Digital(Analog)

I bought a Mac. (Well technically it’s my second Mac, I owned a Mac Classic II in college).

I was saving for a new computer to replace my Dell desktop and decided that I really wanted to play with OS X and should probably have another laptop instead of custom building a $2,000 desktop that I won’t use to its full power. Since they’re running at 2+ GHz they’re not a bad little machine either - at least I can tell from the 45 min I spend playing with one in the Apple store at Southpoint.

The box is sitting on my kitchen counter.

Its partly an exercise in restraint (I had some work to do tonight [what else is new], and I’m taking next week off, so there is plenty of time to play :-), partly an attempt to get to bed at a reasonable hour (I knew that if I opened it up at 9pm when I got home I’d be up REALLY late and I’m almost certain, based on the 2nd sleep study that I did last week, that I’ve got narcolepsy), and partly an exercise in getting rid of buyers remorse (if I let it sit there for a bit I’ll be confronted with it’s “returnability” and just get over it… I saved the money and can afford it.).

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Denise Kalos and Bill Takacs from O’Reilly Media.

"What we know is that people learn first form their peers"

Whats going on in the world:

• Workforces are distributed
• There is a huge gap between the baby boomers and Gen-x’ers that will replace them.
• The attitude toward work-life balance for "Millenials" is different. They will change jobs about 19 times in their career. They are also primarily focused on their personal goals, not their work goals.

Principles most important to the enterprise:

• "Harnessing collective intelligence"
• Data is the "next intel inside"
• Rich user experiences
• Software above the level of a single device
• Perpetual beta

[Not sure what they mean here about being "important to the enterprise" - they're not taking questions until the end] [They cleared it up when I asked. These are points Enterprises need to be aware of when they think about implementing web2.0 technologies]

Gave example of company reaching out to communities for product development. Kettle Chips uses their online presence to get new chip flavors.

"If you build it they MAY come, manage it properly and they will engage, thrive and prosper" (Tools can’t by themselves create community.) [They had some tips here, but skipped past them.]

Community maturity model

Informational > Provisional > Communicative > Proactive > Productive > Leveraged

Its all about people. People need:

• Exposure to things that capture their interest
• the right resources at the right time
• a place to find their voice and hear what others are saying
• a forum to shine and share success
• to be actively guided to ensure that their energy and efforts align with strategic objectives.

Attract Members, Build Community, Capture Knowledge

Getting lurkers to be participants - the best way is to create controversy.

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We do a great job at building software to get in people’s way.

There is a power law for participation (reading is easy, but not very engaging, while collaborating and leading are hard, but highly engaging.) We need to find ways to build low cost of entry points for participation in our tools.

"There is not collaboration without a goal" - Eugene Kim.

Discusses wiki usage at call centers. Makes the differentiation between ’self service’ and ‘community service’.

Discussed 4 scenarios where wikis are used best. (Didn’t catch them while looking up Eugene Kim)

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Suggested the difference between  "closed hierarchy" and "open networked enterprise" in his 1992 book "Paradigm Shift".

Pulled together a research project that looked at the enterprise and its transformation. Discovered that the enterprise is undergoing a fundamental change.

There are 4 divers for this change.

• Web 2.0 - the interactive web.
• The "next generation" - children who take technology for granted. As a panel he asked a 20 year old what she would use email for, and she answered "you know for something formal, like sending a thank you note to someone’s parents".
• The Social Revolution - Sites that have been providing content are being eclipsed by sites that provide content collaboration (e.g. myspace beating out mtv.com). Self organization has been around throughout history and the web empowers that self organization to happen very quickly.
• The economic revolution - Nobel prize winning economist asked "why does the firm exist?". His answer was because of the transaction cost. The transaction cost was really the cost of collaboration. Over time we’ve gone from physical and financial  resources be critically constrained to knowledge being the constraining resource, and at the same time value is moving from the traditional hierarchy to the self organizing.

Enterprise 2.0 - New business models

Goldcorp - a 50 year old mining company peers, opens and shares his proprietary geological data and opens it up to an online community to find gold. He spent $0.5M in prize money and found $3B in gold. He was successful because he:

• Peered
• Was transparent
• Shared his proprietary data.

7 New business models

1. Peer Pioneers - Peer services - lending, open source software delivery.
2. Ideagoras - Idea markets - places to exchange ideas and reward outside of the enterprise.
3. Prosumers - turning customers into producers.
4. The next Alexandrians
5. Open platforms
6. The global plant floor - (e.g. a peer produced airplane - Boeing collaborates from the ground up to build the 787 with its suppliers.
7. The wiki workplace - push more and more to collaborative wikis instead of having the direction come top down.

