[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

—Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as quoted in Wikipedia

The first time I was exposed to the idea of things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know, I’d never heard of Donald Rumsfeld. I believe I read it in some papers by Michael Polanyi, and anyway it was in the early 1980s, long before Rumsfeld had his moments of quotation glory.

Maybe it doesn’t matter who said it first, maybe it does. But that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is simple. Don’t write things off just because you don’t understand how value is to be derived from them.

Take Photoshop. A tool to touch photographs up, to amend and alter them. Useful but perhaps not seen as world-changing. Apparently most useful to narcissists and to those bent on airbrushing their way to amending history, usually the preserve of politicians.

Take social networks. A tool to connect people and allow them to share social objects and comment on them, to support and augment relationships, to communicate. Apparently most useful to people who want to poke people, throw things at others, run farms. All virtually and for the most past virtuously.

Take cognitive surplus. Apparently a luxury, available only to the out-of-work and the ne’er-do-well, people who have nothing better to do than fight over the treatment of subjects in wikipedia.

Photoshop. Social networks. Cognitive surplus. Three things that still have a number of doubters, that still have a number of people questioning whether these things have any redeeming value, people who believe life would carry on perfectly fine if these things hadn’t been invented.

And then…..

And then you have something truly tragic like the earthquake in Japan.

Tragic for the loss of life and limb. Tragic for the loss of lifestyle and livelihood.

And tragic for the loss of precious memories, the loss of thousands of photographs damaged by earthquake and flood.

Except….

Except suddenly, there is an ability to take these three apparently useless things and bring them together. Project Tohoku Photo Rescue http://hands.org/2011/08/19/project-tohoku-photo-program/

People painstakingly giving of their time and their skill, using photoshopping techniques to restore water-damaged photographs.

People painstakingly giving of their time and their skill to help restore memories.

Memories. Try calling them useless. Try convincing yourself that what they’re doing is a waste of time.

And once you’ve failed to convince yourself, go vote for the project on the link provided. They deserve your vote at the very least, if not your admiration and your support.

This is curation at its best in a social context, the application of human passion to a digital tool-rich environment.

And this is what the social enterprise has in wait for us. When the power of connected people is unleashed into environments we can’t see to solve problems we can’t foresee using tools that are emergent.

Sound too futuristic for you? Remember the William Gibson adage about the future. It’s here, just unevenly distributed.

Google, Amazon and Salesforce were building businesses on the cloud while most companies were still debating service-oriented architectures and WAP.

The social enterprise is here; yet we have this weird situation where companies have Facebook strategies to market their products and services, perhaps even try their hand at actually engaging with customers in social networks, while continuing to ban access to social networks from the workplace.

The social enterprise is a radical departure from the past, and we are only in the early stages of discovering the immense value that is being generated by this phenomenon.

As with most radical departures from the past, there’s a continuum when it comes to adoption. Some early adopters. Some fast followers. Some late adopters. And some defunct companies.

The social enterprise is a true game changer. Which means the number of defunct companies will probably be surprisingly high. Which is why Clayton Christenson’s Innovator’s Dilemma will probably need reprinting. [and which, incidentally, is the reason I’m so happy to have joined Salesforce, formally measured as the world’s #1 company when it comes to innovation, by Forbes recently].

As the Tohoku Photo Rescue program shows, human ingenuity knows no bounds. Give people the right tools to work together, they can change the world. And given the choice, people tend to concentrate on things that matter. Which is why the social enterprise is such a powerful proposition.

[note: Part 5 will concentrate on tools, something I’d intended to do in part 4. Patience. Please.]

Introduction

In Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation, Esther Dyson quotes Bill Gates as saying “The future of search is verbs”. Esther goes on to say that nobody really looks for something per se, they look for things in order to do something.

Action.

When Marc Benioff elucidates his vision for the Social Enterprise, he stresses the importance of having information you can act on. So for the last few months I’ve been spending time thinking about what makes information actionable, and whether the social enterprise helps or hinders in this regard.

For information to be actionable, it must have at least four characteristics:

It must be accurate, and verifiably so
It must be timely
It must be comprehensive
It must be comprehensible

These are necessary but not sufficient conditions; to make information truly actionable, the information must be accompanied by tools that allow you to act on the information. In a perfect world, you would also have tools that allow you to monitor the effect of your actions and to receive feedback. But at the very least, you need information that is accurate, timely, comprehensive and comprehensible, with some ability to act on that information straightaway.

