Two ideas have converged.  Elias Bizannes wrote about the Value Chain for Information which I have been thinking about, then I saw Sacha Chua’s Web2.0 @ Work which was done with a Nintendo DS and got really excited about wanting to make something similar. The main difference is I wanted to try make mine as an actual movie, rather than a series of slides.

I give you the Value Chain for Information - The Movie!

This is my first attempt at using a Nintendo DS to create a presentation and I’ve learnt a few things on the way.  I’d do it differently next time (For example, the each stroke ends up as one frame so I’d use more strokes!  On the Nintendo there are lovely sweeping wipes of each screen, but you don’t see these as they are a single frame in the movie), I’d also probably use some more colours! But I’m content enough for a first attempt. Sacha has a great guide here that tells you how to do it, I also used Wired’s more detailed Wiki as well.

I hope you enjoy it and that it adds some value along the way to Elias idea which is growing on me as I consider it further.

The debate around Web 2.0 Vs Enterprise 2.0 etc. is an interesting one. Ultimately though, these are tags for concepts.  An interesting question is what does an Enterprise 2.0 actually look like.  Can we describe explicitly the functions, features, capabilities, staff, management style etc. that all build together to make this the Enterprise of tomorrow and not today.

The reality for Enterprises is that they need to work out how to rise to this challenge and meet the needs of staff who are demanding new and different ways of working, while still providing the seamless experience, security and control that they have traditionally required.  Unfortunately Enterprises almost always exist as a point in time; a combination of old systems and old ways of doing things which conflict against the need to change to meet new challenges with limited time, budgets and often buy-in to new approaches.

For a thought experiment, lets envisage the impossible; a mature enterprise that has no baggage; that can instantly adapt it’s system; where staff adapt and change as technology and process demand — what would it look like?  What would it be like to work and operate in Enterprise 2010 today — the Enterprise that we all believe we can deliver given a little bit more time?  Can we build a vision that could be achievable today if the constraints were removed.

There is only one rule — the technology that makes Enterprise 2010 must exist today.   Why? Because no real Enterprise can move that fast; it usually takes at least 2 - 5 years for consumer concepts to percolate inside the corporate firewall.  If it isn’t very near to being in the market today, then there is a strong possibility that the Enterprise of 2010 wouldn’t even be considering it anyway.  While I think removing constraints is important, I think this one rule helps keep us out of the realms of spacemen with little green suits into what could be done today with what we’ve got.

This begs one other question — am I in fact really talking about Enterprise 2008; the mythical Enterprise which makes the best today of everything that is on offer?

I’m going to let this topic sit for a day or two and hopefully elicit some comments from the usual suspects before I jump in with some of my visions on what this Enterprise would look like and what’s achievable.

Regular readers (and apologies to you all for my inconistent posting of late) will know that I have an Enterprise bent for which I make little to no apology.  Those that know me personally will also know that I am a regular gamer.  So talking about the upcoming Battlefield Heroes in the context of this blog makes a lot of sense!

I won’t rave about the gaming aspect of Battlefield Heroes (BFH), although I confess it’s something I’m excited to play.  What I’m interested in is the charging model they are looking to implement.  There is a lot of press and analyst commentary around emerging Software-as-a-Service models (SaaS), and while BFH doesn’t quite match the definition completely as it’s still a PC installed system, although web delivered, a lot of elements of it do.

So why is this of interest?  Well you my analysis after reading about this a little is simply this:

1. BFH is implementing a micro-payments model, where you get the core software for free, but enhancements (e.g. weapons, clothing, maybe specialist skills etc.) are paid for with a small fee.
2. It helps to combat software piracy — if the software is free, but requires connection to a central server to access and unlock key features, then there is little to no point in piracy, in fact copying and distributing the core software could well be encouraged.
3. My take is that extended features will be ruthlessly optimised and adapted — if they don’t work, people won’t pay for them.  Market forces are very powerful.  I’m not sure this will neccessarily lead to less bugs, BUT there are strong incentives to fix the bugs that do occur in given features.

