Library clips

Bill Ives has a post examining the differences the dynamic and cultural differences between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0.

He points to one of his previous posts and also Kevin Mullens’s blog post that makes the point of “solutions”:

“Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions.”

Isn’t it all about social productivity and emergence, and what ever comes from that…maybe this is what solutions means.

If we go to an Anecdote paper on community, collaboration and networks, we see three different dynamics at play.

1. Communities of Interest - people coming together to share and learn
2. Teams/WorkGroups - people coming together to achieve a goal, this includes a lot of collaboration (working together on a task or paper)
3. Networks - individual centric (self interest), connecting profiles, and in aggregate we are able to get valuable data.

UPATE: I guess there is a 4th type, and that’s social tools mashed into existing applications.

All these 3 types can exist on the open web and in the enterprise.
A community leader or facilitator may moderate, garden, etc…and in a workgroup they may give directions.
Whereas with social networks/sites like Facebook, del.icious, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Twitter there is no leader, it’s individual centric. But if you put up a “bad” clip in YouTube, you will be dealt with (these are the rare occasions we hear from the overall owner), and the same in an enterprise social network.

I don’t see anything different here in dynamics, one difference is that in the enterprise the content must be about learning or work, not goofing off, and that there are policies to adhere to the usual expected conduct from employees (don’t talk about confidential stuff and, don’t jeopardize people).

Accountability

Bill Ives points out a difference within the enterprise and that’s “accountability” to a groups aims:

“In the consumer web you are only accountable to yourself. In enterprise 2.0 you are accountable to the group success of your team, your company.”

This is referring to group work where you may have a project space with blogs and wikis, etc… But what about an internal blogosphere like IBM or a shared interest CoP, this is more about general sharing, learning, and experience (not really accountability). This participation platform is emergent (we don’t know what we are gonna get, we just take part and see what happens). We become more capable and skilled as we are educating each other, and then we can bring that know-how back to our tasks.

So I do think there is a difference between using social tools for project work, and for purposed based sharing and learning. Again the Anecdote paper pointed to above explains the different dynamics between share interest groups, team/project groups, and networks.
At this stage there is no difference between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 in regards to communities (learning) and networks/blogospheres (self interest), but there is when it comes to work spaces set-up to actually do work.
You can have Workgroups on the open web, but you are still volunteering your time to take direction from the leader, if you don’t you may get kicked out of the group…in the enterprise you may lose your job.

One

So the first difference is content in the enterprise must be about work or learning.

Two

The second difference, as just mentioned, is being accountable, or else.

The third difference is that in web 2.0 I choose to participate, and no-one tries to get me to go to training or promote social tools. This may be the same in the enterprise eg. CoP or internal blogosphere or bookmarks, but when it comes to Workgroups then I have to use whatever work style or tools that have been set-up.
In relation to communities and networks/blogospheres, if you are not that passionate about your job or work related topics, you are not gonna blog about work things.

But not all participation is about volunteering know-how, as mentioned above using social tools in team spaces is about social productivity, so it may be mandated that we use blogs for broadcast announcements, news, task status, etc rather than email.
This is directed contributions, it is content you are already producing, only you are mandated to deliver it in blogs rather than email…and have conversations in forums rather than email…and collaborate in wikis rather than email/attachments. See more in Mike Gotta’s post with a great comments discussion (incl. me). I couldn’t believe some people think mandating their know-how (stuff you know that you never really write down) was OK…I bet David Vaine couldn’t believe his luck when he found the opportunity to spread the word about corporate flogging in this post.

Three

So to re-iterate the third difference is mandated to use certain tools over others for directed type of content.

Transparency, Network Effect, Facilitation and Egalitarianism

Bill Ives goes on to say that in social team spaces (Workgroups), managers need to act as coaches to help and sustain the participation and team work, capitialising the transparency to make correlations, connections, and evolve the input, and welcome their POV rather than being watchdogs.

This is about the need for facilitation, and the realisation of emergence rather than imposing or controlling. People in the enterprise need to learn and be encouraged and guided, using informal learning practices, as this may be new to some people. You just don’t need this on the web, as there is no agenda, if someone can’t get the hang of web 2.0, it just doesn’t matter or have impact on the residents of the webosphere, as there are so many people that do get it.

Recently on our internal communities someone left a comment on one of my blog posts about communities of interest. He said; the new technology, this way of coming together, having discourse and learning is something new, he felt like it was migrating to a new country. The dynamic and technology was foreign, and the current participants seemed intimidating (well not really, but the initial fear of wanting his content to be of the right calibre). But he went ahead and made that comment because he said the community participants were hospitable and welcoming, and it was this factor that gave him the confidence to participate.

Another example was a demo I was doing for a new internal community, the managers were excited (the possibilities), and at the same time it was very foreign to them (platform vs channels), they seem intimidated.
At this point I realised even though they see the benefits, they really have to experience them, and when this happens, they need to be guided. So I decided to make a Facilitators community (Train the trainers), I want each community facilitator to know as muchas they can about social technology, community dynamics and facilitation itself.

I made a comment in the post about some additional things I’ve posted about in the past, I’ll re-post it here. It’s mostly about a harder time generating a network effect in an enterprise 2.0 environment due to a smaller amount of participants.

It also harps back to transparency and the fact that the enterprise is not an egalitarian culture like the open web, instead we have managers and hierarchies.
The question is will transparency be accepted, as Bill alludes to in his post, the transparency of participation eventually leads to collaboration (KM 2.0 model).

These higher positioned people may not like the concept that the ideas of lesser positioned people are in a visible arena and may be seen by all to contribute or have an impact on decision making. They may feel this transparency lessens their role, or replaces their impact or exclusivity on what’s best for the company, as it may now be more openly influenced by the people…they might feel less in charge, and that all this transparency undermines their role.

When you think about it, it’s giving more power and autonomy to the people, where social productivity and connection brings the best minds together, in a more networked self organised kind of way that hierarchy just can’t do. Senior staff also have to accept that this greater organisational performance won’t happen unless participation and transparency is welcomed. Once you start censoring this type of ecosystem, it might just revolt on you. In the end they are still making ultimate decisions, but these are based on the conversations and content of the social enterprise, rather than just an exclusive meeting.

