21st Century Organization

Stowe Boyd Stories For His Inside Knowledge Magazine Profile

Stowe Boyd will be the featured industry thought leader in the September Inside Knowledge Magazine. As I've followed Stowe's thinking and memes as they've unfolded since meeting him at the incomparable Multiples of One Conference 2003, I have the privilege, (thanks IKM editor Jerry Ash) of producing the profile.

As Stowe has promoted awareness and adoption of "social tools" since introducing the term in his last 1999 newsletter, it seemed inappropriate to do otherwise than put the tools to work in preparing his Inside Knowledge profile. Hence, this blog post and reaching out to the crowd for stories about Stowe, his thinking and influence on you and your work. Specifically:

How have you experienced Stowe Boyd's influence since he started blogging and writing about social tools in 1999?

What's important for Inside Knowledge Magazine readers to know about Stowe?

Please post your insights as comments here or in streams using whatever tool is most convenient but tagged #IKStowe so I can find them.

This is an experiment so your suggestions about refining the method are welcome.  I'm wondering for example if creating a FriendFeed room might be an efficient way to aggregate #IKStowe nuggets?

Please also note the participation terms:

i. By tagging an item "#IKStowe" you give permission to be cited and or quoted in Inside Knowledge Magazine

ii. Practically please be aware Stowe's Inside Knowledge profile limit is 1400 words. Hence I expect the flow of rich insights will exceed the available space and links to sources used to inform Stowe's profile will have to suffice.

Regardless I hope you will participate so Stowe's Inside Knowledge profile is as rich as can be.  My colleague Victoria Axelrod served as videographer when I interviewed Stowe live at Enterprise 2.0 Boston. What does it say about barriers to implementation in organizations that Stowe and his early adopting peers whom I hope will contribute here, have been writing about "social tools" for approaching a decade?

Thanks Stowe for making time to connect in Boston and your willingness to join in open writing your Inside Knowledge profile, and in advance to everyone who contributes. Please may your stories flow.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

A week of "Net Work". DHL partners with UPS & Matt Moore visits Manhattan

"Net Work" is the title of Patti Anklam's "Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World". I've been actually reading Patti's book this week, not just using as a reference, to review for Inside Knowledge Magazine. (I admit to being a biased reviewer having been a privileged member of Patti's Gennova Emergent Learning Network from which the book sprung.)

A value of Patti's book is the number of real world networks examined.  Examples from “Gennova” that seeded the book, to the Boston healthcare community and the Young President’s Organization, Fast Company Magazine’s “Company of Friends”,  Women’s World Banking, Procter and Gamble’s “Connect and Develop” and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Knowledge Lab are all used to demonstrate network dynamics and the variety of purposes networks can serve.

With how organizations operate as networks on my mind I couldn't help but notice the page 13 Financial Times Thursday (May 29) headlined "DHL pays up to deliver with rival". DHL and UPS are intersecting their networks. DHL is paying UPS "$1bn annually to fly customers packages between North American cities" and "shut down 30 per cent of DHL's US infrastructure... as part of of a restructuring plan that will cost $2bn.." The FT reports for UPS the arrangement "will help ensure its fleet of aircraft remain full even if more customers opt for cheaper shipping options than overnight delivery."

Ending the week writing about "Net Work" I realize it started that way too, in a rich conversation with Sydney visitor Matt Moore. Thanks Matt for fitting me into your travels and the chance to explore our shared interests, especially around organizational network analysis and measuring value created through connectedness.  Good wishes for the rest of your journey.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

The AppGap: Collaboration, Flows & the Right Brain

                            

Thanks to Intuit Quickbase, the visionary sponsor, and Hylton Jolliffe who assembled the blogging team,  I'm a privileged contributor to TheAppGap blog that assembles news, views and reviews about the future of work.

The joy of being a TheAppGap blog contributor is being closer to the latest observations from fellow bloggers Patti Anklam, Matthew Hodgson, Jon Husband, Bill Ives, Shiv Singh and Jim Ware and participating in the broader conversation about Work 2.0.

Not suprizingly, collaboration and emerging tools for working more efficiently in an information overloaded world have become a focus. Jon Husband's "Managing the Flow" post explores a topic that concerns me: the changing work challenges and skills demanded as a cadre of collaborative tools and now enterprise networking platforms (like IBM's Lotus Atlas and Trampline Systems SONAR), increasingly stream information and now organizational network connections. How do people and organizations adapt to work and manage in this world?

My latest TheAppGap post relates to changing skills with a question around whether more "right brain" talents become critical as Dan Pink argues in "A Whole New Mind".  Will the M.F.A. become more in demand at the expense of M.B.A.s, a topic the New York Times explored April 6?

