Enterprise 2.0

On Tuesday night David Terrar and I ran the first Social media in Enterprise session (#smie on Twitter), as part of London's Social media Week (and Benjamin Ellis took some pictures). We only thought of doing it a week before, in fact one of the lessons of Social media is that it was very easy to organise the event - though one of the social technologies used was email, which many "social" purists think of anathema . Its interesting to look at that in fact - Twitter DMs and email were the main "back end" tools used to organise and co-ordinate, Twitter and blogs were the main tools used to publicise, and a cloud based app - Eventbrite - was used to take tickets and Paypal used to collect payment. All this was set up in about 48 hours, part time (Kudos to Cass Business School for stepping up to the plate). You have to stop and think about how easy it would have been to do that even 5 years ago.

We used the Patchwork Elephant to symbolise how the area was still confused, we are like blind men feeling our way around the elephant and by looking at various viewpoints we may see it completely. But its also a patchwork, in that tere are many types of Enterprises - not for profit vs for profit, physical vs digital, manufacturing vs service etc etc.

Anyway, on to the show - the speakers ran in alphabetical order, but I'm going to re-organise it in sequence of big picture to detailed actions (David has a good summary of teh speakers and their organisations over here on his take of the evening).

Umair Haque talked about "Peak Organisations" - in a fascinating talk, he outlined his thesis that organisations designed on 18th century principles are just not fit for purpose today, and that hierarchies built to organise masses of people to perform the same menial tasks do not work when the key issue is to maximise knowledge work. He went through some of the new principles of organisation design that will maximise value.

Benjamin Ellis took this point to the next level of detail, looking at the differences between corporate hierarchy networks, the "real" networks that make things work (his slides are over here). He then mapped this to how a social media network works and what the likely organisational impacts will be - and where the fault lines are. Now people have been writing about "hollowed out" organisations for years, and Social media gurus have long noted that its structure is more sympathetic to knowledge work - but Benjamin is one of the few I''ve seen pointing out that an in-enterprise social network is very different to a friendship one and has all sorts of "plumbing" issues to work through. (a point later picked up by Mat when he noted two different types of capital - social and financial - existed uncomfortable together. Render unto Caesar....! Adriana and Euan picked up on this in other ways too).

Mat Morrison then took this to another level of detail again, showing work he had done on the actual social networks in real organisations. One of teh fascinating lessons was that a social network left to grow "au naturel" in an organisation is patchy and has a few massive nodes, who cause mass failure if taken out. He showed that a certain amount of design is necessary, as well as "automatic implementation" onto desktops to ensure both that everyone was networked and the resilience was acceptable.

My talk was on the challenges Social Media faces to convince people of its overall Return on Investment, I looked at the potential role of Social Media in 3 key areas of value creation (slides are here):

- Innovation
- Operational Excellence - Sales, Operating costs, etc etc
- Agility - the ability to react quickly to changes in a marketplace, and deal with disruption.

In essence this was a discussion on the business economics of SM, and where the biggest levers may be found, It is dependent on the company - for example SM seems quite useful to handle churn, great if you are in a high churn industry, but if you are a low churn industry its not a great benefit.

Adriana Lukas looked at her experience of implementing social media in large corporates (see her slides here), and drew some conclusions about how to do it effectively. Her view reflected the theme that Benjamin and Umair had already floated about traditional hierarchies being orthogonal to social media structures. She pointed out that even the social media structure in an enterprise looks different. Her main hypothesis is that it is not going to be possible to re-engineer today's organisation to use social media - you have to build them this way from the ground up. to build stuff in businesses you have to have small pilots, below the radar, so you can prove it.

Euan Semple talked without notes (he came on towards the end of the event and I think talking powerpointless was very high impact at that time) about his 10 years of experience of working with social media tools in organisations. His basic point, like Adriana's, was that the way social media works is orthogonal to the way rigid heirarchies work. He then noted that Social Media does actually map quite closely to the way people like to work. He also showed that there is no inevitable move towards Social Media , looking at the Burtian Era in the BBC as an example (John Burt tried to impose a Tory style internal market plus industrial grade hierarchy to a creative public service)

What I took away from this and Adriana's talk is that it may be possible to re-engineer some businesses, similar to the way you had to re-engineer to use JIT techniques - but it is very hard, and JIT only took off in this way because some companies like Toyota had spent decades changing to operate that way, and were now whipping competitive asses.

