Interestingly, the same could be said for many of the platform design projects currently underway in the Enterprise 2.0 space. In many cases, IT teams are designing and implementing collaborative software without the benefit of collaboration. Yet, collaborative business platforms suffer from many of the same challenges as sustainable building projects. They try to optimize for interactions across complex business ecosystems, usability of digital tools, and aesthetics. They also involve multiple stakeholders and risk costly lock-in if poor architectural or design choices are made early in development. I’m convinced design charrettes can enhance the performance of platform projects as well.

Here’s how it works. In a typical project, as time goes on, the ability to make changes that greatly impact resource allocation and design diminishes. At the same time, the cost of implementing changes increases as successive design choices create inflexibility and lock-in. The effort consumed by stakeholders and the allocation of resources typically follows a bell curve, so a large portion of the project unfortunately takes place during a time of diminishing impact and rising costs. Moreover, if you don’t get people involved early you tend to have a long tail of resource expenditure on after-the-fact customizations, modifications, and revisions.

In a design charrettes, the idea is to shift the project curve to the left so that more time and resources are devoted to planning and a significant portion of the decision-making occurs when the impact of changes are high and the cost of implementing changes is relatively low. Ideally, at the end of the project, the need for modifications would much lower since input from relevant stakeholders was baked into the original design. Since I’m a pretty visual learner, creating the graphs helped me understand how beneficial this approach can be.*

One of the arguments against charrettes is that they result in “design-by-committee” outcomes (usually meant as a derogatory statement, invoking images of the Homer car, designed for the “average” American) and design delays brought on by conflicting egos. In fact, we’ve seen some leading examples of where design-by-committee works great, including Local Motors and CrowdSpring. A good, recent post advocating for design charrettes is “A Camel designed by committee is a camel,” by LEED architect Rob Fleming, where he argues that, given the current state of the World, what we need is design-by-committee “camels,” not “race horses” by impresario architects. In terms of managing conflict, independent, third-party moderators and mediators also play an important role in steering collaboration for productive charrettes.

* Kudos to Jeff Ranson for his leadership in the area of design charrettes and his back-of-the napkin graphs that helped inspire this post.

A blues or jazz band—or any ‘jam band’ for that matter—operates using many of the design principles we’d like to see from a collaborative enterprise. Unlike an orchestra, a band is much more fluid in their interpretation of the music. They are able to improvise on the spot, blend sounds, and often play to the mood of the audience. In other words, they innovate, create mash-ups, and are responsive to users.

I’m not the first person to use the band analogy. Barry Rabkin of the Market Insight Group asks whether technology analyst firms are more like a jazz band or symphony orchestra. He alludes to the fact that the jazz band style is more agile and responsive to customer demands—another important outcome of collaboration:

“Another area where jazz musicians differ from their symphonic counterparts is that jazz musicians, sensing their audience, can and do take liberties with new selections not identified during their rehearsals. They can do this because they have a broad library of music and musical explorations in their knowledge set and, as importantly, they know how to blend their sounds together to get the best outcome possible for their audience.”

What’s more, in a symphony orchestra the conductor alone is responsible for guiding the entire team, whereas with a distributed, ad-libbing crew, anyone can start pushing with a new riff or mood and the others will follow suit. In this way, the benefit of each player’s perspective and expertise is baked into the model.

One of the factors that allows a band to operate in this manner is the existence of very well defined roles (i.e. guitarist, vocalist, drummer, base, keyboards, etc.) and somewhat open tasks (i.e. what songs to play, when to riff, what chords to use, etc.). This is another important learning for the enterprise. As Lynda Gratton and Tammy Erickson note in the HBR article Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams:

“Cooperation increases when the roles of individual team members are sharply defined yet the team is given latitude on how to achieve the task. [...]Assign distinct roles so team members can do their work independently. They’ll spend less time negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. But leave the path to achieving the team’s goal somewhat ambiguous. Lacking well-defined tasks, members are more likely to invest time and energy collaborating.”

In addition to looking at how bands are structured, we might also consider how band members collect largely unstructured customer experience ‘metrics’ in real time and use the feedback to adjust their approach. These metrics provide a useful analogy for the type of approaches leading companies should take when developing customer strategies, including:

• The applause of the crowd: What kind of noise are customers and prospects making online and in social media channels? Using sentiment analysis companies can find out if it is positive (cheers) or negative (boos) and change their tune accordingly.
• Number of people dancing: How engaged is your audience? Metrics might be based on active participation on forums, comments online, rating of content, and re-broadcasting of brand messages, or more passive (i.e. head bobbing) activities such as subscribing to feeds, friending, and following.
• Song requests: What kinds of requests are coming into your contact center and support organization? In many organizations, the contact center is an untapped wealth of customer feedback, largely ignored by groups like marketing and product development. Listening to this channel and other prosumer input can lead to dramatically improved customer experience.
• Duration of stay in the bar: How long do customers hang out in your online properties? Using Web analytics, companies can now obtain this information, as well as data about how people got there, what path they take along the way, and how influential various ‘promoters’ are at bringing in prospects.
• CD and merchandise sales: How are Web interactions translating into sales? The performance is about creating an experience, but ultimately, in order to be profitable, you need people to buy your stuff.

As companies continue to seek best practices and metrics for collaboration, I firmly believe that some of the more innovative solutions will come from non-traditional fields that have deep roots in collaboration, but that have eluded formal study and analysis. (If I’ve managed to spark an interest in enterprise lessons in collaboration from other disciplines, also see my previous post on Measuring collaboration: Lessons from Shane Battier and the NBA and the related Collaboration box score.)

As I’m sure you already know, there are many companies doing things like creating collaborative workplaces for their employees, partners and/or customers, but finding those that are actually measuring the results AND have some interesting outcomes are very hard to find. All in all I ended up highlighting a little over a dozen examples in a paper last November. They range from companies using social media tools and developing collaborative relationships to drive a marketing campaign, to companies using a webspace to innovate new product and service ideas.

Later this month, March 23rd, my colleague Tim Bevins and I will be sharing some of these findings in a webinar called Real Collaboration – Real World Examples for Successful ROI. We will discuss some of the collaborative activities companies are undertaking and how they are being measured, lessons learned from leading-edge companies, recommendations and next steps for developing successful collaborative initiatives and what ROI top companies are recognizing from collaborative initiatives. Click on the link above or  register here. I look forward to an interesting discussion and hope you are able to join us.

6. The world needs better governments.

Some governments in Central America and Africa are just holding on and many are dysfunctional.  But governability is becoming an issue for G20 countries as well.  One leader said the US is on the brink of being “ungovernable.”  One Chinese executive responded thusly when asked to defend his country’s lack of democracy:  “So we should adopt the American system where lobbyists run everything and nothing happens?”

Democracy was still seen as an unstoppable force but in many regions of the world it is becoming stalled, and in some cases losing ground.  Basic democratic institutions are at risk and in danger of failing part due to the economic crisis in poor countries.  The best predictor of democratic survival is per capita income.  In some countries portions of the government have been captured by interest groups. Other non-democratic countries are proving competitively stable and economically healthy.  And the current economic crisis shows that national governments and domestic regulation are inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global economy.   There is also danger of protectionism and isolationism.

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

The much-discredited phrase from the dotcom period is not just geek speak.  The Internet and Social Networks were central to many of the discussions here.  The digital age seems to be coming of age.  I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. It got a lot of buzz at Davos.  A few minutes into it the session we solicited questions from Facebook.  6,000 questions appeared in first 2 minutes.

The growing consensus is that new business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society.  I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging – changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles.

Most leaders love that a web company – Google –  is taking on China. The circumstantial evidence that the China-based hacking of Google was conducted by authorities looking for information about activists was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Talking to Google execs I’m convinced they not going to back down.

8. Girls, women and gender. A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women’s emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse.  The expected worldwide increase of women’s income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China’s expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest in the so-called Girl Effect, i.e., investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world.  In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men.  But every year of schooling increases a girl’s future earnings by 20 percent.  And by earning more and influencing how dollars are spent, women would acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically.  Countries should be more aggressive in finding female candidates for public office, and look outside the regular channels. But increased financial and political power brings responsibility. Woman could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9.  We need new measures of progress

There is growing agreement that GDPs and GNPs are flawed tools for measuring the health of country, and we should instead emphasize the idea of Gross National Well-Being or something similar.  Just as some companies have moved to “triple-bottom line” reporting for their impact on society, many economists argue that GDPs and GNPs measure activities that are detrimental to society and ignore activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic will increase drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP.  Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP.

There is no lack of research and creativity on this issue, as some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthily a country is growing.  The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and encourage their widespread adoption.

