Technology & Industry Disruption: VC Fred Wilson Speaks at Google

June 3, 2009 at 5:23 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Management, Web 2.0, government 2.0, productivity, social media

While Jim Ware’s recent post reminded us about  Keeping Technology in Perspective listening to long term venture capitalist Fred Wilson speaking at Google about “Disruption” indicates  technology change will continue, demanding that we as  individuals, organizations and industries adapt.

Wilson’s Union Square Ventures current investments include Tumblr, Feedburner, Boxee, Twitter and Etsy. He blogs at www.avc.com and sought feedback on his Google talk before delivering.

Fred Wilson’s “Disruption Talk” begins  with the media industry, the changes to which we’ve all watched and experienced as online and empowered individuals have emerged as driving forces and taken power from large institutions.

He proceeds to outline the industries seen as targets for future “disruption”:  Consumer Finance, Education, Energy,  Health Care and Government.

The presentation is an hour but  recommended viewing if you are interested in what’s next.

How does your view of what’s ahead in technology and the industries to be “disrupted” jibe with Fred Wilson’s?  Please share your reactions.

Book Review: Clara Shih’s “The Facebook Era”

April 29, 2009 at 10:58 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Management, Networks + Networking, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web Apps, productivity, social media, social networks

Subtitled  “Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” the book is a must read, and especially useful as a primer for those still needing to understand the fundamental changes in doing business as the Internet has matured  from Web 1.0 to:

“an entirely new level with Web 3.0- an era that is entirely about innovation and collaboration.”     (Foreword page ix)                        

An excellent overview of the book, in author  Clara Shih’s  own words,  is in 2 parts at the Entrepreneur’s Journeys blog .   Not surprizingly the book’s home page is on Facebook and 24 x 5 star Amazon reviews indicate the book’s value.

The book section titles– starting with “A Brief History of Social Media’ through “Transforming the Way We Do Business’ to “Your Step-By-Step Guide to Using Facebook for Business”–  reveal the key themes.  Reflecting the author’s hands on experience as the developer of FaceConnector and head of Enterprise Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy for Salesforce, the book is filled with lived experiences of companies using social networking to “build better products, reach new audiences and sell more stuff.”

If there are gaps in the book they reflect the state of the industry. For example, “The ROI of Social” is addressed in half a page (205) beginning:

“Understandably, a large number of you are focused on ROI and  might feel frustrated that there has been no clear quantifiable data around ROI”

and concludes suggesting;

“ROI will become much more quantifiable  and standardized”.

Have you read “The Facebook Era?”  What did you take away?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Being social at work: which communications model to adopt for the enterprise?

April 28, 2009 at 9:05 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, social media, social networks

Web 2.0 technology presents the modern organisation with a plethora of means for communicating new information to staff. While some of us are now running to install wikis and blogs as a vehicle to achieve enterprise 2.0 nirvana there are some important considerations that need to be given time before we jump for, say, Yammer over Twitter, that go beyond the fear of our internal information being communicated outside the organisation.

A very interesting article by Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Marshall Van Alstyne [1] on access to information through social networks provides some food for thought on this issue. It’s a fascinating examination of how information flows from one person to another and complements a number of other similar studies that look at how social relationships can either block access to information or enhance access to it.

Obviously, traditional communications models focus on the delivery of information as a top-down process, and as a result, limit the amount of shared knowledge that can be passed between the organisational silos. Because of the linear nature of knowledge transfer blockers can be a significant problem in accessing new information.

Some organisations, though, have adopted various collaboration tools as a means of complementing existing traditional communications channels in an attempt to break-down internal silos and blockers that can limit access to new information. In some instances, these tools also facilitate collaboration with clients and stakeholders outside the organisation.

While there are some obvious advantages with this approach it still doesn’t fully address modern research on how people access information. Aral and Brynjolfsson et. al.’s research notes that:

• Network diversity is associated with higher levels of productivity for task based information workers
• Network diversity is associated with performance, in part because diverse contacts provide access to novel information and resources
• Age, gender, industry experience, education have little effect on access to diverse information, highlighting the importance of network structure for information advantage.

These findings support a more expansive adoption of social media tools within the workplace to more efficiently leverage the social networks that individuals have both inside and outside the organisation, particularly given the homogenous nature of networks within an organisation due to the constraints and norming factors of culture.

The important take home message is simple — the more you leverage individual’s social networks the greater their access to information and the higher the levels of productivity that will result for them and the enterprise.

M

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1. Aral, S., Brynjolfsson, E. Marshall Van Alstyne, E. M., 2006. Network Structure & Information Advantage: Structural Determinants of Access to Novel Information. Workshop on Information Systems Economics.

Future Exploration Network Report … “Enterprise Social Network Strategy”

April 17, 2009 at 5:45 pm · Filed under Change Management, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Networks + Networking

Social architecture

April 9, 2009 at 8:08 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0, Work Design, social media, social networks

I’ve been working lately on two projects with companies building social networking platforms with a purpose. While some aspects are clearly around technology, features, and the like, there are also the subtle aspects that go into understanding how these sites will be used. In a meeting with one of the clients, we talked about this difficult area of how to ensure that the use of the site aligns with its purpose: will people interact on the topics that we want them to, will the site discourage irrelevant content or social tourists from joining?

The word “social architecture” came into my head (or all of our heads simultaneously, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it, when an idea emerges from the collective consciousness in a conversation?).

