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http://blog.wirearchy.com/
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Jon Husband is a recognized expert on social media and the emerging digital workplace, and carries out research into business strategy, organizational structures and work design in the interconnected Knowledge Age.
Jon has been a banker and a Senior Principal for Hay Management Consultants in Canada and the UK, specializing in organizational design and change initiatives for major Canadian and multinational companies. He co-founded a leading Web 2.0 software company, and delivers workshops for clients such as Athabasca University's Executive MBA program, The CIO Summit in Toronto, and the Banff Centre's Leading Innovation program.
He writes several blogs about social media and the growing presence of the Web in business and our daily lives, and is an active speaker in Canada and internationally about the Web’s growing impact on enterprises.
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Lee Bryant @ Reboot … The Network Era Is Here To Stay
Via Bertrand Duperrin (whom I enjoyed meeting in Montreal in May .. a very clever and passionate fellow who scours the Web for everything related to Enterprise 2.0).
The network era has been here and has been growing and is here to stay … and there is an opportunity to use technology to help us all, organizations and corporations included, become less technocratic.
At least that’s how I interpret Lee Bryant’s thoughtful and well-put-together presentation.
I share his belief that large organizations won’t be disappearing any time soon. I also think that many large corporations will be comprised of many small and some large networks, and those networks are made up of people … their brains, their emotions, and their motivations.
It more than time for organizations large and small to recognize that the machine metaphor and assumptions about machine-like structures and dynamics can’t cope effectively with complexity and ongoing change as well as resilient human networks in which understanding and positive motivation reside.
Dare I say that this presentation reminds me of the concept I call “wirearchy” ?
Thanks, Lee, for this clear and compelling presentation. I wish I had been at Reboot this year … aiming to make it to Copenhagen next year.
Perhaps I’ll see you in Montreal at WebCom this fall.
I Think We'll See More Of This
I got up early this morning (5h15 am) so that I could go and frolic in that nice white fluffy powdery stuff called snow, falling down the steep sides of cliffs in a barely-controlled fashion. I love very much this activity, as you have to stay completely "in the present" to avoid doing significant damage to your face or various body parts.
Anyway, just before leaving I noticed a Twitter message posted by Eric Rice:
"social media makes me want to go back to liking the Old Way of Doing Things. Publisher-Consumer model."
... and I replied on Twitter that I thought we'd see more of this.
I think we will see that there will be waves of activity, of significant change followed by retrenchment or push-back, and continued moves by mainstream media to contain or subsume "social media".
After all, we're humans, we've been social since we learned to make noise (and before, no doubt), and there's only so many ways you can say things.
Arguably aggregation and categorization and display in various UI formats is what many areas of social media are about these days, other than the permanent difference of connecting one individual to others, individually or as groups, on a continuum of publicly visible networks.
And yes, there have been some important changes to business logic and business models due to the interconnectedness of people. And yes, there are changes yet to come to governments and other organized activities with constituents and stakeholders who want and need information.
Oh, there will be lots more of "here comes everybody", but we may yet find that the next few years bring even more top-down control, of sorts with which we are not familiar yet ... less visible, more electronic and coded into systems and services, related to money, and / or more socially embedded in the codes that are replicated in integrated systems than we yet realize today.
As ever, we'll see. The big question, I suppose, is whether "we" are indeed THE second superpower, as Jim Moore of Harvard once wrote early in the bloggy Web 2.0 era (his expanded blog post now comprising a chapter of the online book Extreme Democracy)
As for me, I used to believe a lot more than I do today that "knowledge is power", At the moment, I believe more that "who controls information has power", but I also think that is more of a temporary thing than ever before.
Which is why I still think this phrase has meaning and will for a while: "A dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected technology and people".
Again, we'll see over the next ten or twenty years how things will shake out ... should be clearer by then. But a lot of people do not care so much about finding out more than what they are told.
I suspect that things will be more like they are today than they are not, except with a lot more to (try to) pay attention to, and a lot more people kinda / sorta angry with each other and probably themselves too, if they are honest.
Jon Husband
Wirearchy
For All Those Who Have Said Blogging Was Just A Fad ...
I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions ... almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old ... in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.
Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread. We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.
"The world's 50 most powerful blogs
From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.
Here are the 50 best reasons to log on."
The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment. Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other ... always have done, and always will do so. And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.
I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.
Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives. That's a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.
It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0". I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting. I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.
In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group. His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.
Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics. In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said "OK, you win" and challenged me to add all of the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.
