DIG countdown begins

The DIG conference begins next week. Personally, I can’t wait to be part of a three day conversation that focuses on DATA, INFORMATION, and KNOWLEDGE as key enablers to better business decision-making. For sure, the “fast company” of my concern is the one that marries solid business facts with the mobilizing energy of mass collaboration. The possibilities are quite exhilarating!

I will be the facilitator of the E2.0 (knowledge) theme of the conference. In this theme, we will be exploring the opportunity and the application of E2.0 tools to drive business value within our enterprises. We are fortunate to have E2.0 veterans, Euan Semple and R. Todd Stephens, joining us to share both their practical experiences and their seasoned insights on the business value of E2.0 tools and applications within world class corporations (ATT and BBC). Both have success stories to share but, of even more interest to me, they have the battle wounds of practical experience to really dig into the topic. Also, we will have a keynote presentation by Andrew McAfee who is recognized for coining the term E2.0! What a line up.

Noting the fact that we plan to have a Twitter event connection to post everyone’s live comments and questions, I hope that we can really have an open and honest dialog that enables each of us who attend to come away with a deeper perspective on E2.0 and an expanded network to draw upon down the road.

Here are the some of the topics that we will discuss.
1) Business value of Social Computing
2) Integration of Analytics within E2.0 – Are we doing it? What is it yielding?
3) Is E2.0 bringing us closer to our Customers?
4) What is the dependent relationship between Culture and E2.0?
5) Is there a maturity model to E2.0 adoption?
6) Can a company really ignore the onslaught of Web 2.0?
7) …and what are the success stories that we should be studying!

Our only task is to bring a good attitude into the dialog. I hope that you will come with an open and inquisitive mind – a mind that is ready to listen, to poke, and to prod. The bottom line is that this conference is all about being “part of the dialog” so let’s have some fun with it.

See you there and please introduce yourself. Safe travels if you are coming from out of state. Let the conversation flow.

Knowledge Harvests!

Knowledge Harvests - what a great term! Authors Katrina Pugh and Nancy Dixon define a “knowledge harvest as a systematic, facilitated gathering and circulation of knowledge”. I stumbled upon their article on the topic in the May edition of HBR (Harvard Business Review). It was in the Forethought section of the magazine which looks at ideas and trends on the business horizon. Let me recap my now limited understanding of a knowledge harvest and then offer some thoughts on its challenge to us as we seek to leverage E2.0.

From their short article, I believe that a knowledge harvest is a simple but purposeful and interactive approach to a postmortem analysis or debriefing. The basic idea is that the intentional review of a business occurrence or process will yield helpful information or insights for the future; hence - a knowledge harvest!

However, there is a twist. The authors say that the first step in the process is to recruit a set of “knowledge seekers” who want to learn from the harvest. They go on to characterize these people.

Because seekers are self-interested, they ask tough, exploratory questions of knowledge originators, extracting important nuances – not only about how a project was executed but also about how costs built up, how knowledge might be applied elsewhere, what worked and what didn’t, and so on.

A knowledge facilitator leads these seekers through a process of interacting with the knowledge originators to derive key information and valued insights. The knowledge facilitator then works with the seeker to package the content and distribute it around the company.
My question is whether or not our E2.0 applications are focused enough on these knowledge seekers. Do we have people who are clearly articulating what they need to know in order to do their jobs better? Do our apps help to connect these knowledge seekers with the appropriate knowledge originators within the business? I have a feeling that a lot of our Web 2.0 content is produced by knowledge facilitators who are doing screen scrapes from knowledge originators with no idea whatsoever of the needs of knowledge seekers! What do you think?

I do believe that we have the tools and technologies but I’m not sure that we have them working together to support this interesting approach of a knowledge harvest.

100% committed

When thinking about E2.o and social computing, the question we must ask is: Are we getting the most that we can from the people in our business and from its community? Do we have 100% of their energy and imagination? Mobilizing people and teams is the aim of E2.o.

