In 2004, Walt DuLaney and I conducted a longitudinal examination of business growth and cumulative revenue performance.  Among the success factors, we found that companies with powerful business platforms outperformed peers in cumulative revenue growth over a 15 year period.  Our conclusion: business platforms can be a means for organizational renewal, continuous innovation, and sustainable success.

Since then, the sophistication of business platforms and their related ecosystems has expanded and other companies have found success. In the case of Apple, competitors were forced to launch competitive platforms in response (Google’s Android, Symbian Foundation, and RIM) while Apple collected competitive profits.  A growing body of experience indicates that business platforms coupled with an ecosystem of partners can produce superior economic value.  As those partners cooperate and work together they collectively learn, innovate and expand their options for new product features, additional partnerships, and new platform components.  The platform plus the ecosystem becomes a sustainable economic engine for growth and development.

Here are twelve success factors for business platforms based on our work at nGenera Insight.  The first seven are business-related success factors.  The second five are technology-success factors.  The list reflects current understanding and is far from comprehensive.  Nonetheless, it provides a starting point for companies interested in sustainable growth.

BUSINESS SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Leadership, Vision and Purpose – No surprise.  All successful platforms begin with leadership, vision and a clear persistent purpose.  Wal-Mart’s logistic system implemented in 1993, now over 16 years old established the foundation to manage an increasingly complex distribution model, provide a basis to involve partners in category management and drive sustainable efficiencies in the retail industry.  GE’s aircraft engine maintenance platform supported the collection of real-time in-flight engine telemetry data that in turn provided information to customers and ultimately supported concurrent design of their next generation engines.
2. A Vibrant Ecosystem – An ecosystem is an economic community.  An ecosystem thrives when all parties experience mutual economic benefit.  Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has produced 100,000 apps.  In an ecosystem, motivated, persistent participation and contribution is driven by enlightened self-interest which benefits the whole.  The business platform provides the architecture, policies, rules, transactional frameworks, and the information necessary for the ecosystem to operate.
3. Competitive Velocity – How does a company outcompete its rivals and grow?  Move faster.  Salesforce.com revolutionized the CRM business, not only providing a better deal, but also delivering more new functionality per unit time than their competitors like Siebel, Oracle and SAP.  IBM got platform and ecosystem fever with Linux.  By investing in the Linux platform, its world-wide development community, and its related ecosystem, IBM was able to grow a new operating system faster than it could do by itself and enlist more developers than it could possibly afford.
4. Extensible Business Architecture — Business platforms must be conceived, from the outset, as an unfinished masterpiece.  Extensibility means learning.  The difference between an applications project and a business platform is that a business platform is never finished.  When a platform is finished it is at the end of its life.  Learning creates new directions and options.  New options create new opportunities for growth, alternative futures and other avenues for competitive action.  Amazon’s original on-line retail platform evolved into other businesses such as Marketplace, Web Services, and most recently cloud computing with their Elastic Compute Cloud offering.
5. Transparency — Transparency fosters beneficial contagion and excitement among the ecosystem members and interested parties.  An examination of any successful business platform reveals alternative futures.  Alternative future means options.  Options can be valued and hence the investment community can estimate the expected value of such potential futures and model a resulting perpetuity calculation.  Transparency attracts new partners and helps existing ecosystem partners to co-create the future of business platform.  As momentum builds, transparency also strikes fear in the competitors.
6. Policies and Rules — Policies and rules are essential otherwise chaos reigns and the platform and related ecosystem dies.  The business platform becomes the repository and the enforcer of policies and rules.  The business platform also communicates changes in rules. Consider the rules propagated and enforced in the iPhone ecosystem, or the Android ecosystem through the hardware architecture, operating system architecture, the business architecture and the rules and policies for these respective ecosystems.
7. Analytics — Business platforms generate prodigious amount of data continuously.  One of the most powerful advantages of a business platform stems from the collection and analysis of strategic, situational, transactional and detailed usage data.  As the data is collected powerful visualization and analytic tools can provide a combination of real-time and longitudinal analyses.  The closed-loop nature of the data collection process inherent in the business platform enable the platform leaders and ecosystem partners to run experiments, continuously improve products and rapidly evaluate potential business strategies and directions.  It is very difficult to duplicate this type of analytic capability in a non-platform business model.

TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Open technology architecture – Open architectures provide the basis for future options and business platform extensibility.  Open means that other technological standards can interface with the business platform, even technologies that have yet to be invented.  Remember, business value is ultimately determined by the market’s assessment of future viability and the promise of future value.  If the business platform is based only on a few proprietary or close technology architectures, future business options will be limited.
2. Component based – “assembly required.” Most business platforms consist of a collection of open, custom and proprietary application engines.  From a technological perspective, it is cheaper and more effective for a platform to be assembled from the evolving marketplace of technological components.  A component based approach in an open source, open architecture and cloud computing environment also means that companies can enter the business platform space for less cost and minimal proprietary software development.
3. Scalable – Google has scaled from it beginnings.  At the outset the Googleplex consisted of hundreds of servers.  Today the Googleplex is estimated to consist of over a million servers.  Google’s business platform and technology platform was designed from the outset to scale.
4. Sensing capability – Sensors in products (e.g. aircraft engines, cell phones, elevators) and sensing capabilities in key aspect of the business platform’s infrastructure provides a level of detailed data not possible in standard business models.  Almost all successful business platforms, whether product based, or service-based have a sophisticated network of sensors that collects real-time data.
5. Location agnostic – Business platforms operate to deliver their product or services to the customer at the right place, at the right time in the best possible way.  Successful business platforms eliminate the constraint of place.  Dion Hinchcliffe notes in a recent post that the popularity of mobile apps is transforming the Internet and replacing the web because they provide the right type of interaction for the user at the right time. Whether it is a mobile app or another delivery vehicle, smart business platforms live by being location agnostic.

Taken together these twelve factors provide a basis to begin a quest for sustainable growth.  What is your view?  Are business platforms a new basis for business growth and success?  Will all companies need to be a part of a platform or a platform leader?

Do you have plans for a business platform in your future?

Many of our ideas about organizations and leaders were formed at a time when the primary operational challenge was one of getting people to perform tasks consistently and reliably. We leveraged best practices to achieve a uniform approach. We required that everyone be present in the same place and time, in some cases to get the work done, but at a minimum to allow us to gauge performance by watching in-process activities.

But more and more of the work that differentiates our businesses today depends on divergent or creative activities. Our challenge is one of creating environments that encourage people to become engaged, to take initiative, invest discretionary effort in a wide variety of collaborative activities, and, as a result, develop new approaches and ideas, provide extraordinary customer service, or ramp productivity. Think of this challenge as one of setting the stage, creating an environment that engages players from multiple constituencies. It is a “pull” rather than “push” approach to achieving business results.

Does your organization have the processes and practices, the leadership skills and the relationships among participants that you’ll need? Do you have the capacity to collaborate?

Over the last several years, our research has identified the characteristics of organizations that are successful at collaborative activity. With extensive data from teams from around the world, we identified ten factors that are highly correlated with successful collaboration:

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
2. Trust-based relationships
3. Prevalence of networking opportunities
4. Collaborative hiring, development, and promotion practices
5. Organizational philosophy supporting “community of adults”
6. Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
7. Executive role models for collaboration
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
9. Well-defined individual roles and responsibilities
10. Important, challenging tasks

Investing in these ten enabling factors builds an organization’s Collaborative Capacity – its ability and willingness to share information, ideas and insights productively. Conversely, productive collaboration is unlikely to occur is these factors are not in place. A journey to leverage the benefits of collaboration in your business must begin with assessing and, as necessary, building your organization’s Collaborative Capacity.

Think of this like beginning a manufacturing business. One fundamental question you would face is whether you have the right manufacturing capacity. Do you have the right facility? Is it well-maintained? Do you have the right permits and disposal mechanisms in place? And so on. These questions would be the foundation required before you begin any specific manufacturing process.