In order to understand the role of tools here, let me give you an example of information that is not conveniently actionable: the voicemail. While at BT I spent a lot of time with Martin Geddes (I have a lot of time for him), exploring views on how to reduce latency, particularly “human” latency, from communications-enabled business processes. And Martin’s favourite example in this space was the voicemail. Someone leaves you a message. The information in that message is all dressed up with nowhere to go, because all you can do is to take down, transcribe or otherwise memorise it, then you have to swivel-chair into some other mode in order to do something with the message. So Martin was asking why we don’t design voicemail differently, so that the scenario changed. Like this “Hi there, this is Basil. I’m sorry you weren’t in when I tried to deliver your bicycle at 2pm today as promised. If you’d like to speak to me to arrange another delivery at no extra charge press 1. If you’d like me to return as soon as possible today press 2. If you’d like to cancel the order, or to speak to an agent about it, press 3.”

I thought Martin was on to something, but between us we couldn’t make it happen. But the principles remain sound. Communications-enabling business processes are part of the future, and will form part of the social enterprise. Whe designing these processes, it makes sense to look at where the latencies come from, and to minimise, perhaps even eradicate, them. Making information actionable is a key step.

So let’s look at how the Social Enterprise makes information actionable.

Accuracy and veracity

In a social enterprise, the risk of inaccurate or false information is reduced in two ways.

First, because of the transparency implicit in the social enterprise, we get Linus’s Law in operation: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. So you get the value of inspection, something that security experts have known for a while. There are two provisos to bear in mind: one, Linus’s Law exhibits network effects, so you need critical mass before real value is derived; two, not all the information in an enterprise will be made transparent; in social enterprises, as in families, some things are more private, more confidential, than others.

The power of inspection is therefore one way to make information more actionable, reducing the likelihood of error or falsehood. This power is further amplified by the existence of a second phenomenon, the multidisciplinary team. Social enterprises are fundamentally non-hierarchical in practice, given that everyone and everything is a node on the network. So the historical concept of silo-ed business units is weakened, with considerable “lateral” activity, not just within the enterprise but beyond it, involving customers and the supply web. This predilection towards multidisciplinary teams engendered by the social enterprise also goes a long way towards reducing the risk of inaccuracy, regardless of whether that inaccuracy is an act of commission or omission.

[An aside. I have never stopped marvelling at how people believe something just because it was spat out by Excel and made its way into PowerPoint, as if these were robust systems incapable of being compromised. One born every minute, as Phineas T used to say.]

Timeliness

“Venkat” Venkatraman, an old friend and Boston professor, told me many years ago that businesses used to be hierarchies of product and customer, and that they were morphing into networks of relationships and capabilities. I’m paraphrasing him, but the core idea is significant, and forms the heart of the social enterprise.

One aspect of the social enterprise that is underrated is its nonlinearity. Social enterprises don’t follow strait-laced linear “serial” processes. Instead, aided and abetted by network effects, and no longer straitjacketed by silo thinking, information flows laterally from unit to unit, within the enterprise, beyond the enterprise. Massively parallel. This makes the whole organism work faster, since the traditional up-one-hierarchy-suitably-filtered and then down-another-hierarchy-also-suitably-filtered approach cannot hold up proceedings.

Besides, the very concept of everything in the network being a node increases substitutability. You no longer have to wait because someone in the serial process is busy or on vacation or something, the social enterprise has no time for all that.

Comprehensibility

As discussed in an earlier post, the construct of a social enterprise facilitates identification of true domain experts rather than signal boosters, sidlers, spreadsheet jocks or suchlike. It goes further, the social enterprise actually helps ensure that the domain expert can participate where and when required, without worrying about organisation charts and titles and roles.

Consequently it is more likely that the information is generated by a domain expert, close to the action as it were. If the original information was not actually generated by the domain expert, it is reasonably likely that he or she will annotate the info, comment on it, tag it, augment it in some way.

The ease with which people from other disciplines, cultures, contexts can participate also means you get other valuable, hitherto unintended, benefits. You say tomahto and I say tomayto. Cultural distinctions can be made and shared, translations are more likely, the availability of commentary from other disciplines helps increase the likelihood of comprehension.