This is the real difference between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0, it’s about acceptance and a new model of management.
What was initially about sharing know-how and collaboration has turned into a new style of de-management, and decision making, where the networked enterprise approach is heading into a more adaptive, self-organising, and autonomous learning organisation.

This to me is a milestone in time, a change from scientific management and the industrial age to the networked knowledge age. Perhaps the more pressing topic is management 2.0.

Here’s my comment on Bill’s post:

“Bill,

In one of my posts I refer to a post on the Social Glass, and Inforvark blog on the difference between how knowledgeworkers and managers will operate in an enterprise 2.0 world.

“…managers needing all the web 2.0 content data into a usable distilled format, as managers are about the “status” of work, in contrast to knowledge workers being about the “way they do” this work.”
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/03/20/km-20-is-about-showing-your-workings-out/

Also I like what McAfee said in a podcast with Kathleen Gilroy about how enterprise 2.0 will have a harder time generating a network effect, and thet there are no managers on the open web http://www.ottergroup.com/?p=574

I mentioned it in this post
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/11/28/knowledge-sharing-in-the-new-km/

“On the open web there is room for the long tail as there are enough people to make it scale, but in the enterprise the long tail is too small (there’s not enough people for there to be a long tail).
We see network effects as the aggregated value from all the individual contributions, plus the distributed discussion propagates this as well, then we can look into emerging patterns, this is the beauty of free form personal publishing, it has a greater value.

Again we come to knowledge sharing culture, people need to contribute, not just consume, otherwise we will not get the network effect. If we don’t have a fuller participative enterprise, then the social content will not manifest into great things.
In the enterprise if we have only a 1% participation rate from 10,000 people that’s only a 100 people blogging, will this generate a network effect, it may for a topic, but not the system as a whole.
In contrast on the web a 1% participation rate may be millions of people, enough scale for network effects to happen.

So it comes back to visibility and coaching, and a naturalistic approach.”

“Managers may only want contributions that are appropriate to their level on the Org chart.
They may not want someone lower to have input at the same level, or at the worst refine or overrule contributions…this is a decentralised decision environment.

…org charts will not be thrown out, the main benefit will be idea percolation, crowd sourcing, etc…this is basically a result of having bottom up knowledge sharing tools.

In comparison to the enterprise, web 2.0 and the blogosphere is an egalitarian environment, there is no org chart, even if there was, no one cares, all people are treated equal.””

Four, Five, and Six

This makes facilitation, the critical mass of the network effect, and transparency the fourth, fifth, and sixth differences.

Social Productivity and ROI

The seventh difference is measuring social productivity, ie. how much you help others, and how you source the right connections to help you. Personally I thinking knowing the right person to help you out can make a massive impact on a project, compared to getting a lesser proficient person…”who you know” should be valued.

Another impact on whether people want to spend time in the social enterprise is whether they will be measured by their social productivity, that is, helping and spending time beyond their tasks for the greater good.

Gia Lyons was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says, “…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…”.

Seven

Gia sums up the seventh difference by saying, “…we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured.”

All this is highly related to Boyds Law:

“Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity…

Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behavior, where an obsession with personal productivity does not.”

Read more on the myth of interrupting, especially related to IM…Luis Suarez in his email detox diet often refers to the speed of IM in getting something done, and the visibility of social tools to help out future similar requests.

Conclusion

Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 environments may have their differences, but trying to veil transparency isn’t going to do any good. We also have to work at generating network effects, we need to encourage and facilitate participation, and lastly we need a way to measure or value an individuals social productivity. This can all be helped by reviewing job descriptions, corporate strategies, and job evaluations to include or encourage social participation.

Let’s finish with a quote by Larry Prusak:

“The modern organisation evolved in the 19th century to deal with land, labour and capital, not with knowledge, which was assumed to reside only in the heads of the owners and managers,” he says. “This led us to the modern organisation built on command and control mechanisms, run as hierarchical bureaucracies. This won’t do when knowledge is the major source of value, as it is for most large organisations today.”

[ADDED 30/07/08: Eight - How the 90-9-1 participation ratio changes inside organisations]

[ADDED 04/08/08: Nine - Permissions]

[ADDED 12/08/08: Ten - Policies (an overseer can constrain the internal blogosphere so it doesn’t self-organise into a negative direction, and we have to adhere to participation policies)]

[ADDED 14/08/08: Eleven - Light Constraints (whereas the blogosphere will self organise into whatever direction)]

[ADDED 14/08/08: Twelve - No anonymous contributors]

[ADDED 28/08/08: Tale of Two Tunnels: Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Tools: Components for Success]

I just wrote a post on emergence, that basically points out that when a system is unstructured it allows people to use it how they like, and it’s use doesn’t have to follow a vertical value chain. Instead we can use these flexible tools to make our own work-flow, to connect horizontally…they are more organic and have a viral spread.

As I pointed out in the post, the concept of emergence isn’t just about non-rigid flexible tools, well this is the first step which is kind of a “use” emergence. The other aspect is “content” emergence, ie. people are are tagging their content, or we could run a concept tag script through a pool of content, which allows us to see what is being talked about.

An enterprise blogosphere and social bookmarks displays a tag cloud, and from this cloud we can see what is the most talked about topical content, ie. we can see the patterns that are emerging.

Aggregated content

I want to go a step back and see what is driving the content that makes up this emergent scape.
That is, what is the nature of participation.

Jeremy Thomas leads us into a hippie type altruistic notion of doing your unselfless bit for the community, which he, like Charles Leadbeater mention is what web 2.0 is about. I agree, without questions answered and blog comments, there is not much conversation, making for a boring web 2.0.
But Jeremy goes on to say that this is not the foundations of web 2.0, it’s more a personal motivation, akin to the del.icio.us lesson.

It begins by personal publishing, contributing, collecting, and during all this is conversation.
What is important is what drives the beginning; it’s loud and clear that it’s “personal benefit”. If a corporation acts like a person, then their reason for an internal web 2.0 is personal benefit (profits).

