The Conversation Group

I was speaking with someone last night who was attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco who was complaining about how Microsoft has managed to achieve remarkable success with their SharePoint product despite being inferior to start ups like Jive. He then asked if I was attending E2 to which I blithely replied "no, I don't really care about the technology wars." Which is true but incomplete. The more complete answer would have been, "technology is merely the medium we move through in order to get the really interesting things done."

And technology is increasingly a ubiquitous and all encompassing medium.

If businesses were people, technology would be the air they breath. Communications, data collection, decision making systems, etc -- everything a company does is mediated by some kind of technology and this is only accelerating. As more and more information is collected the need for systems which help us use this information become ever more essential.

The most effective companies will be the ones that have the most effective information systems. So I am really not worried about Microsoft wasting people's money with SharePoint -- the companies that use that technology will suffer the consequences. And the businesses that understand the geek-centric reality of 21st century business will succeed. Over time companies like Google, Amazon, and Akamai will teach us to use really good technology to build our businesses. Even Microsoft is beginning to understand -- how do you think Bing works? On Linux servers run by Akamai of course.

So I won't bother with "enterprise 2.0" which has become a writhing pit of technology vendors trying to insult our intelligence with ridiculous claims about their products, and instead I will continue to focus on real business problems and their solutions, safe in knowing that ultimately the best technology will win out because it will create the most value for the smartest companies -- that is, the geek shall inherit the earth.

Watch this TED talk video of David Logan on tribal leadership and then look around your own organization. What stage are you and your co-workers operating at? Stage 2 where you hate the world? Or "stabilizing at Stage four", like Zappos? Or are you at Stage 5 and changing the world? And what can you do to move your organization up this ladder?

Tribes are a critical organizational model that we naturally adopt, whether explicitly or implicitly, in our interactions with others. Understanding tribal behavior and working more directly on improving our tribes is key to developing high performance organizations. And if David Logan is right, it might also be the key to changing the world.

Clive Thompson in a 2008 NY Times Magazine article reported on how "ambient awareness" is enriching our social lives as we have instant access to more and more real time information about our friends and colleagues I'm so Digitally Close to You). The rapid increase in the number of information sources, the speed new information is being generated, and the quantity of information available is equally impacting business processes from product development to marketing to customer service. In my consulting work this is one of the key technology shifts that I see companies struggling with as they re-examine how data is gathered to support decision making. Redesigning business processes to incorporate business intelligence from ambient sources will be a key part of redesigning companies over the next decade.

(This blog post is an excerpt from a long white paper that I am currently writing which I will post in its entirety when complete)

The term ambient intelligence (or AmI) was, according to Wikipedia, first used by Brian Epstein of Palo Alto Ventures in 1998 in a workshop for Philips on the future of consumer electronics. The world they and others began to describe had a set of key technology trends that together created a fundamental shift in the way we interact with the physical world including miniaturization, wireless communications, software platforms for distributed systems, improved human-computer interfaces, the general robustness of autonomous systems and a continuing reduction in cost for the deployment and maintenance of such systems

These researchers envisioned a world that by 2020 thoroughly connected people with their environments as sensors, transmitters and other devices became increasingly inexpensive to deploy, easier to program, and more connected. Ambient information systems can be generalized as following this common pattern: (1) the translation of the inherent information in our environment, such as the speed of passing traffic, into digital information via a sensor; (2) the transmission of this data through a computer network; (3) use and presentation of this data by a human or machine process (for example, traffic statistics super-imposed over an online map). I'll use the term "lens" to denote any system which is aggregating, analyzing, and presenting this data.

A simple example of this can be seen in the automated toll systems now in use in many western countries. A small transmitter placed in an automobile uniquely identifies the vehicle to a toll sensor, allowing the driver to be automatically charged a use fee as he drives past some fixed point on the roadway. In this case the lens is a machine process designed to associate the location of a specific vehicle with a financial transaction to be processed against a specific driver's account.

Augmented reality systems currently in their first consumer deployments through mobile phones also offer a glimpse at the human side of this coming world of ubiquitous information-rich interactions. The combination of a set of sensors including a digital camera, GPS, and a compass into a portable device with Internet connectivity allows information about an individual's environment to be retrieved as he moves from one place to another. Here the lens is a visual human-computer interface made possible through the video display of the digital device.

In just the same way that the physical world can be instrumented, detected, and thus better understood we can also instrument the virtual environments in which we are now increasingly communicating and conducting business. As Thompson points out, the innovation of Facebook's "news feed" in 2006 was not in the creation of new information but in the way that information was surfaced to Facebook users.

Facebook had already created a system in which inherent information about people's activities ("Tim and Lisa broke up") was being captured through the human sensor network of its users. The news feed suddenly provided a lens through which one could consume all of this information easily, providing users with a tool for comprehending larger quantities of data and presumable making decisions (I guess I should call Tim or Lisa...) and, as Thompson reports, startling and upsetting people who hadn't thought through the implications of putting this information online.

In the same way the inherent information in our business environments is increasingly being collected and stored online. Past Amazon CTO Andreas Weigend enjoys pointing out to clients that "more information will be created and stored this year than in every prior year in human history." Businesses must implement the right sensors for collecting and transmitting and the right lenses for aggregating, analyzing, and presenting this information.