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

Like a park in a village we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations – especially intellectual property – through patents, copyright and trademarks. If someone infringes your IP, summon the lawyers out to do battle.  That’s often the wrong approach.  Contributing to “the commons” is not altruism; it’s the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example is when more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling.  Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology – breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders. Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people have such great potential. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us if we don’t want to pass on a deeply damaged planet to our children.  At the final session at Davos, we heard from six inspiring young people on stage on their hopes and ambitions.  There were more than a few tears in the audience.

1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able. Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle. In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed. The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy. The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom. Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change. We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways. They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well: “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better. US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos. Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock. This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4. Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected. The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis. Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs. To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin. But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance. Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use. CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

With the conspicuous exception of global warming, Harper acknowledged that many challenges face the world, but told delegates that the two most appropriate arenas for discussion and decision making are the G8 and the G20.  He described the latter as “the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation.” And each country should be guided by “enlightened self-interest” and a better “attitude.”

But the mood in Davos is that the planet is facing urgent, complicated, 21^st century problems, and we need to craft 21^st century systems to develop the answers. We should involve all of our planet’s best talent in the solution-seeking process, including the private sector, civil society and individual citizens.

Doubtless Harper placed emphasis on the G8 and G20 because this year’s meetings will occur in Canada and he is the Chair. But that doesn’t mean he should be indifferent to the enormous contributions that could be made by others, or closed to the exciting new approaches to solving global problems.

Following last year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, many delegates went on to participate in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative in meetings around the world. The Initiative brought together diverse stakeholders to develop fresh solutions to the many challenges facing our small and fragile planet.  Much of this year’s Forum was devoted to discussing the proposals developed by the Initiative.

The Initiative itself was driven by the belief of Forum members that our international collaborative processes are tired and too constrained to meet current needs.  In Davos, the failed Copenhagen global-warming conference was frequently cited by delegates as a metaphor for the inadequacy of existing processes. To be sure, no one is suggesting that nation states do not need to sit down and hammer out accords. But many Davos delegates believe that such meetings, while necessary, are by themselves insufficient to grapple with the thorny issues confronting us.

Davos delegates feel all issues on the global agenda should be addressed in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and are frustrated many government leaders aren’t embracing this view.

Had Harper come a day earlier, he would have heard French President Nicolas Sarkozy deliver a withering critique of how the planet’s issues are managed today. “From the moment we accepted the idea that the market was always right and that no other opposing factors need be taken into account, globalization skidded out of control,” Sarkozy said. Many systems in the world, including capitalism, were in serious need of reform.  “Each of us must hold the conviction that the world of tomorrow cannot be the same as the world of yesterday.”  A text of Sarkozy’s remarks can be seen here.

While Harper promotes the notion of enlightened self-interest, that got us nowhere in Copenhagen.  . And the irony of Harper’s remarks is that many here think one country with needing a better “attitude” on climate change is Canada. And it is an uphill battle for Canada to turn around its reputation as “the dirty old man of the climate world.”

In fact Harper further damaged Canada’s reputation on this issue, and undermined his approach to global cooperation in a panel discussion after his speech. When questioned about Canada’s position he said that countries needed to take into account the economic costs of being green.  To be sure Canada, as an energy producer has more complex issues than European countries. But some in the audience were disturbed by the remark.

Liberal MP Scott Brison said to me that Prime Minister Harper was “the only leader at Davos who didn’t understand the opportunities for economic growth and jobs in becoming a green nation. Environmental laggards will become economic laggards in the emerging global carbon-constrained green economy.”

Yes the G8 and G20 meetings will be important and they may even make some progress on climate change.  But today there are collaborations involving millions of people, along with governments, private companies and civil society organizations that are actually doing something about climate change. Government leaders need to listen to fresh thinking about how to harness this power, rather than relying on old approaches that have the world stalled.

The venue was a conscripted hairdressing salon that was pressed into service by the Forum as a meeting space.  We were like sardines. But the energy in the tiny room was high.

To recap: The Xchange is a Web-based marketplace where companies can collaborate and share intellectual property which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Ten organizations have already signed on. The Xchange is the first step in a journey towards more sustainable innovation, and the more companies that get on board, the faster we’ll all make progress.  More info can be found here. http://greenxchange.force.com/

In Wikinomics my co-author Anthony Williams and I argued that we’re living in a world where new approaches to collaboration enable new business models that enable companies to create better value for consumers.  We said companies need a portfolio of intellectual property – some that they own and protect, some that they licence and some that they share.  The Green Exchange is all about achieving that.

Nike began the announcement with a cool video that made it clear that sustainability is not an obligation, it’s an opportunity.  Companies can choose to be ahead of the curve or behind the times.  The goal is to create an innovation community.  No one is “giving away” their intellectual property; the exchange includes a licensing protocol.

“Nike is today committing to placing more than 400 of our patents on GX for research, demonstrating our belief that the best way to stimulate sustainable innovation is through open innovation,” said Mark Parker, Nike president and CEO. “Our hope is this will unleash new innovation to help solve current obstacles to sustainability issues.”

Example: Possible cross-industry benefits of making available Nike’s Environmentally Preferred Rubber. Used in Nike footwear the rubber contains 96 percent fewer toxins than the original formulation. By licensing the technology on GX it could be used in other company’s footwear, or it could hypothetically be used by Mountain Equipment Co-op for bicycle inner tubes. In this way Mountain Equipment Co-op could bring a greener product to market more quickly and cheaply than it could on its own.

Parker explained that initially the company’s lawyers opposed the Xchange.  They felt intellectual property was always meant to be kept under wraps and guarded.  But they’ve all come around to see the value of the Xchange, not only to the environment, but also bring competitive advantage to the company.  When Nike’s patents are put into the commons, any improvements made to the patents will be available to Nike.

Parker said universities are a great source of intellectual property. What is needed – and what the Xchange provides – is a standard protocol whereby IP can bust out from the university and be helpful more broadly to business and society.

John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, said “There is so much duplication of effort and wasted resources when it comes to sustainability. We need to make it easier for individuals, companies, academia, and researchers to collaborate and share best practices.”

This idea of a patent commons came up at another session.  Currently the planet has many commons like the ocean, air and space.  Much of the Web is in the commons. It’s time we added an additional area:  know-how related to sustainability.

A couple of years ago the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, launched, to say the least, a rather bold undertaking to use the Internet to turn Davos into a 365-day experience.  Not unthinkable I say.  After all hundreds of millions of people collaborate on social networks, wikis, blogs and brainstorms to do everything from making friends to creating encyclopedias, writing disruptive software projects and helping a devastated Caribbean island recover from a horrific earthquake.  So why couldn’t such tools be used to fix what’s wrong with the world on a year round basis?

Call it a Digital Davos.

But WELCOM (stands for World Electronic Community) got off to a slow start.

There were numerous technical challenges in getting the right companies assembled to  do the work: there was no integration between WELCOM and the system of information kiosks at that Davos attendees use to sign up for sessions and communicate with each other;  the project was viewed by some as elitist – restricted to the few thousand world leaders that might attend Davos; and there were enormous challenges getting CEOs, politicians and leaders of the civil society to actually use the platform and change their behavior to solve problems on networks.

But it looks like this year these issues have been addressed and WELCOM might actually be ready for prime time.

To begin, the technology is now first rate.  After a false start, WELCOM now has a group of partners, companies like Accenture (ACN), Adobe Systems (ADBE), BT Group (BT) and TIBCO that are putting some real muscle into the work, primarily on a pro bono basis.  The platform has good basic functionality and The Forum has a good team figuring out how the system should evolve and improve.  It’s not just another Facebook. Users can videoconference, exchange documents and video and audio files, store material online, co-edit documents, brainstorm and more.

Second, Accenture has fully integrated WELCOM and the onsite Kiosks, so you can sign up for sessions from laptop or Blackberry, reducing the Kiosk lineups.  There is a wealth of material online about the topic being discussed and the delegates in attendance.

Third, one charge frequently made against the Forum is that it is elitist, but the Forum has made great strides in making its work and proceeding open to the public. Linked to WELCOM is a Social Media Outreach designed to engage the broader world.  For example, one of the sessions I’m helping to lead deals with social networks.

But check out the description and the twist:

The World Economic Forum will explore the growing influence of social networks in a workshop at the start of the Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos. The discussion is moderated by Loïc Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic and will include, among others Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning, George Colony, CEO, Forrester Research, Don Tapscott, NGenera, Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn, Owen Van Natta CEO, MySpace.com and Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter.

Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. We want to hear from you:

1.   “How are social networks changing society?” 2.   “What are the most important implications and risks for society?” 3.   “What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?”

 You can join the discussion on a number of social networks and platforms.

1) Leave a comment on the Forum blog

2) Become a Fan of the Forum on Facebook

3) Join the Forum group on LinkedIn

4) Befriend the Forum on MySpace

5) Join the Forum network on Ning

6) Reply to @Davos on Twitter

7) Record and upload a video on YouTube

With initiatives like this, the 2010 meeting promises to be the most broadly inclusive ever.

