Archive for the 'Knowledge' Category

The novelty has worn off, we’re now in a period of consolidation

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on December 3, 2008
in Knowledge
. 0 Comments

Richard Sambrook is sitting in his office on the first floor of Bush House, television blaring. It’s 6th November, the day after the US election result has been declared and the BBC’s World News channel is going into overdrive, broadcasting minute by minute reports of President-elect Barack Obama’s every move – or so it seems.

This is the sort of character-filled room that you imagine should be featured in The Observer magazine’s My Space series. Cartoon caricatures mix with modern art on the walls. A large comfy maroon sofa sprawls at one end of the office, a relatively-contained network of high tech communications (plasma screen, laptop, TV monitor, fax) at the other.

Richard himself seems pretty relaxed, given that the last few days must have been hectic. As Director of the BBC’s Global News division, Richard is in charge of all the BBC’s international news services, across radio, television and digital media. Guiding and monitoring the US presidential election coverage in 32 different languages can’t be easy.

Before we meet, I check Richard’s blog to see how things have been going. Maybe not surprisingly, there’s been a bit of a lull - the most recent post is 29th October, over a week ago. 

Richard readily admits he’s not posting quite as frequently as he was when his first internal blog launched in 2004. Back then, he was the first senior manager at the BBC to do such a thing. 

“I’d moved into my new role and I thought it would be an interesting communications tool. The BBC can be very insular and inward-looking. It’s not just about journalism. I wanted to communicate with the new staff. After about three months I was getting 6,000 unique visitors each month. People I didn’t know would stop me and talk to me in the corridor, just because they’d read something of interest on the blog.”

“Part of it was learning about digital media and social media. Blogging is a way of getting to understand the dynamics, how it all works.”

Richard is refreshingly honest about the four things that bothered him at the outset. His editor’s head identified drawbacks from the start: 

  1. Am I going to be taken to task for something I write?
  2. Am I going to offend a specific constituency or community?
  3. Is anyone going to be interested?
  4. Can I do it?

While he found the blog relatively easy to write, he was concerned about the way his audience would react:

“Being a journalist, the actual writing wasn’t a problem. Finding a personal tone was. As well as issues like transparency, honesty and frankness. If you take all the contentious stuff out, will it be interesting?”

So far, the most awkward moment was during a dispute between the BBC and the unions:

“I said the only way through is negotation. And then found out the official BBC position is not to negotiate.”

Hmm. So would he extol the virtues of blogging to all senior managers?

“I wouldn’t say everyone should do it. It only works for some people. You need to get the right mix of informality and openness. Otherwise it won’t work. It’s good to have a very clear purpose, to see if you can open discussion and dialogue that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

“For example, last year I talked about advertising on the BBC World Service website (outside the UK). A small number of staff felt strongly about it and voiced their opinions on the blog – I wouldn’t have found out otherwise.”

When Richard went to his bosses with the idea of setting up a blog, they must have thought they were relatively safe. After all, to use an old cliché, Richard is a BBC man through and through - he joined the organisation in 1980 as a sub-editor in the radio newsroom (after training as  journalist with Thomson Regional Newspapers) and worked his way up the ranks, becoming News Editor and head of newsgathering, then Director, BBC News, before moving onto his current role. Plus, they must have hoped Richard’s editorial experience should create some kind of Pavlov’s dog-type reaction if he ever thought about writing anything too close to the edge.

“Initially their attitude [the bosses] was, ‘that’s novel’. But I think they were generally very happy for someone like me to do it.”

In 2006, two years after launching the internal blog, Richard moved his ideas into the public domain with the launch of Sacred Facts on Typepad. The site now averages around 2,000 visitors a month.

“Because I’d already done it inside and they [the bosses] had seen my blog, it was okay. They clearly thought that I, more than anyone, should know the risks.”

Richard was Director, BBC News, in May 2003 when BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ran a report claiming that the British Government had knowingly exaggerated claims over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in a dossier published in 2002. The government’s vehement rebuking of the accusations levied by the report led to a British judicial inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, and eventual resignations of the BBC’s Chairman and Director-General.

“Part of my experience of going through the weapons of mass destruction incident motivated me. If I’d been blogging at that time, it would have been an opportunity to say something, to speak out against the spin – although the corporate line would have been tight.”