It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside ... although it may be that the lines between "inside" and 'outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.
Jon Husband
Wireachy
The Coming of the Cloud, Networked Knowledge Work and New Business Logic
Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.
In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market. The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study 
David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.
It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.
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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence
Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.
[ Snip … ]
On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”
This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.
The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.
The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”
All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.
Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.
One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.
Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.
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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute. I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.
Jon Husband
The Coming of the Cloud, Networked Knowledge Work and New Business Logic
Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.
In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market. The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study
David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.
It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.
The Rise Of Collective Intelligence
Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.
[ Snip … ]
On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”
This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.
The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.
The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”
All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.
Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.
One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.
Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.
I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute. I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.
Jon Husband
Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?
Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management. This call to exploration, exploration and action is concomitant with the emergence of the much-debated arena of what has been called Enterprise 2.0.
Here’s a key excerpt:
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"This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.
Most of us grew up in a “post-industrial” society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.
Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by “managers”. To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.
While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: “The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization.” This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.
It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles."
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It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding their ways into the workplace. Why wouldn’t they ? After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment. People have always been creating and building up “... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.”
The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment. Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.
What is today called Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities. These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as Hamel asserts, it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart. See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail
I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making. I am not arguing that we need to replace hierarchy holus-blous … rather, I am suggesting that the capabilities of information systems combined with social computing capabilities and two decades of experience with team development and organizational development processes can permit centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.
As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … it is my belief that the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL and quality circles through socio-technical systems approach(es) through self-directed and self-managing teams and “workouts” on into inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to “management” (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search, Open Space, and dialogue circles. The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as the application of information to products and services in ever-increasing amounts and more and more rapid and both integrated and fragmented flows.
Now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. The principles cited in the paragraph above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiatives and requires collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed. That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as deciding what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,
Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades. The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.
I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so. To reiterate, as it has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while coping with what actually “is”. Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, has often suggested that most traditional management methods are almost useless but are still in place as the proxies for status and power, but that people keep on working by constantly developing and using work-arounds.
I think OD has suffered from being seen as “soft” and a “nice-to-have-time-to-do”, especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century. While it is a maxim in the OD field that “the soft stuff is the hard stuff”, it can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hardnosed management hard-asses, the “I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack” crowd.
Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes. I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0. However it is not seen today as the dominant “management” model.
The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.
Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need. Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:
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“Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both.”
Jon Husband
I Don't Think I Fully Agree ... Fishnets
.. with this statement lifted from the recent Globe and Mail review of Gary Hamel's book The Future of Management.
The End of Management As We Know It ?
[ Snip ... ]
We also must learn from the Internet's example of widespread, leaderless collaborative effort. "The Web has evolved faster than anything human beings have created - largely because it is not a hierarchy. The Web is all periphery, and no centre," he observes.
We can use those examples to build a democracy of ideas in organizations, amplifying rather than dampening human imagination, dynamically reallocating resources, aggregating the collective wisdom in our workplaces, minimizing the drag of mental models, and turning employees from an army of conscripts into a community of volunteers.
That's a tall order. But it's a tall book. He builds his ideas carefully and with discipline, in stages taking us through the challenges facing management, examples of maverick management to draw upon, ideas from elsewhere to consider, and then shows how to bring that together into a new formula for management that resembles Web 2.0 rather than 19th century thinking.
Specifically ... when it comes to applying to organizations the networked structures the Web affords, and the principles of the behaviours it engenders, I don't quite fully agree with the observation that "The Web is all periphery, and no centre".
Technically speaking, I think that is correct. But ... I think that there are (or will need to be) concentrations of expertise and (temporary) power at nodes in networks in order to get things done, which implies temporary centralization based on purpose and need.
"The fishnet is flexible; it can form and re-form varied patterns of connection. The middle manager may at one time be at the apex, at another in the middle. The fishnet organization rearranges itself quickly while retaining its inherent strength."
I am reminded of a graphic image in a long-ago book titled "Upsizing The Individual In The Downsized Organization" (crappy title, good book) by Robert Johansen and Rob Swigart. The image was of a fishnet riding on the top of ocean waves, and the authors spoke of that image as a good way to imagine emering organizational structures ... the waves of the ocean represented the ongoing waves of the flow of change, and they made the point that the fishnet could be lifted up at any given node to create a hierarchy (say for decision-making purposes or to concentrate resources on a specific issue or problem) and then later be let down again when the purpose was served.
I liked that image then, and I still like it today.