Finally, The Forum has a sophisticated user engagement plan. Rather than trying to convince Barack Obama to be on WELCOM chatting up a storm with Nicolas Sarkozy and Ban Ki-moon they are beginning with the participants most likely to use networks to solve problems.  First up are wonks like me – members of the  Global Agenda Council’s that I wrote about in my last post.  This includes constituencies such as academics, scientists, journalists and other who love to discuss and communicate ideas.

They also appear to be focusing on young people who are more likely to turn to networks to collaborate.  In 2005 the Forum has established the community of Young Global Leaders, consisting of hundreds of leaders under the age of 40 from around the world and myriad occupations and sectors.   These young adults are recognized for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.  With many of them being part of the Net Generation, they understandably will fully exploit the tremendous potential a system such as WELCOM has to offer.

The Kiosk integration is also a nifty way of drawing attendees into WELCOM.  Everyone at Davos needs the Kiosks to sign up for activities and communicate.  Now they need WELCOM.

I’ve been using WELCOM for the past year and it’s a solid step forward.  But the Forum is still in the early days of curating the behavioral changes needed for the collaboration at Davos to be extended all year long.

But enough of this, I’ve got to get signing up for some sessions.

Music to my ears.  Evidence is mounting that the world and many of its institutions are stalled and need reinvention — from the financial system, the old model of government, the media, our energy and transportation systems, our cities, the university, science and even democracy. Needless to say, transforming these is a daunting challenge that will require the efforts of many parts of society.

“Global multi-stakeholder cooperation lies at the heart of the Forum’s mission to improve the state of the world,” says Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum. “We have to rethink our values – we are living together in a global society with many different cultures. We have to redesign our processes – how do we deal with the issues and challenges on the global agenda. And finally, we have to rebuild our institutions.”

Most significantly, our systems for global problem solving are broken. Says Professor Schwab: “We have to look at the Forum meeting in the context of what’s happening in the world … and we see that, clearly, the present system of global cooperation is not working sufficiently. So we want to look at all issues on the global agenda in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and we want to address in particular the issue of global cooperation.”

While the Davos event is often misrepresented as a meeting of the business and political elite, this year’s 2,500 attendees will again include a broad cross-section of society, with representatives from business, government, the media, science, religion, the arts and civil society.

Nearly half of participants come from outside business, including more than 30 heads of state or government, at least double that number of government ministers, over 100 heads or top officials from international organizations and NGOs, over 200 leading academics, and more than 200 media leaders.  There will be over 30 social entrepreneurs present, and there will be almost as many labor leaders as central bankers participating, with over a dozen representatives from each category.

Like me, many attendees will have participated in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative, which began following the 2009 Forum. The Initiative is a multi-stakeholder dialogue addressing many of the challenges confronting our world today. Over the last year we have been developing recommendations to help adapt and improve the structures and systems of international cooperation.

Now, I appreciate that such an initiative sounds grandiose. Is it delusional for the Forum to try and pull off such an ambitious undertaking?  My response: If not the World Economic Forum, then who?

To achieve new models for global problem solving we have to overcome a major obstacle: The world is organized around nation states based on national economies and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The idea of national sovereignty dates back hundreds of years with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. After World War II there were many bold initiatives to create better systems of global cooperation, including Breton Woods, The United Nations, The General Agreement of Trades and Tariffs (GAAT), The Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later the World Trade Organization and now the G8 and G20.

But, as evidenced by last month’s UN Climate Change Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, the existing structures are increasingly inept at fixing what ails the world. Contrast the Copenhagen failure to the growing global networks and movement of millions of people motivated to turn back warming.  Evidence that the solution to global problems is not to create some global government.  Rather there are new possibilities on the digital age to create networks involving business, government and civil society.  The Forum is a case in point — a global collaboration that is actually making the real progress in solving global problems on many fronts.  I for one am in!

Some might say this is all just talk and no action.  Wrong there too.  At the 2009 meeting, I participated with Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, in presenting an idea called the GreenXchange (GX) project to a group of about 80 CEOs of large companies. Over the last year several other companies have been working to incubate this idea and this year at Davos it will be formally launched. My company, nGenera, is supplying the GX’s technology platform pro bono, because we think this idea is so important.

The GreenXchange is a clearinghouse for unpatented innovations (“know-how”), patent pledges, and patent licenses related to sustainability. Companies participating in the GX will be able to make both patented and unpatented “know-how” available for research uses and commercialization on standard and transparent terms and conditions.

Nike conceived the GX because there is too much duplication of effort in sustainability, and collaboration on shared challenges is a proven way to reduce costs and increase innovation. Companies face very similar sets of sustainability challenges — how to reduce resource consumption and achieve greater efficiency — but without the ability to share learning and best practices in response to those challenges, good solutions fail to take hold or make a broader impact. The GX was created to address this problem by making it easy to enable sharing and promotion of industry best practices leading to sustainability, while making sure that credit is given where it is due. The GX will also help reduce some of the barriers separating innovators from entrepreneurs in the sustainability space.

In the short term, the GX will make it easier for companies and individuals to identify, share, and obtain licenses to available technologies. The GX will enable rapid identification of commonalities in technology across industries and in turn identify gaps in available technology. In the long term, the GX will create a clearinghouse of public license offers for entrepreneurial development, innovation, and technology adoption. This is the sort of creativity the Global Redesign Initiative is designed to promote.

Contributing to the brainpower of the Global Redesign Initiative is the Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils – over 1,000 experts representing more than 50 thematic areas of international cooperation (e.g. Water Security, Pandemics, Migration). Approximately 3,000 participants drawn from the Forum’s industry, governmental, civil society, academic and media communities provided input.  They were selected as the most innovative and relevant thinkers to capture the best knowledge on each key issue and integrate it into global collaboration and decision-making processes.

I have spoken to many other members of the Councils over the last year.  Most of us were impressed at the high-caliber and sincerity of the discussions.  Our job at Davos will be to not only challenge prevailing assumptions, monitor trends, map interrelationships and address knowledge gaps, but to propose solutions, devise strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of actions.

I’ll be blogging and tweeting throughout to let you know how it’s going.  Stay tuned.

Last month my colleague Laura Carrillo asked if it will be Apple or Google to own the third screen. Recent events have provided an opportunity for a third contender in the quest for the third screen: Microsoft.

Tentative talks have been underway for weeks now between rivals Microsoft and Apple to replace Google with Bing as the default search engine on all iPhones.  The last time something like this happened it was Microsoft allowing iTunes on the Windows platform in 2003.

“If you have to do deal with the devil,” says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, “you might as well deal with the one that needs you the most.”

From Apple’s ban of Google’s apps on its store to the departure of Eric Schmidt from Apple’s Board of Directors last August, it has been increasingly apparent that over the past couple of years that tensions in the relationship between Apple and Google have been emerging.  Finally on January 5, 2010, Google unveiled its phone, the Nexus One, and officially entered the mobile hardware market. On that very same day, Apple acquired Quattro Wireless (Apple’s second choice after Google outbid them to acquire AdMob in fall of 2009), and entered Google’s sphere of advertising. It’s now officially war.

All of this time, Microsoft has assumed the archetype of the forgotten middle child; exactly where it wants to be. With dwindling market share of its mobile OS, why would anyone expect the company to announce its entry into the mobile device market? Microsoft has also repeatedly denied any intention of entering this market, much like Apple did before it released the iPhone.

Back in 2006, Microsoft launched the Zune as an alternate and competing product to the iPod, albeit five years later. It has never come even close to touching Apple’s share in the portable media player market. In 2009, Microsoft only had an estimated 2% as compared to Apple’s 70%. With a five-year competitive advantage and Microsoft’s lack of experience in hardware, this came as no surprise to many. Windows Mobile OS also trails in market share behind Nokia, Apple, and RIM. Q3 2009 reports tell it only has roughly 8% of the global share.

Could Microsoft gain ground in these areas with a phone?

Back in 2008, Microsoft purchased Danger, the producers of the Sidekick for $500 million and subsequently formed the Microsoft Premium Mobile eXperiences (PMX) group. Mary Jo Foley also writes of the Pink Project, the codename for both the set of premium mobile services and one or more Windows Mobile phones aimed at the teen/twenty-something market.

In Q3 of last year, Microsoft launched the Zune marketplace (U.S. and Puerto Rico only) and announced in December the decision to form a new organization within the Server & Tools Business that combines the Windows Server & Solutions group and the Windows Azure group, into a single organization called the Server & Cloud Division (SCD).

Over at Engadget back in April of last year, Nilay Patel rumored that Microsoft was getting ready to launch Zune software on telephone handsets and those rumblings are still going on today.

Robbie Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices at MS, has even gone on record saying, “There are other places where Zune logically could go that we don’t get to talk about yet.” Interview transcript here.

