Infovark

One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.

I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).

The Millenials Are Coming is the new Y2K Bug

I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)

The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?

When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.

Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.

Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.

(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)

I’m still processing all of the information from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Due to some connectivity hiccups, Gordon and I weren’t able to document our reactions as the events unfolded. The good news is that we’ve both had some time to mull things over.

Vendors on Parade

Most of the conference was dominated by product vendors. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the two of us; we got to check out the competition. Most of the other attendees were hoping for insight into other aspects of Enterprise 2.0, though. You can do your vendor and product research anytime online.

I mentally classified the vendors at the booths downstairs into four categories:

1. The Old Guard. The usual enterprise software vendors, like OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, and EMC, touted their “2.0″ offerings. Their pitch was that E2.0 relies on a bunch of foundational technologies that are already present in the enterprise (and in their product stacks). Collaborative technologies are just another layer in your enterprise architecture. These vendors largely ignored the cultural and social implications of Enterprise 2.0.
2. The Barbarians at the Gates. The largest vendor contingent consisted of companies repackaging Web 2.0 tools for use within organizations. Some of them, like Socialtext, Atlassian, and Jive, had been around for a while. Others were young startups. Their pitch was that Web 2.0 had proven itself on the public web and could also be made to work inside organizations. While they embraced the cultural shifts, they didn’t address issues of legacy data or integration with existing systems and processes.
3. The Enablers. A handful of vendors showcased specific technologies. Veodia, for example, showed off their video streaming technology. Sun highlighted their series of embeddable social widgets. Their narrow focus made their pitches more cohesive, but it was hard to tell whether they expected to be bought by end users or OEM’d by the other vendors.
4. The Odd Ducks. At every conference, there’s always a few vendors that seem out of place. Often, they can tell you the most interesting stories. Sometimes, they leave you wondering what their marketing department was thinking. In the emerging Enterprise 2.0 market, there were quite a few ducks quacking, but I can’t say any of them made a real splash.

And Infovark? Where would we appear in this list? Well, considering our product isn’t for sale yet, we fall into the hidden fifth vendor category: The Silent Ones. We were there to listen and learn from the other attendees. We were one of the companies just doing market research, trying to gauge whether our solution and approach makes sense.

More Than a Trade Show

It’s unfortunate that nearly every conference devolves into a vendor showcase. In the case of Enterprise 2.0, I think it’s far too early for any vendor to claim that they have a solution. We haven’t finished defining the problem yet. Yes, Web 2.0 technology enables different communications paths and organizational structures, but what are these different channels good for? Are they more effective than traditional 1.0 approaches? My gut says that they are, but if we want to move beyond a tiny community of early adopters, we’ll need more than gut feelings to guide us.

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…)

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 .