2007 - Page 7 of 9 - McGee's Musings

Dick Costolo blogging on technology ventures

Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, has started blogging again at Ask The Wizard. Better yet, he is blogging about his insights and experience as a serial entrepreneur (in Chicago of all places, which is not noted for its friendliness toward technology startups). Here’s a bit of a teaser from one of his recent posts on the nature of strategic advantage:

Strategic Advantage, Part II

…

Hidden barriers to entry are particularly helpful to your company because potential competitors will severely underestimate the level of investment and resource commitment required to compete with you. I cannot tell you how many times since we first launched FeedBurner I have heard the following comments from senior executives at large companies, industry pundits, hobbyists, and my five year old son: “We could build FeedBurner in [a weekend, three months with three people, whenever we wanted]”. When you have hidden barriers to entry, you don’t get too worked up about these kinds of comments because you know there are lots of pitfalls and issues and challenges that you don’t understand fully until you are far enough along in development that you stumble into them and think “oh wow, now what do we do”.

But there are even better hidden barriers to entry in some businesses. I’ll call them Quantum Hidden Barriers to Entry. Quantum Hidden Barriers to Entry happen when you keep encountering new and unforeseen cliffs you have to scale as you move through different stages of market penetration. While hidden barriers to entry make it harder for potential competitors to enter the market, quantum hidden barriers to entry keep popping up as you move through stages of market penetration. When you are thinking about companies and markets, it’s fun to think about the kinds of businesses where there might be quantum hidden barriers to entry. I think you can anticipate these when you see markets that are characterized by: spiraling complexity, market reactions to the first mover (gaming behaviors, 3rd party ecosystems, etc.), and centralized platforms

…

Definitely someone you should be paying attention to if you’re interested in the venture world.

Research on business collaboration from IBM

James Robertson pointed to this last month. It is one of several excellent articles in an issue of the IBM Systems Journal on the topic of business collaboration. While the writing is a tad dry, the thinking and the research is nicely grounded in some real data for a change.

Beyond predictable workflows: enhancing productivity in artful business processes

C. Hill, R. Yates, C. Jones, and S. L. Kogan have written a journal article on managing ‘artful’ processes. To quote:

Aside from the issues of scale, lock-in, and dependency, certain types of work simply cannot be formalized well enough to safely entrust to an enterprise application. The goals and methods of some processes change too quickly over time; for example, the process of designing high-technology products. In some processes, it is primarily the content in each process instance — rather than the process itself — that determines the outcome; for example, a request for proposal (RFP) process. Most important, many highly specialized processes are developed or refined locally at the individual or small-team level such that the process cannot easily be separated from the specific people who perform it; for example, managing client relationships in professional services firms. While the framing process may be stable at an abstract level, the key details are not. They depend on the skills, experience, and judgment of the primary actors. We denote these kinds of processes artful in the sense that there is an art to their execution that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to codify in an enterprise application.

[Thanks to Martin White.]

Euan Semple on strategies for implementing Enterprise 2.0

Insightful advice from Euan. I’m not sure, however, that most organizations can avoid the temptation to meddle and manage this instead. That will slow adoption down in most cases.

The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY

The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you:

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

And the hardest way …….

…. you don’t need me to tell you that!

Technorati Tags: enterprise 2.0

Literate thinking as a barrier to Enterprise 2.0 adoption

Most of the technologies lumped under the Enterprise 2.0 label presuppose some facility with the written word. I wonder to what extent that presents a barrier to adoption in many organizations? Moreover, I wonder how visible that organizational barrier is to those who are already facile?

I’ve written before on oral vs. literate cultures in organizations (Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1 and Part 2), using the distinctions that the late Walter Ong introduced. Leadership and power in many organizations correlates with comfort and facility with the spoken word. Those same individuals are not necessarily as facile or comfortable with expressing themselves in writing.

Email doesn’t really count, as it appears to be less public and, therefore, feels less threatening. Even so, we still hear of senior executives who avoid using email directly. (Maybe one of the attractions of the Crackberry is that it provides a built-in excuse for doing little real writing). So too for Powerpoint. It is not a tool that lends itself to literate argument and expression.

Jordan Frank of Traction Software argued a while back that organizations benefit from using the tools in simpler ways (Beta bloggers need not lurk in the enterprise). While I agree with his arguments, they also reinforce the notion that feeling uncomfortable with literate thinking is a barrier to be addressed. Jordan’s suggestions are probably among the best advice for routing around this issue in most organizations.

If my hypothesis has any merit, it does suggest that some of the objections to these technologies will be rooted in emotional fears and insecurities that will be unexpressed and potentially inexpressible. To someone who can’t swim, “come on in, the water’s fine” isn’t very helpful encouragement.

Tags: walter+ong, oral+culture, literate+culture, enterprise+2.0

Flight tracking with Flightstats

I neglected to mention this when Buzz first pointed to it, although I did start using it. I’ve tried many of the flight tracking sites and Flightstats does appear to be more useful. Check it out. And thank you to both Buzz and Scoble.

