21st Century Organization

"Should Your Business Be Friends with Facebook?"

To find out please visit TheAppGap blog where slides and the audio of our rich June 25 webinar discussion are posted.

Sincere thanks to:

• TheAppGap and Intuit Quickbase for hosting the discussion of findings from our Facebook Groups in Business Investigation for which the initial invitation to participate was posted on this blog October 2007
• Our audience and their thought provoking questions
• Members of our investigation team who contributed including calling in from South Africa and Europe at late hours.

Now please join us at TheAppGap to continue the discussion and address answers to the excellent questions audience members contributed.

In opening the webinar discussion about:

"Should your business be friends with Facebook?"

my blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod overviewed recent research and cases of companies from FedEx to Serena Software and Salesforce integrating Facebook into their strategies and daily operations.

In addition to addressing the webinar audience questions posted at TheAppGap I'm interested to discuss:

"What's ahead"?

For example, our webinar slides include Alexa graphs showing Facebook growth versus Twitter.

"What does this suggest about the future of consumer social networks and platforms to come?"

Finally, our Facebook Groups In Business Investigation (FGIBI) starting premise was that while Facebook may or may not evolve as a significant business platform, history tells us consumer technologies drive enterpise adoption so we should understand it. Hence:

"What are the important lessons from consumer use of Facebook for enterprise technology development?

What does the future hold?"

and

"How do organizations adapt to the reality of tools transience?"

There's so much to discuss at TheAppGap.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Ambient Information = Connected Intelligence

Clive Thompson writes in Wired Magazine ... We're more likely to act on a subtle but continuously present message than an intermittent one we're forced to stare at. It's "the psychological paradox of ambient information".

Imagine using the device for measuring customer interaction with your company or  knowledge sharing among your employees. If it is up, customers are benefiting.  Let's call it a "Connected Intelligence Meter!"

This device exists and is used extensively by project teams at Google, eBay, Microsoft, and the Arkansas Children's Hospital. Ambient Devices CEO David Rose designed the technology which enables his device to tap into data streams which already exist but in their numerical form do not have as great an effect as a glowing orb which changes color.  You can even have the orb as part of your tool bar.

One of the latest applications is to track your personal energy use - are your adding to carbon consumption or helping to reduce it?

We just finished an article  on connected intelligence for Knowledge Tree, an Australian online  journal by using a wiki which Jenny Ambrozek has posted about here.

Although we will not be using an ambient device this time we will be taking real time questions on our live webcast on August 20th  if you are in the Northern hemisphere - midnight for east coast USA and 9 PM for west coast or August 21st for those past the international dateline. 

Please join us by registering at the Knowledge Tree Elluminate Portal  prior to the event.

To view the hardware and software pre-requisites for Elluminate Live! please visit

http://www.elluminate.com/support

Wiki's and other highly interactive social media which depend on collaboration - "connected intelligence" would definitely benefit from an ambient information system to measure participation.  A subtle pervasive indicator to let you know your participation has an effect.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

FAS Research: Visualizations of a Hypernetworked World

Thanks to Jeffrey Keefer for alerting me to FAS Research social network analysis and especially their Visualizations Gallery.  Jeffrey heard FAS spoke at Friday's Personal Decomocracy Forum. Judging from the program it was quite the event, starting with an opening keynote from Eric Schmidt and Thomas Friedman. although interesting ratings from the first commenters on the opening session.

FAS shares attention getting visualizations showing social network analysis applied to a range of business and political influence networks.

Thought provoking viewing.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

TIME Redesign: Briefing The Moment

Richard Stengel, the same TIME Managing Editor responsible for "Person of the Year:YOU" edition tells readers of the March 26 magazine:

"A New Chapter:  We've redesigned TIME to provide you with a clearer and more forward-looking take on the world."

His editorial describes some of the shifts TIME is making including  "getting the magazine to you before the weekend" and "creating a TIME that is more meaningful and forward looking".

Given the challenges print publishing faces, with burgeoning sources of timely online news (traditional media industry and consumer created), I'm interpreting as TIME magazine needing to change their focus and adapt by repositioning TIME's job:

"to outline the choices ahead and help you make those decisions."

TIME's redesign editorial caught my attention having just bumped into a dated (October 2006), series of "blunt" blog exchanges around the term "User Generated Content" (UGC) inspired by Stowe Boyd's "Nielsen is Clueless" post.  Following the threads finds Mark Kaloff (representing Nielsen BuzzMetrics) confronting leading participatory media practitioners and advocates, catalysts to the search for new business models the media and advertising industry confront.

It was the "Briefing" article that I first noticed in the redesigned TIME magazine. The headline "Briefing" followed by the words "The Moment" tagging the photo.  The phrasing encapsulated what everybody I know faces and the reality that will no doubt continue to challenge all media: people have no "time" and getting our attention for just a "moment" is increasingly difficult.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

My 2.0 profile ... and my network limits

Act I. My 2.0 profile ...

I'm social - got that right!

I like talking with others and telling stories - check!
But I still need to practice listening.

I believe in emergence - let's see what happens!
And in improvisation - hey, nice one!
And the wisdom of the crowd - definitely!
But I worry about mobs.

I love the long tail - w00t!
Heck, I am a long tail - Yes!
But what about all those "A-listers"?

I'm all about collaboration - Skype me!

I need a digital identity ...
But I still can't settle on a name.

Even though there is no "Houston" I can call, I'm pretty sure I have a problem.

--- Intermission ---

Act II. My network limits.

Today Nancy White wrote about collaboration and group size. It's a very generative post and Nancy speculates about what collaboration means in large networks. I'm not sure I agree with her, but this is a start towards developing concepts and models that can help.