It sounds like Microsoft has been steadily working on putting all of the pieces together.

The Microsoft user experience has come a long way. On the software side, Windows 7 OS has been touted as being even better than Snow Leopard; a far cry from Vista, which was only release worldwide three years ago. I will also personally attest to the quality of MS Surface, its tablet device, since I had the pleasure of testing it out myself at IDS10 this past weekend. Microsoft has definitely stepped up its game in the field of interaction design.

With Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft could still be a serious contender in the battle for the platform and ultimate user experience. It has almost every piece of the puzzle: an operating system, mobile hardware (potentially) to load it onto, a search engine (with an opportunity to cut Google off of an information source and subsequent revenue stream), and the marketplace to integrate everything together (even with Xbox Live).

Could it be a step towards a seamless and integrated complete user experience? Here’s hoping we’ll find out more about WinMo7 at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, beginning on February 15^th.

IMHO, I will make one recommendation to the folks at Microsoft. For Microsoft to acquire anything beyond a specialty niche in the mobile computing device market, it is going to require a concerted effort. With an ecosystem of 100,000 applications, and with over two-and-a-half years with a product already on the market, Apple has a big lead. There is a lot of ground to cover in the smartphone market. The Zune trailed the iPod by five years. Don’t let another five go by.

As I move between corporate clients and the work I am doing with the NGO, Mediators Beyond Borders preparing for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I am struck by how we in the corporate world have so much to learn from how this amazing virtual team of mediators works togethe

This team from MBB achieves both results and process dimensions beyond anything I have experienced in many years of corporate work with senior executives in Fortune 50 organizations as well as their Organizational Development/Leadership/professionals.

There is a quality of deep listening and attentive reading (people actually purposefully and with consideration read full emails – don’t just skim and mentally take off on another agenda). I’m convinced that this is the essence of healthy collaboration.

A new C suite officer - Chief Mediation Officer would be the keystone for building collaboration that is deep and lasting, and for embedding the spirit of mediation into all of the organization’s ventures.

Collaboration is the current management “trend” – of course there is lots of history and good data to support the fact that collaborative teams do indeed achieve higher results in both productivity and innovation (see Lynda Gratton’s results from the Singapore teams – as a Hot Spots Coach I experienced this excellent work first hand).

Unfortunately collaboration can be superficial and temporal – especially in virtual teams. A quick “Mediation Refresh Button,” (i.e. short refresher program or usual part of the “ground rules” for every team/joint venture) would embed and legitimize the thinking, spirit and process of mediation in the collaborative process. It would not only save time, but reduce the hurt/misunderstandings and negative energy around “oh that email wasn’t very supportive, wonder what they really meant – guess I’ll just not copy him next time” behavior that builds walls and shuts down any possibility of real collaboration.  We recognize that we need to derive the very best from the diversity and creative thinking that can come with virtual teams.

There is an enormous amount of data supporting the innovative results and value of diverse teams. An excellent article Bridging Faultlines in Teams by Tammy Erickson, Lynda Gratton and Andreas Voigt explores the reality of the challenges and makes good tactical suggestions for managing the breakdowns in collaboration and for keeping the teams from developing fault lines. An embedded culture of mediation would make it not only OK but comfortable (ooh that is the hard part) and normal to address the inevitable – and very healthy conflict that arises within all teams. It is key that conflict be OK, be named and examined, before it becomes de-energizing, painful, and poisonous.

A mediation culture supports conflict and recognizes that it is healthy and innovation generating and that suppressing it at a personal level or group level will at best lead to compliant behavior with no creativity and at worst to isolation and shut down at the personal and the group thinking levels.

Mediation skills building (and I am very privileged to have recently taken workshops with both Tom Fiutak and Ken Cloke) bring together many of the practices we in the Organizational Development/ Leadership/ Coaching world know so well, especially Organizational Learning, (all of the Five Disciplines: Shared Vision, Systems Thinking, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, and Team Learning). Mediation as practiced by experienced mediators integrates, sharpens and focuses these and many other specific skills and experiences to bring to the very skilled process of conflict resolution.

The Chief Mediation Officer is a position that was part of ancient cultures – usually one of the village elders – someone who was wise, with years of learning. As my Bedouin guide said to me “I don’t know why you have to teach people about systems thinking and dialogue, when you grow up as we do, you practice systems thinking in order to survive in the desert and dialogue is how we talk with each other when we are making decisions.”

As we move toward disruptive innovation in our management practices; the most important need is how to capitalize on the human capital assets of diverse groups of people working together virtually. We can continue to learn from ancient peoples and we can put focus on the fields of collaboration – with integral mediation skills and practices.

Vendors such as Apple and Google are driving the consumerization of technology and hence the need to redefine employee computing. However, the majority of vendors, including providers of traditional “end-user services,” have vested interests in yesterday’s computing model and customer relationships. They may not be a source of progressive advice on how to transform employee computing, but you may nonetheless need to leverage their capabilities and adjust how you work with them.

As a first step, understand where vendors are coming from and how their strengths and directions fit (or don’t fit) your roadmap for employee computing in the future. For purposes of illustration, the figure below arrays selected major vendors on three important dimensions: Are they focused on the consumer or enterprise market? Do they primarily provide hardware or software? And are their offerings geared for the public cloud or private networks? The figure also includes generic buckets to represent the Web 2.0 and SaaS vendors. It shows the historical strengths of each vendor, but their placements are shifting. For example, Google is coming from the consumer space and moving more towards the enterprise.

Vendor Landscape

Technology Vendor Trends
Individual technology vendors may not be clear about how they want to play in tomorrow’s employee computing environment. However, we see positive trends among vendors generally. They tend to be:
• Appreciating the need to provide more open solutions, including software that is available from any device.
• Finding that their devices and applications are increasingly being put to both professional and personal uses as work and personal habits intertwine. The BlackBerry and iPhone are good examples.
• Developing more offerings in the cloud (though what may be free in the cloud for individuals may not be free to enterprises).
• Aware that consumerization of technology means individuals have more power.
• Building interfaces that are increasingly more intuitive and easy to use.
• Enabling mashups by letting progressive users configure the information and applications that they need.
• Offering more APIs (application programming interfaces) to developers. The iPhone is a good example.
• Admitting that current applications don’t always translate easily between global locations but they have to.
• Supporting small vendors offering innovative functionality (although we expect consolidation to occur at some point).
• Blurring boundaries as they expand beyond their historical strengths.

What Should You Be Asking Your Technology Partners?
As you work with your current and prospective vendors to evaluate and plan how they fit your employee computing plans, we recommend discussing all of the following issues. They cover not only functionality and cost, but also value and the ongoing viability of the vendor’s business model in the fast-changing technology services scene.

• Vision: What is your vision for how we might operate our employee computing environment?
• Architecture: What does you architecture look like, and how is it evolving? How scalable is it? What resides on your devices and ours? What’s in the cloud?
• Capabilities: What capabilities are available today and what is planned in next 12-18 months?
• Costs: What are my total costs, direct and indirect, immediate and ongoing?
• Openness: How do your products and services interoperate with other vendor solutions in the marketplace?
• Integration: How will your solutions tie to our infrastructure and employee computing roadmaps?
• Security: What is your security model? How do you make sure my company’s information is secure in your environment?
• Value: What value are your reference accounts seeing from your products? How is that measured, both quantitatively and qualitatively?
• Business model: What is your business model? How do you make money? How is your model changing, and why?

A free download of the Redefining Employee Computing management summary is now available. We welcome your comments and questions.

An HR executive at a major manufacturer confided to me: “Last weekend, I hacked my iPhone so I could use it on our network because it is not an authorized device at our company.” When I asked how he learned to hack his iPhone, he said he found an Internet chat group of like-minded iPhone owners and readily found the right settings for his particular network.

A Managing Director in Singapore for a US-based company told me that his PC is virtually useless in Asia “Recently I was in Hong Kong stranded in traffic,” he said, “and I watched another executive, probably a competitor, thumbing his way through phone calls, emails, and other business on a tiny keyboard and tiny screen. Meanwhile I sat in the back seat of my limo twiddling my thumbs looking at my un-tethered laptop, bemoaning the fact that our company does not support an Asian mobile solution.”

Are these isolated examples? No. Are they real? Yes. Are these your typical Gen Y or Net Generation employees? No, all are senior executives each with over 20 years of experience. Why would any company want to stifle the productivity of its high paid executives?

The anecdotes come from the fieldwork of a major study of employee computing released by nGenera Corporation earlier this week. A group of colleagues and I spent more than a year conducting the research, which was sponsored by a blue-ribbon syndicate of global corporations that are members of our nGenera Insight programs. We interviewed individuals at top vendors, global companies, and major government agencies to understand the best way to unleash employee creativity, support new forms of collaboration, and drive new levels of productivity.