How do these three features relate to the Entperprise world?  I happen to think that this is a real model of software that would work nicely for the Enterprise, in a very traditional market place.

Microsoft Office (amongst other Microsoft products) is facing increasing competition from ultra-competitive vendors, both Lotus Symphony and Google Docs are free for use.  The challenge that Microsoft have is that there are few compelling new features that encourage someone to move from a very effective word processor (Word 2003) to the latest release (Word 2007) when they have to pay for the priveledge.

A micro-payments model like BFH is one that I’d be interested to see a large Enterprise Software vendor adapt and experiment with.

Using the same three points as above and Word as an example:

1. Word could implement a free version of their core product, where I pay for the “extra” features to unlock them, for example, I might need to pay $5 to unlock the Table-Of-Contents feature the first time I use it, or perhaps $10 to unlock Index creation (something I suspect is even more rarely used).  Perhaps I could purchase a one off or limited time use, vs a permanent unlock.
2. While no software model is probably piracy free, this may help combat loss of software through piracy, as features would be unlocked from some central service, or perhaps via a one-time software key.
3. It would give a very real-time analysis of what features people really use and therefore where time and effort should be invested to enhance and improve aspect, while little used features could be priced up and perhaps weeded out of the product.

In an Enterprise perspective, I’d be interested in a central licensing server which Word connected to and reported what features were used and not so I can analyse this, pay the appropriate bulk discount for the feature and be able to direct my training team at features which are underused compared to the type of documents we produce.

Even true SaaS vendors like LinkedIn could benefit from a Micro-Payments model.  As one example, Linked In will show you who clicks on your profile, but to see more you have to upgrade, a hideously expensive fee for the one small feature I’m interested in seeing more of.  If they had a Micro-Payment option to just unlock this aspect of their software, I’d be more inclined to give them a small amount of money, rather than simply opting NOT to upgrade which is what I do now.

What do you think?  While I haven’t seen any evidence to date that mainstream software vendors are thinking about this, I believe it won’t be too far away and you can say you read it here first.

I saw ManyEyes at LotusSphere in the labs this year and was reminded again of it when I found a link to it on this blog.

It’s a powerful tool for embedding dynamic visualisations into your site.  The most powerful feature I think, is the way that comments posted on a visualisation keep a link to the visualisation the user who commented was seeing.  This is something that could be extended into many different arenas — imagine a dynamic comment system in wordpress where you could click on a comment to see the text someone had highlighted when they made the comment etc .  Or YouTube, where users could comment with linkbacks to the footage they were specifically commenting on.  I’m sure we will see more of this.

This is something that’s been consuming my thinking recently.  I believe quite strongly that tools like Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks and others clearly represent real value for the enterprise.  But I also believe that there is a gap at the moment, the tools haven’t crossed the divide from the consumer world to the Enterprise (see my earlier post on this http://binaryplex.com/2007/05/27/what-start-ups-should-know-about-enterprises/).

I think there is a lot of evidence this is beginning to change, you only need to look at both IBM and Microsoft to see that features and tools that have evolved on the Internet are beginning to eek their way slowly into their product sets.  In some cases, there are partnerships to short-circuit their gaps, in others the big boys are starting again from scratch.

All of this has had me thinking about what does a model of the Web2.0 look like within the Enterprise.  Not what is the tool and who wrote it, but if you could design a system supported by standards (some of which exist), what is enterprise ready today, and where are the gaps.

I present my first cut of my model of Web 2.0 for the Enterprise.  I’ll take some time over the next week to post further and explain the concepts on here.  I’d love to take your feedback — I think a proper “joined up” design is what we need to work out where the gaps really are and how Enterprises want to use them. 

One simple example of the kind of joined up thinking required (not on the model funnily enough) is security - inside the enterprise I don’t want 15 different security models, or to log in repeatedly as I move between my blog and my wiki.

