It’s been a while that I have published something on this weblog - still a lot of things have been gone on in the world since then. One can unfortunately state that we are in a major collapse of the world’s financial systems - with downturning effects on all money-reliant markets - means every market. We have to painfully realize that the fundament of our economy system, a robust financial market, is build on a pile of sand and collides even faster because of the global interdependencies.
So - we are heading for some hard times because a bunch of investment bankers were too greedy to look closely at what they are trading. In a recent post Markus Breuer links to a very nice article of the New Yorker about “The Rationality of Panic“:
People don’t generally panic in the sunshine. They panic in the dark. And we are in the dark about what assets and liabilities are truly held in what has been properly labeled the “shadow banking system”–the global aggregation of hedge funds, privately placed debt securities, and the hedging or insurance contracts known as credit default swaps. By some accounts, the value of assets held in this shadow system is as large or larger than then value of the assets held in the formal, regulated banking system. But nobody really knows, as there is no transparent market for many of the securities of concern, and no systematic disclosure of assets and liabilities to government regulators–not here, not in Europe, and not in Asia, either.
And as transparency is a key condition for a working market structure we do not have to wonder why it is not working. The market is closed and private though it plays a fundamental role on all other markets - hopefully the crisis will change this and leads us to a more open and transparent financial system where the profits for all the actors may be a lot lesser (because of a working market!).
And despite all the overrated hype about Web 2.0 the underlying principles of easy-to-use and decentralized information sharing systems is a way to more transparency of markets. This might give the chance of turning from a seller’s market of scarcity to a buyer’s market of abundance. This leads to another great post of JP Rangaswami discussing the failures of the “scarcity economics“:
You see, scarcity economics is about hiding needles in haystacks; abundance economics is about making haystacks out of needles. What would you prefer?
So - we have to see the financial crisis as a major outburst of the old world as we know it and hope for a change by a far more transparent and decentralized eco-system supported by the new conversational landscape of social media.
This title of this post came to my mind when I found the diagram Richard Dennison posted on his weblog about the Intranet evolution at BT. Actually this is founded again on the idea of generating added value by “fostering the collective intelligence” - as defined as key idea of Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly and always again linked by me.
The diagram actually visualizes a 3×2 matrix with two axes - one standing for the evolution of dezentralizing the information systems by adding the value of collective information and actions - and the the other representing the evolution from information (contextual data) to knowledge (action-related information) towards competence (person-related knowledge).
Transfering Richard’s diagram to this systemization led me to the following matrix:
Well - this diagram is a “hot shot” and I am eager for your thoughts.
It has been quite a while that I have posted to this blog but actually I am quite busy planning and organizing some new exciting and challenging conferences - I am therefore hardly able to keep up with all the discussions. In the sense of this weblog I also have very much “dezentralized” my writings to several places - if you still want to catch up with me then take a look at my FriendFeed that aggregates a lot of these sources (but be aware not everything is in English!). But I will also try to get back my writing efforts to this place.
This said I’d like to promote briefly the discussions on our Enterprise2Open community blog project - and reflect the issues of us cutting the short leashes of driving the Enterprise 2.0 discussions on our own. The Enterprise2Open blog was originally installed by Martin Koser and Frank Hamm as a weblog project that helps to organize the Enterprise 2 Open at CeBIT this year. This summer I have talked to Martin on the prolongation of the project with a new focus and new approach. The mission we defined for this weblog project is to help bonding the E2.0 community more closely together as well as documentating corporate cases in this field.
Following this path I started some first profile interviews with E2.0 experts - see this and this. I’m still hunting down some more folks on this - if you have ideas on who to interview, feel free to tell me. Furthermore Martin and i have recently started a case study project we want to publish soon on a wiki at Enterprise 2 Open. With this we are trying to documentate the cases out there - starting with those that are being discussed at our events (here, here, here, here and here). For the last mentioned event, the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM on Sept. 18th, Prof. Dr. Joachim Niemeier, one of Germany’s expert in the E2.0 field and moderator of the event, has conducted some interviews with the speakers - that are also being discussed out there - see #e20forum at Del.ico.us.
