Cathexis

Enterprise 2.0 2009 - Pivot Moment

This year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference shows a marked evolution from two years ago.  

Andrew McAfee had written his important paper on the topic “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” in April 2006.  The E2.0 conference of 2007 was talking theory with precious few real life examples to discuss, and so the event was technology and vendor heavy.

Good news.   This year the story is that there are stories - real life examples of companies and organizations implementing the technologies, and engaging their workers, constituents and partners.   From aerospace to the military, education to manufacturers, it’s now clear that there’s experience in what works.     

The U.S. Army uses uses it’s Milspace to support a community of 30,000.   company commanders who use their online collaboration platform to quickly turn to fellow commanders for ideas and knowledge.   Status updates are focused on learning as an “What are you learning today.”    Milspace makes full use of multi-media with video Leadercasts and Gaming features for learning.   For the U.S. Army this kind of collaboration speeds time to competence in a rapidly changing environment.

For the Department of Education in Minnesota, online collaboration connects teachers with the business community in their state to match up teacher needs in STEM education with community members who can offer resources of talent and donations. 

Karen Klinzing, Asst. Commissioner of the Department of Education in Minnesota indicates that STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is vital to the economic well-being in their state.   It is estimated that Minnesota will have an increased of 20-33% in scientific and technical occupations in ten years, but there is a trend, so the DOE are looking for creative ways to help augment the teaching of these skills in the public schools.

The Minnesota DOE launched an online community getSTEM-MN.com in February of this year to match teacher needs in STEM education with potential donors in the business community in Minnesota.   A teacher can request expertise, donations and other support allowing business community members to align their capabilities easily with teacher and school needs.   

The getSTEM brand has already taken off.   Ms. Klinzing mentioned that within 24 hours of the launch of the site, she was contacted by three other states to launch similar efforts.   In the coming months, the getSTEM project will launch in several other states taking the same approach.

Booz Allen Hamilton, winner of the Innovator of the Year Award at this year's conference, their online community for employees hello.bah.com not only keeps current employees connected, but is now the vital component in on-boarding new employees.   According to Walton Smith, of BAH, with 5,000 new employees expected to be hired this year, hello.bah.com is now a vital element of on-boarding and orienting new employees.

Boston Bound - Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009

It’s summer and time to head for Boston for the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference. I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues and getting a perspective of what's evolving.

When I attended in 2007, Andrew McAfee called for real life stories about engagements and implementations.   Enterprise 2.0 had been defined but not fully realized.

It’s exciting, then, to see that there are panels and speakers that represent even more engagements as well as the technology advancements at this year’s Enterprise 2.0.

I’m looking forward to panels like Community and Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment, with a panel that includes Genetech, Sabre Holdings, and Harvard University

The Enterprise in Action track has a a real diversity of companies and organizations talking about their own experiences.  

One panel of particular interest in this vein is Real World Customer Edition: Stories About Social Computing Deployments.    In my own work, I’ve been looking at how social computing can help education system leaders engage in education innovation.   Karen Klinzing, Assistant Commissioner for Education for Minnesota is one of the speakers on this panel discussing how social computing tools are being used to promote STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).     

I’m going to ask some of these panelists not only how they create collaborative work environments internal to their enterprises, but how they use these mechanisms to engage with partners and customers and other key stakeholders.   Hopefully, we’ll see a fuller story developing along these lines.

Enterprise 2.0: The Conference, is a place to hear about innovation in solutions and technology, but it’s also a place to hear perspectives as organizations implement the technologies and foster the process of organizational change.   From Volvo, to Lockheed Martin, Harvard University, Genetech, and the U.S. Army, this year’s conference looks to be showcasing the practical roadmaps as well as the vision.

Collaboration: Why It Needs to Be a Real Business Practice

U.S. business executives often talk about the need to embrace "collaboration," as a means to being more competitive and innovative,  with collaboration viewed as an accelerator to both characteristics in the global marketplace.

But why?   Well, we should probably follow the money.

In the past 25 to 30 years, the aggregate value of stock market has steadily and pronouncedly shifted to an asset base of "intangibles." Ultimately that means the value resides with the talent and skills of the knowledge worker and their capacity to engage in knowledge creation and value with colleagues, partners and customers.   And that knowledge and value creation is the result of what is termed "tacit interactions." 

In an Accenture report published in 2004, Future Value: The $7 Trillion Challenge, notes that those intangible assets have "supplanted tangible assets as the key value drivers in the economy."    

That transition in asset characteristic is shown in the Accenture graphic from Jurgen H. Daum's 2002 book, "Intangible Assets and Value Creation."

Despite any impact of the 2008 downturn on specific numbers, this trend remains the nature of asset value and value creation in the 21st century.

