A lost soul – What will I do without Enterprise 2.0?

So now that I have left the church, walked out and declared my apostasy while throwing up my arms, what will I do? Where will I find meaning?

The passing of Enterprise 2.0 has been redeeming for me. I can now set out, with Pablo and Rocinante by my side, to tell this story.

Here is what I will evangelize quietly, in hushed conversations and late night phone calls:

People can be happy, and there is an economic model for happiness.
I always preface this with “it sounds cheesy”, but it’s a fact of a good use of social software in the enterprise. When people learn to discover eachother, when someone finds their voice or is seen as an expert, there is a fulfillment that the accomplishment culture of a typical organization can’t match.

Your vendor is only as good as you are.
Remember when buying software was simple? IT did the analysis, you could let a manager make the final decision, then you signed off on it.

Those were simple times.

You see, if you want to be successful with social computing in your organization — you have to bet on it and not look back. The fallacy that most vendors want you to believe is that you can simply buy their software, and that will change something about your organization. Come by the Demo Pavilion here in Boston and you’ll see what I mean.

What does it mean to bet on it? You first have to get comfortable with it yourself, understand not just the argument or the analysis, but you have to fully connect with the essence of what you are going to be asking of people. You want them to be open, but what are you doing?

The most interesting organizations are the “old” ones
Supply Chains, Accounting, Product Development, Training, HR. Some of the most boring parts of organizations are quickly showing up as the most opportune places to do worthwhile things.

Helping a bunch of software developers write a spec on a wiki is, I am afraid, not much fun and doesn’t fundamentally change the bottom line of an organization (not that it doesn’t, it is a cost savings after all, but it’s not dramatic enough to show up at a board meeting, at least not what I have seen).

You can’t plan this stuff, try as you might
A very energetic “Enterprise -.- Evangelist” spoke out from the crowd during a panel session yesterday here at the Enterprise -.- conference. She was emphatic that, with the right strategy and process, you could have your entire organization adopt Enterprise -.- technologies. The same person also suggested that the Chief Knowledge Officer was the best place to go to get funds for your Enterprise 2.0 project.

At the core of Enterprise Social Computing, at the center of blogging and the ethos of Open Space is the idea that things emerge.

• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over

How then do you plan the result of an emergent idea? All we can do is plan for emergence, which means that we can set up a supportive environment in which new ideas can grow. That is different from setting expectations. If you expect new products to get developed, then they probably will. If you expect teams to use social software to collaborate, then you will probably find that they do, but was that the best thing they could have done? You’ll never know, because you over-planned the whole thing.

You are an influencer, no matter who you are
You are not a manager, you are not a CEO, you are not a marketer, you are not a cook, a waitress, a cashier or a chairman.

None of those titles accomplish anything anymore. In a flattened organization, you only have your influence, and you have to earn and maintain that influence.

No matter what level you sit at in your organization today, you can influence people. There are stories to tell, ideas to spread and lunches to eat. Get to it. Ask people what they think your organization would be like without Management. Ask them what it would be like if everyone was Management.

There is more, but this is getting long.

If you twitter but twitter is down, did you twitter at all?

I am getting a lot of sideways looks these days. It’s not because I am wearing an eye patch, or telling people I am joining Tom Cruise’s church. I am getting all of these sideways looks because people want to know why I twitter.

My Answer? I don’t know. It just sort of is what it is, and I think that definition changes from person to person.

A lot of the questions I get are the same questions I used to get when people were first hearing about blogging. “Why do you do it?“, “I am really too busy for that.”, “But I don’t want to know what you are thinking every second of every day.”

People who “don’t get” Twitter are just as varied and unpredictable as those who do seem to get it. They aren’t idiots, just curious.

So, again, Why do I twitter? I don’t know, but I do know that it has made a small number of my relationships incredibly strong. It is how Rob and I keep in touch. Johnnie Moore may be over the ocean in the UK, but he now occupies the same “friends nearby” place in my mind that all of my Toronto and Charlottetown friends do. Tim Eby is a friend and the Chairman of a client of ours. Todd Mundt is someone I have formed a relationship with almost completely via Twitter. He’s an interesting guy, doing things I am interested in, so I follow what he does in little bits as he reveals them.

In the way that blogging used to, Twitter also cuts down on the preamble of conversation. Between Twitter and Blogging, you have a sense of who a person is and what they are about.

Why should you twitter?

Don’t bother. I am too busy to listen to you whine all day.

I am cutting Enterprise 2.0 from my vocabulary

This conference has made it painfully clear that the term Enterprise 2.0 has no discernible value at all. The label simply means everything and nothing all at once. It has become a something that people want to add to their recipes.

Microsoft became Enterprise 2.0 this morning and it is the biggest load of bullshit I have heard in ages (and News.com goes and gushes over it).

I am sitting here in a session, which has a great panel (including Ross Mayfield), and I am sure that if you asked for everyone who was an Enterprise 2.0 expert to raise their hand, the whole room would jump out of their seat with their hand in the air.