I ask him what he thinks about the current storm raging over the BBC – the whole furore around the – some would say cheeky, others offensive – telephone calls made by Russell Brand and Johnathan Ross to actor, Andrew Sachs.

Admittedly entertainment is not Richard’s milieu, and he won’t be drawn, saying, diplomatically: “I’d only want to say something that adds value”.

Sacred Facts has clearly given Richard a great feel for social media. As all of you out there will know, BBC News has an impressive presence across digital media, and Richard is looking for the next big thing to develop.

“The novelty [of social media] has worn off; we’re now in a period of consolidation. 2006 was the year of Facebook. Now, I’m on Twitter more than anything else. But it’s not so much professional. It’s more a back-channel to a group of friends who are interested in the same stuff. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Seesmic, Threads, 12seconds, Qik - all have a BBC presence. It’s all experimentation, all extending our journalistic reach. We don’t get a huge amount of feedback.”

So, go on – he works hard - make Richard’s day and give him a comment!

Setting Redcats among the chickens

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on November 20, 2008
in Folksonomies and Knowledge
. 0 Comments

We’re sitting in the foyer of the ICA, the UK’s home of avant garde culture, but somehow Benjamin Ellis and I are talking about chickens.

Benjamin has six bantams and they don’t want to go outside now that the first frosts of winter have arrived. Also, they’ve stopped laying eggs. Of course, the bottom line solution would be to gently put the bantams out of their misery, and have a nice chicken curry for dinner. But would this be ethical? Probably not.

The chickens are providing more than just eggs, they are providing company (of sorts) and entertainment for Benjamin’s children. They represent six little lives. The fact that they’re no longer laying doesn’t directly mean that Benjamin’s children are going hungry. In fact, I imagine there more than enough slack in the Ellis family budget to provide for the six bantams under their new ‘pet’ status.

I’m interested in chickens because my country-dwelling sister keeps them, and it’s great for Lila (my two year old) to get an actual demonstration of where eggs come from.

The only reason I know Benjamin keeps chickens is because he’s been Twittering about them. I swear I wouldn’t have brought chickens up, otherwise.

Social media tools are great in delivering exactly that sort of arbitrary information that you wouldn’t necessarily ask for – but once you know the information is there, you can exploit it.

As Benjamin says (once we get our mutual interest in chickens out of the way):

“A lot of creativity comes from randomness but it’s hard to construct randomness in an effective way. That’s what social media does. It puts the answer in the cloud.”

And how does this work in business?

“Most of the information assets of an enterprise are placed carefully out of reach. If you’re really progressive you use an intranet or Sharepoint. But in many cases information has simply gone from an information pocket to an information enclave.

“The reality is that there’s no meta-data – information about information… bookmarking, tagging and wikis make up a kind of semantic wrapper around information that can really help identify stuff – if these are used properly they can make the biggest fundamental difference to business.”

A former marketing executive at Cisco, Juniper and other leading IT companies, Benjamin now uses his expertise to focus on the communication problems within organisations. Last September he set up Redcatco “to ensure better information flows inside companies”.

“The biggest challenge in any organisation is the asymmetrical nature of information,” says Benjamin. “You have information, I need that information – but the actual problem is knowing who has what, and how to find it when you need it.”

One of the stumbling blocks Benjamin has come across is the natural tendency to hoard information by the people who work within companies:

“Where there’s an information vacuum people exercise their power - so there’s cultural interest in developing that vacuum.”

If getting people to share is hard, getting people to tag and bookmark is even more difficult, but when this is done properly, the rewards are many:

“The critical information is always on the margins. The information that propagates is always the mean. For example, look at the long tail of the exiting customers. Find out their reasons for leaving and you’ll find the interesting, unexpected stuff.

“There’s a risk management analyst in the States [Nassim Nicholas Taleb] who talks about ‘Black Swans’: he asked, what’s the point of building risk analysis on previous problems, when all those problems were unforeseen? It’s the small probability events, the little voices, the unusual conversations that are important. If you wait until something’s become ‘late majority’, you’ll be too late.”

(This argument resonates strongly with Stowe Boyd’s focus on ‘edglings’. And there’s Hugh McCleod on the same subject here.)

“It’s all about resource discovery – discovering the people who are valuable to you, knowing where your experts are…those random things. You may find you suddenly need a snowboarder who can use a camcorder – social profiles can help you find this person. It’s all possible technically…but culturally? We’ve still a way to go.