Several articles/posts from the past few weeks push on this very topic. The McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) published an article on Innovation lessons from Pixar which highlights how Brad Bird, Pixar’s Oscar-winning director, motivates his people by including them in the dialog. Fast Company spoke with Gartner researcher, Tom Austin, about how IT’s Not about the Technology but rather information technology is about leveraging the people. And Susan Scrupski posted her comments in SocailMediaToday on Corporate Antisocial Behavior: the Enemy is Us.

Each of these articles pushes us, in one way or another, to focus on the key driver behind business success – motivated teams of people. People are paramount to making things happen. E2.o tools are technologies that magnify and broadcast the culture that empowers people.

I see three opportunities in E2.o
1) Get people talking about the business - E2.o can highlight and build conversation around the “social objects” of a business. In my last post, I spoke about social objects. These are the things that allow people to connect and be in dialog. In business, these objects are things like business goals, customer wants, or new innovations.
2) Get the facts to the people - E2.o can reduce what I call the perception gap between what you think is happening in the business and what is actually happening in the business. Once facts are clear, true dialog and problem solving begins to occur. E2.o tools can integrate business intelligence into the mainstream business conversations. These same tools can then be used to solve problems collaboratively by tapping both experts' thoughts and front line operators' experiences into creative solutions.
3) Equip people with a contextual understanding of the business - E2.o can provide a more holistic understanding of a business. Through these tools, people are exposed to and vicariously taught about tangential yet pertinent topics beyond their specialized skills. This broader knowledge gives these folks the insight to act or respond with a systems-thinking mindset that is coherent with the overall business. In this way, people are more naturally prepared to act in manner that supports and adapts the business the their changing marketplace.

All three of these benefits of E2.o foster a more pronounced business culture - good or bad.

Do you agree?

Social Objects for Business Conversation

Recently, I have been intrigued by this idea of “social objects” - as the basis for driving the success of E2.o applications. I first heard of the term just a few months back on Hugh Macleod’s blog. I have since looked around for more information and really enjoyed watching Jyri Engestrom’s lecture on social objects as used within social computing platforms. The conference video is out on YouTube. It seems that Jyri, the founder of Jaiku, has been instrumental in bringing the idea to life.

MacLeod defines Social Objects as “The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that "node" in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.”

Honestly, I don’t know if I had ever thought about the idea before seeing these posts – but it seems to make a lot of sense. It’s certainly true for me. There exists some social object in the mix most every time I talk to my friends or colleagues. It might be a movie. It could be a baseball game. It could be a friend’s job situation. It could be a finance report. The bottom line is that “social objects” are the basis for most all of my conversations. It’s a fascinating concept if you think about it.

The idea got me thinking. What are the typical social objects within business conversation? What social objects attract the most attention and could become the basis for a robust conversation? It would seem to me that these objects could be the obvious building blocks of a productive corporate social network or social computing application. Here’s my informal list from a 5 minute brainstorm. I have put an “x” next to the Top 10 form my perspective!

Variable compensation plans
Performance objectives
Market factors
Executive Leaders (x)
Management (x)
Strategy
Mission statement
Values
Culture (x)
Norms (x)
Office environment (x)
Corporate Communications (x)
Brand
Public Advertising
Performance Review Process (x)
Benefits Package
Finance function
IT function (x)
Budgeting Process (x)
Key initiatives (x)
Budget variance explanations
Forecasting assumptions
Customer needs
Customer experience
Parking
Lunch destination

MacLeod goes on to say, “The thing to remember is, Human beings do not socialize in a completely random way. There’s a tangible reason for us being together, that ties us together. Again, that reason is called the Social Object. Social Networks form around Social Objects, not the other way around.”

I wonder. I just wonder what it takes to influence and/or transform the core social objects within our business conversations? At first glance, I would suspect that we would be better off if the top few objects in our business dialog were the following:

Customer needs
Customer experience
Strategy
Performance objectives

As an aside, in thinking back to my many years of consulting, I must say that there is only one client where I remember hearing this last set of “social objects” integrated into almost every conversation. It was WalMart! I wonder what that is saying?

Can you think of other social objects that I have missed? What are your thoughts on the topic? Please drop me your comments.

