The Workplace Blog

The Harvard Business Review has published its list of breakthrough ideas for 2007. Two ideas in particular caught our eye. We couldn’t agree more with them.

An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation
In an array of industries, producer-centered innovation is being eclipsed by user-centered innovation—the dreaming up, development, prototyping, and even production of new products by consumers. These users aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want.

Act Globally, Think Locally
Companies are usually told to “think globally and act locally.” But thanks to their own global information systems and the Internet, knowledge from faraway places can be acquired relatively easily and cheaply. This means that firms have to discover and quickly incorporate good ideas from these diverse sources before their rivals do.

Read the others on the HBR website and tell us what you think.

Not completely sure how Web 2.0 is changing the Internet? Try this YouTube clip for an answer. As I post this, it has been viewed 1,246,927 times and has 3501 comments.

On his blog, David Strom highlighted a conversation he had with Ray Velez about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. In his post, he discussed some of the lessons learned which included paying attention to authentication, security and search. Also read, Patrick Kitchen’s article on wikis in the enterprise written for Newsday. She quotes Ray Velez and Amy Vickers talking about our wiki.

Separately, Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian Software discussed the wiki on his blog. He argued that the custom work required to modify mediawiki demonstrated that the solution is not enterprise software. Jeffery also argued that by virtue of requiring an intern and two part time developers, the wiki (to quote him) “is not fulfilling the promise of Enterprise 2.0 software which should be: lightweight software suitable for enterprises for dramatically less money.”

What do you think? I disagree. Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffrey implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

Commercial enterprise 2.0 software like Socialtext, Brainkeeper and Atlassian Confluence are great options for some business scenarios and we often recommend them to our own clients. But in other cases, simply modifying open source sofware can get an organization what it needs. Furthermore, by modifying mediawiki we were able to get exactly what we needed. Most importantly, by virtue of how it is being used, we know that it is social software in an organization - and that’s the most important part of an enterprise 2.0 solution.

Thomas W. Hazlett, a professor of law and economics at George Mason University, discussed open and closed information systems in an insightful article for the Financial Times. He argued that even though we are all busy hyping user generated content, it is the closed information systems that are just as valuable if not more.

He drew attention to the $$ that companies like Forrester and Gartner charge for their proprietary closed research and also discussed the iPod/iTunes as an example of a closed system. Hazlett even emphasized that electronic games are achieving explosive growth as closed systems.

I am not quite sure if I agree with him. Both Gartner and Forrester give lots of proprietary information away for free and have been forced to publish open blogs just to stay engaged with their readers. Much of the growth in electronic games is now happening because they of the ability to play them online leveraging open Internet standards. And finally, Steve Jobs himself would rather the iPod/iTunes system be open.

User generated content and open systems may not alter every existing economic model but what is certain is that they will at the very least influence these models - both outside and within the enterprise. Your users demand control, give it to them even if they are your employees. Read Nicholas Carr’s perspective on this too.

It may seem that the journalists who have gotten bored discussing web 2.0 have moved onto writing stories extolling the virtues of Second Life. In fact, some publications like Businessweek argue that it will be huge one day.

But should you really care? And will it have anything to do with the enterprise? Will your employees start demanding Second Life type environments within which they’d want to interact with other employees, partners and customerse? It’s hard to say, though for now it seems unlikely. Nevertheless, if you want to introduce your boss to Second Life or simply learn a little more about it here are some tips that may help you.

Colin White featured the Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki in an article for the Business Intelligence Network. In discussing web 2.0 technologies and how they can be used in collaborative workspaces, Colin highlights our wiki and compares it to Accenture’s more traditional knowledge management system. To quote,

“As the Avenue A | Razorfish portal demonstrates, Web 2.0 technologies offer a powerful and alternative approach to building and deploying portals and their associated workspaces. Web 2.0 is here to stay, and IT organizations must plan for its use. At present, Web 2.0 approaches are being used by more technically focused staff such as consultants, and it remains to be seen if less experienced business users will adopt them.”

Those are kind words but I would like to point out that Wikipedia is not managed by technologists and nor are they its audience. I believe that wikis have a place in any organization and it is more a matter of the organization’s culture that determines how successful a wiki solution maybe. Wikis aren’t for everyone, but they’re certainly useful for more scenarios than you may realize.

If you’re looking for a conference to attend this spring, try FASTforward ‘07. They look at new approaches impacting the way businesses compete, learn, build communities and socialize. You can expect to find a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 at the conference.

Even if you don’t attend the conference, take a look at their blog. Here are a couple of posts that I found interesting:

Taking the Pulse of 2.0 Enterprise Adoption: This discusses how companies are using web 2.0 behind the firewall.

What’s at the edges?: This is similar to my post about “Leave room for the Red Light Zones” and discusses finding innovation at the edges. You’ll find it interesting reading.

“Why can’t we build this on Sharepoint?”: This answers the question that my colleagues and I have been asked at practically every conference that we speak at.

Strategic sensemaking and Enterprise 2.0 technologies: This post discusses how sensemaking will drive the adoption of enterprise technologies and helps you think about promoting them.