As I see it, the model is laid out in four parts, from bottom up:

• Services - fundamental elements that provide consistent experiences and management throughout the stack.  These are broken down into:
  • Notification Services
  • Validation Services
• Tools - the components that a pull together into a solution, they may exist discretely or combined together. These are broken down into:
  • Content Creation
  • Social Networking
  • Content Sharing
• Discovery - the “glue” that pulls it together, and often missed in the Enterprise today (how many of you have blogs without a service like Technorati to surface content and find blogs from feeds.  This is where I believe the emerging smarts are only now really starting to mature with tools like Particls, Spock and others to name a few I’ve mentioned. 
• Presentation Layer - the UI layer.  Critical for the consisten experience that the enterprise expects.

So there it is, as I say, feedback and comments welcome and appreciated — I going to expand further on this and explain the reasoning and functions behind each component in more detail, and look at what tools exist today that fill some of these gaps.

I’ve just returned from LotusSphere 2008 and had a great time.  While the presentations and demos are interesting, I found the most insightful part of the time there was spent in the Innovation and Development labs talking with developers about the advances they are making.  In the Innovation lab in particular, deep conversations can develop and you walk away feeling that some of the concepts will make it into a code.

 Loosely speaking, you can categorise a lot of the Web 2.0 tools and concepts into two very high level, broad categories like:

• Organisational Networks - LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, Del.i.cious etc.
• Collaborative Creation  (Wisdom of Crowds type tools) - Wiki’s, Blogs etc.

What’s clear from LotusSphere is that IBM are clearly taking these broad brush categories (perhaps more or less) and building out tool sets like Quickr and Connections that apply these into the corporate world.

There are many reasons why this is appealing to corporates, not least command and control within the firewall on what is going on, but the most interesting idea is how it relates to Knowledge Management (KM). 

In my nearly 20 years in IT, I’ve been involved in various projects in different companies that again and again have tried to address the issue of KM.  What these Knowledge Management 1.0 efforts have all had in common, and why they’ve failed, is that they try and formalise the capturing of knowledge that is expressed and documented.  When I have to consciously make an effort, through modifying my natural processes and procedures, to share with you, then ultimately the effort will fail.  It fails because ultimately, the value in it for me, is not as great as the value in it for you.  Once the latest KM drive loses steam, I’ll drift back to my old ways and the path of least resistance.

In KM terms this type of knowledge is called Explicit knowledge.

Nickols, F. W. (2000). The knowledge in knowledge management. In Cortada, J.W. & Woods, J.A. (Eds) The knowledge management yearbook 2000-2001 (pp. 12-21). Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
It’s worth taking a moment to browse the citation as it gives an excellent summary of the three main types of Knowledge as described in KM terms, I’ve paraphrased what I think are the key three here:

• Explicit - What has been expressed and captured
• Implicit - What can be expressed, but isn’t captured
• Tacit - What can’t be expressed (so by definition isn’t captured).

As an aside, I suspect the categories of Tacit knowledge are decreasing over the years (biometrics probably couldn’t be expressed years ago, but now we have computers that can recognise faces in crowds).  Anyway, my point is this, while the Web 2.0 world and the categories of tools bring real value to corporations, one form of value I haven’t heard expressed until recently is that they will help corporations capture Implicit knowledge by mining my behaviours and actions.

When Lotus Connections 2.0 announced at LotusSphere promises to deliver a Colleagues version of the friending concept, it’s really building an Implicit knowledge network that can be mined for real information that is accessible to all users across the organisation.  Atlas mines your e-mail for your connections and expertise. Spock mines social networks for Implicit knowledge on who you are and who you know.  Wiki’s mine the knowledge of the crowd through the creation process. 

