21st Century Organization

In Frankfurt Enterprise 2.0 = Organizational Change & People Challenges

Luis Suarez @elsua 's November 3 Tweet:

 "One of the things I *really* like(d) from the #e20s is that we still keep making sustained use of the hashtag after the event. W00t!"

captured the abundant spirit of Enterpise 2.0 Summit Fankfurt, (convened by Kongress Media in Frankfurt October 27-28). The conference was exceptional and congratulations to the organizing team, Bjoern Negelmann and Cathrin Gill for two days of rich presentations and active discussions. Jim Worth's wiki page captures the highlights, (see especially active Tweeters) and Lee Bryant's conference reflection, the scope. 

1. Enterprise 2.0 is a Management Model

The "Enterprise 2.0" evolution (in just four years since Andrew McAfee's "Dawn of Emergent Collaboration") that the Frankfurt Summit represented, makes adding a reflection through this 21st Century Organization blog lens irresistible. #e20s was a management rather than technology conference, with organizational impact and change the elephant in the room. Implementing enterprise social software platforms is changing organizations but that's a topic not being discussed widely in adopting companies because people don't like change. 

Emanuelle Quintarelli's Day 1 blog post highlights the attention getting keynotes by Richard Collin – Professor & Director of the “Institut de l’Entreprise 2.0 Grenoble Ecole de Management” France and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz CEO of Sony Music & BMG that set the conference focus.

Collin told us:

"Enterprise 2.0 is the new version, a new model.  It's nothing to do with Web 2.0" but rather "management and leadership for the 21st century".

Identifying the 2008 global financial crisis as the tipping point from an industrial age to information based economy, Collin redefines leadership as the "ability to get others to be connected willingly".  Leading, he argues, involves:

• Value bricolage
• Design tinkering
• Establishing systematic serendipidity, and
• Thriving on gradual breakthrough.

(Collin is @richardcollin on Twitter and his presentation is posted to Slideshare. Collin's video interview with Jean Yves is here.)

2. Enterprise 2.0 is about People

With blunt statements about dangerous CEO's & Boards who "Don’t know anything anymore" because they are so distant from colleagues and markets; the failures of caviar and champagne strategic off sites at 5 star hotels; and "lonely, very smart people who cannot modulate companies", Schmidt-Holtz focused attention on the importance of listening, communication and how "people don't want to be impressed. They have to be embraced."

3. Next Practice Cases, Companies and Innovators

Outstanding corporate presentations from:

• TMobile- Dr. Frank Schönefeld, Chief Technology Officer, T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH, Germany
• Deutsche Bank-  Jamil Ouaj, Communications Manager, Deutsche Bank AG, Germany
• Societe Generale-Franck La Pinta, Web Marketing Manager, Paris
• Bayer-  Ellen Trude - Training Consultant, Social Media & Special Projects, Bayer AG
• BASF- Dr. CheeChin Liew, Project & Community Manager, BASF SE, Germany
• BMW- Stephan Oertelt, Innovation Manager, BMW Group, Germany
• Telecom Italia- Alessandra Pelagallo, Process Design/Optimization Manager, Rome

and others revealed next practices for opening communication and growing collaboration. Organizational cultures are changing, but as a by-product of social technology-enabled new patterns of interactions rather than intentional "change management" programs.

4. Research Reveals Enterprise 2.0 Work in Progress

Presentations from Dr.Thorsten Petry and Cecile Demailly (@ceciledemailly) provide context to the work and challenge that bringing more open collaboration and knowledge sharing to organizations represents.

Petry's study (with 281 participants) revealed the gap between use of collaboration software in participant enterprises (16%) lagging private use (25%) and between expected and realized impact on creating an innovative culture.

