Infovark

I was just looking at a chart from Dr. Todd Stephens- an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint:

For some reason, staring at this pretty colored chart made me quite cross. Not because the information in it was wrong or misleading. It was because this chart takes a scientific management-style approach to Enterprise 2.0. It prescribes the areas in the enterprise that you should consider when you try to pitch your Enterprise 2.0 business case. It aspires to be a guideline for building a “best practice process manual” to follow when your pitch succeeds.

An ant analogy

Imagine you took an anthill, removed every ant, set them carefully aside, and then completely demolished the anthill. Then you brought all the ants back and let them rebuild their anthill again. Would you have EXACTLY the same anthill as you did before?

I haven’t done that exact experiment, so I don’t know for sure, but when I shook my plastic ant farm as a kid, tunnels collapsed and ants scurried about. I’d imagine that the big feature on the Ant Nightly News was about the giant earthquake. Then I’d watch them start digging. After a few days, a new system of tunnels would appear. Life in the colony moved on. (Until the next big quake, of course.)

Studying the way that ants construct their colonies is fascinating. There was lots of room for me, as a 5-year old staring into a plastic ant farm, to speculate exactly what those chambers were for, and why the tunnels ran the way that they did. I couldn’t spot an ant architect with a tiny blueprint, yet somehow they knew what to do. It’s instinct, I guess.

Social animals

We humans have instincts, too. We’re naturally good at things like communicating and forming groups. We’re so good at it, we often don’t notice it happening.

When humans collaborate, we don’t build anthills. We build companies, and non-profit groups, and clubs and teams and associations and governments. These artifacts are what we refer to as “Enterprises”. Much like a colony of ants, enterprises are motivated by a handful of basic goals: resource gathering, manufacturing, growth, survival, etc. Those goals, along with the aggregated interactions of thousands of ants, result in interesting arrangements of tunnels. Shaking things up a bit will produce a different pattern of excavations even though neither the ants nor the goals have changed.

Corporate structure and processes often emerge in the same way as those tunnels. They can seem convoluted, inefficient, and sometimes just plain weird at times. It’s the legacy of thousands of small tactical decisions taken by workers each day. Enterprises are organic, just like anthills.

Nobody reads flowcharts

While looking at the existing structures of an enterprise is fascinating, I’m not sure it helps you plan the next tunnel. I believe that Enterprise 2.0 can improve a company’s tactical operations by better informing knowledge workers. Better informed employees can make better decisions — hopefully ones that lead to the emergence of a more productive enterprise. But I also know that I’d have a difficult time connecting an enterprise instant messaging client roll-out to the company’s bottom line in the same way that I’d have a tough time connecting two ants waving their antennae at each other to the construction of an anthill.

And if it’s tough to follow that chain of events, imagine how difficult it is to reverse engineer an anthill. When I see a colorful, complicated chart like the one above, I picture an ant with a clipboard and stopwatch, shouting, “Hey guys, wait a sec. Let’s plan these tunnels this time.”

A tunnels-first approach in the social world only leads to frustration. You’ve got to get the myriad interactions between the ants right first. Then the tunnels will work themselves out.

As Nate says in between mouthfuls of hummus,

One of the biggest battles I see beginning to rage is the push to have E2 implementations matter to “Corporate”. To me that doesn’t make any sense. Sure, they need to understand the benefits, but they should also understand that their benefits are byproducts of user benefits. These things work because of users. Not a mandate from Corporate. So focus on defining their value, and their value alone.

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. )

I heard an interesting story the other day about automotive companies. Apparently after the Model T went into production, Ford concentrated on selling cars to people who didn’t have cars. Now, as far as marketing strategies go, this seems like a really good one. After all, most people didn’t have cars. The production model meant that this kind of new-fangled transport was now available to all. And, despite some initial adoption barriers, it worked. Ford sold lots of cars. The problem came about when General Motors arrived, a bit later on.

Turns out GM couldn’t sell cars to people who didn’t have cars, because everyone already had one. So, they decided to sell the car as a ’status symbol’ — to entrench the car as a reflection of its owner. Obviously, this too was a brilliant marketing strategy. It was at this point that GM began to surpass Ford as the number one car manufacturer.  Ford, meanwhile, was still trying to figure out what to do with its profits — and still hunting for customers among people who didn’t have cars. “Look! No Horse!”

History repeats itself. Microsoft completely missed the Internet thing. They were firmly focused on the extremely profitable business they invented: selling consumer software. When they did finally engage with the Internet, they saw it as though it was consumer software. Even today, Microsoft are still talking about “Software + Services” — as though the Internet is some kind of Add-On pack to their consumer offerings. In a sense, they still seem to say, “Look! No more IBM mainframe!”

Companies seem to think that the way to beat the Idea 1 legacy thinking problem is to get crazy obsessed with finding Idea 2. Microsoft are trying to be, among other things, an advertising company. Google has gone from Internet search engine to enterprise software/hardware vendor, mobile phones and even virtual worlds. Both companies acquire startups regularly.  I can’t help but be skeptical of these efforts. I think that there’s no doubt that they are possible avenues for success, but looming large over all of these is the legacy of Idea 1.

Success seems to be a fertile breeding ground for legacy thinking. In a way, it’s like we’re all striving to find a point where we don’t have to think any more. Or perhaps it’s just that every new idea has to be seen through the lens of the idea that proceeded it. People are innately more inclined to protect against loss than to seek out ways to gain. The advantage of Idea 1 is that it carried no risk of jeopardizing existing profits, unlike Idea 2 and all subsequent ideas.

Anyway, it’s an interesting paradox, but me musing on it isn’t getting this startup any closer to its Idea 1 release. Back to Vark!