July 31, 2007
Trademark 2.0: New Book
Hardly an information technology book or magazine can be picked up that does not mention the focus to achieve enterprise effectiveness or share information in a manner that allows the organization to react in an effective manner across the entire supply chain. The result of these efforts to lower the costs and gain a competitive advantage within the supply chain has lead to a much more diverse community of individual suppliers. This transformation from hierarchal controlling structures to distributed flat organizations has created what Dan Pink calls the Free Agent Nation. The reality is that free agents may not come from next door but rather the next country. Employees need to adapt by creating unique value propositions that are captured with their Trademark.
This book will discuss several dimensions of building a personal Trademark. Unlike other books on this subject, this book will focus on the “How” an individual can move from local labor to global talent in the new world defined as Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 commonly refers to organizations that operate under an open communication model where interaction and communication is encouraged from the top down. Enterprises are accomplishing this feat by not only addressing the technology requirements of Web 2.0 but the social and organizational changes required to sustain a competitive advantage.
Subject
The domain of the book is the creation, development, and ongoing utilization of a personal Trademark. Wikipedia defines a Trademark as follows:
A trademark is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. A trademark is a type of industrial property which is distinct from other forms of intellectual property. Conventionally, a trademark comprises a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.The choice of the Trademark over the conventional term branding is by design. Information workers think of themselves as members of a trade. A trade is a long term progression where skills, competencies, and experiences come together to create subject matter expertise. The new world of business is built around ambiguity, collaboration, networks, distributed leadership, loosely coupled processes, and a dispersed workforce. For many in the industry, the transformation has been overnight and the majority of us are not prepared to handle a world without hierarchal structures. The Trademark is a physical representation of who you are as opposed to the concepts of branding which are more metaphysical. Much of this book will focus on the physical creation of informational elements that define a brand or brand position. Generally speaking, information workers are more receptive to the hard elements of a Trademark versus the emotional elements of a brand. Historically, trademarks have been associated with professions like the pharmacist’s mortar and pestle, the anvil for the blacksmith, the red and white pole for a barber or the wooden Indian statue for tobacco stores. These symbols represented something about the profession and those that practiced it.
In the 2.0 environment, these physical trademarks have been replaced by more meta-physical ones such as logo, slogans, and reputation. Still, like every organization, we must learn to build both the physical and meta-physical trademarks in order to compete in the next 25 years. This book is designed to give the information worker an overview of personal branding and provide a process for the creation of their physical Trademark in a 2.0 world.
Book Details and Purchase | Book Preview
Posted by Todd at 11:54 AM
May 4, 2007
Who are you in Web 2.0
Well, let’s see who you are in the 0.0 and 1.0 world. The easiest way is to take a look at the corporate directory. “S”, “Ste”, “Stephens”. Ah, here I am “Robert Stephens”, not Todd but Robert. I am employee number 458279 with email address rs9999. My phone numbers and address are here. And so is my job title, “Architect”. There you go; I am a number, an address, a title, and a component of some hierarchal structure that seems to be wrong. Not sure about you, but after 24 years in this business, you would think that I would have accomplished a little more than that.
Now, let’s imagine someone in a 2.0 world. Not a number, but someone that is an innovator because I can see they have several patents to their name. They are an author, due to their recent book publication at iUniverse mentioned in their blog. They have skills, knowledge, and experience that are clearly communicated and oddly enough, up to date in the profile. They are a thought leader based on their contributions to the Wiki space. Reading their blog comments, I can see this person is an educator and willing to communicate the complexities of their subject matter. They are a leader, not in title or organization structure, but a leader of thought and strategic direction. They have an enormous network of corporate relations based on the contextual tagging. This person is honest, open and trustworthy based on the communication and projects they have lead. They represent the values we want based on the family and volunteer efforts described in their profile. Employee number 14528 does say much but the vast experiences, jobs, and qualifications do. This person is an asset, an individual, and valuable to where this organization is going.