Let me review just a few of the findings from the study. (You can download a summary of the report here.)

• Some companies get it, some don’t. Most employees come to work to be productive. Many want to be creative. And, increasingly, more and more want to collaborate. Collaboration in the workplace requires open data, open apps, and open minds. Does this mean a workplace free-for-all? No. In fact, companies that “get it” categorize their data, specify where open apps can be used, and put in place infrastructure that naturally implements policies and controls to guide “creative and open minds.” Those that don’t get it find themselves outmaneuvered when it comes to looking for new talent and forced to reinvent the wheel every time they need to partner. Competitors who get the need for collaboration will continually extend and improve their product and service features faster and at a lower cost.
• Collaboration requires a collaborative services infrastructure – nGenera calls it a Collaboration Server. Who has better information about your employees, your HR systems or Facebook and Linked-In? With over 300 million profiles on Facebook, it’s very likely that Facebook profile information might be useful to download into your internal systems. Would such information benefit your employees? Would profile information benefit your sales reps when they deal with customers or prospects? Yes and yes. Organizations need a “master hub” for collaboration. This “master hub” seamlessly interconnects proprietary systems, structured data and unstructured data, internal search with external search, open applications, and external platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, WebEx, Salesforce.com, etc.), so employees have what they need. As nGenera puts it, the Collaboration Server integrates leading consumer platforms, user management and security, policy and compliance management, and metadata repositories.
• Share data, information, and knowledge to create value, but categorize first. Companies need to segment data and knowledge into a minimum of three categories: 1) data that is open; 2) data that can be shared; and 3) data that is closed (locked up). Why? Employees need to know what data is in which category. Open data can be freely shared with a great deal of discretion and often this leads to new ideas and innovation. Shared data, the realm of joint ventures, product design, etc., must be controlled and selectively (usually under contracts and NDAs) shared. Data such as formulas, designs, customer data, etc., need to be looked up and sometimes taken completely off the grid for competitive and legal reasons. In our research, thought, we found that few companies have taken the time to make even these simple distinctions. It is no wonder data security and privacy are compromised.
• IT cannot do everything, nor should they. Yes, technology is a major source of innovation. And yes, it’s impossible to have any business discussion these days without having a technology discussion. But that does not mean that IT must do everything. Companies that completely lock down their IT tools, technologies, and infrastructure, by definition, must depend on IT professionals to do everything. Today, with computer literacy rates at all-time highs, employees can do much on their own, if given the right tools and the right policy frameworks. In fact once the creativity is unleashed, few companies can anticipate all the innovation that ensues. Locked-down companies deprive themselves of significant productivity and innovation in their workforce. Smart CIOs are revamping their infrastructure and policies to support self-service IT models and unleash enterprise-wide creativity on a massive and measurable scale.
• Some employees will manage their own computing just for the privilege to be more creative and self-reliant. One of our earliest findings in this research program was that every organization has a segment of employees that want to be self-sufficient. They will even buy their own technology and provide their own support if the organization will give them greater freedom over their technological choices. A number of companies now provide this option to employees, such as by providing a stipend for purchases. Employees buy what they can with the stipend (usually from an approved but diverse list), and then are welcome to make additional purchases on their own nickel to augment their “computing environment.” At BP, one of the largest global energy companies, such a program reduced support costs and increased employee morale. Of course, BP also put in place the policies that defined the rules of the road, instituted a computer “driver’s license,” had the participating employees sign appropriate use contracts, and engineered a thin client infrastructure to securely link self-reliant employees to sensitive internal systems. The moral of the story: Do whatever you can to harness this class of employees.

We uncovered several other key findings about how companies are supporting and nurturing employee freedom, creativity, and self-reliance in pursuit of a collaborative workplace. Some companies (see Dion Hinchcliffe on open business data and open business methods) are on their way to the new model of employee productivity and so are some leading government agencies (see data.gov and apps.gov). Every organization has a choice and the consequences of the wrong choice may be dramatic and immediate: Will they pursue new policies, technologies, and practices that unleash the creativity, innovation, and energy of their workforces, or will they continue to rely on command and control and in the process stymie the next generation of enterprise innovation and productivity gains?

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.

The next logical step would be to give buyers complete discretion in the design of their condo. For example; a buyer could decide where to place walls, cut out kitchen windows, install arches and redistribute space among rooms and move in to a space that is truly their own and completely unique. The only inflexible components would be the support beams and sanitation system.

This concept is not entirely new. It is essentially the decision making power afforded to those who build independent homes, loft-style apartments and, more recently, buyers in the luxury town-home markets (). There is no reason it could not be applied to promote sales of residential condos targeted at buyers in other segments that are larger in terms of market size.

For buyers this means:

• Greater sense of ownership from having engaged in the design as alluded to here
• Increased customer satisfaction and higher resale value due to increased uniqueness.
• Though the overall cost may rise a little the modifications, are relatively cheaper as a developer has better economies of scale than an individual buyer
• Less time and effort is needed to make it suitable for occupancy

For developers:

• Higher booking rates translate into; greater cash inflow from deposits; higher likelihood of securing financing due to fulfillment of the financier’s occupancy criteria, and a stronger sales pitch to the later clients – E.g. we sold X% within the first 2 months etc
• Improves viability of small and mid-scale developers who see larger proportions of unfinished projects
• Lower likelihood of buyers abandoning the deposit and/or balking
• Easier accommodation of excess demand of a particular type of condo. E.g. buyer can adjust walls to create extra rooms or change the layout to match another one
• Take advantage of prosumer engagement to gain insight into customer trends. (read more about prosumers, here)
• No delays in matching demand, when faced with the process of amending floor plans to accommodate more of one type of condo – i.e. buyers can self-serve their needs by modifying their space on their own

What of the technology?

That too exists, and can be applied as is to suit this purpose. Moreover, the design software is even available as free-ware in some cases. The developers simply provide a customized version to buyers as a CD with their particular floor plan on it.

Looking ahead it is not hard to imagine the concept being applied to the building in general and develop sites with flexible exterior design to allow inexpensive additions in case of excess demand. Examples of such design principles can be seen in other countries and a similar policy for independent residences is actually being actively promoted by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). When such technology becomes popular in the residential markets, it would be possible to build buildings that offer the above benefits to every future owner as well, and likely increase the re-sale values of such property.

This week I’ve had the pleasure of attending a very well executed Government 2.0 Summit held in Washington D.C. I was pleasantly surprised to find many ‘kindred spirits’ at the conference and additional examples that signal the rise New Public-Private Ecosystem.

Tim O’Reilly, whose firm conducted the conference, opened with a keynote that argued that the twin developments of open data and the power of shared platforms had the capacity to revolutionize government. He noted that platforms such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Apple’s iPhone App Store were successful because they harnessed user contributions to create enormous collective value – value way beyond what they could do alone. He then went on to argue that this same logic could be applied to the role of government services. He argued that the government needed to begin to think of itself as a platform. He pointed to how the investments made by the U.S. Department of Defense in globally positioned satellites (GPS) spurred others to develop applications, products and services, and spawned an entire industry.

Over 40 noteworthy examples of the government as a platform were seen at the conference. Here are some of the highlights:

• NASA’s Spacebook – “Lessons Learned from NASA’s Enterprise Social Network,” (Emma Antunes) that supports internal and external cross-fertilization of ideas and innovation at the juncture of different scientific disciplines.
• TSA’s IdeaFactory – “Transportation Security Administration’s IdeaFactory: Social Media and Securing America,” (Tina Cariola) that harnesses front line TSA employee’s ideas for innovation and continuous improvement at the TSA.
• Citizen budget input in Santa Cruz – “City of Santa Cruz Offers Blueprint for Solving CA Budget Crisis with Social Media,” (Peter Koht) was used to deal with radical budget cuts in municipal services and reallocate resources.
• State of Utah – “Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal,” (Jeff Nigbur) – a shared portal that coordinates safety information, enables collaboration with private media organizations, and saves money for the State of Utah.
• Data and Platforms – “GeoEnabling Gov 2.0″ (Jack Dangermond) – GIS wizard, pioneer and founder of ESRI, illustrated how open data sources with powerful GIS tools and government platforms can enable “on-the-fly” mashups to support situational awareness and crisis situations in realtime, like the recent Station Wildfire in Los Angeles.

