What (Else) Happened?.

I spent last Friday talking about management with a bunch of 'thought leaders' -- academics, writers, venture capitalists, executives, etc.. As I described in my last post, we were brought together by Gary Hamel and the Management Lab to brainstorm the experiments we'd like to run on any corporate guinea pigs that volunteer themselves.

I noticed a broad consensus among attendees that things are different now --  that the challenges and the opportunities facing large organizations and their leaders are not the same as they ever were. And they're different in both degree (competition has always been nasty, but it's getting nastier) and in kind (open source communities?  Huh?). We came from a broad range of disciplines and job titles, but none us said any form of "Hold on a minute, everyone. Things really aren't all that different now for executives and companies. Let's not oversell the current era."

So I just want to sanity check this belief, and then ask a follow-on question. First, the sanity check. Have corporations and other large organizations really entered a new period, one in which new things are happening and all things are happening faster? What evidence do we have that this is the case? I presented some evidence to this effect in the Harvard Business Review article I wrote with Erik Brynjolfsson this summer and in these blog posts. There's also other evidence of 'hypercompetition' (an upcoming special issue of the Strategic Management Journal will be devoted to this concept).

But are they any skeptics out there? If so, I'd love to hear from them, or about them. Are there reasonable and thoughtful people who believe that things aren't all that different now than they were 40, or even 20 years ago? We have a constant tendency to overstate the importance of our own circumstances --  our time, our surroundings, etc. --  so it's important to guard against that tendency, and to be sure that when it comes to organizations and competition it's not the same as it ever was.

The follow-on question is a simple one: if things really are different now, why are they? It seems very unlikely to me that the leaders of organizations as a group suddenly said "You know all the books the management scholars have been writing for several decades now? Let's all start putting that stuff into practice now." In other words, I don't think that we reached any tipping point where the weight of writing and thinking about management actually started to influence management much more than it had done previously. In short, this isn't about us.

So what is it about?  I can think of three things that have substantially changed in the world of business over the past 25 years (to pick a pretty arbitrary time period). The first is the market for corporate control --  the emergence of LBOs, private equity, and all the other alternatives to big public corporations in which executives are paid like bureaucrats. The second is the appearance of several huge new players into the game of modern capitalism. At the risk of saying something inexcusably obvious, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and others are a big deal.

The third, of course, is information technology. In 1983, US companies spent $32 billion on IT, which accounted for 9.8% of their total investment in fixed assets that year. By 2006, spending had risen almost tenfold, to $294 billion, and IT accounted for 21.1% of new fixed assets purchased that year in the US. To put it mildly, this is a big change in what companies are composed of, and it has to be having an impact (or several of them).

I believe that IT is the biggest of these stories, but I don't want to argue that point here. Instead, I want to ask if this list of three big things that have changed the game of business is incomplete. Has anything else changed over the past quarter century that could plausibly account for or contribute to the widely-shared feeling that we're in a new era now? If so, what is it, and why do you think it's such a big deal?  What evidence do you have to support your belief? Leave a comment, please, and let us know. We'd love to hear what you think, and why.

Should Knowledge Workers have E2.0 Ratings, Part 2.

I received a wealth of insightful comments in response to my earlier post on Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers. I thought I'd use some of them to continue discussing the topic, starting with the very basic question of whether measuring E2.0 participation is a good idea at all. A few commenters felt that it was not, and that the very act of measurement would pollute or drain enthusiasm from exactly the activities E2.0 enthusiasts are trying to encourage.

From Kevin Gamble:  I have no doubt that some organizations will attempt to quantify participation... As soon as you try to quantify it, however, you will kill the goose… This would be something akin to paying people to contribute to a KM system. You’ll get nothing but garbage.

From Bryan Labutta: As far as a rating system is concerned, I would be hesitant to implement one around Enterprise 2.0 because I would not want to stifle an individual’s willingness to contribute. As I mentioned above, I feel like the biggest benefits to Enterprise 2.0 should come when employees realize the benefits on their own and contribute at will. If a regular contributor sees that their personal feedback rating is very low will that reduce the amount of time they spend editing wikis and writing blog posts?

From Fenton Travers: E2.0 is about embracing the good, and not being afraid of the ‘bad’.  A rating, that your boss is going to look at and beat you up about is pretty pointless management activity.  Please GET IT GANG, E2.0 is not for the bosses it’s for you!

From Lim Boon Chuan: IMHO no, it is hard to quantify tradition work and services, till no there isn’t really a good measure of the current not to mention Enterprise 2.0 which is much more abstract.  Measurement can help gauge the level of effectiveness of an enterprise.  I qualify it by adding “accurate measurement”.  To date I do not see any accurate barometers or quantitative tools to measure Enterprise 2.0 performances.  Inaccurate measurements are worse than accurate measurements as it will bring uncertainty, frustrations and distrust which will work against the organization... It is certainly useful to be able to quantify some aspects of Enterprise 2.0.  But until we do have sufficiently accurate tools, lets not even try it.

From Samuel: But doesn’t KM research show KPI’s hurt knowledge sharing? Would measuring E2.0 contribution do the same? Furthermore there have been some interesting experiments trying to measure social media ROI. But it’s still hard to do this objectively. Will the comparison between my e2.0 contribution and that of my colleague be fair? Can’t we ‘just’ ask for stories and try to quantify them? Ask employees to tell managers how the tools helped them or others become more productive.

