So, Enterprise 2.0 is turning out to be one of those sorts of conferences where many of the presentations are just product pitches, poorly disguised as “keynotes”. I always thing of keynotes as those presentations that are given by really amazing thinkers, people who can open your eyes to something new, some new way of thinking about the world. What I don’t think of is vendors yapping on about their tools, obscuring everything with impenetrable jargon, and attempting to lead the audience by the nose towards their salesmen.

Yuch.

After two pretty decent presentations, the rest of the morning has been people pimping shit, and I’m not going to blog someone’s marketing pitch. I don’t think you benefit from reading about an unobjective, bollocks-laden presentation; and I certainly don’t benefit from writing it. Specially not on four hours’ sleep.

Now, I know that vendors sponsor conferences and expect to thus have bought a platform to bludgeon us all to death with their product pitch. But many geek conferences manage to get sponsors, and a great speaker-line up, without including a bunch of sales managers pimping their wares. If someone from MS comes along and gives a really interesting presentation about an areas of their expertise, in my mind that actually does them more good than standing up on stage whittering on about Sharepoint.

I really wish some of these less geeky conferences would learn that lesson. This morning has mainly been people talking from the podium – no questions from the audience, no discussion, just yapping. This is 180 degrees from open space, or FooCamp-style gatherings, or unconferences, and it’s made me realise just how spoilt I’ve been lately by conferences that know how to make it an enjoyable experience, rather than a hard slog.

Hopefully the afternoon will be better.

Although often feels like he’s floating in to the stratosphere thinking high-minded thoughts, but very pragmatic and likes building things that make money. But in order to be practical you have to understand what’s going on inside people.

Social software is software intended to shape culture. Stowe said this in ’99, and although was seen as a nutcase then, that’s what has happened now.

Old style groups, your membership in the group dictated your rights and responsibilities in the group. But now, individuals have their own rights and responsibilities – you are yourself connected to a network of people. Primary reason for using social tools is to pursue your passions, connect with people who are important to you, share your passions and desires, and to connect to markets, whether commerce or ideas or any other sort of market.

As more of these techs have moved into our world, the more control as moved to the individual. The edge dissolves the centre. Worthy of a presentation on its own.

Me, mine, and market

Relationship to people helps define his world in an interest area, such as sharing music. Ultimately, the application has to have a mechanism to do what markets do, help people find what they are after, make something more liquid so that you can make money out of it. Last.fm, obvious thing to get involved with is buying/selling music, but they are trying to support people in the discovery of music, but they don’t think that music sales is the right place to make money, but in events and concerts. Value of live shows has gone up in recent years, but the value of music tracks is doing down, and will eventually be zero. Want to help people find events in their area, around music they like, and then broker the tickets.

In enterprise 2.0, the social app may just be to allow people to be more efficient, more effective. In that case the market is informational. So market doesn’t have to be transactional.

Fundamental question, how are you going to take a new app, such as a spreadsheet app, and make money.

Issues people see as the hardest thing: adoption; ROI; how to get a good culture going.

Buddy list is the centre of the universe. I decide who I affiliate with, I decide what’s important to me. I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.

If you look at a network, it’s mostly connections. The value is in the connections, and the more connections you have the richer the networks is. If you make an implicit network more explicit, you can then start to realise some value from that network.
[Stowe opens up the discussion to the floor.]

Problems around federated social media, so that you can bring in all your projects together in one place, and not have to log in to many different places.

Applications around creating a profile, the novelty wears off. And when creating a system that helps people find experts, many people want to find an expert but not many experts want to be found.

The serendipity that these systems can provide is increasingly important and enormously beneficial. Help create social connections.

Stowe talks about meeting the nun that runs the Vatican website. Despite wildly varying backgrounds, she came to the same conclusions as Stowe.

It’s about discovery. People try to discover, apparently, things, but that’s a bit of a red herring. If you’re trying to find the best folding bike or a trip to Hawai’i. But it’s not really about things, that’s not what their motivations is. That’s what they are talking about, this hypothetical third space of the internet. In business it’s not really the third place, it’s the second. First is home, second is work, third is social spaces like bars. Increasingly the internet has become that third place, they are spending less times in physical third places.