“A lot of these collaboration tools are cat-herding tools. The traditional business environment tries to herd and ends up with only the sheep. Red cats are the really distinguished ones (which is why we chose that name for our company). You want to create and nurture outstanding individuals. If you’re using social media in a really inductive way, you’ll attract those red cats.”

When Quentin Tarantino got John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson to talk about hamburgers on the way to commit another violent crime in Pulp Fiction, he was heralded as a master of unconventional story-telling. But that non-linear, broken narrative is probably the best representation of how we all experience life.

If social media at work can capture conversations, linear and non-linear, and enable us to later make connections where we wouldn’t have otherwise, then that has to be enriching at least – and, overall, value-adding.

Time to Huddle

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on November 12, 2008
in Knowledge and Passion
. 3 Comments

Huddle MD Alastair Mitchell isn’t having the best of days. He’s about to exchange on a house and the electronic money transfer system of his bank – a well-known online only service – has gone down. Luckily, given the current economic climate, it’s only a temporary blip. But Ali is having to jump every time his Blackberry bleeps, and he’s constantly apologising.

Alastair – or Ali to everyone who knows him - is bit of a champion of all things digital, so the fact that his internet bank should be shafting him in this manner is ironic.

Two years ago, Ali and his partner, Andy McLoughlin, launched Huddle from a renovated warehouse in South London. The idea behind Huddle is simple: a network of online workspaces where people can chat, share files, organise a project, etc all in a safe, protected environment, but with anyone they care to invite, anywhere in the world.

“From the start, we wanted to bring Web 2.0 concepts into enterprise working methods,” says Ali, when the Blackberry’s been silent for long enough to let him speak. “Everyone hates using enterprise tools. We wanted all the ‘hygiene’ aspects – security, control, back-ups - but to make it social as well - easy to use, friendly and organic.”

Not only have Andy and Ali created Huddle online, they’ve also replicated a mini-version of the concept offline. Their Bermondsey warehouse space is shared with a number of other technology start-ups, and they run a regular event, DrinkTank, specifically for tech entrepreneurs and investors.

“We’re really passionate about entrepreneurship, so we really wanted to do something to support the start-up community here; we wanted to come back and circle in. If you’re an entrepreneur in the UK you tend to retire and go to live in the Cotswolds. But Silicon Valley is like a big business park. We wanted to find a way of getting entrepreneurs together over here, helping them to talk to each other – that’s what DrinkTank is all about.”

Helping people communicate more easily was the impetus for Huddle - the idea to create an online collaborative space came out of Ali’s own frustrations at his previous employer:

“I was running the product team at dunhumby [the marketing company], which was made up of 300 people working in five different countries. Everyone was working via email or social networks because the existing enterprise technology simply wasn’t good enough. So, when I began to think about doing my own thing, I knew exactly what I wanted to create.”

A mutual friend introduced Ali to technology specialist Andy, funds were raised from Eden Ventures - and Huddle was born.

Take up has been enthusiastic, with the company’s user-base growing steadily by around 40 per cent each month (“Because we’re a low cost technology with a relatively small base, the impact of the credit crunch, so far, has been hard to see”).

And, despite, the current gloomy economic outlook, Ali’s for the future are bright: he admits to having “Google-esque ambitions” for the company.

“On the one hand, we’d like Huddle to become a verb: ‘let’s huddle it’. And we’d like to be as ubiquitous as Facebook. On the other, we’d like to become an enabler for social change. We set up the Huddle Foundation to give Huddle away free to charities. In fact, our customer service manager spends about 50 per cent of his time working – for free - with the charities that use us.”

That social element is key in a company where the majority of the workforce are under 30 and keen to feel that they are involved in something that’s about more than just making money: “Our culture is not just about business. It’s very much built around being nice to each other.”

And Ali believes they can keep hold of that dynamic, start-up mentality, citing Virgin and Google as two companies that have grown dramatically yet continue to prioritise innovation:

“The perceived wisdom is that as companies grow they become bigger and more boring; inertia creeps in. It’ll be interesting if we can stay with the culture we’ve built so far. That will be the real test. We believe in what we call ‘loose’ leadership. You hire the very best people and let them get on with it. Give them more than enough rope to hang themselves. I’m constantly surprised and amazed at what these people can do.”

And on that positive note, Ali rushes off to take a call from his mortgage broker. I keep my fingers crossed for him.

