After reading 10 Social Media Commandment for Employers, I was reminded of Blogging Policy = Blabbing Policy, a blog entry I wrote back in 2006 when the the "conversation" in the blog-o-sphere started to center on corporate blogging policies.

I don't care to debate the merit of each of the commandments, but do take issue with the concept at all. The fact that, in the past, there was consideration (by anyone) of corporate Blogging policies makes the point perfectly clear:

Companies don't need a FILL IN THE TREND HERE Policy, they need a Communications (Blabbing) Policy and a related Conduct Policy which governs employee behavior with respect to trade secrets of all forms and terms for legal and ethical conduct.

There is one facet of Social Media policy that could be worth special coverage in a communications policy. Specifically, certain employees who get involved on a business development level with potential partners could be a good target for your competitors' monitoring. If those employees, be they researchers, strategists, or CEOs are visibly connecting to a given set of like individuals from a potential partner's company, the likelihood of a potential partnership or business deal could be anticipated by your competitor.

So, if the formation of an incipient business to business relationship is covered by an NDA (or should otherwise be confidential), company employees ought to be careful about forming "following" or "link" type connections with individuals from the counter-party and, I believe, its perfectly in-bounds for a corporate "communication policy" to specify ground rules for "public gathering," rather than calling out social media specifically.

Professor Andrew McAfee posted a very good business analysis of points made by Garry Kasparov in his Feb 11, 2010 New York Review of Books article on Diego Rasskin-Gutman's book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. Kasparov's summarized of his own thoughts as a Chess Grandmaster and world chess champion playing against - and losing to - IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. But the interesting part comes when Kasparov talks about a recent match open to grandmasters who were allowed to use computer chess programs of their choice to augment their own chess skills: "The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time." McAfee quotes Kasparov and continues:

My favorite aspect of these 'freestyle' competitions was the specific type of human creativity that led to victory. Instead of pure chess genius, it was something much closer to business process design brilliance. The overall winner was a team that contained neither the best human players nor the biggest and fastest computers. Instead, it consisted of "a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants."

Kasparov was surprised at this outcome and I have to confess that I was as well, despite my deep conviction that a well-designed process is a potent weapon. I didn't think that smart process design — in this case, a process for determining the "best" chess move — could overcome both cognitive and computational deficits. But it did, even in this domain where brains and calculations would appear to be the only things that matter. As Kasparov writes of this amazing result, "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process." I think that's my new motto. - Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review, Feb 18, 2010

Read McAfee's Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model for his excellent analysis and conclusions. I commented: Thanks for a great post on what it means to augment rather than automate business processes! Doug Engelbart devoted a lifetime of work to investigating how technology can augment the abilities people to address complex and challenging problems, including but not limited to business (see Engelbart links below).

The Kasparov quote also gets to what I believe is the heart of the Enterprise 2.0 value debate:

• ERP / MRP / BI and other enterprise IT systems deliver value based on optimizing flow of transactions, optimizing management of predictable processes, or providing analytic insight. ROI calculation for optimizing automated processes is straightforward - and managers are comfortable estimating the potential business value of better analytics.

• Enterprise 2.0 systems augment the ability of organizations to recognize and deal with opportunities, exceptions (and threats) which aren't predictable but have high enough value and occur frequently enough give companies who execute well a sustainable competitive advantage.

I believe the two points are connected. Expensive analytic and reporting systems are of little value if discoveries made can't be turned into actionable insights. Senior management should weigh how Enterprise 2.0 techniques can augment their people's ability deliver value using the expensive transactional and analytic IT systems that they already have or want to create.

See also

Augmentation quotes and links
Blog1246: Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010

Why I believe that Doug Engelbart and Peter Drucker are Patron Saints of E2.0
Blog1163: Enterprise 2.0 Schism

Augmenting Human Intellect: Remove the brick

In 1962 Doug Engelbart wrote the paper he calls his bible: AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework. It is both a roadmap of his lifework - and a white paper presented to ARPA and other agencies for funding. In 1962 Doug could not cite examples for the use of computer systems to augment the creative and problem solving abilities of humans - he was in the process of inventing that - but he could perform a de-augmentation experiment which he used as a counter example. He tied a brick to a pencil and demonstrated that his handwriting became much slower and much less legible. My paraphrase of Doug's research objective: Remove the bricks that limit our ability to write, work and communicate effectively by providing computer systems that augment people's natural abilities to write, work and communicate.

See Blog50: Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

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"DOUG Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, "dealing lighting with both hands." At least that's the way it seemed to Chuck Thacker, a young Xerox PARC computer designer who was later shown a video of the demonstration that changed the course of the computer world." from What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff

Doug Engelbart has been recognized as a titanic figure in the history of technology - with awards including the National Medal of Technology presented by President Bill Clinton for: "... creating the foundations of personal computing including continuous real-time interaction based on cathode-ray tube displays and the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, on-line journals, shared-screen teleconferencing, and remote collaborative work."'

