Cathexis

Money and Mouth: Now in Same Location

I’ve been working on large, complex, high technology projects in Silicon Valley for a couple of decades. To me, there’s nothing worse than watching a room full of bright, deeply educated and professional people fumble through a project as they struggle with paltry mechanisms to capture their insight, experience, world views, and personal networks and leverage all those “intangibles” into tangible productivity for the marketplace.

Sometimes those teams are hamstrung by form-fitting to yesterday’s technology. Sometimes form-fitting to command and control models rather than collaborative forms of interaction.

How we transition the nature of productive work is both about changing the modes and models of work as well as the tools .  

To making those transitions we need to experiment, meet, exchange, foster, promote, explore, review follies, celebrate achievements, mark milestones, send specifications back to development, journal our discoveries.

It’s perhaps no accident that the Office 2.0 Conference and Silicon Valley are situated along both geographic and mental fault-lines of tectonic movement;  disruption and exploration happens along lines where worlds collide. Office 2.0 is a live-lab, showcase, cross-roads, expose of what’s happening and what’s possible with pointers to what’s next.

I’m most excited about how the technology and tools get into peoples hands and expand their value and footprint.  So, I decided to put my money where my mouth, or blogs posts, reside, and have jumped on board with the Office 2.0 team to craft the Enterprise and Collaboration track of the Office 2.0 conference.

The good news; I get to collaborate with Susan Scrupski     Jevon Mcdonald,  and the ceaselessly energetic Ismael Ghalimi. Our goal; to put together a set of “user" (a word I dislike) or Web practitioner and implementor panels to tell real stories of what happens when you have the right tools and environment to collaborate.  Panel we intend will encompass technology and culture changes.

So we’ll be bringing together pundits and curmudgeons, early explorers with their tales of penetrating old models and exploring the right value points with new models. It’s about, collaboration within the enterprise, collaboration without, collaboration on-the-go, collaboration and visualization.  So…come and see for yourself…and pick up your iPhone when you do.

 

Office 2.0 Conference - The iPhone and You!*

*Or – “Aren’t you glad you didn’t stand in line all night in June?”

Last year at the inaugural Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, attendees received an iPod as their virtual conference brochure…All speaker bios and conference schedule were pre-loaded on the iPods.

Now, this year’s Office 2.0 conference is coming out of the gate with the iPhone for this year’s attendees. Yes, you read it right. If you’re an attendee the iPhone will be your conference badge, your business card exchange, your window on demos,….you get the picture.

Ismael Ghalimi, conference producer and CEO of Intalio, just announced it today in his blog, IT|Redux. 

Office 2.0 is a conference cum live lab and experiment, and this year’s event will focus on bringing users and implementers to the panels, with two forum tracks on Collaboration in the Enterprise and Mobility and  Productivity, as well as  two demo tracks. And yes, while it’s great to exemplify virtual collaboration, there are moments when face to face interaction is warranted….Mark your calendars for September 3-5 in San Francisco, and whether you have an iPhone already or not…Be There.

End of the End User – Open the Pod-Bay Doors, HAL

  At the Enterprise 2.0 conference main stage, vendor presentations were classic Marketing 1.0.  IBM had added a new social computing bundle, and the mashup environment looked promising. Microsoft drove everybody from the room with a “death by PowerPoint” presentation that was uninspired. SAP came across looking absolutely swell following MSFT. Cisco’s vision and offerings seemed overblown and heavy, especially when compared with the beautifully simple presentation of Dr. Milton Chen of VSee Lab.  Milton did a "when is a smile  a smile”  demo of VSee's free videoconferencing and appsharing service in the workshop “10% technology, 90% people” moderated by Jessica Lipnack of NetAge.   

The nature of Web 2.0 is that knowledge workers are not “end-users” anymore. They are "Web Practitioners” , not passive recipients of whatever the IT department bought this year, but an active professional with their own network of colleagues, and needing to grasp and assemble a variety of collaboration and communication tools to do work and innovate, more often than not in an “extra-prise,” not solely enterprise context.