Like a good web 2.0 doo-bie, I tweeted that I was interested in using the term but needed to understand it more. My friend and colleague, Andrew Gent, tweeted back a definition, but then went on to do much more: he researched it, thought about, and has written a wonderful blog post, Social Architecture, that offers the definition that he tweeted back to me:

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals.

Andrew’s blog details the current use of the term with respect to social media as well as its history in the field of architecture. When I began my own superficial search, the thread I followed was biased toward the design of the interaction of various social media (Sam Huleatt: “To me, social architecture is best thought of as a cross between three elements: interface design, social media functionality and user engagement strategy.”) which didn’t reflect what I needed. Andrew has, I think, hit on the more sociological and social engineering (without the negative connotations of that term) disciplines needed to shape a user’s experience.

While Andrew’s context is the corporate intranet, where it is possibly simpler to design intent and purpose into the environment, my work is currently leading me to social networks in the world, a case where an individual company wants to draw people into a network to expand its field of vision and expertise.  No answers yet, but Andrew’s exposition is a terrific start and I thank him very much.

Yet Another Glimpse At the Future of Work

March 31, 2009 at 11:52 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0

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About a month ago the summary of McKinsey’s research on the use of the Web and social computing tools in the knowledge-based workplace made the rounds of the blogosphere and the Web.  It brought to mind an article from the January 2006 survey “Knowledge and the Company” in The Economist titled “The New Organisation” to which I have pointed several times over the past two years.

Why did that particular article come to mind ?  In the context of McKinsey’s research summary, for two reasons.

The first because the article started out with several paragraphs that took us back to the 50’s and William H. Whyte’s famous “The Organization Man“, noting that basically organizational structures and basic management techniques haven’t changed much since then, whilst juxtaposing that with the increasingly obvious facts that with the Web, web services and tools and mobile devices many (if not most) knowledge workers are continuously connected and ever-more densely interlinked … today we euphemistically call it ‘networked’.

The second because towards the end of the article The New Organisation McKinsey and Mercer (two high-end blue-ribbon management consulting firms) were cited as demonstrating rapidly growing interest in, and awareness of, the emerging new landscape for networked knowledge work.

In my previous posts pointing to the Economist article I have somewhat sarcastically noted that these firms knew a good market space to grow into when they smelled it (sarcastically because I have been aware of and following practitioners who have been talking and writing about this for almost ten years now) … the granddaddy of them all Stafford Beer, and people like Bill Ives, Euan Semple, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Stan Davis, Verna Allee, Chris Meyer, Jim Ware, Arie de Geus, Tom Stewart, Hubert St. Onge, Tom Davenport, Jim McGee, Dion Hinchcliffe, Gary Hamel, Larry Prusak, Dave Snowden, Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, Niall Cook, Lee Bryant, Matthew Hodgson, Patti Anklam, Jenny Ambrozek, Anne Marie McEwan, Ross Dawson, Cindy Gordon, Marc Prensky, Karen Stephenson, Valdis Krebs, Michel Bauwens, Nancy White, Dan Rasmus, Robert Johansen, Michael Schrage, Tom Malone, Jessica Lipnack, Luis Suarez, and on and on and on.  If I know you and I’ve left you out, please forgive me; there’s so many it will get boring if I keep thinking of and listing them (it probably already has).  Shameful egotistical plug …  I count myself as one of them, albeit probably on the farm team.

So … given the arrival and settling into place of what’s called Web 2.0, I think that the McKinsey summary mirrors what many leading thinkers have been saying for some time about the impact of the interactive participative Web on the workplace.  It’s useful, as it offers a fairly concise overview of the core issues associated with the shifts in leadership, management and basic organizational effectiveness management; and because it’s McKinsey, it provides an imprimatur of legitimacy to the ongoing discussion of and refinement of strategic and practical implementation issues related to this massive era-defining shift in the way work is perceived, designed and carried out.

To be fair, people at McKinsey have also been paying attention to knowledge work for quite a while now.  Anyone remember the name Brooks Manville - closely associated with McKinsey’s knowledge management practice back in the day ?

To help us all understand even more clearly, here’s a video clip explaining McKinsey’s Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.

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Can Twitter really be 3 years old? Does it signal a new economic model?

March 7, 2009 at 11:01 am · Filed under Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Networks + Networking, Web 2.0, productivity

Appropriately via Twitter this morning I found a post by @johnt  both marking the occasion of Twitter’s 3rd birthday and making the case for why Twitter is the Killer App.  

Can Twitter really be 3 years old? Wikipedia confirms  and provides this history:

“Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It began in March 2006 as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo.^[4] Odeo was co-founded by Noah Glass and blogger Evan Williams. In October 2006, the company was bought out by management, and Williams, Stone, and other Odeo employees started another company named Obvious Corp. to operate Odeo and Twitter, another startup Williams had been testing in the offices for about a year.^[5] Twitter had been initially used internally by Odeo’s employees and became a product of Obvious at this time.^[6]

The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category.^[7] Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter,^[8] gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”

John Tropea’s blog post scanning the Twitter  landscape and spelling out the case for microblogging as a productivity tool is recommended reading. (The AppGap’s Jon Husband is quoted.)  However, the assertion catching my attention was this:

“Most of all it is the perfect example of defining a new generation, away from the economic model of self-gain, and more to a social connection, collective, and engaged model.”

Does Twitter’s rapid rate of adoption and popularity  in fact signal the arrival of an economic model based on engagement?

If so, what are the implications?

~ Jenny Ambrozek