I have been in Africa for several days and have learned more about Culture, Relationships, and Resources. Our Mission Team from America has been working with local teams at Humble School in Uganda. Humble School provides care and education to children here in Africa. The school, just like many organizations and individuals here, have very limited resources. Some people come here and see the needs and then try to implement THEIR solution. Some of these solutions die a horrible death and it’s usually due to poor communication and disregard of culture. It’s sad to see that here and in Enterprise 2.0 Solutions.
When I see hungry people in the morning, I think eggs, but no eggs were to to be found. I was thinking we could buy eggs to help feed the people. Eggs got me thinking about chickens, which lead to plans about lunch and dinner. What if we gave the school a truck-load of chickens?
The Chickens and Eggs System
A chicken ranch would give the people a simple system for producing chickens and eggs. A big chicken ranch could feed the community and provide an income stream by selling chickens and eggs to other communities. This sounds like a great idea, right?
Death Before Life
The “Chickens and Eggs System”, just like any solution will die without a full-lifecycle plan. The ideal plan puts Cultue first with a focus on Sustainability. A plan without these two key elements produces a stagnant (If something such as a business or society is stagnant, there is little activity or change) solution, which leads to Death before Life.
What’s Wrong with The Chickens and Eggs System
How would you keep them healthy?
How would you feed them?
How would you protect them?
How would you help them be productive?
What if the community could not or would not eat chickens or eggs?
What if the community preferred fish?
A Little Culture Goes A Long Way
Our “Chicken and Eggs Solution” is not that different from Enterprise 2.0 Solutions. The main lesson I see is understanding Culture first improves our ability at creating Sustainable Solutions. Attend any Enterprise 2.0 Conference and you will hear, “It’s about the people, not the tools”. This is more than a “buzz phrase” and goes beyond responses from a subset of people in the Enterprise. This is about a complete understanding of the culture within the Enterprise. What works in one Enterprise, does not work in all. A good place to start understanding more about culture in the Enterprise is with Susan and her teams at The Adoption 2.0 Council.
If you think Enterprise 2.0 is Facebook behind the firewall, this is not for you
If you copy Social Networking features into your E 2.0 solution without knowing why, this is not for you
If you put technology before people, this is not for you
If Culture is not part of your Enterprise 2.0 Strategy, this is not for you
How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
This presentation is almost an hour long, but it is well worth the small investment of time. This is not just a few golden nuggets of wisdom, it’s a goldmine of information you can use right now.
John take us on a wonderful journey in the world of innovation and shows us what extreme surfing and World of Warcraft can teach the enterprise. I encourage you to watch the whole video. If you just want to catch the SOA & Cloud Computing stuff then fast forward about 30 minutes.
(You may want to have a notebook handy for this one)
Learn more about Enterprise 2.0
The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston is happening right now. Their theme is Collaborative technologies accelerate information flow to drive revenue and productivity. You can get video streams and more informaiton on their site. You can also fish for wisdom in this Twitter Stream #e2conf
Applying the basic concepts of Web 2.0 strategies in your organization along with taking advantage of crowdsourcing (internally and externally) are keys to business intelligence. Using your intranet and the internet as platforms to create relationships with people and things will allow you to harness collective intelligence to improve business performance. The fundamental concepts of the internet operating system can be applied to intranets to improve the intelligence Enterprise 2.0 solutions.
State of the Internet Operating System
Tim O’Reilly explains the “State of the Internet Operating System” in this video from the San Francisco, CA Web 2.0 Expo in 2010. “Inventing for the Future” is the key message behind this video. I also captured 8 steps for applying a Web 2.0 Strategy in your Organization, as a quick video summary.
8 Steps to Go From Good to Great
Web 2.0 Strategy for Your Organization
Invent for the Future
Don’t take openness for granted
Enable others
Leverage knowledge
Strengthen your data with Social Graph
The Thing Graph matters too
Become useful to others
Create more value than you capture
“…it takes a web of cooperating species to create a truly rich environment” ~Tim O’Reilly #quote
In that video, Tim talked about the “Social Graph” and the “Thing Graph”. You can learn how to start creating your own “Thing Graph” in my previous article “Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Patterns: Collective Intelligence“. There are some simple steps to review in the section titled, “Improving the Intelligence of Enterprise 2.0 Platforms”. These simple mods are a quick way to get started, but should be done in the SOA frame of mind. You can discover some simple steps on how to get started with “Social Graph” in this previous article “Game Theory for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption“. These are the simple steps to the discovery of “Collective Intelligence”.
The Real Business Reason for Enterprise 2.0
Collective Intelligence
The world is a web of people and things that create the collective intelligence of life. Understanding these relationships is the fundamental experience while discovering your purpose. Understanding why these relationships exist is the key to unlocking the door to emergent technologies and prediction markets. Collective Intelligence is like a gigantic brain that’s created through the collaboration of many. Systems and Apps for analyzing collective intelligence related to your business is the real reason for Enterprise 2.0.