Another way…

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on November 4, 2008
in Knowledge and Sharing
. 0 Comments

At the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, JP Rangaswami focuses on the history of workplace communication for his keynote, “Web 2.0 versus the Water Cooler”. In typical JP style, the area he covers is broad, comparative and entertaining - and includes everything from ancient manuscripts to train timetables to the Olympic games.

JP is a familiar face to this crowd, as well as a great speaker, and it seems everyone wants a piece of him after the talk. We’re due to meet right after he’s finished, but it’s 45 minutes before JP finally wends his way down to the community lounge for our interview. He’s still in reflective mode:

“In low attrition, low job-mobility environments, there was a genuine covenant. It made sense to have a consensual style of management. You learnt to take a bullet for the team. And your team would remember. Over time, everything evened out. It was thick ice that you skated over. Consensus was built over long-term relationships.”

This ‘covenant’ did not only affect teamwork, it also impacted on performance reviews and appraisals. “There was institutional memory”, as JP puts it. And this memory was responsible for deciding whether or not it the time was right for a pay rise, or if a minor misdemeanor might be overlooked.

“Nowadays you get moved around. How do you get that information to be valuable? How do you deal with this new world? The silo structures of the past didn’t allow us to access information. Maybe you need to have a wiki-like construct, where knowledge becomes a cloud asset?

In 2001, JP Rangaswami was working as Chief Information Officer at Dresdner Kleinwort, the investment bank, when he decided there had to be a different way of doing things:

“I realised that email was appalling – there were so many ‘broken trust’ implications in it – bcc was evil: ‘I’m going to have a conversation with your boss watching’; cc was ‘cover your arse’ – so I started looking at the problems I had and ways to find solutions to them.”

“Also, I realised, this way of records being attached to messages was the wrong way round. We want messages to be attached to the records. Those were the sort of characteristics I began to look for.”

As Global CIO, JP was responsible for a communications network of 6,000 employees across 35 countries. The way he saw it, the problems at Dresdner Klienwort were caused by four key things:

1. Attrition (the high rate of staff turnover)
2. The high mobility of staff between roles within the firm
3. Cultural differences – the same word meaning different things
4. Linguistic differences – the meaning of words being lost in translation

So, JP started a blog internally, and started championing wikis as a way forward.

“If you capture things using social software…there is a record of how things happened. Now a newcomer has the chance to catch up and understand what’s taken place.”

As a long-time advocate of disruptive technologies, and with a 40 per cent cut to his budget to consider, JP also began to introduce open source products to the company. By 2003, 43 percent of Dresdner Kleinwort’s Unix users were on Linux.

In 2003, JP was named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine and in 2004 he was named CIO Innovator of the Year by the European Technology Forum. In 2007, Silicon.com chose him as one of technology’s 50 most influential individuals, describing Dresdner Kleinwort as “an aggressive leading-edge adopter of innovative and disruptive technologies”.

Now, JP is a managing director at BT Design, heading up strategy and innovation. If his influence there is anywhere near as successful as his impact at Dresdner Kleinwort, we have some delightful surprises in store.

Inverting the Pyramid

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on October 25, 2008
in Knowledge
. 3 Comments


I’m in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. A disproportionate amount of my time seems to be spent with people who work at IBM. ‘Big Blue’ is a sponsor here so maybe it’s no surprise that key members of its social media team are popping up all over the place.

I bump into Delphine Remy-Boutang, World-Wide Social Media Marketing Manager, over lunch, and then there’s Stuart J.McRae and the nine other ‘BlueIQ ambassadors’ who’ve been invited along as a reward for spreading the social media gospel around the company’s 500,000 employees.

Meanwhile, corporate email refusenik and blogger extraordinaire, Luis Suarez, is doing a keynote and VP Social Software Programs & Enablement, Gina Poole, is running a session on web 2.0 at work.

It’s standing room only in Gina’s session and I’m a few minutes late so I only get to perch on the steps behind a pillar and listen to her voice - quite a nice voice, as it happens. Gina is telling the story of Jeannette Browning, an IBM employee who was singled out and praised for adapting social software (Lotus Connection Activities/Lotus Notes) to help her sales team, and then was so chuffed by the recognition/ acknowledgement of her efforts that she started creating lots of ‘enablement’ materials to help other IBMers do similar stuff.

As Gina reflects in the Community Lounge afterwards, it’s clear that this kind of ’social pyramid selling’ is something she loves to be architect of. In her time with the company (and there’s been 25 years of it – she started out as a programmer in 1984), Gina has set up various social media programmes (BlueIQ, promoting social software use internally, is the latest); and launched a start up, (the developerWorks community).

A common factor behind Gina’s projects has been the use of volunteers in driving things forward. This is how she builds momentum and consensus when introducing something new:

“Run a pilot programme. Get a few dedicated people on board – some early adopters and enthusiasts. Make them the ‘poster children’ of your campaign. Make them the rock stars. Don’t just evangelise the project, say ‘look at what it did for this individual’. Success breeds success.”

Charming, softly spoken and clearly a lover of people, Gina appears to be the Craig Newmark of IBM. So, how would she describe her leadership style?

“More pure leadership than command and control. It’s more carrot than stick. I want to make sure I’m hiring the best people and then create an environment for them to succeed.

“In the old management era, knowledge was power. Now in the social era you want to unleash the knowledge. The powerful person is the one who can lead by influence. You don’t need a big budget and lots of direct reports. You’re managing more of a matrix. Listening is very important.”

And why has social media become so important to her?

“People like to share – that’s one of the most powerful things. This sharing creates ‘weak ties’ you can build on. I’m interested in helping people get outside of their inboxes [echoing the IBM mantra kicked off by Luis Suarez]. People start mixing and matching things in ways that management would never dream of.

“The end result of bringing projects together, that serendipitous stumbling across things is very powerful. Like connecting the dots. It’s a great way to break down silos: ‘oh, you’re doing that, so am I. Let’s work together’…things tend to go in directions you’d never expect.”

Things were very different when Gina started at IBM back in the 1980s:

“When I joined IBM it was very hierarchical and things moved very slowly. It was tough for good ideas to bubble up. We went through a near-death experience. Then Lou Gerstner came in. That [near-death experience] was a great catalyst for a change in focus.

“Management became much more participatory. We turned the management pyramid on its side and then on its head. Now we’re really harnessing creative capital and social capital.”

Close to the tipping point?

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on October 16, 2008
in Knowledge
. 1 Comment

It’s a Friday afternoon and there’s this big web conference, Remix UK, going down in Brighton. Sadly, I’m stuck at my desk in London, battling a backlog. But I get to watch the conference back-chat on Twitter: half the people I follow seem to have defected to the seaside for the day.

Around 5pm a tweet from James Governor comes in, saying he’s just had a nice glass of wine with a great guy called Stewart Mader. Now if James recommends someone or something, they (it?) is probably worth looking into. So I click on the link James gives and find Stewart’s website. Looks interesting, so I message him.

And that’s how Stewart and I come to be here, chatting on Skype, a couple of Fridays later.

It turns out consulting is Stewart’s second career. He once was a chemist, but got sidetracked:

“I was lecturing at the University of Hartford; we put our curriculum on the web and told people about it. They sent so many suggestions and changes, the [web]site became a bottleneck. I started looking around for some way to open it up and I stumbled upon wikis. I put one up as an experiment. Within a few months the html site was gone and everything was on the wiki.”

That was back in 2002, now Stewart runs a company called “Grow Your Wiki” which helps clients (the majority of them Fortune 500 companies) navigate their ways through the potentially murky waters of corporate social media.

The issues Stewart comes across are “social, cultural and generational”. He defines his key concerns as follows:

    1. For people who’ve worked in organisations for a decade or more, they think ‘oh there’s this army of [younger] tech savvy people coming in’ and, for that older generation, they find they don’t pick up the tools so easily so you get a fair amount of fear and frustration. One of the things I like to do is champion mutual mentoring. So you get the older person with the wealth of experience about the organisation, and the younger person with the technical knowhow, and they help each other.

    2. Employees hear all the popular cultural obsessions around Wikipedia and become concerned about all wikis being a free-wheeling anarchic mess. I have a very complex opinion of Wikipedia – it’s created a massive misconception around what a wiki can be. Wikipedia is totally open, with no security around it. People look at Wikipedia and think they don’t want that within their organisation. But wiki use inside an organisation and Wikipedia are two completely separate worlds. Giving concrete examples of wikis that work inside organisations makes a lot of difference.