Jon Husband
Dave Snowden Podcast ... The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management
I recently caught up with http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/, the well-known complexity theorist / expert and acknowledged guru on the construction and use of knowledge ... quite a feat given Dave's last-minute bout with gastroenteritis, his round-the-word schedule and his doggedly determined pursuit of good rugby matches.
This interview is the first I have ever turned into a podcast, and I must say I am pleased with it. I think I asked useful questions that allowed Dave to articulate a clear and coherent picture of how he thinks the dynamic hyperlinked digital infrastructure most commonly known as Web 2.0 will usher in important new ways of working with information and knowledge. From my point of view as non-objective interviewer, I feel that I stayed out of the way reasonably well as he explained, explored and expounded.
He forecasts some major changes to knowledge work and the information systems support of that knowledge work ... and no doubt some of those forecasts may be controversial. From what I know, Dave is no stranger to controversy. Indeed, from my experiences in reading and listening to what he has to say, I think he may well nourish himself with intelligent and well-argued controversy.
Thanks to Brian "Repurpussing the Voice" Moffatt for the professional intro and the clean-up of my Skype recording.
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Dave Snowden on Web 2.0, Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management
eOD ... A Fledgling Domain For Enterprise 2.0 ?
I've alluded before to what for now I'll call eOD (Hyperlinked Mass Collaboration Will Create A Field Called eOD).
Various people with whom I have talked have expressed dislike, or boredom, with the notion of e-anythingmore, saying it's an overworked prefix. Nevertheless, it seems clear that social computing and the use of social software to collaborate in many or most areas of knowledge work will be with us from now on, and will spread and grow (I believe to the point where the use of wikis and blogs, combined with increasingly flexible ERP systems, will be THE way work is done in organization within the next decade).
Many organizations already spend a lot of consulting dollars on team-building, facilitation of "employee engagement", buy-in to and alignment with vision, mission, values and objectives ... all in the search for improving organizational effectiveness. And all that without really considering much the impacts of hyperlinks, the ability to assess and comment and add one's voice directly into the mix, the more subtle effects of collaboration on an organization's culture.
I remember reading that one of the big HR / human capital / organization al effectiveness consulting firms (Watson Wyatt) intended to start a "social media" consulting practice last year. I think that will be problematic, for both Watson Wyatt and its clients.
First and foremost, the use of wikis, blogs and social computing in an organization does not lend itself all that easily to a clearly defined set of solutions, or a defined methodology (other than perhaps acting as a strategic advisor and some coaching, and perhaps a few workshops). Secondly, if I were a client I would not trust anyone to advise me unless the were a wiki-er or a blogger and had been doing it for a while. I don't believe it's the kind of thing you can offer advice about and support with just from a conceptual and theoretical base .. and most consultants in a large firm will be too busy - between billing their butts off to support the firm's business model, selling new projects and then trying to maintain a private // family life - to become very experienced in the use of blogs or wikis. At least up until now ... as their use becomes more and more widespread and they become a core medium for knowledge work, more of these consultants will have more experience with them. But that will still not easily address the firm's business model issue.
And .. with respect to the mapping and tapping of social networks in an enterprise, a la Valdis Krebs or Karen Stephenson ... if it is the case that an organization sees and accepts that the social networks in an organization (and out to its customers) are where the work happens and how things get done, in my opinion this has significant ramifications for the organization's structural assumptions, the compensation philosophy and practices, how performance is measured and managed ... all that consulting stuff.
I expect that there will be a lot of head-scratching about the re-definition of roles, and about how and why more seems to get done when different areas of knowledge are seamed together and put into use horizontally rather than along reporting lines or in vertical silos. It bring to mind a conversation yesterday with Luis Suarez about William Halal's concept of "internal markets for knowledge" and how to use internal department-or-functional-silo "advertising" to help facilitate cross-silo and cross-functional communications and break down the obstacles related to still-too-often silo-ed knowledge and expertise.
I consulted in that area for a long time in a previous career. I began learning about blogging, wikis and social computing about five years ago. I know lots of ex-colleagues who have essentially no clue about blogs and wikis (either how to start off, how to use, how to evolve, and all the nuances of the interactional dynamics discovered along the way). I know several blogging / social computing friends who I believe to be knowledgeable, careful thinkers who can provide useful, practical and wise advice and coaching. But as far as I can tell, those consultants who can do so at the present time are few and far between, thin on the ground so to speak.
That said, I think that a lot of what has emerged from the OD world over the past two decades, such as Open Space, large-scale employee involvement / engagement, team-building and team development, participative work design, coaching, and so on, are very relevant to the demands of the emerging field of eOD.