One of my favorite sessions was a panel on “Creating an Effective Platform,” with John Markoff (New York Times), Vinton Cerf (Google), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Tim Sparapani (Facebook). Markoff started off the session by distinguishing between “platforms of liberation,” and “platforms of control,” suggesting that platforms of liberation lead to creativity and innovation whereas platforms of control tend to limit creativity, stifle innovation and by implication in the worst case, be used to enslave or oppress. All the panel members reiterated that effective platforms (aka liberating platforms) have the ability to enlist broad voluntary participation. Cerf noted that a combination of design requirements from the Department of Defense for connectivity among all of their assets mixed with the values of the academic community fostered an open, cooperative architecture for the Internet. Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, noted that the concept of a utility, like the electricity grid or the Internet was his inspiration for Twitter – a reliable platform that can be used by others to build new capabilities. Sparapani noted that while Facebook has over 250 million members, it is also important to note that Facebook’s architecture also enlists and supports over a million independent developers that add value to the Facebook platform every day.

At the highest levels of the Obama administration the United States, with the appointments of Vivek Kundra as the first CIO of the United States and Aneesh Chopra as the U.S. CTO, is developing policy frameworks (e.g. The Open Government Directive) and new tools (e.g. data.gov and The Federal IT Dashboard) that will support collaborative platforms and open data. Both Mr. Kundra (see here) and Mr. Chopra (see here) provided additional information on these efforts at the conference.

So the story continues and I believe the mindshare is growing. Policy makers, practitioners and thought leaders are rising to the idea that a globally interconnected world affords new opportunities to reshape government. Open data unleashes the creative potential of citizens and private enterprise to create new services, software applications, and insights that the government cannot do by itself. The shear numbers tell the story. Millions of citizens and hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes uniting to independently create value and enhance the common good. The proprietary ownership or licensing of that data to a few (Gov 1.0) seriously limits the power of the New Public Private Ecosystem. Now not all government data should be open and privacy must be safeguarded to be sure. Nonetheless, the vast proportion of government data falls under the non-private category.

The same logic applies to collaborative platforms. In contrast to open data, however, collaborative platforms require investment and development. As we further explore the New Public-Private Ecosystem, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and the market will need to work out where it is best for the public sector to invest and where the private sector should invest. The dividing line is not clear. Only 10 years ago, one would not expect Twitter to emerge from the private sector; utilities were the province of governments. But the good news is that democracies, republics, and open societies have the natural open forums to debate and collaborate to find the answer. Closed societies force themselves into a comparative disadvantage on the world scene – they only harness a small proportion of their collective creative spirit. We are not likely to see the New Public-Private Ecosystems and its benefits emerge in those nations.

This is a new age of collaboration and the train has left the station. Distinctions between less government or more government are the realm of old categories and thinking. Government may well get smaller – a happy thought for citizens. Howeverit will get smaller, not through fewer services, but rather through the power of collaborative platforms, open data, and the New Public-Private Ecosystem, and in the final analysis, private citizens will have more services and a play a greater role in the development and delivery of those services. Everyone can win: the dedicated public servant, the engaged citizen, the investor, and the company.

The rise in mobile computational devices such as smartphones and the opening of SDKs for operating systems such as Android, the iPhone, and Symbian have resulted in the proliferation of applications that have enabled users the ability to edit photos without having to purchasing expensive third party applications. Some of these are even free. For example, instead of working in Photoshop to create panoramic photos, I simply purchased a fantastic little app called Panorama for my iPhone and it uses an algorithm to seamlessly patch photos together.

However, the compromise in using a mobile device to take photos is that the quality of the camera is nowhere near that of using a DSLR. Beyond ‘face detection’ and ‘red eye reduction’, how will camera companies continue to further the computational development of their products?

Stanford Computer Science researchers have gone beyond this question and are taking matters into their own hands. Marc Levoy, professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and his students are currently developing what they call ‘Frankencamera’, an open-source and fully programmable camera that allows computational photography researchers and enthusiasts to develop and test new ideas and applications. They believe that the camera no longer needs to be limited by the features that a closed and proprietary camera manufacturer deems fit to supply. All the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere.

I think Levoy phrases it best when he states:

For the last ten years there’s been a megapixel war. That’s finally winding down and the asian camera manufacturers can no longer compete based on the number of megapixels so now they’re beginning to compete on one other feature. We’d like them to offer lots and lots of features that the research community is currently working on and offer those all at one; not merely when they want to compete with one another.

With support from Nokia, Adobe Systems, Kodak, and Hewlett-Packard, Levoy and his students have put together the open-source camera from a number of difference parts. The motherboard is a Texas Instruments ‘system on a chip’ running Linux with image and general processors and a small LCD screen. The imaging chip is from a Nokia N95 cell phone. They are using standard Canon lenses, but they are combined with actuators to give the camera fine-tuned software control. Finally, the body is custom made at Stanford.

Within about a year, after the camera is developed to his satisfaction, Levoy hopes to have to have the funding and the arrangements in place for an outside manufacturer to produce them in quantity, ideally for less than $1,000. Levoy would then provide them at cost to colleagues and their students at other universities.

Although far from distribution to the public, this is an incredible advancement in computational photography. One can only hope that camera manufacturers will catch word of this and will adopt their philosophy, accelerating the process with their use of capital and technology.

1. Over a year ago I was scheduled to speak with 2 executive clients at a large manufacturing company. The purpose of the call was to interview them for a research study our team was conducting on how collaboration tools are forcing companies to redefine their employee computing environments. The problem was that I only had first and last names of the contacts; I had no titles, departments or backgrounds. In this case the set of interview questions were specifically tied to individual’s roles, so I had no idea what question set to use. As is often the case, I was preparing for the next day at 9pm the night before, so I did not have a lot of options. I crossed my fingers and conducted a search on LinkedIn, hoping that at least one of the executives had a public profile. Thankfully they both did! Not only was I able to see their current job titles, I could also see their backgrounds. Based on this more detailed information we were able to adjust our questions, leading to a much more fruitful discussion. This relatively short preparation and interaction not only helped us to gather some great data points; it also helped my company develop a stronger client relationship. BTW: Yes, after the call I did “Link” to both executives on LinkedIn, along with my usual “thank you for speaking with us” message. This is quickly becoming a best practice for follow-up and maintenance of client relations.

2. Just this Friday I was brainstorming with my Manager about ideas for my research on the ROI of collaboration. While I have the bulk of the study completed, I will spend this week pulling together a few more useful examples. My Manager suggested I reach out to a company; we’ll call XYZ Corp., who he had met with a while ago. The problem was that he could not recall the name or contact details of the individual he had spoken with. Fortunately he did know one of our co-workers who might have a contact. While still on the phone I jumped on Twitter and sent her a DM (Direct Message) to see if she had a current contact at XYZ Corp. Within minutes I had a DM back with name, title, email and phone details. The value here was not just in the quick response but in knowing that the quickest way to reach the person I needed was via Twitter, not Gmail, Skype or IM. If she was only a casual Twitter user it may have taken a few days to hear back so the efficiency would have been lost.

3. One last example occurred after “business hours” (does that still apply anymore?). It was late and I was preparing for an early morning client discussion. I had two quick questions that could only be answered by one of our head engineers. I knew that an email would most likely sit until the morning. I also knew that this individual was often on Facebook so I logged in and spent 5 minutes chatting with him. This short interaction provided the information I needed to have a successful interaction with our client the next day.

Have I measured or monetized the time savings, productivity gains or added value of these activities? No, and I have found very few companies that have. However, I don’t think anyone would argue the value derived from these interactions, especially given the quick turnaround required and achieved. The important take away is not how many people you’re connected to, or how many networks you participate in, it’s all about knowing how to navigate each channel to get what you need in the most efficient way possible. It’s also important to note that in some cases the best option is to forgo 2.0 tools altogether and simply pick up a telephone.

CoTweet is a platform designed specifically to help businesses use Twitter. It lets multiple individuals at one company send tweets on up to six corporate Twitter accounts and keeps the messages in sync across all of the accounts. Per its website, CoTweet is “How Business Does Twitter”. I spoke with the Co-Founder and CEO of CoTweet, Jesse Engle, @jesseengle earlier this week. Per Engle, “CoTweet’s underlying value proposition is to help companies engage in authentic two-way communication and to focus on that engagement.” Illustrating that point, CoTweet offers the ability to view conversation histories allowing you to view your team’s responses in context so you can see which tweets have been responded to and know who’s said what to whom. Engle feels that this is one of the most useful features and is part of what makes CoTweet unique. I personally like the assignment feature which allows you to delegate a task/tweet to someone on your team for follow-up. There are too many other features to include here, but the model is intriguing and already creating a buzz among enterprise customers including @Ford, @Pepsi, @JetBlue and @MSWindows, yep, that’s the Microsoft Windows team. The Twitter API team, @twitterapi even uses CoTweet to manage user requests, and uses CoTweet’s CoTags, a convention for using signatures when tweeting from a company’s brand account.