While advancements in communications and Web 2.0 collaboration technology and tools are major enablers of collaboration practice, and there's lots of discussion about those technologies, what's often missing is the concomitant discussion about the actual, disciplined practice of collaboration.  

One of the best articles on the practice of collaboration is a Harvard Business Review article entitled Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf.  And while the article was published a few years ago, it recommendations often remain the exception rather than the rule in organizations today.

Here are Evans and Wolf's Collaboration Rules, highlighted in a mind map.

Technology underpins many aspects of this model, but just as importantly, the Evans and Wolf "rules" speak to culture, behavior and practice.   I'll be talking about each one of these areas in upcoming posts.

Collaboration and the Gig Economy

According to Tina Brown in a January Daily Beast article, we’re all doing knowledge piece work, and have entered the age of “The Gig Economy,” where college-educated professionals & knowledge workers find themselves working “Gigs” instead of jobs – short-term, project-based efforts, for fee.    No health benefits, no stock plans, no 401ks.    These folks are trying to stitch together enough “Gigs” to make the “Nut” which, according to Brown, is the amount of “Gigwork” income it takes to make the middle class income formerly acquired with that one-steady-job-with-benefits.

Tina Brown’s world view doesn’t seem as shiny as Dan Pink’s, the one he called out in his 2001 book entitled “Free Agent Nation.”   Back then Pink viewed the diaspora of the formerly fully employed as an army composed of the  “independent worker, tech savvy, self-reliant, path-charting, micropreneur.”    But this more upbeat view was on the pivot point of the Dot.com boom implosion into the Dot.bom bust.  A free-wheeling Free Agent Nation was a tech-age version of the traveling guild worker of the Middle Ages: skilled, self-sufficient, and joining a community of other guilders for interesting work.  In the Middle Ages they’d get together and say build a Gothic cathedral.  Now, according to Brown they're doing spot projects among multiple clients.  

What’s interesting about Brown’s commentary is her observations of the challenges for both companies or large organizations and the peripatetic,  Gig-worker as they try to coordinate, collaborate and communicate among those projects that’s been “pieced” out from companies.

According to Brown, organizations and companies may enjoy of the cost benefits of Gig-workers who have no benefits, but their organizational behavior still expects to conduct meetings and interact along a model where people are physically present.  

Gig-workers have to communicate and coordinate multiple projects across multiple “Gigs”   being nimble, agile, as they connect and collaborate electronically with each client.     Gig-workers are creating online guilds as they create communities to identify work, and highlight their portfolios.

Companies themselves are challenged trying to track and connect with this new class of knowledge worker, while the “Gigsters” spend time, money and effort trying to keep consistent collaboration with their clients.     Many companies are trying to foster better collaboration tools and practice within their organizations, but in this model, we’ll also have to have Enterprise 2.0 with a twist of Gigging,  please.

 

Virtual World Conference: The Intel User Community Case Study

A small gem at the Virtual World Conference last week was Paul Steinberg’s presentation of the genesis and launch of the Intel user community in Second Life. Humorous and helpful, Paul, of Intel's Software Solutions Group, readily shared the peaks and valleys of getting an online user community going in a virtual world.

Like all good online user communities it starts with a good vision, and as Paul articulated “What Intel should be doing is convincing the public that they are the real artists of society by going into details of what actually is involved in creating a new microprosscor, ….”

With executive blessing and a committed resource, the Intel project went through a couple of learning curves. The first was getting the right “look and feel” of the Second Life location. Initial design points from external designers ranged from something out of a 1950s Sci Fi flick, to a large confectionary concoction run amok.  But the once the clean and open space was designed, then the project was launched last spring, (two launches to ensure global time zone coverage).

Here’s some observations from Paul.

On the virtual locale: Focus on interaction and community, not cluttered look and feel.

Keep cool: Initial skepticism from some participants, voiced in the blogosphere, should be acknowledged but not over-reacted to. The community settles in pretty quickly. Especially if the mission of the community is clear and above board. 

Not just outreach, but in-reach: Once the project started, all sorts of internal Intel connections also emerged, creating a whole new network of people with new connections not formerly apparent through the usual forms of corporate communications. Internal participants were truly cross-functional not just engineers, but marketers, many of whom were already on Second Life or other virtual worlds that the Paul didn’t know existed.

Virtual Worlds are optimum for interaction and engagement. Don’t over develop content for a venue like Second Life.  Websites are good for that. The Intel venue is now hosting a calendar of regular events for the next quarter; at least 2-3 month. He also described a coding contest for customized bots that was very successful and turned into an all-day event.

Stay true to your community: In Intel's case it means reaching out to technical people on technical terms and not do marketing.  Some of the presentations Intel organizes are by noted technologists external to the company.

Keep the corporate PR people (politely) at bay. Dialogues in a user community will range from positive to negative, but it should be able to play out within the community without too much intervention.