Demailly's findings identify the early stage challenge:

"..organizations face a paradox that often happens with adoption of disruptive change (whether it is technology, work methods or management patterns); they have to cope with it but cannot yet justify it nor master the transformation because it is too early, too little history and case studies to learn the lessons from from others. Except for some (high tech companies notably), we are still moving through the early stages of adoption."
Source:  Toward Enterprise 2.0 Survey Report

5. No Room for "Wars"

Nowhere was the individual change challenge more present than in the "Knowledge Management versus Enterprise 2.0 Culture Wars" session, encapsulated by Elmi Bester via Twitter from South Africa as "Culture War or Turf War?"

While holding on to simple descriptions of our roles in complex 21st century organizations may be reassuring, I invite everyone to scan the bios of the thought leaders presenting in Frankfurt for the array of disciplines and open, curious minds each displays.

Think too about the diverse and talented teams leading innovative change in their companies, exemplified by BASF's computational scientist Dr. CheeChin Liew and communications aficionado Cordelia Krooß.

6.  And, Both and Next

My 21st Century Organization blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod frequently reminds me today we operate in a complex "And Both" world. (Our 2008 article strives to capture the shifts.)    

Returning from Enterprise 2.0 Summit Frankfurt to Victoria's maxim I'm adding "NEXT". The presentations and conversations (especially around KM and Enterpise 2.0 cultures) highlighted the importance for business success today of each employee being open, enquiring and paying attention to "NEXT", being prepared to adapt to a constantly shifting operating environment. If you have any doubt see Anja Wittenberger's Organizational Challenges to E2.0 Setup Mindmap.

7. New Organizational Models Emerging

I was fortunate to extend my Frankfurt trip to visit family and friends. The photos of remnant Heidelberg castle walls, reminders of what was, and the Saar River Loop constantly adapting to the changing, networked ecosystem in which it flows, to me symbolize the organizational model transitions 21st century enterprises confront.

What did I miss?  Please challenge and enrich my thinking as did #e20s conversations live and on Twitter, especially during the Social Networking Culture Workshop.  Special thanks to all workshop participants.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Credit: Saar Loop photo courtesy of Marianne Hilpert.

"Socially Challenged" - Putting the WHO in Enterprise 2.0 at Frankfurt Workshop

Thanks to Bjoern Negelmann and his exceptional team organizing Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 I'll be in Frankfurt, October 26, leading a workshop on "Social Networking Culture- Made Simple". 

I'm in outstanding company as Mark Masterson will bring next practice into the room sharing how CSC used Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) to ensure their C3: Connect, Communicate. Collaborate enterprise wide networking platform introduction succeeded.  If you've heard Mark's recent talk at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference (OSCON), you know you can look forward to a thought provoking, bottom-line discussion.

An Information Week article titled "Socially Challenged" (September 27) provides a timely workshop backdrop with:               

"IT's under pressure to deliver Facebook-like social networking inside companies. Yet the biggest worry is getting employees to use it. What's going on?"

The article draws on a suvey of 624 business technology professionals at companies using one or more internal social networking systems, August 2010.

It is recommended reading for insight into both the reality and complexity of implementing enterprise collaboration platforms, and the roles different internal groups want and need to play.

My "Social Networking Culture" Workshop builds from a couple of assumptions that:

1) The Enterprise 2.0 SLATES Andrew McAfee described in 2006 (Search Links Authoring Tags Extensions and Signals) are impacting organizations whether management chooses to face the reality or not.

By empowering individuals to communicate and share information up and down formal organizational hierarchies, across and beyond the organization, Web 2.0 tools are changing the way work gets done and impacting where control lies. Social Tools Impact Organizations

View more presentations from Jenny Ambrozek.

2) The 1980's Xerox Parc research (into how Xerox technicians fixed copiers) that led John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray to write in an article titled "People are the Company" in the inaugural Fast Company magazine that:                         

"Organizations are webs of participation. Change the patterns of participation, and you change the organization.

At the core of the 21st century company is the question of participation. At the heart of participation is the mind and spirit of the knowledge worker. "

~ John Seely Brown & Estee Solomon Gray, "People are the Company" 1995

Through a series of network mapping exercises we apply principles from social network science to planning the people networks essential for collaboration success. (The workshop builds from the Open net∞WORKing Organizations article (2008) co-authored with colleague Victoria Axelrod.)