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Panel session, moderated by Jessica Lipnack - abstract: What if we put as much organizational energy behind culture, behaviors, and values as we do toward bringing in new technology? Hear - and tell - one another what it takes to "release? v2.0 of an enterprise. This session is about the soft stuff - even when we’re talking about technology. Each panelist will speak briefly. Then we’ll open it up to the room to discuss what works.

Jessica starts out the session having everyone in the room introduce themselves. Huge variety of companies represented here. Panelists from Sitescape, VSee, NetAge. Milton Chen (CTO VSee) is presenting remotely through the VSee software - "Why John Chambers may be wrong about tele-presence". Milton studied video conferencing for his PhD at Stanford. One of the components of his work was a study of "smile recognition time" as related to the size of the video. It appears that the effect of the resolution/size of the video flattens out quite quickly.

Tele-presence has value - the claim here is that usually executives overstate the claim that high quality tele-presence is most important. Milton claims that the key is to provide tele-presence in the context of the locations that people typically occupy (e.g. Milton’s messy office).

Tom Witkin from SiteScape talks about ICEcore - a new product for "discovering cool collaboration." … "A personal workspace that’s your ‘on ramp’ to team collaboration." Not sure I got much from the short presentation.

Dan Somers from vc-net. Where is your Chief Collaboration Officer? Usually collaboration practices change by someone going outside of their job role, some times its an exec reacting to things being really really bad.

Dan believes that you can measure anything that you’ll need to measure collaboration at some time, even if its just to justify it to your financial director. "A sound collaboration strategy requires all forms of collaborative technology".

Dan suggests that when you create teams of remote people their natural tendency is to drift apart. This leads to a number of cultural conflicts that might be blamed on the technology or various other misleading causes. "The empowered CCO interfaces with many business areas"

Key points from Dan - (1) Jostle for proper position as CCO (2) establish measurable results, (3) be prepared to spend $5 in training for every $1 of technology

Bill ? - In the early 90’s there was a property casualty insurer who was having some problems. One of their issues was an IT system focused on extracting data from employees. (There was no value seen by the agents, so the data was often sloppy). The one technology that peopl where using we was the "rumor mill" executed over email. The company brought together some of its best underwriters and asked them what they needed to do their jobs. One thing they wanted to know the experiences of people who’ve underwritten certain types of entities before.

This created a new issue of transparency. People did not necessarily want other people knowing what they were doing. They solved this by asking what people were comfortable with making transparent, and show them the value of things being transparent.

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Enterprise 2.0 started Monday with a day 0 of tutorials. That was a travel day for me, so not much to say there

Day 1 was filled with keynotes and talks, followed by a cocktail reception in the demo pavilion.

The morning kicked off with David Weinberger (author Everything is Miscellaneous) who gave a great talk about data, meta data, and how not imposing physical world limitations on organizing data is a key to making it as accessible as it can be. There is a great synopsis of the book (or at least the talk) in one of the reviews at amazon.com - a snippet:

David Weinberger, internet visionary, has again synthesized an intellectual romp through another important topic - Information. We, humans, are obsessed with defining, categorizing and organizing information as our way of bringing some order to the chaotic world we live in.
Weinberger explores our obsession with information from Plato and Aristotle to our modern-day digital explosion of information.
He frames this exploration by defining 3 orders of organizing information:

1) 1st Order organization is of the physical world, manipulating physical objects and organizing them,
2) 2nd Order of organization is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints.
3) 3rd Order of organization is the world we live in today, as we move from the physical to the digital, organizing information becomes freed from physical constraints allows us to simultaneously define, categorize and organize information into a million different taxonomies.

The next talk was from Andrew McAfee of Havard Business School. He gave a "report card on the state of the enterprise 2.0 meme." One of my big take away’s from his talk was the lack of (real) evidence supporting the value of web 2.0 technologies for business. At least beyond the few examples he said that he uses over and over again. This is also a point that I’ve been making in presentation I’ve been giving inside of IBM. He called for a repository to be build that we could all use to store (and borrow) success stories.

Then came the corporate talks. The room took a bit of turn. These talks were really more product pitches than anything else. Clearly there was some sponsorship precedence here, and companies have to get their messages out. The chunking seemed really discongruous and really seemed to "harsh the buzz" of the room. We heard from IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Cisco.

Between two of the talks Jessica Lipack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge gave a talk about their long history in social networking and online communications network. One memorable story about how they used snail mail years before the Internet to reach out to their immediate network (and higher order degrees) find people interested in creating an international communications network. I believe their initial request went out to 9 people and they ended up with 50,000 people at one point.

Unfortunately I missed a couple of great sessions after lunch due to customer / partner commitments. Hopefully I’ll get to some today…

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