It’s not really about the people, yes you want to meet new people, because you want their advice, but mainly people are trying to find themselves. People are on a voyage of self-discovery. Sounds very high-minded, fuzzywuzzy liberal nonsense – but people aren’t necessarily aware of it, may not want to become aware of it, but as a builder of an application, people gravitate to apps that help them figure out who they are and their place in the world. And the way they do that is through people.

In an enterprise 2.0 setting, the same things are at work. People are trying to figure out what they are good at, what they are doing, what they want to do, who they trust.

Q: This relates to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and people need to be higher up that in the workplace for this to work.

Stowe completely agrees. The fabric of social networking is very revolutionary to command-and-control businesses. So there is a national cultural barrier to adopting those thoughts and therefore those technologies. Cultural barriers to rolling these things out are the primary barriers – it’s not about does this tech work, or is it measurable. Lots of transitional steps along the way, and there’ll be friction when these things are rolled out in enterprise.

Enterprises are generally not self-aware enough to think about the fact that people are on a voyage of self-discovery. Most people take it for granted that you’re doing that one your own, and the thought that it should be ingrained in the IT systems we work with, most people don’t get that.

Q: Seems that frequently the top gets it, and the bottom gets it, but the middle management are going to suffer the most change. How do we deal with this?

Stowe: When email was implemented, it lead to a reduction in middle management because there was no need for them to manage the flow of information up and down the organisation. So this will happen again. The centre of organisations will hollow out, and the control will move to the edges, to the people actually doing it. So there will be less management and when you move to this model, you need less management. You need some, but the traditional tree structure is doomed.

Q: Is this like what’s happening with Google’s applications?

Yeah, I think we’ll see this as a fractal pattern that will show up everywhere. Just a matter how quick are the transitional changes.

Q: In IBM presentation, they said “Well, of course it’s the enterprise” as if no enterprise worth its salt would risk using something that’s not IBM or SAP. How can small start-ups develop successful enterprise applications?

I think the successes for the future will use different principles. The idea that everything has to scale up in a centralised manner is outdated, and a lot can be outsourced. So you want the sort of scale of Gmail, not enterprise email. My recommendation would be, look at the edge, at the small start -ups that satisfy the needs of small groups of people. Individuals will make individual decisions about what they want to do.

Talking about networks in many ways. Focusing on the people side of this. Not going to talk so much about tech or wikis or blogs, going to focus on networks as a concept that’s useful personally and in business.

People have always formed networks. Wrote a book about networks in 1979, published in ’82, wondering what happened to the issues from the 60s. Sent letters to ask for names, then sent letters to those people. Ended up with 50,000 people – all by snailmail – interesting in networks.

Web caused explosion of networking – much more is now possible. It’s people that make organisations what they are. The network is us.

Now talking about Zoetrope.com, the writers’ community started by Francis Ford Coppola. [I’m a member of Zoetrope, btw.]. Asked what ‘network’ is in different languages and it turns out that in many of them, it’s still ‘network’. All these networks we have are the same thing, just different manifestations.

Four networks in enterprise
– organisational network
– working networks
– knowledge networks
– social networks

Need to be careful about privacy, as without it network is damaged. Yet a lot of useful information can be gathered.

If things are going badly? Is the purpose clear? Do you know who is doing what? Who is linked to who? People, purpose, links.

Technology is not enough, it’s really about the people. Can take this simple model and do a lot with it.

Principles provide consistency when working in online spaces. Realtime techs attempt to replicate face-to-face experiences and will always fall short. Asynchronous techs are the more important ones, which change the way that things work.

Online spaces much have a place for people, links, purposes. Must learn to do this in a consistent way.

Virtual teams great, but teams can become very insular and lose sight of the larger organisation we’re part of. Good on focus, but losing context.

We all need to be connected.

New generation who are used to social software in their personal lives have an expectation that business will have tools that they are familiar, such as IM, blogging, etc.

Websites used to be top-down and managed, now users create the content, and defines what is available on sites like Wikipedia and others. Next generation of Web 2.0 tech enables users not just in terms of creating content but also allows them to program what appears on those sites.

Has a wiki for business ideas and it is very successful as people collaborate on developing the ideas. Mash-ups. Google maps, where it’s going will improve video mash-ups. YouTube is just the beginning.