I imagine, though, that making E2.0 measurements and ratings visible, might instead do a couple positive things:

* Encourage friendly competition. Lots of people are fiercely proud of their PageRanks, TopCoder ratings, number of Wikipedia edits, etc. and work to keep them high only to preserve bragging rights. Slashdot, in fact, had to replace their numeric karma scores with text labels because people paid too much attention to the scores, treating them "like some sort of video game."
* Make people strive to improve their scores. I know I've been inordinately proud of my Technorati ranking, even though it has no direct bearing on my professional success. The desire to maintain it has definitely driven me to keep blogging regularly.

And I don't really see how measuring an activity and publicizing the results will massivley discourage the activity in question. I imagine that some people will likely be turned off by the measuring and stop contributing, but are these people the majority or the minority of the population at large? Or of members of an online community? Of coworkers within an enterprise? My intuition and (admittedly not vast) experience tell me otherwise. They tell me that the simple act of publicly measuring E2.0 contributions will increase participation, not decrease it. A couple commenters seemed to share this view:

From Atul Rai:  I do quite agree with you that participation in social computing cannot be reduced to one number, but as you said, this could be treated as a set of numbers ... some folks would be good at edits, others at authoring ... In addition, this is making the entire idea of social computing what it should be ... fun!

From (my former student) Alex Bain: I think a scoreboard can be extremely motivational. I remember the Cambrian House founder mentioning in your class that the virtual currency they created for their community lead to a surge in contribution...  I’ve also seen a scoring system work within a company. I know the designers that work at Zurb, and they boil down their contribution to their company’s blog to a single number, and keep track of who’s winning: http://www.zurb.com/article/88/team-motivation-for-us-its-just-a-game [they say this has lead to both more and better work]

Later posts will consider what will happen if an organization moves beyond simply measuring contribution and takes more active steps to encourage it, such as putting direct incentives in place. I wanted to start the discussion, though, by positing that public measurement of individuals' E2.0 activities will, absent any direct incentives, encourage and increase participation and contributions, rather than decreasing them. Do you agree?  What else do you think?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Terror and Twitter.

A few different friends recently pointed me to stories about terrorists’ use of Twitter, which were sparked by the appearance, on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, of a report titled "Sample Overview: al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions & Potential Creative Uses." It was prepared by the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion. My friends pointed me to the stories because I’m interested in Twitter’s uses for different purposes, and have blogged about it a few times.

The 304th MI’s report "coverhs a few examples of terrorist use and potential use of mobile to web and web to mobile technologies and tactics" including "a red teaming perspective on the potential terrorist use of Twitter." (in a war game, the simulated enemy force is the red team). After briefly describing the service, the report notes that Twitter was used as a "counter-surveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention" and suggests three red team scenarios:

• Members of a cell using Twitter to communicate with each other


• Terrorist B using Terrorist A’s tweets to determine the optimal time and place to remotely detonate A’s explosive vest


• A spy joining a US soldier’s group of Twitter followers, then using the information gathered to somehow target the soldier

The third of these seemed at least plausible to me, but as the report says "this scenario is not new and has already been discussed for other social networking sites." And it immediately struck me that mobile phone text messages would be much better suited for the first two purposes, since text messages are inherently private and point-to-point, while Tweets are inherently public and broadcast to the world at large. Twitter allows members to protect their accounts so that their tweets are only visible to pre-approved followers, but would members of an actual terrorist cell consider this secure enough for updates about, as the report imagines, "the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush"? I am no military strategist or expert on terrorism, but I doubt it.

Cell members and terrorist masterminds seem to be going to great lengths to keep their conversations secret; the Christian Science Monitor reports that many messages from terrorist leaders are now being sent by donkey and camel, and that there is "an extensive network of handwritten messages extending across southern Afghanistan." Twitter is close to the opposite of such a network.

For the first two scenarios above I can’t see any advantages to using Twitter over text messaging (beyond perhaps the convenience associated with device independence), but I can see plenty of disadvantages. As I read the report I found myself thinking that Twitter would have great value as yet another tool to disseminate terrorist propaganda, but not as an aid to their loathsome operational activities.

But after thinking about it a bit more I came up with a scenario for Twitter-assisted terrorist operations that I found novel, realistic, and a bit scary. Here it is; please let me know what you think of it, and if I’m overlooking anything important.

In multiple parts of the world today, a segment of the population is sympathetic to the goals and methods of the terrorists in the country. These sympathizers aren’t all members of cells or active participants in past attacks, but let’s stipulate that at least some of them are looking for ways to get involved and help the terrorist cause.

Terrorist leaders, meanwhile, have to be careful about the people they recruit into their cells and attacks because of the constant risk of infiltration by agents. As a result, their caution probably forces them to turn away sincere and eager volunteers. From the terrorist point of view, this is a shame; they’d love to be able to put all willing people to use, as long as doing so was riskless and costless to them. In fact, they’d love to be able to enlist as much of the sympathetic segment as possible in their operations, again as long as it was riskless and costless to do so.

One last important aspect of this scenario is that many of today’s terrorist leaders seem to have very little of the military commander’s historic concern for his troops’ well-being. Modern terrorists have shown a willingness to train and equip suicide bombers and direct them toward civilian targets. It seems safe to say that they consider many types of people expendable.