Shifting Mindsets on BI

Pete Graham recently wrote a post on Using Business Intelligence in E2.0 that challenged each of us to bring business intelligence (BI) into the business conversation (verses creating a business conversation around BI). It was a prickly role reversal for those of us who like to look at the information value chain in a linear fashion beginning with data: data -> information -> knowledge (picture below of basic analytical information systems strategy). However, he provided a gentle but persuasive reminder that our mental mindsets and diagrams need to shift.

Let me explain. The idea of information and its use within business is an old idea, but its mastery reigns rather elusive. There are three core competencies that need to be achieved: Data IN, Information OUT, & Knowledge AROUND.

Data IN
Every time something happens within a business, there exists the opportunity for us to capture a piece of “data” that records its occurrence. For instance, when someone walks into a retail outlet, their visit can be recorded with a date stamp and time stamp. When the visitor buys a greeting card, the transaction is stored, inventory is marked down, and cash can be credited. If the person happens to pay by credit card, the purchase is tagged with the person’s card number. If the customer scanned their loyalty card, the transaction is immediately tagged with their profile information - and on and on. We could go on to name thousands of activities that are tracked within our organizations. These transactions let us know that something has happened!

This is not surprising. We live in a digital world where many of our actions are recorded. The challenge for businesses is to store this point-in-time data in a timely fashion and in such a way that it can be accessed quickly and easily in the future. I call this exercise, the “Data IN” process. This is the opportunity for our organizations to capture all of the happenings within our business ecosystem. Unfortunately, this raw data is unwieldly to the average business person.

Information OUT
Therefore, an organization is tasked with putting this data into context so that users can see an evolving narrative about their business. This narrative helps us to understand the what, when, and how of our businesses and their performance within the marketplace. We get to see the single occurrence (or piece of data) with the context of the business story. This process of transforming data into “information” is invaluable and gives us the digestible analytics to manage, measure, and improve our businesses.

Getting “Information OUT” is achieved by answering both traditional and current business questions with information about the past or with forecasts about the future.

Knowledge AROUND
The last piece of the information value chain is to seize the Aha! moments and business insights and push them out to the organization. For instance, a store manager who sees a declining trend in her customer base may realize that a profound shift is taking place in her market. With the combination of some analytical reporting and some field observation, she may notice that a local competitor has cut deeply into her customer base. This “knowledge” needs to be shared with her organization so that other store managers can prevent a similar decline and so functional groups within the organization can support or assist with planning a response (or change to the business). Our companies have a need to easily and quickly share insights throughout the organization, or broadcast “Knowledge AROUND”.

Today’s E2.0 tools have brought renewed energy to the business conversation represented by the Knowledge AROUND piece of the value chain. Tools like blogging, microblogging, wikis, prediction markets, etc… are democratizing the voice of the market facing parts of our organizations! This is exciting because it allows the conversation that is happening out in the field – between the people in the field and the market (customers, vendors, etc… ) to more effectively influence the information value chain. To Pete’s point, at the beginning of this post, our organizations need to bring BI into the business conversation. If we do, we have the opportunity to consistently adapt to fulfill the needs of our changing markets.

Let’s keep thinking about the paradigm shifts required to bring BI to E2.o. What do you think? What topics should we be discussing?

Centre Pompidou as an E2.o Analogy!

I'll begin with my conclusion. The transparency enabled by E2.o could unleash a thrust of unstoppable execution within our organizations. Do we dare? Can we handle it? Let me share my thoughts.

In the recent April 2008 HBR piece by David Collins and Michael Rukstad titled, Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?, the authors offer the following visualization of the importance of having a clearly articulated strategy:

Think of a major business as a mound of 10,000 iron filings, each one representing an employee. If you scoop up that many filings and drop them onto a piece of paper, they’ll be pointing in every direction. It will be a big mess: 10,000 smart people working hard and making what they think are the right decisions for the company—but with the net result of confusion…

If you pass a magnet over those filings, what happens? They line up. Similarly, a well-understood statement of strategy aligns behavior within the business. It allows everyone in the organization to make individual choices that reinforce one another, rendering those 10,000 employees exponentially more effective.