Who would you hire or fire? Personally, that Robert guy doesn't sound like he is doing anything of value so get ride of him. That second person sounds like the kind of leadership we need. Hire her and pay her what ever she wants
Posted by Todd at 11:38 AM
April 12, 2007
Mass Adoption of Social Software
While Web 2.0 applications like Flickr, SlideShare, MySpace, and Second Life provide great examples of large scale deployments, we seem to have a shortage of Enterprise mass adoptions. Mass adoption would be where a large percentage of employees, contractors and business partners access the social application in their day to day work. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia is updated by only 1% of the user base actually updates information. In January 2007, the site registered 42.8 million unique visitors while only 75,000 registered contributors. Another way of looking at it is that the Wikipedia server infrastructure handles 200 million queries while handling around a million updates. Do not misunderstand, this is very impressive but with those numbers within a corporation, what happens? To keep the math simple, let us assume that we have 100,000 employees. Based on the Wikipedia numbers, we might expect to have 1,000 people updating content. Of course, that would only be in a perfect world. The actual number may only be around 100. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says that instead of the hundreds of thousands of people we might imagine contributing information to the site, it’s actually written by just a few hundred people, known as "super-contributors. Jacob Nielson remarked User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute); 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
So what constitutes mass adoption? Can we say that 100 contributing users defines an environment of mass adoption? Perhaps we can separate the content from the usage and only attach the mass adoption class to the usage side. That seems to be limiting to me but I have been wrong before.
Posted by Todd at 2:13 PM
April 4, 2007
What is Social Tagging
Social tagging describes the collaborative activity of marking shared online content with keywords or tags as a way to organize content for future navigation, filtering, or search (Gibson, Teasley, & Yew, 2006). Traditional information architecture utilized a central taxonomy or classification scheme in order to place information into specific pre-defined buckets or categories. The assumption was that trained librarians understood more about information content and context than the average user. While this might have been true for the local library with the utilization of the Dewey Decimal system, the enormous amount of content on the Internet makes this type of system un-manageable. Tagging offers a number of benefits to the end user community. Perhaps the most important feature to the individual is the ability to bookmark the information in a way that is easier for them to recall at a later date. The benefit of this ability on a personal basis is obvious but what about the impact to the community at large. The idea of social tagging is allowing multiple users to tag content in a way that makes sense to them, by combining these tags, users create an environment where the opinions of the majority define the appropriateness of the tags themselves. The act of creating a collection of popular tags is referred to as a folksonomy which is defined as a folk taxonomy of important and emerging content within the user community (Ahn, Davis, Fake, Fox, Furnas, Golder, Marlow, Naaman, & Schachter, 2006). The vocabulary problem is defined by the fact that different users define content in different ways. The disagreement can lead to missed information or inefficient user interactions (Boyd, Davis, Marlow, & Naaman, 2006). One of the best examples of social tagging is Flickr which allows users to upload images and “tag” them with appropriate metadata keywords. Other users, who view your images, can also tag them with their concept of appropriate keywords. After a critical mass has been reached, the resulting tag collection will identify images correctly and without bias.
Posted by Todd at 12:02 PM
Introducing Enterprise 2.0
By now you have probably heard of Web 2.0 and all of the hype surrounding the next evolution of web technology. The impact on our culture is unmistakable with the advent of Weblogs, Wikis, and many other social applications. While Web 2.0 has been debated by researchers as to who and when the concepts emerged, little argument exists that the technology has arrived. Unlike Web 1.0, this new technology encourages user participation and derives its greatest value when large communities contribute the content. User generated metadata, community based information, and innovative designs enable a much richer environment for value creation.
Imagine a world where delivering the most advanced product with the greatest number of features actually losses the war for customer’s attention. This is exactly what happened to the feature rich Diamond Rio MP3 player. The Rio hit the world with a simple design, advanced features and a collection of technology advancements that forced the recording industry to file suit to protect their interest. Yet, today 75% of the market is owned by Apple’s IPod which has far fewer features, cost more, and operates on top of a proprietary music format which cannot be accessed by other devices. On the surface, this seems to fly into the face of Web 2.0 openness. What happened to the traditional framework where value dictated the winners and losers? Describing the competitive market where the Apple IPod competed head to head with the RIO is leaving out a few details. Specifically, the emergence of ITunes and the ITunes Music store altered the entire music ecosystem. The advanced functionally was transformed to the computer application which eliminated the need for that kind of feature set to be housed within the device. Add the ability to buy any song for $0.99 and you have a complete transformation worth billions. What Apple delivered is the “music experience” for the end user. This transformation from the traditional buying CD’s and loading the songs on the computer then trying to manage the music was Apple’s greatest accomplishment.