Sue Black talked case study - how she utilised Social Media for a Not for profit Enterprise - Bletchley Park (where the German codes were broken in World War 2) has been left in a shabby state (the UK does not love its technology heroes much - poor old Frank Whittle, who invented the jet engine, was only remembered by an Industrial Estate named after him for decades). What she described was a masterful use of social media - at very low cost - to mobilise people to help. What really struck me was that Sue didn't pretend she had a perfect strategy, but in fact had to try many different things in the process, some worked, some didn't. A reminder that this is experimental stuff.

Dave Terrar then gave a number of case studies from companies doing things today - Swiss Re, Cisco amd Wachovia, noting that what is now needed is to aggregate an emerging body of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. His key point was that this may move like the ERP market in future:

Although a lot of my social media colleagues favour a bottom up, disruptive or even "skunk works" approach to implementation, which can all work… the old rules of project implementation still apply inside the culture of many, or even most, businesses. Swiss Re is a perfect example of how you get senior executive buy in and sponsorship to ensure success, and then spread the word to 11,500 employees. It was the way we used to get a successful ERP implementation going, and it can be done for the change management required for implementing these sorts of collaboration tools too. One of my key messages is that these tools need to work with, enhance and improve the existing business processes, not go around or subvert them.

I think what we are seeing here is two phases in the evolution of a system (Dave puts Enterprise 2.0 in The Chasm right now) - before ERP there was MRP, and in its early days it was skunkworked, then when it was shown to work it got taken up by a few go ahead companies, whose success drove others to emulate it.

Shefaly Yogendra and Will McInness couldn't make it unfortunately, but have put up thir contributions online here and here. Well worth the read, Shefaly dealing with highly regulated industries and Will taking up the theme of it being inevitable as it works as we do. (I will link to people's stuff as they paste it up)

In the Q&A and discussions afterwards there were quite a few interesting threads around what the endgame will look like - Ronald Coase's work on sizes of firms being driven by transaction costs, abiut Dunbar and the optimal size of hierarchies, about the industrial era organisation of current enterprises vs the organic structure of social media (a few old salts noted the smallest unit in a Just In Time organisation is a self reliant "cell" - a thread I want to push further in future). But one has to come back to a corollary of Umair's thesis - before we see major changes there needs to be a structural change in the way capital is accumulated (the rich get richer regardless) and distributed (small, nimble companies find it far harder to get money than large, sclerotic ones) whereas most of the innovation and value is being created outside of these existing systems.

To end - an observation by Patrick Hadfield:

To change the culture and behaviour in organisations, we need to look at all aspects of working – including the processes and the reward structure. If we don’t tackle these aspects of organisation life, we will have little success: people will work to the outcome they are rewarded for and by which they are managed.

The move to flatter, less hierarchical organisations – even, perhaps, the fabled “virtual” organisations where almost all aspects of business are outsourced – may be the most fertile ground for social media in enterprises: they can be nimble, and they rely on effective communication to function properly. Here, use of social media could provide a real business advantage – and maybe this is where the real value of social media in business will be found.

Afterthought - on reading this, I know a number of people will say "we've heard this before". To them I'd say, you are right - but you have also heard a lot of other stuff, a lot of which is total snake oil, that was NOT said. This is the considered view of a bunch of smart people who have been looking at this for a long time, long before there was a bandwagon to jump on. I'm not saying this is canonical, but i can see the glimmerings of an elephant taking shape. More later, as they say.

A Patchwork Elephant a bit better described, then. There does seem to a considerable feeling to do another one, and there were at least 8 people in the audience who could as easily have been speaking, so I think this may, like our elephant, have legs

Last night we had rather a good session on Social Media in the Enterprise, where we did quite a bit of crystal ball and navel gazing, so its interesting to see Gartner's predictions today. Here they are with my takes:

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. “While e-mail is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services. “

My take - what is more likely to happen is they will all be integrated into unified comms systems that can receive and send a message in whatever format one wants. And why cloud based? Enterprise email hasn't needed a cloud based system so far?