Comprehensiveness and context

Historically, there were two types of systems: systems of record and systems of engagement. Computing departments built systems of record, substitutes for the books and records of the firm, robust, secure, safe, hard to attack, and consequently hard to use as well. Communications units built systems of engagement, which, while reliable, were open to all, with simple security needs and exhibiting network effects. Convergence, the coming together of computing and communications, had the unintended consequence of bringing these disparate design and security philosophies together for the first time.

People working on the Social Enterprise at Salesforce.com pretty much pioneered the work on making this work; they were used to delivering services on a multi tenant utility model as their core business for over a decade, so this was nothing new.

As a result, the social enterprise is built with a deep understanding of entitlements and permissions; as long as you have the right to see it, you can get to the source information, the order in question, the compan profile, the complaint, whatever. So the context of the information is carried with the content. You can drill down as needed, or see the summary. In the social enterprise, summaries are just convenient representations, the source data is never far away.

This increases comprehensiveness. But it’s not all. The presence of the extended network, the nonlinear participation of customers, partners and staff, the crowd sourced ability to inspect and reduce error, the support for tags and folksonomies, every one of the characteristics I have described earlier today accelerates and enhances comprehensiveness.

The social enterprise is therefore designed to provide more accurate, verifiable information, faster and more effectively when compared with the traditional enterprise, easier to understand, more complete and in context.

The social enterprise provides actionable information. But as I stated earlier, actionable information alone is not enough, you need the tools to do something with that information. Which will be the subject of my next post.

Comments welcome as ever.

[Note: This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Curation in the Enterprise, and seeks to develop some of the themes introduced there.]

First, a quick recap.

Machines can filter. Only humans can curate.

When a human curates, she does three things. She selects something (or things) from a larger group. She organises those selections cohesively. And she arranges to present those things in such a way that people find it easy to engage with those things.

What I thought I’d do in this post is to look at all this a little more closely, all in the context of the social enterprise.

First, let’s look at selection.

The simplest and commonest form of selection in social networks is the asymmetric follow (a phrase I first heard used by James Governor). You follow someone or something, you subscribe to that someone or something. Elect to receive updates, alerts, reports. That doesn’t mean they follow you.

This can be permanent or temporary, you can undo this relationship at will. Unfollow the person or thing. Even block the person or thing. Stop receiving updates.

The social enterprise comes into its own because you’re not restricted to subscribing to alerts and messages from people alone, you can also follow things. Projects (you receive a status update whenever there’s a change, perhaps even at data element level) bills (you get told when it’s paid) complaints (you’re informed as to where it is in the process) orders (has that order closed yet?), companies (you receive news about competitor product releases, market activity, stock price movements, the lot).

If you find that someone or something is too noisy, just turn it off. Your call.

This is social 101, since you’re able to communicate with a real community, consisting of your staff, your partners, your customers, your products and services. But that’s only the beginning.

Once you’ve selected the publisher nodes you want to subscribe to, you start getting into second gear. Of course you receive direct messages from your network, but you could argue that it’s just email fit for purpose, made to work a little more sensibly. From people you trust, from people you’d like to hear from.

But that’s only the start. You have many more powerful selection tools, based on the network, its participants and the tools and techniques available to assess the information. You can check on what’s popular…. What are your customers talking to you about? What about your partners? Your staff? Separate views, yet compressed into a single whole if you want.

An order, a blog post, a presentation, a complaint, a bill, a sales success story, a promotion, a really clever way to solve a problem, a thank you note…. Each of these in turn becomes a social object, gathering the moss of comments from all and sundry. The rich interaction is captured in one place and congregated around the object in question, simply and conveniently. Threaded mail solved some of this, but only for the contents of the mail itself. In the social enterprise, you don’t have to worry about versioning either (which presentation are you looking at? That’s not what I have on slide 3?) since the “attachment” is always the same one, held centrally.

Selection is not a one-time administrative process redolent of the desktop productivity tools of the ’80s and ’90s. Instead, it is dynamic and responsive, driven by you and your network of choice.