Or, think of it like assessing the talent in your firm. Most of you probably do an annual review of your workforce, asking: Do we have enough people to deliver? Do they have the right skills and training? Are they engaged?

Assessing your Collaborative Capacity is similar to these two analogies. Do you have the beliefs, processes, behaviors – the things our well-grounded research has shown to have a statistically valid correlation to collaboration – in place as a foundation upon which to build?

In upcoming posts, I’ll share ways you can assess your organization’s Collaborative Capacity and some of the approaches successful companies are using to enhance these factors in their organizations.

Becoming a Collaborative Enterprise won’t just happen. Many of today’s processes and practices – and the culture within many organizations – are not ready to reap the benefits that the new collaboration can provide. The ability to collaborate can be a powerful competitive advantage – but doing it successfully requires the right organizational context.

If you’re interested in learning more about tools to assess or build your organization’s Collaborative Capacity, please let us know.

In this post I would like to share my experiences as a long-standing member of a niche video game community, Uniball, that has been independently run for over 10 years, throughout which there has been an incredible display of leadership, community resilience, social dynamics, and growth in function and prosperity.

Uniball 101
In order to understand the community you need to understand the game, because it is the focus point of all activity and of primary interest to members. Uniball is a simple, 2D game that is played with ships that move around a map, passing, juking, and bouncing a ball with the objective of scoring it into the opposing team’s net. There are typically two teams a side and for almost any major sport conceivable, parallels can be made to this game’s strategy, which is so rich that players will play for years without mastering the game.

The simple in-game controls, physics, and graphics belie a sophisticated and addictive game that has captured the hearts and … fingers of many, so much so that few people ever actually retire from the game. Many community members have played for 5+ years and know each other by name, skill, and reputation in this community population of about 300 active players, and total size of 1000.  Players are represented from all over the world, with major communities and servers in North America and Europe and yet the community is intensely close, and everyone knows who you are. So dedicated to the game are some, that statistics wise, the most active player plays an average of 20 twenty-four days a year (or about 10% of all waking time). There is also an interesting demographics story, which is that because dedicated players rarely quit, the average age of players has changed over time, from teens to early 20s. Few games have the longevity of Uniball, so it is an interesting study in how the community dynamic changes (e.g. general maturity, growth in skills/knowledge) as the people within it age and learn from the real world.

Community Organization
Although the game itself is the attraction, it is complemented by a variety of tools that allow the community to communicate and organize. First among these is a chat program that allows people to create and manage teams (“squads”), as well as discuss things publicly or in private rooms. This central chat tool is the backbone of the community as it allows users to converge and dialogue in a shared meeting space, while not playing, or during times of technical difficulty. Users’ squads compete against each other in sophisticated league competitions with professionally designed, interactive websites, where squads compete intensely for the ‘fame and glory’ of winning (community recognition). These leagues and other discussions are supported by a non-real time communication channel, Internet forums, which are useful for community announcements, and for tying together geographical communities less unified by time.

Community Governance
What is perhaps, most impressive of all, is the degree to which this community has been self sustaining, and independently run for over 10 years. Uniball was originally programmed by an individual who, before disengaging from the game, passed decision making control to a group of administrators. Over time this central government (“Administration” or “Admins”) had the authority to guide the community through turbulence related to user troublemaking, cheating, server outtages, and game development. Although the Admins staff and maintain their elite organization, they are still publicly accountable, and it is critical that users trust their decision making, lest they rebel and cause trouble. Thus, administrative actions are closely monitored by members of the community, as well as by other Admins, who are generally transparent in their dealings.

Community Development
Although the Administration is important from the perspective of authority, and mediating issues, much of the driving force behind the game is its users, who will go to great lengths to develop community or squad initiatives. Examples of these include programming interactive league websites or spin-offs of the game, developing playing manuals, as well as creating new maps, patches, and graphics. These user driven enhancements ensure that Uniball is continually refined.

