My colleague Karim Lakhani and I have just finished the first Harvard Business School case on Wikipedia.  Like Wikipedia itself, this case is available for free online and published under the GFDL.

It’s focal point is the articles for deletion process on Wikipedia’s "Enterprise 2.0" article, but I’ll use this focal point and the other information in the case for a much broader classroom discussion.  Using this case, I’ll talk with students about:

• Why Nupedia (Wikipedia’s more formal predecessor) failed to gather momentum, and why Wikipedia has gathered so much.
• Whether Wikipedia’s highly egalitarian and freeform editing processes and policies yield good results and, if so, how this happens.
• How decision rights are allocated in Wikipedia.
• The merits of the Inclusionist and Deletionist perspectives.
• Whether Wikipedia really has become a "post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers."
• Whether the Wikipedia community practices the ‘right’ level of deference to the opinions and judgments of subject matter ‘experts.’
  
• If Wikipedia’s policies are being correctly followed, what the fate of the "Enterprise 2.0" article should be.

Please feel free to leave a comment here (the online case itself has no comment capability) or, if you’d prefer a more private channel, email me with your feedback about this case.  Karim and I would like to hear what you think about it, and about the issues it raises.

We’d also like to thank HBS’s Senior Multimedia Producer Melissa Dailey for being an outstanding colleague and collaborator on this project.  This case would have looked very amateurish without her.

Adam makes a really interesting point.  By most of the standard yardsticks, he has a great job for a recent MBA —  plenty of responsibility and autonomy, a large budget, use of both ‘hard’ and ’soft’ skills, a role to play in large deals like acquisitions, etc..  And at a company like TripAdvisor I’m pretty sure he’s not painting himself into a career corner by taking a job related to the company’s online presence.  As he says, that presence is becoming more and more important for marketers, brand builders, retailers, and many others.

So he has an interesting job, the chance to use and build skills, and a career trajectory that looks good.  So what’s not to like here?  Maybe his pay is lousy, but I suspect not.  I suspect he’s right —  that jobs like his are still not seen as being in the ’sweet spot’ for most business school grads.  I think and hope that this will change; the world needs more business-IT / geek-suit boundary spanners.

This past fall I traveled to several business schools in order to present some recent research (watch this space to learn more; I’ll be soon be posting about this work, which is an attempt I’ve undertaken with some colleagues to directly address the question "Does IT matter in competitive battles?" ). In addition to talking about the work, at every campus we also talked about the state of IT teaching. And there was broad agreement that the biggest challenge we IT+business academics is getting enough students to take our courses.

Student demand drives many things at business schools, not least of which is departments’ ability to hire new faculty. Demand is also a very clear signal to deans that a particular area merits resources, attention, breathing room, and a seat at the table.

For a few brief shining years in the late 1990s, IT studies had all of these. The Internet, the Web, eCommerce, eBusiness, B2C, B2B, and Y2K combined to bring business students into our IT classrooms. We couldn’t generate new teaching materials and new courses fast enough, and we and our schools faced complaints that we were behind the times.

As you can imagine, all of that changed quite quickly after the spring of 2000. The tech wreck meant that the days of really easy, really fast money were over. More fundamentally, the collapse of many Internet companies and the hugely overblown Y2K ‘crisis’ indicated to many students, at both the MBA and executive levels, that both the promise and the perils of IT were overblown. Many students concluded that IT was something that did NOT need to be in the ‘toolkit’ of most managers, and could instead be outsourced, delegated, and essentially ignored without any serious consequences like loss of competitive position or advantage.

So the first years of this century were a dark time for us. Most courses at most schools were undersubscribed, and we faculty spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to bring students back into our classrooms. At a conference on IT teaching, Stanford’s Haim Mendelson articulated our challenge beautifully. We couldn’t pander to students, he said, because they see through efforts to sell fluff rather than to teach rich material. It was incumbent on us to figure out what that rich content was in the post-dot-com era, and to figure out the best pedagogic approaches for delivering it.

My colleague and mentor Dave Upton took my thinking about this one giant step forward when he encouraged me to frame the MBA course I was developing in terms of the business models and capabilities that IT enables, and that can’t realistically be obtained any other way. In other words, a good IT course should show business students what new, useful, and unique tools IT puts in their toolkits. 

In addition, it should also show them what they themselves need to do in order to use these tools effectively. Electricity lets companies do all kinds of amazing things, but this fact is irrelevant to most B school students because most business leaders have absolutely no role to play with respect to electricity. If the relationship between business leaders and IT is more of a two-way street — if leaders need IT to succeed, and if IT success requires business leader involvement — then we have the conditions for a vital addition to a business curriculum.

I don’t pretend for a minute that I’ve cracked either half of this case — that I’ve nailed once and for all how to teach about either IT capabilities or about business leaders’ IT-related responsibilities. But I do know that this is what I’m trying to do in the classroom, and I see some positive reactions to the effort.

I taught Managing in the Information Age (MIA), my full-semester MBA elective, to about 20 students a year ago. The students were great. In a class that small there’s really no place to hide, and they were well-prepared and enthusiastic. My pre-registration for the current version of the course, which started last week, was about 30 students.

I was more than a little surprised when over 50 second year students (there are no electives in the HBS first year curriculum) showed up for the first day of class, and even more surprised when 70+ came for the second day. The classroom I’m teaching in holds 82 students, and over the weekend I started hearing from prospective cross-registrants that they weren’t able to get in to the course; it was full. Sure enough, every seat was full yesterday (HBS’s course shopping period was over today and students were locked in to their selections. Knowing that they could no longer switch out of MIA, I introduced my Excel-based random cold caller to loud groans this morning.).