The IPod story is an Enterprise 2.0 success story based on collaborative designs, viral marketing, and the implementation of the experience over technology and features. Businesses, organizations, and individuals are all changing the way in which value is delivered. Enterprise 2.0 is about you, your collaborative ability to contribute to the vast amount of knowledge in the world today. We are starting to see power shift from the few that controlled the flow of information to you; Times Person of the Year for 2006. The business implications of this new media are unclear. No one is really sure where the rich user interfaces, self-service, the long tail, agility, transparency, and the emergent components of trust are going to take us. The one thing we can count on is that change is inevitable. Organizations have a plethora of knowledge stores ranging from repositories to registries; from corporate Wiki’s to Enterprise Collaborative applications like SharePoint. While we have plenty of tools to choose from, technology is only part of the solution. Social or behavioral changes must also occur in order to make inroads into the business culture of the organization. For example, when sending out an attachment do you email the document or send a link to a shared workspace? With collaborative type solutions, we have a much richer set of tools to deliver value to the business. Additionally, the organization must also change and adopt the technologies as a viable method of doing business. The essence of Enterprise 2.0 is the facilitation of value creation not the management of it. We are moving away from the traditional command and control model of value creation to one that is self-organizing, innovative, distributed, and collaborative. By utilizing these tools, altering the social behavior, and implementing change in the organization, we can evolve to a single entity all driving toward the same goals.
Posted by Todd at 12:00 PM
March 7, 2007
Design and Usability are Irrelevant in Web 2.0
Wait! I can hear ever reader out there saying that in the Web 2.0 world design and usability are not big issues. The contribution will be based on the value of the content not the look and feel. Of course, that’s why we buy a Lexus versus a dune buggy because we only want to get to point A to point B. Please, give me a break; you can’t honestly believe that.
Imagine for a moment that web communications is like owning a home and the original web was like living with your parents. If you didn’t know how to landscape a yard then you just cut it as your Dad told you to do. If you didn’t have an inkling of interior design then that hand-me down furniture with neon posters worked fine. If you didn’t understand the architecture of remodeling then you shared a bathroom with your three sisters. Same thing with Web 1.0 design and usability, if you didn’t understand Human Computer Interaction, HTML or Metadata then you stayed at home and used whatever your management told you.
Early or Pre 2.0 applications like discussions threads or community sites was like leaving home and renting an apartment. Of course, you felt the freedom and exhilaration of being on your own and being able to say and do whatever you wanted to do. However, you couldn’t change the infrastructure even if you had skills in design, the landlord would have kept that 2 month security fee. Rules were everywhere; no parking, no parties, no noise, no boats, etc. It was better than living at home but your freedoms were limited.
The emergence of Web 2.0 is like moving into your own home. You are now responsible for the look, the design, the content, and the perception decreed by the environment. If you want to plant Kudzo in the front yard because you have childhood memories of failure then that’s ok. If you want to paint your house with a giant “Wonder Bread” design then knock yourself out. Do you like that seventies look? They still have those Forrest Green and Harvest Gold appliances available and shag carpet may be making a comeback. The point is that you control things now and you don’t need to know HTML or .Net programming but you still have an image or brand to protect. Design and usability don’t become irrelevant, they become distinguishing. There are 55 million voices out there and your just one of them, you are going to need all of the help you can get.
Posted by Todd at 5:13 PM
March 5, 2007
Paving the Cow Paths
Web 1.0 was about “Paving the Caw Paths”; we took the current and well defined business processes and simply automated them with faster and faster technology. While many will argue that Business Processing Reengineering efforts are redefining the way in which business gets done but from the 50,000 foot level, it’s much of the same. The idea of a cow path was to define a walk where all of the cows would follow one after another as if lead by some force of nature. Web 2.0 networks the cows together and allows them to define the best path for the situation they are in. One would expect to see mass chaos emerge but how to you think the original path was formed? Farmer Brown didn’t go out there with his shovel and declare all cows will follow this path. The essence of 2.0 is to review and evolve that path depending on the changes in the community and the environment.