By focusing on putting the "WHO?" in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives the workshop aims to make your organization a member of the 10% Information Week identified who can say:

"Great: usage is high and we've improved communication."

 

 Source: Information Week, September 27, 2010 p15.

Please join me, hear from Mark Masterson and participate in a day of intentional people network planning at Enterprise 2.0 Summit Frankfurt, October 26.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Enterprise 2.0 Boston June 2010 Highlights: Making Technology Work in Organizations

As Marc Smith's Node XLS map reveals, recognized and aspiring Enterprise 2.0 thought leaders and software vendors gathered in Boston starting June 14 for the conference that grew from Andrew McAfee's 2006 MIT Sloan Review article The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration and became the book. 

 

Source: See Marc Smith Node_XLS Map and blog post

Here are are my take aways from spending two days in the Expo Hall and chatting with valued industry luminaries including @absolutezero, @bhc3, @billives, @debs, @EranBarak @elsua, @frogpond, @jackvinson, @mikegotta, @panklam, @ross, @stoweboyd and @vanderwal.

1. From "Social" to Tapping Streams

Last year every booth brandished a "We've Added Social" announcement, usually in the form of micro-blogging or deeper member profiles.

As evidenced by SocialText's "Connect" announcement this year "social" functionality has turned to harnessing activity streams and integrating flows of information from multiple sources into platforms where the individual is front and center.  Watching presentations from numerous vendors, I couldn't help but recall Stowe Boyd's meme "the individual is the new group".

Beyond SocialText, Thoughtfarmer effectively pre-empted my questions with a Power Point loaded on an IPAD. However, my standout for showing the future of enterprise collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms is IBM's Vulcan Project that strives to work across IBM platforms (including Cognos) and beyond, assembling information and connections (both requested and predicted), as relevant to an individual's work.

2. Drive to Innovation Rules

If "social" ruled as the must have functionality in 2009 in 2010 "innovation" (not surprisingly given the challenging economic climate) seemed top of mind with a host of platforms touting their abilities to assemble ideas and facilitate new initiatives.

Spigit, with a space just inside the Expo door exhibited their high profile industry position and Warburg Pincus bolstered coffers.  Not so visible in a back corner InnoCentive (with it's pioneering crowdsourcing credentials and recent efforts to provide solutions to the Gulf oil spill) is showing new product offerings focused on enterprise adoption. ONRAMP is a suite of professional services and technical resources and InnoCentive@Work an "internal web-based collaborative community for problem solvers".

Other vendors touting "Innovation" solutions ranged from BlueKiwi to Newsgator and Portugal based Launchpad finalist Innovationcast.   

3. Launchpad Finalists Instructive

Four finalists faced off in the Launchpad competition. The winner, Baydin, offered an "unsearch" solution for Microsoft Outlook email while Doodle helps teams more efficiently schedule meetings.

The buzz at Enterprise 2.0 is about "social" and harnessing information "streams" but what does it say that 2 of the 4 Launchpad finalists address very basic individual productivity challenges, saving time searching email and scheduling meetings?

4. The ROI Search Continues

Before leaving Wednesday I caught Dion Hinchcliffe's session while understanding from Martin Koser that a related ROI conversation was happening along the hall.

I've paid close attention to questions about proving the value of collaboration tools since Joe Cothrel and I conducted the Online Communities in Business 2004 Study and 72% of our respondents told us they couldn't measure ROI. While use examples grow can it be that sharing positive anecdotes continues to be a prime means of making the case to management for the value of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives?