Still a free service, how will they make money? CoTweet is planning to implement a SaaS model where subscribers pay per month to use the service. Pricing levels and timing are still up in the air, though it’s been reported that this model could be implemented by the end of the year. Also reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Scott Monty, Ford’s digital and multimedia communications manager says that he and a team of nearly a dozen others use CoTweet to manage Ford’s multiple Twitter accounts and would pay for the service when asked to.” A pretty nice endorsement that I’m sure the 6 CoTweet investors liked seeing. Did I mention that CoTweet secured $1.1M in funding last month? Not bad for a company that just launched its public beta site on July 9th.

Another company I came across is StockTwits. This company provides an idea and information sharing service for investors. It’s a very simple concept, you follow @StockTwits and watch or participate in real-time conversations about stocks. The service allows users to see trading activities, conversations about certain stocks as well as view activity about a particular company in one stream. Users tag tweets about specific companies with a $ and the stock sticker symbol. Tweets not about specific companies are tagged with $$. Yesterday I caught up with Co-Founder and CEO of StockTwits, Soren Macbeth, @sorenmacbeth. He mentioned that they have received many testimonials from users who value the opportunity to trade alongside thousands of other traders vs. trading alone. Macbeth believes, “The community is the real value. It’s like a global virtual trading floor for traders.”Given the clout of some of the active traders on StockTwits, companies have started to take notice. Bloomberg now takes some of StockTwit’s tweets and posts them in the Bloomberg Terminal. On August 3rd, StockTwits announced an initiative with NASDAQ called Data Junkies, @datajunkies. NASDAQ now posts real-time stock prices to specific streams on StockTwits, and will host StockTwits virtual lunches with inside tips to help traders take advantage of the different tools. StockTwits will also host StockCamp at the NASDAQ MarketSite, a physical gathering for traders to meet, exchange ideas, tips and generally collaborate. Just yesterday NASDAQ and Stocktwits announced a contest where 30 lucky Data Junkies will be picked to ring the NASDAQ closing bell on August 25th alongside the StockTwits team.

So what about the money? StockTwits has received $1.6M in total funding and is already producing revenue via 3 subscription-based, premium content blogs launched this spring – alphatrends.net, upsidetrader.com, and investingwithoptions.com. Per Macbeth, “Micro-blogging is great for real-time posts during the business day, but longer form content is needed for deeper research.” Macbeth also knows, “This is not new. Subscriptions to financial content has been around for a long time, we are just presenting it in a unique way.” And that unique way is what should help drive revenue for this popular start-up.

I also got the scoop on another revenue channel that StockTwits is planning to introduce this fall. On September 1st the company will launch a desktop application along with its own micro-blogging platform. Features will includes things that are currently not feasible on Twitter like vertical specific services, groups i.e. an option trader group, as well as watch lists so you can see posts related only to specific stocks you are interested in. The application and platform will remain free with premium subscription-based services eventually rolled out on top of the platform.

So where does this leave Twitter? There are many other Twitter-based tools out there doing lots of interesting things. Will Twitter end up acquiring some of these companies or are they already developing more unique capabilities in-house? There is even speculation that an online giant like Google should acquire Twitter.

Two things we know for sure – 1. Twitter’s ecosystem is huge and highly dependent on the platform’s success which should buy them ample time to figure out and implement a feasible revenue model 2. Twitter-based tools like CoTweet and StockTwits are for real, have real funding and are set up for real revenue. There are many options for Twitter and its ecosystem. What do you think Twitter should do? I’d love to hear from you here or of course, on Twitter, @lcarrillo.

VenCorps is an online community for discovering and cultivating the most creative solutions to a specific problem. It is the next evolution in collaborative innovation, where the community first helps to identify the best solutions and helps build out and cultivate those solutions. VenCorps connects entrepreneurs, investors and facilitators together in a community of shared interest.  In short, VenCorps uses the wisdom of the crowds to attract, screen and cultivate the most innovative solutions.  (Disclosure:  I am a significant shareholder of the parent company that owns VenCorps.)

Cash prizes are generally awarded to those people that are:

• Bringing an innovative technology to the market.
• 10x faster, smarter, better, cheaper, stronger, etc than current solutions.
• People with domain experience or a track record of success. We also realize the best solutions can come from first-time inventors too.
• Can reach millions in revenue within a few years of launch.
• Are solving a real problem with a big pain point.
• Are scalable, costing less per unit as the sales grow.

In the case of the Intelligent Transportation Society, the goal is to fund a company that can reduce environmental impact, strengthen economic productivity, move people more efficiently, or prevent accidents.

After the challenge was issued, 94 groups submitted solutions that were reviewed and voted on by a community of 4080 people.  (I am familiar with several of the entries and have advised some, so I have recused  myself from the selection process.) The nine best solutions were just announced, and will now undergo a much more intense round of scrutiny.  The nine finalists can be seen here.  With finalists coming from Hungary, Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States the origins of these solutions are as varied as their approach to make traffic history.

Here is a sampling of the finalists.

Intellione:  The company uses mobile phone handsets to monitor traffic congestion. Users can see where traffic congestion is occurring in real time and know their travel time and make a choice to take an alternate route. This impacts transit and commuter travel and hence is an important tool in mitigating greenhouse emissions. The systems also helps governments to see how their roads are performing and address safety issues and plan where to make their capital infrastructure investments.

Skymeter:  Since 1998 governments in Europe/Asia have cut congestion by charging for road use, a $2B/yr market in 2008. Now Request for Proposals ask for GPS tolling; integrators lack solutions that price reliably. Our Financial GPS system is the piece needed to win bids.

Avego:  We want to build the automatic, intelligent, real-time infrastructure that makes it no-brainer-easy for travelers to share their empty seats, thereby unlocking the excess capacity already travelling and wasted on our ‘congested’ roads.  We want to enables individual drivers to advertise their excess capacity and make it available to other travelers.

iCarpool.com:  One Web site for all modes – Carpool, Vanpool, Transit, Bike, Walk. One site for all travel types – commute trips, events, long distance trips and real time trips (through mobile phones and SMS). One site which enables you to find matches within all your networks – your employer, your residential community, your friends, your soccer club and more.

Signal-to-noise ratio: I think the most visibly important metric – analogous to points on a basketball stat sheet – should be one that is focused on the value and quality of content you broadcast.  Using Twitter as an example, measure tweets versus re-tweets.  If your content is getting re-tweeted it’s safe to assume that it’s valuable (signal) and not noise. For blogs, the metric might be comments per post, indicating a compelling or timely argument worth discussion. Using online sentiment analysis tools, companies could add an additional layer of complexity to this stat by also measuring positive versus negative comments.  As a basic example of signal-to-noise, my ratio based on re-tweets/tweets is: 10/91 = 0.11.  For comments/blog posts it would be: 289/79 = 3.7.  Of course in a multi-channel world, the metrics get muddled.  If re-tweet is the new blog comment, how do you calculate the metric?

In/out ratio: How good of a curator are you of information?  We interviewed the company Cataphora a few weeks ago (recently profiled in BusinessWeek) – their software uses social network analysis to identify good content by how much it is shared and passed around and track document originators and curators to assess individual productivity.

Document “originator” stats: Building on the previous point, how much good content do you generate, where “good” is defined by the number of times your content is reused (this is similar to signal-to-noise, but attempts to quantify the strength of the signals). At a more granular level, the originator stat might also highlight certain areas of expertise – e.g. all good ideas related to robots originate from Alan.  A twist on this metric could be “conversation initiator stats,” which would track who kicks off popular conversations on ones that lead to valuable ideas that are implemented.

Responsiveness: This would be a fairly basic stat that looks at how quickly you respond to other people’s requests.  As part of this, you would also have to account for the number of requests an individual gets (which might actually be another stat around collaborative demand or reputation).

Feedback assessment: To temper responsiveness stats, you’d want to have something like the “assist” stat in basketball, where you only get credited for responses that lead to a positive outcome.  As an example, you could base it how much change occurs to documents as they flow through you.  This would have to use software that analyzes document content and tracks versioned documents (independent of filenames, which often change as they pass through different users – e.g. docs that come through me usually leave as filename_nh).

Sociometric factors: These are the intangible aspects of collaboration that don’t necessarily leave a digital trail that is easily measured.  I liken this to measuring an individual’s plus/minus in basketball – it’s based on how other people perform on their stats when they are around you.  Since there’s no “court time,” in enterprise collaboration, you could measure face time through badges, digital connections, or even video.  Using this type of reality mining, a company could also analyze things like the tone of conversations as well as emotional response in order to gauge the impact you have on the morale of those around you (without necessarily measuring content, which leads to privacy issues).  This stat might also highlight diminishing collaborative returns – if too many minuses start showing up, maybe you’re collaborating too much (or are not very good at collaborating).  A company could also develop a “starting line-up” for projects based on sociometric factors that show positive results from certain combinations of employees.