Andy McAfee, author and management science guru, weighs in on the importance and value of collective intelligence in the enterprise.
I was looking back at this article “There is no Enterprise 2.0, there is your Enterprise 2.0” by Gil Yehuda, Director of Open Source at Yahoo! He makes some valid points about how the approach to Enterprise 2.0 Solutions depends on the organization. This still holds true today. A Web 2.0 strategy in an organization should include business objectives and methods to facilitate collaboration focused on business goals. Gil included a link to clip from the original Matrix Movie, where a child helps our star try to realize the truth. I believe the day is right around the corner where there is no Enterprise 2.0. The practice of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Patterns will soon be invisible because that is just “how business gets done”.
You Enterprise 2.0 Evangelists may of already noticed the word play in this title. There seems to be some controversy about Enterprise Pilot Programs. A quick search on Twitter or Google will shed some light on this topic.
Here is another Matrix Movie video clip where someone needs some critical information now. This reminds me of how a collaborative environment can work in the Enterprise. You may not need to know how to fly a helicopter, but you may need to know some critical business information instantly. Oh yeah, you may not get it as a download straight to your brain, yet.
Box of Wonder
Once upon a time, back in the 1980’s, I was lucky enough to be exposed to LexisNexis, an online database for legal research, while working for a Law Firm in Pennsylvania. I remember how I was so amazed at this tiny screen that would return a couple lines of text from my simple key word query. THIS IS AMAZING!, I would exclaim. My colleagues seemed so unimpressed with this box of wonder, it was just a part of their workflow. This is how I believe our perception of Enterprise 2.0 will look in the very near future.
I went on to volunteer for The Legal Aid Society, while studying more about computers. I moved to Virginia and started working for a Circuit Court, but my passion for using computers and programming to improve lives soon took over. I have been building systems and programming as a hobby for several years, but the time was right for a new career move. I was impressed about how a few lines of code could run a program on a single machine, but I felt the web is where the real innovation was happening. I worked a few small jobs, then took a position with a tech company that supported the Department of Defense.
How We Saw Enterprise 2.0 Back Then
One of my buddies worked in the Human Resources department and he always seemed stressed out about work. One night during a poker game while drinking beers with people from various departments of our organization, someone asked, “How will our jobs look in the future”? Some interesting things were discussed that night, but the next day my buddy came to the programming team and wanted to know how we can start with changing things. We started gathering information on the current HR process and interviewing people involved in the process to see what would make their work-life better. This included talking with the people that worked job fairs. We also talked about possible future needs and gathered feedback about existing tools and resources.
We had a tight budget and little resource, but we created a system that aligned with their process. This system included methods for authentication, communication, notification, and the ability to export information. This system could also search internal and external resumes. Most of the software we had to work with did not have APIs or a WSDL (methods for software to work together). We created our own APIs and web service methods. We authenticated people with LDAP. We used a combination of mini discussion boards and web-based email notifications for communications. We used a combination of SQL, custom document properties, and Adobe’s Collection Indexing (This is similar to Google’s Search Appliance GSA) to manage resumes. Users could attach notes to documents and create their own sharable resume lists. People rapidly adopted this new solution because it made their lives easier. Management loved it, because it paid for itself in about three months, plus we now have capabilities that did not exist before. One new feature was the ability to easily identify geographic areas of talent. Productivity went up across the organization because they stopped getting all those emails asking if they have or know anyone who has certain skill sets.
I think this was just a small example, but some of these basic principals still apply today:
Have a plan that maps to business objectives and goals
Your audience is your strategy
Design for interaction
The more problems you solve, the more success you will have
Solutions with Extensibility have more value
Sharable data (APIs/Web Services) creates flexibility
Think Platform of Apps
Having the “App” mentality will give you the flexibility for views of important information that can be used on multiple devices and across platforms.
In the Center of my Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye
I hope you find these resources helpful.
There are a lot of very smart people that are passionate about Enterprise 2.0. You will find many of them at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
You can find some Enterprise 2.0 Warriors to help you here 2.0 Adoption Council.
A lot of thought went into this white paper “Accelerating Business Performance“. I like the part on “Building an Innovation Culture to Stay Competitive and Responsive”, but it’s difficult to choose a favorite.
This article talks about the white paper above “Enterprise 2.0, Meet Enterprise 1.0“. I don’t agree with all of this, because I have already seen Enterprise Solutions with this blend. I do like this comment he made, ‘We’d get more powerful and robust Enterprise 2.0 “apps”‘. I believe “Apps” should be a key part of any platform solution.