Beyond the technology the motives that drive Doug's research have a moral purpose, reflecting the skills and attitude of a great engineer and humanitarian: If the world is faced with complex, intractable problems that challenge the ability of individuals and nations to solve, what can I do to help people fix what's broken?

Doug's research focuses on how computers can aid people's ability to think and work as groups as well as individuals - what Doug refers to as Augmentation rather than Automation. This involves understanding how problem solving groups actually behave - and how introduction of new technology changes behavior and vice versa. This led me to nominate Doug along with Peter Drucker as a patron saint of Enterprise 2.0; the phrase is flip but the thought is serious. Please send 85th Birthday greetings to Doug today.

I'll let Doug speak for himself in the opening paragraphs of what he calls the bible of his research agenda, AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework from Oct 1962:

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.1a1

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.1a2

This report covers the first phase of a program aimed at developing means to augment the human intellect. These "means" can include many things--all of which appear to be but extensions of means developed and used in the past to help man apply his native sensory, mental, and motor capabilities--and we consider the whole system of a human and his augmentation means as a proper field of search for practical possibilities. It is a very important system to our society, and like most systems its performance can best be improved by considering the whole as a set of interacting components rather than by considering the components in isolation. - AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework, Douglas Engelbart October 1962

And notes from a conversation with Alan Kay - one of the two thousand people who attended Doug's Dec 1968 Demo, and went on to shape the world of technology as we know it.

Alan Kay At PARC one of the goals was to do NLS as a distributed system and all of the ALTOs had the five-finger keyboards as well as the mouse on them. We basically loved NLS and we'd done a few modifications which we thought even sped up. NLS part of the interaction scheme on it was, I believe, because the analog mouse there was some drift in it, so one of the things that they did was to say what kind of a thing you were pointing at, so you'd say move character or move word or move paragraph and so forth. It was kind of a procedure where you gave the command first and then bug bug and then command accept. We realized at Xerox PARC that you wanted to have a speedy scheme for interacting and we thought we could go even one better by selecting the objects, so you'd select something you'd do something to, give the command and then, in the case of move character you'd go select, move, select and it would it with fewer keystrokes.

Now, the abortion that happened after PARC was the misunderstanding of the user interface that we did for children, which was the overlapping window interface which we made as naive as absolutely we possibly could to the point of not having any work flow ideas in it and that was taken over uncritically out into the outside world. So we have many systems, like Lotus Notes and many mail systems that when you say replay it comes up with a window over the very thing you were reading as though there weren't any connection between these things. So this is an abortion to me, but its basically part of the whole feel. Whereas our notion was that you start the kids off on this fairly simple, naive thing and then there would be an actual progression where you would get up to this several commands a second kind of thing that you could do with NLS. If you have ever seen anybody use NLS it is really marvelous cause you're kindof flying along through the stuff several commands a second and there's a complete different sense of what it means to interact than you have today. I characterize what we have today as a wonderful bike with training wheels on that nobody knows they are on so nobody is trying to take them off. I just feel like we're way way behind where we could have been if it weren't for the way commercialization turned out.

Doug Engelbart Well, strangely enough, I feel the same. It's part of the thing of the easy to learn and natural to use thing that became sort of a god to follow and the marketplace is driving it and its successful and you could market on that basis, but some of the diagrams pictures that I didn't quite get to the other day was how do you ever migrate from a tricycle to a bicycle because a bicycle is very unnatural and very hard to learn compared to a tricycle, and yet in society it has superseded all the tricycles for people over five years old. So the whole idea of high-performance knowledge work is yet to come up and be in the domain. Its still the orientation of automating what you used to do instead of moving to a whole new domain in which you are going to obviously going to learn quite a few new skills. And so you make analogies of suppose you wanted to move up to the ski slopes and be mobile on skis. Well, just visiting them for an afternoon is not going to do it. So, I'd love to have photographs of skateboards and skis and windsurfing and all of that to show you what people can really if they have a new way supplied by technology to be mobile in a different environment. None of that could be done if people insisted that it was an easy-to-learn thing.

So, moving your way around those thought vectors in concept space - I'd forgotten about that

Alan Kay You said that, right?