Flight tracking

We’re about to hop on yet another plane, this time from Seattle to San Jose. One problem is that the flight trackers that Google points to generally suck. Buzz was raving about a new flight tracker he found, Flightstats, which is much better. Our plane is running late, which is why I wanted to track the flight.

Learning how to make wikis work effectively

Atlassian has indeed put together a very useful resource with their Wikipatterns site. The social patterns that contribute to successfully wikis are by no means self-evident. This provides some really useful tools and ideas to help someone who grasps the technology make headway on the necessary changes in work practice.

Making the Wiki Work

“If you build it, they will come.” We’ve all heard those words way too many times, and yet I’ll bet if you look around at your online haunts you can find more than a few ghost towns: places that some web worker built where nobody bothered to come. Part of the problem is that we tend to be the virtual vanguard: we assume that everyone else on the team will “get” the latest bit of social software as fast as we do, and jump wholeheartedly on board.

In real life, things are different, as anyone who has ever tried to set up a corporate wiki has probably discovered. Faced with the possibility of building up a vibrant company-wide user-edited online resource, most people end up scratching their heads and retreating back to more familiar modes of communication. Now Atlassian (makers of commercial wiki software Confluence) have done something about this particular problem with their new site Wikipatterns. [Web Worker Daily]

Galbraith and the Economics of Innocent Fraud

John Kenneth Galbraith
The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time.
Houghton Mifflin (April 26, 2004)

Earlier this morning I was reading one of the threads over at Ask E.T., the ongoing discussion hosted by Edward Tufte. It was a discussion of Richard Feynman’s conclusion to his report on the Challenger accident:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled

I thought it fitting relative to John Kenneth Galbraith’s extended essay The Economics of Innocent Fraud. In it, Galbraith reflects on our collective capacity for self-delusion in matters economic. Here’s one representative sample of his ruminations:

The myths of investor authority, of the serving stockholder, the ritual meetings of directors and the annual stockholder meeting persist, but no mentally viable observer of the modern corporation can escape the reality. Corporate power lies with management — a bureaucracy in control of its task and its compensation. Rewards that can verge on larceny. This is wholly evident. On frequent recent occasions, it has been referred to as the corporate scandal.

Something positive must also be said. The modern corporation has a highly serviceable role in contemporary economic life, more than that of the primitive, aggressively exploitative capitalist entities that preceded it.

These adverse tendencies must now be known, celebrated, and addressed. The easy emphasis is on the error. More important is well-designed and enforced remedy. [p.31. The Economics of Innocent Fraud.]

You can read the book in a quiet evening. You’ll be thinking about it for much longer.

Alan Kay on learning and technology

Alan Kay is talking once again about what went wrong with the personal computer and personal computing. Here’s a pointer to a recent interview he did with CIO Insight magazine that is well worth your attention.

A CIO Insight

Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine’s Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped–Now, Alan discusses the mindsets that stand in the way of real innovation – and what his not-for-profit VPRI is doing to address the issue. In the article, Alan defines Croquet as one of those efforts and as “a new way of doing an operating system, or as a layer over TCP/IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time.”
[Julian Lombardi’s Croquet Blog]

Alan is up to his old tricks of trying to invent the future instead of predicting it. His focus remains on viewing the personal computer as a learning tool more than a productivity tool, which means, among other things, that you should be prepared to invest time and effort in that learning. He is not fond of efforts that sacrifice the real potential of tools by focusing on making the first five minutes easy and entertaining at the expense of crippling the long-term capabilities of the tools.

Alan remains a disciple of Doug Engelbart:

Engelbart, right from his very first proposal to ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], said that when adults accomplish something that’s important, they almost always do it through some sort of group activity. If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don’t really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that’s understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be. [Alan Kay: The PC Must be Revamped Now]

There is a potentially deep and rich connection between challenging knowledge work and technology. But realizing that potential will require different attitudes about how much time and effort we should be prepared to invest in learning. Organizations thinking about investing the technologies collectively identified as Enterprise 2.0 should also be thinking about what investments they should be making in the appropriate individual and organizational learning

Jack Vinson’s plans to blog with his knowledge management class

I had lunch yesterday with Jack Vinson. Jack is teaching about knowledge management again this Spring and is planning on having his students keep blogs as part of the class experience. Back in 2002, I tired a similar experiment at Kellogg and blogged about the results then. I figured I would share the pointers here, in case anyone else wants to take a peek

Blogs in the classroom

Blogging in the classroom, Part 2. Forced blogging = flogging?

Blogging in the classroom, Part 3. Developing an initial view on klogging

Blogging in the classroom, Part 4. Plugging into the conversations

Certainly, the technology environment has gotten richer and easier to work with. My recommendation to Jack was to keep everything browser based, especially given that many of his students work full time and have computers locked down by their IT departments.

I am also inclined to start with reading blogs and following blog conversations via Bloglines or Google Reader pre-loaded with an initial set of feeds. Requests to comment on items and publish reactions will flow from that more naturally than from straight on assignments to post. I am looking forward to Jack’s efforts.