Posted by Todd at 6:57 PM
February 27, 2007
Value Creation in Enterprise 2.0
Traditional command and control communications, business models, and value creation frameworks are being replaced inside and outside the corporation. End users are no longer just consumers of information and customers are no longer consumers of products and services. Rather, they have become the product, the service, and the source of value. What are the implications to the business, technology, and individual in a world where the lines of the organization extends to the other side of the world? Federation, Agility, Ubiquitous Computing, SOA, Seamless end-to-end interoperability, heightened business intelligence and monitoring are no longer visions of the future but street signs of the present. This session will describe why this is happening as well as the implications to us as consumers, employees, and technologists.
View Slides from SlideShare
Posted by Todd at 12:11 AM
February 16, 2007
Corporate Collaboration
Organizations will need to understand the full impact of deploying Collaboration technologies. Traditional command and control would dictate that there needs to be an over arching strategy, architecture, and governance in place in order to be successful. However, that type of deployment fails far more than it succeeds. Traditional organizations tend to focus on the measurements of failure. That is to say, they focus on the technology and infrastructure which only ensure that you don’t fail but has little to do with success. Success comes from a bottom up framework that allows for exponential growth of both content and usage. Content and usage are measurements of success; the only way to truly succeed in the organization is to gain mass adoption of the technology which results in a massive change in culture. Some organizations will choose this change while others will be forced into it but competitive forces.
Posted by Todd at 1:32 AM
February 15, 2007
Get Involved with Enterprise 2.0
What could someone do to get involved with Collaborative or Web 2.0 solutions within an organiztion? Here are a few ideas:
Access Research Firm Information on Web 2.0 (i.e. Gartner, Forrestor, etc.)
Create a Collaborative Team Environment with Sharepoint, IBM, etc.
Create a Blog and/or Wiki even if no one cares
Replace your Intranet with Collaborative Applications
Utilize the Web, Audio, and Video Conferencing Tools
Communicate Outside Knowledge Sources from 2.0 Environments
Share Articles, Books, and Overviews with Executives
Get Involved with the Client-Support Organization
Get Involved with the Architecture Team Organization
Get Involved with Related 1.0 Technologies like Search, Intranet, etc.
Advertise your Interest and Expertise: i.e. IBM Blue Pages
Engage the Web Service Delivery, SOA or Registry Teams
Network with other Web 2.0 SME’s
Email me with your thoughts...
Posted by Todd at 8:57 PM
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 11:21 AM
January 3, 2007
Deminshing Demand
The diminishing demand for the technology professional (Labor) has an inverse relation to the Increasing Demand for IT Talent! Think about this for a moment. Labor is a commodity in which individuals can be replaced easily. Commodity skills can be easily automated or moved overseas. Worse yet, our education system has down played the need for technical skills and replacing them with softer skills required by management. Our corporations can not be excluded from the blame game since they are outsourcing these skills to lower costs. For those that argue against this action, there is little to be said since our history supports this type of activity. We automated the farm, the factory, and now, the cubicle. The power of technical transformation is that labor gets transformed. Talent, on the other hand, is in constant demand. Irregardless of your skills, if you are in the top 99 percentile then you will be able to find work. In the world of Enterprise 1.0, I competed with the top of my profession. Every profession and skill category has its gurus or subject matter experts. In the Web 1.0 world, these people freely published their knowledge in the form of books, articles, and online references. They started consulting organizations and established themselves are the experts. We could read and purchase their skills in order to deliver the business value demanded. As an individual, I could easily rank and rate my effort and accomplishments as compared with theirs, but that was the old world.
In Enterprise 2.0, I now compete with the cumulative knowledge of everyone in the world. In other words, the technology professional has become a commodity and it doesn’t really matter how talented you are. Even if you are the worlds best, the competition will take what you have done and expand beyond your original ideas. Think about this for a moment, the new web provides the medium where everyone in the world can contribute, destroy, and define your area of expertise. How will you compete? How will you build your brand? How will you develop your trademarks in this new world of web 2.0?