In short, the Intel community Second Life presence has a clear mission, keeps its focus on a technical community, emphasizes interaction and engagement, and with Paul’s willingness to experiment and evaluate, evolves with the needs of the community, both internal and external to Intel. Cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting to Collaboration – Virtually and in 3D

3D applications and virtual worlds are moving dramatically into the enterprise and not just in the realm of e-learning.  Virtual worlds can enhance collaborative work inside the enterprise and deliver value to customers in the marketplace.

This week, I attended the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, and  Wednesday’s  enterprise panel on “Applications That Work” , moderated by Linda Ban of IBM’s 3D Internet and Digital Convergence group, assured the audience that the enterprise virtual world was not synonymous with Second Life.  Business needs for virtual private worlds with security and access control were acknowledged.

There’s a tendency to use the terms virtual worlds and 3D applications interchangeably. 3D applications are often employed to do group exercises and practice (i.e., disaster and emergency responder scenarios, visually rich training experience on complex tools and instruments).

Virtual worlds are 3D, visually immersive collaborative environments, with strong elements of online social networks to foster interactivity and informal learning, and often in a way that is persistent and sustained beyond a vocational training session.

Virtual world communities of interest and interaction can be part of a spectrum of tools to enable distributed project management. Teams in a virtual world, meeting in a 3D project or situation room,  readily access  unified communications mechanisms (IM, VoiP, Chat), or and can integrate document and application sharing functions into the 3D experience.   

Proton Media’s initial core competency in e-learning has evolved to include, ProtoSphere, a 3D environment for project collaboration and informal learning.  A hosted or on-premise offering, depending on the customer’s preference, Protosphere’s live, virtual 3D world, also has social networking and collaborative tools such as blogs and wikis, simulation capabilities, VoIP and text chat.

VT&T’s capability wasn’t 3D, per se, but a 2D representation of a meeting room, with whiteboards and screens for application and document sharing, a “file cabinet” in the corner, that contained all the team’s project artifacts (documents, project plans). VT&T’s strength was in its robust integration with typical corporate communications and applications environments, making the  project room an easy extension of existing infrastructure

While Multiverse’ platform play is primarily focused on the online game and 3D Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) it’s capability is readily used for non-game virtual worlds. Their customer, Accelerate was demonstrating a virtual employee “on-boarding” application where a new employee receives their initial orientation.

IBM had a strong presence at this conference, with a large booth, and presenting or moderating several panels.   According to Wayne Smith, a consulting specialist with the 3D group, IBM is very active in helping customers identify the right virtual world technology for use internally and for customer engagement.

 

*Second Life Brand Map

Wayne demonstrated the Deutsche Bank presence on Second Life, where DB engages their customers in visualizing some of their real-world goals and then develop a financial plan to realize those goals.  Deutsche Bank, according to Smith, has kiosks in their brick-and-mortar settings for customers to access the Second Life-delivered services.

It was a fascinating two days.  More observations and summary on the way.

 

 

Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose

And Now for Something Completely Virtually Different

 

This week I will be attending the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, reporting on the event and exhibits. Readers of my blog will know that I’ve been keenly interested the collaborative enterprise, which indeed, is the title of an important new book by Charles Heckscher of the Rutgers University,  Center for Workplace Transformation   (The Collaborative Enterprise: Managing Speed and Complexity in Knowledge-Based Businesses, Yale UP).  The collaborative enterprise, according to Heckscher, is an emerging organizational form, in an evolutionary line from the days of the guild and crafts association, through simple bureaucracy of the 19th century to 20th century paternalistic decentralized bureaucracy to the era of the emerging collaborative enterprise.

While my attention will be focused at conference on the Virtual Worlds for the Enterprise track, there's sessions on technology, business and strategy, community, and of course, entertainment and marketing. 

As Susan Wu has noted in a Worlds in Motion interview, “all social interaction online will be driven by game mechanics.”   Until recently the worlds of gaming and online collaboration have been moving relatively separate spheres. Susan’s work at Charles Rivers Ventures  focuses on finding the companies who are at the nexus of social networking and gaming.

Virtual World conference sessions focusing on the enterprise will explore the kinds of applications that work best for the enterprise, and platforms that are appropriate for enterprise use, evaluated along the BEST guidelines (Business, Economic Value, Social Interaction and Technology).

See you there.

Creative Coffee Club Launch - Palo Alto

In September, a UK colleague, Toby Moores, launched the Creative Coffee Club in two venues, one in London and one in Leicester (Toby is a visiting professors a DeMontfort University there: see prior blog post).

Toby and I have been having virtual discussions about innovation and creativity for the last year, since the first Office 2.0 conference, over Skype in the intervening months into this year's conference.  I've been blogging and musing on the topic, but Toby recently waxed eloquent on the topc, so here's some comments from him.