5. Social Network Science and Organizational Knowledge Gaps

Back at my desk reading the #e2conf Tweet stream and emailing colleagues involved in teaching a forthcoming "Collaboration: How Your Practice Benefits from Social Media" Workshop it strikes me that there are vast bodies of untapped knowledge to address the challenges Enterprise 2.0 adoptions confront. For example, presentations by 21st Century Organization blog co-author Victoria Axelrod outline new organizational models, complexity and systems science, and "sociotech" as levers to more effective collaboration, knowledge sharing, stakeholder engagement, and co-creation of new offerings for enterprise sustainability. And as Enterprise 2.0 promotes "social" why isn't the science of social network analysis (SNA) more determinedly used to improve results?  

Source: Victoria G. Axelrod in "Open netWORKing Organizations Co-generating Business Value" 

Perhaps my perception would be different if I'd attended more Enterprise 2.0 conference sessions. If you did please take a moment to share your perspective on any knowledge gaps you see in improving success of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

From Crowdsourcing to Collective Intelligence at Work: Organizations are the Key

The Knowledge Innvovation Network (of the University of Warwick Business School) recently convened a diversely thought provoking workshop addressing "Knowledge and Prediction Markets". Jed Christiansen did his always stellar job explaining the operation and value of prediction markets.  I had the opportunity to broaden the discussion, talking about "Collective Intelligence at Work: Promises, Perils and Practice".

My slides are now posted along with appreciation to all the very smart people-- acknowledged below-- who gave time to providing cases, insights and idea filtering to inform my talk.

Collective Intelligence At Work

Next Practice

Qualcomm's Ricardo Dos Santos and Motorola's  Rami Levy are responsible for the two most evolved applications of "Collective Intelligence at Work" that I know:

i. Qualcomm's VentureFest where collective intelligence meets corporate entrepreneurship and

ii. Motorola's ThinkTank Idea Exchange (TIX), a model of "socialized innovation"

and generously shared their slides allowing others to learn from their initiatives.

Both demonstrate the investment involved in putting collective intelligence to work that begins with clear focus on business strategy and how value will be created through crowdsourcing. It proceeds to developing the organizational systems and collaboration platforms required to filter the most promising collected ideas into profitable business opportunities.

Qualcomm's Venturefest and Motorola's ThinkTank Exchange also highlight the exceptional "Whole Mind" management talent required to lead collective intelligence initiatives. Both Ricardo dos Santos and Rami Levy succeed because they have respect and support from executive leadership and can also build the relationships across their organizations to engage key stakeholders and contributions from diverse minds.

Promise and Perils

My talk also included examples of crowdsourcing efforts that help us appreciate the discipline and evolved nature of the Qualcomm and Motorola collective intelligence initiatives.

Wikipedia participation dynamics, the gap between the number of people who read and actively contribute and their organizational challenges, have been well documented and discussed.

Tom Malone, director of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence, a "We are Smarter than Me" project sponsor, openly admits that the project needed more active facilitation. Ultimately a team of paid writers were hired to filter the crowdsourced contribution and produce the book.

Andrew McAfee's Cases 2.0 wiki was inspiration for Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises (WSE) (convened with colleague Victoria Axelrod) to collect examples of enterprises leading the way with sustainability projects to provide models for others. Paying closer attention to the number of Cases 2.0 collected emergently over two years would have made me wiser about the work involved to make WSE successful. I'm appreciating the organization the Social Media Advertising Consortium has assembled to collectively support the development of a common social media vocabulary and evolve their industry.

Your taking time to review my slides, comment and challenge my thinking is appreciated.

Do you agree putting collective intelligence to work is critical to 21st century business success?

Please share your successful collective intelligence projects and recommended practices.  And if perchance your initiatives did not meet expectations do take a moment to reflect so others benefit from your experience.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

CREDITS

In addition to Ricardo Dos Santos and Rami Levy who shared their cases my thanks to:

• Linda Rebrovick, CEO Consensus Point for permission to use her Web 2.0 Trends slide
• Ana María Llopis, founder of ideas4all;  David Resseguie, Sensorpedia, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Michael Turillo, COO of Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations, (an industry leader through their investments in InnoCentive and Inno360) for product and trend insights
• Gary Colet and Phil Ridout (Knowledge Innovation Network), Victoria Axelrod, Bill Anderson, Steve Ardire, Dan Keldsen, John Maloney, Wendy Gold and Cathy Joseph for fresh perspectives 
• Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises contributors and Vincent Associates for providing network maps.

