Category: Four pillars

Looks like Prince really does get the Because Effect, as I wrote earlier. Take a look at this first night review in the Evening Standard. Here are a few excerpts:

The star has made himself available to Londoners with supreme generosity, charging just £31.21 for a concert ticket with a copy of his new album, Planet Earth, thrown in at the door.

Music stores and his latest record label, Sony BMG, were infuriated, but they must now acknowledge that the move has placed an artist well past his songwriting peak right back on top.

Prince has recognised, correctly, that these days a new album is just one money-making opportunity of many for a major star, of little more significance than ringtones.

Mainly, though, the giveaway has prompted even more interest in Prince the performer. It was evident right from his emergence from a cloud of smoke, flanked by Amazonian identical twin dancers, that the stage is where he most wants to be.

When he finally relinquished the spotlight, he had spun and slinked his way through a fabulously entertaining set that demonstrated that, unlike that omnipresent album, talent like this only appears once in a generation.

Albums are abundant. And free. Talent like this only appears once in a generation.

One of the commonest criticisms levelled at social software is that of wasting time. Wikis were whined at, blogs were barracked and now we have social networking sites (particularly Facebook) getting slammed.

Now I can understand the arguments about “too closed”. I can even understand the arguments about “too open”. What fascinates me is the number of people that take a different tack altogether….Facebook wastes time.

This takes me back a very long time, to the days when Visicalc and Wordstar and Storyboard were coming through, and corporate e-mail was just settling down. To the days before Microsoft Office, and the days soon after.

There were people playing with Visicalc, and they were followed by people who played with Excel. Digging around to find out how it worked, using it for all kinds of purposes. And all around them, people stood accusing. Accusing them of wasting time. Spreadsheets weren’t real work. they said.

Many years later, I had reason to audit many servers worth of Excel files at one particular institution. To my surprise, most of the files had nothing to do with “business”. Fantasy football and cricket teams. Tea and coffee rounds. Stock portfolios. Expense claims. Shopping lists. Lists and lists and lists and lists.

The spreadsheets per head ratio was in the region of 3000:1. Yes, you read that right. And over 80% of the spreadsheets had absolutely nothing to do with “work”.

But hey, it was Excel. So it must be legitimate. After all, whole businesses are run today on Excel, aren’t they?

I’ve seen the same thing happen with other so-called “productivity tools” or “end-user computing tools” or, more recently, “collaboration tools”. And the patterns are the same.

Phase 1: Bunch of people start playing with software. Nobody cares.

Phase 2: Large bunch of people start playing with software. Now everybody cares, and the Wasting Time card is played.

Phase 3: Slowly, more and more business uses emerge. But still no enterprise adoption. People get more proficient at using it, though.

Phase 4: Proficiency gets higher, enterprises begin adoption. Site licences emerge.

Phase 5: Users break up into three groups: SuperPower, Effective and Don’t Care.

Phase 6: New tools emerge. Play begins again.

or something like that anyway……

I’m flabbergasted. There’s a lot for me to read and to catch up on, a lot for me to digest, a lot for me to learn from. My thanks to all of you. Now I need to do justice to the comments and suggestions and criticisms, and it’s going to take a little time.

I’m also working on the fourth post I promised, critiquing Facebook in the context of Four Pillars. I hope to have that done by Thursday.

[Stephen, as far as I know, I used Customer Exploitation Management in public around the middle of 2002, and in print  a year or so later. By all means use the phrase, cite me if you need to, I am not hung up about “owning” phrases. Language, like ideas, must remain free, and its evolution does not take place in a vacuum. I’m sure others have used the phrase before….]

Something David N Wallace said in his recent post triggered this train of thought.

There are people who think that Facebook is too open. And there are people who think that Facebook is too closed.

The Too Open crew tend to take a risk-averse enterprise view, and concern themselves with archival and retrieval and regulation and privacy and confidentiality and all that jazz.

The Too Closed crew concentrate on issues like absence of RSS, API restrictiveness, inability to export stuff out from Facebook, and so on.

The median age for Too Open is probably Generation X. The median age for Too Closed is probably Generation Y.

Ay, there’s the rub.

A few days ago, I promised to share my thoughts about Facebook in the context of knowledge management in the enterprise. So here goes.

First off, some context. For many years people have not wanted to share their “little black books”, their contacts and addresses. For whatever reason, some people appeared to feel that they were defined by the raw data rather than the relationships. Sad but true. As a result, when the first Customer Exploitation Systems came to be implemented, there were salesmen in all walks of life who pushed back, who refused to share their contact network.

Similarly, for many years bosses have not wanted their staff to help out any of the boss’s peers. If you take a charitable view of this, you could call it a case of incentive misalignment. Sadder still, the commonest reason was pure selfishness, bordering on spite.

I could go on but won’t. The point I’m trying to make is that our generation has not always wanted to share, to collaborate. To learn and to teach.  This is not something I’m seeking to solve within this post. You can take a horse to water….

I am far more interested in environments full of people who want to share but can’t. I think that tools like Facebook can make an immense impact in such environments. Let me take three simple examples:

One, relationships. Facebook has a rich array of relationships, from Friend to Group Member to Network Member and even Cause Supporter, all the way to Event Participant. And they’re all non-hierarchical and nonexclusive. This is very powerful, since it mimics real-life relationships far better than organisation charts and hierarchies. Furthermore, it allows you to “subscribe” to your interests with reasonable precision.

Two, conversations. Facebook allows a wide range of conversation types, from Poke to Send Message to Write On Wall to Chuck Book to Hug to Give a Gift to Dedicate a Song. It also features a number of conversation styles, from text to video (and surely audio cannot be far behind) and a whole plethora of ways to attach stuff and comment on stuff, both bilaterally as well as multilaterally.  Again, this mimics organisational real life far more than the straitjackets of email-only deprivation zones.

Three, transactions. Every event in Facebook is a transaction, and every transaction you do in Facebook can be an event. A news feed is nothing more than a transaction ticker. You get status updates on a number of things as well. And notifications. The entire alert process is promising and more flexible than traditional enterprise approaches.

None of this is perfect, but there’s a good foundation. Relationship-Conversation-Transaction. Pretty much everything persistent. Pretty much everything archivable and retrievable. The beginnings of syndication and search functionality.

Now, before I meander into my next Facebook post (where I connect Facebook with Four Pillars) let me bring this Knowledge Management piece to a reasonably tidy end.

Facebook provides a good relationship-conversation-transaction base as foundation. It assists you in finding people and skill and expertise, in creating communities of interest, in subscribing to news and events, in supporting polls and questions and discussion boards. It also captures quite a lot of profiling and preference and behavioural information.

If I had something like Facebook functionality within an enterprise, I could do things like draw collaboratively-filtered lessons from watching the apps that people used. Why does person A have an app set that differs so widely from that of person B? What can I learn from that difference? What can person A and person B learn from that difference?

If I had something like Facebook functionality within an enterprise, I could do things like plot out the routes that real information took, subverting hierarchies and tunnelling under garden walls. I could see relationship maps and mash them up with, for example, age-in-firm, to help me select mentors and buddies and role models.

If I had something like Facebook functionality within an enterprise, I could do things like start with a view that all information is open, then begin to close some elements selectively for regulatory or confidentiality or safety reasons. Instead of today’s post EAI post DRM nightmare, where Sharing is a Miracle. Or a lie.

More later. Keep the comments flowing.