By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

“However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter's scale is one of the reasons for its popularity,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner. “When limited to a single enterprise, that same scale is unachievable, reducing the number of users who will find it valuable. Mainstream enterprises are unlikely to adopt standalone, single-purpose microblogging products.

My take - the reason enterprises are interested in Twitter and similar is not due to it being a social network, but because its a very flexible transport system. That transport system will find many uses, including M2M, M2P, P2M and P2P functions. It will be used for broad and narrowcasting and be part of the Unified Comms (UC) Architecture.


Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

My Take - Indeed, but thats a "so what" - its a fairly standard failure rate with new technologies. Lessons will then be learned, best practice will emerge etc etc. The far, far bigger issue that emerged last night is that the way organisations are organised and the way social media works are orthogonal to each other, so it will require big shifts in workflow, processes, culture etc - companies will only do that if they can see a clear ROI based rationale. And because metrics are still new, failure will be as much about mis-measurement as mis-steps


Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

As we move toward three billion phones in the world serving the main purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime anywhere, Gartner expects more end users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only applications they use. The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use. Just as the iPhone impacted user interface design on the desktop, the lessons in the mobile phone collaboration space will dramatically affect PC applications, many of which are derivatives of decades-old platforms based on the PBX or other older collaboration paradigm.

My Take - this is Planet Mobile we are talking about, which is very susceptible to hype. Halve everything. Restated this is that " Within ten years, 35 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications." Much more likely.


Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organization, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.

My Take - Companies will try to spy now, staff won't like it, and some companies will go too far - expect regulation to emerge by 2015. Also, not all business functions and companies will have the same "bang for buck" from social media, so many will not really use it very much.

Well, we thought the Apple Tablet would be the Porn device of choice for the New Age. But Apple trumped us and called it the iPad. Suddenly headlines like "No Flash on Apple's iPad" take on a new meaning.....

What were their marketers thinking? As Tom Lehrer noted, when correctly viewed, everything is lewd.....by the way, its a snip at $499!

OK, you can see where this is going - so we will show you one of the many pictures (see above)

As partial recompense here is a rather interesting article on its economics - Peter Thompson:

Lets be clear, in economic terms the hardware of the iPad is not a new product. It's an iPhone Maxi edition. That makes it a line extension. And there is one thing we know about line extensions. You don't need to sell many of them to make money. The reason is that the development costs are low. The R&D spend on the iPad can be made to seem significant and I do respect the care that has gone into the iPad. But the fact shines through, this is just a tweaked up iPhone.

By the way, given the hypesteria, it is delightful to write such a sleazy article

What is it?

As our contribution to London Social Media Week we are putting on Social Media in Enterprises on Tuesday Feb 2nd from 6 till 9pm at the Cass Business School in London (map is over here).

Why? Well, at Tuttle last Friday Dave Terrar and I realised that there was no event for the more B2B and value chain based aspects, ie the Enterprise/Business aspects of Social Media. This is the "Elephant in the Ecosystem" - a huge arena, but hard to get your head around easily and see clearly. So, we decided to put one on - and this is it!

The aim of this event is to look at this unmentioned "Elephant in the Ecosystem" from lots of angles, so we may get a better view of what it is.

So, what we thought we would talk about is how Social Media can be used by:

- Enterprises: How can use it internally to re-engineer themselves,
- Supply and Value Chains: How does it restructure a B2B value chain, which can be complex and global
- How to create sustainable business value, not an easy to replicate one-off.

Also, we want to touch on the Hard Stuff that is brushed under the carpet, for example:

- how to integrate into existing heritage systems,
- how to handle security issues,
- whether a flat social network structure can work in a firm.

And that's never mind the potential Returns on Investment.

The idea is to have a number of short talks from a variety of people with various angles on the subject, and a Q&A session - and then break for drinks and informal discussion.