When you aggregate all this personal benefit you get a macro picture, basically, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Jeremy relates this to economics:

“Adam Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” that drives the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. A knowledge worker “…intends only his own gain”, he seeks recognition which can ultimately lead to promotion and increased salary. In describing the driving force behind free markets, Smith writes:

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

The “selfish” contributions made by knowledge workers makes the enterprise as a whole better off. And the services the enterprise opens up makes other enterprises better off, and this is consitent with the “Invisible Hand”.

Enterprise 2.0 is not based on utopian ideals. It is instead based on the very principles that drive all free-market economies. Organisations that adopt enterprise 2.0 will do so for auto-preservation and corporate gain - to help their bottom line.” Period.”

Charles Leadbeater adds to this:

“…counter culture of the 1960s, combined with pre-industrial ingredients it has resurrected, folk culture and the commons as a shared basis for productive endeavour. The web allows for a massive expansion in individual particiaption in culture and the economy.

Greater individual participation will not, on its own, add up to much unless it is matched by a capacity to share and then combine our ideas”

Shawn Callahan describes the tragedy of the commons:

“That’s when the individual actors operate to maximise their self interest and in the process ruin things for the wider group.”

From all of this we see the personal benefit is what drives this participation culture, and in aggregation we see trends, but it’s also the aggregate of people that creates a market of conversation, that is the dynamic of web 2.0. The Cluetrain Manifesto talks about “markets are conversations“…yet to read it.

Market economy

So if enterprise 2.0 is a “market economy” what is enterprise 1.0?

In “The Wisdom of Crowds“, James Surowiecki points out that companies should work more like markets, an Autonomous flow (based on Collective intelligence) rather than an Expectations model…and this is just what can happen with Enterprise 2.0.

The following is lifted off a presentation I made a couple of months ago:

Companies pay people to perform on an expectations (target) model
- Hiding information may happen
Markets pay people on what they do
- Don’t make more money if you exceed expectations
Markets have “incentive” to seek valuable information (eg. Buyer behaviour)
- When acted upon, it becomes public knowledge
Companies need to work in this incentive model
- The more a worker contributes the more they are recognised and the more prosperous job (money)…information goes back up the value chain
- This is a new incentive model for what a worker does
Aggregation/Network Effects/Emergence
- The worker need only worry about personal benefit
- Others can benefit from public aggregation of information
- Social Capital is leveraged

This is saying currently companies (managers) set levels of expectations and reward people financially.
eg. you get a holiday bonus if you make 10 more sales this month.

By setting these incentives the company also benefits, but is this a narrow approach; are there lost opportunities?

In this type of setting why would I want to share my knowledge, it’s my “power”, we are all on our own, and my personal know-how is going to get me ahead. If I don’t share I will meet my expectations (and no-one else), but on the same hand if I don’t find any knowledge, I may not meet my expectations.

So in fact this expectations model promotes “not sharing” information.

I see this as the parts on their own, and not coming together as a dynamic whole…siloed people with a fear of trust to connect.

What if a trend spikes or drops in the industry without us knowing, but indeed someone else in the enterprise knows, but they are not in the business of sharing this information, or perhaps the enterprise would share this information, but they don’t have a sharing ecosystem (tools and behaviours).

You lose, because without this information you don’t get your job done, and your managers loses as you have missed an industry opportunity.
Had your enterprise encouraged knowledge sharing, this information would of surfaced to your attention. So here we have missed an opportunity which may have dire consequences, and worse still, someone in your organisation held this information…a bit like the enterprise shooting itself in the foot.

If corporations, in respect to the law, act as one person, they should also think about doing this in respect to “one intelligence.”

The idea is a knowledge conversation market, connecting all the brains into one hive mind, the more we share and participate (as is done in web 2.0) the more we are contributing, and these contributions form new content, they are valuable to others…re-using knowledge.

The new model can be financial rewards for participating, but not by gaming the system, the participator has to demonstrate contributing valuable stuff, engaging in conversations, and some success stories that have come from the simple fact that you shared and conversed.

Now you still get your reward, you and the company still win, and it’s more holisitc as the company is not missing out on opportunities as people are connecting to get their work done. From this it seems a social enterprise is essential, I’d want one now if I was a manager.

It’s a different way to look at the model, the more you share and engage the more you are seen as a “guru”, so you actually become more powerful by letting go of knowledge.
If this knowledge can be used to add value to the work of 5 other people, then they and the company are better off.

In essence, Enterprise 2.0 enables the enterprise to leave an expectations model for a social model, as conditions for innovation is the new performance driver, and this will only happen if there is a participative ecosystem where knowledge sharing is the currency.

NOTE: By knowledge sharing I just mean: visibility, publishing, participating, contributing, conversing…

Rod Boothby has a great post on emergent environments:

“Emergent intelligence only evolves when agents have the freedom to act independently. The traditional command and control structures employed by most large firms do not lend themselves to fostering this kind of independence.

However, that does not mean that there isn’t still a roll of management to play. Their task now is to cultivate an environment that encourages innovation.

To guide emergent intelligence in an organization, you need to think about management techniques that foster innovation, and encouraging dialog and the exchange of ideas.

Imposing rules and taxonomies isn’t going to achieve the goal. Nagging people to add to the “knowledge repository” isn’t going the right answer either.”

In the above rant about markets have I really been talking about a knowledge economy?

I think the knowledge economy is about relationships (client and internal), conversations, and information flow as the new competitive edge.

As mentioned in previous posts, it’s now a level playground in that enterprise’s can easily compete with assests, people, cash, outsourcing, offshoring, perfecting supply chains…relationships, conversations, sharing and exploiting know-how is the new way to get ahead of the innovation curve.

But it’s not just about profit, it’s also about quality. When everyone is in the loop there is less chance of mistakes in processes and design, hence less chance of not getting things delivered on time and and the right cost, and less chance of damaging client relationships.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman goes into great detail about outsourcing and supply chains, and I just came across a few typical links of this nature this past week, Artemis (film-making), and Ponoko (for furniture).