Unique personas are blending, consumer, producer, etc., becomes ‘user’.

Web now much more interactive.

The network blends, private public networks, no one cares which network they are using, just want to be able to do what they want.

Applications, anytime anywhere. IM, etc. from any device, anywhere. Unsecured, not inside company’s firewall, but users want it, are familiar with it, and use it to be more effective and productive.

Creation and consumption => collaboration and sharing.

Concept of what a website is is changing rapidly. Traditional website was a destination, needed to know where to go to find information or do business. Required search – if you didn’t know where to go you had to find it. Still need to know where you’re going, but it’s much more unstructured and unmanaged.

P2P, the network is the destination, all you need to know is what you are looking for, not where you are going to find it. Very open and unmanaged. Shared music. Starting to see the next step as Apple is increasingly solving the DRM problem. You’ll be looking for a song, and where that comes from you won’t know and it won’t matter because you’re just interested in [i presume he means legally] acquiring that song.

Computing processing power just keeps getting greater, and will do moreso as telepresence makes its way into your home. Devices we have in our pockets are equal to the processing power you had on your desktop two or three years ago. Enables new ways to create media, new media types, that has never been possible before.

Video will becomes and increasingly important part of Web 2.0. Historically, very different market segments which are now converging fast.consumer, business, service provider => social networking, collaboration, entertainment.

Video is a very powerful medium. [Show’s video that illustrates how a photo doesn’t give you the whole story… but then, neither does video].

Web 2.0, it’s XML, wikis, blogs, mash-ups.

Best is yet to come. Future will be about any media, anywhere on any device. Will create a new wave of apps in video and virtualisation. Just at the beginning of what is possible for collaborative possibilities and Web 2.0.

Network as the platform. Use cases:

Consumer, network will enable user created video, deliver not just to PCs but also TV and mobile devices. Prosumer class emerging – very talented consumers using tech to showcase talent, who are attracting millions of fans over a few months. Professionally created media uses network as platform to deliver to wide range of advices, e.g. AppleTV.

Telepresence, will make its way into the home and video calls will become more common. Surveillance, can keep an eye on children or relatives in day care [creepy idea], not just on PC but on a range of devices. On demand, live broadcast video will be used for wide range of applications, training, exec comms, etc.

His company has rolled out telepresence, and used thousands of times, 1/3rd with a customer. Product dev cycles shortening, sell cycles shortening, collaboration is more effecitve. Collaboration isn’t just about Web 2.0, but to drive next generation need teleprsence.

All forms of creative media use the network as a platform. Over last decade, networks becomes increasingly intelligent, will become intelligent video network of the future. Seeing wide range of apps and solutions. Apps need new levels of features, enabled not at endpoint or apps level, but make way into the network.

Web 2.0 – defined by users not by owners of content; evolving everyday, hard to imagine what it will look like tomorrow.

Video is finally here, has been an evasive promise for many years, but now we have the bandwidth and processing power. Becoming pervasive, here to say because it’s most experiential medium of all.

Will play the role of an anti-social, fat, dumb, happy exec who doesn’t want to move into the next phase. Where is the resistance? Twelve years ago when web started to get really popular. People didn’t understand why they needed the web, thought that they didn’t need it, didn’t need to share information.

Then e-business started. Ent 2.0 is the natural evolution of e-business. they said then there were three things enterprises could do:
– share information in an extranet
– do commerce on the internet
– share information with employees on the intranet

Those three things started to take off. Could put any info up anywhere in the world, and people can see it. Didn’t need contracts, business deals, etc., could just access information. Were some extreme views, that bricks and mortar would not be needed; that didn’t happen but lots of new things did. Businesses expanded, new businesses started.

So why name it now? We can do a lot of things now that we couldn’t before, can help people to benefit from this new technology. Time for the next step, something new is happening, so right time to rename it.

Have a bunch of technologies, but the key one is that other people can update a website, can tag things. Multiple technologies but it’s important about updating. Might say we had Geocities, or message board, but they are very hard to navigate, not metadata. Take a look at Facebook, easier to navigate through. Different kinds of communities are forming, evolution taking place, very different to traditional message boards.