Speakers are:

- Dr Sue Black, University of Westminster
- Benjamin Ellis, RedCatCo / SocialOptic
- Umair Haque, Havas Media Lab
- Adriana Lukas, Mine! Project & VRM
- Will McInnes, NixonMcInnes
- Mat Morrison, The Magic Bean Laboratory
- Alan Patrick, Broadsight
- Euan Semple
- David Terrar, D2C
- Dr Shefaly Yogendra

Yes, its a lot of people but we rather liked the Mashup Firehose format late last year - a range of short, to the point talks on an angle of the subject, People will be limited to 10 minutes time tops. If it #Fails, we'll try something else next time

We will be adding details of what people will be talking about so watch this space.

That should get everyone's pulse racing - and to make it even better, we are going to Charge You Money - no FreeConomics here - to cover the costs for the tea, coffee, biscuits, nibbles and alcohol you will consume. It will be a tenner (£10), as you can see no expense has been spared

Booking for the Event

So, do not delay - go over here and book now!

Any spare funds at the end of the night will be spent at the pub afterwards....

Read Write Web asks why 2m people have downloaded the Microsoft Office 2010 beta suite:

In the face of so many free options, why are people so loyal to Microsoft Office?

There are a few possible reasons:

Microsoft has a locked in user base. It is an enterprise standard. As the story goes, no one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft.

As one person replied to the question on Aardvark: "A lot of the free options simply aren't suitable for corporate use. You are basically out of luck if your free-no-guarantees Google Docs spreadsheet disappears. The free products do not have the complex formulas, interconnecting tables and client data that comes with Microsoft Office."

Another person stated on Aardvark: "That is because it is the most accepted office package. Try doing business without the capability. I had to purchase it just to be able to work at home instead of extended office hours. Now I am loading Open Office on all computers I repair and send out. I also think Google is going to do a large bite into Microsoft business."

Then they go into a bit of Microsoft bashing, how customer loyalty is fickle and - of course - how Google is goping to wipe their clock.

This is where we wonder about how the events over the past few days may affect the future of Microsoft Office. Google is coming on strong with it's Nexus One. Couple that with its big push into the enterprise and you have to wonder what Microsoft is going to do to counter Google's undeniable momentum.

.

I don't think so - having tried all the "Free" alternatives out there, we went back to Office because:

- It does what it says on the tin, and has a lot of functionality too
- It doesn't stop working if Microsoft's datacentre or the Internet falls over.
- Everyone else uses it so its easy to co-work

Also, Open Office suffers from the problem all Open Source stuff suffers from, ie everyone wants to build the sexy stuff and no one wants to do the boring UI and upgrades so its lagged behind. Most Web 2.0 stuff - including Google - do the basics for amateur use but they just don't have the feature set a professional user wants. And - I know this may shock some people - but its actually quite a good product that people like to use.

Last night the Cass Business School in London ran the Networking the Workplace session, with a number of Social Media Evangelists on the panel:

- Suw Charman-Anderson, Social Technologist (SCA)
- Jemima Gibbons, Author 'Monkeys with Typewriters: myths and realities of social media at work' (JG)
- Euan Semple, Independent Advisor (JG)
- Luis Suarez, Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist, IBM (LS)

(I've used initials in brackets to speed up referring to who made what point bekow)

Jemima was also launching her book (its available from Triarchy Press) and was heavily involved in putting the evening together - a great way to launch a book in my opinion (Maybe I'll take a leaf out of it one day...)

The system for the evening was quite entertaining - a question, a quick set of answers, some audience feedback - and then a vote. Here are the questions, comments and votes (Caveat - questions are written as best as I could capture them, comments are what stood out to me):

1. Does social networking waste time?

- JG no
- ES can be
- SCA no - too much measuring waste, not measuring saving
- LS nuanced - use it for the right thing eg finding right expert internally

Audience view: Social Media reduces friction, - can waste time but can be useful if you use tool carefully. Need to decide on when what you are doing is relevant, as with all tools

Vote: 47% yes 53% no

My take - I'm with the audience - its a useful tool, but it can waste time if its abused


Is email the best way to share information and ideas?