Yet the compelling case remains elusive still. This situation does amaze me, as it seems clear that collaborative management processes, and the software that powers these processes, will drive the next great wave of business productivity. As my nGenera colleague Tammy Erickson likes to point out, the way corporations have organized and managed, and set up processes to get work done has not changed much in over 100 years … yet, the costs of communicating and collaborating have accelerated toward zero and the next generation of workers have grown up on these new collaborative technologies and processes … the train has left the station and it is not coming back. Also, John Chambers of Cisco tends to agree with this statement.

The compelling case for adopting collaborative management and supporting technologies is that they will power the biggest productivity wave since the re-engineering / ERP software / Web 1.0 revolution. However, rather than automating transactional processes, we are now “stimulating and influencing discretionary effort” to drive productivity (hat tip to Tammy Erickson for codifying this concept).

In the old way of work, employees were locked into specific roles and in specific departments, even though they may have had skills and value to offer outside of their strictly defined role. In a company that has adopted collaborative management, the talent is networked and peer reviewed, much like we review products on Amazon or restaurants on Yelp. An employee with available ‘discretionary effort’ (including the skills, and references and ratings to support the claim) can easily be matched brought into the fold by project teams to contribute in a meaningful way for the individual, team and company. Their work becomes unbundled from the task-oriented role of the past, and more woven into the fabric of the company’s operations (e.g. an engineer not only designs products, but has a role in engaging with customers and supporting the products he or she has designed in the past).

In the past, this employee may have had an effective utilization of 60% of their capability … under collaborative management, it is likely to be closer to 100% if not above it, and the employee is more fulfilled and engaged in his/her job.

This is not a theoretical example or exercise. From May 2007 to November 2008, I led the corporate development effort at nGenera where we raised two significant equity financings, one debt financing, closed and integrated six acquisitions, and divested one business unit. Throughout this period, I was the only full-time headcount in corporate development. Other than attorneys, we did not use any outside consultants or advisors. The entire effort was run on relatively large teams made up of employees from functions across the company, each applying discretionary effort away from their full-time ‘role’ to be part of the team. We accomplished an incredible amount operating in a collaborative management process, all without hiring full-time individuals.

Furthermore, take the role and process of customer support as another case example. In the past, a company would have a role defined for a customer support rep. The number of reps, and the management overhead needed to operate customer support overall could be sized by the expected call/contact volume, and the software would be purchased to help automate these transactional roles so each rep could handle more and more contacts. A well run company would have no involvement in customer support by the people who were designing and making / delivering the products or services, and the company would do a decent job of pattern matching similar issues from across the customer base and publishing solutions to common problems. nGenera has solved this exact problem with our Customer Interaction Management, or CIM, software – including, chat, email, phone, knowledgebase applications.

The acceleration of the cost of communication and collaboration to zero presents a new opportunity, almost 180 degrees opposite of what the ideal customer support organization was trained to do in the past. With the simple addition of a customer community, the pivoting of the CIM software suite to a Social CIM (or Social CRM) suite, and the investment in the complexity of fostering and operating the community effectively (no small task), a new collaborative customer management process is possible, with significant productivity and other benefits as an output.

With collaborative customer management, customers can connect with each other to provide support and solutions to common problems, even providing better outcomes than the best synthesis the company itself could provide. Moreover, the employees that are designing and making / delivering the products and services (i.e. the engineers, product managers, marketers) will apply some percentage of their discretionary effort in the community – seeing and helping with real customer issues, and incorporating this real-time interaction into product and service improvements immediately and new product and services offerings that are in demand. Again, this productive use of discretionary effort is likely to also lead to higher job satisfaction and engagement for the designers and engineers, fewer customer support people and overhead, and better results for customers. Lastly, the senior executive team now has a direct line of sight into who are their most engaged employees and what are their key customer, product and services issues.

Now, apply this similar line of thinking on unbundling work across the enterprise to other processes, such as team selling, talent management, citizen engagement, mergers & acquisitions integration, investor relations, and others, and the productivity improvements are compelling. Moreover, the overall competitive velocity and agility of the enterprise will increase dramatically.

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.

The Twentieth Century business challenge was the mastery of scale and scope. Organizations that mobilized productive effort at the best volume, cost and quality were the ones that dominated the economy. To meet this challenge, organizations optimized around strong hierarchies and the division of responsibility. Only top leaders were expected to worry about the overall goals, freeing workers to focus on performing the defined work. Strong units or “silos” formed, allowing each component skill to be developed to high levels of competency and providing excellent control through strict accountability. Frederick Taylor explicitly worked to remove knowledge from the daily production process and to center knowledge in a few managers and engineers. Value was maximized by making organizational behavior routine.

Over time, those value creation techniques themselves became routine – and lead to commodity models. The skills remained necessary, but were not sufficient for success. For the past three decades, we have been slowly bringing knowledge back into our work:

• Encouraging production workers to think about improvements
• Encouraging sales people to take initiative and responsibility in dealing with customers
• Learning and continually improving processes and routines

Now, the dominant challenge is one of mobilizing intelligence, harnessing the smallest units of insight, and leveraging specialists. Organizations must encourage people to invest their discretionary effort – to use their particular knowledge and capacities in ways that continuously contribute to the success of the whole:

Achieving more flexible ways of combining different forms of knowledge and expertise to come up with something better than any single function could achieve

• Tapping multiple experts to innovate faster
• Responding to the market and environment more fluidly and effectively

These activities require collaboration.

Today’s constantly-evolving Web 2.0 technologies offer substantial advantages as we work to meet these challenges. They:

• Bring people together and let them interact, without specifying how they should do so
• Cause patterns and structure to appear over time
• Offer significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, letting people find helpful colleagues, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.”

My colleagues, in the research for Wikinomics, identified exciting examples of these new technologies in action creating new business models, including:

• Peer-to-Peer Production – Applying open source principles to create products made of bits – from operating systems to encyclopedias
• Open Platforms – Inviting participation of external partners to build new tools, leverage databases, or invent applications
• Ideagoras – Giving companies access to a global marketplace of ideas and uniquely qualified minds to extend their problem-solving capacity, and
• Prosumer Communities – Giving customers the tools they need to participate in value creation.

The examples in Wikinomics – many of them unique and compelling examples of new companies – illustrate what the science fiction writer William Gibson has said: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

But the advantages of Web 2.0 are not confined to “new economy” companies, nor to those full of Gen Y workers. The business use and resulting benefits of the new tools of collaboration are available to any organization – even the most traditionally hierarchical and siloed. As Andy McAfee writes in his upcoming book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, due out this fall, “the story of how businesses use technology is about to become a lot more interesting.”

The key for all organizations is to reframe collaboration not as something to do in addition to other priorities – but as a fundamental way to address all business priorities. There is little on any corporate agenda today that will not benefit from mobilizing people with widely diverse skills and views to work together effectively. This capability is:

• The key to successful innovation – bringing ideas together that have never before been combined
• The core opportunity for re-thinking obsolete business models
• An essential element of employee engagement – creating commitment and stimulating discretionary effort
• A powerful tool for strengthening the customer experience and your brand presence
• New possibilities for continued efficiency through shared learning and new approaches.

Granted, shifting to collaboration can be difficult. Reshaping a hierarchical organization into a collaborative enterprise goes against the grain of five centuries of Western tradition. It requires that we move yet further away from cultures based on loyalty, reciprocated with protection and care, and that we give us the notion of individual autonomy. It will mean accepting performance-based arrangements and recognizing our mutual interdependence.

Collaboration asks individuals to step up to a higher and more complicated level of contribution than was necessary in a hierarchy. It challenges us to interact with peers in new and unfamiliar ways – negotiating directly rather than running to a boss for protection or arbitration; dealing with rich content that flows through infinite links.

But the business opportunity presented by collaboration is substantial, in part, because it is difficult. Mastering collaboration presents the opportunity for significant competitive advantage. Old approaches (scope, scale, cost), although always important, add little value. As technology enables a very different level of performance, smart competition will shift the playing field. This train is leaving the station.

As recently as six months ago, the question may have been how best to “manage collaborative technologies” – how to experiment with interesting new applications inside a traditional organizational design. Today, the bar rising. Today is about managing the enterprise collaboratively – solving business problems through collaboration – achieving business outcomes through collaboration.

Don’t get left standing on the platform.

SONAR technology from Trampoline systems visually maps out the informal network within an organization and helps people connect to experts and resources on-demand. Personally, I think any company serious about collaboration should have something like this installed. Check out the video for a guided tour from Charles himself:

UnHub is a social network aggregator (inspired by the Skittles social network marketing campaign). The UnHub Personal Profile Bar is a quick easy way for individuals or small businesses to consolidate existing facets of their digital selves or establish a brand online using free social networking tools. The newer edition to UnHub is the Personal Link Shortener – a neat way to stamp your brand on a link and track the social network buzz around links that you share. Given the Twitter-generated surge in link shortening, I think this is an awesome way to add value to traditional link shortening services that typically mask provenance. Check out the preview below: