• Web 2.0 & Social computing behavior In many companies this is new ground for employee and technology policy. These policies outline expectations for employees’ communication and behavior when using Web 2.0 technology, not only on the job, but anytime they can be identified as employees of the corporation. Today, everyone with an online presence is in a sense (or may be perceived to be) a spokesperson for the company. Every day brings news stories of people and organizations learning the new rules of the road the hard way, ranging from silly (bad-mouthing the boss on Facebook after you’ve “friended” him) to the serious (discussing product plans or arguing product quality with competitors on online forums). Remember, employees have always had the ability to pick up a phone or send out an email with unacceptable company content. The difference in the 2.0 world is the breadth and speed of the channel. News, true or untrue, spreads very fast. A few years ago Yahoo announced a reduction in the workforce but did not publicly disclose what parts of the organization were affected. However, upset employees posted notes online and it became clear quite quickly what groups were involved. A Web 2.0 policy and diligent use agreement may not have changed the Yahoo situation but it could have substantially decreased the amount of traffic initially posted. Far better to establish some basic rules of the road than to keep learning the hard way, or try to close the road altogether.

• Self-service rights and responsibilities As employees are permitted more control over their computing set-ups, they need to understand the limits of what they can do on their own and the responsibilities they are assuming, especially if self-service extends to hardware purchase, configuration, or service; software selection and maintenance; vendor contracts (e.g., for telecom services); and any facets of systems administration (e.g., backup and recovery). Define what employees must or can do on their own. Also define the flip-side – what they can not do or must seek help with.

• Laptop and PDA configurations This is a more technical policy companion to self-service rights. The approach may vary by employee segment. For technologically adept employees, those who are self-sufficient and really want to manage their computing environments, define the basic standards and protocols that must be met in order to operate with the corporate infrastructure. For those who are technologically capable but not gung-ho, define a limited number of packages (hardware, software, communications) from which to choose. The packages may be attuned to roles (e.g., sales) or work patterns (e.g., road warriors). For those who don’t want the responsibility, a standard company configuration should still be an option.

• Vendor and license management This is another set of adjustments driven by the two points above, self-service and variable configurations. Does the company want to purchase hardware and license software in bulk for the sake of volume discounts, then resell or reissue to employees? Or really get out of the provisioning business and let employees serve themselves, but set up standing arrangements with key vendors (e.g., for discounts in return for guaranteed volume, or for group service plans)?

Of course, most of these policies are not brand new. Many companies are building on existing policies and adding information about new technologies, primarily email and the internet in general. Now is a good time to review your policy set and expand it to include Web 2.0 tools. Chances are you will also need to revisit your guidelines around information, IP, and privacy as well. As the market continues to add new ways of sharing information and collaborating with each other, enterprises need to keep up by recognizing trends early, learning about the implications on their businesses and ensuring that policies morph as quickly as employees’ computing environments do. Click the link to read more about the Redefining Employee Computing study.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directed by Ivo Gormley, the film explores how the web is changing the many ways in which we can organize ourselves. From a democratic football club where the fans pick the team to a lending service where everyone can be a bank manager, Us Now brings together the leading thinkers in the field of participation and web culture to describe how mass collaboration could change society. As the co-author of Wikinomics:  How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, I was asked by Ivo Gormley to participate.

The UK documentary had its North American premiere 2½ months ago in Toronto.  One of many attending the premiere was Ruby Ku, a self-described 20-something SciBus student at the University of Waterloo.  Ruby was good enough to track down the URLs for many groups featured in the film:

1. School of Everything – a website that helps people who want to learn meet up with people who want to teach.
2. Zopa – a market place where people lend and borrow money to and from each other, sidestepping the banks.
3. Couchsurfing – a worldwide network making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit; participate in a better world, one couch at a time.
4. The People Speak – a campaign to engage young people on the global issues that will shape their future – an initiative from the United Nations Foundation.
5. Slice The Pie – a music financing company that aggregates thousands of people’s opinions about upcoming bands and allows fans to invest in producing albums.
6. MyFootballClub – join members from over 80 countries who own Ebbsfleet United and vote on all key decisions from team selection to financial budgets.
7. Mumsnet – a social enterprise + community of parents sharing their know-hows on the net and meeting up in real-life.
8. Open Everything – global conversation about the art, science, and the spirit of “open.”