As you can see both the provider and the consumer can take advantage of e-commerce by bypassing a number of logistic processes, but it’s more than that. In a past post I mentioned David Weinberger talking about how web 2.0 is granular, and how you can pick and choose components and put them together, creating your own personalised view of the world. Well I found the same with using a web 2.0 site to buy a t-shirt.
My wife visited Redbubble where she keeps her art, this site also allows you to make t-shirt versions of your art…that’s all you have to do as a provider to have a shop, as RedBubble will organise the rest.
As a consumer I browsed t-shirt designs for hours, I could choose colour, long or short sleeve, etc…
This is similar to what web 2.0 has done to the news…the change from one-to-many in a physical shop, where the shop decides the range, to many-to-many where the consumer can choose stuff from the globe, from supposed non-experts.

Since this new edge, is about sharing your know-how in a more social and visible way, I think it will make for an enterprise where people feel socially connected (happy) and that they have impact on decisions made and direction…the networked enterprise will catapult innovation, just look at how fast web 2.0 spreads and evolves ideas, reducing the global into a coffee room.

Charles Leadbeater points out the limits of markets [as compared to a knowledge economy]:

“But markets of this kind have limitations: they work for specific problems that need exactly the right individual to solve them. They do not provide the basis for sustained creativity and innovation to explore difficult complex systems. That kind of problem solving only comes from intense collaboration.

…crowds need meeting places, neutral spaces for creative conversation, moderated to allow for free flow of ideas.”

So it seems a market economy is more a demand/supply thing whereas a knowledge economy is more about collaboration, volunteering know-how, conversations, connections…all due to participating and visibility.

More from Charles Leadbeater:

“In the economy of things you are identified by what you own: your land, house, car. In the economy of ideas that the web is creating, you are what you share: who you are linked to, who you network with and which ideas, picture, videos, links, comments you share.
That matters because the more ideas are shared the more they breed, mutate, and multiply, and that process is the ultimate source of creativity, innovation and well being.”

“The web’s underlying culture of sharing, decentralisation and democracy, makes it an ideal platform for groups to self organise, combining their ideas and know how…

At root most creativity is collaborative. It is not usually the product of a flash of insight from a lone individual.

The factory made possible mass production, mass consumption and with that industrial working class. The web could make innovation and creativity a mass activity.

Our preoccupation in the century to come will be how to create and sustain a mass innovation economy in which the central issues will be how more people can collaborate more effectively in creating new ideas.

The factory encouraged us to see everything through the prism of the orderly production line delivering products to waiting customers. The web will encourage us to see everyone as potential participants in creating collaborative solutions through largely self-organising networks.”

Perhaps a knowledge economy is a way of being, the way you work, it’s the notion that “none of us is smarter than one of us”…mostly it’s about the intangibles.

Social Capital and Conversation

The title of this post is “Participation is the currency of the knowledge economy”, but perhaps I should have substituted the word “participation” with the term “social capital”. Chris Fletcher has more on this:

“…we are seeing a change in perspective around knowledge from one of a content centric focus on Intellectual Capital, to one where social capital will be the currency. It will be about who we know and what we will do for each other. In essence, we are seeing shift to people being central to how knowledge moves through the organisation.”

Chris has a great matrix of moving from Content & Collection to Context & Connection. The collaboration and innovation quadrants are where conversations and connections happen, and this is where knowledge in context is exchanged and created.

James Dellow picks up on a post by Sam Lawrence, pointing out that a new way of working is emerging, “social productivity” focusing on the “we” over the “me”…more from Sam:

“This more accurately mimics our work-with-others activity vs. the produce-alone-and-distribute part of our daily equation”

Maybe in the title of this post I could of substituted the word “participation” with the word “conversation”.
Chuck Hollis, who I have posted about before, has realised that conversation is gold, and creates more gold:

“These conversations were personal, honest and context-rich. And they were perhaps the most important source of innovation and value-add in our corporate culture.

To go even further, the really cool conversations I was having usually started with someone saying “you know, I was talking to so-and-so, and we came up with the idea that …” so we had one conversation feeding into another.

If you believe that conversations were creating incredible business value, maybe the focus should be on having many more conversations, much more easily.

Conversations lead to passionate topics of mutual interest.

Passionate topics of interest lead to ad-hoc community formation.

Community formation leads to collaboration around shared activities, including document collaboration.

Community collaboration is the quintessential magic of all things E2.0.

So, not to oversimplify, but if EMC got really, really good at starting interesting conversations, the rest would follow naturally and organically.”

I’d like to hear what others think the differences are between a market economy and a knowledge economy…please leave a comment.

[UPDATE: Just read an interview with Clay Shirky that seems relevant to this post.

Clay Shirky: Coase is the economist who asked and answered one of the most famous questions in all of economics: if markets are such a good idea, why have firms at all? Why do we have these sort of institutional and organizational frameworks? Why can’t you just have everybody offer their services to everybody all the time, and have markets and contracts put it all together? And his answer was that there’s a huge transaction cost in simply finding who’s available, what they offer, making some kind of deal. And so what firms do, in Coase’s answer, is they lower transactions costs for group effort. And that gives them an economic advantage over markets in certain situations.

Everybody has understood since that article was published in the mid-1930s that there’s a Coasean ceiling: a point past which, if a firm grows too large, it just breaks down.

What we all missed, because it was never really an open question until now, is that there’s also a Coasean floor. Which is to say, there’s a set of group activities that would create some value but it isn’t worth forming an institution to create.

And the Flickr photo streams are a perfect example of something that’s beneath the Coasean floor. The costs of being an institution are too high to make the activity worth pursuing that way. But if you can get people to do it for themselves, you can create that value anyway. And that value, the value that’s under the Coasean floor, is I think one of the really big surprises of the current era, which is: now we’ve got places where we don’t need institutions, necessarily, to take on large or complicated tasks. We’re actually seeing kinds of value created that were simply unreachable by society previously.]

[ADDED 12/05/08: Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque?]

Related:
k-flow
Tap into the social capital

A lot of people have different views on “emergence”, stating that this is the true essence of “enterprise 2.0″.
Using blogs and wikis doesn’t necessarily mean you are being social or are doing “enterprise 2.0″, it’s only when you these tools are certain way, and ultimately when a new social organisational culture has emerged.

Further to this, the best kind of “enterprise 2.0″ is when the participation and contributions are not just Directed In-the-Flow social ways of doing tasks, but moreso when people are Volunteering Above-the-Flow tacit knowledge.

Emergence isn’t just what content emerges from using these social tools, that would have never otherwise emerged. It’s also that these social tools are unstructured (not rigid) allowing people to use them for whatever purpose they like…rather than desiging tools for a specific purpose, we see new ways emerge in how people use these free-form tools.

For more see my posts:
Collaboration, Emergence and Culture
Why km 1.0 failed in a nutshell
KM 2.0 : catalyzing voluntary participation

Emergence is technology populism
- people start using a social or productivity tool as it helps them get work done, and it spreads virally
- it emerges as a tool of choice and method of choice to get things done

Emergence is similar to above but deployed by the enterprise as a bottom-up approach
- a pilot with ground level people may spread virally by word of mouth (rather than a roll-out)
- it emerges as a tool of choice and method of choice to get things done

Emergence is invention in the ways people creatively use free-form unstructured tools
- a team uses wikis to gather input from everyone to make a list
- it emerges as a great use as everyone is now using wikis this way

Emergence is collective intelligence
- a wiki is used to start a glossary of terminology and acronyms used by the enterprise
- it emerges a massive glossary, like wikipedia, via the collaborative input by the whole enterprise

Emergence is evolving ideas
- people have distributed blog conversations and leave comments
- it emerges a new concept or solution…an initial blog post may of had nothing to do with the end solution, but it’s existence spurred related ideas, and debate within the collective evolved a concept that no-one person thought of at the time

Emergence is seeing patterns in explicit data
- people that tag their wikipages, blog posts, bookmarks (folksonomies), etc…are contributing to a collective tag cloud
- it emerges concepts people are talking about, and we can see what they are most and least talking about…this tag cloud analysis reveals what’s going on in the enterprise and decisions can be made from this raw data

Emergence is seeing patterns in implicit data
- people click things leaving behind a recorded trail of what they pay attention to (clicks stream)
- it emerges a way to graph offerings like What’s Popular, and Personal Recommendations

Emergence is a new culture change in organisation dynamics and autonomy
- people are being socially productive using social tools; by participating, contributing, being visible and having conversations, they are drawing on the social captial to get things done, learn and create
- it emerges a learning organisation of an autonomous nature where people are tuning in and particpating to knowledge flow…you are aware of what’s going on, and perhaps the right projects and tasks fall into your lap (the right person is doing the right job as the enterprise social graph is aware of everyone and everything).

Explanation

Andrew McAfee
“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

Mike Gotta
“The emergent use of social software platforms” vs. “use of emergent software platforms”

Mike Gotta
“Enterprise 2.0 is not about “all collaboration”, “all types of information sharing” or “all types of communication”. The context of E2.0 is anchored around “emergence”. Addressing organizational dynamics, which includes culture, is important to fully leverage and sustain the goals associated with E2.0″

Gordon Taylor
“The traditional approach is to build something autocratic, and deployed from the top down, that works along vertical reporting lines. Working this way, silos of information are preserved. and communication is kept within the traditional areas.

The emergent approach is work from the bottom up, in a manner than allows the system to spread virally along horizontal functional lines. By making the system less restrictive, and easy to use the system is more likely to become the solution of choice for knowledge workers. And as they communicate better, they share information and increase their awareness.

For a system to be emergent, the emphasis needs to be on how quickly the users will adopt the system rather than on its structure. That explains why a hallmark of these Web 2.0 technologies is that they are accessible and less restrictive.”

Gordon Taylor
“Emergent systems are decentralized, self-organizing and organic — the antithesis of the top-down, rules-based engineering approach taken by most enterprise software. To build an emergent system — an ecosystem — you target the bottom of the pyramid, building it up one user, one connected node, at a time. The value of an emergent system is derived from its flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness.

Emergence isn’t another feature to add to the enterprise technology stack. Emergence isn’t a feature at all — it’s an approach to solving a problem.”

UPDATE: I just noticed Ray Sims has a post about emergence.

James Dellow (ChiefTech) is interviewed by Matt Moore (Engineers without Fears) on a podcast all about Enterprise RSS…good listening.

One thing I disagree with is the terminology, an email broadcast was referred to as “pull”, and RSS as “push”.

To me email is “push”, as I can push (send) you an email and you have no choice, it just ends up in your inbox.

Whereas RSS is “pull”, as I publish and people can subscribe to it and “pull” it down to read.
Technically once you are subscribed new posts are, I suppose, pushed to you…it’s not like I have to pull each post everytime. But at least you have control, you can decide to disable the subscription.

The podcast wasn’t just about RSS, there was a lot to take away in relation to enterprise 2.0 in general.

One quote I liked was something like…social software doesn’t have to be used socially.

This really hones into a post I published on knowledge visibility, and how collaboration is different than emergence.

Blogs and wikis can substitute email and Document Management Systems for certain types of processes and communications.

A blog can be used to broadcast news, announcements, project status…
A wiki can be used to collaborate on a document

These scenarios are not anything unusual, you still are doing the same things and tasks you normally do, only using more appropriate tools for particular types of tasks (In-the-Flow).

Using tools this way makes things easier, centralised and more visible, and comments offer people to participate for all to see…and the fact that it’s visible allows more eyes to come upon this content and perhaps add value.

So far this is not km 2.0, it’s just using social tools to replace ways of getting our tasks done.

What KM 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is mostly about is emergence, ie. people participate and contribute their know-how, whether it’s blog fragments, presence status, research bookmarks. This content may also be tagged, and from a tag cloud we can see emerging patterns.
This participation is also about transparency, allowing anyone in the enterprise to be heard, as value and innovation is not just generated by supposed experts.

The most valuable part to knowledge workers is that publishings and conversations are taking place online, and you can tune into the flow.

Knowledge Management is about flow, maybe we could call it K-flow.

It’s no longer about capture and store it, and if you have a task go search the knowledgebase.