Many of the corporate-style presentations at E 2.0 were oriented with classic messages to IT Directors and CIOs, designed more as a sop to the status quo, than providing vision and leadership in regards to the impact the these technologies have on collaboration and innovation.  The tone of the presentations seemed to be the software industry’s response along the lines of HAL to Dave, the astronaut, when he tried to get back on the mother-ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”    What the Enterprise 2.0 attendees needed to see was some clear examples of how their offerings enabled this new class of “Web Practitioner. “ Seeing is believing, and next year, all of them should bring a couple of “Web 2.0 Practioners”  to the main stage with them with real-life examples.

Web 2.0 is the about power of the participative network, allowing collective intelligence to flourish through increased transparency and interaction.  The consumer and SMB market may be showing the way, unfettered by the inertia of prior infrastructures.  One-way corporate vendor messages do not exemplify the impact of the relational web, but sound like HAL-speak.

   
 

 

Daisy, Daisy...

Web 2.0 Findings by McKinsey Survey

This month the McKinsey Quarterly published the results of a global survey “How businesses are using Web 2.0.” The report , conducted in January 2007, indicates that executives, by and large, intend not only to increase their investment in Web 2.0 technology, but they wish they had done more sooner. The recent rapidity and ubiquity of uptake of Web 2.0 tools in the consumer marketplace likely colors the hindsight. 

McKinsey surveyed respondents on specific areas of Web 2.0, including Web services, collective intelligence, peer-to-peer networking, social networking, RSS, podcasts, wikis, blogs and mash-ups. The emphasis on investment was highest on Web Services, collective intelligence, P2P networking, with respectable, but less emphasis on social networking, RSS, podcasts, blogs and wikis.

McKinsey included sidebar of definitions of all of the above terms, and collective intelligence is defined as  “any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.”

I found it interesting that wikis, blogs, social networking and RSS were not viewed in the constellation of collective intelligence tools, but it may be that executives were less familiar with their role in that capacity. Virtual team workspaces, such as eRoom, MS SharePoint are perhaps considered by IT professionals in the collective intelligence space, but McKinsey didn’t specify.

But the executives surveyed did indicate that they viewed  Web 2.0 influencing and creating a more flexible method of  introduction and acquisition of capabilities than the typical top-down practices. Some of the resulting benefits were towards optimizing internal collaboration, extending their collaboration and communication effectiveness with customers and partners, and gaining efficiencies in their supply chain.

The survey also points to a significant global uptake in these technologies in every major geography across major sectors of retail, high tech, telecommunications, financial services and pharmaceuticals.  It’s a survey well worth reading in its entirety.

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: Enterprise 2.0 Conf. Case In Point

Sometimes combining basic tools form powerful collaboration mechanisms.

I’ve been surprised that the concept of mind mapping wasn't  discussed as a relevant and powerful mechanism for collaboration at Enterprise 2.0.   I’ve been a user of mind mapping through the use of MindJet’s MindManager product for some years, and have mentioned to various people at MindJet that their desktop application would be extremely powerful if they brought it into the Web 2.0 world. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last month,  I saw that SnapXT has done just that.

Using MindManager as the user interface, a non-technical, knowledge worker can create web pages and mash-up applications. The MindManager tool allows the simple structuring and visualization of a web page, or a project portal and SnapXT joins,  or snaps the applications and data elements together. 

When I used MindManager in a corporate enterprise workplace a year ago, I found it useful to help a team outline a support process between the company and a partner organization. In other cases, I used it to help a team brainstorm the structure of a proposed online community. While MindManager itself does have many points of integration with other desktop applications, SnapXT enables simple mashups that would integrate with other enterprise business systems.

These type of tools can give knowledge workers greater access to   collaboration and ability to create their own project specific application, almost a "disposable"application, useful for the duration of a project without the immense lead time and cost of more traditional applications development models.

Here, in map format is an outline of the MindJet/SnapXT combination.