With this I also want to answer a tweet of Andrew McAfee yesterday questioning how far European companies are behind in implementing E2.0 concepts. As all the IT and Web ideas are mostly being invented in the US it is without doubt that Europe always is lagging behind. Especially when it comes towards concepts and methods that are based on less hierarchical and more open principles for organizational structures like the collaborative idea of E2.0 our cultural background is hindering the adoption. Control and structure are still two core values that drive the taught and conducted management doctrine - and can be explainded very much anthropological as the state of power within the social structures of the European culture were long time ruled by clerical and monarchical constitutions where as the American culture started with the economical constitution.
Regarding the companies where E2.0 concepts are adopted very early and likely to succeed I assume from the anthropological explanation that those firms are mainly global players with non-European headquarters or at least strong non-European branches within the organization. Examples for this from our case lists are Deutsche Bank, Adidas, BT but also ABB or Motorla. They are characterized by bottom-up approach regarding their E2.0 projects. The typical German case - in comparison - is characterised rather by a top-down approach like ProSiebenSat1 (corporate Intranet with social features), B. Braun Melsungen (corporate knowledge & collaboration management), Bosch (corporate wiki strategy), Fraport (corporate wiki strategy) as well as Festo (corporate wiki and social networking approach). Most of these cases have problems with the corporate-wide roll-out and acceptance of the E2.0 idea - though they are already further than a lot of other companies.
Therefore coming back towards the question of Andrew McAfee - yes - Europe is always running late in the adoption of new IT and Internet ideas, but there are projects and some of them are leap frogging the adoption.
Well - I am not a fast paced writer - but I do eventually post my thoughts and insights on the blog. I started this as my personal blog writing about everything what I am doing and interested in. From the title of the blog my main interested is the change of the industries, organizations and management practices while being influenced by the paradigm change the Web (esp. the Web 2.0) is bringing to it. As I am a fan of Rod Beckstrom’s analogy of the “Starfish and the Spider” as metaphor for explaining the characteristics of decentralized organizations - I gave this weblog a name that is relating to this book.
As the “chief conference chair” of Kongress Media and part of several advisory boards of other leading conferences (here, here and here) I am limited in the spare time of writing about my thoughts and interests. So far a lot of things around here were somehow linked to my work - and therefore maybe some kind of boring for people who are looking for some real value. Therefore I decided to re-focus this blog on the above mentioned topics and exclude things as my Twitter digest or work reports on another blog at http://bnlog.network.kongressmedia.de - in doing this I am also doing some kind of language cut - as I am eager for a broad conversation in regards to my thoughts and insights of the web 2.0 sphere I will be mainly posting in English on this side. As my work is mainly focussing on German conferences as well as consultancy jobs I will post mainly in German on the other side. So is up to you - what you want to read!
BTW - there are three more places you can find me:
- Techlog - Our Weblog about the developments of Kongress Media’s content technology
- ECM Flash - my former weblog about the German content management market - that I am also trying to re-install
- Enterprise2Open.com - a blog community with the target to bond the Enterprise 2.0 expert’s community
For many years the software industry was characterised by one central point: walled gardens. Each vendor tried to lock in its customer into his software dependancies - with closed software boundaries or at least proprietary APIs and components. But something is changing - many markets nowadays are changing to a greater openess by providing software based on industry standards, setting on top of open-source programming frameworks, turning towards advanced modularization e.g. through an aspect-orientated programming, including or substituting functionality by open-source best-of-breed-solutions or opening completely towards an open-source-project.
The driving forces behind the increasing openess of commercial software solutions are not the so often mentioned competitiveness of open-source solutions within the same markets - at least for the content management applications I can say that the open source content management solutions are as closed and walled as the commercial ones are. No - the driving force is the increasing complexity of the customer’s requirements. The solutions seeker want the software to interact, exchange with and aggregate from other solutions. Because the customer’s company are changing from hierarchical and functional organized structured towards decentralized process-orientated structures. And software needs to reflect these changes. Therefore an opening of commercial software packages is a must-be to sustain market competitiveness.