- LS has it's uses but not best way to share data with many
- SCA interrupt costs from answering email, plus used as proxy to show productivity
- ES twitter is the new email issue, its blurring personal and professional and showing that managing the firehose is a major issuel

Audience: Email co-opted into areas it wasn't designed for, but still the best and widest didtributed general transport system

Vote 35% yes 65% against

My take - I think Suw was in error blaming email for interruptions - I recall doing "White Collar Productivity" work in the 80's, email was seen as a massive benefit to disruption vs the technology at the time, the telephone which isn't asynchronous (and has a higher interrupt time). As others pointed out, as new technologies become the new major transport platform they then also will cause interruptions. (I note with interest that Twitter adds email functionalities at a month by month basis, most recent eg lists). (Added later >) Key is to be able to filter and offload stuff better done elsewhere off email.



Social Networking is a danger to corporate integrity?

- JG it's about how organizations behave
- ES it's about how organizations manage risk - its useful to have monitors, but biggest risk- risk is in the senior guys not the rank and file
- SCA do you trust your staff or not eg cameras and photocopiers can be used too. There is a need to create guidelines in an organisation
- LS depends on who you trust - are you hiring the right people

Audience - Carter Ruck/Trafigura example shows risk is not just internal. But, people tend to be less inhibited on social media, and it has real persistence, so slip more likely and longer lasting than inadvised slip in pub. Also, people can say stuff that is defamatory without realising it,

My take - imagine if the Climategate emails were on an internal social net, not email - I'm sure they would have got out a lot earlier. Also, having been involved in share price affecting activity, legislated "quiet periods" and dealing with state of the art IP, there will still be stuff that is sensitive and the easiest way to keep its safe is not to disseminate it too widely

Vote: For 65% No 35%


Will SocNets remove need for special expertise / the more experienced you are the more likely you are to make the correct decisions?

- ES no
- LS yes

Vote 58% in favour of experts still needed, 42% against
My take - agree with the floor


Open Source approach may work for software but not for business in general?

- SCA with enough eyes all bugs are shallow, lots of brain cycles help in development and testing
- JG - can't separate strategy from implementation, move to the perpetual beta
- ES - not everything can be done by crowdsourcing expertise

Audience/Vote - didn't buy it but vote went 75% "will work in general" (The original question was poorly worded, I think they meant it the other way, ie 75% think it won't work in general)


If companies allowed employees to self organize nothing would ever get done

- JG - tuttle example of self organising entity that gets things done
- SCA - Dan Pink TED video shows old style metrics don't work for knowledge work (we showed this video at TEDExTuttle in September, this is it). Gore Tex spins off units once they get to 150m people

Audience - you can't rely on self organisation in all cases, eg in financial services which is regulated and fast paced/big impact of poor play. General feeling - "It depends" - what size of business - what type of decision - depends on environment - self organize around what?

Vote: 20% sceptical, 80% not (again, the question was double negatived so I wonder if this is the right way round based on audience comments

My take: All the reading I've done around self organising people shows that they usually organise most effectively around some simple issue (eg single issue protest movements) but cannot actually run things (protest movements fall apart and a more rigid structure emerges once they win). They also struggle to organise fast and repeatably, things businesses often need. On the other hand, where they can be used within structures they can be very powerful, as cell manufacturing / working studies have shown.


My conclusion - the panel were by and large always more optimistic than the audience (by definition, they are all evangelists for the upside ). Personally, I think the "Wisdom of the Crowd" - the audience - was pretty sensible, ie they are more likely to be correct than the panel in terms of the real degree of difficulty implementing Enterprise 2.0 stuff, but every movement needs its optimists to get things moving and point to what might be. A good show.

I also learned how one may write referendum questions to get the answer one wants

Update - Suw has listed the actual questions in the comments, they were:

1. Online social networking during office hours wastes valuable working time
2. Email is the best way to share information and ideas
3. Social networking tools can be a danger to corporate integrity
4. The more experienced you are, the more likely you are to make the right decision
5. An ‘open source’ approach may work for software development but it can’t work for business generally
6. If companies allowed employees to “self-organise”, nothing would ever get done

This is an article we should have written, but Business Week got theirs in first so we will cut and flatter it profusely, as below:

Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.

