.

Think about it: a shadow, criminal cloud computing network, as powerful as any available from the world’s leading information technology companies. What does this mean? SRI International researchers have written extensively about the worm, including detailed examination of its code. In the article by the Times’ Markoff, in answer to the question of meaning, he quotes SRI research director Phillip Porras with the following: “Perhaps in the best case, Conficker may be used as a sustained and profitable platform for massive Internet fraud and theft. In the worst case, Conficker could be turned into a powerful offensive weapon for performing concerted information warfare attacks that could disrupt not just countries, but the Internet itself.”

So, a pre-cognitive version of Skynet lives. But, behind it, the principles of wikinomics – mass collaboration amongst two apparently passionate dedicated groups of people, one on each side of international law – is playing out in a way that could have profound effects on our public and private information flow for years, if not for sure by April 1.