The social enterprise is able to vote up the importance of a topic in a number of ways: direct messages, “hotline alerts”; “re-tweeting” the update, link or post so that more people see it and can engage with it, rather than the linear paths of the past; voting or just “liking” or “thumbs-upping” something; rating it; reviewing it; just by talking about it, making the topic “trend” so that it rises to the top of the pile; raising the frequency of the words used so that they appear in relevant tag clouds; driving engagement through the use of collaborative filtering techniques (people who read this link also read…. People who tracked this complaint also did… And so on).

So the linearity of past communications styles is no longer there; non-linear, non-hierarchical, pattern-based rather than process-based communications take place instead. The likelihood that you see what is important is increased in quantum leaps because people you trust have true 21st century tools.

Just over a decade ago, I had to ensure that the bank I worked for was prepared for the euro. We’d made all the changes, tested them, run them ad nauseum. Soon we were in dress rehearsals, simulating the triple-witch of month-end, quarter-end and year-end as part of going live with the euro. [I wonder which genius chose to make the go-live at such a time…] as the cutover drew near, one of the year-end reporting suites blew up. To cut a long story short, the program causing the problem was reporting on client turnover for a company that had been shut down seven years earlier. But the reports chugged on.

Getting information in an enterprise has never been a problem. More reports than you can shake a stick at, more enquiries than the average sports ticket desk. At least nowadays the outputs are emailed rather than printed, but the emails carry the same curse. Too many of them, with haystacks of information rather than needles.

So the first job of curation is selection, and you should (by now) have some idea as to how that is made more effective.

Let’s move on to the “organisation” aspect of curation in the social enterprise. I’ve already spent a little time talking about the value of tag clouds, of collaborative filtering, of social objects gathering moss via comments and observations, about voting processes, like buttons, thumbs up and down, rating mechanisms…. All these are ways to make the selection process easier, to make the curated information more valuable, more timely, more relevant. So we need mechanisms and conventions to assist us. Not everyone likes hashtags, but some more generally accessible equivalent is likely to be needed. Simple ways of getting collaboratively filtered information have to be built in, still bearing in mind that the filter may be automated, but not the curation.

When it comes to presentation, the world of the social enterprise is replete with mobile devices, multiple devices, mobile apps and native HTML5. So the minimum requirement is that the curated information is made available to the device of choice, and in the form requested. SMS alerts where required, email alerts only when absolutely necessary (why add to the waking nightmare of too much email?) Where and when the information is persisted, archived, retrievable and searchable matters.

I’m still on vacation, sharing these “provisional” thoughts as the rest of the family sleeps. Your comments are welcome, they help me figure out whether I’m making sense or not.

My next post is going to concentrate more on the topic of how to make the curated information actionable, how to learn from what people like Esther Dyson have been saying about search.

[Esther Dyson, Clay Shirky, Marc Benioff and David Weinberger, people I consider as friends, have said and written things that have influenced this post considerably; the curated conversations between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere, as recorded in This Is Not The End Of The Book, have also been very influential. Finally, Steven Rosenbaum’s excellent Curation Nation helped me bring all this together. Disclosure: I have co-invested with Esther in at least one company, and I now work for Marc Benioff.]

Content may be considered king, but distribution has always been the hand that rocked that particular cradle and ruled that throne.

And distribution had its kingmakers: those who weeded out the vast majority of possibles and probables and selected the content that satisfied their taste, then ordered and organised that content into a cohesive whole, then made that content accessible to the particular audience that mattered.

Curators.

[For some time now, I’ve pondered about the distinction between filtering and curation, and my thoughts on the subject are as follows: curation is what happens when filtering is augmented by humans, sometimes expert, sometimes amateur, always passionate.]

Curation is not just to do with libraries and museums. As Steven Rosenbaum describes in his book, Esther Dyson curated a magnificent conference, PC Forum, for many years. And a great journal, Release 1.0; while the journal lives on, the conference, sadly, is no more.

Talking about conferences, I’m looking forward to Dreamforce next week, the annual Jamboree for those involved in cloud computing. Last year, at my first Dreamforce, a columnist from Barron’s described the event more as a political convention than a tech conference. I have some sympathy with that view, it feels like you’re part of a global movement. And that’s what Dreamforce represents, global transformation in the way enterprises drive, participate in and consume information technology.