RELATED RESOURCES

• KIN December 2 Resources Google Wave
  
• Ambrozek, Jenny, and Axelrod, Victoria "Broadcasting Innovation:Organising to Collect Intelligence," Inside Knowledge Dec. 2007
• Axelrod, Victoria and Ambrozek, Jenny "Prediction Markets Co-creating an Organisation's Future." Inside Knowledge Mar. 2008

Have Prediction Markets arrived as an Enterprise Knowledge Sharing & Innovation Platform?

A small and really smart group of people convened by John Maloney (at the Gleacher Executive Center in Chicago), on November 6 to explore the latest developments in collective intelligence and use of prediction markets.

The conversation flow, diversity, and challenge to conventional thinking mirrored the forward looking sculptures in nearby Millenium Park.  

For those new to prediction markets finding a public prediction market to explore is increasingly easy, for example see the Industry Standard and CFO Magazine. The 2.0 Adoption Prediction Market made news at the recent San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 Conference. 

Andrew McAfee lists prediction markets as part of Enterprise 2.0. This Inside Knowledge Prediction Markets Masterclass (co-authored with colleague Victoria Axelrod) describes the prediction market landscape in 2008.

Why did I leave Chicago thinking that enterprise use of prediction markets to tap grassroots employee knowledge for forecasting, and in support of innovation. is about to blossom?

Three reasons:

1. High Profile Proven Enterprise Prediction Market Applications

Exemplifying the time for new ideas and technology to find their way into widespread adoption first use of an enterprise prediction market is credited to Robin Hanson (George Mason University professor and Consensus Point prediction market platform provider Chief Scientist) and dates to 1990. 

HP pioneered  use of prediction markets with it's BRAIN project. (Dr. Leslie Fine, now Crowdcast's VP Market Design, was HP's BRAIN lead researcher.)  The wider adoption of prediction markets by companies from Google to Best Buy, Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, General Mills, Qualcomm and ArcelorMittal, is widely reported including in this New York Times articles.

Friday Rami Levy, added to the list in explaining Motorola's evolved use of a prediction market to filter ideas and speed innovation.

2. Technology Evolution

As a pioneering prediction market provider since 1994, Chicago Cluster sponsor Consensus Point hosts high profile clients Best Buy, Motorola and Qualcomm among others. The Chicago meeting also revealed a next generation of vendors including Crowdcast and Spigit. Crowdcast's focus is forecasting business results. Spigit gets attention  because of Warburg Pincus's recent $10m investment. Their platform targets "innovation management" and embeds prediction in a social networking platform.

Each provider is carving out a niche and extending enterprise prediction market applications.  In the process platforms are evolving, made easier to use and integrate into day-to-day business processes.

3.  Growing Enterprise Understanding

The case has been made for the business value that comes from reaching out and engaging more diverse minds to solve business problems and co-create new opportunities. A host of books from James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds (2004) to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks (2006), Dan Tapscott's Wikinomics  (2006) and Clara Shih's Facebook Era (2009) detail the trend. 

While enterprise prediction markets have been the province of innovative companies, the Chicago participants pointed to a diverse and expanding array of new applications.  

The talent represented in each of the platform vendor executive teams, and among participants implementing new applications, was also thought provoking about factors in successful use. Putting prediction markets to work in enterprises demands a wide array of skills from technical understanding for making markets perform within the culture of an organization, to relationship building to engage participants and encourage contribution.  Quantitative skills + tie to business strategy + relationship building + technology are all essential.

What have I missed? If you were in the room in Chicago, or not, please comment to inform my reflection on the discussions.

