Infovark

ReadWriteWeb, (the most impossible web site to actually say aloud), carries a great article this morning on Zappos – an online shoe company that has dived, boots and all into Twitter.

The tweets of every Zappos employee, including the CEO, can be found aggregated on the company web site.

I think this is a really inspired piece of thinking. Twitter allows me to see that the company is made up of people — real people, with thoughts and feelings, and senses of humor. It allows a transparent view into the company, which tells me that Zappos must actually trust and value it’s employees. (Hey — It even made me want to write this blog post about them).

There was a time when the most important thing a CEO did was to constantly present a “professional business” approach to the community. Zappos’ CEO, on the other hand, is apparently having troubles getting his pants to stay on.

Is that going to hurt sales? is it going to be ‘bad for business’?

Nope. In fact, I bet it does just the opposite.

(Dean and I are so busy right now, that we don’t update as much as we should, but you can find us on twitter too - we’d love to hear from you!)

Dion Hinchcliffe has a really important post about the impending maturity of the Enterprise 2.0 market, in the wake of Forrester’s prediction that the Enterprise 2.0 space will be a $4.6 billion industry within 5 years.

He contends that a hallmark of the new enterprise solutions is that they are emergent — that they aren’t handed down from on high through the traditional IT/management channels — that instead they are introduced by people in an effort to solve their problems.

“In other words, we seem to be coming from a push-based era of command-and-control management and are heading into an era where more and more work is being conducted using a decentralized pull-based model that’s more scalable, efficient, and leads to increasingly innovative outcomes.”

We’ve spoken about this at length before, because we see emergence as a crucial property for any system that’s going to be able to deal with the kinds of unpredictable situations that occur for modern knowledge workers.

Dennis Howlett, also over at ZDNet calls Forrester out on their Enterprise 2.0 definition:

A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.

Forrester’s definition is indeed pretty vague. But then, no analyst is ever going to be precise. (Vagueness means never having to admit you were wrong.)

Dennis also suggests that Forrester have missed a key part of the problem. Forrester expects the major vendors to roll up all of these new “2.0″ features into their collaboration offerings. By doing so, Dennis feels that Forrester greatly inflates the size of the E2.0 market. He’s right; the true E2.0 market is much smaller, and the big enterprise vendors just don’t understand it.

The major vendors sell to CIOs and IT departments through traditional channels. They aim at the top of the corporate pyramid. Their systems enforce repeatable processes and follow established metrics. Their value is derived from imposing order on chaos.

Emergent systems, on the other hand, thrive on chaos. They address the “Barely Repeatable Processes” that happen within organizations. Emergent systems are decentralized, self-organizing and organic — the antithesis of the top-down, rules-based engineering approach taken by most enterprise software. To build an emergent system — an ecosystem — you target the bottom of the pyramid, building it up one user, one connected node, at a time. The value of an emergent system is derived from its flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness.

Emergence isn’t another feature to add to the enterprise technology stack. Emergence isn’t a feature at all — it’s an approach to solving a problem .

When I was starting out as a Software Project Manager, A Zen Master taught me something that I never forgot. It happened when I was complaining about the lack of process behind the development team that I had just inherited.

I was younger then, and was frantically trying to introduce more structure to the way that my team shipped software. I could see a lot of the reasons for the product delays and the quality assurance failures. I just wanted to help. I had policy documents, and process plans, and Gant Charts. Lots of Gant Charts. But every effort I made to modify the process was met with stony resistance. In conversation, people could see that I was making sense. They would agree that yes, things were broken, and they probably shouldn’t be.

And yet I couldn’t get them to change anything. That was when the Zen Master appeared:

Me: “Grrrr! These guys are just making it up as they go! Everybody is just sitting around waiting for the developers to be finished. No wonder everything is so crappy and full of bugs. There is no structure or process here! ”

Zen Master: “You are wrong. There is structure.”

Me: “???”

Zen Master: “Structure comes in two states: implicit or explicit. You are complaining because there is no defined structure. Particularly no structure that has been defined by you.”

As is so often the case in fantasy Zen Stories, the master was right!

There was plenty of structure to the way people worked. It had grown organically based on the way that people wanted to work. It was hard to describe, and it was optimized more for individual happiness than for productivity, but it was there.

It dawned on me then that the best way to effect change was to embrace the practices that were implicit.

This kind of thinking led to Agile Practices. It led to Extreme Programming.

And it is the central premise behind Enterprise 2.0 or Social Productivity software. Harnessing the implicit structure of an organization can be the best way to improve it. People are innately social. They like to talk. They like to discuss things. They like to achieve things. They like to share. They like to boast.

It turns out the easiest way to get things done is to optimize the way people innately tend to do them.

Incidentally, If your PM is complaining about a lack of processes, it means that she can’t effectively bring about the cultural change that is required. You should either give her more authority, or hire a new PM. Or you could see if you can rustle up a Zen master to change her mind.

Sam Lawrence just posted an article about Twitter and social computing. Sam notes that people are learning interesting information and getting questions answered by tapping their public social network. Inside the enterprise, however, most of us are stuck using legacy tools that aren’t as effective. Couldn’t Twitter — or something like it — help companies communicate internally?

We certainly think so. As we noted in small cloud theory, there’s no reason why the same tools that work on the Internet couldn’t work on the corporate intranet. In some ways, it should be easier to network within a company than outside it. After all, as Sam points out, folks in an organization have — by definition — shared goals and common interests. So in a sense your social network is already built for you.

Twitter’s intuitive minimalism, like Google search, means that it’s easy to learn and understand. Compared to most of the other software used at work, it’s a breeze to use. No training required. No change management. And right now, it costs nothing to support. From an enterprise IT perspective, you couldn’t ask for a better deal.

The only barrier to Twitter adoption within the organization is the fact that not everyone has adopted it yet. Which means that progressive E2.0 types still need to use traditional channels, like email, to communicate with folks that haven’t begun using it yet. Which means the IT folks still need to provision email to every employee. It’s self-reinforcing; Email’s killer feature is ubiquity. And email is ubiquitous because everyone has it.

And it’s not entirely clear whether Twitter could succeed as a ubiquitous tool. Twitter is a really noisy communications channel. (Hence its name.) The last thing most knowledge workers need is another distracting communications mechanism. Email is bad enough. Hugh MacLeod just permanently disappeared from our twitter stream, because he figured he had better things to do.

Part of what makes Twitter work today is the fact that it’s an opt-in social medium. You sign yourself up. You choose whom to follow. If the IT folks signed you up for an account and automatically subscribed you to all 500 coworkers, would its utility collapse? Not everyone is @scobelizer.

The folks at Twitter have two related challenges to solve before they have a truly enterprise ready system. They’ve got to figure out how to scale the system technically as well as scale the system socially.

As a startup in the social productivity space, we know how hard it is to get the social design right. Twitter’s done a great job of social design so far. We wish them the best of luck.

Darn. While I was writing this post, another 40 tweets came in.