This year’s line-up includes, amongst others, Eric Schmidt, Neelie Kroes, Vivek Kundra, Neil Young, Alanis Morrissette and Jay Leno. [You may still be able to get a free pass to the #df11 keynotes and Cloud Expo go to bit.ly/oMPVKw ]

Where was I? Oh yes, curation. The SOP of curation, to paraphrase Rosenbaum, is Selection Organisation and Presentation. Curation is about human beings adding their passion to the filtering process, in order to select what should be experienced, put the selections into some cohesive order and then to make those selections accessible to the relevant audience.

Curation is not something that is restricted to libraries and museums; people curate things all the time, all around us. Every DJ is a curator. Every reviewer is a curator.

In a networked, non-hierarchical world, every one of us is a curator. As I’ve mentioned before, I use twitter as a curation device. The people I follow have a good idea of what I’m interested in, and they make recommendations to me. Sometimes they do it via Direct Messages or DMs, sometimes through @messages others can see, sometimes by ReTweeting or RTing; one way or the other, they make sure I am made aware of the thing they want me to be aware of.

Personal social networks are powerful curation devices, a theme that has been tackled by Clay Shirky time and time again. David Weinberger adds a different twist to it in his writings, looking at the role of taxonomies and folksonomies in this context.

Which brings me on to Esther Dyson, whose writings about the future of search have been at the back of my mind all through my thinking about this. In Curation Nation, Esther quotes Bill Gates as saying (at a private dinner) “The future of search is verbs”. She then goes on to explain that “when people search…they are looking for action, not information….they want to find something in order to do something”. If you get the chance, you should read Esther’s writings on the future of search, just google it. In fact there may still be a YouTube video summarising her views.

This action-orientedness that Esther refers to is something that Marc Benioff is passionate about, a passion that shows in the way he thinks about enterprise software. Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time.

Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms:

The Signal Booster
The Spreadsheet Jock
The Soulmate
The Sidler

The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide. Useful, but often not valuable; can’t take decisions, hasn’t got the depth of knowledge, runs the risk of exhibiting passive aggressive behaviours and operating weak vetos. A fence-sitter who works hard at joining the winning team when victory is in sight.

The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future, of being anchored, framed and constrained by the underlying assumptions, doesn’t always understand the assumptions, whether implicit or explicit.

The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO. An unfortunate and unintended consequence of Soulmate speak, as they spend time interpreting the CEO’s desires and making those desires unintentional filters.

The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.

All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.

And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise, since valuable information gets mutated, suppressed, discarded. Most of the time this is done without any malign intent, an outcome of weaknesses in the system and in the process.

If they were that inefficient, why did they exist in the first place? Probably because the structure of the firm, the culture of the people and the technology that supported them were all incapable of achieving much else. In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.

But today it’s all different. The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise. And this promise is based on a number of key characteristics:

1. The social enterprise is fundamentally based on networks of connected people, within the enterprise, beyond the enterprise into the supply chain and trading partners, and extending all the way to customers and their customers. And products and services.A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.

2. This reduces the distance between the firm and its customers, between the designer and the consumer; it simplifies the links in the supply chain; more importantly, since it is built around the concept of two-way communication, customers are themselves designers; trading partners are themselves designers. Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.

3. This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low. If you’re looking at a conversation, you can drill into the customer name or the order or the complaint or all of them. Summaries are now just forms of presentation, always with the ability to drill into the detail as required.

4. Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.

5. It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise. Real domain expertise, sometimes with letters after names, sometimes not. Peer-reviewed and peer-ranked expertise. Again something the social enterprise is designed to do. Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.

6. Talking about doing, every customer is different, every product and service is different, every problem is different, every situation is different. This makes the traditional process mindset we problem in itself: we spend enormous amounts of time handling exceptions because the process is inadequate. Processes are just not repeatable enough, the volume of exceptions is too high. As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”.

7. Which is where the social enterprise comes into its own. Because everyone can be an expert. Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.

8. Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.

The social enterprise is about bringing the learning from consumerisation and community action and applying them to an environment populated by a new generation using new technologies, social, mobile, open and cloud.

Not surprisingly, I’ve now heard Marc Benioff speak about his vision a number of times. More recently, I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.

In my next post on the subject I shall spend more time on precisely how these characteristics manifest themselves within and beyond the enterprise: Why social, mobile, open and cloud matter, individually as well as collectively.

In the meantime, comments welcome as always.