This spoken the news about CoreMedia’s move towards excluding parts of its developement into an open-source package is not surprising. (One of it’s competitor set already this path five years ago: Day Software and its CEO David Nüscheler with ther JCR 170 standarization efforts and the DAY CRX, an open source content management backend based on the standard.) Despite the customer’s demands there is also the increased value aspect of an open-source project being part of my software. Accurately introduced an open-source project and the developing community behind the project gives the opportunity to “harness the collective intelligence” (as Tim O’Reilly always says regarding the core value of Web 2.0 technologies). This is also what Sören Stamer told me in our brief interview regarding the Jangaroo-project:
Eine Business-Strategie ist es insoweit, dass wir Open Source als einen starken und zunehmend wichtigen Werttreiber für die IT-Welt und unsere Gesellschaft ansehen. (=> “… we see open source as strong and increasingly important value driver for the software industry and our society …”)
And excately these words and the underlaying views of the software business are the reasons why I am so interested in CoreMedia’s efforts. They emphasize the vast opportunities Sören Stamer is seeing in destroying internal hierarchical structures, giving staff members more freedom to develop their interests, opening up towards dialogues also with external stakeholders and in the end also opening up CoreMedia’s market offering. Here we see the power of the Enterprise 2.0 idea or as Koch/Richter are stating (in German):
„Enterprise 2.0 bedeutet vielmehr die Konzepte des Web 2.0 und von Social Software nachzuvollziehen und zu versuchen, diese auf die Zusammenarbeit in den Unternehmen zu übertragen.“ (=> Enterprise 2.0 means to understand the notion of Web 2.0 (=> see Tim O’Reilly’s statement about the core characteristic of harnessing the collective intelligence) and social software and to apply this towards corporate collaboration and value creation.)
For more background info - see:
In der Publikation der ersten Referenten-Interviews zum Social Media FORUM (siehe Interview mit Ehrhardt Heinold und Markus Franz) bin ich auch noch einmal über die Definitorik von John Batelle zu Conversational Media gegangen. Dabei ist mir folgender Satz entgegengesprungen (Quelle):
And while the major media companies are unparalleled when it comes to running companies that live in the Packaged Goods Media world, running major companies in the Conversational Media field require quite a different set of skills, and consideration of radically different economic and business models - models which, to be perfectly frank, conflict directly with the models which support and protect Packaged Goods Media-based companies.
Das stellt mich vor die Frage, ob das klassische Online-Medienmodell und Social bzw. Conversational Media nicht vereinbar sind. Was meint Ihr dazu? Ich bin gespant, was unsere Praxis-Referenten auf dem Social Media FORUM zu dieser These sagen.
Unbestreitbar ist wohl aber, dass es eines Wandels bedarf. Ehrhardt Heinold sieht dabei allerdings Probleme darin, dass
die oft nicht klaren Erlösmodelle und die fehlenden internen Voraussetzungen wie Personal, Knowhow oder finanzielle Mittel
den Wandel schwierig machen. Interessant ist in diesem Zusammenhang auch ein Kommentar von Nic Brisbourne bei John Batelle (Quelle):
I think successful enterprises will increasingly delegate power to the edge and senior management’s job will change from control to co-ordination.
Fazit: Web 2.0 Konzepte können nur durch eine dezentralisierte Unternehmenskultur realisiert werden.
Lange habe ich mit mir gerungen, mit welchen Zeilen ich diesen Blog wiederbeleben könnte … Lange ist mir nichts Passendes eingefallen. Heute beim Hören von Herbert Grönemeyer’s “Bleibt alles anders” kam mir der Geistesblitz: Stillstand ist der Tod!
Ja - und dabei ist ja nichts stehengeblieben. Vielmehr hat sich in den letzten Monaten soviel gedreht, getan und bewegt, dass ich einfach keine Ruhe für ein paar längere Zeilen als nur das kurze 140-Zeichen-Statement in meinem Twitter-Account zu hinterlassen. Das soll sich jetzt aber wieder ändern, denn neben einem Plan für mehr Sport und Bewegung habe ich mir auch einen Plan für mehr Blogging auferlegt: Auf fünf Twitter-Einträge muss mindestens ein Blog-Beitrag folgen!