Doug Engelbart I must have, its so good. [laughter] Its to externalize your thoughts in the concept structures that are meaningful outside and moving around flexibly and manipulating them and viewing them. Its a new way to operate on a new kind of externalized medium. So, to keep doing it in a model of the old media is just a hangup that someplace we're going to break that perspective and shift and then the idea of high performance and the idea of high performance teams who've learned to coordinate, to get that ball down the field together in all kinds of operations. I feel like the real breakthrough for us getting someplace is going to be when we say 'All right, lets put together high-performance, knowledge-work teams and lets pick the roles they're going to play within our organizations in some way in such even though they operate very differently from their peers out in the rest of the organization they can interact with them and support them very effectively. So there are roles like that that would be very effective and everyone else can sortof see because they're interacting with these guys what they can do. And suppose it does take 200 hours of specialized training - that's less than boot camp.

One of those boxes on that paradigm map about deployment was really coming down and showing you that special purpose teams are one kind of thing in the way that they can propagate and very different from moving a group of people who have an existing set of staff and processes and methods and skills and equipment and trying to move them all together. It's practically an impossible task to do that in any significantly large step without having casualties. They just aren't all equipped to mobile in that space. So, there's a lot to go with that and it all stems from looking at today and saying 'why do we accept that?' That's the modern thing, its almost a religion. In any other company I'd be afraid to bring that out. Maybe I'll have to run from you too... from Notes from the Panels The Brown / MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, October 1995

See

http://www.DougEngelbart.org - The Doug Engelbart Institute was was conceived by Doug Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting our ability to better address complex, urgent problems. It contains an excellent history, archive of papers, photos and other published resources as well as links to Doug's current projects.

Blog912: Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 | Forty years after the Mother of All Demos Engelbart's demonstration of the Augment shared screen hypertext and video system developed by a team at SRI under Doug's leadership. Links to videos, interviews and other resources

What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, John Markoff, April 2005 See an authorized excerpt from the chapter on Engelbart's Dec 1968 Demo.

AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework By Douglas C. Engelbart October 1962 (SRI AUGMENT, 3906)

And yes, Doug also invented the mouse and used it in his 1968 demo. But introducing Doug as the inventor of the mouse is like introducing Leonardo Da Vinci as a guy who knows how to make some pretty good paint brushes.

See also

Blog936: Reinventing the Web

Blog50: Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

Blog9: Tricycles vs. Training Wheels

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Facebook: To me this place is a neighborhood where you can choose your own friends and neighbors. I use Facebook mainly for informal friend, family, alumni keep in touch posts and links. Because Facebook friending automatically builds a two-way follows relationship versus Twitter's one-way user model, it's easy to build and maintain a neighborly feel by default. I enjoy status updates and posts (like tweets with structure for videos, web links and Facebook apps) from "friends" and keep my posts open to members of my college's Facebook Network. The Facebook posts I write and read are generally for smile value or status updates that would only be of interest to folks who know one another and find the chatter comforting rather than noise. Although it's possible to turn down the volume of posts from folk who tend to update a lot, signal to noise is not really a problem with a neighborhood of tens to hundreds of folk. Just like in real life you know how to act and what to expect in your Facebook neighborhood. 
Greg Lloyd / Blog1014 / March 22, 2009 / 9:27:10 PM EST

Update Dec 17, 2009: Facebook's controversial ex-post facto revision of member privacy settings along with the revenue driven rise of apps like Farmville (as well as sleezy internal promotion) lead me to revisit this, see Blog1232: Facebook: A Carnival Midway not a Neighborhood?

Oliver Marks wrote a very good post: Facebook: The Legal Rumblings Start Dec 17, 2009, on the Facebook's potential legal exposure due to its controversial changes to member privacy capabilities and settings. My comment: Oliver -- Very good followup on Facebook's awkward (to put it mildly) changes to selective privacy capabilities which were a large part of their differentiation vs Friendster and MySpace.

With over 70 million folk apparently hooked on "social" games like Farmville, targeted ads that seem to belong on late night TV, and incredibly lame attempts to nag folk get their friends to use Facebook more (giving "viral" a new and flu like meaning), I see Facebook becoming a downscale carnival midway more than a neighborhood. They certainly have a right to do that.

Originally I thought the equally lame and manipulative privacy changes would just contribute to the downmarket feel of the place.

But as you point out - EU privacy laws may land them in legal entanglements too.

Facebook is becoming a bad example rather than a good example for use of social software in the enterprise - or anywhere for that matter. Look out below!

---

My point is that Facebook has every legal right to attempt to develop, market and monetize a site with whatever privacy and promotional rules it wants - and let customers vote with their feet. But changing rules of an established site by eliminating privacy related permissions can run into legal trouble as well as losing trust that makes people comfortable continuing to use the site.

Facebook seems to be floundering and flailing into the greedy vision of "a closed Internet with ads" that has been the graveyard of AOL, Friendster and others, see the Onion Video Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins of 'Friendster' Civilization. Even worse - Facebook ads, apps and promotions are increasingly loud, spammy and sometimes offensive. Google does a pretty good job of mixing advertising that's not too obtrusive with their services - and the certainly makes money. Facebook should learn from Google.

