Infovark

The most discouraging thing about running a startup is how long it takes to start up. Maybe that’s why I found The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun such a great read. He systematically demolishes common misconceptions about how ideas get to market. Just skimming some of the chapter headings made me feel better:

The Myths of Innovation

• The Myth of Epiphany
• The Lone Inventor
• There is a Method for Innovation
• People Love New Ideas

We’ve absorbed these myths into our culture because they make entertaining and memorable stories, but innovation rarely works that way. Edison had a team of reasearchers working for him and trial-and-error was his primary means of refining ideas. The advertising industry owes much of its existence to the difficulty of getting people to try new products and services. Sometimes it takes years for a new development to reach consumers, as was the case with 3M’s laughably weak glue formula eventually becoming the blockbuster Post-It note.

It’s good to be reminded of these counterexamples. The idea is often the easy part. It’s the execution that’s hard.

We’re big fans of Clay Shirky. We cited his work twice in our Seminal Articles for Enterprise 2.0 post. So naturally his new book, Here Comes Everybody, was required reading.

Here Comes Everybody

To summarize the book in one paragraph, Here Comes Everybody is an exploration of the effect of the Internet on society. Clay’s central thesis is that the Internet and related technologies have dramatically lowered the barriers to information sharing and group formation. As a result, new sorts of social groupings have emerged and many previous assumptions about organizations have been overturned. The effects of this are subtle and pervasive, and modern society is just beginning to adjust to the new logic of group structure and dynamics.

Two examples of these new kinds of groups include the open source movement and flash mobs. He also discusses the communities that form around Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

There key difference between these groups and organizations established without the new technologies is cost.  Prior to the Internet, coordinating a group of people to do anything imposed relatively heavy costs. It took time, money, and effort to coordinate and direct people. But those costs have fallen dramatically in recent times. Where before you needed funding, offices, employees and experts to build complex software, write encyclopedias, or collect and organize a photo exhibition, you can now do so with volunteers working in their spare time.

Not all of these groups succeed, of course. Most of them don’t produce anything of lasting value. But since the cost of forming these groups is so low — requiring just a “Promise, Tool and Bargain” to get started — it leads to massive experimentation. With low barriers to entry and a large enough scale, trial and error emerges as a viable strategy. It leads to innovations that in the past would never have passed institutional muster.

Here Comes Everybody is a thought-provoking read. The explanations are clear, the anecdotes well told, and the analysis hits close to the mark. Others, notably Nick Carr, have taken issue with Clay’s enthusiasm for his subject (read their ongoing debate on britannica.com) but I found it helped knit the book together. You can’t understand the changes happening to the Internet and society today without understanding the viewpoint of technologists and technophiles like Clay Shirky. A lot of us are caught up in the Internet revolution, and we’re determined to follow it as it unfolds.

Pie has a great post musing about the origins and ultimate purpose for Enterprise 2.0. I’ve been thinking about it myself. And as we get closer to getting ready to ship, I think I might be feeling brave enough to try to field an answer to this question…

Previous enterprise solutions tried to solve the problem at a high level. Enterprise 1.0 was defined by expensive, broadly defined solutions whose use was mandated by the top of the org chart. I’m certain that this approach fails because it doesn’t take into account the actual problems of the average knowledge worker.

I think that’s why we have Enterprise 2.0.

Structural holes and the spaces between them are fascinating, but they amount to little more than an academic distraction. I have a lot of respect for folks like Mark and Bex because they are both brilliant thinkers.  But somehow I can’t imagine them sitting down with  Lisa from Accounting to explain how “the holes between non-redundant contacts provide  you with opportunities that can enhance the control benefits and the information benefits of your network!”

Well of course not. Those kinds of things aren’t important to people doing the work. They’re interesting to Enterprise Architects. My point is that we’re drifting far, far away from the actual problems here. We’re back in the same sort of abstract thinking that led to 1.0 solutions. Enterprises are made of people.