The article goes on to delineate the elements of a clear strategy and outlines both the analysis and supporting documents that should be shared throughout one’s organization to take advantage of that strategy (you should also check out Dave Norton and Bob Kaplan's Strategy Map). Collins and Rukstad then make some observations that scream E2.o. However, I believe that there is an oversight (my opinion!) that pulls up shy of the true opportunity that we have. The article reads:

The process of developing the strategy and then crafting the statement that captures its essence in a readily communicable manner should involve employees in all parts of the company and at all levels of the hierarchy. The wording of the strategy statement should be worked through in painstaking detail. In fact, that can be the most powerful part of the strategy development process. It is usually in heated discussions over the choice of a single word that a strategy is crystallized and executives truly understand what it will involve.

The authors begin the preceeding vignette talking about employees in all parts of the company helping to develop the strategy and, then, they end the same paragraph with only "the executives being involved in the heated discussions" that allow them [executives] to truly internalize what the strategy will involve? Is there no way that we can allow the heated discussions to be transparent throughout the organization?

Imagine if we could have the good, the bad, and the ugly of the strategy dialog open to the organization - like the Centre Pompidou in Paris – where all of the supporting structure and systems, such as the escalators, are exposed to the outside world.

Color-coded ducts are attached to the building's west façade... blue for air, green for fluids, yellow for electricity cables and red for movement and flow. The transparency of the west main façade allows people to see what is going on inside the centre from the piazza, a vast esplanade that the architects conceived of as an area of continuity, linking the city and the centre. [quote link - Centre Pompidou website, picture link - Wikipedia]

I can only dream of being in an organization that is designed to run itself with the transparency and intentionality to always “link the city and the centre”. I believe that a liberal use of E2.o applied to the strategy development process could lead to a profound mobilization of the human capital within our organizations. But I understand the fears that run wild within our corporations -> our competitiors will get our information!

As Andrew McAfee concludes at the end of a post in 2006 on E2.o Insecurities,

Imagine two competitors, one of which has the guiding principle "keep security risks and discoverability to a minimum," the other of which is guided by the rule "make it as easy as possible for people to collaborate and access each others' expertise." Both put in technology infrastructures appropriate for their guiding principles. Take all IT, legal, and leak-related costs into account. Which of these two comes out ahead over time? I know which one I'm betting on.

In conclusion, the transparency enabled by E2.o could unleash a thrust of unstoppable execution within our organizations. Do you agree?

What do you think? Have you seen any real-life successes in "open strategy" dialog, please tell us.

E2.o as the Catalyst for Organizational Evolution

Last month, Fast Company’s Fast 50 highlighted Google as the top selection in their list of the world’s most innovative companies. This past weekend, I read through Harvard Business Review’s April 2008 cover story titled Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine by Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport.

Noting these two recent cover stories from two of the more popular business management periodicals of our day, I would say that Google has captured the attention of the best of today’s business management minds. We are preoccupied with the company because they are unflinchingly trying (successfully at that) to manage complexity using a nontraditional management approach - an approach which encourages flexibility and widespread experimentation in the face of chaos. The HBR article goes on to highlight six traits that Google has embraced to “Build Innovation into Organizational Design”.

The article states, “Innovating on internet time requires dynamic capabilities to anticipate market changes and offer new products and functions quickly. Google has made substantive investments in developing the capacity to innovate successfully in this fast-changing business environment. The company is pioneering approaches to organizational culture and innovation processes …”

One of the six traits that the article highlights is Google’s ability to “Use Data to Vet Inspiration”. The company is known to be very analytical but the article cites their advanced use of both internal prediction markets (300) and an idea management system to vet their thoughts. Google is using the foremost of E2.o tools to democratize the management input process and to fully harness the intellectual capital of their entire company.

This makes Google very interesting to me. First because I am an advocate of E2.o and want to study any business that is attempting to incorporate social computing to augment business management!

However, the second reason is because I want to understand Google’s management approach, itself - a unique culture that encourages innovation - or adaptation. To this point, I refer to Eric Beinhocker’s book, The Origin of Wealth, in which he expounds on organizational adaptation. In our world of increasing complexity, we must use all of the information available to us as a means to educate our organizations to the evolving dynamics of the marketplace. Only by understanding one’s changing market does an organization stand the chance to survive and adapt to the next generation. This organizational learning is fueled by equipping all aspects of a business to “exploit and explore” their interactions within their current marketplace.

Briefly, I see E2.o tools as the catalyst to our getting to this fully-enabled next generation approach to business management. With E2.o tools, our organizations can harness, prioritize, and make sense of all of the information that is bombarding us on a daily basis. By doing so, we can begin to adapt continuously. Google may actually be leading the charge on something quite remarkable.

Join the dialog. What do you think?

(As an aside, Google will be joining us this May at DIG2008. I am excited to hear from Bo Cowgill on the company's use of internal prediction markets. Check out the short case study overview.)

E2.o NewsBytes

Several weeks ago, I made a post in our E2.o theme titled: Mass Collaboration meets the Experts.

On Wednesday, Knowledge@Wharton published a great article on the topic (brought to my attention by Experientia) titled: The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media. Though the article is more Web2.o oriented than E2.o oriented, it does a nice job of laying out the juxtaposition of expert and amateur content as complementary means to an end. It concludes:

Despite hand wringing over professional and amateur content, the reality is that consumers will use and appreciate both.

Another item that I would like to suggest reading was a press release (the actual story would be better but I don’t have access to it), about The Conference Board Review's March/April 2008 cover story, which showed online on Forbes. The title was The Future of Advice. I ran across this story when reading a post on the topic in Ross Mayfield’s weblog. Mayfield concludes his post, titled Advice is a Conversation, with the comment:

I'm not sure how we lost our way with BI and decision support tools and forgot that advice is a conversation.

These themes are exactly what TalkDIG and the DIG2008 conference in May aim to address. We are trying to spark the dialog that rightly positions INFORMATON, in all of its manifestations, as a core enabler of successful business strategy and execution.

Join the dialog. What do you think?

Simple and Fun E2.0 Videos - A Needed Oasis for the Day

This past Friday (March 14th, 2008), we saw the collapse of a 20th century financial institution Bear Stearns. The investment bank was purportedly overleveraged with hedge fund debt and mortgage-backed investments! This weekend, the Fed took action to bolster consumer sentiment by reducing interest rates a bit, probably as an off cycle token of their intention this week, and by approving and insuring (up to $30 billion in troubled mortgages, etc…) the buyout of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan for $2 per share (a fraction of their market capitalization just last week). Let’s be frank, we are entering a confusing and emotional week for many.

Therefore, in recognizing the volatility and complexity of the day, I would like to point folks to an oasis of easy and fun videos. These videos will keep your mind focused for just a minute or two, here and there throughout the day. For those more experienced practitioners, these videos are old hat but I suspect that they will be refreshing for most all of us!

Let's go to The Common Craft Show. This is an online website boasting a series of what I believe are simply fun yet truly explanatory videos of Web2.0 tools and more. The site is the creation of Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever in Seattle, WA. See the following,

WIKIS: http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

BLOGS: http://www.commoncraft.com/blogs
RSS: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english
SOCIAL NETWORKS: http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking
TAGGING: http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

I would also suggest the following PDF titled Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future by Gary Matuszak at KPMG for some simple E2.o overview reading.

Relationships Trump Rank

I finally got to reading through Karen Stephenson’s article dated February 28th on The Community Network Solution. The subtitle reads: “In reweaving the social fabric of a city or town, relationships trump rank.” That last phrase caught my attention! And it teased me into leaving it on the top of my ‘reading pile’ for the last two weeks! (I know – I need to retire my reading pile and try an Amazon Kindle or a Sony Reader.) Anyway, the whole article is excellent.

The article begins by bemoaning the selection of quote-unquote ‘power brokers’ to make things happen within a community. Here are some highlights:

When a community sets out to address complex problems such as … the effort usually ends up going nowhere.