    3. Rank and file employees are often afraid that if they put all their knowledge into a wiki, they won’t be needed any more but the opposite is true. If you hold onto your knowledge, all you are is an overpaid security guard. Once you start sharing your knowledge and collaborating with other people you become more valuable to your company. You’re more likely to have your job outsourced when you’re not contributing knowledge.

    4. Senior management is largely changing right now. At Enterprise 2.0 in Boston there were a number of senior execs (Wachovia, CIA, IBM, SAP, Chevron, University of Helsinki) talking of the promotion of web 2.0 throughout their companies. The embracing of tools is there. The question is not should we use these but how can we optimise these? Two years ago it was different. I think we’re close to a tipping point.

    5. Cultural change is necessary. The ideal is to run a pilot with a group of employees and pass on lessons from that. Successful wiki adoption happens at the lunch table. If you chat to a guy you have lunch with every day and he talks about using the wiki and says ‘meetings are shorter, we’re getting more done’, that creates real change.

The house that Tim built

Published
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Jemima Gibbons
on October 4, 2008
in Knowledge
. 0 Comments

It’s September 2008 and I’m on Manhattan’s West Side, standing in the foyer of the massive, aircraft hangar-like Javits Centre. The centre backs onto the Hudson River in an otherwise nondescript, rather run-down corner of the City. No matter. This ain’t no sightseeing trip. I’m one of 5,000 people attending the inaugural Web 2.0 Expo New York. There are workshops to go to and seminars to be had. There is endless coffee and cookies and even little packed lunches, served up courtesy of Microsoft.

When Tim O’Reilly’s colleague Dale Dougherty coined the term Web 2.0 back in 2004, and Tim picked it up as a useful meme to throw out to O’Reilly conference audiences, they had little idea how the concept would spread like wildfire through the digital media world.

The term ‘Web 2.0’ came at a time when there was a resurgence in optimism around the web and its capabilities, post the dotcom bust of 2000/01. The phrase isn’t allied to any specific technology, it’s more a hypernim or ‘handle’ (thanks Tom Coates) to capture the various trends that were happening at the time; these were (and still are) creating a shift in the way we use the web.

When I bump into Tim in the Javits foyer at the Web 2.0 Expo, he invites me to come with him as he heads to the hall to rehearse his keynote.

After the run-through, we get some time to sit and chat in front of the main stage. I ask Tim how the whole Web 2.0 idea came about:

“The original idea was that the web was ‘back’,” says Tim. “And we were asking, what are the new rules of business? Those new rules were network effects: you design applications that get better the more people use them, then the applications that work get the most user data. The winners are those that harvest collective intelligence: Amazon, Google…Google is actually harvesting the intelligence of all users.”

So, what does business need to do, today, to make the most of the web’s capabilities?

“Enterprise needs to learn real-time responsiveness to its users. Banks have a tremendous amount of data about their users – but they don’t share it with us. For example, look at the great things being done on Wesabe [a kind of personal finance wiki - you upload your entire bank account and credit card info, and get advice from other users on your spending habits]. Every business needs to be thinking about what data assets it owns and how it can use them.”

What’s wrong with the current business mindset?

“Firstly, that you do things in the back office. Everything should be automated [and tracked]. Companies really need to automate more services and really upgrade their IT staff.”

Tim goes onto explain that all this automation doesn’t mean there can’t be human intervention, if necessary (apparently Google had to intervene manually when its algorithmic search listing for O’Reilly caused O’Reilly Auto Parts and not O’Reilly Media to dominate the front page).

“Secondly, organisations need to be restructured around IT services, like the best Web 2.0 companies. Amazon, for example, has a whole team dedicated to the efficient functioning of the ‘buy’ button.”

“Some businesses are ahead of Web 2.0 in terms of automation. There can be too much of it. Look at what’s happening to the financial markets now. All this was predicted in Richard Bookstaber’s book, The Demon of Our Own Design.”

Who does O’Reilly really admire in business today?

“Look at the growth of Zappo’s [the online shoe store]. It recently hit revenues of $1billion. Tony Shieh, the CEO, has become a hero.

“Jeff Bezos [Amazon.com] is very strategic. He’s thought a lot about how the world is going to change. Who’d have thought that getting into cloud services would make sense, but Amazon web services (providing hosting to Flickr etc) has become a great sideline.”

Needless to say, both Shieh and Bezos are friends.

It’s likely that, in time, the group of very clever people that O’Reilly, Bezos and Shieh form a part of will come up with another very clever label to acutely describe a future zeitgeist.