In these circumstances Twitter can be a new and very powerful tool for terrorist leaders. They simply set up some Twitter accounts and start attracting followers from among the sympathetic segment. They don’t have to know in advance who all these followers are, or vet them carefully as they show up on Twitter and start following the leaders. In fact, the leaders wouldn’t want to be picky at all; they’d just want to build a big mass of followers, who they could turn into a mob when the time was right. In this scenario, Twitter a vehicle for terrorist leaders to do two things: assemble a large and self-selecting group of followers, and send this group messages and updates in real time using a convenient and mobile interface.

The terrorist leaders would probably use Twitter to broadcast propaganda most of the time, but their accounts could also be useful when operations are planned. For operations that consist of mob action, or that would benefit from the kind of large-scale chaos and paralysis that a mob --  especially a directed one—can sow, Twitter is a great orchestrator. It’s group-level, instantaneous, mobile, widely available, easy to use, and free. And becuase the terrorist leaders don’t care about the mob members’ welfare, they also don’t care if their orders to the mob are seen by the enemy (it would be a bit better if these orders could be kept private because of the advantage of surprise, but it’s not a deal-killer for the mob action if they are seen).

The same is not true of the communications they have with other terrorist leaders and orders they send about targeted activities such as suicide bombs. For these communications the older methods, including donkeys and camels, are better. But if the new style of asymmetric warface includes the formation and direction of ’flashmobs,’ Twitter is an ideal tool. It would require no new investments and no real behavior changes by any participants, from the leaders to the sympathetic segment, and would conceivably augment terrorists’ ability to wreak havoc in many parts of the world.

The following messages are all less than 140 characters (Twitter’s current limit):

Today will be a great day. Go to the US embassy and await instructions
Soldiers are gathering in the courtyard. Throw rocks at them
All children under 18 go to the intersection of x and y streets
Lie down in front of the vehicles
Turn the abc neighborhood into a giant traffic jam
The soldiers are heading south on z street.  Stay away
Erect barricades at the intersection of m and n streets
They are conducting searches in dfg neighborhood. Remove all weapons from houses
Do everything you can to make it difficult for them to move
All women go to checkpoint q
Everyone leave checkpoint q
This was a great day. Go home now

So my scenario is different than any of those put forward by the the 304th MI; my scenario is a mob attack executed by the sympathetic segment and initiated and coordinated by terrorist leaders using nothing more than a series of Twitter messages like the ones above. Such an attack has a few interesting properties. It’s simultaneously highly autonomous --  people only sign up with the mob if they want to, and are under no formal compulsion to obey commands --  and tightly centralized and coordinated. It’s self-organizing in some respects, but not in others. It’s easy to practice and experiment with. It marries crowd energy to a central will. Even though it’s tightly scripted, it requires little or no up-front planning. It also doesn’t require the leaders to identify the combatants in advance, or even during the attack itself; leaders just have to satisfy themselves that ‘enough’ combatants will participate. And this attack can be easily modified and redirected as events warrant.

An attack with these properties would be easy to design and carry out using Twitter. I also think that it would be difficult to organize and execute using other social or mobile technologies, although one could cobble together something similar with mobile blog updates, RSS feeds, and mobile feed readers. Finally, I think that it would suit the purposes of some terrorists quite well.

I feel the need to state that I’m not trying to get Twitter shut down, modified, or curtailed, nor am I hoping to educate, arm, or in any way abet terrorists or terrorism. My goals with this post are the same as those of the authors of the 304th MI’s report. I want to help us better understand how terrorists might use today’s technologies against us, so that we can figure out how to best combat them. I doubt that this post is telling terrorists anything they don’t know, but I hope it can stimulate some thinking on our side of the current conflicts.

If you have anything to contribute to this thinking, please leave a comment.

Why Some Business Innovations Can't Get Off The Ground.

On September 30 of this year American Airlines announced its new PriorityAAccess privileges, intended to ease the processes of checking in, getting through security, and boarding the plane for its most loyal and lucrative customers. PriorityAAccess is most visible at the gate. As I flew around the country over the past month on American (where I’m locked in because of my AAdvantage miles) I started to notice that the area in front of the door to the jetway—the place where we all line up to hand our boarding passes over to the gate agent—has been reconfigured. It now consists of two lanes, one marked "Priority Boarding" and the other marked "General Boarding" (or something similar).

According to American, "Customers with PriorityAccess privileges will be invited to board first or board at any time through their exclusive PriorityAAccess lane, which allows them to bypass lines after general boarding has begun." The new configuration seems to be pretty uniform; I’ve seen it at every airport I’ve flown out of over the past month, which is more than a couple.

The new configuration also seems to be uniformly ignored. My fellow travelers and I have continued to line up and board just as we always do, except now we use two narrow lanes instead of one broad one. I haven’t yet seen us fliers make any effort to sort ourselves into the ‘right’ lane, and I certainly haven’t seen anyone voluntarily take themselves out of the lane reserved for the elites and rejoin the general boarding hoi polloi.

More importantly, I also haven’t seen American’s gate agents make any effort to sort us properly. I’ve heard them make announcements about the two lanes, but that’s as far as it’s gone. I haven’t seen anyone walk the lanes to explain what’s going on and check boarding passes, and I definitely haven’t seen them turn anyone away once they reach the head of the line and hand over their boarding pass. I can only imagine what would happen if a gate agent said to someone about to board ‘Sorry, sir, you’ve been in the wrong lane. You’ll have to join the general boarding line. At the back."