When corporations ask what value in Web 2.0 concepts and social networking, they are undervaluing what most would say is their greatest asset - the collective knowledge of their employees.  I believe that the real value in a lot of what we call Web 2.0 will be realised when these tools begin delivering ways for corporations to finally tackle Knowledge Management 2.0 — non-intrusive KM, captured by tools that work the way people work and ensure that the Implicit knowledge of the organisation is captured effortlessly by people simply doing their job in the way they want to do it.

Based on this, my final three thoughts are simply that:

1. The reason Collaborative Creation tools are being adopted by corporations today (and will be at an increasing pace) is because they deliver a form of Implicit knowledge that corporations (slowly and eventually) “get”.  Content is delivered in a relatively concrete way that mimics a document to some degree.  The stretch is less.
2. Social Collaboration tools will begin to boom as Corporations realise that they are a promising solution to unlock the Implicit knowledge within their organisations that they can’t see.
3. Discovery and Surfacing tools (of which Spock, Atlas and Particls are all examples of) will become even more critical.  Smart ways of unleashing the networks and information people are building to capture and deliver value that was not easily attainable before.

After my previous post, I’ve been doing some further research on Visual Mail interfaces.  Of course, like all things Internet, spelling matters.  Once I started to use US spelling instead of British, my hit rates went up.

I’ve found several papers, some more “academic” than the previous post, none quite as visually appealing, but all trying to address similar issues.

This one on Themail is both interesting and perhaps the most relevant because not only have they built an interface, but assessed it as well.  The authors are from IBM, HP and MIT so a well credentialed team to actually make something happen here.

The following UI, Exploring Enron, was presented at an e-mail Visualization conference at UC Berkely

IBM have also done some early research back in 2003 with their Remail project, re-inventing e-mail.

Anyway, hope you enjoy looking at these.  I present them merely out of interest that there is clearly some activity going on in this space, although it’s not a deluge just yet.  My personal opinion is that undoubtably at some point in the not too distant future, a visual interface to our e-mail will be inevitable, but perhaps for now it’s a little distant.

There is something appealing in this visual mail interface anymails from Carolin Horn and Florian Jennet.  As someone who gets large amounts of e-mail every day, a new way of processing information is a great idea.  I consider myself naturally “visual” so perhaps I just “get this”, but I think that this kind of interface will become more prevalent.  There are a number of them out there – see some of the experimental offerings from Digg Labs also play with similar concepts.  Any information rich experience would benefit from a powerful visual metaphor.

I’ve been reading the “Science of the Discworld” series and enjoying the immensely.  The science (for me at least) is fairly hard core and stretches my brain cells a fair bit, and I love anything by Terry Pratchett anyway — it makes a great combination.

A concept that is referred to quite a bit in the third book is the idea of “Steam Engine Time”.  The questions is would James Watt, who made several key advances in Steam Engine technology (and is commonly, but mistakenly, known as the inventor of the steam engine), been successful if it wasn’t “Steam Engine Time”.  Another way of thinking about this, is if James didn’t come along, would someone else of had his insights?

While it’s hard to unpick history, it’s clear that the Steam Engine has existed for many years, indeed powering various religious articles by steam dates back to ancient greece — if you’re an ancient priest, there is nothing like a mysterious door raised by steam power to impress the local supplicants and improve your standing with your God.

The conclusion seems to be that almost certainly someone would of had the idea (indeed there were others on similar tracks at the same time).  I’m not here to debate it in great detail, other than to say I think there is real merit in this concept that a “Steam Engine Time” comes along and everyone is on a similar path at the same time.  For example, without the fact that there were wealthy mineowners who needed solutions for pumping water from ever deeper mines, James may not of got his funding, conversely, if he hadn’t come along, there would of still been a need for the solution and money to find it.

Clearly the same phenomonom exists on the internet — in fact there is undoubtably an “Internet time” which was driven by many different causes, but regardless, I suspect something like the internet as we know it (World Wide Web) would of come along with, or without, Tim Berners-Lee.  As we all know, the internet itself existed way back into the 70’s.