A few of half-hearted souls tried to push something called ‘Web 3.0’ at the New York Expo. I’m relieved to say it didn’t take off.

Mixing pleasure with business

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on September 26, 2008
in Knowledge
. 1 Comment

Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield works out of an unassuming office in downtown Palo Alto, a couple of blocks away from the Caltrain station (if you listen hard, you can hear the trains clanging) and a stone’s throw from the sprawling Stanford University campus.

Like just about everywhere else in Silicon Valley, Socialtext’s low-tech surroundings are a foil for the hi-tech business taking place. People talk on the phone about ‘mikis’ (mobile wikis) and ‘webinars’ (online seminars) as if these were common words in the English language. ‘Wiki Wednesday across the way’ is scrawled in faded marker pen across the reception whiteboard.

After a few minutes, Ross appears. He’s the first company chairman I’ve seen wearing shorts – ever. Admittedly it’s 28 ºC today. We go outside to sit a shady spot under a couple of Cypress trees, partly so I can make the most of the weather, partly so that Ross can have a cigarette.

Ross co-founded Socialtext, ‘the world’s first wiki company’ in 2002. What made him feel that this type of social media could work in business?

“So much interesting stuff was happening in the social space [at that time]. Adrian from Ryze was putting on loft parties and wanted to connect the people who went to them; Ben and Mena Trott from Six Apart, Evan Williams from Blogger…they all created tools to scratch an itch, to interact with friends from a community. The guy who invented Trillian [instant messaging between different networks] did it simply to connect with a girl he had met on a beach.

“It was just after the [dotcom] crash and a lot of people had been made redundant and I guess had time on their hands. The thing is, these [new] tools had better social dynamics, and they were lightweight and easy to use compared to the clunkier enterprise systems.”

Ross and his co-founders were keen to take that simplicity and apply it to business. For two and half years, they worked out of their own homes (“in a distributed fashion” says Ross, not without irony).

So, what’s the main diff between the early noughties and now?

“In 2001, it was the fear economy – the only people selling technology were the security companies, and then 9/11 happened! Now, there’s much less hype; buying behaviour and investing behaviour are verging on the rational.”

Ross cites the change in the consumer markets – the growth of wikipedia, open source etc – as a key change: “on the consumer side, the bar is raised higher”. Consumer products genuinely have to work for people, otherwise they simply won’t be used.

The growth of blogging, in particular, has helped enormously:

“We used to have a lot of push back from PR and legal departments. Not any more. Now there are thousands of blogging policies up on the web for corporate lawyers to pull down and adapt.”

In November 2007, the company entered a new phase, securing a further $9.5million of funding. This seemed a good point for Ross to hand over his CEO role to Eugene Lee, a former executive at Cisco and Adobe:

“I’m very much an early stage guy, very hands on,” says Ross. “I always knew that I’d have to step aside at some point. You start off wearing all the hats, then you’ve got to give every one away, ideally to suitable people. It was a very emotional decision when I first had to step aside [at my previous start-up].”

See Ross’ blog for more of his thoughts on ceding control.

Needless to say, the Socialtext platform, originally a wiki solely for the highly tech-literate, has grown and developed in six years. WYSIWYG editing, introduced around 2004, was a step forward. But the real tipping point came in 2006, when mass collaboration became possible.

It was around this time that more ambitious ideas, such as ‘Wikipedias’ for companies were introduced. The whole user experience became more transparent and participatory, meaning that ‘non-teccie’ types could access and use the platform with relative ease.

Ross constantly thinks about how to make the platform more genuinely useful - in internet parlance, maximising ‘network effects’ (ie, the more people using a network, the more powerful it becomes). Identifying when and how people interact with the Socialtext platform has been a key part of making it more relevant:

“Our VP of Professional Services came up with the framework of ‘in the flow’ use cases as opposed to ‘above the flow’: where [people used our platform] as an integral part of the process of a project, rather than outside of it. These [in the flow use cases] are what we specialise in.”

One context in which Ross has found social media to be particularly useful is change management – where people can “collaborate on the change”. He points to the recent merger between two large companies (7,000 employees each) as a good example:

“The wiki and social networking became a great way of getting cross-pollination to happen…in the past it would be 6 or 7 people, and $1million, just to define a structure or taxonomy. Now the approach is to let the structure emerge, let staff collaborate on building it.”