It’s about publishing fragments, and conversations, we are educated everyday with what people are saying in the Enterprise Conversation Market.

We can tap into this k-flow whenever we want to be informed, and we can also tap into it to ask questions…it’s all about people and conversations.
Sure this stuff is also archived by default for later searches, but the point is that it has flowed around the place, maybe evolved, and may come to rest, only to be resurrected and evolved again perhaps later on.

Twitter is the perfect example of flow. I subscribe to people I trust, and watch the tacit flow, I tune into what I like, I converse, stuff evolves. I can also ask questions to the sources of my flow (subscriptions/contacts) and get answers or have discussion, others, perhaps weak ties can add value or perhaps eaves drop and learn.

Twitter is about people, stuff I’m interested in comes to me, and stuff I want to know will be returned to me…you are no longer on your own, people are the filter to finding stuff and discovery.

Ross Dawson refers to research that identifies this is how people work anyway, so social tools are just encouraging and harnessing the way humans work:

“The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response.”

Two quotes I have posted before have to be mentioned again:

O’Reilly - “…it’s more important to have a shared memory than a shared workspace.”

McAfee - “…focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on the practices and output of knowledge workers.”

McAfee’s SLATES model is also mentioned in the podcast:

Search
Links
Authoring
Tags
Extensions
Signals

James Dellow uses the term “Awareness” in reference to RSS picking up signals, and I think this is what k-flow is about, we are participating, we are each others daily news…forget about knowledge management, this is a learning organisation.

A couple of weeks ago I was writing a wikipage primer on blogs for my work, and when tryng to describe that you can get email updates to new blog posts, I used the traditional subscription model as a metaphor.
James mentioned a newspaper subscription sent to your house, I used a similar description explaining email updates to new blog posts is like a magazine or journal subscription.

This is what I said:

“Blogs are different than email as you are not pushing a message to a set of people, instead you are publishing an item, making it visible to all. People may visit your blog, or decide to pull content by taking out an email subscription.
This is similar to physical magazines or journals, people publish these, and you may browse them in a shop, or you may decide to take out a subscription.”

James has taken this more granular and has mentioned that it’s a little different as you can use an RSS Reader to create your own personalised newspaper. A daily newspaper has many articles by many contributors, similarly everyday your RSS Reader can have many blog posts by many people.
The great thing is you have decided on all these sources, or you have decided on the topic content (search feeds) you want in your daily newspaper.

My post on, Web 2.0 : assemble and tune in goes further on about the new many-to-many model and the new authority model.

Lee Bryant calls this Actionable Collective Intelligence:

“From my 300+ sources, I may skim read 1000+ items every day, of which I might bookmark 10; if something really newsworthy is going on then I might write one blog post or internal analysis based on one or more of these signals. That means that as an individual, I am rigorously filtering my information inputs by amplifying the signals of 10 stories and perhaps adding my own insight and analysis to one key development in any given day. Imagine for a moment that a significant proportion of 5000 person knowledge organisation do this every day. The resulting social signals about what is important would be incredibly useful to the organisation as a whole, and would provide a far greater return for the overall investment of time and attention than unconnected reading and research. Creating this kind of flow for signals, information and insight is one of the key objectives of a social knowledge sharing strategy. KM people used to talk about the knowledge pyramid where a wide base of information is filtered to a middle tier of knowledge and then further refined into the ‘point’ of insight. Social tools give us the potential to do this in a networked environment.”

There’s a few related memes at the moment on learning and familiarising yourself in a new environment or situation, this also applies to methods used in find things and getting things done in your current environment.

Not talking just explicit stuff, but tacit stuff like:

- “didn’t you know, when that happens, you gotta use this workaround”

- “goto Jill, I know she is in IT, but she knows more than anyone about travel medicine”

- “that sort of informal information is stored on this spreadsheet kept in this share drive in this folder, it would be good if we could have it on the Intranet”

Examples

• A new employee getting to know the place, the right people and information to get their job done

- Stewart Mader - using wikis
- Dave Snowden - finding stories via a social networking quest
- Shawn Callahan - social learning

• Working with a new team
• Mergers and Acquisitions

- Dennis McDonald - blogs and social networks
- Thomas Vander Wal- social bookmarks, blogs and wikis

• Finding the right person, and the right information

- Gia Lyons - expert locator, blogs, bookmarks, social networks (Lotus Connections)

This post shows the great value in tapping into the social capital to find the right person and information.
It describes two forms of social behaviour: Lurk-n-Learn, and Connect-n-Collaborate.
Check out the examples in how you get things done, how you find stuff, discover, collaborate, etc…

There are a few screencasts on Lotus Connections, this one I think exemplifies the great power of finding the right people and information based on a participation culture in a social ecosystem…also check out Lotus Greenhouse.

More from Gia:

“You can also include Atlas for Lotus Connections, an add-on asset not included in the license, that does the following:

Visualize and analyze social networks in an organization
Identify the shortest social path to reach someone
Find expertise across extended networks
Visualize and manage personal networks”

Social tools empower the individual to discover and make sense of all the people in our company, without them, each person is losing opportunity in finding a person or their content in helping them get things done. We’ve all heard of re-inventing the wheel syndrome, or, after the fact (”didn’t you know so and so, are an expert who could of helped you”).

Lotus Connections is more than a directory, every person has a profile page, on that page you can read about:

- who they are
- who they report to
- project they have worked on
- communities they are in
- keywords they have tagged themselves with (expert tags)
- keywords others have tagged them with (expert tags)
- latest blog posts, bookmarks
- contact details

Scenario

You are after an expert in the new technologies in “nuclear reactor design” who know’s the Russian language:

- look up the keyword tag “nuclear” in the expert locator (profiles)
- you find 7 people, and 2 communities about the topic “nuclear”
(it also displays related tags like “decomissioning”, “uranium”)
- you look into each of these 7 profiles and notice 1 of them speak Russian
- you look at their bookmarks (web-pages they have saved, probably when they were researching stuff)
- you look at their blog and see that their latest posts are about new technologies on this topic
(this person is not only an expert, but is up-to-date on the latest methods)
- while you are there you can visit the 2 communities to see discussions, blogs, forums, documents, etc…
(perhaps you may find useful information and people in these communities)

All this without having to be linked by hierarchy or a team, or limited to just the people you know or your office location, or having to broadcast an email…accidental collision some say.