Another good example is the “Palm pilot time”, there were other devices (notably the Apple Newton) which did similar things and failed to various degree, eventually Palm were such a dominate player that there was a definite “Palm pilot time”.

The clear connecting thread in all of these is that there is a period of lead up where different concepts and parts of the idea exist, followed by a boom when someone eventually clicks with the right combination and the idea becomes widely and inevitably accepted, often like wild-fire.

I have several posts in mind over the next few days where I’ll refer back to this idea, so I wanted to make sure it was explained clearly first.  Suffice to say, the question forming in my mind is simply “what time are we in now?”

If innovation is a process of the right idea, in the right place and at the right time, how do we judge what the right time is and measure what is going on around us to hit the right spot?

A resurgance once again in the local press about the wisdom, or lack of it, in crowds.  I’ve posted here about this a little, and that was added to very eloquently by Chris Saad of Particle who pointed out that media is additive.  There is place for both wise crowds and smart people. So what more to add to the debate? Well I was sufficiently impressed by the differences and the power of both Google Streets and Microsoft Lives Photo Synth to want to contrast them here in this context.

What’s interesting about this when it comes to the Crowds Vs. Expert debate is that both do a similar thing — street level perspectives of our world, yet they tackle the problem in different ways.

Googles view of the world in Google Streets is high quality, “expert” imagery taken presumably from a car with a special camera and then stitched together. 

Microsofts PhotoSynth uses Flickr (or presumably any photo source with a sufficiently high level of detail) to locate photos as “points” in space, pulling the wisdom of crowds to give us a point by point overview of the object in question.

Both give a very different view of the world.  Googles is a seamless experience, where you can browse from one end of the street to the other, rotate and view in any direction.  Microsofts points give an eerie overview of the object, with detail highlighted where it’s of interest and gaps where there is nothing that is worthy.

Both are amazing pieces of technology, regardless of their respective perspectives on the world.

Ultimately the power of the new web is the power of information - with Google Streets, users will be able to not only tag their favourite restauraunt, but also show a picture of its front door.  Photosynth enables a virtual tour of buildings and places and provides context to endless Flickr photos, not just on a map, but in space as well.

Crowds and experts live will together in the new world and more fool the journalist who tries to seperate the two.  To paraphrase Chris once more, the long tail of information means that there are consumers for all views of the world.

As Elias pointed out on my last post, evidence of the semantic web is emerging all around us.

I’ve been travelling for work a lot over the last four weeks which has limited my time to blog, but I’ve had plenty of time to read magazines.  Wired is a great travel companion, with a good balance between fun, entertainment and something to think about.

One article I loved recently and well worth the time to read is this one about Louis Von Ahn, the inventor of Captcha’s (according to Wired) and his quest to put your spare time to work.  His “reCapthca’s” are helping the Internet Archives digitising project, by using you and I to decipher phrases computers can’t understand.

This is innovation at it’s leading edge — re-purposing tools to provide greater and greater benefit.  How many cycles of unused time do we generate that could be turned to useful purpose?

Chris posted on the need for a new metric which could supplement traditional page-view metrics.

I’m going to add to the call-to-arms from the Enterprise point of view.  The ability to understand not just what people click on, but the attention they give to elements of the new, rich media world is crucial.  Detailed information that goes beyond “IP Address loaded page X” and various derivatives of this is crucial.

I touched on this in my earlier post about Syndication in the Enterprise, the model I proposed there includes an attention client and engine which collects the data independently of the RSS browser, but this could do SO much more.

Chris is correct when he says that there is a vast range of attention data, for example, YouTube videos, flash movies etc. etc.  An open standard here for collecting and analysing this information would be a real boon to the emerging Attention arena.

Elias took up the conversation over here as well and raised an interesting point:

So before we come up with new measurement systems, lets spend more time determining why we are measuring. Simply saying we are better measuring what consumers are giving their attention to, is only part of the problem. We need to first determine what value we obtain from measuring that attention in the first place.

