My friend Luis Suarez takes me to task for my post on expertise managment. He makes some very good points but I differ somewhat with how he interprets the role of “communities” within an organization. He says:
All in Web 2.0
OK, call me clue less. But I don't care if Amanda is leaving Rocketboom. It's about as important to me as Katie Couric moving to the network evening news.
Comparing Eras of Innovation: 1950's Aerospace Advances and Today's Web
We are now in the midst of a very innovative period of social and technological change that is being partly driven by the increasing availability of web based tools that support the development of relationships, the sharing of information and experiences of all kinds, and the manipulation of information on a scale that was difficult to contemplate just a few years ago. The experiences we have online are taking on increasingly important roles in terms of individual emotions, financial consequences, and personal relationships.
There have been other periods of intense social and technological innovation. One of my favorite ones for study is the post Word War II aerospace industry.
Have we reached a "tipping point" for enterprise acceptance of Web 2.0? According to Martin LaMonica's Corporate America Wakes Up to Web 2.0, published June 26, 2006 on ZDNet News, we may have.
In the first article in this series I commented on the web based evolution of systems for matching up experts (and their expertise) with users based on relationship management and social software technologies.
In this article I discuss the implementation of such systems within large organizations
Remember near the end of the first MATRIX movie, our heroes were fighting it out on the roof of an office building. They needed a helicopter – fast:
* Tank: Operator.
* Trinity: Tank, I need a pilot program for a V-212 helicopter. Hurry…. Let’s go.
Trinity, already a member of a tightly knit community, knew the right person to call, got a download of her program, and the rest is history.
We (Martin McKeay, Dan Sweet, Robyn Tippins, Jeremiah Owyang, and I) had fun schmoozing about three topics last Saturday: (1) HP's planned reduction in telecommuting, (2) Technological threats to the continued relevance of corporate marketing departments, and (3) Increasing incompatibility in how individual web based accounts are handled.
In the old days of planned release schedules and successively more capable release functionality, the term “beta” was applied typically to limited-release software where both distribution and user environments were tightly controlled and monitored.
Nowadays businesses are being built upon “beta” software that goes into universal web wide availability along with statements of incompleteness and limited support. Users are invited to use and write about the software. Users get early peaks at and access to useful features. Producers get real world feedback which helps further the development of future releases.
Lately I've been reading Ross Mayfield's Weblog, which I discovered while tracking back an incoming link from him to an earlier posting of mine, Corporate Resistance to Enterprise Web 2.0.
Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext and has feet (literally) in both the development and business worlds when it comes to real world applications related to Enterprise Web 2.0. I like how he thinks and writes about enterprise adoption of systems and processes based on Web 2.0 technologies.
I'm fascinated by peeks into the inside of what actually happens in the real world of Getting Things Done. The web site Bare Naked App could therefore be a voyeur's delight.
Should We Be Able to Buy and Sell our Personal Financial and Medical Data?
When I first heard about USA Today breaking the NSA domestic phone spying scandal involving the major long distance phone companies, I wasn’t surprised. I won’t even be surprised when, in the next few months, word leaks out that Federal agencies are also involved in non-court-approved electronic screening of domestic call traffic looking for specific words and word combinations.
Are DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems compatible with the current growth in the use of blogging and social networking technologies that actively promote the sharing of information? Maybe not.
There’s an interesting book excerpt available on the Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” web site titled Managing Alignment as a Process, by Robert S. Kaplan and colleague David P. Norton. I read through the excerpt and what it says about “alignment” is interesting to put into the context of enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and processes.
Last January Jeremiah Owyang and I wrote a “white paper” titled Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools. In this 20 minute podcast (available here) we discuss how our thinking has changed since then.
One thing that has become clear since January when Jeremiah Owyang and I co-authored Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New "Web 2.0" Tools is that "it's not just about the technology." Web 2.0 is about how people communicate. Technology is an enabler.
The number and type of “Office 2.0” applications continues to expand, as documented recently by Ismael Ghalimi. He is testing these applications and is publishing the results as he goes about looking for ways to be totally dependent on browser accessible applications and remote storage.
Basically, “Web 2.0″ means different things to different people.
* To the programmer, it’s a set of tools and techniques that have the potential for fundamentally altering how network based applications and data are managed and delivered.
* For start-ups and venture capitalists, it’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of another bubble.
* For the corporate CIO or IT manager, it’s another set of technologies and architectures to be adopted and supported in an era of continued I.T. department budget strains.
* For newer or smaller companies, it’s an opportunity to acquire technical and business process infrastructure at a fraction of the investment made by older and legacy companies.
* For the marketing manager it’s an opportunity to “end-run” a traditionally unresponsive I.T. department.
* For the CEO of an established legacy industry, it’s a threat of loss of control over customer relations.
* For the customer it’s an opportunity to establish and maintain relationships that are both personally fulfilling and empowering in the face of the traditional power of larger institutions.
Something happened this week that reminded me of the fragility of using the web to deliver rich media content and how some companies might be justified in taking a “wait and see” attitude about still-evolving “web 2.0” technical architectures for handling sensitive or valuable personal or corporate transactions.
I received the following email from fellow blogger Chris Law (1000 Flowers Bloom) in response to my article Web 2.0 and Maintaining the Integrity of Online Intellectual Property:
I really like your article. One thing that I think is very much related is what happens if it’s not a document? What if it’s say the classified listings on my site that are then being mashed up with a Google Map?
I haven’t really decided how “revolutionary” web 2.0 applications are. One school of thought is that web 2.0 applications like blogs, podcasts, and wikis are “just another set of channels” to be considered in the overall mix of ways to manage communications with one’s target markets and customers. There’s another school of thought, though, that suggests that the interactivity and social networking aspects of Web 2.0 are finamentally changing the balance of power and influence in the marketplace in a profound way. I come down somewhere in the middle.