At Office 2.0 I proposed CCC as an example of a new breed of infrastructure (in the roads, rail and web sense of the word). The creative tragedy of the commons is that it is easier NOT to create within enterprise, and NOT to share between enterprises. For me this club has a business purpose for its members (including academia) in that it is a creative and conversational sandbox away from the constraints of measurement and results. It is also a regular, osmotic exposure to the wider creative process. This supports, but is far more powerful than, a conference, off-site or 3 day workshop.

Creativity needs to be a habit.

 

As we have discussed before, flipchart tearsheets go to die in handbag hell and most of the learnings die with them. Creativity needs to be part of the rhythm of our lives. CCC wouldn't exist without social software to drive it but we have demonstrated a great deal of pent up demand for this meetup in just five days. I'd like to push this thinking out to the Irregulars and similar groups. I am pleased to see that many of them have joined up already but I'd like to capitalise on their curiosity. This will work because the word is spread by respected, connected individuals. I'd like to start moving from awareness to advocacy across our networks."

The first Palo Alto CCC will meet at the Coupa Cafe at 538 Ramona St. (Wireless access included with your cup of java) from 10 am - noon.  At 11 am, we will connect to the Wiki Wednesday group in London since many of those participants are also in the London CCC.  The idea is to convene these sessions bi-weekly and as Toby says, support the notion of "creativity as habit."

This creativity notion is not confined to high tech, but we hope to get creative arts, academics, government, into the conversation. 

So what makes you creative?  How do you innovate?

Creative Coffee Club on Facebook

Creative Coffee Club Blogtronix Site

Office 2.0 - Mind Mapping Panel

Tomorrow is the kickoff for the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco at the St. Regis Hotel. Ideas and live projects will abound on the future of work, the impact of Web 2.0 in education (Classroom 2.0) mobility and productivity, and how to unleash and foster creativity.

I’m pleased to be moderating a panel on Mind Mapping and Collaboration, with guest panelists Lisa Arthur of MindJet, Michael Hollauf of Mindmeister, Jonathan Sapir of SnapXT, Keith Patterson of Itensil, and Martin Cleaver of Blended Perspectives.

I’ve used mind mapping as a planning and collaboration tool for several years now. In my work in high technology, I tend to work with people whose stock in trade is either the written word or program coding. When one gets a room full of people together in a room to work on a project with those skill sets making up the predominant tool kit, the model of thinking tends to get fairly focused and linear fairly quickly.

The Mind Mapping panel will take up perspectives on the impact of visual tools such as mapping to aid a group towards collaborative efforts and promoting relational and big picture thinking as part of “thinking through” a problem rather than “diving in” quickly.

My colleagues and I will discuss mind mapping, Web 2.0 and mapping, and mapping as an element in a spectrum of collaborative work processes. As I mentioned in a recent blog post about my conversations with Toby Moores, collaborative efforts need a variety of mechanisms to get from the “initial first thought to the final finished product”.

I’m excited about bringing this topic of mapping to the subject of collaboration and the enterprise. This year’s conference is sure to surpass last year’s in high energy, latest thought, and live lab experiments.

iPhone: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Actually

As I posted on the Office 2.0 Conference community the other day, it took me 45 minutes to set up and activate my new iPhone. Thirty minutes of that set up time was spent trying to pry the darn thing from my two teenage daughters’  hands.

One of the major themes of this year’s splendiferous Office 2.0 conference is Mobility and Productivity, and Mr. Jobs obliged by having the iPhone manufactured and released by late June. Our peripatetic conference producer and wunderkind Ismael Ghalimi said “aha” and so everyone at the conference, if they don’t already have the device will get one: It’s their conference packet. No more paper please, no more conference totes to hold your chotchka’s. 

Calling it an iPhone is the marketing ploy to fix all other cell phone providers in the cross-hairs. It’s THE portable internet device. My contacts were synched in 30 seconds, my phone account established in a matter of minutes. Here, after 48 hours is my short list of benefits. No, I didn’t pry it apart to see how I could hack it. I have been waiting for years for something to help me get through my very complicated day.   Pay attention Apple marketing focus groups. This is a high tech, working mom version.

1. Family Calm: Keeps my fidgety, teenage daughter quiet while we’re in a traffic jam. I hand her my iPhone “Chill out and watch You Tube.”

2. Fashion Advice: Check the 10-day weather outlook. What’s the temp going to be like in SF during the conf? Sweater Advisory.

3. Calendar: Client appts. Dentist appts., you name it;  no paper, and no spinning up the laptop.

4. Book tickets: A quick trip to SoCal over the weekend. Safari, Orbitz, I’m done.

Next week, at Office 2.0, the iPhone will be put to a great collective experiment. All of us will have the phone, a Etelos-built conference application will keep us together, video feeds of conf. activities will be available. How do we work? Interactively, connected to the net at all times, and therefore connected to one another.  They call it an iPhone. The Important letter in that concept is “I” .