I know I couldn’t raise my hand. Could you?

I have been working on bringing social computing in to enterprises for almost 5 years, and guys like Euan have been at it longer. Fantastic minds have been thinking about it for years, and every one of those people, who I regard as the real experts — they are all the first to admit that they are not experts. We don’t know anything, we just know that we need to find ways to give up control.

Enterprise 2.0, the term, isn’t about giving up, it’s not about seeing your organization in a new way, it’s not about happier and more fulfilled people. The term now means technology.

The idea that you can take a particular piece of software and put it in to an enterprise and that it will make your company better, or more efficient, or more profitable, is a very industrial mentality.

Buy a better machine and reduce your costs? More widgets, faster?

No.

Lasting change in organizations happens in spite of fads not because of them.

Welcome Back.

At E20Conference: Andrew McAfee

Andrew is going to give Enterprise 2.0 a grade, just like he gives his students at school.

He says “Grade A”. “Remarkable Progress” and a growing awareness of Social Software.

Andrew’s Meme’s of Enterprise 2.0 are:

• * Network Effects
• * Freeform Authoring
• * Emergence

Lots of rehashing the core Enterprise Social Computing ideas. Covering Wikipedia, with references to SocialText.

Technology
Andrew is now giving a grade for the technology side of Enterprise 2.0. Grade A-. “Excellent Progress”.

Perhaps this is more of that famous Harvard grade inflation?

He points to startups as a source of great technology, but is also giving the incumbents a lot of thanks and respect.

The biggest problem is that new tools need to be 9X better than email. “when you are proposing a replacement, we tend to overweight the relative advantages of the incumbent technology by a factor of 3. We tend to underweight the new technology by another factor of 3″

Communicating Results
Andrew says “I give it a C”. We aren’t communicating results well enough. We all have a store of case studies, but aren’t getting them out there. One of the dangers we fall in to is to keep referencing the same case studies over and over again.

“Spotty progress”

Andrew sees a lot of case studies, and he’s never seen an ROI claimed to be less than 100%.

Proposal from Andrew: We need an Enterprise 2.0 Repository for Enterprise 2.0 Efforts.

• * Disclosure is key
• * Vendors can participate
• * Have some ground rules

Andrew is now recapping the last year. He says he has learned a lot. He used to think that people who made friends online were “pathetic”, but he doesn’t think that anymore. He used to think that blogs were for teenager’s diaries. He’s learned all this in the last year.

“Enterprise 2.0 is not going to radically change organizations in the 5 years. That is way to optimistic.”

Interesting. Andrew really showed his young age in all this, having not participated in the blogosphere in a real way until late in the game. Could that have an effect on his lack of optimism for the progress that Enterprise 2.0 can make? Or is Andrew just more realistic than those of us who have already been at this for 5 years?

Mozy Along

Mozy is not a poweruser’s backup solution, but it fits my needs perfectly.

I have been looking for a simple, unobtrusive and rock-solid backup utility. The key features for me are that I can select individual directories and files to backup, and the restore utility is web-based, so if my computer dies completely, it will be easy to get back up and running.

The other feature I like is that Mozy does all of the backup via the internet, and you get 4gb of storage for free (which is all I need). This keeps me from having to manage backup DVDs as I had been doing before, and I don’t really like the idea of an external drive much better.

(disclosure: the links to the Mozy site include my referrer ID, which will give me additional backup space if you sign up — I have no other affiliation with them, other than that I am a user)

Mashable overtakes Techcrunch

Mashable seems to have overtaken Techcrunch, according to compete.com at least.

Interested?

Consulting Counterculture Conversation

I didn’t really feel like responding to this today, but Stowe took the time to respond and covered what I wanted to point out, especially the misunderstand about why the big consulting companies won’t get it (not that they can’t try).

Alan Patrick has posted a thoughtful response to the discussion started by Jevon McDonald, and joined by Euan Semple, about a new model for consulting, which Jevon (gasp) dares to call Consulting 2.0. Read the Rest Here »

The Next Big Thing

UFit is a completely new kind of fitness company.

If you know the owners, Gord and Eireann, at all, you know that they really don’t care about profits and are not driven by ego. Gord and Eireann really just care about helping people get healthy. I know this for real, because I worked with them for a short period of time on the UFit business, and I couldn’t even convince them to raise their rates! Oh well, my experience is that Gord and Eireann usually make the best decision for their business.

Rob is now helping out and they are on the verge of a breakthrough. UFit is a real life community that is slowly moving online, and once they are really online, they are going to grow faster than ever.

The more they talked, and I tried to just sit and listen, it became obvious that any remaining formal communications from head office had become completely useless. Each time one was discussed, it was noted that “those typically lag a couple weeks behind the forum discussions and people get really frustrated with them”.

Read it all on the FASTForward Blog »