How do we take advantage of that. Can I create communities? hard to talk about ROI, but easier to talk about commerce. Today’s commerce sites are designed for a few markets and millions of people; not the long tail, ie. millions of markets with a few people. Long tail gets marketing people very exciting as can personalise, and meet the needs of individuals and sell more products.

What do we do with our intranet site? Very simple – when you deliver service/support to a client, you find you can improve your support documentation, if you put it up as a wiki, anyone in the field anywhere in the world can edit the manual. Live document. Can create forums and communities of interest. Make it easier for people to talk to each other, customers, suppliers, etc.

Is there going to be be a brand-new set of technologies or will existing platforms embed these technologies?

[Interlude for IBM WebSphere Portal marketing stuff which I’m not going to write up – sounds sort of a rather full-on game of buzzword bingo and my jetlag is getting in the way of my understanding anything that’s not said in plain English. There’s also an attempt to play a video which is not working. Sometimes I worry that I’m missing something when my brain switches off during these sorts of things, but on the other hand, these people need to learn to talk interestingly about their stuff, rather than just yapping on in impenetrable jargon.]

Where are we now? How has Enterprise 2.0 progressed?

How are we doing with awareness?
Lots of awareness about this idea, the mainstream press has covered this, but the high-school and college age children of decision-makers in companies are doing the most to spread the meme, because they are on Facebook, or Wikipedia, and are showing it to their parents who then think it might be useful inside their business.

Ideas that are gaining momentum:
– social software, very different to software companies are used to deploying which are ‘anti-social’, but people are clueing into the idea that we can use tech and software to put people in touch with each other, build network of peers and colleagues. New idea that software is inherently social too, starting to penetrate organisations pretty well.
– network effects, idea we need to get more people onto these tools, and get a lot of participants involved, more good things will happen.
– freeform authoring, once we get more people on social software platforms, our goal should not be to impose structure on their interactions or give them forms to fill in, but should be getting out of the way and let people do what they want. Really don’t know what people want in advance, but don’t know what they know in advance. Get clues from org chart, job description etc, but sources of expertise are widespread. Being freeform, don’t try to predict what they know, where they have energy, are they authors, editors, organisers? A small percentage of people are ‘gardeners’, who like rearranging stuff. We need more of them. But don’t know what people are going to want to do. Wikipedia originally tried a seven step review process, but their insight was to get out of the way and create an egalitarian place.
– metadata, known for years we need metadata, but it used to be about experts defining it. Huge leap forward in Web 2.0, users generate metadata, and produce it almost as a by-product, not sitting down thinking about it. Tags, labels, etc. Do it for our reasons, without imposing structure, and huge multi-dimensional schema for it.
– emergence, used to think that the web was a big mess “the world’s largest library, just that the books are all on the floor”. Structures emerge. Ability to find stuff. Want to encourage this inside companies.

How are we doing with toolkit?
Toolkit is fantastic, and it’s growing all the time. Making good progress on what the specific enterprise needs are with freeform and emerging collaboration. Cambrian explosion going on, explosion of tools. Most won’t work out, or be final answer, just like the species of the Cambrian explosion. Probably not what you want if you’re the CEO of one of these start ups, but we want to see this massive amount of variation then the selection mechanisms kick in. Seeing some great start-ups, but the incumbents have not been slow at all. Pleasantly surprised with the speed that they are rolling out new tools, and leaving behind old way of doing corporate software.

Need to watch out for ease of use, technologists suffer feature creep and add in too many things to do with it. think about the tech that’s compelling – zen-like simplicity, do one or two things that really need to be done. We are not deploying these technologies in a vacuum, there is an incumbent tech which this has to work with. 100% of knowledge workers use email, but if you are proposing a replacement for an incumbent tech then people over-emphasise the benefits of the incumbent tech, and underweight the value of the new tech. Have this challenge with email.

Communicating results
Need case studies – have a few examples that we fall back on. Our store-houses of success stories needs to expand fairly dramatically if we are going to get traction with decision-makers within companies. What will help them make that decision is verifiable case studies. Need to make sure we don’t keep using the same examples over and over. Mustn’t get into the trap of coming up with impressive ROI numbers for these techs, Lots of these ROI numbers quoted are 200% – 300%, which makes people ask, if these are true then we should be throwing money into buying software. Those numbers have to be suspect. Don’t want us to fall into the trap of coming up with glowing numbers.

