Web 2.0 Summit: IBM evolves vision of SOA and Web 2.0

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Can SLATES overcome the need for a science?

Your blogs are a learning experience. However, this one favors a direction (Enterprise 2.0) for the future enterprise. The stakes are high. The corporate email population is over 600 million. Collaboration is poor. A 30% improvement in performance [1] is conceivable with a reliable process for collaboration. Assuming a per seat cost of USD 1000 (average for an end-to-end process [2] is USD 1550) this translates into a total potential market of USD 600 billion excluding growth. Great demand for an assured means for collaboration will come from developing countries. In contrast, the annual knowledge products and services market was projected at under USD 12 billion for 2004 (Ovum Ltd.). This excludes the wider market for collaborative business knowledge. This is estimated by Basex [3] at USD 60 billion.

The prevailing facts are clear:

- A one-size-fit-all process is not possible for corporate decision-making on an event since the participants are unknown and the workflow is unpredictable.
- Enterprise 2.0 ? easily understood by the SLATES mnemonic of Andrew McAfee ? offers the power of emerging web technology for connecting and collaborating. However, in the absence of a process, its first requirement [4] is a receptive culture to pave the way for self-organization of practices.

The book ?Managing Collective Intelligence? [5] by Olivier Zara elaborates on the culture. It very clearly requires personnel to exercise discipline to consistently spare time and energy for ?an ethic of collaboration?. This includes driving IT tools for collaboration. Thus, IT is conceived as passive energy that must be driven by personnel. Any system dependent on personnel is unlikely to succeed as they have little or no energy to spare. Besides, there are those who regularly leave their brains out of the front door on entering office (3 out of 4 per Marcum Buckingham [6]). Excellence requires their energies be engaged. The need is inexhaustible energy to organize, drive and channel collaboration in a habit forming manner. IT has acquired the potential to provide this intelligent energy. What is missing is not great data flow power but an understanding of how personnel connect and collaborate across space and time, viz., a science of interactions, to establish an end-to-end collaborative process.

What is the nature of the science needed? Since its purpose is to induce a collaborative culture it will be worthwhile having a look at the cultures induced by IT. Email for personal communication and IM for chat are now common cultures. IT provides an intuitive language for connecting. I favour Humboldt?s definition of language popularized by Noam Chomsky: ?'the infinite use of finite means'. Christopher Alexander, quoted by Tim ?O? Reilly in his seminal ?What Is Web 2.0?, concludes much the same thing. The emerging Web 2.0 requires personnel have facility with a range of tools. There is no uniform grammar for knowledge exchange. Web 2.0, for all practical purposes, establishes a sign language clear to those who follow it. An enterprise cannot rely on a voluntary sign language for knowledge flows. All must be fluent in the language and engage in it from choice. The science must therefore lay the foundation for creating a compelling enterprise language [7] for efficiently conducting all knowledge work and coordination in an environment of unpredictability and chaos.

Apart from inducing a work culture the enterprise language shall, by its very nature, deliver all the requirements identified by Andrew McAfee for Enterprise 2.0 [8] as a by-product of its operation. This assumes an ability to function anywhere/anytime/offline and deliver the blog concept in a secure way. Replication technology is robust enough to support this. However, I expect it shall be a while before Web 2.0 supports replication. This gives the proprietary platform vendors a clear advantage to deliver on constructive Enterprise Collaboration but I do not see them exploiting it.

References:
[1] ? http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook/By_Alphabet/TheArtOfWork.htm
[2] ? http://www.deskeng.com/Articles/Feature/Does-One-Size-Fit-All?-20060217882.html
[3] ? http://www.basex.com/web/tbghome.nsf/pages/researchandcoverage
[4] ? http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2006/spring/06/
[5] ? http://www.axiopole.com/pdf/Managing_collective_intelligence.pdf
[6] ? http://www.fastcompany.com/online/49/buckingham.html
[7] ? http://www.waykm.com/Organizing_The_Way_To_Excellence.htm#EP
[8] ? http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/

Posted by: waykm   Posted on: 11/13/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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