Category: Resources

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport webinar on viability of Enterprise 2.0

This should be a fun and illuminating interchange this Friday, the 11th. Both Andy and Tom have been paying attention to the realities of how enterprises do and don’t make effective use of new technologies for a long time.

I’ve agreed to moderate their discussion, which will likely consist of throwing in a new question or two if things slow down. I’m also looking forward to continuing the discussion in Orlando at the FASTforward ’08 Conference. Follow the link below to get a special blogger’s discount if you plan to attend yourself.

We re excited to announce we ll be hosting a free webinar discussion next Friday (January 11th) from 11:00-12:00 AM EST between two academics with much to say about Enterprise 2.0: Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School and Tom Davenport of Babson College.

Join us at 11 AM EST for a point/counterpoint debate about the viability and speed of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools within the enterprise. If you re familiar with their writing and thinking, which has been much discussed here on this blog and elsewhere, you know this should make for a spirited and fun joust between two great minds with strong opinions on the matter.

Among the topics that ll be touched upon:

  • Are the barriers to adoption human, cultural and political in nature too large to overcome?
  • Is there enough ongoing momentum to ensure broad-based adoption in certain industries?
  • What processes are most likely to benefit from Enterprise 2.0 tools?
  • How will success be measured?

Join the discussion by registering for the webinar here. We ll be taking questions from the audience at the end of their discussion or feel free to leave questions in the comments of this post.

FASTforward 08

Andrew and Tom (as well as all of the contributors to this blog) will also be joining us at FASTforward 08 in Orlando. The theme of this year s conference, which runs from February 18-20: The User Revolution. Among the other notable speakers: John Hagel, Don Tapscott, David Weinberger, Clare Hart, and Safa Rashtchy.

Find out more at the conference s website and if you register be sure to do so through that link for a special discount for readers of this blog.

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport webinar on viability of Enterprise 2.0
Hylton Jolliffe
Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:18:31 GMT

A dozen papers you should read in the world of Enterprise 2.0

There are a variety of articles and papers that I continue to draw insight from and find myself recommending to others on a regular basis. I decided it would be a useful exercise to assemble them into one set of pointers, add a little bit of commentary, and make it available.

I limited myself to materials that were easily available on the web, which eliminated some more obscure, academic, materials that you probably wouldn’t want to read anyway. I ended up with a dozen items that fall into two categories. The first group represents useful thinking about individual knowledge workers; the second about design principles relevant at the organizational and strategic level.

Design space for individual knowledge work

  • “As We May Think” – Vannevar Bush. Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1959. Bush set the framework for a knowledge worker’s day in 1945.
  • “Structured procrastination” – John Perry. A somewhat different, but nonetheless useful take on how to best leverage a multi-tasking, multi-demand world.
  • “You and Your Research” – Richard Hamming. Underlying strategies for how to set and follow a strategy for tackling worthwhile and rewarding problems. Although focused on research, the advice is readily applicable to all kinds of knowledge work.
  • “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” – Doug Engelbart. Engelbart set an agenda for the use of technology for knowledge work that drove much of the conceptual innovation in software for the last several decades.
  • “Personal Dynamic Media” (PDF file) – Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. Along with Engelbart’s paper, Kay and Goldberg’s imagines much of the personal computing revolution and how we might best make use of technology in doing knowledge work.

Strategic and Organizational Design Principles

  • “The nature of the firm” (PDF file) – Coase. Coase ultimately own a Nobel prize in economics for this work, which examines the conditions that differentiate between activities best organized by markets vs. those best organized by organizations.
  • Cluetrain manifesto – Searls, Weinberger, Locke, Levine. The first, and still best, thinking about the ways that the internet affects markets and marketing
  • “End to end arguments in system design” (PDF file) – Saltzer, Reed, & Clark. These guys were key designers of the underlying protocols that drive the internet. This paper lays out the reasons why centralized command and control is a bad idea in networks; regardless of how appealing it tends to be to the powers-that-be.
  • “Rise of the stupid network – Isenberg. From a former phone industry software engineer, this paper provides an interesting examination of the interaction between technology change and organizational/strategic inertia.
  • The long tail“– Anderson . The article that led to the book. Both offer insight into the opportunities to design products and services that take advantage of how the net offers alternatives to mass markets.
  • “Places to intervene in a system” – Meadows. The changes we need to make to take full advantage of the opportunities that technology presents us depend on thinking and operating at a systems level. This is the best short overview of the leverage points that can be found and used to make this level of change happen.
  • “Wicked problems and social complexity” (PDF file) – Conklin. As a counterbalance to Meadows, Conklin enriches the discussion of systems change by laying out the notion of “wicked problems.” These are the kinds problems whose solutions arise from the interaction between competing interest groups and change the definition of the problem as they are implemented.

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A new voice in the blogging firmament – Abbie Lundberg of CIO

The conversation about technology and organizations has been enriched with a new blog, Difference Engine, by my long-time friend and colleague, Abbie Lundberg. Of course, as Editor in Chief at CIO Magazine, we’ve been benefiting from her perspective and insight for years. Now, we’ll get it a bit less filtered and a bit more personal. I’m looking forward to it. Here’s a quick sample:

As the debate over the CIO role rages on, we wonder which is the most critical skill set: business, technology or, as some argue, the ability to detect bullshit?
The debate about the best background for CIOs isn t new. It s been going on since the mid 90s, when Johnson & Johnson first appointed a CIO from the business, without hands-on IT experience. The argument goes something like this: Technology is becoming an increasingly integral part of business; ergo, CIOs have to be business strategists. So far so good. But then some people continue the argument to say that because business knowledge and ability is so important, technology knowledge isn t. False!

…

So what do you think? Can you be a truly great CIO without a pretty deep understanding of technology? Does the merging of business and technology make technology knowledge more or less valuable to the individual leading strategic IT?

The Most Critical Attribute of a CIO | Advice and Opinion.

PopTech 2007 in Maine and on the Web

One of these years I am going to make it to PopTech with Buzz. He’s been twisting my arm for as long as I’ve known him to do so. Hasn’t meshed with my schedule yet.

Live from Pop!Tech 2007

 It is like Christmas Eve here in Camden, Me. Just came back from an afternoon session on Mobile Technology, cold beers with great friends, the opening party for Pop!Tech.

This is the best thing I do on an annual basis. The quality of the ideas and people is over the top. Hard to know where to begin.

One of today’s ideas was that cell phones “are the dominant computing platform on every continent.”

Another idea was that Nokia was working on a technology where in cell phones could be web servers. Wild!

I have pages of notes, more to come tomorrow, and now am headed to bed, too late on the left coast!

 In the meantime, the folks at PopTech have announced that:

we will be webcasting the entire Pop!Tech conference – for free – at http://www.poptech.org/live between 9am and 6.30pm, October 18-20, 2007. Viewers can even submit questions to our stage live by emailing questions@poptech.org. The 2007 Pop!Tech program is online at http://www.poptech.org/schedule and speakers are at http://www.poptech.org/speakers2007/

Pop!Tech is a nonprofit, with the mission is to accelerate the impact of world-changing people and ideas. We’ve invested *heavily* to give our content away to the world for free, and if have a blog and you felt so moved, we would really appreciate a post to help us spread the word!

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More insights from Hans Rosling at TED 2007

Someday I will find a way to attend a TED conference. In the meantime, I hugely appreciate that they are making videos of the conference available to mere mortals. Hans Rosling returns for an encore to his 2006 performance (which I blogged about last year about this time) to offer new insights to be gleaned from statistics about health, education, and economic development. You can find Rosling’s presentation video here.

There are a lot of good lessons here including how powerful good data, good software tools,  and good storytelling combined can be.

Video: Wikis in Plain English from Lee LeFever

Another excellent and quick tutorial from Lee LeFever.

Video: Wikis in Plain English 

We made this video because wiki web sites are easy to use, but hard to describe. We hope to turn you on to a better way to plan a camping trip, or create the next Wikipedia.

Length: 3 minutes 52 seconds.  

If you’d like to share this video, you can grab the code at Blip.tv or YouTube. A transcript is here and soon we’ll have a subtitled version on DotSub.

Video: Wikis in Plain English

 

Andrew Hinton on Architectures for Conversation

Courtesy of David Weinberger, here is an excellent presentation on information architecture. It is also a good lesson in effective communication/presentation techniques.

What is information architecture? The slide show.

The always enjoyable Andrew Hinton has an insightful, witty, surprising set of slides ‘n’ text that tries to explain not only what Information Architecture is, but why it’s been so hard to explain. Along the way he has things to say about communities vs. communities of practice, how to attract flies, and why Wikipedia is more like an AK-47 than like an M-16. Great stuff, entertainingly and elegantly communicated. [Tags: ]

Solving puzzles or framing mysteries. Dealing with wicked problems

There’s in interesting essay in the most recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine on the importance of understanding whether you are working on a puzzle or a mystery written by Gregory Treverton, who is the Director of RAND’s Center for Global Risk and Security.

There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable—an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age. [Risks and Riddles.]

Treverton’s essay focuses on the distinction in the context terrorism and law enforcement, but it is worth pondering more broadly. Most of our training and experience in organizations is focused on puzzle-solving skills. MBA programs focus on equipping their graduates with toolkits for solving a host of problems; once those problems have been appropriately identified and bounded. They offer far less guidance on the far more difficult task of framing issues in ways that can be addressed.

Absent good practices in framing issues, the temptation is always to force issues into puzzle structures that can be solved. Treverton offers an important reminder of the risks of forcing mysteries into puzzles.

Another helpful language system to employ here is Horst Rittel’s notion of “wicked problems.” Jeff Conklin, at the CogNexus Institute has some excellent materials to help get started down this path. Take a look at “Wicked Problems and Social Complexity” (PDF file) and “Issues as Elements of Information Systems” (PDF file) which is Rittel’s original paper on the topic. Conklin has also written an excellent book on the topic: Dialogue Mapping : Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. Finally, there is an open source software tool, Compendium, available to support some of the techniques for framing and working on wicked problems that Conklin advocates.

Mindjet Recommends Mind Mapping Blogs and Resources

I’m very flattered to be included on this list. More importantly, there are quite a few other blogs talking about mindmapping that I wasn’t aware of that I will now be checking out.

Mindjet Recommends Mind Mapping Blogs and Resources

Hi Everyone,

We asked the Mindjet Blog reading community to share with us their own mind mapping / MindManager blogs.

The map available for download below is the result of this outreach and shares with our community a nice range of mind mapping blog sites and resources.

Enjoy!

Mindjet Recommended Blogs Map

PS- Please note: We’ll be adding the larger “Writing an Article” map from our previous post onto Mindjet Labs as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.