It struck me at some point over the past month that I was witnessing an excellent example of why so many business improvement efforts fail: it’s not that they’re not good ideas, it’s that their not easy enough to enforce. American’s PriorityAAccess boarding procedure is a straightforward case of what used to be called ‘business process reengineering,’ and it’s also a microcosm of why reengineering so often failed. It’s one thing for a small group of smart people to study an existing process and figure out a way to execute it better. It’s quite another to then deploy that new-and-improved process broadly --  across many business units, geographies, and/or interdependent groups.

As the example of AA’s new boarding process indicates, reengineering often runs aground not because customers or other external constituencies are unwilling to go along, but because employees are. Airline gate agents have plenty to do as a flight boards; is it realistic to expect them to also wrangle uneducated (and, in many cases, unwilling) fliers into the right lines all throughout the boarding process? PriorityAAccess boarding requires either that all of us travelers self-police, which seems extremely unlikely, or that American’s gate agents work diligently to enforce the new process. So far, playing enforcer here seems to be pretty low on their list of proirities. This doesn’t mean that they’re lazy or obstinate, just that they’re busy and stretched thin as it is, and I don’t see where the slack required to let them play enforcer is supposed to come from.

Which brings us (you knew this was coming, right?) to information technology. One of modern IT’s most underappreciated roles is as an enforcer of process discipline. Today’s enterprise systems make sure that complex, multi-step processes --  ones that involve employees, customers, suppliers, and other groups—are executed the same way time after time, location after location, with few or no exceptions. I just attained Platinum status on AA (a dubious achievement), which means that I can now request upgrades 72 hours in advance. I can’t sweet-talk the AA website to try to get my request in 75 hours in advance, and I’m pretty sure that if I call up the airline and try to sweet-talk the customer service rep I’ll get politely told that there’s just no way. The airline’s systems are configured to start accepting such requests no sooner than 72 hours in advance, and getting around this configuration is difficult, if not impossible, for me.

Today, the parts of a business process that are executed with the assistance of IT are the easiest ones to control, monitor, and enforce. They’re also the easiest ones to reengineer with confidence, a point Erik Brynjolfsson and I highlighted in our recent Harvard Business Review article about IT’s competitive impact (posts on this topic are here and here).

Processes that are technology-free, meanwhile, can be maddeningly difficult and slow to improve. IT-free reengineering is not impossible --  I’ve seen Southwest, for example, successfully make major changes to its boarding process, and I’ve also seen other airlines start to refuse people boarding before their group number has been called—but it’s definitely hard, often much harder than clever process architects foresee.

An old Chinese saying about the power of regional bureaucrats holds that "The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away." If remote locations, for whatever reason, don’t want to follow new orders from a central authority, there have historically been few good tools available to enforce compliance. In the era of the Internet and enterprise IT, the situation is very different. Some types of new order can be embedded in information technology so that they’re faithfully followed. Orders from headquarters that can’t be backed up with technology, meanwhile, diffuse slowly and with low fidelity, as the example of PriorityAAcesss boarding so far shows.

As technology touches more and more aspects of our working lives and business processes, the percentage of IT-free processes like PriorityAAccess should continue to decrease. As someone who wants things to run smoothly, I welcome this development. Do you? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

p.s. Happy Election Day!

p.p.s. I asked my MBA students last spring how many of them had read Hammer and Champy’s incredibly popular 1992 book Reengineering The Corporation. None of them had even heard of it. I felt old.

What This Country Needs is a Chief Technology Officer.

I’ve read in a few places recently that president-elect Obama plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer for America, perhaps as a cabinet-level position. This is one of those brilliant ideas that seems glaringly obvious in retrospect --  of course the most technically advanced, innovative, and computer intensive economy on the planet should have a high-ranking official in the federal government dedicated to technology issues! Why haven’t we had one since the dawn of the mainframe, PC, or Internet Eras? Still, much better late than never.

The precise job description is not yet clear, but how could it be? Technology’s role in American society is boundaryless and constantly increasing, so delineating the CTO’s role is going to be hard. Is it confined to information and communications technology, or should also include other blossoming flields like energy and life sciences? And is the mission to make policy, to allocate resources via something like a venture capital fund, to take control of large portions of the federal government’s IT spending and personnel, and/or to to be an advocate for enlightened use of technology in both the private and public sectors?

Good arguments can be made for any of these roles, and I hope that the US CTO is given a broad charter. But the office could still be an extremely valuable and important one even if it has a narrow mission. Let’s say that this is the case, and that the position comes with only a small staff and budget. The fear then is that it would descend into irrelevance because it would have no real authority or clout, and would be at best a bully pulpit.

Maybe. But I can think of at least three ways in which the office of the US CTO could do critical work even if it doesn’t control vast resources (these activities, of course, are highly complementary and would feed off each other):

Increasing transparency and accountability. There are many ways to use technology to make the work of the federal government more open and visible to the people. The city of Washington, DC is a leader in this area, having made over 200 data feeds about the municipal government available for download and mashup.
My father’s political hero was Harry Truman. I thought this was just Midwestern pride until I read David McCullough’s biography and learned about the Truman Committee to investigate fraud, corruption, inefficiency, and abuse among military contractors during World War II. The committee, which started as Truman himself driving around the country in his Dodge to bases under construction, is acknowledged by the Senate’s web site as "one of the most productive investigating committees in [our] entire history." This same page also fesses up, though, that congressional leaders assured President Roosevelt that the committee would not be able to cause much trouble because it had a budget of only $15,000. Give ‘em Hell Harry found a way to make that money work hard, to the massive benefit of our country. Imagine what he could have done with a bit of modern technology.