I may very well be wrong, and will be glad to have someone show me that I am wrong. But at the moment, with respect to the increasingly interconnected workplace and the organizational development issues it engenders, I don't think so.
Jon Husband
A Skeptic's Take On Enterprise 2.0
Here in today's Globe and Mail is an overview of the main Enterprise 2.0 takeup and implementation issues by a freelance technology writer.
She raises the main issues correctly, I think, but does not address the larger promise (which in my opinion is the rhetoric regularly employed by corporations who argue that they are starved for innovation, flexibility and responsiveness ... all of which also require the major cultural and structural changes that most corporations seem to want to avoid).
The wait for any significant redefinitions may be a long one. As long as power and money are key features of organizational structure, significant flattening and real culture shifts are not really major items on the agenda.
It will take some clear examples of organizations using such tools and culture outperforming others by an order of magnitude before shift happens.
Jon Husband
Be sure to check out Jon Husband's Wirearchy blog.
Redefining business
Companies may not be ready for cultural shift required by Web 2.0
POONAM KHANNA
[Snip ...]
Corporate-wide wikis could be used to exchange information about everything from the latest sales figures and market trends to client leads to the state of the company kitchen. As the number of wiki entries increase, folksonomies ¯ taxonomies created from the ground up based on how users tag and link to information ¯ could be used to navigate through pages.
But such an approach to communication requires a different type of corporate culture ¯ one that is flat rather than hierarchical, flexible instead of rigid and open ended as opposed to closed. Companies that live by the Web 2.0 creed are willing to hear what Joe from accounting has to say about streamlining manufacturing methods, ready to be ravaged by both employee and customer blogs and prepared to rethink who gets access to what information. It remains to be seen whether corporations can ¯ or even want to ¯ affect such a change.
It's hard to imagine many companies fostering a culture in which a lowly clerk would be given or take advantage of the power to change his boss's wiki entry, let alone the company CEO's. Are workers going to be willing to change entries made by higher ups or even by fellow co-workers? And how will they react to having their own entries edited?
The Web 2.0 approach assumes there are a lot of untapped ideas out there, and no doubt there are many a bright individual who never meet their potential, but how often does Joe from accounting really have something salient to say about streamlining manufacturing methods? And if he does, will the VP of manufacturing be any more willing to take his wiki entry seriously than she would have been willing to read an email from him on the same point? Equipping workers and managers with Web 2.0 tools won't necessarily mean they'll gain all of the benefits that the technology has to offer ¯ especially if the tools aren't accompanied by a profound cultural shift.
The Web 2.0 world as envisioned by the likes of Harvard Business School associate professor Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, is one in which office politics can be transcended.
And even if wikis, blogs and podcasts do take hold, will they make life in the corporate world any easier, or will they add another layer of complexity to the already overloaded worker who has to deal with 300 emails a day. Email isn't likely to disappear as the new technologies are adopted. It might diminish some, but will the number of wikis, blogs and podcasts that workers have to keep up with on a daily basis grow exponentially, as emails did? Will a great deal of the entries ¯ like a great deal of email ¯ really be worth the time?
Jon Husband
Enterprise 2.0 - Just Sayin' .. Again
I do not necessarily think that teenage boys talking business models in a pizza shop is a primary recommendation for promoting collaboration and the use of social software, but it is a harbinger of a rapidly-approaching reality, as Joe McKendrick points out in this post from the FastForward blog.
But I've posted often about the rapidly-approaching impact of digital natives on the workplace of the near future ... one more in what will be sure to be a long and widespread series of observations by many people.
Enterprise 2.0 Revelation in a Pizza Shop
by Joe McKendrick
Stewart Mader (Atlassian) surfaced this post from Steven Baker’s BusinessWeek blog, and it really makes you stop and think, especially if you’re old enough to remember the first seasons of Saturday Night Live:
“Stephen Baker tells how he overheard a group of boys in his local pizzeria discussing how MySpace makes money, and why YouTube sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion. He reflects that the boys are “orders of magnitude more tuned into business” than he was at that age, and that to them, “business is a much more vibrant and relevant subject. They know that a start-up is just an idea away.”
Stewart ties this revelation into the rising social software and collaboration phenomenon. “It matters more than perhaps anything else because the mindset of this generation and tools available to it are combining to limitless potential. While most major news stories concentrate on the perceived pitfalls of technology - the dangers of online chat rooms, the dangers of games, the ‘overuse’ of Wikipedia, and so forth - people in my generation and younger are showing incredible savvy - by understanding Wikipedia better than their parents and teachers, restricting their MySpace and Facebook profiles to just their friends and people they approve, and starting great new companies and tools based on the power of their ideas.”