As everyday work demands grow the challenge always is taking time to look forward. Still I hope you will regularly find moments to join us at TheAppGap to consider the future of work and the gaps to be filled to maximize opportunities.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Sustainable Globalization - A 2008 Resolution

Sustainable Globalization is not an oxymoron.  In the last few days of finishing a book chapter on globalization it occurred to me that I have spent close to two years thinking, writing and consulting about the antiseptic "silicon" world while the "carbon" world has been grinding along half way around the planet, namely China. 

The New York Times ran a photo journal series on China - Choking on Growth which causes flashbacks to the US and other developed nations "industrial revolution".  China is not alone as other developing nations, India and Mexico, are keeping pace. We in the US complain about off-shoring, however what many do not realize is that by sending our manufacturing  elsewhere we have also off-shored our environmental issues.   But the chickens are coming home to roost.  We only inhabit one planet. 

"Corporate social integration" as Michael Porter reinvents the term corporate social responsibility has the unique capability to resolve the "tension between business and society."  Imagine leap frogging the 20th century industrial wastes in China by understanding that "business and society are interdependent."

Oddly enough our silicon advances have the capacity to bridge the gap by enabling rapid information sharing and collaboration.  China or any developing country does not need to repeat the unsustainable history of advanced countries.  There are limits to egregious consumption. 

Kimberly Simaha, one of our colleagues in sustainable energy is looking for cases to demonstrate the possibilities.  We link you to her video as an energy boost of its own!

Let me also introduce you to SeaChange founded by husband and wife team - Roger Payne and Lisa Harrow who use natures beauty and immutable laws to bring us to our senses about the state of our biosphere.

man is not the overseer of life but an integral part of life’s complex web, and that our survival requires that we attend not just to our own wellbeing, but also to the wellbeing of the entire web of life.

As Payne points out every religion begins with the notion that man has dominion over the earth - possibly to destroy or save it - but not if we acknowledge that we are only part of an ecosystem.

Hard facts and data appeal to some i.e. carbon foot prints and percent of land, water and fish loss, or global warming. Others are moved by finance  - the worth of all of our natural assets, and some by poetry and song.  Payne and Harrow bring both science and poetry together in an outstanding performance.

In the following weeks we and our writing colleagues will be speaking on various topics from our Sustainability Fieldbook -When it All Comes Together to be published by Geenleaf and AMACOM in the fall of this year.  You can join us on the journey in the Sustainable Enterprise Facebook Group where your participation is valued and we will keep you posted as events unfold. 

Look forward to hearing about your models of "sustainable globalization" from your companies in 2008.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

2007 Year in Review: Google Zeitgeist

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/

Google's gift to those intrigued by the power of connecting intelligence and learning through participation.

~ Jenny

Prediction Markets: Connecting Intelligence in Organizations

The prospects for wider adoption of prediction markets in organizations have intrigued me since attending the New York Prediction Markets Cluster event early 2006. Searching for prediction market applications to reference in our recent article a 2005 Bo Cowgill piece on Google's use was the most readily accessible. 

The Consensus Point hosted Prediction Market Conference September 24 in New York revealed I was clearly not looking in the right places.  Hats off to David Perry and Ken Kittlitz for a rich gathering and update on the prediction markets landscape. You answered my questions and more about what companies are using, for what business objectives, and why prediction markets are not more visible.  Following are some highlights.

1.  Hearing Robin Hanson Speak

It's interesting knowing about a tool and then discovering oneself in a room talking with the person credited with being the "the first to set up and run a corporate prediction exchange —at Xanadu, Inc., in April 1989". Robin Hanson is an "associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University." His presentation is laced with graphs and focuses on how value is created. Devoting time to exploring his presentations is recommended.

2. Getting Insight into How Leading Companies are Applying Prediction Markets

Hearing the experiences of companies the caliber of GE Research, Misys Banking Systems, NBC Universal, Best Buy and Qualcomm using prediction markets to improve decision-making and project management is attention getting. That answered my question about what companies are adopting.  Learning Consensus Point serves companies that do not reveal prediction market applications for data sensitivity and competitive intelligence reasons helps understand why this tool doesn't have a higher profile.

3.  Hearing from "The Wisdom of Crowds" Author James Surowiecki About Challenges 

Essentially implementing prediction markets challenges traditional hierarchical organizational structures, notions of power, and mindsets, "the deep seated impulse to find the one person with the right answer."  I heard Surowiecki say:

"Prediction markets are not just about improving decision-making. Also about transforming organizations as a whole."