Now every person in the enterprise can find people they need to get things done by leveraging the social capital, this is sure to get the best person for the job, cut down your cycle time, and save you money…no more lost opportunities just because we couldn’t “see through” our organisation.

Not only is Profiles an expert locator, but it connects to the other social components of Lotus Connections, we can find out more about a person: websites they save (bookmarks), what they are up to (blog), communities they are enagaging with, etc…

I guess you can say that profile pages lead to social networks (something Lotus Connections will absorb with its Beehive product), which is how the millennial generation get things done (they really don’t use email, they find it too static).

For a more business perspective check out this presentation, The Business Value Of IBM Social Software.
Contrast this social way of getting things done compared to an Intranet, email and a Document Management System, which environment would you choose

I opened my RSS Reader today and read a couple of articles in relation to collaboration, how it differs to emergence, and whether a collaborative culture is a pre-requisite for companies to use social tools.
If you want a summary of the essence of this post read, Enterprise 2.0 culture.

Personal InfoCloud

COLLABORATION

Thomas Vanderwal illustrates that collaboration is about individuals coming together to contribute their bit to an object, “…but it done so with everybody working together to build one understanding.”

The following gets to the heart of it:

“The depth and of understanding is flattened - if the object is a picture of a sunset, once it is annotated as being a sunset there is no value in many others making the same statement. Quite often a wiki page on a subject is used as an example of a collaborative effort.”

The value and aim:

“The collaborative understanding has value as it allows for capturing consensus and usually aims at completeness.”

COLLECTIVE

A collective is where “the individual’s voices and annotations are held separate as each individual is working as an individual.”

I really like that he used the term “Collective” rather than a relationship term like “Networks”, for a review see a comparison and a clarification.

The following gets to the heart of it:

“The individuals annotations and contributions can be aggregated or collected (a helpful connection is the collective is based on collecting) and surfaced as an aggregate.”

The Value and aim:

“The ability for anybody and everybody to tag and annotate and object and have their perspective captured is a very strong value for each individual who has hopes of refinding the object in their own perspective and context, as well as having others whom have similar understanding find the same object.”

The above is in relation to social bookmarking and folksonomies, but anything can be tagged. A blogosphere can be examined by tags where people are writing their own individual stuff, but in aggregate, perhaps by a tag cloud, we can see emerging patterns of things that are being talked about a lot or a little, and this analysis can bring like people together, and help with decision making.

This succinct difference I get is, collaboration is everyone adding a perspective to the same object, whereas a collective is acting on their own, but when we aggregate the collective information we get value out of seeing potential emerging patterns and the value of serendipity and discovery such as browsing tags or users, or searching to see similar stuff…plus we act like a hive where we do some gardening on tag terms evolving a less amibguous and tidy folksonomy, acting like there is a group agenda when really there isn’t, it’s moreso a collective intelligence.

Transparent Office

Michael Indinopulos states that, “Culture is a destination on the collaboration journey, not a prerequisite for taking the first step.”

He goes on to say that non-collaborative cultures may be introduced to a collaborative social tool such as a wiki, as a way to get things done, “…to streamline and simplify existing business interactions within existing organizational silos.”

From using a social tool the culture may begin to manifest or grow:

“What tends to happen then, often quite organically, is that the members of the wiki start interacting in new and different ways enabled by the wiki. Then the wiki is discovered by colleagues in other groups who work with participants of the wiki and want to be connected to the network. As they join in, the wiki starts generating new interaction patterns and norms that cut across organizational silos. Voila! You now have cultural change, as workers collaborate in new ways with their colleagues across organizational silos.”

He has described in an earlier post ( which I covered), the above scenario demonstrating an in-the-flow process of use of a wiki (social tools)…this means using social tools to complement and perhaps to substitute currents tools that are used to get things done.

What is harder is above-the-flow where in indeed we need a social culture as this involves people sharing personal insight, ie. participating and contributing your experiences, thoughts, opinions, reviews (thinking out loud, work in progress). All this stuff is related to your job experience, but in the end if you don’t participate in the Above-the-Flow scenario, you can still get your tasks done.
This means Above-the-Flow really requires a social organisational culture, and we all know the benefits of sharing personal know-how…we get to tap into the expertise of the workplace, a kind of collective intelligence or hive mind.

This is synergistic, in that once you have an Above-the-Flow culture, this Above-the-Flow social knowledge, can be used for In-the-Flow tasks, so soon enough tapping into Above-the-Flow becomes really important to effectively achieve your In-the-Flow…with a thriving social culture the hope is that it just becomes “The Flow.”

The irony is that In-the-Flow processes don’t neccessarily require a pre-made social culture, so it’s In-the-Flow “collaborative practices” that would be naturally adopted first, and the hope is that this may change or evolve cultural dynamics where people start using Above-the-Flow processes, and as mentioned above this could feed In-the-Flow processes…

Michael alludes to In-the-Flow or collaboration as a first step to building a social culture:

“…most companies need to work their way up to openness, beginning with incremental operational benefits derived from better collaboration within existing boundaries.”

eg.
IN-THE-FLOW
- Using a wiki for setting up meeting and minutes
- People really like that there is no longer ping pong emailing

- You team uses a blog for announcements, instead of broadcast emails, and comments discussion
- People really like that there is no longer ping pong emailing (no-one is left out, information is centralised and searchable)
- You get major benefits from one of the comments, in fact what that person shared, the people they put you in touch with, and the documents they linked to in your DMS, will save you half the cycle time on your project
- You don’t even know this person, they work in another office, and somehow came across the blog post
- This person who left the comment is interested in progress you make, so you decide to blog instead of email as the blog platform has been good to you so far

ABOVE-THE-FLOW
- you now blog stuff you come to know, like a project diary
- that person who left a comment earlier on, is now leaving comments on your “work-in-progress” blog posts, this discussion leads to brilliant insight, other people are becoming regular readers and commenters
- the commenter is now setting up her own blog (project diary)
- you read their blog and find more valuable information
- others join the blogosphere (they’ve caught the virus)

The idea is the readers, become commenters, and eventually become bloggers.

