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.)

Real-time Data Usage

This past weekend was a major weekend for me, one that would determine my core happiness for the rest of the year!

You see I’m Rugby mad. I’ve played it, I’ve coached it, and now I watch it, incessantly.

This past weekend was the concluding weekend of the European 6 Nations Rugby Championship, an annual international tournament between the home nations of Europe (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy). A tournament that started in 1871 and every year since has been an excuse for all to bring out their nationalistic pride and cheer for their ancestral team! For me it’s Wales, the land of my forefathers, the land of daffodils and of course sheep. Wales had the opportunity to win the tournament in style, beat France at home and raise the championship trophy undefeated, Grand Slam winners. And did they do it? They sure did!

Rugby, just like most American sports is now a professional sport and with it many changes have come. Dragged out of the traditions of amateur pastimes where the local butcher was your star player, teams today are forced to continually explore all possible avenues in an attempt to better themselves and obtain competitive advantage over their rivals. No longer is it good enough to just employ the best players and coaching staff, teams are looking elsewhere.

One interesting field of innovation that we were given a brief insight into during one of the games was the usage of statistical information real-time by the Welsh coaches that allowed them to then make real-time adjustments to how their team and players were approaching the game. Using the interesting technology Sportstec the Welsh team was actively making adjustments that helped provide a competitive advantage over their opposing team.

Around the field “spotters” were employed to feed information into a database application on specific events happening. Number of times a player passed to his left vs. his right, how many carries an individual had with the ball, number of times the ball was kicked from a certain place vs. passed, number of missed tackles by each player, success rate of a particular move, etc... By providing such detailed information on actions performed by their team as well as the opposition, the coaches were then able to react and make tactical real-time changes, for example adjustments to the team’s strategy on the field, instruction to specifically focus and improve in certain aspects of the game, as well as instruction to target identified weaknesses in the opposing team.

Did having this level of information access have a direct result on the outcome of the game? Who knows, but one thing for sure Wales beat Italy in this game 47-8, when on average the other teams who beat Italy did so by only 6 points! The other thing, did I mention, Wales won the Championship, undefeated!

So where next? If teams are able to get hold of and make use of such real-time data I just wonder how much further they could go.

What if players began to wear RFIDs in their shirts so we know where they are at anyone time. The ability to understand in real-time how much time they have spent in one location, how much time it took them to reposition, the average distance they make while running with the ball, efficiency of path travelled by each player when covering a kick-off. What about collecting information from body skins that can sense applied pressure? Could we measure the level of impact endured in a tackle thus giving the ability to predict level of fatigue vs. amount where performance begins to degrade, an opportune time for a tactical substitution perhaps?

For more detailed commentary on how the Welsh team and others are finding innovative ways to capture and use information check out the videos @ http://www.sportstec.com/videos.htm

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.

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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.