Launching small projects with big impact. ‘Small’ here means inexpensive, at least in comparison to the federal governments overall IT spending, which exceeded $60 billion in 2005. As the Obama campaign well knows, the technologies of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 can deliver benefits that are hugely disproportionate to their cost.
My favorite example of this within government so far is the deployment by the Directorate of National Intelligence of a powerful suite of 2.0 tools across all sixteen federal intelligence agencies. When the DNI was established many people felt that it wouldn’t be anything more than ’a thin new layer of bureaucracy,’ which hardly sounds like what our country needs as it faces new enemies. The pessimism was both deep and broad; as Amy Zegart of UCLA said, " "I think it’s pretty telling that both Bob Gates and John Negroponte prefer jobs trying to bail us out of Iraq to the job of trying to fix U.S. intelligence." And while it’s certainly true that Intellipedia and its sister technologies have not done anything close to fixing US Intelligence, it’s also true that, as a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Knowledge Lab observed, "Intellipedia has the potential to change the nature of intelligence analysts’ work." The budget for all of the DNI’s 2.0 technologies has been described to me as ‘rounding error’ when compared to the IT budget of any single intelligence agency. I am fully confident that there are many, many more opportunities within government to get huge bang for a judiciously spent IT buck.

Surfacing and sharing best practices. The examples of Intellipedia and the DC government show that there are plenty of good ideas and successful projects out there. A national CTO would add great value by simply highlighting them, showing how and why they work so well, distilling lessons learned and mistakes to be avoided, sharing this knowledge as widely as possible, and generally acting as a technology Johnny Appleseed for the country.
The more I learn about technology and how it’s put into use, the more struck I am by the wide spread in both approaches and results. Highlighting this fact and helping to spread the word about how to get the most from technology are noble pursuits. At Harvard Business School we teach primarily via the case study, and I’ve written, read, and taught enough of them to appreciate just how powerful they can be. The best technology case studies show people both what’s possible and how to get there, and they take away a naysayer’s ability to say "That’s all fine in theory, but it’ll never work in practice." Case studies show what actually has worked in practice, and provide concrete examples that people can read, discuss, and take back to their own jobs. A national library of best (and worst?) practice technology cases, maintained by the office of the CTO and used to educate and evangelize, would be a wonderful resource. 


America and the Obama administration face no shortage of challenges and opportunities. Because technology can help with so many of them, a national CTO could also be a great help to the country. Just writing about the office makes me excited about its potential. I think I’ll go over to change.gov and submit an application...

Are Our Technologies at War with Each Other?.

On Twitter this morning I was alerted by @israelblechman to a great article at the Social Computing website by Venkatesh Rao called "Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War." Rao asserts that different generations of knowledge workers have had quite different approaches to the perennial challenge of using technology to help generate, capture, and spread knowledge among people. He also predicts how the struggle among these approaches and their advocates will end:

"The Boomers will retire and the Millennials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution."

Jeff Kelly replied with an equally valuable piece, "KM vs. Social Media: Beware the Warmongers" in which he cautions against, well, warmongering between the different approaches. His closing prediction is that:

"Our technology and society will continue to evolve; people will continue to be resistant to (but finally adapt to) change; youth will continue to disdain their elders until they become tempered by wisdom; and the opportunities to learn and prosper will continue to grow for those wise enough to do so."

I like Kelly’s caution against ageism: not all Boomers and Gen Xers are irretrievably clueless about social media or hostile to the ideas of information sharing platforms that are (at least initially) radically freeform and egalitarian.

But I also really like how Rao highlights that successive generations of technology to support group work and knowledge creation are not all the same, or essentially interchangeable. Instead, these different waves of technology reflect differing assumptions about the right, or smart, or best ways to go about these tasks. As I wrote earlier, "It’s not about the technology" is often a dangerous and incorrect oversimplification, and nowhere is this the case more clearly than with tools for group work and knowledge creation.

To make this point, Rao uses Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote that "the medium is the message."  I also like Mitch Kapor’s insight that "Architecture is politics." You will get different politics, different dynamics, different levels and types of participation, and different results and benefits from different architectures of participation. And I’m with Rao that the newest architectures are the best ones we’ve come up with yet.  Do you agree? And how ‘real’ is the war between KM and SM?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Taking to the Airwaves.

I’ll be on Federal News Radio 1500 shortly after 4 pm this afternoon (East Coast Time) to talk with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris about president-elect Obama’s proposed US CTO post, which I blogged about here. Tune in if you get a chance—streaming audio is available here—or listen to a transcript afterward and let us know what you think of the discussion.

Update: a podcast of the interview is available here. And let me make one immediate clarification:  I might have given the impression in the interview that the DNI actually created or launched Intellipedia and the Intelligence Community’s other 2.0 tools, but this was not the case. These tools started from grass-roots efforts within the community. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has officially blessed or approved them (I’m not sure what the right term is here) but did not initiate them.

