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February 15, 2007
Early Stages of the Revolution
The key component of Enterprise 2.0 is participation; we must all get involved and add to the body of knowledge. We must define who we are and what makes us special. “Good Enough” is no longer the definition of success. This road to transformation will be blocked by everyone up and down the food chain. Managers, who have made a career of controlling information, will feel out of control in this new world. However, managing the human imagination will be the corner stone of value delivery in this next environment. How will this manifestation occur? For each of us the drive will be different; some will be forced while others will choose.
In 2004, our organization started to look into collaborative solutions and the value that could be generated. The collaborative architecture environment included team workspaces, work flow, information access, integrated communications, Intranet platforms, presence, web conferencing, and many more. These technologies brought an entire new perspective to a traditional culture of command and control. Control is the key here. Corporations enjoy control because it is a great predictor of outcomes. The tighter the control, the more predictable the outcome will be. Collaborative applications eliminate the control and this can be unsettling for some. We have been taught that without control chaos will emerge. Look around the web world and see where assumptions have been wrong.
When Amazon allowed customer reviews, the prevailing opinion was that sales would drop with the negative comments, sales didn’t drop they rose. When Ebay allowed seller and buyer feedback, the world said that the business model would crumble. When Google went to a value add business model versus an advertisement one, we all wondered what the end result would be. When Wikipedia started, all said that the quality of the information couldn’t compete with published papers and encyclopedias. In the end, the errors in Wikipedia are less than .02 per 1,000 as revealed in a recent study. Is this new or something that only applies to new technology? Well, not really:
Lee Iacocca wanted convertibles but the engineers said no, the salesmen said no, the dealers said no, the plants said no. Lee said “Yes, if you have to take a can opener and pull the tops off each car, we are having convertibles”. Mark Twain said the man with a new idea is considered a crank until the idea succeeds. Beethoven wrote the “Heroic Symphony”, which broke every rule of the classics; the orchestra said no we can’t play it. Stravinsky premiered the “Right of Spring”, the critics declared him insane. Marcel Duchamp painted “Nude Descending a Staircase”; everyone declared it the worst picture ever painted until it was recognized as a turning point in art history. Freud described the un-conscious world, while the conscious world said no. James Joyce changed the literature world forever by writing in the stream of consciousness technique and everybody declared him deranged
The point is that today, the architecture of participation seems far-fetched but in reality, we are simply in the early stages of the next revolution.
Posted by Todd at February 15, 2007 11:21 AM