Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Lots of pontification today on whether the iPad will become that third device that removes the claustrophobia of surfing the web on a mobile device, yet takes some of the clunk away from a regular laptop.

Om Malik on GigaOm has one of the best analysis on this, saying:

Despite their evolution, laptops and desktop computers as we know them are essentially work tools. They’re designed for content creation — be that of writing blog posts (or a book), editing photos or creating videos. On the iPhone, we create content of another kind — personal, communication-centric content.

The consumer web is slowing moving away from ‘Read and Write’ mode, back to ’Read More, Write Little’ status as I tweeted earlier today. But not as we saw in the pre-social days before blogs and wikis.

We’re going to be writing more than we ever did, just a lot less every time we do. Tweets are 140 characters, the Re-Tweet is the new gesture to simply express acknowledgement or endorsement, LinkedIn imposes character limits on some of the fields in Groups, Yelp Reviews are a paragraph or so. And auto posts from Tumblr and Posterous to Facebook are primarily visual media uploads with a few lines of description. Lots of limits on each gesture. But many many more of them.

That’s just touching on the writing elements of our web experience. Gaming, enjoying videos with your family at the dinner table,  and other visual consumption models are overdue for some fresh blood as well. 

And so the iPad will sell and will sell big. Save a few really ridiculous omissions (seriously? no webcam?) it’s the perfect device for the type of text based communication that’s becoming more and more prevalent. And sadly its the optimal device for the attention deficit online world we’re participating in, every day.

Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard gave an excellent interview to Adam Bryant of the New York Times on the topic of flatter organizations.

I highly recommend reading the entire piece. On why the shift occurred, Mr. Conde opines:

I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

What stood out most for me was his characterization of establishing a true meritocracy in the enterprise.

Meritocracy in the enterprise is something that most high performing leaders would love to see and institutionalize. But its difficult when layers of management can create barriers to transparency around who really was instrumental in getting the job done.

At most organizations, those at the very top are acutely aware that its very hard to have a handle on who truly are the best performers in the enterprise and as important how to infest the rest of enterprise with those smarts. The old model, that characterizes much of how this done at most companies today, would be to throw a lot of money and resources at actively identifying the best of the best via all sorts of creative performance reviews (peer, skip level, top down, etc etc). Then to actively “manage’ that talent pool downstream in the hope that it drives organizational performance.

Via the strategic use of social and collaborative tools, what SunGard has fostered is a more transparent, open enterprise where you move to a passive model of continuously allowing talent identification to happen in the flow of work, and in a way that fellow employees can identify, leverage and learn from the best. In turn, recognition, whether from fellow colleagues, industry peers and managers happens in the open and over and above subjective evaluation by managers. And there’s a lot more that comes with such collaborative and transparent structures in the areas of HR performance, Communications Performance and Line of Business Performance that I’ve written about in the past.

The most brilliant management thinking and execution planning at the top echelons of enterprises no doubt can get companies ahead within defined windows – monetizing a killer innovation breakthrough, riding a bull market, accessing untapped talent in an emerging market and the like. All require active execution by those at the top to ensure follow through. Sustainable advantage on the other hand, is a much much harder goal to achieve as scaling all that top down thinking quarter over quarter is not practical in active mode. And frankly the top heavy model is no guarantee of success as we’ve seen with the last financial crisis.

As much as many of us believe it, you just cant scale the “if you want it done right, do it yourself” mode of work. What socially powered enterprises get is the ability for the best minds, whether at the top, middle or bottom to see, participate and influence outcomes to drive overall organizational performance.  Passively….in the context of work.  I recently wrote about why Building IS Strategy – that’s the only model where the best ideas can be found as well as scaled. And socially tuned enterprises enable this mode of doing business where an open meritocracy around the best strategy and execution plan, against stated business objectives, can drive performance in a scalable way.

Stowe Boyd has some good thoughts on this in the context of social business on his blog that are certainly worth a read.

Update: MIT Professor Andrew McAfee has another good piece on this article, here. Also, I should mention that SunGard used Yammer to help enable this shift in their organization.

I recently contributed a report on the concept of Real Time in the Enterprise, published by my friends at GigaOM Pro – the research arm of the wildly popular GigaOM Blog Network.

The concept of the real time enterprise is going to be top of mind for many organizations over the next 24 months. Amongst other things, one primary driver will be organizations waking up to the fact that their customers and prospects expect to engage in real time, whether on public social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, or on company managed community forums. As a result, critical processes within enterprises need to be re-wired to be able to respond to real time customer inquiries whether that be order status, product knowhow or access to experts. Supporting the end customer is now everyone’s job and so-called “enterprise 2.0” solutions have the ability to let key people rally around the customer in more efficient ways.

We’re seeing it in our work already where this is not just some data problem that IT is interested in solving. Line of business executives are looking to understand the optimal information flow design in the context of discrete performance acceleration opportunities in the areas of customer service, channel distribution, sales and marketing collaboration and the supply chain. Whether its revenue or cost efficiency, all these executives all have a number on their head and are increasingly convinced that latency means cash left on the table.

Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about the topic or the report, or if you’re interested in learning about what this means for your enterprise.

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The report is for GigaOm Pro subscribers but here’s the Executive Summary:

Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access.

Together, these new interaction formats enable real-time communication and access to information emanating from within these new collaboration suites as well as from external systems. The result is a real-time flow of information from the people and systems that are critical to business functions for each employee, all accessible from a central dashboard.

The widespread proliferation of real-time tools in the enterprise will, however, require concerted analysis of what process and information flows truly warrant real time access. The notion of “right time” vs. “real time” will become more important as organizations decide what consumption models work best for individual users and the tasks they are responsible for. The speed of “real time” also will be limited by how fast traditional applications in the enterprise are able to process and publish information. However, the existence of extensible APIs now make it easier than ever to tap into multiple systems to extract information as soon as it’s made available.

While the concept of real time has existed for more than a decade, a new crop of collaborative suites from vendors such as Jive Software, Socialtext and Socialcast provide this facility out-of-the-box. Traditional enterprise software vendors have also announced their intention to provide real time collaborative and data access capabilities. Notable mentions include Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010, Salesforce Chatter, Google Wave and IBM’s Lotus Connections.

In 2010, expect to see the concept of the real time enterprise ascend the hype cycle. Enterprises will begin to analyze how real-time access can help discrete business processes such as customer interaction, sales intelligence, lead generation, partner interaction and employee project collaboration, and they’ll begin to evaluate the switching cost of moving their systems and data to platforms that have real-time as part of their solution sets. Customers and prospects are interacting with each other and with enterprises in real-time making it imperative for the enterprise to structure its own internal and external processes to respond to customers as fast as possible. Expect this shift to be one of the primary drivers for considering a real-time architecture.

Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/01/report-the-real-time-enterprise/#ixzz0cJXzIFXn

Update: Reviews of the Report on:

• GigaOM (Startups Fight Giants for the Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViWw) 
• WebWorkerDaily (The Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViXU)

Tom Davenport (who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, my alma mater) has a post on Harvard Business Review where he makes the case that Knowledge Management may well have been the most palatable solution to preventing Underwear Bomber security breach that look the peace and joy out of Christmas Day, 2009.

Professor Davenport concludes:

There are, of course, some remedies to this problem. One would be a really nasty police state, with a lot of false positive detentions. Another would be an international data management agency. A third would be lots more money and intrusiveness spent on airport searches, behavioral screening, etc., a la Israel and El Al. All seem somewhat unlikely.

Perhaps the only palatable remedy would be an intelligence community that views high-quality information and knowledge management as its primary job. If I were Barack Obama, that’s the approach I would be viewing as the real solution to the "connect the dots" problem.

I’d contend that, in this case, knowledge was too managed. And that’s the crux of the problem – too much general purpose management of data, silos, content artifacts. And too little context around discrete tasks that in actuality is what should have been manage -Where data, content and people would wrap around the task to solve it.

There’s plenty of analysis on how the billions spent on information sharing post 9/11 failed. The New York Times writes:

Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, as failing to piece together information about an impending attack.

Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to prompt a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the C.I.A., which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.

KM is hardly the place to start to wrestle this challenge. The problem with KM is that it’s often (not always) measured by somewhat nebulous yardsticks such as amount of shared and reusable content, amount of contribution, lowered email use and number of docs stored on the network. All of this is done in closed networks. As a result, just like we see in the enterprise and its use of Content Management Systems, the government also suffers from ‘silo-ization’, poor findability, and poor analytics.  The fact is, no amount of closed loop information sharing is enough of an air tight strategy to prevent intelligence from falling through the cracks. There’s too many systems in place to let computer based intelligence automatically throw up red flags every single time.

The solution lies in putting people at the core of this difficult problem. The Social Computing Frameworks that we use, in contrast, consider the concept of ‘closed’ to be an exception rather than the rule. This allows those responsible to take ownership of the task but other unknown “experts” get to watch the flow and participate where they can enrichen the quality of the outcome or even better, as in this case, raise a big red flag. Once clear unified objectives are set across agencies, open up the execution so that the best known and unknown minds can chime in.

Whether Social Computing or traditional KM, the larger problem is with lack of objective setting to getting the right information to the right people. It’s about setting the right objectives upfront at the highest levels and identifying which of these objectives can in fact be addressed by information management solutions and frankly, which can’t. And whether the right incentive structures are in place for individuals and groups to collaborate towards a common goal. I’m willing to bet that the strategic and execution objectives laid out by the chiefs of each agency don’t line up in a way that can practically lead to a unified collaboration and intelligence discovery execution plan.

I’m afraid the crotch bomber event will result in hundreds of millions being thrown at "information/knowledge management” solutions that centers on better sharing, transparency as a strategy in and of itself,  as opposed to as an execution path towards defined strategic goals that everyone is firmly behind.

I hope I’m wrong.