Community Engagement
And although the administration and user contributions are important, what really drives the game, is competition. The aforementioned squads will compete for brand recognition (some squads are dynasties lasting 2, 3 and 5+ years) by recruiting and training players. These squads require leadership and top squads can have a strict recruitment process to recruit talent, involving sponsoring a new recruit, a voting process using private squad forums, a probationary period, as well as squad practice involving group and 1-on-1 coaching. A number of squads even use voice chat to communicate, for bonding, and for training, and over time many players develop deep ties with each other.

Uniball is a good game but what makes it great is the community element. Although people enjoy video games, it’s important to remember that people play in order to be entertained, and online entertainment is largely a social device. Communities exist in the real world, and online with people from the real world – I hope that this discussion has provided a small peak into that online world.

What about you? Have you considered yourself a member of an online community, video game or otherwise? Which community and what are some of the characteristics that you think speak to the community?

I came across an interesting article (props to Daniel Debow of Rypple) that goes against some of our research that asserts that gamers (specifically players of World of Warcraft) bring great value and advanced leadership into the workplace.

From the article:

“[The job recruiter] replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players,” Tale wrote. Contary to the opinion that playing WoW teaches teamwork and leadership, these companies allegedly have a firm belief that “WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc.”

Our research shows that Gamers develop the following talent and skills that are leveraged in the workplace:

• Quickly integrate onto remote, virtual teams and understand the importance of relying on team members for success
• Use state of the art collaborative communication tools and learn to tailor communication style
• Demonstrate adaptability and nimbleness in responding to quickly changing circumstances
• Demonstrate willingness to take risks with a focus on creativity and innovation
• Desire to be measured and held accountable; seek transparency
• Use technology to make data-based decisions

Wikinomics readers, what is your experience? Is the value of gamers greater than the liabilities?

http://www.openforum.com/marketing/video_socialgood.html

The question in this first one if the value of social networking to business (particularly small business). Seth gives a relatively entertaining answer that focuses on how many of the “relationships” people have on social networks aren’t real – rather just a collection of people that didn’t want to offend you by turning down your friend offer. While the bar of “people I haven’t met in person on the other side of the world being willing to let me sleep on their couch” seems a tad high, the notion of focusing on real, high value relationships resonates.

http://www.openforum.com/innovation/video_noonecaresaboutyou.html

The question is how to put the 5 billion monthly videos viewed on YouTube to work for your business. This is a particularly interesting topic for me, as I’m currently researching the role of prosumer-generated content in the creation of YouTube’s iconic success. Seth’s immediate response is an important reminder that “nobody cares about you” – basic idea is they don’t watch the YouTube video because they care about you, but because they care about me (themselves, not Denis Hancock ). Implicit in his response is the importance of entertainment value, as he indicates nobody will watch your companies video about being 12% more efficient this year. Though if “efficiency” is determined from a green angle, you never know…

http://www.openforum.com/leadership/video_delicatebalance.html

This one focuses on a true or false question: business is not a democracy – there is only one boss. Seth’s response takes a Coase-ian angle: any business is just a series of small businesses, and each of these small businesses has only one boss. The most important lesson from this – if all you want your employees to do is follow a manual, someone else can always find someone else to follow the same manual a little cheaper.

You can find plenty of other great snippets from Seth in the videos listed here. Anything jump out at anybody?

I want to particularly focus on the last one, which is in relation to Cambrian House (CH). Following a brief discussion about why crowdsourcing and commerce “make uneasy bedfellows”, the article leads into the CH story with “And even those companies that do try to share the proceeds from commercial crowdsourcing are not safe.” Noting that the CH model of encouraging people to send in ideas for new software products, have the community evaluate them, and fund the winners sounded like a good idea, the article then mentions that the chief executive acknowledged that the business model failed.

I assume they’re referring to the comment that CEO Michael Sikorsky made on this TechCrunch article about CH’s failure in May. If you look at his explanation, Michael brings up one particularly interesting reason for the problems CH – “… most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select members of the community. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse… Hence: the wisdom of the crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down.”