For example, for a B2B client we recently added online social profiles to the set of information that sales people have about prospects as they try to follow up on initial product inquiries. Having more information available about that particular individual measurably increases the likelihood that the sales person can reach a prospect and have a meaningful conversation. But almost as important is how this information is informing the process of deciding who to contact in the first place.

Sophisticated sales organizations have long implemented "scoring" mechanisms for trying to decide who their most interesting potential prospects are within a given list. A weakness in these systems is that much of the information used for such scores is self-reported by the prospects (size of company, title, industry group, etc). Thus the ambient intelligence about these prospects -- the data they are creating all of the time as the use various online services -- can be significantly more useful in assessing the relative value of one prospect versus another.

Another example, marketing organizations are increasingly aware of the vast number of customers talking about their companies and products. Communications teams are establishing "listening posts" (sensor networks) to aggregate this information. Too often this information stops at an evaluation of "influencers" who can then be targeted for media campaigns. We have helped organizations recognize that key product insights, support issues, and other business processes can be informed by the collection of this ambient intelligence from the marketplace.

These are a set of ideas which we are only just beginning to understand about how business will change over the coming decade. When researchers began to define ambient intelligence a decade ago, they envisioned "...a world in 2020 where user-friendly devices support ubiquitous information, communication and entertainment." We can now see that the same technology trends impacting consumer products will also radically transform business processes and decision making. The most advanced companies have already begun using sensors to collect relevant information from their environments and are developing lenses to use this information in their activities. The development of these systems will be critical to competitiveness in the 21st century.

An increasing number of people are talking about how social technologies -- social media, social networks, collaboration, reviews, crowd sourcing, etc -- are impacting our understanding of how organizations should be structured and how employees should be recruited, managed, and rewarded. On Wednesday of last week I presented an initial paper in London on this subject, based on my work with companies over the past decade or so: Open Management (opens PDF on Scribd website).

The last 10 years? Yes, in May of 2000 I joined Borland as its Chief Strategy Officer and had the pleasure of working with Doc Searls (one of the four authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto) who was working as a consultant to the company. Borland had decided to develop an open source development tools product, (Kylix for those of you who might wonder) and Doc had been retained to help the company understand the Linux "community" whatever that was!

As a technology firm working with software developers Borland already had a long history of using online forums to connect with customers. But I think it is fair to say that the experience of bringing a Linux product to market significantly increased our awareness of a new dynamic between companies and their markets. This has led me on a decade long exploration of social media, social networks, and a variety of other tools which I broadly group together under the name "social technologies." Social, not because it they are about fun but because they are about people doing things with other people. In other words, social as in sociology.

And organizations, especially corporations, are one of the most interesting places to study human social behavior. For generations now we have relied upon hierarchical structures to facilitate the coordination required for large numbers of people to act together. Now technology is offering an alternative to hierarchy, one which is proving to offer significant competitive advantages to early adopters, open source being one clear example.

In taking "open" as my label for this movement I seek to focus on the difference emerging from our twentieth century business constructs. All business is "social" -- but the 21st century will see an increasing number of open business models -- open management, open communications, open source, open support, open product development, open research... It is a great time to rethink assumptions and consider alternatives to everything we know in business!

While TCG partner Haydn Shaughnessy has kindly attributed co-author status to me, I can hardly say that I did more than a few edits and act as a sounding board for this terrific essay - "Five Ideas That Matter" (link opens the document on Scribd) in which he introduces the idea of metatrends. Here I have reproduced the introduction in the hopes that this may intrigue you and you'll follow the link to read the whole paper:

"As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close it’s clear that there are profound changes underway in the systems that govern and condition our lives.

The World Wide Web offers an opportunity to uncover where people's ideas and sentiments are headed and what they think about those changes. Never before have we had instant access to 8 billion pages worth of thoughts, ideas, or belief. The trouble is, as designer Matt Webb recently remarked, we have already passed the point where our attention can keep track of what is knowable and memorable. We need more shorthand.

This document is a deliberately brief guide to ideas on the web. In it we put forward a new research methodology and conceptual framework for dealing with the web’s data stream – the METATREND. Metatrends are, we hope, a shorthand for understanding change - as perceived by many millions of people.

A Metatrend is a trend that is parsed through the prism of web opinion and attitude. In place of a guru’s vision of we propose subjecting expert analysis and trend watching to social dialogue.

What we present is a first approach to seeing trends through the eyes of people who routinely blog, comment, tweet and search the web.

Why bother? Apart from the desirability of understanding large-scale opinion, in a parallel project The Conversation Group is witnessing increased interest in ideas such as creative destruction and system renewal, indications that people are seeking a new description for their experience and aspirations.

That search should be central to the business planning of any company or Government because it represents a changing mindset, and a new approach to production and marketing, of products, services and ideas.

Here we've had our first go at defining one element of that change. It's an ongoing project. Eventually we hope the project will help leaders, corporate and political, to create the messages, product and policies that respond to what people are seeking."

Continue reading "Five Ideas That Matter"