Posted by Todd at 11:46 AM
December 22, 2006
Wiki Defined
A Wiki is a web site that promotes the collaborative creation of content. Wiki pages can be edited by anyone at anytime. Informational content can be created and easily organized within the wiki environment and then reorganized as required (O’Neill, 2005). Wikis are currently in high demand in a large variety of fields, due to their simplicity and flexibility nature. Documentation, reporting, project management, online glossaries, and dictionaries, discussion groups, or general information applications are just a few a examples of where the end user can provide value (Reinhold, 2006). The major difference between a wiki and blog is that the wiki user can alter the original content while the blog user can only add information in the form of comments. While stating that anyone can alter content, some large scale wiki environments have extensive role definitions which define who can perform functions of update, restore, delete, and creation. Wikipedia, like many wiki type projects, have readers, editors, administrators, patrollers, policy makers, subject matter experts, content maintainers, software developers, and system operators (Riehle, 2006). All of which create an environment open to sharing information and knowledge to a large group of users
Posted by Todd at 4:40 PM
Weblog Defined
Weblogs or blogs have become so ubiquitous that many people use the term synonymous for “personal web site” (Blood, 2004). Unlike traditional Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) web pages, blogs offer the ability for the non-programmer to communicate on a regular basis. Traditional HTML style pages required knowledge of style, coding, and design in order to publish content that was basically read only from the consumer’s point of view. Weblogs remove much of the constraints by providing a standard user interface that does not require customization. Weblogs originally emerged as a repository for linking but soon evolved to the ability to publish content and allow readers to become content providers. The essence of a blog can be defined by the format which includes small chunks of content referred to as posts, date stamped, reverse chronological order, and content expanded to include links, text and images (Baoill, 2004). The biggest advancement made with Weblogs is the permanence of the content which has a unique Universal Resource Locator (URL). This allows the content to be posted and along with the comments to define a permanent record of information. This is critical in that having a collaborative record that can be indexed by search engines will increase the utility and spread the information to a larger audience. With the advent of software like Wordpress and Typepad, along with blog service companies like blogger.com, the weblog is fast becoming the communication medium of the new web.
One point to make is that while Weblog entries may have a low impact, the existence of an industry Weblog will have a huge impact.
Posted by Todd at 4:39 PM
December 14, 2006
Enterprise 2.0 and Expertise
In Enterprise 0.0, the competition for my job was within a specific geographic or organizational area. That is to say, in order to compete, I just needed to be better than the guy sitting next to me. Enterprise 1.0 came along and with the advent of Web 1.0 the world opened up to my skills and knowledge. Knowledge and information was freely available as the organizational walls started to crumble. I competed with the top Metadata professionals in the world and this changed the game forever. Without organizational or geographic boundaries, there is no limit to where companies can go to get help or lower costs. Assuming you grant me the courtesy of being one of the top five professionals in the world, I really only needed to compete with the top four metadata professionals. Unfortunately, that was the good news since I understood who they were and what they knew. These experts produced books, articles, and various other publications and freely shared their knowledge. Web 2.0 changes the game, once again. Instead of me competing with the top four, I now have to compete with the Cumulative knowledge of everyone else in the world. Mark Twain once commented that:
The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot
In the Web 2.0 world, being the worlds number one may very well be liability. While being recognized is nice, the fact is that when any technology opens it mind to the open source mentality, expertise is no longer needed. This is what happens when all information is free, freely available, to anyone at anytime; anywhere in the world.
Posted by Todd at 1:14 PM
December 6, 2006
Valuation of Knowledge
There was a day where the valuation of knowledge was based upon the scarcity of it. IN fact, we built hierarchal structures within organization to ensure command and control of knowledge where those that know are located at the top and those that do are located at the bottom. Even today, the Coca-Cola secret formlaue is only known by a few people located at the very top of the organization.
But something changed in the past 20 plus years where the value of knowledge was flipped on its head and thus based upon the number of people who shared the information. Towering command and control organizations were humbled by their flat and knowledgeable competition. The Internet opened the door where knowledge is not only shared it is free and free to everyone with a connection. Companies are sharing their intellectual property, their insight and trade secrets (see GoldCorp, Staples, P&G).
Now, the Web 2.0 environment opens some new doors and flips the model once again. Today, the knowledge does not create value from sharing but becomes the product itself. The barriers between producer and consumer have eroded and the friction removed. Hence, the consumer now becomes the product and generates value for the producer. Think about Amazon and Netflix; with you as the consumer generating millions of reviews and ratings have fundamentally altered the business model. Your as the knowledge consumer have become the knowledge producer and created value.
Posted by Todd at 1:26 PM