And Ross has some words of comfort for any CEO fretful of any loss of control s/he might experience:

“The person who benefits most [from good knowledge management systems] is the CEO because he can drill down and see exactly who did something and why it happened.”

There’s no doubt about it, Socialtext must be doing something right. Today, it’s a global company, with offices in California, New York and the UK, employing 50 people and serving more than 4,000 organisations.

The easy-to-use, accessible style of software that originally came from the social space has now entered the corporate world. For good.

The Barnet Crusader

Published
by
Jemima Gibbons
on August 15, 2008
in Knowledge and Sharing
. 1 Comment

One day, back in 2005, council worker Dominic Campbell found an unsolicited email in his inbox. The email was inviting him to a business breakfast on ‘customer insight’. The breakfast was at Mosimann’s and it was free, so Dominic thought ‘why not?’

At the time, Dominic was working in a back office for the IT department of the local council in Barnet, one of London’s leafier outer boroughs. He had been there for five years (since graduating in Geography from Manchester University), and was relatively happy with his lot.

Then, at the breakfast, he met James Governor from the UK consultancy, Redmonk.

“He was just completely bananas and brilliant. He said there was this thing called del.icio.us and this thing called salesforce. And we were just nowhere [in terms of using these new tools].

“I tried to get James in to the council to open them up and get them to understand this stuff. I completely failed…but James did enough to inspire me to leave and set up on my own.”

Dominic is sitting with me (ironically enough), in the walled garden of the Euphorium Bakery in Islington. He’s clearly relieved that he took the chance to set up Futuregov because, three years on, things have come full circle.

Dominic is now back at Barnet Council, but working as a consultant, and implementing the kind of IT solutions he only dreamt of as an employee.

A bit of background: Barnet Council is led by Councillor Mike Freer, who blogs at www.leaderlistens.com. Outside Barnet, not many people in the UK have heard of Mike, but he may be about to become a bit more of a household name. He’s due to stand in Margaret Thatcher’s old constituency, East Finchley, in the next election and is tipped for the Cabinet if David Cameron wins.

Ever since Webcameron, the Tories have been upping the ante to Labour over which party does new media best. So it’s in Freer’s interests to look web 2.0 savvy. In fact, he’s done such a good job, that even Labour are keen to get involved in his work (the DCCG recently invested a significant amount in ‘social marketing’ for Barnet council).

All in all, a good time for Dominic to be around, then?

“Barnet is at the vanguard of redefining what a council is. They’re trying to work out how they can become an enabler [for the people] in their area. They’re trying to do something better than sending out Surveymonkey surveys. They’re trying to open up the policy-making process.”

I tried to get James in to the council to open them up and get them to understand this stuff. I completely failed…but James did enough to inspire me to leave and set up on my own.”

Barnet runs a project called ‘The Future Shape of Barnet’ in which it attempts to redefine the role of the local authority, and how it should work.

As part of this project, the council is engaging with residents and crowdsourcing ideas from staff and residents alike using web 2.0 technologies (with the help of Futuregov). Barnet now uses wikis on its intranet, and has got a page on Facebook.

“OK, so there’s only 25 fans at the moment, and they’re all council employees, but the very fact Barnet is on Facebook moves it to a different place.”

All well and good, but the fact that Barnet is so unusual says a lot about the state of play in the IT systems of local government.

“Anything freewear or open source is seen as flakey or dangerous. There’s a saying that you won’t get fired for buying Microsoft. All these people are Microsoft certified and Microsoft is flooding local government. Almost every time I go into a council I walk past a SharePoint salesman.”

Isolation is another problem:

“For people working in councils, the only contact they get with the outside world is when someone visits from SAP, Logica or Microsoft. This person tells them that whatever they’re selling is cutting edge, and they’ll hand over £1 million.”

So what are the chances of all this changing?

“Putting organisations like that into a network instead of running them as walled hierarchies is a massive step. At the moment it’s only beginning to happen, and that’s just in marketing.

“It’s gotta be another twenty years [until things really start to change]. The people in their twenties now who’ve grown up with computers, they’re the ones who are going to do all this [web 2.0] stuff naturally.”

But for Dominic, the future for genuine social change should really be outside the hands of local government altogether:

“To be honest, I’d rather government step back and let the social innovators [private entrepreneurs] do stuff. Local government should actually worry about little else than being a series of listening posts, keeping an ear to the ground on what people really need and want.”