It would be great to see the documentary go viral.  If you haven’t seen the film, please give it a try.  And if you like it (which you will) tell as many friends as you can.

The Institute is dedicated to keeping the profession abreast of new techniques, new media and new practices. Promoting best practice, the Institute works to increase marketing’s contribution to business, while reducing its cost, through:

* Assisting the lifetime professional development of those engaged in direct, data and digital marketing
* Providing thought-leadership and disseminating best practice
* Setting and promoting global standards of professionalism

One of the best ways to do this is by enabling people to collaborate remotely. Much of the technology is already available – Blackberries, laptops, teleconference and telepresence systems allow for work to be done virtually anywhere. Similarly, Web 2.0 tools can help remote teams stay in touch and collaborate. The savings from a more distributed workforce strategy can be great, both in terms of financial and environmental impact.

One of the leaders in this area is Sun Microsystems, where half of the company’s employees work remotely at least some of the time. The company’s Open Work Platform has allowed it to reduce office space by a sixth while increasing worker productivity by a third. The move has also been good for the environment, preventing 29 000 tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere by employees driving to work.

Most companies still do not have the capability to effectively collaborate remotely, but many are experimenting with more flexible approaches to work. As cash strapped businesses look for ways to lower costs by cutting back on travel and offloading physical infrastructure the environmentally friendly virtual workplace might become a perfect option.

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

I look forward to reading your thoughts on this new approach to the global marketplace.

If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles – and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me – if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.

TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:

Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.

This sounds fair enough – having a single company break the platform repeatedly would seem to be a problem. However, WL vehemently disagrees with this assessment. If you read through the emails they point the finger for whatever platform problems exist squarely at Ning (particularly highlighting when Ning implemented Dojo changes that broke many applications without bothering to inform any of their partner developers in advance). They also indicate the shutdown may be more about anti-competitive behavior (a.k.a. they’re making too much money and Ning wants it, and/or Ning is worried they’ll lose customers and revenue going forward). From their POV, this was a win-win-win relationship, and they don’t understand why Ning would do this unless there were ulterior motives.

What’s the truth? it’s hard to say without knowing EVERYTHING that’s gone on, but it’s even harder to say Ning has went about anything in the right way. If you work through the email train, there is an ongoing (if occasionally heated) dialog through to August 7th between Spencer Forman at WL and CEO Gina Bianchini of Ning, at which point she indicates the communication will be handed off to Jay for technical issues, Bob Goorah (general counsel) for the terms of service, and Jason Rosenthal for business conversations (who was starting on the 15th). The next email in the chain is this:

Dear Spencer,
I am writing to inform you that your network (widgetlaboratory.ning.com) and third party applications have been removed for violations of our Terms of Service. Please direct all correspondence regarding this matter to my attention. Thank you.
Bob Ghoorah
General Counsel
Ning, Inc.

So much for business and technical I guess – only the lawyer now, and there appears to be no interest in finding an amicable solution. WL, as noted, has posted the email correspondence on the web. Ning’s initial public response, in contrast, was this:

This morning we removed WidgetLaboratory, a third party application developer, from the Ning Platform for violating Ning’s Terms of Service. WidgetLaboratory provided independently developed applications that could be added to a social network on the Ning Platform by a Network Creator. While we try to be as transparent as possible, it’s our long standing policy not to comment on specific cases where we remove networks or third party developers from the Ning Platform so we will not be providing any additional details publicly.

You have to love that – we try to be as transparent as possible… but we’re not going to tell you anything. How transparent. Lawyer Bob continued to respond to several emails from Spencer, and helpfully reminded him of the terms of service:

Ning has the right (at its sole discretion) to delete or deactivate your account, block your email or IP address, or otherwise terminate your access to or use of the Ning Platform or any Network, or remove and discard any Code or Content within any Network, without notice and for any reason.

While legally this is very clear, one has to imagine that setting a precedent of unilaterally shutting down the most successful widget provider on the platform might not be good for encouraging other developers, or encouraging customers to pay for premium services that could/ will quickly be axed. If you read through the responses on various blog posts (including this one on the Ning developer platform), you see this come up repeatedly – and you notice that most seem to be on WL’s side.

Gina later posted a more thorough response which has some more positive responses – though it’s interesting to note many users seemed to be asking for Ning to offer them the applications that WL used to offer them, which is a very slippery slope indeed. It’s even more slippery when Gina notes that:

Our focus at this point is in assisting Network Creators in finding alternatives to features that they may have been using from WidgetLaboratory. If we could fill these holes today, we would. We will start this effort shortly.

There’s no way around it – this looks really bad. It’s bad to have a model where 3rd party players are encouraged to get involved, grow a business with valuable offerings they develop and prove, and then get shut down while the “parent” company and customers clamor over replacements for them. Not sure how that can be sugarcoated.

There’s also another wrinkle in this – if you check out the August 7th email, you’ll note that one of Ning’s other complaints is that WL sometimes asks for user names and passwords, which is also against the terms of service. WL points out that they do this as a service for paying customers, who WANT to provide it to them, so they can go in there and… diagnose and trouble shoot problems with their licensed and purchased products. That seems perfectly sensible, and again to everyone’s benefit – but apparently Ning does not agree. Even while complaining that WL code regularly breaks down and hurts the network. Curious.

So overall there are a lot of disconnects here, and as more information comes out it might clear up – but I doubt it. I think it’s fair to say at this point that if you want to learn how to deal with such “open” development platforms and partnerships, do pretty much the opposite of what Ning did. Even if they had to shut down WL, they could have went about it in a far better way. Secondly, saying that you try to be transparent, and then sharing nothing, is dumb. Finally, if it’s the innovation of 3rd party developers that is helping your company so much, you really have to think about what the long-term implications are when you unilaterally axe your top performer and then very shortly after that talk about replacing their offerings being your top priority.

During recessions company’s start to hunker down, prepare to weather the storm. We have seen this in our clients in terms of budget cuts, hiring freeze’s and even more aggressive staffing cutbacks. Regardless of the how you spin it, downsizing, streamlining or put more transparently ‘layoffs’, the point is that organization are looking to cut costs and do more (or at least the same) with less.

Personally this seems to be a perfect opportunity for Web 2.0 tools and technologies to further penetrate the enterprise. Collaborative tools are a lightweight, low cost technology designed to drive faster communication, more efficient collaboration and greater transparency in organizations. If you are an organization trying to do more with less this would seem to be the ideal solution.

Unfortunately, for most individuals change is scary, and taking a risk with your career or organization during unstable financial times isn’t the most enticing option. However, I think this means that the opportunity to create competitive advantage and differentiation become are even greater. In have highlighted four areas that leading organizations could look to exploit the benefits of collaborative tools.

• Connecting and leveraging internal resources – For large organizations dealing with limited internal resources (or in some cases poorly allocated resources after cutbacks) the ability to connect to and leverage internal knowledge and expertise will be extremely valuable.
• Measure twice and cut once – In organizations many times information is horded and work is duplicated. If organizations can utilize collaborative tools to increase organizations transparency and promote collaboration they should be able to operate in a much more efficient manner. Think of the benefits of being able to complete 10 or 15 percent of your project from preexisting work.
• Marketing in a 2.0 way – I think it will be tempting for many organizations to revert back to their tried and true marketing channels in tough economic times. Investing money where they have established metrics is safe from a job security standpoint, but doesn’t make sense given the direction we see marketing and the customer relationship moving
• Attracting and retaining talent – Yes, I know in a recession and the labour market isn’t exactly tight, but that is today. Look five, or even three years out in your organization and think about how that workforce will change. As the Baby Boomers retire organization will need to be able to attract and retain Net Generation employees. Creating a dynamic and collaborative working environment is one way to accomplish that.

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, rather something to get you thinking about how to proactively deal with the economic environment using Web 2.0 tools. Agree? Disagree? let me know if you have other thoughts and ideas.

The current Jericho model of security (fitting name) is great a putting up impermeable walls to keep to dangers outside at bay, but not so at quickly adapting and reconfiguring them. Even inside the walls of the enterprise security has largely been based on group permission. Which is just a step up from the one size fits all XXXL t-shirts that get blasted out of an air gun at sporting events.

The problem is that organizations today need to be agile, reconfigurable, be able to leverage partners and third party expertise. Unfortunately to operate in this new environment security and permissions need to be dynamic and flexible both internally and externally. To become a next generation enterprise it will be increasingly important to both empower and trust employees when it comes to information and security decisions.

My feeling is that in moving beyond the current model for information security is going to take a little bit of technology and a lot of trust. Web 2.0 tools and the Net Generation will both be additional factors that push the issue to the forefront at leading organizations. Companies will need to move to a model of ‘decentralized security’, which I see as basically allowing users to manage their own security permissions. Organizations will first start experimenting with information inside the firewall, but eventually they will need to evolve and extend beyond the walls of the enterprise.

Take the simple example of sharing a proposal. In a traditional organization that would be done via email, perhaps a networked drive, or more sophisticated reporting tools. The problem is that in all of those cases the permissions for the document have predefined by the system (ok except email, but we all know that is not the best way to share something with and organization). IT predetermined who should see the document even though they have no idea what it contains (nor do they care). A good wiki product will allow an employee to set permissions they decide are appropriate based on the content in the document, not to mention tag it so others can actually find it.

Allowing users to manage their own security permissions may seem like common sense, but in the IT world we are still a ways away. Luckily organizations are currently recruiting a generation of security 2.0 experts. Net Gener’s are constantly granting permissions, blocking harmful people and materials and managing spam filters. Now with Facebook’s feature that enables social graphs, they are controlling the access and permissions of hundreds of their friends, colleagues and family members to their personal information. They decide on who to allow to view various content, use specific applications and access certain areas of their profile. They can define access levels on a group or individual basis. Should I stop? Sounds a lot like they are taking network admin 101 to me? The bottom line is that they will be a generation of employees that has been developing some skills and thought patterns that will be portable to a decentralized security environment.

Although comedic in nature, these diagrams give you something to think about. How much of the criticsms of Enterprise 2.0 out there are well-founded? Argued by people who have actually tried to use the technology, and how much of it is just ‘hot air‘ based on peoples’ perceptions.

Three of my favourites:

I encourage you to go to the original post and view all 10 charts.

I believe you can love what you do at work.

When I look at the sore subjects of work – email overload, unfocused meetings, and the confusion & misunderstandings that drag down projects – I see opportunity. A grand opportunity to take a step back, get a clear perspective on what really matters, and fix these things so that work can become meaningful and fulfilling.

Hi, I’m Stewart Mader, and I’m pleased to have been invited to guest blog with the Wikinomics team. That paragraph above is from my blog Grow Your Wiki, and it’s my call to action to people inside organizations who feel disempowered by existing tools and business processes.

I’ve been working with wikis for five years, ever since I built my first wiki community for collaborative science curriculum development, and I think the paradigm shift it represents – direct user editing of the content on a web page – is as significant as the Internet itself. When Tim Berners-Lee created the WorldWideWeb, he envisioned it as a “creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext (info.cern.ch)” and wikis enable people to do just that.

Growing wiki use in your organization is worthwhile because it creates an environment where everyone is empowered to directly make things happen, which gives people a deeper sense of purpose and accomplishment. That’s not something I can say for most other tools, like email. It’s essential if you want to build a successful new venture, or ensure the relevance and success of an existing organization in this rapidly changing world.

This is the first in a series of guest posts, and in the next one I’ll discuss how a wiki can address the growing problem of lost productivity because of interruptions during work. Have you ever said this? “I just can’t work in the office because there are too many interruptions and distractions.” If so, my next post might be able to help.

Like many of my colleagues (which helps explain the temporarily low blog post count), I’ve been busy at our Enterprise 2.0 conference today – so I thought this mash up would be appropriate. As always, the original can be found at www.dilbert.com.

Enabled by Google’s tremendous index of online data, mobile and landline users can now call 1-800-GOOG-411 and by following the queued prompts, receive the phone number, address and even a map of a desired business anywhere in the United States and Canada.

One of the first questions that came to mind when reading about this service when it was launched in 2007 was “What’s in it for Google?“ Despite the fact that the retrieval of such data is a natural extension using Google’s readily-available data and capabilities, it was not immediately clear why Google would provide such a service for free when local phone providers charge anywhere from $0.75 to $1.50 for similar, if not lesser services.

Therein lies the beauty of the service for Google – Google engineers, who were seeking to develop a top-notch search tool for speech content within audio and video clips needed to amass an incredible library of phonemes (small units of sound, spoken in a particular voice, with a particular intonation) to be able to enhance their speech-to-text model.  The GOOG-411 service provided just the tool to obtain such meta-data.

(This is similar to Google’s Beta Image Labeler, which creates a “game” whereby users are paired with a partner and receive points for the depth of matching descriptions given to selected on-screen images, thereby helping to increase the accuracy of Google’s image search.)

While the service is still in its very early stages in Canada, (the record for recognition of requests is still spotty, at best) I am currently in Boston at our nGenera Enterprise 2.0 conference and so naturally, I decided to give the service a try as soon as I arrived.  The results on the U.S. system are much more precise, due to the refinement that has come with the program’s increased U.S. lifespan.

What do you think about GOOG-411?  Is it creative innovation?  Another great use of Web 2.0 tools to harness mass collaboration?  Does the idea of having your voice recorded and attached as meta-data to your phone number bother you?

For about as long as corporations have been the dominant form of value creation in society, they have been viewed as enemies by social activists. Naomi Klein’s No Logo documents the rise of a social movement in the 1990s that is specifically anti-corporation. The 2003 book and film The Corporation has taught a generation of socially concerned youth that corporations act, by flawed design, like psychopaths. “The corporate model is broken and must be changed,” is perhaps one of the most unifying mantras across the diverse range of social activists.

And here’s this guy Ben, starting a network for social change, and he incorporated it? Did he not get the memo?

Actually, I believe that this is an example of a much larger trend that is remaking the model of the corporation, blurring the line between businesses and NGOs, redistributing corporate power from shareholders to communities, and marking the beginning of a post-capitalist society.

Change.org isn’t about making money, Ben told me, but it has equity investors and a “sound business model.” The site is free and has no advertising. But rather than support themselves by raising money, they charge NGOs for some higher-end consulting services, and use that revenue to pay for the rest of their work. The hope is that their business model will allow them to become completely self-sufficient.

Change.org acts like a business, and has a business model that could be used to make money, but chooses to be concerned with social rather than monetary profit. The same idea is found in micro lending: small loans given to entrepreneurs in developing countries. These loans make money, but more importantly, they create social value.

As NGOs become more business-like, businesses are becoming more socially-responsive, because their power is being redistributed from shareholders to communities. Wikinomics argues that businesses’ value is increasingly coming from their communities. As corporations own fewer and fewer physical assets and lose their ability to control their intellectual property, employees and customers are able to bypass shareholders and recreate a business in a new image overnight. This is even more true in an era where value is created by prosumers and outside-collaborators.

In order to keep their communities, businesses need to make the case that they are contributing to positive social change. A global talent crunch is forcing corporations to compete over employees, and one of the biggest sells is providing jobs that have a meaningful social impact. Customers are increasingly making socially-informed purchases, and increased transparency is giving them more information to do so than ever before.

Naomi Klein and others saw the rise of socially-concerned brands like Starbucks, Apple, Nike, etc. as a corruption of progressive values. But what has been overlooked is the fact that, in creating these brands, these companies have handed over power from shareholders to consumers.

When Greenpeace launched its GreenMyApple campaign to get apple to become more environmentally friendly, they did not attack the company, but created a community of appreciative Apple customers who wanted the company to do a better job at espousing their values. And guess what, they won.

We are moving to an era where NGOs behave like corporations, social activists collaborate with the businesses they are trying to change, and companies get their value from their ability to attract collaborators by showing how much social good they are doing. The corporation will survive, but it will be controlled not by the owners of capital (shareholders), but by the community it serves.

Officially, IT analyst firms are a $2.5 billion dollar business, of which about $1 billion belongs to the industry behemoth Gartner. As impressive as this number might seem, it represents only a fraction of the total IT analysis actually being traded. There is a social media undercurrent running just below the surface of the IT analysis industry—call it “IT Analysis 2.0” or “Open Source Analysis,”—where insightful content is not bought and sold, but rather offered up for free…

Like MySpace and YouTube in the entertainment industry, the social media undercurrent in the IT analysis industry is threatening to build up to tsunami proportions.

… my point is that online research reports and white papers – like a great deal of other digital content – are becoming commoditized. Open source analyst firms understand this and are disrupting the market by offering basic content for free and shifting revenue models to value-added services.

Officially, IT analyst firms are a $2.5 billion dollar business, of which about $1 billion belongs to the industry behemoth Gartner. As impressive as this number might seem, it represents only a fraction of the total IT analysis actually being traded. There is a social media undercurrent running just below the surface of the IT analysis industry—call it “IT Analysis 2.0” or “Open Source Analysis,”—where insightful content is not bought and sold, but rather offered up for free. Examples include enterprises like RedMonk, Freeform Dynamics, MWD, and Enterprise Irregulars, as well as community-driven sites such as IT Toolbox and Wikibon (IT analysis a la Wikipedia).

Like MySpace and YouTube in the entertainment industry, the social media undercurrent in the IT analysis industry is threatening to build up to tsunami proportions. Witness the most recent Institute of Industry Analyst Relations poll results below. While the top three analyst firms are predictable, open source analyst firms RedMonk and Freeform Dynamics are making significant gains. Notably, two of the top five individual analysts are from RedMonk.

Source: Institute of Industry Analyst Relations

This is not surprising. Traditional IT analyst firms are supported by a faltering business model characterized by low net margins (in the 5% to 10% range), a high cost of sales (~30%), and a sticker price in the $100,000 range for access to research and analysis. In contrast, RedMonk’s research is free and clients pay only for advisory and consulting as needed. Blogging and providing free content lets individual analysts build credibility that they can then use to market their services. This allows individuals such as Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble, Om Malik, and Jakob Nielsen to generate more traffic than established companies like Gartner (see below).

Sites like IT Toolbox (with over 1.3 million members) offer community support and peer-to-peer advice at no cost. Even forward-thinking trade sites like CIO.com have developed strong expert-moderated communities that act as trusted sources of advice. It isn’t happening yet, but I think there’s also an opportunity for the vendor community to get involved at a more intimate level in the open source analyst push. By participating in, and contributing to these shared online spaces vendors can offer advice, gain credibility among users, and learn about customer preferences (think Sermo’s or PatientsLikeMe’s business model).

What’s the greatest service analyst firms provide? They help you arrive at a decision. In fact, the ability to arrive at a decision—any decision—is often more important than the quality of the decision itself or the process used to arrive at the decision. As I’ve learned from first-hand experience, oftentimes companies use analyst firms as therapists that help them justify decisions they need to make so they can get on with the day-to-day affair of executing on projects and fighting fires. Glossy reports with “magic” geometric shapes are certainly visually appealing and help when justifying decision-making to superiors, but there’s an argument to be made that a Magic 8-Ball might work just as well when selecting a vendor from a shortlist. As Gartner itself so eloquently put it, “To Save Time on Product Selection, Flip a Coin.”

Ok, so I’m being a purposely irreverent, but my point is that online research reports and white papers – like a great deal of other digital content – are becoming commoditized. Open source analyst firms understand this and are disrupting the market by offering basic content for free and shifting revenue models to value-added services. It’s essentially the same model used by Linux (free software, pay for services) and cell phone companies (free phones, pay for services). Let’s fee if the rest of the analyst community catches on.

The business model savior of Web 2.0 may come in the form of Enterprise 2.0. According to Forrester, companies are set to spend $5 billion on social networking by 2013. The report also states that 56% of North American companies see Web 2.0 as high priority in 2008. The urgency is well founded as companies struggle to give their employees tools that they already use on the open internet and have come to expect in the workplace. However, in contrast to tools on the open internet, companies need to pay much more attention to things like information quality and security, compliance, current business processes and decision making structures. Hence the opportunity for Web 2.0 companies to customize and create offerings that take into account the unique needs of the Enterprise 2.0. Lucrative subscription and software sales revenues will follow. Can you say Facebook Inside?

I feel what differentiates visualization from a static graph or a chart is the ability or the users to manipulate and control the inputs and outputs of the tool. The first case I came across was a tool called Liveplasma and it allows users to visualize and expand their music/movie preferences by leveraging the data in the Amazon cloud. Sarah Perez at recently put up a great blog post about ‘The Best Tools for Visualization” that goes over a wide range of different tools and their uses.