 ~ Jenny Ambrozek

Enterprise 2.0: A solution in search of a problem

A CEO’s first question, after the decision to launch a new product or expand to a new market in a different geography, is WHO will lead this endeavor? states the EVP of HR of a global media giant. Notice the CEO did not ask what technology will we use to support.

Talent at the end of the day is what makes or breaks a business. Technology enables individual and group performance which translates to organizational results. No doubt in some cases poor technology actually hobbles organizational performance.

I’m a technology advocate, but I think the emphasis needs to be on the who, not the how which is where E2.0 has focused despite protestations of its proponents. Reading some of the recent manifestos Andrew McAfee’s How Beautiful it is, how easily it can be broken or Michael Kreigsman’s mash up of Gary Hamel and McAfee,  Enterprise 2.0, the Kumbaya irony  one still gets the sense that technology is the “white knight” if we can only get the people to collaborate.

Technology generally has developed along the lines of someone seeking a better means (automation) to an end – an extension of what we have, tractor replacing a horse.  Sometimes technology is applied to satisfy a desire to have more knowledge (fmri to map the brain territory in operation when we think of an object or concept - now a reality) and lastly, technology is a happy accident – a tool for one purpose turns out to have business benefits - Facebook like social networks, blogs wikis, and RSS – repurposed consumer tools for business.  Historically, happy accidents abound.  3M’s semi-sticky glue meets scrap paper bookmarks equals Post-it Notes (now digital). Social media feels like Post-its.

Jenny Ambrozek and I have written before on technology/tool transience in our Facebook Groups for Business investigation. Five years ago only a small group used FB, two years ago what was Twitter? A year from now who knows what tool we will have.  I’ll go so far as to say these technologies are only artifacts in our search to keep making our work and life more efficient, effective and meaningful. 

Which gets back to the CEO’s question WHO will lead the business endeavor?

 Once we start talking about WHO we are back to the beginning again.  People, their skills, abilities, competencies, relationships and networks. Yes, social networks the backbone of getting work done or not.  Not all folks play well with others. We are inherently social, but with social comes both competitive as well as collaborative behavior.  Human behavior is a well studied field, but some how not known to many technologists. 

Why businesses don’t collaborate- Meeting management, group input and wiki use  is a nice survey conducted by Stuart Mader and Scott Abel.  There really are no surprises in the report. All the usual suspects are accounted for – resistance to change, too many tools, and not enough time.

 Organizational – people basics are what matter. Rob Cross, interviewed for the Financial Times comments, You can kit everybody out with Google’s new Wave system, which combines all the latest communication and social networking features, but if the right people are prevented by bad gatekeepers or energy-sapping bosses from working together, nothing will come of it.       

Technologists keep tripping over the same human system in the middle of the floor.

 At the 2009 Miami FOWA conference I caught up with Mark Masterson about my observations on human systems which he captured in his blog post on the event…

 At dinner Monday night, Victoria and I had been kvetching over the problem that too many wheels get reinvented in the IT industry. People never seem to know what other people have already done, and assume they've had some profound insight when, in fact, they've just gone down a path well worn by any number of other people. In particular, people don't read enough. We're all in such a hurry -- there never seems to be enough time to just sit down and learn. So Victoria's gripe was that there was lots of research, both existing and ongoing, on things like organisational models, webs of trust, and so on, all of which contained significant information of value for IT practitioners working on software to enable things like social networking and collaboration. Yet, she said, it was a rare developer or designer that she'd meet who had the slightest idea of the existence of such research. 

 Leap frogging our selves into the future

The good news is each wave of technology actually does leap frog us over our own human limitations.  Although the business of leaping can be pretty messy; just like the game, most of us have good intentions of moving forward, but we succumb to change fatigue.  Efficacy has us opt for the equilibrium of status quo (which I prefer over resistance, having a pejorative slant) just to survive in our fast paced work environments.

A few folks stand out in the next leap forward Sandy Pentland, MIT – "sociometers" Honest Signals, Tim Berners Lee, Harvard – Linked Data , Fred Wilson, tech venture capital  – Union Square Ventures, neuroscientists Marcel Just, Carnegie Mellon University – “thought identification” and Gemma Colvert, Neurosense – neuromarketing. 