Can talk about what happened, at the anecdote or case study level. These are very persuasive. Not all companies have a rigid ROI view of investments, but what they want is ways to triangulate the quality of investment.

Need to address this problem, need a repository of information. If and when we do this we need to throw the gates open as widely as possible – should be emergent, widely accessible, and egalitarian. Need to disclose where this information comes from – it’s not automatically suspect when a case study comes from a vendor. Too often, we don’t to basic levels of disclosure, so just need some disclosure rules about who’s putting information up. Wikipedia has an elaborate set of rules, guidelines and policies which have emerged over time. Not sure what they set of ground rules is needed, but we’ll come up with them over time. He volunteers to participate in this effort, what we need is a couple of technologists or vendors to provide environment; perhaps a wiki. Then everyone else throws information up, and structure will emerge over time, as will groundrules, but it would be an invaluable resource for all of us if there’s a repository were we can point decision makers to so they can find valuable information.

This has been an incredibly interesting year. Used to think that the IQ of a crowd was half the IQ of the dumbest person, but his view has shifted 180 degree – we have tools that help the IQ of the crowd be double the IQ of the smartest member. Used to think blogs were teenage diaries, but now thinks it’s the single most important source of information. Used to think that people who got social interactions online was pathetic, but now is amazed at how well you can get to know someone from their blog, and has met some wonderful people, and the strength and non-patheticness of the people online.

We are not anywhere near the end of this. Most he’s seen are people dipping the corporate toe in the water. Good things await those who experiment.

Here in Boston at the the Enterprise 2.0 conference, ready to start blogging at 8.35 in the morning, despite the fact that the jetlag kicked my ass last night, and I got just four hours’ sleep. The schedule for today looks completely bonkers, though, starting at the crack of dawn and going on til 6.30pm, with hardly any breaks. I really, really wish that conference organisers would have a little pity for attendees. If my brain doesn’t melt before 10am, it’ll be a miracle.

Currently the conference chair is getting people to do a mobile phone vote as to whether control over IT is more important than enterprise users’ needs, and whether Enterprise 2.0 is more hype than reality. Interestingly, users and reality are winning already.

First speaker of the day, and the reason why I dragged myself across the city at this ungodly hour, is David Weinberger. Here goes:

David Weinberger – Rattling Business’ Foundations
If we’re talking about Enterprise 2.0, someone must be talking about Ent 3.0, or 4.0… it’s just going to keep going. We might have the sense of ‘enough already!’, because everything has been changing. But another set of changes, multiple sets of changes, already at work. Next changes: authority, trust, boundaries, i.e the shape of business.

Why aren’t we drowning? Told from early 90s that there’s going to be way too much info, lots of natural catastrophe metaphors, and there’s way more what was predicted. yet we’re not drowing, we’re doing well, even though there are a few issues. Solution to info overload is more information – it’s metadata, info about info. Got way smarter about metadata. Ent2.0 is really about getting hold of metadata in interesting and important ways.

Frame this broadly. There are two orders of order; in the first order you organise the stuff itself; in the second we physically separate the metadata, reduce it in size, and then have two or three ways of sorting that. This is handy, we’re good at it, and it works for physical stuff. But limitation – whoever gets to make up the sorting order is in control of something important, ie. how we order our world, because you’re only allowed one way of organising. That’s a limitation of the real. Always have to do it because physical world demands it. Limitation of the real is that it seems designed to keep things apart because you can’t have two things in the same place in the same time.

E.g. real estate on a newspaper – someone makes the decision of what goes where and that person has the power. Org charts are the same sort of thing, we like tree-like structures, thought that they were a natural order, but that’s not quite true. But they are quite powerful and we use them for business.

But how we think about our information, in categories, and sub-categories, but the sad truth about the trees is that they sort the world the way we sort our laundry: have a big lump of stuff, and then split by person, by body part, by style. but you have to make a decision as to which pile you’re going to put stuff in. this limitation that requires us to do this we’ve imported into how we sort information.

It’s a sad thing that we have assumed that the way to think about how the world is organised suffers from the same limitations as our laundry when we go to sort it.

But now we are digitising everything, so there is a third order of order in which everything is digital: the data, the content, the metadata.