Should Knowledge Workers have E2.0 Ratings, Part 3.

My previous two posts on measuring knowledge workers’ participation in Enterprise 2.0 generated a good bit of discussion. Many of the comments I received relate to the eternal debate over optimal incentive design, and whether it’s desirable (or even possible) to measure and reward effort vs. activities vs. outcomes. Rather than trying to summarize this debate (which I’d do poorly), let me instead try to make it specific to the topic at hand: whether it would be a good idea to measure, using some kind of multidimensional scale, the contributions of knowledge workers to emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) as well as the popularity of these contributions.

Many of the comments on my previous two posts pointed out problems with the approach I advocated, which was to measure each knowledge worker’s relative levels of activity/contribution along with the popularity of their contributions. I can boil a lot of the excellent points raised to three archetypal objections, phrased here as questions:

If you measure activity, aren’t you just going to get activity?  Yes!  This is exactly the point! The objection is that activity does not always lead to desirable results, and that it’s possible to have large amounts of unproductive activity. And it is. But all the evidence I’ve seen indicates that thriving ESSPs yield useful stuff. They get questions answered. They serve as large and dynamic knowledge repositories. They help people find each other and stay close. They transmit good ideas . They harness collective intelligence. And they work in concert with the goals of the organization, not at cross purposes.
So the basic goal is pretty simple: to encourage more activity in these environments.  It’s only a small leap of faith, I find, to believe that activity will yield results.  And the activity doesn’t have to totally self-directed. Instead, the organization’s leaders can guide Enterprise 2.0 by signaling and stressing where they want people to focus their contributions. In this economic environment, a focus on cost cutting (and survival) seems like a good idea.


Why not measure instead what we’re really interested in --  innovativeness, productivity, service levels, etc.?  For one thing, they can be hard to measure. For another, few companies would think to measure receptionists based on their contributions to innovativeness or R&D scientists based on their contributions to customer service. But these kinds of contributions can and do occur on ESSPs. So I advocate measuring and evaluating people based on their contributions to E2.0, and have some faith that E2.0 helps with innovation, productivity, service, etc.. And let people themselves figure out how they want to contribute, participate, and be helpful to each other, and let their abilities to do these things become clear over time, instead of assuming that their place on the org chart completely specifies their areas of expertise, or dictates how they should be spending all their time. Believe instead that expertise is emergent (I hope this phrase becomes a bumper sticker).
One other problem with measuring high level outcomes like innovativeness and productivity is that they’re typically measured at the level of the group or the entire enterprise. This gives rise to the free rider problem --  the fact that some people don’t pull their weight and instead count on others to do the work. With group-level outcome measures it’s hard to detect and deter free riding. With individual-level measures, in contrast, it’s easy to see who’s not pulling their weight.


Wouldn’t some people treat ESSP contribution as a chore, doing the minimum necessary, and with minimal thoughtfulness?  Yes, and so what? This would be a problem if others in the organization (the people of good will) came to believe that this approach of least possible effort --  call it the ‘phoning it in’ strategy—worked as well as a more conscientious approach. If that were the case, more and more people over time would start phoning it in. But if people see instead that sincere effort is rewarded, and those who phone it in get treated as if they’re phoning it in, then it’ll be perceived as a losing strategy and avoided.
Another worry is that the poor content generated by the phoning it in strategy will clutter up the Intranet or Extranet, obscuring the good stuff and making it harder for people to navigate, search, etc.  But think how much clutter there is on the Internet, and how little it impedes us. Thanks to Googleish link-based search, tagging, rating resources like Technorati, Digg, and Yelp, and many other such mechanisms of emergence, the cream rises to the top on the Internet. We can find what we’re looking for, navigate efficiently, and pretty accurately assess quality. The whole point of E2.0 is to make Intranets a lot more like the Internet in this regard --  to make it a place where there’s a lot of content, and where the bad or irrelevant does not get in our way of finding the good and relevant.

So I hear the objections and am trying hard not to dismiss them out of hand, but they don’t yet dissuade me from advocating an individual-level multidimensional E2.0 measurement program. What do you think? Am I leaving out or misrepresenting any of the main objections? Are my answers to the archetypal objections above wrong, naive, incomplete, or otherwise bad? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Andyasks , and Hopes for Answers.

I’ve been told by a few people that if I want to really understand the power of the microblogging utility Twitter (which I wrote about here and here ) I need to use it more broadly. Up to now I’ve ‘tweeted’ almost exclusively about IT and Enterprise 2.0. I also use the utility to respond to other people’s tweets, and during baseball season (a happy time that seems as far away as Saturn right now) I use it to shoot my mouth off about my beloved Red Sox, but that’s about it.

I don’t use Twitter to tell the world about my day, my feelings, my quotidian vexations and triumphs, traffic conditions, the song that I’m listening to at the moment, etc. And I don’t really want to start. I’ve been told by credible sources, however, that the more you give with Twitter the more you get, and it’s a possibility I want to explore. It’s clear that it wouldn’t take much effort to tweet more; it just hasn’t been clear yet to me what more I should be tweeting about.

And then I remembered that one of my favorite things to do with a group of people, whether or not I know them well, is to ask a question and get everyone to answer it in turn. I always learn a lot, both about the topic and the folk involved, and the exercise usually sparks some lively conversations. People’s explanations for their answers are very often as interesting, if not more so, than the answers themselves. And very often answers lead to good follow-on questions, and the interplay can go on for a while.