The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. "It's a bit of a Wild West scenario," blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to "snake oil salesmen."

Actually I'm glad they've written it as sometimes I feel we are the only guys questioning the Orthodoxy of Enterprise 2.0. Many have popped up in the last 2 years from (seemingly) nowhere but with a lot of PR push. My frustration is that many of these people have never worked in an enterprise, put in systems or done change management within an enterprise, and certainly very few have ever run anything. These would probably - in my old fashioned book anyway - be important criteria for selecting Enterprise 2.0 consultants or advisors, but hey ho..... (OK, OK being old salts in the game we would say that, but I really don't see how this is so radically different from other radical innovations that have come before like MRP, Just In Time/Lean Ops, etc). The other sure fire sign that an expert is not business or experience led is that too many solutions are based on dogma (whereas most companies are fairly unique to some extent), and are often trying to avoid proper business metrics and ROI with "new economics" calls - Dotcom 1.0 should make most CEOs very wary of that pitch.:

Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes. Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel: Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos. Yet these strictures don't always make business sense.

As the Business Week chart shown above notes, one has to be a bit more careful than that. Also, in our experience social networks in structured hierarchies that have to deliver to real deadlines work differently to consumer ones that don't. Most importantly, Social Media does not exist in a vacuum and to get real value it has to tie into other systems, as well as requiring restructuring to new ways of working to maximise its impact. To do this is non trivial and requires more than enthusiasm. (It does worry me slightly that a lot f the Social Media advice is coming from marketing companies rather than business ones, I think this risks driving too far down the Marcomms route without fundamentally attacking the end to end business processes.

The issue for those in the industry who actually do know what they are doing is there are so many noisy people who don't, which leads to the risk of an "Akerlof Law" effect - ie because the buyer can't tell good from bad they assume the worst and price accordingly, and even look at the wrong things (speaking circuit profile vs implementation track record for example). As the article notes:

The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media's practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results. It may be the only way to convert the skeptics—and flush out the snake oil.

I read a recent McKinsey interview with Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 Impresario Extraordinaire, and was rather struck by the similarities to two bygone eras:

Firstly, on Implementation, the fight between bottom up and top down :

....the debate is typically between people who advocate [a top-down approach and those who
advocate] almost a purely bottom-up approach—in other words, deploy the tools, stop worrying about what’s going to happen, and get out of the way as the management of the company and let it percolate up from down below. Or, if you hear about a grassroots effort, encourage it, support it financially, but, again, get out of the way, let the bottom-up energy happen.

The other school of thought says that you need some top-down energy, or at least
signaling—that this is appropriate, we want this to happen, this is in line with the goals of
the organization. And the top-down school of thought says if you don’t have those signals
from the top of the organization, people are going to sit on the fence for a long time and
they’re going to wonder if this is a worthwhile use of their time, if it will increase their
human capital in the organization or not. And until they have clear answers to those
questions, they’re going to do nothing, or they’re going to sit on the sidelines.

I have a lot of sympathy for both approaches. I find myself agreeing more with the topdown
crowd, though. We know how important it is for management to create culture and
to signal what’s valued inside the organization. These tools are not an exception to that; I
think they’re a great example of it.

I'd agree - near 40 years of experience of system implementation (20 of which I've been around in) tells me that top management support is crucial for anything bigger than a few pilots (and I was around in the early "sneak a PC and a LAN in days)

Secondly, on justification of the project he notes a number of old saws:

- Another failure mode [the first was "build it and they will come"] is to be too concerned about the possible risks and the downsides. If we get wrapped up in those, we’re not going to take the plunge and actually deploy any of these new tools and turn them on and encourage people to go ahead.

- A lot of them [CIO's] see their roles as essentially conservative, though. In other words, “My job
is to not increase the risk profile of this organization before everything else.” That’s a legitimate concern, it’s a legitimate job for the CIO, but all my experience so far tells me that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t increase the risk profile of an organization.

- I haven’t come across people who have done our old-fashioned technology ROIs1 and are happy with it. What I’ve seen instead is organizations that do a bit of thinking about: What do we want to have happen? What business need are we trying to address? What challenge, what opportunity, are we trying to seize here? And then think about which exact technologies they can deploy to help them with that.