What connects these wizards is sensing (as in detection) and semantic (as in smart web). Between sensors, semantics and science our connectedness will become transparent. What they are achieving will more nearly marry our brain patterns to our social behavior with a web presence.

We are moving to linked data in a profound way – stuff talks to stuff and has been for the past few years. RFID chips track goods in the supply chain and your car trouble is diagnosed remotely. With Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data we will begin to not only structure how we tag information but be able to see the relationship of data sets as in network maps.  My wiki may hold information which is unique or 95% redundant to another. The benefits become obvious.

Pentland’s “sociometers” are now gathering early data on the dominance of our nonlinguistic communications and their importance in increasing our 'network intelligence, comments Bob Metcalf. Looking much like a cell phone, the sociometer provides real time social network relationships.

These technologies are not science fiction. They are works in progress being used by top brand companies. Unilever, Intel, P&G, McDonald’s, and MTV-Viacom are all exploring neuromarketing.

Today’s web 2.0 and E2.0 are still rather clunky requiring endless conscious clicks between oceans of information accompanied by huge amounts of human energy to get people to become “users”.  Ideally, we are “prosumers” with the above technologies, simultaneously generating and consuming.

Predictive power

What makes these technologies a leap ahead of web 2.0/E2.0 is their predictive power and embedded science of behavior.

Hopefully, when the CEO asks “who” will lead, science based technologies will enable an informed answer. The technology solution is then to serve the ever present problem – how to enable us to be more effective and efficient at what we want to do.

~Victoria G. Axelrod

Why this Season of Web 2.0 Discontent?

Has Web 2.0 lost it's sparkle? Finding multiple posts suggest an intriguing trend.

At Techcrunch, Robin Wauter uses a barometer of declining number of startups contacting his company and including the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message as an indicator suggesting the "Death of Web 2.0".

Beyond this Wauters looks to Google trends for insight into Web 2.0 interest:

".. the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for 'Web 2.0' by 2011."

I've added a note to my 2011 calendar to test that prediction. Meantime, seriously, where does Web 2.0 stand? Where do we look for clues to declining Google search interest in Web 2.0? And what new is capturing attention?

A February 2009 McKinsey Quarterly article "Six ways to make Web 2.0 work" provides helpful insights?  It reports McKinsey's study of 50 Web 2.0 early adopters over the past two years and finds:

"Our work suggests the challenges that lie ahead. To date, as many survey respondents are dissatisfied with their use of Web 2.0 technologies as satisfied."

The article goes on to describe the impediments dissenters cite:

"..organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools. We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results."

The rest of the article is recommended reading especially as it reiterates the case that Victoria Axelrod and I will be making Monday to our FOWA workshop participants. Successful technology development and adoption demand both focus on engaging stakeholders in the business improvement to be gained and a deep understanding of the human networks on whose success they depend.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Miami February 23-24: The Place to Be

The FOWA Miama Conference web site promises:   

"We’ve got some awesome speakers lined up for you this year and a ton more to come! It’s gonna be bigger and better than ever. So don’t miss out."

Scanning the speaker list suggests this is an understatement.  The Who's Who of web application development and social media  includes Alex Hunter (Virgin Group), Ben Galbraith (Mozilla), Chris Messina (Vidoop), Daniel Burka (Digg & Pownce), Dave Morin (Facebook), David Recordon (SixApart), Dion Almaer (Google), Francisco Tolmasky (280 North), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Jason Fried (37Signals), Joe Stump (Digg) Joel Spolsky, Kevin Hale (Wufoo), Kristina Halvorson (Brain Traffic), Mark Masterson (CSC), Michael Arrington (Techcrunch), Mike McDermott (FreshBooks) and of course, Ryan Carson, the force behind FOWA.