But here’s the thing – if you look back on the history of crowdsourcing models, the heavy lifting almost always falls back on a “few select members of the community”. We’ve seen this with Digg, Wikipedia, and a myriad of others – some sort of hierarchy is almost certain to emerge in a crowdsourcing platform, and within this hierarchy a relatively small group of people will do most of the heavy lifting.

In turn, what I’m saying here is that CH shouldn’t have been surprised by this, nor should they have seen it as a business model failure. That was what history indicated would happen. Moreover, as companies start blending crowdsourcing with commerce (i.e. bringing in direct financial incentives), one would expect that it would amplify the effect – and the strategy for the company should have been designed accordingly. This would indicate the Economist’s tongue in cheek final sentence might have some merit – “Perhaps it should have crowdsourced the management of the company, too?”

That’s not to say it would have neccesarily worked, however. This challenge of blending crowdsourcing with commerce is still in it’s infancy, and there is a lot of collective learning to be done – history also tells us that failure is an important part of the innovation process. I think it will be one of our more interesting research topics over the next little while. Right now, I’d agree with the Economist that they’re uncomfortable bedfellows, but somebody is going to figure it out sometime – and might that somebody be VenCorps, who acquired the CH assets in May?

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.

Leaders have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what the Net Gen want. Many of the answers may lie in what they pay to watch.

From movies like Xmen, The Hulk, Ironman, and Fantastic Four, to TV shows like Heroes and Smallville, superheroes seem to be on the mind of the Net Generation. So then what do they see in them and why?

1- The Net Generation heroes are coming from comic books. We don’t have any Churchhills we look up to. We are known for scrutinizing leadership. This might be caused by transparency. We know our leaders too well. The bible says, “No man is a prophet in his own country.” When it is so easy to uncover dirt about your leaders you find it hard to respect them so you turn to the comics.

2- We have superheroes because we can affiliate with them. Our Boomer parents gave us the cape growing up. We were taught that we could do anything we put our minds to. We like the idea of being unique and special, and we have great desires to do good.

3- The Superheroes are coming in teams. Even movies like The Hulk and Ironman are being set up to join alliances or leagues. We want to be superheroes but don’t want to do it alone.

So what can leaders take away from pop-culture? Net gen are seeking a better world, they want be the hero, but they want to do it together. I watched a YouTube video by an anthropologist named Michael Wesch studying social media. He called this idea cultural inversion. He said that we live in an interesting time period. We crave connection more than ever but at the same time also want more freedom and individuality.

Here’s the Leadership Laundry List: Create environments that will allow them to “become the hero”. Play off their strengths, mentor them and give continuous feedback, praise them, and include them. Don’t mandate from the top. Give them a vision or “something to fight for”. Share responsibility, and customize their roles to maximize their potential. Give them responsibilities that will allow them to shine but don’t cut them off from the group.

In the end, regardless of generational differences it comes down to proper communication. To get the results you want, give your people the tools to be successful. Those tools will only be identified through constant communication and feedback.

I interviewed our friend Bruce Stewart about gaming and leadership and he brought up a good point. Old School games such as Dungeons & Dragons also indicated some potential for success in the workplace, despite it’s reputation as a game played in dark basements by mouth-breathing losers. Full disclosure: I was NOT the quarterback of my high school football team and am not proud of how much I enjoyed this article.

Role-playing games ruled by paper maps and dice developed the imagination more than (or at least in different ways) than videogame versions because the only limits are with the dungeon master’s imagination. These players, especially, have developed skills in communication, organization, and scenario planning.

Thoughts? Do you buy it, or am I just trying to justify time I wasted during high school.

To understand the wikinomics connection here, you may have to read what wikipedia has to say about termites. Notably:

The termites are a group of social insects usually classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (but see also taxonomy below). As truly social animals, they are termed eusocial along with the ants and some bees and wasps which are all placed in the separate order Hymenoptera. Termites mostly feed on dead plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung…

As eusocial insects, termites live in colonies that, at maturity, number from several hundred to several million individuals. They are a prime example of decentralised, self-organised systems using swarm intelligence and use this cooperation to exploit food sources and environments that could not be available to any single insect acting alone.