My worry about these - conservative CIOs, boring beanies wanting ROI, careful company men - are that they are the standard saws of the vendors trying to knock down perfectly rational client concerns. As he does admit, it is their job to do so. And everybody's been through Web 1.0 where they heard all this before and those that drank too muck Kool Aid got washed away.

As a parting shot, there is also a lot of breathless hyping of the benefits, very little is heard about the downsides of having all your employees connected al the time. The last wheeze in this gig was "Employee Engagement" (see Dilbert cartoon above) and the easiest way to guarantee failure of Enterprise 2.0 is to give people the feeling that this is just a way of getting all those brain cycles they currently spend elsewhere harnessed to the Corporate Mill.

The latter part of this week I had an experience which I thought was quite an interesting use case for the Government 1.0 to 2.0 transition, ie exception handling. In a nutshell, I had to pay the road tax on my car. This, in the flow of things, is a fairly simple process. You take a renewal notice for the car or its ID document, go to the post office with evidence of insurance and its MOT (roadworthiness certificate) and Bob's your auntie. You can even do it online.

Except if you have moved house. In that case, you have to send in a part of the car's ID document, you get a new one back, so even if you do not get a renewal form in time, you can use the ID document to prove the existence of the car. You with me so far?

So where does this go wrong - simple, for some reason the new car ID document hasn't come back. Nor, for some reason, do we get the renewal notice this year. Something has clearly gone wrong. But the car needs its tax disc as a legal requirement to use it, the police start hauling you off the road and fining you if you have last year's (the tax disks have different colours year by year and very big numbers telling you what year it is, so its very visible).

If this case occurs, you then enter Kafkaland.

The DVLA (Department for Vehicle Licencing Annoyance) may have messed up the paperwork trail, but it now becomes your problem. You are no longer allowed to register online, as you don't have the requisite documents. The nearest DVLA office is miles away, so off you go to the post office, armed with the photocopy you took of your original form. This was allowed the last time we moved, a few years back - in fact it was the recommended approach.

Except that the Post Office has now decided not to accept photocopies of the original any longer, nor do they accept the remainder of the form that you have kept as evidence. In short, if the DVLA messes up returning your new car ownership form, you cannot tax your car, and you will be fined etc. You wind up in bureaucratic limbo because the Online and Post Office systems no longer recognises forms that were once deigned sufficient, and the process has not been updated. A long (hour plus) drive to the nearest (hah!) DVLA office beckons. A process that would have any jobsworth swelling with pride.

Except, we found a solution - human intervention. Our local post office is in a corner store, the lady who runs the store knows me. My car is parked outside, I show it to her, and she makes an executive decision to disentangle the Gordian system by granting me my tax disk on the basis of my photocopy and kept half of the ID (after the handing over of the money of course) so I can avoid the long arm of the law, and I can now chase the DVLA to find my lost change of address Car ID form at my leisure.

The lessons for Government 2.0 from this?

(i) You can't automate existing workflows, this process could not be solved online. Existing "Social" technologies on their own didn't solve this, I had long arguments with jobsworths over phone and post office counter, so it is unclear how new ones would do any better.
(ii) There has to be a continual stress test process - when you are mashing up multiple systems in a workflow and some later change their own policies, it will cause problems. The System has to accept that their own systems may have problems.
(iii) There needs to be "human over-ride" when The System is broken in these cases, rather than the default "user is wrong" assumption.
(iv) There needs to be a way to represent social capital - the postmistress knows me, and judged I wasn't trying to cheat the country in any way. The "system" as it stands is blind to an ordinary citizen frustrated by its rigidity, and a bad person trying to subvert it. There are far more of the former of us than the latter. There were multiple instances of my ownership good intentions that I have on paper (Proof of past payment, other proofs of ownership etc), but the system cannot see them.

Anyway, that was what a simple car tax disk renewal taught me.......