I believe that the popularity of social sites on the public Web and the value of internally and externally facing Enterprise 2.0 collaboration comes from a skilled combination of affordances that make spaces more or less inviting and suitable to some intended purpose. Great architects of physical places know that people bring expectations and norms about the kind of behavior that's appropriate and enjoyable to any physical space - and that's a lesson that public Web and Enterprise 2.0 designers need to learn and use.

See also

The Social Facebook Fiasco Oliver Marks, Dec 15, 2009. Analysis. "...the effect of these Facebook fiascos are a confused business audience, some of whom would like to see an ‘enterprise Facebook’ in their corporate environment…if they could get a handle on Facebook’s ever mutating terms of service."

Facebook's Privacy Move Violates Contract with Users Kaliya Hamlin, Dec 15, 2009. Guest RWW post reviews the changing "social contract" offered by Facebook - and points to Second Quarter 2010 planned availability of Facebook's Social Graph API as the motive for the privacy change.

Privacy groups file complaint with FTC over Facebook settings Larry Dignan, Dec 17, 2009. A very concise summary of Facebook's Dec 2009 revision to privacy settings offered to members.

Blog1014: Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People I decided to describe Twitter as one of three distinct places on the Web where I socialize every day: the public commons. The others two are my neighborhood (Facebook) and my workplace (the 300+ spaces on Traction Software's TeamPage server). Compares and contrasts patterns of connections and the social architecture at work and in public places.

Blog952: Ask an Engineer: What do you think of the Facebook Terms of Service Flap? Analyzes the Feb 2009 Facebook terms of service revision flap based on the difficulty in defining privacy policy based on two different and irreconcilable sets of expectation on what should happen to data previously shared by applications if a member subsequently revokes permission to share.

Blog977: Clarity Amid the Hype What's different about enterprise Twitter? Most of this carries forward to consideration of What's different about enterprise Facebook?

Blog691: Borders, Spaces, and Places How to model permissions and borders to enable collaboration where there's a natural expectation of privacy crossing many spaces - for example a law firms simultaneous collaboration with each its clients as well as internal groups. Permissions and borders need to be simple, scaleable and secure to work for internal and externally facing E2.0 collaboration.

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I'm flattered that Professor Andrew McAfee cites Enterprise 2.0 Schism in his Nov 20, 2009 blog post Enterprise 2.0 is Not THAT Big a Deal, kicking off a neat discussion on serious points behind my tongue in cheek analysis. McAfee agrees that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal - but "... I don't see E2.0's tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts and formal cross functional business processes". There's no need to use a 2.0 version for the Enterprise, but:

I yield to almost no one in my belief about the power and utility of ESSPs [ Emergent Social Software Platforms ], but I just don’t think they’re going to transform the structure or purpose of the enterprise. As I wrote earlier, I don’t see E2.0’s tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts, and formal cross functional business processes...

I want to be clear: Lloyd’s post is fantastic: grounded and very thoughtful. He’s not in the enterprise-as-slime-mold camp. And I definitely agree with him that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal. So what’s the right way to describe its impact?

Here’s my take: ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes.

This is not a conservative statement. Enterprise systems have been a huge deal for organizations. They’ve turned reengineering from a whiteboard exercise into an unignorable reality for many, many companies. And Drucker was right when he said that “Reengineering is new, and it has to be done.” - Andrew McAfee Nov 20, 2009

I happily replied:

Andy -- Thank you for the kind words as well as the thoughtful analysis. I agree strongly with your take that the impact on the informal processes will be as large as the impact of large scale commercial enterprise systems on formal processes.

I differ a little by including daily working communication, awareness and alerting (the way people work - not workflow or transactional communication) along with the ESSPs as having a large impact on the informal processes of organizations.

It's an interesting - Peter Drucker style - question to see how this plays out over time see my Drucker Centenary post which really should have been titled: "What questions would Peter Drucker Ask about Enterprise 2.0?"

On the 2.0 question: I always took the "2.0" of Web 2.0 as a tongue in cheek observation that the way people use the web and their expectations have shifted dramatically even though there is no "version" you can associate with the emergent phenomena we call the Web. "Who rolled the version?" on the Web is a funny and enlightening question.

I wouldn't expect organizations to use "2.0" as much more that a rallying cry, koan or plain old kick in the pants to take a look around and see what's changed. That's useful too.

Euan Semple commented:

Great post Andrew. I think what is happening IS a big deal but have been wary of labelling it Enterprise 2.0 as this makes it too easy to make it "other" and ignore it or assimilate it - bit like what happened to KM. I don't think our current methods of organisation are inevitable and I don't think we have even begun to see the effect of networked ways of thinking on how we relate to the world. This is why when asked recently how long I thought it would be before the full impact of what is happening works itself into organisational life I said fifty years.

I replied:

I agree with your 50 years - if you start the clock running with Doug Engelbart in 1968!

More seriously - for a major shift in enterprise use of technology I believe 10 years (from early adopter to common use) is closer : From "We have a Web Page" in 1993 to Web Commerce Bubble of 2001; Rare use of inter-enterprise email 1988 to universal by 1998; "Enterprise 2.0" in the broad sense 2006 to 2016. Pretty close to Engelbart + 50 years!

The evolution of the Web itself is an great example of an emergent phenomena. It started from TBL's very austere protocols and concepts though unpredictable and intertwingled rounds of innovation in how the Web was used the tech layered over it (search engines+), see Reinventing the Web for my view as early Web skeptic.

I believe the motivation for changing informal processes of organizations will come from a combination of: 1) people's expectations on how things can and should work from their direct experience with the public Web (as well as internal examples); 2) a measure of strategic thinking about how patterns of work and management can change based on new technology and expectations - in the spirit of Drucker and Engelbart.

Very few individuals in an enterprise are experts in ERP / MRP / Supply Chain Management etc so the feedback and demand cycles that drive human factor improvement and evolution of these systems are very weak. I have very few constructive comments on improving my payroll system and only whine about its eccentricities and complexity.

However everyone is a social animal and brings that experience to work every day. That's the "social" in social software that will drive evolution and adoption of new enterprise technology - with the public Web as a practical benchmark.

Euan replies:

I'm sticking to 50 years from now! I was thinking of the impact on how we structure organisations rather than just common adoption of technologies. Still think that will take a long time.

If I'm wrong I hope I'm around to settle the bet in fifty years!

See also

Blog912: Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 | Forty years after the Mother of All Demos
Blog408: ... And here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968

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Earlier this week Oliver Marks wrote an excellent post on his Collaboration 2.0 Blog: 'The Purpose of a Business is to Create a Customer' - Peter Drucker Centenary. Oliver celebrates the Nov 19, 2009 Centenary of Peter Drucker's birth with two of his favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes: " ‘Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes‘ and ‘There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job‘, which somehow seem to fit together very well." then uses these quotes as context to discuss the disturbing findings of the 2009 Shift Index report and followup analysis by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Please read Oliver's full post - you'll like it. Oliver was also used kind words to build on my earlier Enterprise 2.0 Schism post. Here's a slightly extended version of the comment I posted in reply, along with my two favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes and several links to celebrate Drucker's birth and life.

Thank you for the kind words and for pointing out the HBR Drucker Centenary issue. My "Enterprise 2.0 Schism" post was fun to write - with tongue firmly in cheek - as you note. But it also expresses some serious beliefs.

For me the key Drucker quote is: "The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things."

The scale shift that ubiquitous Web tech enables as well as bottom up participation in E2.0 initiatives are both necessary - but neither are sufficient to distinguish "Enterprise 2.0" from the Web we see and use every day outside work. I believe the difference lies in the shared purpose which drives people to create or join an enterprise and work together over time, along with the need to manage use of scarce resources to a shared end.

By definition an enterprise is a purposeful undertaking that generally requires many hands, expertise and capital that aren't easy for a non-purposeful group to gain and apply over time. This make the "social ecology" of an enterprise different from other groups.

In saying "2.0 modifies how the Enterprise works, not the technology," I take the rhetorical position that the technology which underlies E2.0 - specifically the ubiquitous Web as a platform - is a necessary enabler which provides the first chance to practically apply many of the principals of open work, distributed work and effective collaboration over time that Drucker and Engelbart have advocated for the past fifty years.

I believe that emergent phenomena which Prof Andrew McAfee includes as a core part of his definition of Enterprise 2.0 are significant and different in kind and structure from anything seen before in any enterprise - based on the speed, scale, simplicity and ubiquity of the technology combined with expectations and experience grounded in the public Web. Speculating on how management could embrace but not squash these phenomena to "create more customers" is a good Druckerian question.

But I also believe that the most likely path to large scale adoption and use of this enabling technology will come from small to mid size groups within an organization who intentionally use it to improve their own ability to get work done - rather than in direct pursuit of emergent benefits. They can (and by mandate should) open the direct and indirect record of their work to others who then may become better aware of what their enterprise plans to do, is doing or has done - and who knows what. I really like Jon Udell's term for this principal: Observable Work.

I believe this bottom up and pragmatic adoption model parallels lessons learned from bottom up Knowledge Management versus the failure of top down KM, and lessons learned from the history of the simple, practical Web itself versus failed dreams of more sophisticated universal hypertextuality.

The benefits that are new in kind are emergent, but the path to broad adoption and acceptance will be based on mutual consent, compelling benefits to those who do the work, leadership, and experimentation in activities that have a clear business purpose - designing, building, selling, maintaining products, providing services to clients, customers and partners.

It's presumptuous to guess what Peter Drucker would say about the relationship between the technology, techniques and phenomena we call Enterprise 2.0 and its potential to change the patterns of work and management of an enterprise.

But I believe it's fair to ask: "What sort of hard questions might Peter Drucker ask?" David Rendall (of the UK's National Health Service, Orkney) tossed a nice Druckerian question to Carmen Medina during the followup discussion to her Enterprise 2.0 and the Context of Work keynote at TUG 2009 last month:

#tug2009 Question for Carmen: how do those collaborative networks balance with clear lines of responsibility e.g. in healthcare? 10:06 AM Oct 14th from TweetDeck @davidrendall

For example, the decision on course of treatment for a particular patient is yes or no and may be life and death. You want many people to be able to contribute to that decision - including the patient - but ultimately someone has to accept responsibility for that outcome. In all enterprises decisions between mutually exclusive courses of action need to be made - up to and including "bet the company" decisions.

See the video (time 68:20) for David's question. Then follow Carmen's response and a fascinating discussion that includes FAA experience in understanding and mandating training on cockpit resource management to make air crews aware of how to communicate effectively in high stress situations. Planes have literally flown into mountains when a junior officer was not willing or able to alert a senior pilot to a critical issue while the senior pilot was dealing with the same or an unrelated emergency.

Drucker would hold management ultimately responsibility for the course of action and outcome. But how to make best use of the experience and judgement of a distributed, experienced and self-directed organization is not a simple question, particularly in a crisis such as the mortgage credit crisis (or South Sea Bubble) where madness rather than wisdom of crowds is part of the problem. In my opinion Drucker was often at his best when expressing and defending contrarian opinions that he considered morally right as well as intellectually correct. See Schumpeter Keynes which Drucker wrote on the Keynes Centenary.

Drucker makes the point that innovation in how an enterprise (profit or non-profit) works - how it provides motivation, support, leadership and resources to its members to "Create a Customer" - is as important as innovation in whatever else an enterprise delivers.

I hope we'll see more good work (like John Hagel & John Seely Brown's The Only Sustainable Edge) that focuses on E2.0 style business innovation based on Drucker's understanding of what drives success.

PS - My second Peter Drucker bumper sticker quote for the day: "A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant--and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates."

Peter Drucker Centennial

'The Purpose of a Business is to Create a Customer' - Peter Drucker Centenary Oliver Marks, Nov 16, 2009

Entreprise 2.0 : Les promesses du management moderne enfin tenues ? Cecil Dijoux, Nov 11, 2009

Drucker Centennial Week Celebration (http://www.Drucker100Week.com) - The Drucker Institute, Claremont Graduate University

The Drucker Centennial (http://www.Drucker100.com) - The Drucker Institute
[ Drucker photo credit ]

The Drucker Centennial - Harvard Business Review, Nov 2009

Books and articles by Peter Drucker

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices - Peter Drucker (Paperback edition 1993)

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials) (Paperback 2008)

The Theory of Business - Peter Drucker, HBR Sep-Oct 1994 ($)

Schumpeter And Keynes - Peter Drucker, Forbes May 1983 (cover story) A superb essay comparing the two greatest economists of the 20th century, written in the centenary of Keynes birth. A Drucker classic on the relationship between economics and innovation.

See also

Blog1163: Enterprise 2.0 Schism

CIA and the NHS: Common features of “high risk, high reliability” organisations - David Rendall, A Web that Works, Nov 3, 2009

Carmen Medina: Enterprise 2.0 and the Context of Work | TUG 2009 Keynote

Blog1114: As We May Work - Andy van Dam

Mind, heart and hands: Lifelong learning and teaching in the digital age - Jon Udell on what he memorably calls the principal of Observable Work April 2009

Blog936: Reinventing the Web

Blog384: Enterprise 2.0 - Letting hypertext out of its box

Blog50: Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart

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I have to confess that I've enjoyed watching recent rounds of Enterprise 2.0 discussion and mud wrestling. The fact that so many people enjoy debating definitions, values, doctrinal principals - even the existence of Enterprise 2.0 - makes me think that E2.0 might best be framed as a religious debate. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce a new and exciting element: schism.

I hereby declare myself an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Druckerian. I believe that "2.0" should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology - which is what an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Technarian would have you believe.