I’ve used Twitter a few times already to ask questions, and have been greatly impressed with both the quality and quantity of answers. I was going to have my first TV appearance last Friday (so as not to jinx it I’ll wait until the segment is officially scheduled to air before saying anything more) and, in a panic, asked the Twitterverse for tips on how to avoid screwing it up. I got a lot of valuable advice back very quickly, and tried to incorporate it (I did not, however, follow Lewis Shepherd‘s advice to swear up a storm like the Sex Pistols did in 1976 ).

So I’m combining my penchant for asking questions with my desire to learn more about Twitter, yielding a tremendously exciting new initiative called "andyasks". I’ll tweet at least one question a day, and people can reply with their answers. In best E2.0 style, the community that forms atop andyasks, and in fact atop each separate question, will be self-organizing. I also it want to be freeform, and so am putting no ground rules or guidelines in place up front; we’ll see if there’s a need for them over time.

If you’re interested in participating, simply follow me --  "@amcafee" --  on Twitter and reply to questions if and whenever you feel like it.

I also want to learn more about hashtags, the lightweight add-on to Twitter that lets us categorize our tweets. So I’ll tag all of my questions with the #andyasks hashtag, and ask all respondents to do the same (participants in andyasks will also need to follow the Twitter user "hashtags" ). This will let everyone track all questions and responses over time by typing "andyasks" into the search box at hashtags.org . If there’s a better way to organize this initiative, please leave a comment and let us know --  as I said, I’m still largely a Twitter newbie, and am eager to be educated.

I have no clear idea what I’ll ask about over time. I’ll try to make andyasks questions varied, and of broad interest. I know that they’ll reflect my interests, which include good writing of all kinds, movies, modern American culture (OK, pop culture), the arts of living well, baseball, technology, and whatever catches my eye in the paper and online.

I imagine that most questions will be lighthearted; there’s more than enough somber material floating around the ether these days. And there will rarely if ever be right vs. wrong answers. This is not intended to be a trivia contest (in the age of Google, how much sport would there be in an online trivia contest?).

I hope you’ll find andyasks to be fun and engaging, and I hope you’ll frequently take the few seconds required to fire off an answer. Leave a comment here if you have any questions or feedback about it.

The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan.

Recent events in the news have inspired a thought experiment: I asked myself what I would do if I were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. To be a bit more specific, I imagined that one of the big 3 American auto companies was taken over tomorrow by enlightened and aggressive new leadership whose only goals are to restore the company to operational and financial excellence. This leadership is enlightened (in my book) because it believes firmly in the power of IT to help businesses achieve their goals and differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose (this is a complete fantasy for several reasons, but thought experiments aren't supposed to be constrained by reality.).

So what would I propose?

I'd be guided by a couple facts and a few principles. The first fact is that on day one I would know virtually nothing about the company's IT environment. I wouldn't know, for example, what major enterprise systems needed to be deployed, integrated, consolidated, upgraded, etc. I also wouldn't know about the health, status, and importance of the large projects currently underway. I'd set about trying to learn answers to these questions, of course, but this would be a long, slow process.

My colleagues on the new management team would be similarly in the dark on day one about other critical questions:

•   Which of our current vehicle platforms under development will be hits in the market?  Which will be duds?
•   Are our current platform projects largely on schedule, or are they falling badly behind?
•   Where are our biggest opportunities to cut costs without losing valuable capabilities?

 The second fact (actually more of a very safe bet) is that the company would have a static and fragmented Intranet, and that employees would communicate with each other primarily via email. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 would not be advanced within the company, nor would it be universal.
  
As I got to work and tried to deliver results and benefits as quickly as possible, I'd be guided by a set of principles, many of which I've discussed in this blog:

1. The company 'knows' the answers to our questions. The knowledge required to answer them exists within the workforce. This knowledge is widely diffused, constantly changing, and not contained in the mind of any single person (As Friedrich Hayek pointed out many years ago), but it is out there. Most executives, I'm pretty sure, believe this to be true. What's frustrating them is that they don't have great ways to collect and access this knowledge.
   
2. Most people want to be helpful to each other, and to the company. I think it's self-evident that people are largely good; if we weren't, we would have wiped each other long before now. And we are to some extent wired for altruism and reciprocity. Finally, American carmaker employees have ample reason to fear for their industry, their company, and their jobs, so they have extra incentive to pitch in and help out, and to experiment with new ways to do so.
   
3. Expertise is emergent. It's logical and natural to think that all the good new product ideas come out of the design department and R&D labs, that the folk in the IT department are the best ones to help you with your computer problem, and that the engineers are the only ones who can figure out why the doors start rattling after 5,000 miles on the road. But this is not always going to be the case. The more we look, the more we see that a very effective way to solve a problem is to expose it to a highly diverse set of potential problem solvers, then let them have at it.
4. People are busy. Most knowledge workers have more than enough to do with their normal jobs, and aren't going to go too far out of their way too often, even though they do want to be helpful. This implies that any new tools need to be perceived as 'in the flow' of work, rather than 'above the flow.' There are a few ways to achieve this. One is to make the new tools extremely simple, easy, and intuitive to use, and to ensure that they're never more than a couple clicks away. Another is to 'widen the flow' so that job descriptions include 'enterprise-level helpfulness / collaboration.' A series of three posts advocating this is here, here, and here.
   
5. Weak ties are strong. Weak-tie networks are great places to look for novel information and introductions to valuable people. And social networking software (SNS) is a great tool for building, maintaining, and exploiting networks of weak ties. Instead of being a time-waster, enterprise SNS would be a powerful resource.
   
6. The ability to convert potential ties into actual ones is valuable. At present we rely primarily on human brokers and connectors to introduce us to valuable colleagues. These organizational matchmakers are extremely valuable and influential, and there aren't nearly enough of them.
7. Platforms are better than channels , for a lot of reasons. Channels like email hide information; platforms like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter make it visible, persistent, and widely consultable.
   
8. Search is the dominant navigation paradigm. People navigate online content by typing words into search boxes rather than navigating through menus. This implies that we should do everything we can to make sure search works well.
9. The mechanisms of emergence should be encouraged. For search to work well, online content needs to be heavily interlinked. So people should be given the ability to link to content they find valuable and encouraged to do so. They should also be encouraged to tag, vote, rate, and to all the other things that help identify what a particular piece of content is about, and how good it is. In addition to this explicit work people also vote on and rate content implicitly as they browse through it. 
10. Anyone can learn the new tools, but they need to be educated, trained, and encouraged. I do think that digital natives use technology differently than us older digital immigrants, but we can learn. The new tools of collaboration don't require any skills beyond point, click, drag, drop, and type. They do require users to adopt a particular philosophy about sharing information and interacting with each other, and this philosophy can seem strange at first. When I first heard about Twitter, for example, I said something like "What on Earth would that be useful for, and who on Earth would ever want to use it?" Now, however, I'm a fairly frequent user, find it a really novel and valuable resource, and think that it has strong potential within the enterprise (here are my blog posts on Twitter, and here's a research report on Enterprise 'microblogging' from Pistachio consulting ).
    

So what would adherence to these principles lead me to do? I'd roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company. This suite would include blogs, wikis (including collaborative document production tools like Google Docs), discussion boards, SNS, a microblogging tool like Twitter or Yammer, a tagging utility, prediction markets, ways to vote on good content (a la Digg) and ways to give praise or good karma to particularly helpful colleagues. Lots of vendors both big and small are working to develop such suites; for now, I'm going to assume that a complete one exists.

As I wrote earlier, SNS helps with principle #5 above, and a blogosphere (broadly defined here to include a Twitterverse) helps with #6. And the whole idea of ESSPs supports #7. To put the other principles into practice, I'd insist that:

• The tools be trivially easy to use, primarily by copying the look, feel, and user interface of the most popular Web 2.0 resources. Too many ESSPs intended for the enterprise try to reinvent the wheel, and they do so poorly. (helps with principles #4 and #10)
• All content is cross-linkable, taggable, and Diggable. (#9 and #3 and #8)
• The ESSPs contain some initial content and suggested structure, but that these are modifiable over time. (#4)
• There be few initial rules or policy statements beyond 'use your judgment' and 'highlight any behavior you find inappropriate.' (#2)
• Most platforms be available company-wide.  I'd probably allow only group collaborative document production tools to have limited membership. (#3)
• Training on the tools be made mandatory for all employees (#4 and #10)

Of course, I'd also make them as device-independent as possible, and give people the ability to access them from home, the road, etc. Somewhat more controversially, I'd also make E2.0 part of every knowledge worker's job. A series of three blog posts on this topic is here, here, and here, and generated a raft of great comments. I'd introduce this change by announcing on the 'go live' date of the new E2.0 suite that participation will become part (10-20%?) of everyone's performance evaluation, starting in six months.

But what about principle #1 above, that the company knows the answers to the critical questions it's facing?  This is perhaps the most important one, yet is not directly addressed above. To start to get answers, I'd set up prediction markets for the biggest projects, both IT and otherwise, within the company, letting people trade on whether they'll be finished on time, nearly on time, or nowhere near on time. These markets would very quickly provide accurate and valuable information. I'd also set up markets to predict sales volumes and competitors' moves.
I'd also start asking questions via my own blog, and listen to the comments and responses I got back. I'd work to create an environment in which people feel safe and free to speak the truth.

How would I know if Enterprise 2.0 was working well over time? The accuracy of prediction markets is easy to assess. It's also easy to conduct surveys and find out if employees like the new tools, and prefer them to previous ways of collaborating. I'd also partner with academics to design and execute research investigating whether various attributes of performance improved after the new tools went in.
But the point of having the trust and commitment of my management colleagues is that I wouldn't need to justify this kind of expenditure. If they're on board with the principles then they're on board with the investment required to put them into practice. And this investment is not huge. I'm pretty sure E2.0 wouldn't cost as much as the typical ERP project at a car company.

I used Twitter to float this idea before writing this post, and a number of people responded that "IT isn't the problem at the car companies!"  I totally agree. But technology can be a large part of the cure for what ails them. And I'm confident that the biggest and fastest bang for the IT buck at a US automaker today comes from ESSPs and Enterprise 2.0. 

Do you agree? Or do you think there would be better uses for investment dollars and managerial bandwidth after the hypothetical leadership change of my thought experiment? I don't, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and reasoning if you disagree. Leave a comment, please, and let us know.