In case you are wondering why I'm so enthusiastically encouraging attendance at FOWA, it's because Victoria Axelrod and I are participating. We're leading a workshop on "How to build web apps for the emerging Enterprise market." Our experience supports what  Bob Buckman-- labelled "Knowledge Management's father figure" by Infoworld-- told us in an interview last year:

“If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same”              ~ Robert H. Buckman

Please feel free to tell me your experience is different but what I've seen over decades is coding and development of applications is the easy part.  The real challenges are ensuring:

i. Technology is developed in support of a clear business strategy

ii. Implemented with user enthusiasm and support, and

iii. Actually adopted.

Victoria and I are action and results oriented, so our workshop helps participants look beyond the technology you are creating to the business and organizational support needed to ensure success. Exercises include:

1. Analyzing your personal network looking for the gaps to fill to increase chances of your application's success, both inside and outside your organization.

2. Focusing on the business challenges surrounding your application development

3. Sharing challenges with fellow FOWA conference attendees  to help you consider solutions and the way forward.

Please don't hesitate to ask questions or nudge us on our workshop themes as we prepare. We look forward to meeting in Miami, February 23.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

The Contribution Revolution at Work: CNN Creating Value through Volunteer Co-Creation

A pointer from Rob Laubacher  to The Contribution Revolution- Letting Volunteers Build Your Business by Scott Cook (Harvard Business Review October 2008) came in perfect time for watching CNN's inauguration coverage.

The Contribution Revolution author, an Intuit cofounder, "challenges traditional companies to follow the lead of internet superstars—and of innovative peers such as Honda, Procter & Gamble, and Hyatt—in tapping the contributions of countless people beyond their organizations."

And what better example have we seen of the "Contribution Revolution" than how CNN tapped inauguration watchers on The Mall, and virtually, to expand their coverage and perspectives on the occasion.  Wednesday CNN TV announced 11,000 videos and photos were uploaded. Has anyone seen a number for how many people contributed through Facebook messaging as the CNN coverage unfolded?

During the pre-inauguration coverage last weekend, CNN unveiled their collective intelligence initiative to create a 3D image of "The Moment". What I didn't realize then is that they were using a Microsoft technology called Photosynth that is required-- a 4mb download-- to view the results.

Regardless of whether the technology delivered as promised, or not, to me the willingness to participate and co-create CNN's "The Moment" points to a world of customer engagement that businesses, as Intuit's co-founder Steve Cook makes clear in the first paragraph of his HBR piece, cannot ignore:

"Our aim was to come up with ways that people outside the company could volunteer their time, energy, and expertise to make life better for our customers. Sound odd? Well, if you’re not conducting an exercise like that at your organization, you risk missing the boat on a sea change that’s transforming business." ~ Steve Cook

Colliding Web Sciences - MIT Research Initiative

Yesterday' conversation with Leslie Bradshaw of New Media Strategies , one of a talented caste of co-presenters at Friedman Foundation's first Generator Forum on social media and the recent passing of Oliver Selfridge, founding father of artificial intelligence, reminded me I had not posted on the Web Science Research Initiative begun this fall at MIT and South Hampton University. September's Scientific American detailed the philosophy and research focus of the academic program in their article Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Future.

What is most striking to me is the multidisciplinary approach the initiative is assuming from the start and acknowledging the socio-cultural impact as core.

There is a symbiotic relationship with web technology, the intentions of people wanting to connect around what interests and motivates them and the culture that evolves.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web and leads the consortium, it is now time to analyze the Web in a scientific way. By modeling its structure, articulating the architectural principles that have fueled its phenomenal growth, and discovering how social conventions drive online human interactions, Web science hopes to find mechanisms that will ensure the network continues to grow productively and in ways that support the basic social values of trustworthiness and privacy. As transformational as the Web has been, far more advancement could be realized with deeper scientific investigation of decentralized information systems.

The first round of papers for the Web Science Research Initiative will be presented at Society Online Conference in March of 2009 in Athens, an apt setting as it was the home of Hadrian’s library, the ancient Greek's physical hub of society.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod