The CIA's Collaboration Growth Curve & IBM's Lotusphere ecosystem

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Can't stuff the Web back in a box ...

Oliver -- I think the three parts of this post fit together very well, particularly the network effects and the collaboration curve theme.

The JH, JSB, and LD quotes make the point: People and institutions are the 'nodes' that can enable a collaboration network to perform better as you add more of them to a social network ('social' in the broad sense - not party time).

But I think it's also important to note that the Web has become an open platform that allows the work product of collaboration networks to be created, linked, annotated, signaled, searched and analyzed at scale that would have been unimaginable in the heyday of Lotus Notes. In that respect the Web *is* like the "self-improving fax machine" whose limits we won't see for a very long time.

You muse: "... on the idea that the agility of modern enterprise collaboration techniques and technologies are arguably far more powerful when consciously assembled to achieve given objectives, as opposed to people attempting to work within the manufactured framework of a product suite, when watching the Lotus demos."

I believe that's right. In every previous generation hypertext system, the ability to read, search, link and communicate came with a terrible price: it might work well, but only if you were willing to put everything you wanted to work with into some sealed box, and convince everyone you wanted to work with to use the same box.

Ironically most successful collaboration box that the Web allowed people and institutions to escape was -- Lotus Notes. If IBM focuses on building a product suite rather than a platform that works with and like the web I think there's a problem.

See Enterprise 2.0 - Letting Hypertext out of its box http://bit.ly/8zxm
based on a 2007 debate / discussion between - Mike Gotta and Andrew McAfee.

Posted by: grl@...   Posted on: 04/17/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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