Infovark

We arrived here in Boston tired, and pretty scruffy looking after the red-eye train from DC. But, we made it!

We just missed an interesting sounding opening presentation from Rob Carter from FedEx - it looks like FedEx are making extensive use of the web, facebook and blogs and wikis both within and external to their organization.

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke then presented a great seession on their work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s knowledge sharing ability has been greatly enhanced since they deployed their “intellipedia” - a mediawiki implementation that allows CIA staff to edit and share information freely, and without editorial regulation.

My favourite quote from Sean - “Wikis don’t work in theory - they only work in practice”

Other than removing the ability to make anonymous edits, not much was changed by the CIA when they launched intellipedia, last year.  They claim also to have a much higher contribution rate (Wikipedia has a markedly low percentage of users who actually edit it - often guessed at about 1-3%) - but they are still working with the early adopters - intellipedia hasn’t been wholly rolled out to the entire organization.

“A culture problem - not a technology problem”

Don mentioned that there was substantial resistance to their efforts to incorporate this crazy wiki thing into their business. Primary benefit comes from working at the broadest audience possible. The wiki approach also focuses more on topic than on organizational structure - it means that the point tends to be on content, rather than process. That’s a really good thing.

” But - I don’t have time to edit this intellipedia thing”

Don and Sean seem adamant that the best way to deal with this kind of response is for people to stop writing emails and documents, and start writing intellipedia articles instead. (I suspect that that’s going to be a friction point for them. People don’t like new ideas very much. )

All in all, this was a great session - intellipedia seems set to be a great success.

I really got a kick out of Jevon’s Enterprise 2.0 Drag Queens post. Watching a company trying to be something that it’s not is a bit sad, but in a comical way. On the eve of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I thought it might be time to stop and think a bit about “Enterprise 2.0″, which is really quite a horrid name for something so important.

As corny as it may be, the thing that I really like about the label is the “2.0″. It sounds as though it’s a new release of the Enterprise. But-why do we need a new Enterprise? The old one still works, right?

Well, yeah. But also no. Things have changed. And the changes have happened subtly - to the foundations of the way we work.

If you take any department in your organization, you will find two common elements. These are Information Management, and Communication.

It doesn’t matter what department it is. HR, Finance, Operations, Marketing -all they are doing is storing and retrieving information, and selectively passing it on to people - customers, colleagues, and other organizations. ( I realise this is a pretty high-level abstraction, but stay with me for a while. The view’s really nice up here )

Most of the principles - the “best practices” around optimizing organizations deal explicitly with these two elements. That’s what’s kept management consultants getting paid so much for so long. That’s what brought us Business Process Management, and Automated Workflow, and Process Re-engineering. Structuring and refining information management and communication processes. That’s it.
(See - what good is a high level abstraction if you can’t make sweeping generalizations?)

But while we were busy with flowcharts and telephone systems, the fundamental assumptions of those two disciplines changed. And it was the internet that changed them.

The 1.0 Rules of Communication

1. The marketing department controlled all external perception of the enterprise
2. Internal Communication was always just internal

The 1.0 Rules of Information Management

1. Information only exists in one place at a time.
2. Access to information was readily controllable.

None of these things are true anymore. 

That’s why we need the 2.0. That’s why our tools need to change. The foundations that we built our organizations on are not the same.

(And perhaps that’s why it’s funny when the guys who have years of 1.0 experience behind them cram their burly legs into the silk stockings and the whip out the lipstick…)

It’s a funny thing working for a “stealth” startup. There’s two very diametric forces at work. In one corner, you have the notion that you aren’t willing to share precisely what you’re working on with everyone until you’re sure that it’s ready. And in the other, the fact that as a young organization, you really want to engage with potential customers and partners already in the kind of space that you’re aiming to get to.

This kind of “Come Here - Go Away” paradox is pretty common in startups and their blogs (ours included).

But, after a bunch of long hours writing code, and consulting with designers, and doing other fairly insular activities, Dean and I have decided that we couldn’t possibly miss the big Enterprise 2.0 Conference. So, we’re dusting off our nice clothes, and emerging from the comfortable darkness of the Infovark Burrow to join everyone in Boston next week.

We’ll be in town Tuesday to Thursday - so if you happen to be able to make it, and you’d like to catch up and talk with us about Enterprise 2.0, the stuff we’re working on, the stuff you’re working on, (or any thing at all) — we would absolutely love to see you! You can leave us a comment here, find us on twitter, or via email at info@infovark.com.

Dean and I are leaving the Burrow today to visit the kids at George Marshall High School. We’ve been invited to talk to a couple of senior classes about running a startup, our product, our business plan, and generally share how Infovark came to be.

We’re really excited to be given the opportunity to speak, so we took a few days out from our hectic schedule to put together some slides and prepare a talk.

Thinking back to when I was a fresh-faced young graduate, entering the business world for the first time, one of the really important lessons that I remember was when I realized that business systems tend to change much slower than I would have liked. And not just the adoption of new systems — but the very ideas that underpin the design of those systems take a long time to evolve.

I like to refer to the problem as one of legacy thinking — so as to distinguish it from legacy systems.

Take for example, the replacing of paper filing solutions with digital systems. This has happened over a period of about 20 years (and it’s still going on today). But initially, these computer systems were just electronic versions of those paper systems. They held onto a lot of ideas from the past:

• That information can only exist in one place at a time.
• That originals were innately different from copies.
• That information took up physical space, and you could only retrieve it from that space.

And so the systems that we built were kind of like Virtual Filing Cabinets. Files within folders within drawers and so on. But none of those points apply to digital information. We had new tools to manage the data, but we were still using old paradigms to organize it.

It wasn’t until the rise of the Internet search engine — and particularly Google — that people started entertaining the notion that you could perhaps manage information without a comprehensive underlying taxonomy.

People’s willingness to let go of old ideas is the only thing that can really facilitate new ways of working.

On that note, we’d better go. We don’t want to be late for class!