Principle that changes:
– leaf can be on many branches, photographic equipment can go on to many virtual shelves. Messy, but that’s good. Messiness in the real world is a disaster, but online it’s
great – more links the better. Messiness enriches online, so long as we can sort through it. – tracking visitors to your website is very hard to do, your customers are messy.
– less difference between metadata and data; almost whole books are online, so everything now is metadata, the difference is metadata is what you know, data is what you don’t know but are looking for. If everything is metadata we just got smarter, if your business isn’t taking advantage of this, you have a boost coming, but requires letting go of control.
– unowned order; if you go to a real-world store, and you get everything that’s your size and made a big pile, they’d throw you out. Online, you want just what’s your size, you’d leave a site that showed you stuff that wasn’t. Control this by tagging and plastic classification or user ratings.

We’ve operated under the principle that you get some experts, they do the filtering, and then we look at their conclusions. But now we’re pulling the leaves off the trees, making a huge messy pile, associating metadata, enriching it all, and let the users postpone the moment that organisation happens until they know what they want to organise. Let them see the relationships which were invisible before.

E.g. Real estate site with map mashups with crime, or politics, or bus routes, or Starbucks proximity, or graveyards, or dog parks, flight paths, or where intersections of these things are. Knew someone who wanted to live under flight paths, so you can’t tell what people want, so give them everything and let them decide. So make it miscellaneous.

This is about authority, trust, fallibility. Institutions that have garnered authority over time, that people trust. Encyclopaedia Britannica, vs. Wikipedia. Why would you believe what Wikipedia says? Well you might know a bit about the topic, or look at the discussion pages, or how many edits there have been. But Wikipedia encourages you to put up notices if you see something wrong, .e.g. has ‘weasel words’, or reads like an ad, or is not objective…

Wikipedia is more credible because it’s willing to admit its fallibility. But you’ll never see them in the NY Times, because they are in the business of being authoritative. Businesses find admission of fallibility very hard to grasp, despite knowing that it is.

Wikipedia is not the only example of this – also present in every mailing list. Discussion expands the knowledge, and mailing list collectively is smarter than any individual within it. Knowledge is social, always was of course, but now it’s unavoidable. Conversations with suppliers, customers, etc.

But it’s not enough already. Ok, it’s been 10 years, but we’re not far enough along. Keep having major revolutions, these are big changes, it’s not hype, it’s right at the heart of knowledge, authority, trust, and how it’s smudging the supply chain, the org chart. We are reshaping business, whether we like it or not. Business is changing from being ‘theirs’, to the remaking of knowledge and authority that is ours.

I’m off to a couple of conferences next week. First up is Enterprise 2.0, where I will be talking about the use of blogs and wikis in business, alongside Chris Alden from Six Apart; Oliver Young from Forrester Research, Inc; Sam Weber from KnowNow; and moderated by Stowe Boyd. The session is on Tuesday, and starts at 2.30. Sadly I’m only in town from Sunday night until Wednesday morning, so will miss much of the conference, but if you see me around please do stop me and say hello.

On Wednesday, I fly over to San Francisco for Supernova on Thursday and Friday. I’ll be blogging it obsessively over on ConversationHub, so if you’re interested please do subscribe to the RSS over there. I’ll be in town until the morning of 28th and again, feel free to say hi if you see me.

Looking forward to the trip and to meeting a lot of interesting people whilst I’m travelling!

In May I announced that I was going to be blogging over on Conversation Hub, the Supernova conference blog, and whilst my schedule got in the way to start with, I think I’m now getting into the swing of things there. It’s always strange writing on a group blog with lots of people you don’t know, but it’s a good opportunity to read and respond to people I might otherwise not have come across. Here’s a summary of my posts so far:

• The multilingual web – I talk to Stephanie Booth about the difficulties of making the web mirror our real-world use of language.
• The unintentional social network – constructing social networks from publicly available data.
• Our old friend, the social network – We’ve always had social networks in business, just now they are explicit.
• Playing with numbers – Will the 1% Rule suffer the same fate as the Pareto Principle and end up overused, abused and misunderstood?

I’ll be blogging more on ConversationHub in the run up to Supernova, so do pop over there and take a look!