As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com, and see all my other mashups here.

Thanks to Nicholas for this post – it’s refreshing to be called an exception in a good way – and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you don’t remember my first mash up?)

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. Click on the Dilbert tag below to see all 52 of my mash ups (and counting…).

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. To celebrate my 50th mash up on the Dilbert platform, I thought that it was about time that I started branching out into a new genre – action films. The graphic below is not for the faint of heart, but it was recently revealed that Hellboy overpowered Hancock in the US, so somebody had to take a stand north of the border…

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. If these themes keep up I’m going to have to add “random violence” to the tag cloud.

When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many.

Let’s look at an example – the expense report. It’s a standard process, with a common form that people need to access, complete, include receipts, and submit for approval.

If the organization’s accounting office uses a wiki, a staff member can add a page, explain the process for filling out an expense report, attach the blank report template, and make sure the page can be viewed by employees logged into the wiki. That staff member might also decide to make the page editable, so that others can refine the instructions based on their experience. Another option is to restrict direct editing of the page, but enable comments so that people can leave feedback and notes in addition to the instructions. The accounting staff can then update the instructions and procedure based on comments, and leave reply comments to let people know that their feedback has been incorporated.

Either option is more participatory than a static page, and more efficient because people throughout the organization can add useful knowledge where it makes the most sense – on the wiki page, in context, instead of cluttering email inboxes with messages that will be mostly ignored.

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where all employees can become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the evolving knowledge about how to reach those goals.

As always, check out www.dilbert.com for the original and all the other mash ups – now on to my comment on voting.

I have a group of people that I know who regular read my Dilbert cartoons, and they are extremely blunt in their assessments – whether they’re great, terrible, or somewhere in between. Interestingly enough, whenever they say that I’ve done a “good or better” job lately, I tend to find I have a relatively large number of ratings on the Dilbert site – but the ratings tend to be quite low. One possibility is that everyone I know has equally bad senses of humor, but I’m going to ignore that for now to look at what could be a fundamental flaw in the voting system.

There are no financial incentives for doing a Dilbert Mash up, just like there aren’t financial incentives to participate in many other collaborative platforms (like Wikipedia, etc.). In turn, those of us crazy enough to participate regularly in such things are likely, whether we admit it or not, to be interested in building a “reputation”. In the Dilbert mash up case, such reputations come through the voting mechanism – do people find you funnier than others or not?

Now unless it’s changed recently, the only way to vote on the comics is to be a registered user on the site. I would think the only people interested in registering are the people that want to do the mash ups. In turn, if they are interested in relative reputations, they’re incentive is to vote low scores for everyone else – particularly anything that looks half decent. It would be like a class full of students, knowing they were being graded on a bell curve, voting on each other’s scores.

I’m in no way saying that most people do this – in fact, it looks like the vast majority are like me and never vote at all, which leads to a low overall vote count that is easy to sway. In turn, when you see vote tallies in the single digits, do these scores really mean anything? And if so, what? Could a low score actually indicate that a comic was funnier than one with a high score (or no score at all)?

While I’m focused on the Dilbert example here, it’s more of a broader question in terms of mass collaboration / wisdom of the crowds platforms – are the incentives of the crowd aligned with the outcome the platform is trying to achieve? In a future post I’ll tackle some examples of situations this has (or might) arise that have far greater implications than how my Dilbert cartoon was rated…

Check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Sadly, I don’t think I can compete with the sweater for the dead squirrel today – check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

I kept thinking there was a twitter joke in here, but I couldn’t come up with it… can you? As always, you can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Reminds me of the most innocent sounding insult I ever remember hearing – when asked about the performance of a one-time collaborator, a particular gentleman stared straight ahead for a few seconds and then deadpanned “he met my expectations precisely.” As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com.

Let’s just say it’s in honour of Canada Day. You can check out all the other mash ups, and the original, at www.dilbert.com.

Check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com. Who knows – maybe this one will spark another Friday Dilbert mash up war.

You can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

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.