A few days ago we were looking at Augmented Reality (AR) and thinking about the potential of the emerging early plays, and how most of the ideas were old* (how many times has the "find a great restaurant in the neighborhood that you can visit" use case been used to flog dodgy mobile apps in the last 10 years?), but the combination of smart phone and big, cheap(er) bandwidth has now changed the dynamic. However, one curious thing struck us - there was virtually nothing in the literature about Augmented Reality for Enterprises (most under that term in Google are Star Trek based, and the most prominent article searched under "Augmented Reality for Business" was written in 2001, for example.

Anyway, what followed was a bit of mental freewheeling which I thought I'd put down here, to get others' creative thoughts flowing. So, in some semblance of an order:

Why AR Now?

Combination of the penetration of increasingly smart phones with various types of sensor (GPS, Camera, motion detection etc) plus good coverage of high bandwidth at increasingly affordable costs drives a "tipping point". Potentially.

Why AR for Enterprises?

Enterprise AR already exists in early forms - the Helpdesk person who has access to a lot of supplementary customer data is using an early form of AR. Some field service apps have online access to extra data. Also, RFID sensors and suchlike have been "augmenting" the ERP and CRM systems' data for some time.

Consumer AR seems to be purely mobile based - is this how Enterprise will go?

No, and its probably not even how consumer service AR will go, for 2 reasons:

- AR is not purely about mobile phones: Laptop ownership is still high compared with smartphones, and netbook ownership is rising fast. The mobile screen still has a tiny real estate, so risks AR clutter (and thus massively reduced utility) very quickly. Netbooks, Tablets and even smarter e-Readers are potentially powerful platforms for AR applications

- AR is not purely about physical location: The "great restaurant" use case is a mental trap. Enterprises have huge ecosystems all of their own, partly physical (in office) and partly structural (who is doing what) - much of this data could be used to "augment" reality. (There is an amusing piece in Pattie Maes' TED demo of Sixth Sense where it projects the data about a person onto their T shirt for the device user to read )

.

Where will early Enterprise AR applications be used?

Early applications of similar types of technology have in the past been deployed first among staff away from the office - salesmen, drivers/deliverymen and field service staff. Next up has typically been staff requiring data but not at a desk - shop floor, warehouse, front of house etc. One could also imagine "reverse AR" devices which are more dedicated to picking up AR data in other companies' sites when one is visiting them.

What about RFID?

RFID will be a key component of Enterprise AR as a lot of the AR will probably be about taking and interpreting data from RFID systeme (and other simpler forms like Bar Codes). This could be one of the main differences between Enterprise and Consumer AR, in that consumers by and large won't deploy RFID infrastructure (though we can imagine businesses that will, specifically to feed consumer AR data applications)

What's the Business Case?

As with all information handling tools, a combination of faster/better information has a number of knock on impacts, typically around:

- Better customer acquisition
- Potentially, better knowledge allows better upselling
- More effective/timely service and help reduces dissatisfaction and churn
- Operating cost reduction via higher labour productivity' less waste (lean operations) etc

Which Industries will deploy early?

Probably those with large numbers of staff outside the office, and where the responsibility / value of those people "getting things right" is high. Also, potentially very large enterprises where it is impossible to meet everybody in the normal course of events.

What sorts of systems will be deployed?

Probably a combination of systems with new and useful metadata in them, plus ones with interfaces to older company systems that extract and re-present the existing data in more usable ways. These new systems will have to be partly online and near real-time to be most useful. One of the issues will be security as multiple formats and data sources will need to be accessed (unless the whole service is a walled garden) so we would expect layered apps with various levels of access

How does this square with Enterprise 2.0?

To us, Enterprise 2.0 thinking at the moment seems to be taken up too much with the social network aspect of Web 2.0, and the other vectors have been largely ignored. This is more part of "Olde 2.0" - about getting useful data collated above a single device rapidly to the point of use. At the moment, most "Enterprise 2.0" implementation is of blogs, wikis and social media front ends - these will be datastreams into the AR, but will need judicious filtering. (In fact we predict that filtering will be a major growth technology in enterprise and consumer AR)

*Most of the AR apps emerging today existed in some form 10 years ago at MIT and other R&D labs around the world. What has changed is the application of Moore's Law over 10 years and rational data pricing behaviour by mobile companies