If visualization is so powerful and useful, how can you get them into the hands of your employees? It only makes sense to arm them with the with tools that will allow them to make better decisions and exploit all of the information that corporations are now capturing. I was pointed to a tool called ‘TheBrain‘ a few weeks ago and I have included a quick blurb and an example of one of the solutions you could use it for below.

TheBrain software enables helpdesk and IT managers to organize and share all relevant information online quickly and easily. Using TheBrain’s visual interface you can see all related issues and solutions. See a complete mapping of your IT network so you immediately know what server runs what application and the impact of any changes.

While the example above is rather simple (a user defined interactive tag/knowledge cloud), you can see that benefits this would have for IT HelpDesk staff. The key for organizations will be to open up information and databases to these new visualization tools and widgets. There is so much untapped potential residing in most companies and I believe that organizations that figure this out early will see marked improvement.

Looking at The Wire from a purely technical standpoint you notice that over the course of the series the ‘drug dealers’ are always weighing the cost of efficient communication against the criminal liability of having their conversations and interactions recorded. In many cases defaulting to face-to-face meetings in order to assure that the remain free from prosecution.

Unfortunately, I am seeing the same mentality used in organizations when it comes to technology and web 2.0 tools. Enabling employees to communicate, collaborate, efficiently share information and provide value across the business should be seen as a god send by organizations. However, many companies have been operating under the mindset that ‘ignorance is bliss’ especially when it comes to ‘legal liability’.

Take for example a company that produces widgets, and during the development process employees are used to help test the widgets. They use Web 2.0 tools that enable employees to report errors and potential improvements, interacting directly with engineers to help improve design and speed up development cycles. The problem is that from a legal standpoint the information captured from the process could mean that the organization would now be liable for all of the errors and improvements captured, even the ones it deemed ‘acceptable’. Ironically something that would increase value for both the organization and the consumer becomes harder to manage because of legal liability.

This leads to some organizations taking a street inspired approach to communication. Now we have things like ‘information life cycles’ that are aimed more at removing potentially damaging information that saving space on the server (think of it as digital shredding). Basically, the less efficiently you track you communications and expose your flaws the safer you are. Employees shouldn’t feel the need to send Blackberry PIN messages and shy away from documenting information especially when they are acting in what the think is the best interest of the organization.

I think it will be interesting to see how corporations and the legal system adapt in the coming years.

The theme of FASTforward 08 was ‘the user revolution’ and it is the user/employee that is at the center of successful Web 2.0 solutions. The theory is that because employees are now informationalizing your IT systems being a fast follower is more difficult. The reason for this is two fold. First, implementation is no longer a matter of rolling out the tools, but rather convincing employees to adopt a collaborative mindset and way of working. Second, in the past the success of an ERP or CRM rollout revolved around a small team of experts and consultants which could to a certain extent be replicated by another organization. With collaborative tools success hinges on the entire organization contributing and developing the tools.

Look at some of the mainstays in the Web 2.0 suit of technologies – wikis, blogs, social networks, tags, RSS, predictive markets. The collaborative, social, user generated nature of these tools makes it almost impossible to duplicate the value from one organization to another. Sure, technically speaking it’s simple to install and configure Web 2.0 tools, but when you are talking about information technology, getting the information into those tools is an art form. This means that organizations that can leverage Web 2.0 technologies will gain competitive advantage based on the skill in which they use those technologies.

Some of you may already be familiar with IBM’s “Extreme Blue” internship program, which was started by a woman named Jane Harper at IBM who went out on her own — a maverick — and created the skunkworks within IBM that eventually grew to become a formal, companywide initiative. As “Mavericks at Work” author Polly LaBarre asked on the Today Show, why would any young, talented person work for IBM today when they can work for a Google or similar company? Worried about that very phenomenon, IBM expanded a few years ago on the nascent ideas of its maverick employee to create a program for eager, talented NGeners that’s now worldwide. In 12-week internships, NGeners work on real-world projects in one of 14 labs and have been responsible for more than 60 open-source products and more than 360 patent disclosures.

So to answer the question about how established companies compete with newer ones in an Enterprise 2.0 world, one of the answers is to take risks and start small. IBM proved it’s a formula that can work.