Today I also followed Jenny's pointer to the Center for Collective Intellilgence at MIT and specifically to a video recording of a talk by Bob Metcalfe. Bob is a very engaging speaker, who does not use Powerpoint (so the talk is a great example of how to speak without slides, but with notes), and his talk examines aspects of what he calls "connected intelligence", the idea that the intelligence of a collection is a result of connections among the members. The more connections a collective member has with other members, the greater is the value of the collection. The eponymous "Metcalfe's Law" is simply the assertion that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of members. Bob is careful enough to distinguish not just connections, but affinities; some connections are more valuable, or personal, or special in some way, than others. This I know is true. Bob also hinted that there might be a leveling off effect and when networks grow past a particular size the value actually decreases as new members are added.

I think the question is how many connections can I maintain? And how is that number a function of the kinds of relationships they represent (family, friends, immediate colleagues, intermittent colleagues, occasional committee members, etc.)? My recollection is that I could manage to keep track of more people when I was younger. I could also keep track of all my college homework assignments without writing them down. But now I write down even a short shopping list. And I'm sure the number of people that I can stay aware of simultaneously has diminished with age. But it may be that as I got older I took on more diffuse responsibilities for families and other personal activites, and this limits how many connections I can manage. Maybe social networking software can help with this. Maybe not.

21st century organizations are already made up of people who have experienced a number of computer-network based collections, so exploring the relation between connectedness and network value, or the collective capacity for work needs some attention. We already have a good deal of experience in collectives, and we get more with each passing day. We'll need tools that help us measure and improve these experiences. Note to self: do a little more research here.

- Bill

Where the 2.0 am I?

After many years working as a chemist and a software engineer, I still have to work hard at adopting, and adapting to, computer based systems. Of course, this can be put down to age (but I've noticed that no one is getting younger), but I still cling to the notion that the systems might be better designed and easier to use. But, hey, that's just me.

I have to admit that my experience in software engineering and product development colors my appreciation of the use of "2.0" as part of a name. And it started with the publication of the magazine Business 2.0 in the 1990's. Maybe it's my own aversion to using version nomenclature as a shorthand name for ideas that actually require explanations. When a software system's version changes from "1.0" to "2.0" that usually means that most of the software is new, the design may be new, and the way the product is used may also be new. And as a definition this fits very well with the summary presented in Tim O'Reilly's September 2005 article "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software".

However, one problem with tagging "business", "office", "enterprise", and "web" with version numbers is that after a while we actually believe that we are using something new. I do believe that much has changed, but, also, that much remains the same. One of the challenges in actually talking about a 21st century organization is that organizations today are largely made up of people born in the 20th century, and they will remain so for another, say, 15 years. And even more importantly, people born in this century won't be in positions of power in these organizations for another 25 years or more. Furthermore, the technology that we're so keen on using is based on 20th century science, engineering, business, and practice, and this will remain so for some time. So things are new, but maybe not that new.

What stands out for me as the most generative ideas in Tim O'Reilly's article are those dealing with people: participating with the users and harnessing collective intelligence. The bulk of the article is about the technology, and while it's interesting, technology is changing way too fast to really keep up. And that's true for the technologist too. Recently, Nick Carr posted a critique of 2.0 architecture and implementation. I have my own engineering concerns about "The end of the software release cycle". But don't get me wrong; changes are afoot. One day, and maybe quite soon, we will be faced with a computer that has a kind of native machine intelligence. This will be a remarkable, fascinating, and possibly frightening event. And especially so if such a machine has some reliable electro-mechanical connections to an airplane navigation system, or an emergency room ICU system. But until then it looks like I'll be having fun learning to use robotic vacuums. I know I should buy one, but still, I resist ....

So I hope to use this week to look a bit at what we know about people participating and collectively thinking ... what's new, what's borrowed, and what we might look forward to. Maybe we'll get to talk about what our tacit understandings are that both help and hinder our adoptions and adaptations. The other day Jenny blogged about continuous partial attention. Is this a real skill to learn? Do I need it? And if I'm good at that will I still be able to spend five years focusing on a single problem in thermodynamics or mathematics? Can I be a "live node on a network" while I'm sitting for 40 minutes attending to my breathing?

Finally, by way of introduction I'll say that I'm definitely a child (and an adult) from the 20th century. A child, in fact, of the 1960's when I was optimistic and naïve enough to believe that it would be easy to change how the world was and how things were done. Now I'm older and I know that whatever isn't working for us, collectively, today, is going to take some real effort to change. However, I'm an optimist and an empiricist, so I think I'm ready for our experiment in using the world-wide web to do things differently. Whether I am ready or not isn't really important; we're experimenting right now.

- Bill

Paying Attention to Continuous Partial Attention

I've been paying attention to "attention" since hearing Seth Goldstein present AttentionTrust.org at the Corante Berkman Center Social Architecture Symposium November 2005*.  So thanks to Nancy White for pointing to Linda Stone's Continuousl Partial Attention Wiki.

There is a lot to consider in Linda Stone's wiki but her connection between attention and networks got my attention:

"To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network"

as did her observations about younger generation employees and what this means to organizations:

"The younger generations are on the leading edge of thought for the coming dominant attention paradigm. This is one of the many reasons why the most successful companies are likely to effectively recruit, employ, incent, and manage representatives from every generation and keep an active listening channel toward the ideas and ideals, and the habits and passions of the younger generation."

Finally, there is good advice about how to deal with the reality of continuous partial attention including a suggestion to focus not just on managing time, but also on "attention".

~ Jenny Ambrozek

* Social Symposium site unavailable at time of writing