My push-back to both of them is simply this — I think we DO need a standard for aggregating attention data from all the different clients people use during a day, for the very simple reason that in Enterprises understanding what people are using and how they are using it is a crucial part of the delivery eco-system for information.  It’s the feedback loop that lets you know you’re getting it right.

It may be useful for bloggers etc. as well, but I think the problem should be focussed on the Enterprise as this is where the “real” need is (I show my bias here, but I don’t believe I as a blogger need to know in great detail who looks at what, but as an Entprise of 160,000 people globally I do need to understand where and how my information is flowing).

What’s new in all this is not the concept — Advertisers have been doing this for years with demographics, TV ratings seasons, market surveys etc. etc., however what is now being proposed is a very finely tuned attention engine that understands (and helps others to understand) that most unique of individuals — you.

A brief post, but I wanted to share this excellent post on Principled Innovation.  I think Jeff D Cagna’s spin on this topic is a little differently focussed from where I’m taking it, but I think what he is saying is valid not only for associations and organisations, but Enterprises as well (perhaps he also meant this, I’m not sure).

He says:

 The real threat to our future is the way we’re thinking about and leading our organizations today.

I see evidence of this all the time - Enterprises are setup to preserve the status quo, breaking through the tried and trusted to approach something in a new way is generally considered a threat.  More from Jeff:

This is not a point I make lightly, but we must be clear on what is really holding our organizations and our community back, i.e., our inability or unwillingness to admit that we actually do live in a different time and that we must adjust our ways of thinking and leading accordingly.

I’ve been working with a number of bricks and mortar retailers in fashion recently, and one thing that’s come through again and again is a sense that while they believe that something might be happening, they can’t quite place their finger on what it is all about.

Are we holding ourselves back as Enterprises from embracing the new, and will our risk aversion to experimenting with the new modes of business hamper us in the near future?  Or is it a Tortoise and Hare race, with the Enterprise the Tortoise that will eventually adapt and win the day?

I posted earlier about The Battle To Innovate in response to a post by Elias.   It was interesting to read on Innovation Zen about The Playstation True Story, which really resonated with me about the frustrations both Elias and I have been describing.

What struck me about this article is that it really illustrates many of the realities we observe day to day, that successful innovation / invention is hard work.  Large organisations resist change, particularly when they don’t understand it, but the power of one individual who never gives up despite the setbacks and obstacles CAN succeed.

One thing is for certain — it can be lonely leading from at the front.

I first became interested in the idea of prediction markets and ideas stock exchanges when I first came across the Hollywood Stock Exchange back sometime in around 1998 / 99.  It always appealled to me as something that would have some use internally in trading ideas, but brief investigations at that time didn’t reveal anything really suitable.

Fast forward to 2006 and I read Wisdom of Crowds, which convinced me that my inner belief there was some use for these kinds of tools could in fact translate to a real application.   I’ve been looking around again and recently came across Inkling Markets.   I had the opportunity to speak with them in my “day job” and I learnt a lot of things about how to apply a prediction market internally.

What I took away from this were three things:

1. No prediction market will function effectively without a metric on which you can measure the success of the prediction.
2.  Small prediction markets are pointless — it’s wisdom of crowds not wisdom of a few.  If you’re going to trial it, get as many people involved as you can.
3. The market has to be dynamic to keep peoples interest (ie. no point asking them to list 10 ideas and leave them open for 3 months — they’ll rank them in the first week and stop trading).  This means opening new markets all the time, and ensuring that there are changes to the stocks (either new IPOs or de-listings) in existing markets on a regular basis.

Some of the features of Inkling Markets which I like, is the tools that it supports to allow you to blog effectively about your market, including embedding graphs etc.  As soon as I can think of an effective public market I’ll have to start one up and try it out as well as the internal ideas markets that I’ll be experimenting with.

As we trial our internal market, I’ll be sharing some of the pros and cons of that experience here.  If you’d like to know more feel free to drop me a comment.