Wir testen gerade ein besonderes Plugin für Wordpress MU, mit dem ich und alle anderen (siehe Intranet Matters und Eventkochbuch) per Mail Nachrichten an unsere Blogs schicken können.
Im Test ist hierzu das Plugin “Blog by Mail” von Dan Horrendous:
Wordpress cleverly multi-user sibling, WordpressMU has a slimmed-down feature set for the individual bloggers. One of the features that has been removed is “blog-by-email”. This plugin implements that function. This plugin ONLY works with WordpressMU.
Und wenn dann dieses Posting sauber unter meinem Namen hier erscheint - dann hat es funktioniert.
Nach über zwei Wochen hier mal wieder ein Beitrag … folgendes habe ich gestern für den Newsletter zum Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT geschrieben:
Diskutiert man über das Thema Enterprise 2.0 ist auf einen Artikel von Ross Mayfield, seines Zeichens Gründer von Socialtext, vom 26. April 2006 zu verweisen. In diesem Artikel diskutiert R. Mayfield das “Power Law of Participation”, was als Grundlage für Konzepte mit Web 2.0 Ansätzen gesehen werden kann.
Im Kern geht es dabei um die Verteilung und den Intensitätsgrad des Nutzer-Involvements, den man auf der Seite der Nutzung identifizieren kann. So lassen sich für partizipative Konzepte im Web 2.0 in der Regel eine breite Masse von niedrigem Involvement und geringer Partizipation feststellen und nur eine geringe Zahl von Nutzern mit hohem Teilnahmegrad. Der Verlauf ist nicht proportional, sondern in Form einer Lorenzkurve stetig konvex.
Interessant an dem Artikel sind dabei die Ausführungen über die Effekte, die sich aus der Nutzerteilnahme ergeben. Allseits bekannt sollten dabei schon der Begriff der “Kollektiven Intelligenz” (auch Schwarmintelligenz) sein, was das Ergebnis einer durch Nutzerpartizipation hervorgerufenen Informationsqualifizierung darstellt. Nutzer, die Informationen bewerten, inhaltlich auszeichnen, kommentieren und austauschen, ergänzen einen singulären Wert, der sich über die Nutzeranzahl aufgrund der Netzeffekte (je mehr teilnehmen, je besser wird es!) potenziert.
Auf der Seite der hohen Partizipation sieht Ross Mayfield allerdings darüber hinaus eine ganz besondere Form der “Intelligenz”, die er als “Collaborative Intelligence” bezeichnet und die sich in einer quantitativen und qualitativen Verbesserung der Zusammenarbeit auszeichnet. Don Tapscott spricht in diesem Zusammenhang auch von “Mass Collaboration” und subsumiert hierunter genau diese Effekte, die durch die selbstverstärkenden Steigerungs- und Wertschöpfungseffekte intensiver Zusammenarbeit entstehen.
Die Effekte aus dieser “Collaborative Intelligence” lassen sich in Innovations- und Flexibilitätsvorteilen konkretisieren, die im Hinblick auf die Wettbewerbssituation vieler Unternehmen einen strategisch wichtigen Faktor darstellen. So erläutert z.B. Euan Semple beim Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT, wie er in seiner ehemaligen Funktion als Head of Knowledge Management der BBC genau diese Effekte erzielen konnte. Gleiches gilt auch für die Best-Practices von Vodafone, SFR und BTicino.
Insgesamt wurde der Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in Anlehnung an die Unterscheidung von Ross Mayfield strukturiert. So zeigt die erste Best-Practice-Session wie “Collective Intelligene” mit Hilfe von neuen “Informationsmanagement-Konzepten” erzeugt werden kann. Während die zweite Fallstudien-Session mit der Keynote von Jenny Ambrozek und den genannten Fallstudien von Vodafone, SFR und BTicino auf die Erzeugung der “Collaborative Intelligence” eingeht.