Most important from the above example is, In-the-Flow benefits have led to Above-the-Flow usage, which in turn you gain insight to use in your In-the-Flow tasks.

Collaborative Thinking

Mike Gotta adds to Michael’s post by taking a somewhat similar Directed vs Volunteer approach:

“If I use a wiki within a business process where people are directed by role, workflow and functional needs of the procedure - that’s not all that emergent at all - in fact, it’s not really a valid Enterprise 2.0 use case scenario. But it is indeed use of a wiki for collaboration and it can thrive without the culture issues that this post correctly points out. However, it the wiki was open and allowed participation from others in the organization even though their role, workflow or functional duties did not direct them to interact with that wiki group - well, now we have crossed over into the emergence aspects of Enterprise 2.0 - and, we’re back to “the culture thing”. So you can see how tools, context and whether the interaction pattern is directed or volunteered all collide with each other”

Mike is saying that when a directed approach is taken with social tools to achieve job tasks/functional duties (deliverables), you may not even need a “social culture” upfront, whereas a volunteered approach (people participating for the heck of it) indeed requires a social culture for this to happen and sustain. And a directed approach is not an example of emergence which is a defining aspect of enterprise 2.0…more from Mike.

Does this mean…

In-the-Flow = Directed

Above-the-Flow = Volunteered

Directed ≠ Emergence

Perhaps not, because in another post Mike concludes:

“But even within a scenario where participation and contributions are directed - there are often opportunities for emergence - there is no exclusivity here between the more structured work that occurs within an organization and the informal interactions that E2.0 emphasizes.”

And what if like the old school approach, you are directed/mandated or encouraged (job description/rewards) to use social tools in an Above-the-Flow way, could this lead to emergence?
I think not, in KM 1.0 as soon as the mandate wore off, people stopped using these tools to contribute to the sharing agenda, and I think this would also happen in KM 2.0 even though the tools are more social, easier, simple, effective, etc…

As the meme says it’s all about nuturing culture, people have to want to participate and share Above-the-Flow…

Andrew McAfee in his pioneering article says that if managers didn’t have to look over your shoulder to make sure you were using email and IM, why should these new social tools be any different, he says “…if the new technologies are so compelling, won’t people just start using them without being directed to?”, that is “if we build it, they will come.” The article goes on to say this is not good enough and lists several essential deployment and adoption methods.

But, imagine a project leader ran an experiment for a project where all participants are to have a blog (project diaries), and bookmarks (research collections).
They are to bookmark all their research which may include internal DMS, Intranet, blog posts, and also external stuff.
They are to blog the experience on this project (and also the experience of the experiment)…they are to publish: working’s out, thoughts, feedback, thinking’s out loud, review, opinion, announcements, news, insights, etc…
They are also asked to leave comments on blogs posts, and write blog posts in reply to discussion…and also browse the folksonomy.

Since web 2.0 tools are easier than what came before in order to tease out and share tacit know-how, an experiment like this, even though directed, could scale (provided everyone participated and contributed), and demonstrate some emergent behaviour.
It could show that when you participate (even unpolished thinking out loud) that discussion could evolve your work, and take you to a place that you could not have achieved on your own, and now it’s visible for others to find.
It could show that searching the personal know-how (what’s in our heads) database could reveal stuff that helps you with your job…with a feeling that you are glad someone took the time to share this, and that you feel that you should share to so benefits are reciprocated (we all educate each other).

If people did get all these benefits from participating in the social enterprise, would the next project be a volunteered drive to use social tools, would the participants demand it, as it was so successful in the experiment?

The question is would a mandated (directed) experiment that could show positive benefits (thriving use and gains) from using social tools, be enough to catapult a volunteered approach thereafter?

In the above I mentioned, “…provided everyone participated and contributed…”
If it’s a mandated experiment on one project (pilot), is this enough for people to take part in the experiment properly?

The issue is that it’s hard to explain the feeling you get from enterprise 2.0, like we do on the open web, it’s something you have to experience, and since the tools are cheap or free this isn’t an obstacle.

So is mandating a pilot, enough to generate a positive enough experience, that from thereafter use will continue on a volunteered approach?

If so, then you better get the pilot right, and nuture and guide every nuance to make the experience pleasant, smooth, and fault free…using all the essential deployment and adoption methods.

I’m not too sure I agree with my proposition of running a pilot as a mandated pilot, but as I said it’s an experiment…I tend to hope that if you set the right scenario, support, role-modeling, etc…that the tools may be infectious. The pilot participants need to be carefully studied and guided to make sure they are getting the benefits that we all know exists.

More from this post:

“We (as an industry) are still remiss in associating Enterprise 2.0 as a specific set of tools. That clouds the role of culture and other organizational dynamics which are so influential on “emergence”. What we also need is to a better job at is defining the use case scenarios and usage models around information sharing, communication and collaboration tools that make something “E2.0″”

“When you ask whether Enterprise 2.0 is important to your business strategy you are asking the wrong question. E2.0 augments your business and organizational initiatives - E2.0 is not an end in-and-of-itself. This was the false siren call of KM which lead to so many overblown expectations and so many project failures.”

“If you talked about E2.0 in business terms such as how such a program augments strategic talent initiatives, address shifting workforce demographics, assist with innovation efforts, reduce exception handling or other coordination costs, etc. you are far ahead of the game.”…this is an approach also suggested by James Robertson.

“The role of culture is spot on. Enterprise 2.0 is not about “all collaboration”, “all types of information sharing” or “all types of communication”. The context of E2.0 is anchored around “emergence”. Addressing organizational dynamics, which includes culture, is important to fully leverage and sustain the goals associated with E2.0.”

Anecodote

They continue on from their three types of collaboration post with a quiz to see just how social your organisational culture is, in both the collaborative (directed) and emergent collective (volunteered) aspects.

Related

Networks, Communities and Aggregation
Blogs : the many ways “many” come together