The quiet failure of such initiatives is often attributed to human nature, or to some flaw in the process that shaped the effort. But in fact, the problem usually starts when the project organizers compose their first list of proposed participants. The organizers ask themselves: Who are the power brokers around town? Who are the key players? …

Thereafter, the whole effort will operate on the unspoken presumption that influence derives primarily from positional power, and that positional power translates into the ability to get things done.

That assumption is as naive as the belief that a company’s organization chart –– with its boxes and circles, its dotted lines showing who reports to whom — provides an accurate picture of how the organization actually works. Like org charts, “most powerful” lists reveal nothing about the human qualities of those who occupy senior positions, the web of personal relationships upon which they can draw, or the trust they inspire (or don’t inspire) in other people.

She goes on to share both her understanding of and experiences for how networks permit and accelerate the flow of information and her approach to identifying people who have the capacity for “fruitful collaboration”. These are people who transcend workplace silos and collaborate freely across traditional community boundaries - to get things done.

The glory of the whole thing is that these most likely unheard-of-people are the ones that can bring together the skills, knowledge, and approach to operate without hesitation of differing hierarchies or CULTURES.

My question is can we transfer these ideas inside of the walls of the traditional organization? Can E2.0 be a catalyst for bringing these folks to the fore of our organizations? I think a good reading of this article alongside Gary Hamel’s chapter on W.L. Gore [The Future of Management, chapter 5] should be required reading for E2.0 practitioners. It is a challenge to be achieved. Let me know your thoughts.

If it’s not a dialog, why waste the time.

Mass Collaboration meets the Experts

Yesterday, Newsweek posted a web exclusive, Revenge of the Experts, delineating and heightening the debate over the value of user generated content. The subtitle reads:

The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.

The article goes on to challenge the exclusive role of mass collaboration and begins to define the growing role of experts in generating trusted web content.

My gut is that we need both and we should begin to think through better ways to integrate the two. However, to start, we need to look at the PURPOSE of the content we are looking to generate and evaluate the factors that would produce the best outcome – which always varies on the basis of being “free, perfect, and now”. In each situational context, we can make decisions based on a common set of factors that can be weighed and traded off as we consider the options we have to produce the best outcome within the constraints that are in front of us.

For instance, if I need to quickly understand the stats behind the Patriots recent championship seasons, it might make a lot of sense to ask the web where I would probably get a get an accurate, fast, and cheap response. On the other hand, if I am looking to understand the genuine subtleties of the relationship between Iran and the U.S., it would behoove me to engage some educated perspectives of history, politics, religion, and culture to weave an intricate but delicate understanding.

This leaves us with the need to define the factors for evaluating content and/or its the process of its development. My guess is that there is plenty of existing thought on this topic. For instance, the framework would need to consider facts and the accuracy thereof, opinion and the diversity of perspective, and context and the narrative of the times or specific situation. Once we identify these factors, we can begin an educated dialog on how to balance and integrate mass collaboration with professional expertise and focus – possibly for both the content and the process of generating the content! Who knows, we might be able to have a 1+1=3 result for both Web 2.0 and E2.0 applications.

What are your thoughts? We would value your comments on this topic and any references that you might be willing to share.

Getting Value from the Masses

This week, I noticed the blog post by Scott Gavin [Enterprise 2.o Evangelist] sharing about the recent release of Ubuntu Brainstorm.

Ubuntu, the user friendly Linux distribution, launched Ubuntu Brainstorm this week. Inspired by IdeaStorm from Dell, the Ubuntu community can now suggest ideas and vote online. Its goal is to have a better idea of what Ubuntu users would like to see in upcoming Ubuntu releases.

As a user you can add your ideas or vote for your preferred ones, add comments and see their implementation status. The best and most popular ideas quickly rise to the top and can be creamed off for inclusion in future releases.

Upon reading the post, my mind immediately jumped to some unresolved questions about the ultimate utility of these online sites for engaging customers in co-creative efforts. Armed with this question in mind, I jumped online to refind an article that I had only recently stumbled upon by Wired author, Ryan Singel. In his article, “The Wiki That Edited Me” (Sept 7th, 2006 - WIRED), Singel recapped his experience of putting a draft story of his out on a Wiki site for mass contributions and edits.

As to the outcome, he says, “Certainly the final story is more accurate and more representative of how wikis are used.”

He asks rhetorically, “Is the story better than the one that would have emerged after a Wired News editor worked with it?”

“I think not”.

“The edits over the week lack some of the narrative flow that a Wired News piece usually contains…”

This outcome was my exact expectation. I didn’t expect mass collaboration to provide a narrative flow fitting for Wired! I did expect it [mass collaboration] to deliver accuracy and perspective to the topic – as it did.

Our challenge is to figure out how to bring “focus” and “narrative” to the value-added benefits of mass collaboration. I realize that this language may be too traditional but?!

What are your thoughts? How do corporations get optimal value from E2.o mass collaboration?

E2.o enables Business Design Innovation

This is my inaugural post as the facilitator of both the E2.o theme of the TalkDIG blog and of the upcoming DIG conference in May, 2008. I must say it is such an exciting time to be talking about information and decision-making. The plethora of technology available to us is unprecedented. And the opportunity that it allows for new management thinking is confounding.

Revolution?
Simply put, I think that we have the makings for management revolution! And I side with the writings of gurus/consultants Eric Beinhocker, Lowell Bryan, and Gary Hamel who each tout (from my vantage) the possibilities available to those organizations that embrace a more evolutionary approach to business markets and a more "social" approach to management (my words).

The E2.o theme of this blog will be all about exposing and sharing the business information available to our companies in such a way that more eyeballs, and therefore smarts, can be harnessed toward innovating products, innovating customer experiences, and ultimately innovating all aspects of business design. The future is one of co-creation with people inside and outside our organizations - and we have the ability to encourage this trend using the information and Web 2.o tools currently available to us.

Prepare those Minds
Remember the saying by Louis Pasteur, “In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.” Well, if we believe that the business climate is chaotic, then we better make sure that our people have prepared minds to detect and respond to their environment. I will go as far as suggesting that we pull out the texts of Stafford Beers on cybernetics despite the US nationalistic taboos that he might incite. I think he was on to a new paradigm of management many years ago. But enough said, I’m excited to be sharing my thoughts on E2.o and I hope that many people with more smarts and experience than me will join the dialog so that we can all grow and learn as a community.

***
George Veth bio - I have been consulting to large companies in the domain of Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management, and Strategy Execution for 15 years. Over a year ago, I left my consulting post and have just recently joined a startup, BigTreetop, which is looking to spur on Experience Co-creation in small and medium sized businesses. The BigTreetop (Web 2.o) platform is created to enable your favorite local businesses to share their plans and questions with their community in order to leverage the experiences and insights of their customers and partners to continuously evolve to the current needs of the marketplace. We’ll see!

The 2008 Fast50 Has Arrived

Ever wonder what it takes to be truly innovative? Well, every year I enjoy skimming through Fast Company's annual picks for the world's most innovative companies. These are companies that make things happen. These are companies that constantly push the envelope with a mind for being the best in their respective niches.

This year (Fast Company - March 2008 issue), Google tops the list and the FC article goes on to highlight 10 or so of the key roles in the company that make it No. 1 for 2008. And, indeed, Google has made an indelible mark on our current generation and leaves me asking "What makes Google hot and others not?"

Well, who makes the list is a question for Fast Company - but I personally believe that innovation is an eye for constantly innovating the future and the guts to stay true to a culture that supports disciplined creativity. An oxymoron possibly but innovation is intentional and by no means an accident.

This blog is new - but it is going to be intentional. And it is going to be about innovation. The type of innovation that drives business design and continual strategy execution.

Talk DIG is going to be about information and how information is being harnessed to drive "fast" companies toward business success. This blog is for potential DIG 2008 attendees and anyone else who uses and/or needs information to do their job. In this blog, we will explore data, analytics, and E2.o tools for insight sharing. I am going to focus on the Enterprise 2.o concepts and tools.

Stay tuned and jump into the dialog as you desire. I hope that I will be a stimulating and amusing facilitator if not an able guide through the topic at hand.