I’m sure that the tremendous amount of interest around such recent Internet phenomena as Wikipedia, the YouTube deal, and Web 2.0 is behind some of this demand surge. But our first few case discussions have clearly shown me that there’s something else going on as well. My students, I’ve learned, don’t need to be convinced much that IT and business are now inseparable. And none of them have advanced the argument that technology decisions and responsibilities should be delegated.

I get the strong impression that they’re largely technology enthusiasts (even the ones who don’t self-identify as geeks), and that they want theories, frameworks, and concepts — ways to think about IT-related business issues — that will help them turn that enthusiasm into action. And they don’t just want to understand what a Trojan Horse is or how anyone makes money from open-source software (although we do talk about these and many other tech-y issues over the semester). Dave Upton was exactly right; they want to understand the kinds of capabilities and businesses that IT lets them build, and what they need to do as part of this work. They’ll use this knowledge, I believe and hope, to do exactly what we want our graduates to do: create value, shake up markets, and vex competitors.

The writer and  and cultural observer Stanley Crouch, when asking his audience to consider a given issue, sometimes proposes a ‘flip test’ in which important elements of the status quo are reversed.  It’s an effective way to unmask hidden assumptions and double standards.  And it can work quite well for questions around technology.

One useful flip test consists of mentally switching the order of appearance of a new technology and an existing one.  At a conference years back I was sitting on a panel that was asked to talk about future of the book.  As the discussion was heating up about the inevitability of the electric media, someone on the panel (I wish it had been me) proposed a flip test.  He said  "Let’s say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called ‘paper.’  It’s cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries.  You can’t write over it once it’s been written on, but you buy more very cheaply.  Wouldn’t that technology come to dominate the market?"  It’s fair to say that comment changed the direction of the panel.

So as talk about the risks and possible downsides of Enterprise 2.0 technologies continues, a flip test might bring some clarity to the discussion.  This flip test consists of imagining that communication platforms (like E2.0 tools) are already in place, and then channels show up within corporations.

Most current collaboration technologies, including email, instant messaging, and cell phone texting are what I call channels.  They essentially keep communications private.  People beyond the sender and receiver(s) can’t view the contents of information sent over channels, and usually don’t even know that communication has taken place.  Information sent via channels isn’t widely visible, consultable, or searchable.  And no record exists of who sent what to whom, so channels leave no trace of collaboration patterns.  

The new generation of collaboration technologies that are underpinning Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, in contrast, are all platforms.  They’re repositories of digital content where contributions are globally visible (everyone with access to the platform can see them) and persistent (they stick around, and so can be consulted and searched for).  Access to platforms can be restricted (to, for example, only members of an R&D lab or a team working on a particular deal) so that proprietary content isn’t universally visible within a company, but the goal of a platform technology is to make content widely and perennially available to its members. A lot of content on this blog and other writing on W2.0 and E2.0 has articulated the desirable properties of digital platforms.

So here’s the flip test:  imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively E2.0 platforms — blogs, wikis, etc. –  and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies —  email, instant messaging, text messaging —  became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation.  What would happen?  How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?

I imagine two main outcomes.  First, users would adopt the new channel technologies for private communications, but not for much more than that.  They’d quickly see that it’s less efficient to use channels, and less helpful to their colleagues.  In other words, whether they were thinking selfishly or selflessly they’d keep using platforms.  And the endowment effect would be working in favor of the platform technologies they’re already using.

Second, many constituencies would hate the new technologies, and strenuously advocate that they be kept out.  In a company accustomed to platforms, introducing channels would be perceived as asking for trouble.  They’d be seen as tools that would let sensitive information leave the company and jump over Chinese walls, let sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior flourish below the radar, and let people waste as much time as they wanted to chatting with each other about irrelevant stuff.  What’s even worse, compliance officers and other managers would feel largely powerless to stop this bad behavior, because channel traffic is so hard to monitor.  They couldn’t read all employee emails, and sampling would be unlikely to catch all the problems quickly enough to head them off.  

For managers accustomed to platforms where all contributions are immediately and universally visible and traceable, channel technologies would seem scary.  I could imagine that a common response, upon hearing about them, would be something like "No way.  The risks of email and IM are too great.  If people need to talk privately, let them pick up the phone.  We’ll set up a few email accounts so that we can exchange information with the outside world, but we’re sticking with our platforms for internal communication."

What does this flip test reveal?  To me, it indicates that many companies are paying far too much attention to the possible risks and downsides of E2.0 platforms, given that they’ve already deployed technologies that have much greater potential for abuse.  I’m not advocating that channel technologies should be shut off and entirely replaced by platforms; I’m just trying to highlight the relative risks of the two technology categories.  The flip test is a good way to do this.  

What do you think?  Am I missing something, or downplaying some important downsides about E2.0?  Or is the flip test telling us what I think it is?

I’ll be speaking at the FastForward conference, which takes place in San Diego from February 7-9.  It’s sponsored by the enterprise search company FAST, and bills itself as "The Business and Technology Conference for Innovate, Search-powered Enterprise 2.0 Applications."  It was not hard to convince me to leave New England for Southern California in February, but I’m looking forward to it for reasons beyond the weather.  For one thing, the speakers include Tim O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, John Batelle, Ray Lane, and many others. I listen carefully to what these folk have to say, and I’m eager to hear what they’ve been working on lately, what conclusions they’ve reached, and how they think the phenomenon of Enterprise 2.0 will unfold.

I also hope to have the chance to talk with a lot of the conference attendees, to learn what their experiences have been as they’ve introduced the new generation of collaboration tools and social software.  I understand that the conference organizers are putting together a couple roundtables; please let them know if you’d like to participate.

Finally, I know some of the topics I’m going to cover in my talk, but what would you like to hear about?  What are the burning issues around Enterprise 2.0 in your company?  The biggest open questions?  Leave a comment and let us know, or send me an email.