Members of the emerging generation that is beginning to populate our enterprises clearly understand the power and potential of information technology. Not only that, they will expect that their employers (or clients) will also be savvy about the potential of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms. If the organization isn’t savvy, then they will be expected to stay out of the way while they create, innovate, and find new ways to drive value to their businesses.
As my colleague Bill Ives pointed out in a recent post, a Watson Wyatt study concludes that “nearly 50% of the employee population will soon prefer – and expect – collaborative and interactive methods of communication with their employers.”
In other words, enterprises better get savvy about E2.0, because their employees (of all ages) will do it anyway. Lead, follow, and get out of the way.
Jon Husband
To view Jon Husband's Wirearchy blog, please click here
Enterprise 2.0 … Coming (Sometime) to an Organization Near You
The term Web 2.0 created enough noise and confusion for a good year or so ... what is it, why is it that, I don’t agree, here’s my $0.02, etc. There are still many who prefer not to use the term, but the 2.0 meme has crept into all sorts of other labels, like Marketing 2.0, Advertising 2.0, Management 2.0, and a term that was coined by Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School, Enterprise 2.0.
The term comes from the concept of ERP systems (enterprise resource planning) such as SAP, which in turn is the child of the venerable MRP (manufacturing resource planning).
2.0 signifies the second large wave of the Web’s impact as it has moved from a static representation of pages and images to a much more dynamic and interactive user experience, as in Web 2.0.
Here’s McAfee’s definition (and I guarantee you’ll find others):
Enterprise 2.0, version 2.0
I'm not satisfied with my earlier definition of Enterprise 2.0, so let's propose a refinement (I'm sorry if this feels a bit pedantic, but clear constructs are important to academics):
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).
Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time. Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.
Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
1.Optional
2.Free of up-front workflow
3.Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
4.Accepting of many types of data
Don Tapscott (see post below) has moved the goal posts along with his recent book Wikinomics, which addresses the use of wikis as collaboration and productivity tools for organizations. His firm poured a whack of money and time into research, and has come to the conclusion (paraphrasing) that wikis are the single most important change to the core architecture of the enterprise in the past century. Other notables have suggested that “Corporate Blogging Becomes Enterprise 2.0”. There’s an Enterprise 2.0 blog (http://www.fastforwardblog.com) developed by a range of tech specialists, and any number of debates raging about both the technological and sociological aspects of implementation inside the firewall of organizations, such as those underway here and here and here.
Why do I say “coming (sometime) …” rather than “coming soon …” ?
Because there’s a tremendous lack of understanding, and consequent fear, of loss of control, of turning the keys of the asylum over to the inmates, I think. The vestiges of Theory X management, where employees can’t be trusted to focus, stay on task and act responsibly ... no self-organizing here, thanks very much.
But also because this wired, interconnected and hyperlinked world of work is here to stay ... and the younger generations of digital natives now entering the workforce will expect things to go this way sooner rather than later.
My take ? Five years or more of blogging and wikiing have shown us that what goes on online is just like what goes on offline. When focused on purposeful work activities, I’d argue that the issues of effective leadership, corporate culture and empowerment or work enrichment (call it what you will) come to the fore when considering why and how to introduce the use of social software into an organization’s knowledge work processes or ecology.
Knowledge workers are volunteers, so the saying goes. You can’t control their minds, and so the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives is about influencing people positively and addressing their often more-latent-than-it-needs-to-be interest in what they are doing.
Looking back at Enterprise 1.0 … I wonder how many C-level executives and IT managers wish that there had been more discussion and exploration (for example, on blogs) about the more often than not sociological challenges of implementing large integrated enterprise systems. Training in the use of such systems even came to be referred to euphemistically as “change management”. How many millions of dollars (per company might have been saved?
One of the key differences with respect to Enterprise 2.0 is that the costs are much much less significant, and so it’s OK even to experiment, to fail faster (in the words of Dave Snowden) and thus accelerate learning and the development of productive work designs in a networked environment. I’d have to say though that I believe the main reasons for any “fast failing” will be the sociological resistance on the part of managers who will want to control and measure everything and thus mitigate against the flow of information sharing and ideas that is a key characteristic of the purposeful use of social software.
Jon Husband
To view Jon Husband's web site Wirearchy, please click here.
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