Archive for October, 2008
Individuals in Groups
Ross Mayfield, co-founder of SocialText, and Stowe Boyd, a leading social software consultant, have been discussing whether the focus of Enterprise 2.0 is the individual or the group. You can read Ross’ latest thoughts in his groups and networks post. We’ve weighed in on the topic, too. Gordon wrote that there is no enterprise — it’s made of people.
So what is Enterprise 2.0, anyway?
Unfortunately, Enterprise 2.0 means different things to different people. But it does imply a change in priorities and a different way of doing business. You’ll find those two concepts present in most definitions of Enterprise 2.0.
For the last century or so, we’ve structured the corporate engines of the economy to handle problems of scale. We’ve seen major revolutions in manufacturing, logistics, and transportation as a result. Mass production and mass distribution have changed the way we live and work and vastly improved our standard of living.
But not every business problem is a problem of scale. The same managerial techniques and organizational structures that make today’s cars and computers won’t work well for producing television dramas or delivering health care. Yet if you skimmed the business and economics section of your local bookstore, you wouldn’t find much good advice for in running those sorts of enterprises. Nor would you find many off-the-shelf software applications to help you run those businesses — until E2.0 came along.
Other sectors of the economy haven’t seen the dramatic productivity gains that manufacturing and distribution have. And most of those companies don’t follow the rigid corporate hierarchy lampooned in Dilbert. Law firms, medical practices, and consultancies often run on a partner model. In entertainment or design it’s not uncommon for the highest paid individual to be a member of the staff rather than the managers or directors. Where’s the Michael Porter for these companies?
That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is about. It’s about adapting some of the successful tools and communications technologies found on the open web to solve problems faced by people working in creative, knowledge-based industries.
The priorities have shifted from problems of scale to problems of innovation.
It’s about individuals in groups
Ross Mayfield is right when he says that “the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group.” Whether you’re managing a small team or large division, you’ll likely find dozens of products that can improve group dynamics or productivity. These range from old-school solutions, like hiring an information architect to redesign the internal web portal, to state-of-the-art E2.0 products from folks like SocialText, MindTouch or Jive Software.
But Stowe Boyd is also right. The primary difference between 1.0 and 2.0 solutions is the focus on individual users. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0, famously summed the Web. 2.0 vibe by saying, “users add value.” Individuals can and should contribute directly to the content of sites they visit and the organizations to which they belong. If the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group, then the fundamental unit of knowledge work is the individual.
The challenge of enterprise social software is to make tools that work for both the individual and the group. It’s devilishly hard to do, and there’s no shortage of failed attempts, from custom IT projects that fail to high-flying dot.com companies that go bust. Getting ad hoc groups of intelligent, creative people to work together in harmony is an art.
But people thought the coordinated, mechanized dance of the assembly line was an art, too, before management science made it routine.
Happy Birthday to Us!
It was just more than a year ago that Gordon and I started Infovark. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long since we left world of enterprise systems consulting to build our own product. We’ve learned a lot about writing code, marketing products, and running a software startup. It’s experience we couldn’t have gotten working anywhere else, for anyone else. It’s been hard, hard work. It’s also been a lot of fun.
You might have noticed that the rate at which we post to this blog has slowed lately. That’s because, in anticipation of our one year anniversary, we’ve been planning for the next year, which will bring lots of changes. We’ll conduct a public beta and launch our first product. We’ll set up a satellite office in Australia for Gordon. We’ll establish our revenue model and pricing. And we’ll do all of these things while remaining engaged in the Enterprise 2.0 community.
We started Infovark because we had a particular itch to scratch. We felt that many of the solutions being sold to business professionals failed to deliver on improved productivity or collaboration grounds. We felt like there were tools and technologies that could help, if you could put them together in the right way. We felt that doing so might require totally new approaches, ones that broke with old habits and legacy thinking. And we knew that was going to be a hard sell.
So we’ve been reaching out to a few folks. Some will help us with interface design, some with business development, some with performance and testing. Gordon will catch up with some of his mates in Australia that might want to pitch in. I’ll be looking for talent here in the U.S. But good people and good ideas come from everywhere. We aim to be the smallest, most innovative global company you’ve ever seen. We want to change the world of work for the better.
So here’s to the coming year!
Contribution Engines
Mark Masterton left a great comment on my post about contribution and discovery. It’s prompted me to think some more about contribution engines.
As an example, I see FriendFeed as a contribution engine. It collates and collects all of your social interactions from multiple social channels, and unifies them into a central stream that clearly shows what you have been doing on the various different colored social highways that make up the internet. This means that I don’t have to sign up to a zillion different services to find out what my friends are doing.
But what about your workplace? Most of the work that’s going on in those channels isn’t happening in an existing RSS-enabled application in the cloud. And, despite how much Google and Amazon nag us, a lot of that content is going to stay behind the firewall. It’s not discoverable. It’s not sharable, or taggable.
By a contribution engine, I mean a tool designed to find the Dark Matter. There is still a lot of content that is not visible — not REST exposed. A lot of this content isn’t taggable because it’s the byproduct of personal communication in direct channels — like email — and it’s contained in business artifacts like documents and reports that people want to retain inside the organization. If we want to connect the enterprise, we can’t ignore this fact. We can’t just plonk a giant server in the middle of the organization and say, “Do all your work in there starting… now!”
In any organization, content is all over the place. Some is on share drives, some is in sharepoint, some is in the ERP systems, and lots of it is lying around on people’s personal computers. Is it reasonable to move all of this into the cloud? Why not just publish it from where it sits?