4. Listening to Jed Christiansen and being Reminded of the Growing Demands for Analytical Skills in Organization

Jed presented his London School of Economics thesis study results investigating prediction markets to group forecast rowing race winners. (His Mercury's Blog includes video presentations explaining prediction markets and how they can help companies.)

Listening to Jed talk about calibration, accuracy measures, scoring rules, trader distributions, data scatter, linear best fit, and probabilities you cannot escape recognizing the increasingly quantitative talent demands of 21st century business.

5.  Noting the People Connecting Impact of Prediction Market Initiatives

A thread among the presenters was how prediction markets expand people connections in organizations.  Through market participation employees from disparate parts of organizations discover unknown people with similar interests and unexpected talents.  Market activity becomes a thread in employee conversations. Previously unrecognized expertise emerges through successful trading and listing on leader boards.

Smart companies are exploring use and adopting prediction markets to connect intelligences and improve decision-making and forecasting. But doing so demands leadership that is not threatened by discovering what the collective wisdom can tell them, especially when the information shared is not what they want to hear.

Considering Robin Hanson's first corporate prediction exchange dates to 1989, and Ken Kittlitz has been developing exchanges for fourteen years, gives some insight into the realities of putting prediction markets to work in organizations.  Has their time come?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

 

From Videotex to Facebook: 22 Years Online. So What's Changed?

Thanks to Nancy White and Jo Murray, editor of The Knowledge Tree, the Australian e-journal of learning innovation, with colleagues Victoria Axelrod and Kiki Mulliner I've had the opportunity to co-author a piece on "Learning through participation and connecting intelligence: experimenting with a wiki to co-create". 

The article documents some of our lessons learned through the process but remarkable for me was the excuse to look back at my 22 years online, beginning at the Australian Caption Centre in 1985. Thanks to farseeing Caption Center founders Adam Salzer and Alexandra Hynes I helped create "Edutel", an educational content service for the launch of Viatel, a U.K. Prestel standard videotex service. As this was pre-Web there are few remnants to tell the story. Peter Hosie's reflections on the potential of videotex for education capture the times.

Coming to the U.S. I was fortunate to find my way to the Trintex offices in White Plains, NY where a group of smart, dedicated people were working hard at pioneering the NAPLPS based online consumer service launched as "PRODIGY" in 1988. 6 years later, December 1994, with AOL nipping at our heels, PRODIGY became the first online service to integrate a Web browser. 

In 2007, creating a Facebook 21st Century Organization Group with minimal effort and functionality I never imagined 20 plus years ago, I asked myself the question J. C. Spender uses to provoke discussion at New York Knowledge Cafe gatherings:

"So what's changed?".

Here are some reflections.

1. Today's Invisible Servers, Cables, Programmers and Code

I've heard Cliff Figallo tell wonderful stories about The WELL's early days and heroic efforts to keep the service up as new members joined, including tending the server dressed in formal attire. As PRODIGY grew each morning attention turned to the previous day's peformance levels.  There was a scheduled downtime during pre-dawn hours for maintenance. 

Today we just expect to be always connected wherever we are, and on the move without cable tethers. Failure to do so, like Skype's recent outage, becomes a news event. How many people ever consider the server network Google has around the world ensuring 24x7 access? Wikipedia cites 450,000 servers in data centers worldwide.

Similarly, where are the programmers?  No doubt behind the sites I log into every day ranging from Earthlink, through Facebook, Google,Typepad, Technorati, etc are hundreds of programmers working to add functionality and service stability. But I don't know them, the programming languages they use, or where in the world they are.  At PRODIGY programmers were highly visible, essential and valued colleagues with names, people whom I'm delighted to see when PRODIGY alum gather to mark another year.

And where is the CODE?  I created our Facebook 21st Century Organization Group without seeing a line of code. I considered this while applying John Pederson's rule for making del.icio.us tags display in a Wikispace, to our ConnectedIntelligence wiki. 

2. From Information Sparsity to Overload and Abundant Connections

Did anyone else notice the number of people admitting they were taking time away from being connected to reflect this summer? I sympathize with Stuart Henshall's frustration expressed in a Facebook wall post that as he contributes "to more and more "Streams" with twitter, facebook, social bookmarking, blog posts, wiki pages etc and I'd like to capture that all in one place." In 2007 with the exponential power of network laws at work, our skills are constantly being stretched to learn new tools and manage through this abundance.

3. TIME and ENERGY Become Increasingly Precious Resouces. Knowing when to say NO to Connectedness

Anders Hemre first focused me on the importance of allowing TIME for THINKING during a 2002 article interview.  With "REFLECTION" the topic of article co-author Kiki Mulliner's dissertation, we spent time during our article writing considering the importance.  In a highly connected world, as TIME becomes an increasingly precious resource, knowing when to say "NO" to connectedness to devote hours and ENERGY to creating value from available information and connections seems to me an essential skill.