I further declare: No, it is not "all about the people" - which is what an Enterprise 2.0 Strict Proletarian would have you believe. Without the enabling technology of the Web, plus search engines and other affordances based on Sir Tim Berners-Lee's innovation, the Strict Proletarian would find it difficult to fit the inhabitants of McAfee's inner, middle and outer rings into the same room, get them to participate in the same conference call, or exhibit their "emergent" behaviors using typewriters, copy machines, faxes and email. Speed, scale and connection patterns matter and the technology that spans these barriers is neither trivial nor insignificant to the phenomena Strict Proletarians value.

I believe that although both technology and broad bottom-up participation are necessary to achieve the Drukerian vision, neither element alone is sufficient to achieve the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together to achieve the ends of enterprises they choose to affiliate with.

As Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things." Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices Chapter 28, The Spirit of Performance, p. 361 (1974)

I nominate Peter Drucker and Douglas Engelbart as Patron Saints of Enterprise 2.0 (Strict Druckerian). If you don't know who either of these gentlemen are, I suggest you click their Wikipedia links for two pretty good short biographies.

Peter Drucker constantly advised businesses to give employees direct control over their own work and environment, with teams of "knowledge workers" responsible for work toward goals stated as broad business objectives rather than prescriptive plans. Drucker stated that management could only achieve sustainable profits by treating people as an enterprise's most valued resources, not as costs. In later years he described his role as "social ecologist" rather than management consultant.

"Marketing alone does not make a business enterprise. In a static economy there are no business enterprises. There are not even businesspeople. The middleman of a static society is a broker who receives his compensation in the form of a fee, or a spectator who creates no value.

A business enterprise can exist only in an expanding economy, or at least in one that considers change both natural and acceptable. And business is the specific organ of growth, expansion and change.

The second function of a business is, therefore innovation - the provision of different economic satisfactions. It is not enough for the business to provide just any economic good and services; it must provide better and more economic ones. It is not necessary for a business to grow bigger; but it is necessary that it constantly grow better...

Above all innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than technology. Non technological innovations - social or economic innovations - are at least as important as technological ones.

In the organization of a business enterprise, innovation can no more be considered a separate function than marketing. It is not confined to engineering or research, but extends across all parts of the business, all functions, all activities." Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974)

At a 1934 Cambridge seminar by John Maynard Keynes, "I suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behavior of commodities, while I was interested in the behavior of people." Peter Drucker, The Ecological Vision, p. 75-76, (1993)

"A manager's task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weakness irrelevant--and that applies fully as much to the manager's boss as it applies to the manager's subordinates." Peter Drucker, Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

In an equally distinguished career, Douglas Engelbart has been immensely influential in creating and inspiring the creation of technology we use today (far beyond his invention of the mouse), but Doug's goals have always been expressed in terms of improving the abilities of groups to address complex, difficult and important problems:

"By 'augmenting human intellect' we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by 'complex situations' we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human 'feel for a situation' usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids." Douglas Engelbart Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Introduction, (1962)

On the term "social software", I believe it's fair to blame it on Clay Shirky - who had the misfortune to introduce a term that's perfectly respectable for a sociologist who studies how technology influences group behavior:

“It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.” − Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy O’Reilly Conference (April 2003)

If the term "social" must be deprecated, I hope its banishment takes with it all Social X marketing buzzwords, job titles, twitter tags, and the well-earned disco ball reputations of the so-called Social Media gurus.

On "Return on investment" debates, I believe that Taylorist time-and-motion studies would show gains that typically exceed the modest costs of introducing and using Enterprise 2.0 software, but studies for knowledge work where the value is not transactional (time to process a purchase order) are difficult to design and far too easy to fudge. Large scale experimental studies based on overall business success are even more problematic - except in hindsight.

"A very important surgeon delivered a talk on the large number of successful procedures for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, 'Do you have any controls?' The great man hit the podium and said, 'Do you mean, "Did I not operate on half the patients?"' ... The hall grew very quiet and the voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, 'Yes, that's what I had in mind.' The surgeon's fist really came down as he thundered, 'Of course not, that would have doomed half of them to their death!'...The room was then quiet, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, 'Which half?'" - Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., University of Arizona College of Medicine; quoted in Medical World News, p. 45 (September 1, 1972) quoted by Edward Tufte in Beautiful Evidence (2006)

I believe the value of Enterprise 2.0 techniques comes from small to mid size groups within an organization who intentionally (not emergently) improve their own ability to get work done, while opening the direct and indirect record of their work to others who then may become better aware of what their enterprise plans to do, is doing or has done - and who knows what.

Finally - having demonstrated the unerring truth of the Strict Druckerian position regarding the nature of Enterprise 2.0, I declare both the Strict Technarian and Strict Proletarian interpretations to be false, heretical, and anathema. Living in our tolerant and civilized times, I found it difficult to imagine an appropriate way to separate those who obstinately cling to these heretical beliefs, until I ran across this nugget:

Nike does "email archeology" to decompose email thread to expose one part of a specific collaboration. :>) #e2conf @lehawselive (4:20pm Nov 4, 2009)

So if you don't agree with me, I hope you spend the the rest of your corporate life decomposing email threads from your corporate archive into Google Waves or Traction TeamPage comments where others can benefit from your labor if not from your ideas.

See Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock - Dennis Howlett Aug 26, 2009

Denial is a river full of crocks - Gil Yehuda August 31, 2009

Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock: Discuss - Andrew McAfee Sep 2, 2009

[ And so much more. It's the Web - you could look it up - or follow the fun on Twitter ]

See also Blog1207: How big a deal is Enterprise 2.0? What do you mean by "Big"?
Blog1185: Peter Drucker and Enterprise 2.0 | Drucker Centenary
Blog1246: Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010
Blog1071: Having versus Using Enterprise 2.0 Software
Blog936: Reinventing the Web
Blog912: Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 | Forty years after the Mother of All Demos - Doug Engelbart
Blog640: Connections - Clay Shirky and Social Software
Blog597: The Rise of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee | Video | Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2008 Tokyo

Schumpeter and Keynes, Peter Drucker, Forbes magazine (cover story) May 23, 1983 - This is great!

This was far to much fun to write. I hope I haven't needlessly offended anyone, but I'm also happy to defend the essence of the Druckerian position in more serious terms; Enterprise 2.0 is a big tent and I hope it stays that way.

I also value the term Enterprise 2.0 for a reason over and above the Druckerian fantasy. Unlike terms invented to express a desire to sell software to managers (X Management - you do want to manage X don't you?), Enterprise 2.0 expresses a simple, grounded wish:

"I wish the software I used every day at work allowed me to find what I want; discover what I need to know - along with surprises; and connect with people I don't even know to get my job done, learn more, and work in an enjoyable place." or much more narrowly: "Why can I find what I need with Google on the Web, but have to pull teeth to find anything useful when I go to work?"

This is a grounded wish since everyone in business has a direct basis for comparison - what they or their children see, use and enjoy on the public Web every day. This doesn't mean that expectations, behavior, and (uh sociology) of the public Web and the internal/external web of connections used in an enterprise are the same - but they are comparable with respect to desired experience.

To the extent that corporate barriers dash expectations, read Peter Drucker on how to get rid of those barriers or find a better employer.

To the extent that enterprise technology differs with respect to needs for privacy, finding information in a link-deprived environment and sharing access to confidential sources or legacy applications, Enterprise 2.0 offers the opportunity for vendors and community projects to create products that respond to that simple, grounded wish and measure the difference.

I'm not sure where Professor Andrew McAfee sees himself in this ecclesiastical model. I'd be happy to support his claim to any sub-numinous position.

To continue this conversation on Twitter, please use hash tag #druckerian and mention @roundtrip (me).

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Traction Software Director of User Experience Michael Angeles introduces Traction's new Google Web Toolkit (GWT) based Proteus user interface with a brief tour (video below).

See also

• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Proteus - Andy Miller, Traction Software Director of Engineering Video | interview
• Customizing Proteus - Michael Angeles, Traction Software Director of User Experience Video
• 2 Nov 2009 | Traction Software Showcases New Collaboration Capabilities at Enterprise 2.0 Conference
• TUG 2009 Providence | Keynotes by Carmen Medina, Chris Nuzum and Stewart Mader

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I'd like to thank all of the Traction customers, partners and friends who traveled to Providence last month to make TUG 2009 Providence as enjoyable as it was enlightening. Special thanks to keynote speakers Carmen Medina, Chris Nuzum, Stewart Mader and all of the customers and partners who participated in the Oct 14 Main event. And my personal thanks to everyone on the Traction Software team who worked so hard to bring TeamPage R4.2, the Oracle RDB backend, Attivo Advance Search, and the Proteus Google Web Tookit (GWT) UI to life. I don't know what we'll do to top TUG 2009 next year - but TUG members provides some excellent ideas! See TUG 2009 Providence | Keynotes by Carmen Medina, Chris Nuzum and Stewart Mader for links to TUG videos, slide shows, interviews, tech talks and more, along with how become a TUG member and join the conversation. TUG registration is free and open to the public.

You're also welcome to review the the TUG 2009 dinner menu at Gracie's Restaurant in Providence. This year we had an outstanding five-course tasting menu with paired wines at one of Providence's best restaurants. Gracie's was kind enough to give TUG folk the main restaurant when we outgrew the event room. In past years, TUG events featured two full McGrath's Rhode Island clambakes (lobster, clams, mussels, corn etc seaweed steamed over a hardwood fire) and a crab fest. Between Gracie's and the good folk at the Hotel Providence, TUG members this year were well nourished physically as well as mentally and we'll carry on the tradition at future TUG events!

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