The way I see it, as far as ‘knowledge’ is concerned, there are only really two important things to your average information worker: discovery and contribution.

Discovery

Discovery is just that — knowing what you didn’t know before. Common workplace discovery problems are things like “Who knows about this vendor/partner/account?” or “Who was the guy we talked to about that thing?” Enterprise 1.0 tried to address this by mandating a central repository and hierarchical classification system. It forced employees to tell some computer system what they knew and how they knew it. Only after a lot of manual data entry would the system be able to tell them something in return.

This approach failed because knowledge workers couldn’t be bothered. There was too much up-front work to make the search results useful. Without useful search results, nobody wanted to use the system. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Instead, knowledge workers would just ask someone who knew rather than working with a difficult computer and move on. You simply can’t turn your workforce into programmers, historians or archivists. There’s work to be done.

Google changed our way of thinking about discovery. It’s not a filing problem any more. It’s an indexing problem. The problem isn’t that content has been put on the wrong shelf — the problem is the shelves themselves. Digital information doesn’t occupy space and it can be duplicated with perfect fidelity. The strategies for managing a physical library are different than managing a virtual one. Web 2.0 taught us that reckless capture and rigorous indexing can solve discovery problems with much more success.

Contribution

Contribution problems precede discovery problems. How do people add what they know to the organization’s collective memory? How do they get credit for their work? Most knowledge workers are altruistic, but they both want the organization to benefit from their contribution and to recognize their effort.

When I was working in ECM, I used to joke about the “seven-second window.” That’s the period of time between a user finishing a piece of work and moving on to the next task. That window is the length of time users will devote to figuring out where to put content and how to share it. Do I send an email? What folder on the share drive do I use? If you can’t capture the necessary metadata within that seven seconds of “Hmmm. Where should I put this?” then you lose. The system won’t work. People are too busy.

I’m not sure that Enterprise 2.0 has really woken up to the importance of “Contribution Engines”. I define a contribution engine as a tool that automatically captures an employee’s output, indexes it for later retrieval, and shares it with others in the group. Sam Lawrence is looking for a contribution engine when he talks about Attention. But solving the contribution problem is huge. If we could find a way to allow people to contribute to knowledge bases just by doing what they do, then we have the “2.0″ — a solution that’s perfectly aligned with the goals of the individual worker.

Automatic contribution. Instant discovery. Those things will make enterprises work better, because they make people work better.

And I think “working better” is the real point.

Paul Graham from Y Combinator posts a list of ideas that his investment firm would like to fund, and Enterprise 2.0 makes the list at Number 5:

5. Enterprise software 2.0. Enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money. They get away with it for a variety of reasons that link together to form a sort of protective wall. But the software world is changing. I suspect that if you study different parts of the enterprise software business (not just what the software does, but more importantly, how it’s sold) you’ll find parts that could be picked off by startups.

That last point — that it’s not as much about what the software does, but how it’s sold — was a huge motivator for us when we started Infovark. One of our most popular posts to date is Emergence in the Enterprise — a rant that was a direct result of me spending far too long as part of the Enterprise Software Sales Cycle.

Power and money are concentrated at the top of the org chart, so naturally vendors want to sell to senior management.  After all, from a cost-of-sales perspective, you make higher profits by making only one sale for 12 million dollars than you do making 24 sales for a half million each. That’s surely good for your business.

But the reality is that Enterprise 2.0 can’t deliver much value at the top of the org chart. It’s the process changes and cultural change that delivers value. Unless you can convince the C-Level guys to force everyone else to come along for the ride, the cultural change necessary won’t occur. And as Dean says, if top-down “thou shalt” approaches to change management worked, there wouldn’t be any need for Enterprise 2.0… Enterprise 1.0 would do the job.

That’s why we’re firmly focused at the bottom of the org chart.

(We finally managed to get our product page up — if you’d like to find our more about how Infovark is planning to help, you can check it out here. )