4. The Technology is Catching Up to Support People Networking, Where the Real Value of Connectedness Lies

As PRODIGY yielded to AOL's mid 90's ascendancy on my office wall was a quote in a Jupiter Report citing Bob Smith from AOL saying:

"AOL understood people come for the content and stay when they get connected."

AOL's focus on chat and IM revealed that understanding.  Reports from the recent Always On Stanford Summit point to what's ahead online.  At minimum, as Facebook is revealing, the technology is catching up to support people connecting where early online services, from The WELL forward, suggested the real value of connectedness lies.

This post has grown long. I also pondered what HASN'T changed.  Grist for another time. 

Thank you for reading if you've persevered this far.  Your reflections and experiences about the evolution of online, and implications of connectedness, invited and welcomed as comments.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

What a difference a decade makes. From Blogiversary to Telepresence

The piles of reading matter in my office are at critical mass so its clean up day. 

1. Happy Blogiversary

I've been saving the July 14-15 Wall Street Journal to read their "Happy Blogiversary" article that turns to twelve commentators including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, Christopher Cox, and Mia Farrow.  Unlikely selections, no?

I put the article aside as I associated the start of blogging with PyraLabs and Blogger that I now see is 1999. The Wall Street Journal admits:

"The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger" ... an "imperfect exercise".

The article mentions Dave Winer, who blogged (and still does of course), with Scripting News, and "Cameron Barrett", Camworld, and the "polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard".  The WSJ piece concludes:

"But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form."

Reading Tim O'Reilly's quote on Dave Winer's bio page indicates that 1997 is also time to celebrate the anniversary of RSS.

2.  Looking Ahead:  Telepresence

The Financial Times July 16 has a story looking at where Cisco's CEO John Chambers is placing his next online bet. Not surprisingly,

"Cisco's most recent bet is that future growth will come not just from network infrastructure, but from applications and services that help customers take better advantage of the connections between themselves and their customers.

To that end, it has launched a series of new technologies that combines, voice video and data traffic with other services such as voice mail, instant messaging and teleconferencing."

(We'd covered Cisco's multiple acquisitions including WebEx on this blog.)

As we look back to a decade of blogs, Chambers and Cisco are looking ahead and making  their bet on "Telepresence":

"a high end videoconferencing system that uses life-sied images and carefully synchronized audio to create the illusion that participants on a call are meeting face-to-face."

Bill Lessard had alerted us to the arrival of "Telepresence" earlier this year with  Telepresence World.

So if in fact Telepresence is already here, what's next? What we will be worthy of celebration in 2017?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

07.07.07 - Live Earth

The critics are out in force on Al Gore's global Live Earth fest but I think they are missing the point - mobilizing young minds (and a few million more senior) to take a small step toward addressing the earth's climate crisis.

It's not about the music, it's not about the event, its about connecting so many people both physically and online in a monster network to participate and influence and issue.

I am old enough to have participated in the first Earth Day and still have my button!  Having grown up around east coast rivers that were polluted beyond recognition from industrial waste I thought this was the norm and that I would never see them as habitable for wildlife or humans.  But we know the end of that story - we did pull together in the US and saved our waterways and more.

Thumbs up to AL and company for using a multimedia platform to effect grassroots changes to consumer behavior and prod corporations, political leaders to step up to sustainability.  I fully expect to see positive results.  Live Earth sure beats Dead Earth.

~Victoria G. Axelrod

Enterprise 2.0 RAVE Virtual Events May 21-22: Schedule & Survey Invitation

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE, originally planned as a physical event to take place in NYC has gone virtual.

2 sessions are planned May 21-22 with Andrew McAfee opening the discussion Monday 21 at 2pm EDT on:

Enterprise 2.0: Getting started and measuring success:  Is it better to start small and iterate fast or plan for an enterprise-wide deployment? How do you balance the need for organic, self-organized growth with other enterprise requirements?

The conversation continues Tuesday May 22 at at 11am EDT on:

Adoption issues related to Enterprise 2.0 deployments, ranging from people processes, to the tools themselves.

I look forward to participating in the Tuesday discussion and hope you will join us.

Please register here.

To provide meat for the conversations a market readiness survey is being conducted.  Your contribution and insights are appreciated.

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE discussions provide a great opportunity to hear from Andrew McAfee and share your perspective about the reality of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.  I hope busy schedules will allow time to participate.

~ Jenny Ambrozek